lore i sort of did it!

[ckdamascus]

I beat KTahu, zero losses although my team is a bit diff now.

paladins, royal griffins, elves, hunters, and bowmen.

First quick run, I lost 51 troops to baal. I was a fool. I'll try it again, but I was just so impressed at how fast the battles were. Took me 8 rounds to kill baal.

12 Rounds to kill and resurrect for KTahu.

I wonder if the mage can do it without using black knights? I had about 45K in leadership after flaming eye though.

[loreangelicus]

This is great news! So a pseudo-archer team does work for a warrior on impossible difficulty.

12 rounds on K'Tahu, that's wicked. :) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing these three factors helped a lot in your speedy no-loss victory:

1) phantom paladins allow you to resurrect your troops all at the same time

2) except for maybe the royal griffins, your high physical resistance paladins and all 3 of your archers could concentrate fire on K'Tahu when there are no summons

3) you have a lineup of 5 full stacks

I haven't faced Baal myself, but I always thought K'Tahu was the tougher fight since you had Bill Gilbert's army to help you finish off Baal.

Just finished Elon atm, took Zilgadis no-loss in 39 rounds instead of the 67 rounds on my initial run-through (see screenshot). I am very envious of the 95% magic resistance (gift-bag items?) you had when you took him out in 6 rounds; I only had around 37% magic resistance. :( Oh well, I probably wouldn't have been able to equip those magic-resistance items anyways, what with all the XP-bonus items I need to put on.

[Zechnophobe]

Baal is a fair bit harder than Ktahu. The extra army makes little difference for the most part, and ends up being more of a 'oh cool trick' than a truly useful helper. (maybe less so on Normal difficulty).

Baal summons units that are generally harder to 'deal' with than the lizardmen. Imps do fire damage. Archdemons halve. Demons have a lot of turns. And he summons them between you and him, and while doing damage to you. In general he just has better attack options.

Anyhow, that isn't the point of the thread. Good job on pwning Ktahu with the archer formation. How many paladin phantoms did you have to make? I assume you left like, a brontor or gorguana stack alive while you rezzed?

[ckdamascus]

Phantom paladins help in the final stages, but oddly enough it really is more of the "best defense is a good offense" build.

However, you really need to abuse turn back time with a native paladin resurrection. I take SEVERE losses from ktahu's first hit. I did have leather dress and twinkling but oh man... that really doesn't do much. But yes, I keep the archers in a circle so phantom or paladin resurrection heals more efficiently.

I also got the inquisitor's sword specifically to abuse this, as my intellect is low (11) and I did not spend runes for the mage tree "resurrection" spell power. Does that even help a paladin's resurrection?

Contrary to what the info thread says, I out-initiative ktahu with my hunters in the first round due to quick draw. Not that there is much I could do with it but it was funny. :)

A few surprises. I actually NEEDED tactics 2 so my paladin and royal griffins can hit his arms in the first round. His AoE blast slows my units afterwards. I am fairly sure this is critical to prevent him from summoning an early wave or to do another area of effect blast.

Yes, I found magician's cowl in a chest (huge shocker to me), chaos crown (gift bag 50% magic and astral resistance), and diploma.

Oddly enough, ktahu's minions are more troublesome, but not by much. Reason? Almost all lizardmen take HALF damage from my attacks due to rugged scales. However, after retooling my items and using flaming eyes, I can wipe them out nearly as fast as they come up.

I literally have 3 archers that have 100% critical rates (thanks to black bandage, another gift bag item!)

The key to ktahu for me was to keep hitting his arm, even if it meant teleporting the paladins to hit it. It was a tricky balance between that and preparing for a turn back time resurrection.

Yes, I tried to keep a ranged unit alive so I had enough time to do phantom resurrection. I suppose it is a little cheesy, but if all no-loss methods are chessy, I would rather kill the boss very fast. :)

Baal's minions do not do anything for the first round, so I can kill them all handily, but I do not want to!!! I need them to stay alive longer so I could resurrect more. The gilbert army ends up killing the imps... :(

I can probably do the baal thing better as long as he does not shift my paladin to prevent the turn back time resurrection. My first run where I only lost 51 guys was the best one. :(

I probably will not try it for too much and leave it as it is.

Seeing as how useful physical resistance is, I am going to try an impossible mage using some archers too.

To compensate for the lower leadership, I will experiment with precision, hell breath, and berserker. :)

[edit]
sorry was at work when I responded, here are some screenshots.

Haha, took out the frog in 2 rounds. :) Spider took a while because you cannot use range to hit him. So, the ranged waited many rounds and took out the summons while the paladin and griffon did the real work.

I included my embarassing baal battle. Bleh. Maybe I will redo the battle, but I am just so excited about the possibility of using a mage with archers instead.

[Zechnophobe]

Frog, spider, and Driller are all very much mid game bosses, not really end game ones. Spider is the easiest to do without losses, as he doesn't have an AoE attack.

Did you try Dragon Arrows at all? It can be amazing against bosses or high armor/resistance units. Almost broken feeling in some cases.

[ckdamascus]

No, I did not.

I have come to the conclusion any "ability" gives you a critical hit rate % of ... 0%. So I suspect you lose your ability to crit when you use stuff like "double arrow shot" (elf ability) or "dragon arrow".

They seem to only be really good with archers that have range penalty early on, otherwise, helplessness level 3 seems to work quite well.

I am a little bothered that hell breath does not seem to scale up in power due to intellect. I do wonder if hell breath works with two necklaces of flame/firestorm. So would a level 3 hell breath (40%) go to (40*1.6 = 64%?)

Do you know if +fire dmg or +astral dmg items also get multiplied by criticals? If so, seems like hell breath might be particularly useful. :)

[Zechnophobe]

I do not know first hand, but I think it probably does not.

And you can't cast helplessness on Ktahu (If you can and I've missed that all this time, I am sad).

Not that I use dragon arrows very often, but the jaw dropping damage they do against units like Cyclopses and trolls is pretty amazing.

[ckdamascus]

It does. You get linear growth with hell breath. Not sure on how any special immunity to fire helps out. It "might" sneak through since the true base damage is physical. Unless the game is clever enough to break it down separately when calculating total damage.

[edit] Game is clever enough to break it down separately when calculating total damage.

No, but the bosses tend to take quite a bit of damage anyway. 100% crits really changes everything and it is not clear to me if 30% less resistance (too bad there are no negative resists) and NO chance to crit PLUS losing one round of casting is better than 150% damage guaranteed. I prefer the 150% damage for now.

That said, the Flame Necklace is one of the few items that DOES increase the power of Hell Breath. Intellect does nothing for this skill. I happen to have two of them in my game and a fire bracelet for a potential total of 30+30+10 or 70%. Ugh, those keepers are SO hard to kill though.

Level 3 hell breath gives 40% damage * 1.7 = 68%.

So, I can do mass precision, and one hell breath on the lucky stack that gets to do, INSANE DAMAGE.

Yes, I did test this. :)

Sadly, since warriors tend to have double the leadership over mages, all I might have really gained is a flexible build due to superior mana pool and doublecast, but one that is "crippled" by requiring both buffs to reach the same level of damage, and possibly not as good against fire resistant enemies.

This almost makes me want to cry. :)