Chosha: Godly unit, or military academy bug?

[Puce Moose]

I've always wanted a lovable Chosha unit or 76 (what my leadership will allow) for my very own, but sadly have never found any to recruit in Reha. To my delight I discovered that the military academy will let me train gobots into Chosha; but at a terrible price; over 800 trophies per Chosha! Considering that each battle seems to yield 100-400 trophies, this seems like a *steep* price for a single Chosha.

Is the academy the only way these units are available, or do they sometimes show up for hire? I've accumulated about 14,000 trophies over the last twenty hours of play, clearing multiple islands - are 17 Chosha worth this exchange, or is this a price bug/oversight?

[Jah]

Don't know whether it's a bug or not, but the trophy requirements for training units in general seem a little too steep to make that feature really useful. I suppose it also depends on your character class and difficulty level; maybe a mage (whose lower leadership doesn't allow huge armies anyway) on Impossible (where enemy armies are bigger and you presumably accumulate trophies faster) would have more use for it.

As to the availability of choshas, you could use the save game scanner to see if there's anyone selling them.

[Rhygadon]

That sounds like you just had bad luck with the population rolls for Reha; usually Choshas are as plentiful as any other lizard unit. (I had a similar experience, though - my Reha had no Gorguls.)

One option might be to use trophies to acquire just one, then either Sacrifice other units or use Leadership during fights on Reha. Or just hope for better luck in your next game. ;)

[Puce Moose]

Thanks for the information. I actually found a pretty reasonable work around; I modified the file battle_academy.lua to lower the upgrade cost, then dropped the file into the sessions/orcs/Mods folder. Just in case anyone wants to do similarly, the file is located in orcs.kfs. On line 62 the function that controls the pricing begins:

function tc_army_price_up(i) ---- íîâàÿ öåíà
return {3,15,250,100,9,50,80,190,19,75,80,85,85,6,8,370,1 80,50,95,370,45,10,11,35,110,110,2,140,75,1,85,15, 1,750,50}
end

110, 110 are the chosha entries (it's 810, 810 in the default file).

[BB Shockwave]

How did you find out which entry is which?

I'll probably use the training academy a lot in my game, as I want to use Royal Griffins with my human army, and there aren't many to recruit - so I will have to train them from Griffins.

[onepiece]

@BB; Curious. In my previous walkthrough (paladin impossible) there where like 30 royal griffin and in my current (mage, hard) there are like 300 only in Verona.
You really have to use the Scanner to avoid things like this.

I've also come to realize that the lower your difficulty level, the more chances of getting better items, units and altars.

[Puce Moose]

BB:

I compared the entries for the upgrade to the army list. Here's the relevant section from battle_akademy.lua:

function tc_army_price_up(i) ---- íîâàÿ öåíà
return {3,15,250,100,9,50,80,190,19,75,80,85,85,6,8,370,1 80,50,95,370,45,10,11,35,810,810,2,140,75,1,85,15, 1,750,50}
end
function tc_army_af(i) --- íîâûé áîåö
return {"robber2","footman2","archmage","paladin","barbarian2","bear2","bear_white","griffin2","beholder2","snake_royal","snake_royal","kingthorn","kingthorn","spider_fire","spider_fire","assassin","elf2","ent2","unicorn2","assassin","dwarf","droideka_guard","ingeneer","gorguana2","chosha","chosha","goblin2","goblin_shaman","shaman_blood","zombie2","vampire2","ghost2","imp2","demon2","archdemon"}
end

Assuming that griffin2 refers to royal griffins (Not sure what else it could be) the bolded entry should be the one that controls the griffin upgrade cost.

[smartguy]

I wonder why you not simply use the "sacrifice" chaos spell. I used it all the time to "breed" the units I wanted, long before the addon was released. Dunno if it still works that way and for warriors though but for mage back then there was no problem.

[onepiece]

The only problem with sacrifice is that is very expensive in terms of mana, units sacrificed and requires lots of intelligence to raise a small number of level 4 units (it makes it difficult for a warrior who has the most leadership and the least mana to use it).

Plus sometimes you get it near the end of the game so most of it you're gonna play without it. And it makes problem if you're doing a no-loss game.

[BB Shockwave]

I managed to use it with my Warrior - I ran out of Gorguls around the end of the game, and had to Sacrifice my Tirexes. Works well as all you need is to eat a corpse and the Tirex is healed again, a Warrior doesn't have enough Intellect usually to kill one with a Level I-II sacrifice.