So I'm in a game on 1.51 Extreme where I've dominated 3 other Wizards but 1 is running away and getting out of control.

I'm High Men, with a reasonable collection of High Men, Trolls, Draconians, Barbarians and Orcs.

I've got Sorcery Mastery and Alchemy with 9 Sorcery books.

It's still fairly early. It's well into mid-game, but I moved really fast. I'm just now starting to see Rare spells in my spellbook and there are still many un-taken encounters.

My main death-stack is 4 Flying Paladins with 4 Flying Warships and Alorra. I managed to trade for Summon Champion fairly early and so far I've summoned 1 Champion (Elvin Archer) and plan to summon 5 in total ( I have 1 other hero).

But, the most powerful Wizard is Sharee, who has 1 Sorcery book and like 11 Death books plus some retorts (Conjuring I think is one).

She currently has a Wizard Pact with me and right now all 3 other Wizards are still in the game, but banished and/or beaten down. Sharee has put curses on like every enemy Wizard town, so what I fear is that if I don't take out her capital then she'll start cursing the heck out of me if I attack her towns first.

But I tried to take her capital as a test run (yeah I saved and the reloaded after it failed) and it was bad. She currently has 4 Death Knights plus Alorra and Warrax and Aerie plus Wraiths. I assume she's going to get rid of the Wraiths and make it all Death Knights.

I was barely able to make a dent in her forces with my death-stack (minus Alorra, I didn't have her at the time). BTW, she also has Guardian Wind, so the idea of trying to get Slingers or Adamant Draconian Bowmen isn't going to work.

I'm not sure what to do. Even if I get the Sky Drake spell it would be hard to get enough Sky Drakes to match her Death Knights. When I tried attacking her I was able to take out 2 heroes and 1 Death Knights, then my remaining ships were on the run and I could have gone all 50 rounds and maybe killed 1 more unit to retreat with like 1 Paladin and 2 or 3 ships left.

I seriously doubt I can stay on her good side much longer. I'm still a long way off from the Spell of Mastery. She is super-powerful. I'm not really worried about her much, the only thing I have to worry about is town curses and Death Knights. For now she's keeping them in her capital, but once she fills that up she's going to start sending DKs out.

She has a ton of towns. She's got probably half the towns in the game and I've got about 1/3 and the rest the other wizards have. She has mostly High Men and Barbarians.

I'm not really seeing Very Rare Spells to research yet either. I think my best hope is to stay on her good side as long as possible, keep the other wizards in the game, take a bunch of encounters to look for spells and books and items and such and try to get some Champions going. I'm researching Magic Immunity now, so if I can get a few Champs with Magic Immunity and maybe find Suppress Magic I'll have a shot, but man, she's got one of the hardest capitals I've seen in a while.

Any suggestions?

My first thought is "More Paladins". Are the unit stats different in 1.51 vs the base game?

What summons can you use? How is combat spell situation? Does she have a lot of spell skill (can she throw a lot of combat spells)? Are her combat spells making much difference in the battle? What combat spells do you have available? What is each of your respective mana stockpiles?

Another option is to send in a stack of Pikemen, preferably with Mithral or Adamantium weapons. They should be accompanied by a single unit of paladins (holy bonus for +1 att/resist) and hopefully a hero with Leadership (+att) or (especially) Prayermaster (+resist). The Pikemen may be able to shred through the Death Knights via armor piercing, negate first strike, and sheer numbers. They might need some resistance buffs, and you may need a second wave of something to finish the job. Don't expect many pikes to survive the battle, of course.

Not a bad idea on the Pikemen, but she has Death Spell. I'd likely need to create 2 full stacks and then put Resist Magic on all of them and send them in in waves. They would get eaten up by the ranged Champions and the DKs likely wouldn't attack them, just behind the walls and I wouldn't be able to initiate combat unless I also put Flight on all of them. :)

Yeah, I think I can't crack her capital for now. I'll just have to build up Champions and try to get Suppress Magic ASAP I think. Once I get Suppress Magic I can start attacking her towns and just leave her capital alone. Maybe I'll eventually get good enough Champions to be able to take it.

If I go in with Alorra, Warrax, Sir Harold, and Deth Stryke plus Paladins, with Magic Immunity on all the Champs, that should do it,but it will take time to get to that. Sadly Aerie won't be much help against DKs. Morgana or Malleus would be nice too, but it's harder to get them than Champs at this point.

Sounds like a few waves of trash will solve some of that. Send in a few groups of 4-5 spearmen, just enough to survive a round or two of spell casting + ranged attacks while you burn down Aerie and Warrax with Psionic Blasts. Aerie especially should be vulnerable to death like this. Spearmen are so weak compared to the defending force that you won't lose any fame when they all die, and they don't need any enchantments or anything either.

Once the two heroes are dead, pre-battle Guardian Wind takes care of Sharee's Allora (or burn her down too) and you can use Counter Magic to help fend off everything but Sharee's first combat spell. Flight on all the pikes was assumed, of course, and it can be cast overland while the stack is still being assembled. Resist Magic is all Veteran Pikes need against Black Sleep, Death Spell, and the like. Resist Magic will also basically fix the Life Stealing problem; between Resist Magic and the single unit of Paladins, each Veteran Pike will have 9 resist against the -4 Life Steal.

You can Spell Blast any attempts at summoning more Death Knights while you're assembling your forces.

Well, we'll see what happens. This may be the first game that I lose at this stage in a long time. Usually I can either win or I get crushed early due to absurd situations on Extreme and Impossible difficulty. But usually once I get past the early part of the game and can get my feet under me then it's solid.

In this situation, I was playing Large land size but there were three main islands. I was on a small island (which is usually bad but my strat focused on Flying Paladins so it was actually fine) and an island very close to me, with 2 enemies on it and towers that led to an area close to the Myrran wizard. I was able to handle all 3 of those guys, and I guess because Sharee also had Sorcery books and was at war with those guys he was friendly to me. I knew I couldn't take her at the time, already being in multiple fights and I saw she was heavily using town curses so I tried to stay on her good side, plus she kept trading good spells to me.

Her capital was also very far away, across water, like on the total opposite side of the world.

So I left her alone as I went after the other Wizards, but man she has grown into a beast.

She is now casting the Spell of Mastery. I already Blasted it once, which fortunately didn't cause her to end her Alliance with me. I just got Suppress Magic. I blaster her SoM last turn and then started casting Suppress Magic. It's going to take me 10 turns to cast Suppress Magic and she started SoM again. So hopefully I can cast Suppress before she finishes SoM, then I can blast it again.

I'm researching Spell Binding now, but it's going to take a few turns, and I have Sky Drake in my list after that. So if I can get Suppress Magic up, then Blast her SoM, then Disjunction her Eternal Night (or should I Bind it and then cancel it?) and steal her Zombie Mastery.

I did manage to luckily get Warrax on my other Champion. So I have Warrax and Alorra. Warrax is now at 1 Gold dot and Alorra has 2. But there aren't many encounters left. I took two encounters with Arch Angels, but I got no Life books sadly. I was hoping to be able to get some Life Spells, at least True Light or Prayer or something, maybe Heroism as well (I've found a couple decent heroes, but all are un-leveled at this point). I've tried to get some Chaos books too, but no luck.

But I'm not summoning any more Champions because #1 I don't have the capacity to do that and all the other stuff I need to do and #2) it would take too much effort taking towns to level them up now anyway.

I'm getting ready to start attacking her towns. I still can't take her capital. She now has 4 Demon Lords, Aerie, and the rest Death Knights in her capital. And she's starting to send Demon Lords and Death Knights out into the world as well. But now that she's casting SoM she can't cast anything else, so it all comes down to me getting Suppress Magic finished in time to let me Blast her SoM.

I've got at least 1 Paladin in every town, but even with that, if she starts attacking me it could be bad, because the only thing really safe are the Paladins, everything else is going to get hammered by Death Spell. I can't rely on even full strength Counter Magic to work every time, and when it fails Death Spell will take out most of the stuff except Paladins.

So yeah, it's not looking good. My plan is to attack the town closest to her capital (which is a huge High Men town with all buildings) while I'm waiting for Suppress Magic to cast, then start pumping out Paladins to send at her capital in a strategy like you said and try to pick of single units at a time before sending in my main stack.

If/when you blast her SoM, does she start again next turn?

I'm assuming not, because if so, why would you spend time casting Suppress Magic? Looks like < 10% chance to suppress SoM, and it doesn't affect combat spells. For that matter, if she's focused on Death Knights (~45% chance to suppress) and Demon Lords (~30% chance to suppress), I'm still not sure it is a good bargain. YMMV depending on how spells were changed for your patch.

You can use Spell Blast to check her casting skill. Start it, check how much mana you'll need to blast her SoM, cancel, then cast it again next turn and see the difference. That gives you your (current) timeline, which will be shrinking as her spell skill grows. I'd say skip Suppress Magic (she's casting SoM anyway), ignore Eternal Night, and just steal Zombie Mastery. Eternal Night will help your new zombies (which can also then be fodder for her combat spells!), but it won't significantly boost her high end summons (especially Demon Lords). How many towns do you have? If you can grab that town, then you can move your summoning circle there and Word Of Recall all your paladins in for the fighting.

How does her mana supply look? Maybe you could spam a bunch of naga or something to get her to blow through it?

I'm wanting Suppress Magic to prevent her from cursing my towns once I attack her and Blast her SoM. I was planning to cast SP before she started casting SoM and I'm just kind of continuing with that plan. But you have a point, its possible she could just keep trying to cast SoM now, but I'm not sure what she'll do once we are at war and I put an end to her SoM. At that point she could start casting curses and such on me instead of casting SoM, and that's where SP would come into play.

But yeah, once I can get a town close to her I'll start teleporting in troops. But I want a Sky Drake as well...

If I can steal Zombie Mastery and start running my Champions through a bunch of her towns by themselves that would level them up while I take a bunch of her towns. That could work. But realistically I'm going to need a large second death stack that I can use on defense as she starts attacking me.

Right now I've got Wind Mastery up with Flying Warships that are getting 8 total movement turns so that makes something like a Warships & Paladins defensive stack relatively effective. But right now I only have one such stack, I'll need to get a second one going so I need time to cast Flight on at least 3 or 4 Warships as well :p

That makes a lot more sense. I have no idea whether she'll keep trying to cast the SoM, or whether she'll take a break to throw a few other things whenever she gets interrupted. If nothing else, maybe a settler can make an outpost, and an outpost can hold a Summoning Circle. Barbarians grow fastest, so theoretically they should last longest even in a low food position where the outpost ultimately disbands. Good luck! I strongly suggest figuring out how much spell skill she has.

I recently tried an impossible game oriented toward using artifacts and nodes, but it didn't work out. With Tauron, Sss'ra, Lo Pan, and Jafar, there was a MASSIVE focus on Sorcery and Chaos. I finally conceded my capital when I saw Doom Bolt and Psionic Blast being thrown around liberally, and Sss'ra knew Flame Strike (though I don't think he ever got around to using it on me). I did manage to end Lo Pan before going down, and I did end with around 600 points (mostly by achieving spell parity with the AI), but I just didn't have the units to compete when they all dog piled me.

Well, I finally took her capital. She did manage to Disjunction my Suppress Magic, but I took her Zombie Mastery.

Her spells are insane. She has the max 30,000 mana, and with only 2 Sorcery spellbooks she has Phantom Beast, Air Elemental, Invisibility, Magic Immunity, Counter Magic, Dispel Magic True, Psionic Blast, on top of every Death spell, lol.

When I was ready to take her capital she had 3 Demon Lords, Aerie, and a bunch of Death Knights. I sent a a single Paladin in and took out Aerie with an Air Elemental and Psionic Blast similarly to your suggestion. Then I followed with 2 Paladins, 4 Flying Warships, and 3 well leveled Heroes/Champions.

I had Malleus, Warrax, and Alorra. Warrax has Leadership BTW, so that helped the Paladins. I put up Counter Magic which helped block some of her Inivis attempts, but she still got a few off.

I was able to pick off the Death Knights from range mostly and finish a few with Paladins. She got some Invisible Death knights on me that took out a Paladin and then I was able to take those out with Warrax in melee.

She got an Invisible Demon Lord, and I was low on mana, too low to Disenchant area, so I ran Alorra (Agility with 28 shields) in to find him, then when I did I used Warrax to Disenchant True and make him visible, and then was able to finish him off with ranged. BTW, Malleus has Super Arcane Power :)

I've also got Aerie, but for some reason she got 0 extra picks, so she's not that great and wouldn't have been very helpful against a bunch of undead. Now I'm going to have to rampage her towns while she's gone and fill the world with Zombies. BTW, I did Disjunction the Eternal Night, it seemed to powerful with all the Death Knights she's got running around.

I should just be able to keep her constantly Banished at this point.

Always a good time. :D Make a second "Tower Assault Death Stack" just in case, but it sounds like you now have the game well in hand.

Yeah, I'm splitting up my heroes now to have them go take towns solo. I'm keeping Aerie with some Flying Warships (in part because she only has 2 movement and also because she's still low level), the other 3 will split up. Then I'll summon a Sky Drake ASAP, which should be in about 8 turns and I'm sending normal unit stacks out and take anything they can as well. So it should come to a pretty quick end at this point. Even if she comes back, her magic isn't that scary without the large stacks of Very Rare summons.