Impossible Warrior - no buy

[fable]

The rules are:
- impossible difficulty
- no buying of units
- buying eggs are fine, but it doesn't make a big difference
- no map-kiting, that would make it too easy
- no loss of battle, and getting free army that way

It was fun in KB:TL, I wrote about it here: http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=6022

Ancient Vampires still rock, but sacrifice doesn't work on them. Splitting and turning back time on griffons still works.

It's very hard, but also fun. I won 10 lossless fights with the starting army to get the first leadership medal. You can double them up if you put them all to castle reserve before the tutorial. Also added a griffon from egg and a few thorns I found.
There are unguarded 2 Bolo maps, one on Debir and one on Scarlet Wind, I restarted the game a few times until one of them gave Call of Death as a duplicate.
I'm trying to use the wanderer scrolls to summon units as late as possible, to have better results with more leadership. Maybe I'm overdoing it, but so far I've only used up one call of death to summon 14 ancient vampires.
When I picked warrior, I thought it'd be easiest due to high leadership and lots of rage to summon mythic eggs. However, with a single stack of vampires to start, it's hard to build up rage, so it's not like I can drop lots of eggs quickly.
After reaching Verona I found sacrifice and brought them up to 29 from spare snakes, that was enough to open Montero, Dersu, Tekron and Uzala. Most of them were epic battles, when there're like 5 vampires left and they still came back, or the last point of rage is just enough to summon another egg for the win. I'm at level 17, 7k leadership, dragon pet is level 26.
I feel like it'll be easy from this point. If I find a physical resistance item, I can switch to Black Knights. If I find Turn Back Time, I'll use griphons, that's even better than black knight + evlin, because I can end a fight with more griphons than I started with. Or I can just keep the vampires, my favourite unit ever since HOMM 2.

[fable]

I'm running around with vampires + ancient vampires + griffins, and that got me thinking. They're all available from eggs/coffins/transform, so in theory, no wanderer scroll is required. With map-kiting, adding a few more constraints would make the game even more interesting, but still doable:

- impossible difficulty
- no buying of units, only eggs/sprouts/etc
- no loss of battle, and getting free army that way
new contraints:
- no loss of units
- no use of wanderer scrolls
- no use of level 5 units

With map kiting, get "turn back time", "sacrifice", some good +mana items, a few levels and leadership, at least 2 griffin eggs and a carved coffin. Go back to debir and on easy fights multiply griffins by split+time back. Once there're enough, start sacrificing them for vampires and keep doing split+time back to prevent unit losses. These 2 units can probably win the game, but you can also transform 5 vampires into an ancient vampire in Nameless, and get them to full as well.

I'm thinking if it's possible to pull this off without map kiting. If Verona could spawn Turn Back Time (I heard it can), and if the Verona map guard units could be kited around the battlefield with a griffin, a thorn archer stack could shoot at them while covering behind a wall. There's a carved coffin in the graveyard in Verona as well.
Those are big IF-s though :)

[Zechnophobe]

I was considering something like this, since it amused me to make Diplomacy an actually useful skill. If you can't recruit troops, it becomes a cool way to get an army.

Sadly, Shield of Rekrosse remains best item in game.

[DGDobrev]

I also wonder if it's possible without kiting. On debir you have some spiders, some snakes, thorns and a few griffins to go around. That is a pretty poor army, and if you decide to play with a single griffin stack, you may not be able to outrun some enemies due to their low speed. That gives you a serious setback right from the start...

Otherwise, the challenge is interesting. However, some boss battles may prove quite a challenge with these units, because they have very poor resistances.

BTW, if you slap in the no lvl 5 unit constraint, how will you grow your stacks without losing a unit? There is no guarantee that vampires can leech enough life out of the enemies to get up to par when you sacrifice them to grow another stack. Evlin may cut it, but I'm not sure if it resurrects the extra creatures you got by sacrificing.

EDIT: On the second thought, my bad. It can be done, even if that requires a lot of mana. Get 2 stacks of vamps (single type or 2 types), use one to grow the other and then evlin to replenish the losses. That would require 2 fights to be effective, but that proves that there is a way.

EDIT 2: The next thing I'm wondering is how will you start growing your stacks when you'll have only a few vamps, because sacrifice hurts a lot. In general, there is still a way - use griffins or lvl 1-2 creatures, sacrifice them, grow the vamps and then use resurrection. That however costs even more mana to do :)

[Harush]

Another challenge I was thinking of was to see how many levels you could get without spending any runes. Or similarly, what is the highest number of runes you can collect. I've had over 100 runes on me several times, but I've never tried to focus just on maxing them out.

[travelingoz]

I think the challenge will be hard enough if it's either no level 5's OR no Wanderer Scrolls. And no kiting of course.

[fable]

BTW, if you slap in the no lvl 5 unit constraint, how will you grow your stacks without losing a unit? There is no guarantee that vampires can leech enough life out of the enemies to get up to par when you sacrifice them to grow another stack. Evlin may cut it, but I'm not sure if it resurrects the extra creatures you got by sacrificing.

EDIT: On the second thought, my bad. It can be done, even if that requires a lot of mana. Get 2 stacks of vamps (single type or 2 types), use one to grow the other and then evlin to replenish the losses. That would require 2 fights to be effective, but that proves that there is a way.

EDIT 2: The next thing I'm wondering is how will you start growing your stacks when you'll have only a few vamps, because sacrifice hurts a lot. In general, there is still a way - use griffins or lvl 1-2 creatures, sacrifice them, grow the vamps and then use resurrection. That however costs even more mana to do :)

Sacrifice doesn't work on vampires, or any undead. I like this change, because it was way too powerful combo in TL.
The trick with griffins, a bit more detailed:
- enter the first battle with 4 griffins. On the second turn, split them and use time back on the original stack. Now you have 6 griffins. If you can do it again in the same battle, you'll make another 2.
- The second battle you have 8 griffins and can make 4 per time back.

Once you have enough griffins, let's say 20 and leadership allows 30:
- enter battle with 20 griffins and a vampire. Use split and then time back, now you have 30 griffins. Use sacrifice on the extra griffins, they'll not count as loss. If you can set it up, you can split the griffins, cast sacrifice on them, and time back on the next turn.

[DGDobrev]

Most interesting tactic, and very imaginative, if I might add. However, that pretty much forces you to go on a kiting spree, because you'll need to start around lvl 20 or so to make good use of the spells you listed with a warrior, because you will be hard pressed to delve deep into the magic tree. In addition to that, you will need a good supply of mana to achieve that goal. Time back is 30, Sacrifice is 20... If you don't have any good means of restoring the mana (like mana accelerator, because concentration is way too deep in the magic tree and you need distortion lvl 2 and chaos lvl 1 at least), you may be stuck at ground zero if you don't have enough runes.

[fable]

Most interesting tactic, and very imaginative, if I might add. However, that pretty much forces you to go on a kiting spree, because you'll need to start around lvl 20 or so to make good use of the spells you listed with a warrior, because you will be hard pressed to delve deep into the magic tree. In addition to that, you will need a good supply of mana to achieve that goal. Time back is 30, Sacrifice is 20... If you don't have any good means of restoring the mana (like mana accelerator, because concentration is way too deep in the magic tree and you need distortion lvl 2 and chaos lvl 1 at least), you may be stuck at ground zero if you don't have enough runes.

It's not that bad. I've attached my save game at level 6, before using the wanderer scroll for vampires. You can buy a +20 mana item in the mage tower for a total of 30 mana. My dragon started with mana accelerator. That, and mana spring would provide the mana regen. You only need distortion level 1, first level time back is good for level 3. If you spend the runes you can already get both distortion and chaos magic. Too bad Time back is not for sale in Verona in this save game. Hopefully you could find enough gold in Verona to buy it.

[DGDobrev]

Looks pretty good, but you will still need to kite. The army you have set up is indded containers only, but it is prone to suffering casualties. Some of the enemies you have in debir are pretty badly set... At least you have a Verona map on Scarlet.

I also stand corrected on the time back, it will work on the griffins. You have 1 + 1 egg, there are a few more in verona, and this is a decent starting point for your tactic.

Well, might be worth the try. In any case, it will be fun :)

EDIT: I suppose the units you get from robbing graves do count? Skeleton Archers can be quite nice if one can get his hands on a decent amount of them through sacrifice. Although they're low on HP, evlin can resurrect thousands of them. Same can be said about the 2 types of zombies. Vampires, Ancient Vampires, Zombies, Decaying Zombies and Skeleton Archers may be a fun party to play with. Now, if there was a way to transform spiders into undead spiders, I would have been even happier.

[fable]

Here's another savegame, "turn back time" in verona, "sacrifice" in rusty anchor, and the verona map guard in scarlet wind is 1600 devilfish, as seen on the screenshot. The griffin just has to keep flying between 2 places while the archers do the job. It's just a trial run, there would be 6 archers and more thorns if done properly. I've used up 2 call of nature scrolls as cannon fodders, to build up rage for the wall. I expect it'd take around 200 turns.

[DGDobrev]

OMG :) Feeling masochistic? That's a lot of real time spent. Why not simply do the kiting run and start with Vamps, 2 types of zombies, Griffins and Skel Archers?

[fable]

I don't like map kiting :) Also, it's about pushing the limits.

I'm level 40 with my warrior, I want to finish that first, at least I'll see if I can beat gremlion with griffins. I'm pretty sure the 2 stack of vampires will own Baal and the big lizard.
After that I'll see... I also have a plan of trying the paladin class with level 1-2 units only (without any other constraints, except "no map kiting").

[fable]

Well, I've finished with that savegame. No buy, no loss, no wanderer scrolls. Just 5 griffin eggs and a carved coffin :)

The fight for Verona map indeed took 203 turns :) it was boring as hell, until turn 197 when the remaining 67 devilfish started to be tricky and "wait". Archers's ice arrow saved the day. The rest of the game was lots of fun with quite a few challenges. Getting 30 mana for the first few time back was a close one (2 from rat meat, 3 from shrine, etc), I had to spend a lot of magic runes on Wisdom. Sacrifice was sold on Rusty Anchor but its map was inaccessible, I had to kite away Old Rotbox in Verona, it was also sold there. The carved coffin was also there but you can grab it without kiting him. For a long time I was barely able to cast one sacrifice per battle, the vampires were growing slowly. Mana spring was not for sale until Montero. Later, with more rage coming in, and Chaos Magic 2, it was much faster, I could get 30-50 vampires per battle in easy fights, and stocked up a lot to last through the game. I got the ancient vampires very late, because I had to clear the basement on Nameless, and there were 460 necromancers and 45 bone dragons versus my griffins. They became a full stack and a lot in reserve in a few battles, and sadly, it was too easy after that, so I quickly finished it instead of clearing everything. Gremlion was easy. K'hatu was tricky due to the gorgonuas, a vampire with mark of blood wouldn't survive a turn. Baal was a close one. They would have been easy if I got more levels (I was level 48 at the end) and the staff with -15% undead leadership... but easy is no fun, is it? :)