KBDS Normal/Hard/Impossible No-loss thread

[DGDobrev]

Guys, I think we should relieve the other threads from our no-loss talks, cause others play the game differently than us and we shouldn't impose that mentality on them.

So, since people are already trying it, we can share some thoughts here. Since I started this, I will start I guess... So my observations are as follows:

- early game is the hardest, but no surprise there. The three troops you need to kill for the Spirit of Darkness are a bottleneck you must go though. I was kinda hoping there isn't one, but it is manageable (I just need to stop losing 1 imp to the Human troops, easy as that).
- Orc: Good damage, large numbers, but ultimately low-HP troops, so very hard to go for no-loss.
- Demoness: Good HP troops, Demons can summon, Demonesses can swap, but Imps are too dangerous to bring close to the fray, cause it takes very little to bring one of them down. Probably the best no-loss option.
- Vampires: you need to rely on Vampires to replenish themselves, but they can only do so much. I am quite sure if you get some decent spells at start, you might be able to deal with the enemies, cause worst case scenario, vampires are fast and can fly quite far. I am yet to get into the vampire leader seriously though.

Well, jump in guys, we can share and improve our tactics :)

[zjazd18]

Yeah, it will be all about those few early battles, later there are multiple ways to deal with stuff, there are no big boss battles etc.

I see people talking about 3 units (dwarf/elf/human army) and actually i had problem with other 3 units. Right after those 3 you have to clear another 3 at whitehill, it's where i gave up on no-loss and brute forced them with spiders, or can you skip those battles at whitehill and i missed that? After those 3 battles no-loss was pretty easy, whoever played any other KB game on impossible won't have any problems.

Demoness is definietly the best at start, late game i would guess vampire will be the king (I wanna to test how far you can push intellect with Archamge talent). Feel like orc is the weakest at the start, he has nothing going on for him. There is shop at his starting location with trolls, would be sweet if we had leadership for them :grin:

I was thinking vampire with lvl2 trap and trapper might have a shot, at those 3 battles but then again there are archers and mana will be a problem.

I'm gonna finish my current playthrough (lvl53) and go redo those early battles no-loss.

[sethmage]

At Whitehill you need to take only one out of those 3 to progress on.

[DGDobrev]

Orcs are extremely powerful - they just need to build some adrenaline and they trash the enemy. But then again, not an army to go for no-loss. I am totally gonna play them in the future though. They can get to wicked attack values, even the measly goblins. Their leadership requirements are relatively low, so you can amass a huge army of orcs. Combine their traits with the warrior ones and you can trounce everyone. They can go on an easy rampage, you just need to have means to replenish their ranks.

Then again, not an army to do no-loss.

[zjazd18]

There are paladins after the castle battle at portland so i guess even orcs will work fine from early stages of the game. Just the problematic resurrection, sometimes there might not be weak ranged or no retaliation creature to leave, while grouping for resurrection.

Best unit early on to get is demonologist, very good leadership ratio on summons, and not so bad heal/resurrect. If you get executioners it's pretty much free win.

[DGDobrev]

Well, re-rolling the demoness, I managed to defeat the Knight hero for the first time. It was a glorious battle. Key to it was to just dump the imps in reserve and split the demonesses, effectively using 2 high HP troops to tank the enemy's "heals". I played this fight 3 times, and on all 3 times, there was a volcano on the battlefield, so it goes beyond saying that the more you keep the enemy around it, the better :) The 2x1 demonesses can swap troops around the battlefield as needed, preferably switching the Demon summoning with the Bowmen for an easy bowmen kill, as they suffer close combat penalties.

Whew. That was awesome. There does seem to be another Knight troop on the map, but it looks inaccessible. I am not the type of player to scream bug right away, so it might be a captured troop. Sadly, you can't kill it.

[zjazd18]

Yeah, its all about overcoming, what seemed to be impossible to do. It's the greatest fun for me in this series, still remember KB:AP/CW and doing necromancer hero(first island) at first visit, what a fight it was.

I don't know what Knight troop you are referring to, but if it's in any starting locations, or in dwarf territory you will get back there, and explore them fully.

[DGDobrev]

It is on the intersection leading to the Catacombs portal in the Demoness' starting world. On impossible it shows as a "Strong" enemy vs your best lineup. There doesn't seem to be any obstruction that prevents you from fighting it, but you cant. Whatever... I can live without it :)

[Zhuangzi]

Yeah, I couldn't get to that trapped troop either, DG. I didn't see it as a bug.

I was completely stuck on those three Shelter battles, or more accurately on the Elven one. I retried this battle dozens of times and I just couldn't do it, so I started again and did the first 12 or so battles again (this is Impossible Demoness). This time I changed my skill tree usage so that I had level two Diversion (2 traps). I also have Chaos magic 1 but sadly I only have Fire Arrow (which you start with), Fear (no use here) and Chaos Blade.

I haven't re-done those 3 battles successfully yet, but one strange thing I noticed is that the Elven fight had less Fairies this time around. Last playthrough I'm sure there were like 89 of them, now only 49? I'm wondering if the game varies the number of troops depending on which battle you take first, i.e. it will be easier if you do the Elven one first?

EDIT: well, I won that Elven battle on my first try this morning! For this is a super difficult fight, with two stacks of Werewolf Elves, Fauns, Elven Archers and Fairies. I generally tried to get rid of the fauns first with Imp fireballs and Fire Arrow. I let the Demon spawn a unit on turn 1 and swap that for the Elven Archers. Once that stack is down to 3, the Demoness could charm it. The big problem was the Werewolf howl which caused my Imps to turn TOWARDS the enemy! I used the Demon to tank (obviously) and also to an extent the Demoness. I just managed it with the Cerebus on 9 HP, the Demoness on 10 (with bleeding that would have killed her) and the Demon on about 50 HP. Phew!

Sadly I have to go to work now!

[DGDobrev]

Exactly. Troops are always randomly generated, so you may have a better roll the next time you play the game. I for one, won't mind less ranged units on the human troop. I just couldn't drop their numbers well enough before they could kill 1 imp. I have the 1 lost imp save, but... but... oh well. We will try again. I am also going for lvl 2 Diversion this time around.

That was also pretty much how KBWOTN no-loss play-throughs were made. Luck out vs less opposition on the bottleneck battle, and you are golden. GG.

EDIT: Allrighty, with lvl 3 Diversion (to achieve that you need level 5 and that requires you beating the Knight hero in Atrixus, which is a very tough fight) and some cunning planning, I am past the 3 guards. Demoness swapping/charming enemy troops when needed for the win. Feed the troops summoned by the Demon to the enemies by swapping their ranged units with it, drop the swapped ranged unit down to a low count, and charm them with the Demoness. Now use it against them :) Fun times. Haven't felt that since KBAP.

[Zhuangzi]

Yeah, I'm past those three guardians myself now. For some reason tonight I beat the Human and Dwarf stack first time. Then you can kite your way through the basement without fighting (Very Hard stacks of Snakes - ouch), take down the easiest looking stack on Whitehill, and then you're able to replenish your Imps/Cerebuses and head to Portland. I kited my way around Portland picking up everything and now I am up to about 1200 leadership on Level 6. The stacks around here are Slightly Stronger and above. Unfortunately I can't see any Demons/Demonesses anywhere, and no Paladins as yet. So I'll have to be really careful. The only unit of use (at Clarrisa's hut) is Evil Beholders. So this is still pretty much a Demon army for now with no way of resurrecting even a single troop.

[zjazd18]

Nice job guys, so you can skip those stacks at whitehill, how could i have missed that. You can go back to demoness starting location from portland and buy nice units there.

[DGDobrev]

I am still trying to do something against those spiders. I see a light in the tunnel, but it sure is a bad fight. Baiting enemies in traps and evilns left by the undead spiders is key. I dropped their numbers to like 20 spiders before my demon tank died last time, so it should be possible somehow.

[zjazd18]

If you are talking about that one stack of spiders stronger than all the others, there is no need to do it right away, you can come back there from portland, and do it once you have bought units you want. On the other hand where is challenge in that;)

[DGDobrev]

It is in the basement where you need to dig out 3 items. Killing the weakest stack and digging the items is easy, but I have certain doubts that I can come back to this place. Worst case scenario, I can skip those fights, I doubt the experience from them will be that crucial later on, and from all I hear, the game should open up soon.

Btw, careful with the Paladins, people. Their resurrection skills used to HURT Demons and Undead in KBAP/CW. The only character who can resurrect demons is the demonologist to my knowledge. Or of course, you with the resurrection spell.

[zjazd18]

Sorry don't remember anything like that, must have not been that difficult or possible to do later.

As of paladins they aren't normal paladins, they are dark paladins, and resurrect troops of the dark. Resurrection doesn't work on demons now, you have to do quest for it to work on troops of the dark.

[DGDobrev]

Most interesting, thanks for the info :) So, you mean we have paladins of the dark who ress, we have dark knights and eviln... I am already getting quite a bunch of ideas in my head.

[Zhuangzi]

DG, I think you're right that we won't be able to come back into the basement later, but I figured that the xp wouldn't count for much in the long run so I skipped them. Plus, you know, really difficult fights!

zjazd18, I'll have a lookout for those Dark Paladins. They are in one of the castles on Portland, are they? I'm guessing I'll need to do some quests first.

EDIT: around this time you should get the first level of the Grand Strategian medal (20 fights), which is worth 200 leadership. Takes me up to 1450 now. If only I could find some Demons and/or Demonesses to buy...

[zjazd18]

Yeah, in the castle near the shore - Branigard. I think i had 20 of them there, then some at Inselburg, but really once you get recruiter deep in demoness skill tree you basically have unlimited supply of paladins.

EDIT: demons are in Atrixus (demoness starting location) you get there by going into catacombs at portland.

[DGDobrev]

You were correct, it was easy to open up the new locations through the catacombs, so I pillaged Atrixus and found demonologists in the Demonologist hut which you can access through the flying platform in the main yellow picture-circle (or whatever that is). Now things are going much more smoothly.

I will, however, eat my shorts if KBDS has the early KBAP bug where disbanding troops count as losses :D

[MattCaspermeyer]

I've been playing Demoness with the early access since the end of June (my brother, Dave, had gotten me Dark Side for my birthday).

Since this is about no loss, here's my spoiler alert. If you don't want the game spoiled then don't read any further...

SPOILER GAP
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END SPOILER GAP

These strategies below have resulted in no loss.

While obviously some things have changed since then and the release, I've been able to do all battles no loss so far and am now level 59.

The keys are to use the abilities of your units to their fullest through the Whitehill battles as well as opting for damaging skills and medals (i.e. Trap was instrumental in all the battles through Whitehill). Also if you have spells, you should be using them every turn to either damage or slow the enemy.

You couldn't go to the other areas through the Catacombs when I was playing so you had to make due with the units you could get from your starting location. Plus there was no way to get Demonologists from Atrixus (this must have changed) and I honestly have not even seen one the entire game, yet.

Since I didn't play the other classes, I can only speak of the Demoness, but there are a lot of similarities between the other classes with respect to troop availability and what you should strive towards.

I also did all the Atrixus, Catacombs, Dragandor, Shelter, and Whitehill battles (every single one including the Knight that kidnaps the demon child, the big spider stack in the Catacombs, all 3 Shelter battles, and the 3 Whitehill battles) with just the paltry starting units of Imps, Scoffer Imps, 5 Cerberi, 2 Demonesses, and 1 Demon. When I was playing earlier, you had to defeat all 3 Whitehill stacks before the Shelter would replenish, not just 1.

Also, forget about getting any decent level 4 troops in quantity of your race until you get to Monteville (where they will be Undead). Those Evil Beholders that you get from the Witch in Portland are going to be your best units until you get to Monteville. I actually had Assassins that I got from Inselburg for a brief period of time.

My army consisted of Imps, Scoffer Imps, Blood Priestesses, Cerberi, and Evil Beholders for my Portland play and then I swapped out the Blood Priestesses for Assassins when I got them. Your main goal is to do as many quests as possible with kiting / minimal fighting and then get the maps to the other islands of Inselburg and Monteville.

You will then be able to do more kiting and complete some quests to get the Mage for the shelter. Once you do that, focus on getting a Scroll of the Colossus and get yourself either 1 Red or Black Dragon or ArchDemon. Once you do this then focus on defeating the Dragon in Portland. The Dark Human troops are not available until you finish the Portland quests so you can forget about getting Dark Paladins until then.

For me, though, by the time I had Portland finished, I had defeated the Dragon and the 1 Red Dragon I used to defeat the Dragon was enough to make the game significantly easier.

Getting the healing spell is obviously a top priority since you can't resurrect level 5 troops and you'll need to get the dark version of heal to heal your ArchDemons as needed. Empathy is also a very good spell to get to keep damage to your level 5's to a minimum and protect you from Geyser / Armageddon. By the way, the description for Empathy is wrong - it can tie an Ally to an Enemy as well as an Ally.

You will also have the opportunity to get Scrolls of the Colossus and then you should try to get yourself ArchDemons. Once you get them, you can use their Volcano skill and ranged attackers will always attack the Volcano to destroy it. This is huge! For a while I had 2 or 3 ArchDemon stacks with a few Red and Black Dragons and sometimes Green Dragons and you can pretty much defeat most stacks with this group of troops.

Then once you get Dragon Riders, the game is pretty much over. They summon random dragon stacks and, here's the kicker, the skill is largely affected by your leadership and not the number of Dragon Riders in the stack. So I basically had two stacks of ArchDemons evenly split and three 1 Dragon Rider stacks and I was summoning like 7500 Leadership worth of Dragons at first. This is more than enough to defeat most stacks. The Dragon Riders are 100k gold each + 1 Princess, but I essentially have played almost the entire game with just 3 Dragon Riders and two ArchDemon stacks.

Also you will find the Call of Nature spell is seriously overpowered once your leadership gets in the 15 to 20k range. I am able to summon level 1-4 units with about 40k leadership now. They mow through everything and if that is not enough, summon another 40k stack next turn. Slap Mana Spring on them and you'll be able to recharge your mana for the next battle.

I've actually been a bit bored with it, since it is a bit tedious defeating stack after stack of "invincible" enemies this way. Put out the volcanoes, summon some dragons, use Call of Nature and repeat.

I also find the power of Bleeding, Freezing, etc. to cause way too much damage - the Dark Clot skill can literally cause several thousand damage to each affected stack each turn, depending on how large the stack is. The larger the better.

The only things to look out for are:


Heroes with Geyser / Armageddon (I think I've counted 5 so far - use Empathy to split the damage to another troop)
Rarely, Elf Hunters will move before your ArchDemons (so you'll need an artifact with -1 enemy initiative or you'll have to put some more points into the Warrior Onslaught skill


I'm hoping to finish the game in another couple of weeks - I don't have much time to play during the week so it is mostly on weekends.

So pretty much the challenge of the game is through Whitehill and then after that you shouldn't have much trouble. I do find some of the early quests interesting, but you get Dragon Riders before any of the other new units for the most part (it took me forever to get the Spy and they are lousy), the Amazons are neat, but once you get ArchDemons / Dragon Riders the other troops just pale in comparison to the power of that arrangement.

Hopefully they have made enough (or will continue to make) improvements to make the game better since I started back at the end of June. I actually really like the Dark units of each race (WotN / I&F should have done this), but it would be nice to change their abilities to be darker instead of being just the same.

I also (except for Call of Nature) continuously find both the Spells and Rage Skills to be lacking. I am maxed out with rage and have no problems being close to max rage at the end of a battle since there is really only 1 direct damage rage skill. The Vampire Rage skills are really hard to use since they damage your own troops. I'm hoping some rebalancing of spell power will help with the spells as I pretty much only use Call of Nature, Heal, Empathy, and Magic Spring. Orc Shield is really good for Black / Blue Dragons / Dragon Riders since they are immune to magic.

For one really large enemy stack of werewolves I used just 1 stack of ArchDemons + Invisibility and Dark Clot. That was probably when I was level 35 or so.

So if you can do no loss through Whitehill you should be able to do no loss through the entire game with just some slight variations of your army makeup once you get ArchDemons and later Dragon Riders..

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Thanks for that, Matt. I will be referring to your post as I get further into the game :)

Me, I kited around Atrixus and got some Demons (13 wanted to join me!) and some loot. I also thought I'd buy a Fireball spell for 5000 gold. Now I need to upgrade Chaos Magic past level 1. Another devious trick is to go through the portal to Tristem. There's an invincible troop right there that can't be kited, but now that I have the Tristem map I can sail there and kite my way around, right? :-P

[DGDobrev]

Seems our games are running similarly, mate :)

I opted against kiting the Portland guardians, cause they aren't that powerful anyway. I am using Scoffers, the starting 2 Demonesses (can't find any more), Demons, Demonoligists and Evil Beholders. I am getting um... re-used to the old KBAP tactic of kiting enemies into traps, as I have 4 at any point on the field, and I am not far away from a 5th. Swapping the best enemy archer unit is doing wonders too. Especially since I always try to swap them for a demon-summoned creature with a trap right behind it, lol - if you don't kill the ranged unit yourself, it will move a hex back and fall into the trap. Fun times :)

I haven't moved on to the other 2 islands, Inselburg and Monteville. I might do some scouting to see which ones provides better options.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Thanks for that, Matt. I will be referring to your post as I get further into the game :)

Me, I kited around Atrixus and got some Demons (13 wanted to join me!) and some loot. I also thought I'd buy a Fireball spell for 5000 gold. Now I need to upgrade Chaos Magic past level 1. Another devious trick is to go through the portal to Tristem. There's an invincible troop right there that can't be kited, but now that I have the Tristem map I can sail there and kite my way around, right? :-P

Wow! That's a ton of Demons! I was stuck with 1 Demon and 2 Demonesses for so long that when I finally was able to recruit them I was like forget it!

It is interesting that they now allow you to go through the portals to the other areas at the beginning as when I started, once you went to the catacombs, you could not go to any of the other places until you got their maps.

I couldn't even return to Atrixus because I was wanting to defeat the Knight that stole the demon child and it wouldn't let me go back. So then I just loaded an earlier save, rolled up my sleeves, and came up with a strategy to no loss him.

If memory serves, that fight got my another level and allowed me to do the big spider Catacombs stack and also made one of the Shelter or Whitehill fights easier.

Seems our games are running similarly, mate :)

I opted against kiting the Portland guardians, cause they aren't that powerful anyway. I am using Scoffers, the starting 2 Demonesses (can't find any more), Demons, Demonoligists and Evil Beholders. I am getting um... re-used to the old KBAP tactic of kiting enemies into traps, as I have 4 at any point on the field, and I am not far away from a 5th. Swapping the best enemy archer unit is doing wonders too. Especially since I always try to swap them for a demon-summoned creature with a trap right behind it, lol - if you don't kill the ranged unit yourself, it will move a hex back and fall into the trap. Fun times :)

I haven't moved on to the other 2 islands, Inselburg and Monteville. I might do some scouting to see which ones provides better options.

That's nice that you were able to get a Demonologist (or more?) as I could have used some during my EA playthrough. And you're right that once you are "trained" by the 3 shelter fights and the 3 Whitehill fights you should be able to do most of the fights on Portland with your paltry squad.

That's how I felt, anyway, when I went there, although I did run around at first checking out getting better troops (Evil Beholders) and grabbing leadership flags, etc. to get more troops (at least Imps, Scoffer Imps, and Cerberi as I was stuck with just 1 Demon and 2 Demonesses).

I only got the first level of the trapper skill and with the Paladin (Spirit) skill I got 4 traps as the enemies start to get stronger where it is a lot harder to get them to die when they hit a trap. I think I'm like 10 deaths from getting to level 2 trapper, but I've way surpassed its usefulness.

Well, I hope you guys have fun and enjoy it. I do think it is better than WotN (I got I&F, but never played it) as I got tired of fighting Undead troops by about the time I got to Greenwort. After Guildford shows his true colors, I thought it would have been nice to see Undead variants of humans, dwarves, and elves and we now have them in DS! :)

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

To me, traps are not for killing - I use them to hinder the enemy. If enemy falls into a trap, it can't hit you, and if it can't hit you, you are one step closer to winning the fight without losses. Simple as that :)

As for the demonologists, well, if that demonologist demoness in Atrixus had no demonologist troops, I would have had her change her profession :D But then again, no Call Collosus scroll for me yet.

[MattCaspermeyer]

To me, traps are not for killing - I use them to hinder the enemy. If enemy falls into a trap, it can't hit you, and if it can't hit you, you are one step closer to winning the fight without losses. Simple as that :)

Yep you got it! It's just that you can't increase the medal without actually killing the stack so that's why I've pretty much been stuck at just 4. You really got to work to get the trapper skill up - been that way since AP.

As for the demonologists, well, if that demonologist demoness in Atrixus had no demonologist troops, I would have had her change her profession :D But then again, no Call Collosus scroll for me yet.

Yes - you're fired! ;-)

I think that must be a new character since I never saw her - unless you're referring to Pacca. I forget her profession. Nice to hear that they added some Demonologists to Atrixus at the start. I tend to be a fan of summoner troops and probably would have enjoyed it more with a Demonologist or two at the start.

As far as Scrolls of Colossus are concerned, don't worry, you will get one once you find a mage for the magic department (he's in Inselburg). If you're really lucky, you'll swap out a navigation map for one before that.

/C\/C\

[zjazd18]

Wow, i really wonder how you did those 3 fights at whitehill Matt, I quickly assumed those were impossible to do. But at least you confirmed that there were 3 fights necessary before release. So next challenge is to do beginning with Orc class.

I'm level 60 atm (rushed learning) my pet is 60 (full level) and still have 2 island to do, and helvadia, and i guess those final fights at whitehill. Game is pretty boring atm, all i do is summon dragons from dragon riders, summon demons with demonologists, summon more demons with demons ;-) and watch summons kill everything, if fight is going slow i raise dead with necromancers for more damage. Wanted to swap out demons for archdemons but if they died i had no way of resurrecting them, so i scratched that idea.

At the moment planing my vampire play-through, have already prepared save with trap spell. If anyone wants the save, pm me no battles were played just got trap from talking to witch, and it took some reloads to get one.

[DGDobrev]

Well, Matt, this NPC is very easy to miss. You know there are a few flying platforms in Atrixus. One of them leads to the traitor guy you need to eventually kill. There is another in the (middle?) of the map where the yellow circle-not-quite-pentagram thingy is, the area with the inn and the demon who had his son captured. If you take this flying platform, you will be taken to a small flying island where another Demonologist Demoness lives. She sells 4 spells in my game (Volcano, Armageddon and 2 weaker ones) + Demons and Demonologists.

Could have easily missed her out myself.

[Zhuangzi]

Well, Matt, this NPC is very easy to miss. You know there are a few flying platforms in Atrixus. One of them leads to the traitor guy you need to eventually kill. There is another in the (middle?) of the map where the yellow circle-not-quite-pentagram thingy is, the area with the inn and the demon who had his son captured. If you take this flying platform, you will be taken to a small flying island where another Demonologist Demoness lives. She sells 4 spells in my game (Volcano, Armageddon and 2 weaker ones) + Demons and Demonologists.

Could have easily missed her out myself.

Wow, I need to check this out. I love Demonologists.

In my game I have been able to grind my way through Portland now, killing everything on that island except for the fight against the 1 black dragon. Not sure how I can no loss this yet. So I'm off to Inselburg and Monteville for some goodies, then Atrixus to try to pick up some Demonologists. Then more grinding, I guess.

40 no loss fights done so far.

EDIT: yep, it's just like DG says, if you teleport to Atrixus you start on that yellow circle thingy, and there's a platform just off there which takes you up to the demonologist guy, Verdelet. He has 140 Demonologists, Volcano, Armageddon etc. So now I am very pleased with my team of Demonologists, Demons, Cerebuses, Scoffer Imps, Imps with my measly 2 Demonesses in reserve.

[DGDobrev]

I am progressing well so far. Tristem is a great location to open. Just go through the catacombs, poke your nose into Tristem (you will most likely aggro units on very narrow pathways, so you cant go past them), then go back into the catacombs. This is enough to open it as a location. Use Blackie to port you there - you won't regret it. I snagged 70 free orc Shamans, which seem to be quite OP. Thanks to adrenaline, their skills are available every round. I wouldn't go so far as to say it is broken, cause I have never played the orcs in the OOTM campaign that introduced adrenaline.

So right now I am sporting 2 Green Dragons (bought eggs), Demonologists, Necromancers, Shamans and Demons. Good times :)

[zjazd18]

Well you guys are set for the game now, there won't be any big obstacles anymore.

I'm trying Vampire now, and it's pretty much impossible to do anything no-loss. Demoness start is so much stronger than other classes. Even with trap lvl 2 and trapper there isn't enough damage to deal with all the stacks. With one more level i could possibly get diversion. Only way i see this working out is witch giving phoenix spell :grin: Anyone have done it, or only demoness is impossible no-loss viable?

[MattCaspermeyer]

Well, Matt, this NPC is very easy to miss. You know there are a few flying platforms in Atrixus. One of them leads to the traitor guy you need to eventually kill. There is another in the (middle?) of the map where the yellow circle-not-quite-pentagram thingy is, the area with the inn and the demon who had his son captured. If you take this flying platform, you will be taken to a small flying island where another Demonologist Demoness lives. She sells 4 spells in my game (Volcano, Armageddon and 2 weaker ones) + Demons and Demonologists.

Could have easily missed her out myself.


Hmmm... I think they must have added that, because all the platforms were broken (i.e. not working as the human invaders had really trashed the place) and there is nothing in the central yellow circle for me at least at the beginning of the game except for that big gate you can't go through.

Wow, i really wonder how you did those 3 fights at whitehill Matt, I quickly assumed those were impossible to do. But at least you confirmed that there were 3 fights necessary before release. So next challenge is to do beginning with Orc class.

Yah, it was tough, but the two side stacks were weaker than the middle stack when I played and so I ended up doing the side stacks first. I think the first one I was level 5, but defeating them got me to level 6 and allowed me to pop back to the shelter and get a few more Imps / Scoffer Imps. My army was 18 Scoffer Imps, 1 Demon, 5 Cerberi, 2 Demonesses, and 28 Imps. Then I was able to get 3 more each of Imps / Scoffer Imps for the other two battles.

You basically have to use the Demonesses to swap their big shooter stack to your Demons with the Demon's summoned troop (and you use that troop to attack a secondary shooter if there is one near where you were swapped) and then once you take them out, the other troops are either slow so try to get them to walk onto a trap (you'll note that I have 4) or you can have your Demons absorb damage until they are down to about 30 or so life and then the Demonesses swap will be reloaded by that time and then you can have your Cerberi / Demonesses absorb the rest of the damage. I'm not joking about maxing out the damage absorption of all 3 of those troops, getting them down to 30, 20, or even fewer hitpoints. Also, under no circumstances, allow Bowmen to use their Cold Arrow on your troops (forget about no loss if that happens) or Priests / Inquisitors to use their "Healing" on your troops (if you've whittled them down a bit you might survive a "Healing" attack).

I've attached pictures of the 3 Whitehill stacks (in the order I defeated them) so you can get a feel for what I was up against compared to what you may have faced.

I actually have to find Verdelet for a quest and had no idea where he was - now I know he's in Atrixus. I've kind of been saving it for last as I have three islands left and then Helvedia and Atrixus.

Of the three islands, they are Aralan, Oakarland, and Galenrim. I have Aralan probably about 75% completed, Oakarland about 50% done, and Galenrim probably about 50% as well.

Actually in Helvedia, I was having trouble with the Demon troops believe it or not when I first went there about 10 levels ago (stacks of 43 ArchDemons would Fire Rain my single Dragon Rider stacks, but now that I've finally been able to max out my Dragon Riders I have 13, 12, and 13 in each stack so I'm ready for a rematch!).

By the way, be careful if you face Royal Griffins with dragons because they do either 1.5 or 2.0 times damage to dragons. That was a major ow! the first time I came up against that! I've also used it to my advantage with Call of Nature and I think I had a stack of 120 or so single-hit kill 43 Green Dragons!

By the way, the Armageddon spell is back to only damaging non-magic immune enemies and Dragon Riders are magic immune so it can't hurt them. I forget which games have it that way, but I know at least TL is that way, whereas I think they changed it in WotN where it even affects magic immune enemies.

At the rate I'm playing it'll probably take me a couple of weeks to finish the game no loss...

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

I am progressing well so far. Tristem is a great location to open. Just go through the catacombs, poke your nose into Tristem (you will most likely aggro units on very narrow pathways, so you cant go past them), then go back into the catacombs. This is enough to open it as a location. Use Blackie to port you there - you won't regret it. I snagged 70 free orc Shamans, which seem to be quite OP. Thanks to adrenaline, their skills are available every round. I wouldn't go so far as to say it is broken, cause I have never played the orcs in the OOTM campaign that introduced adrenaline.

So right now I am sporting 2 Green Dragons (bought eggs), Demonologists, Necromancers, Shamans and Demons. Good times :)

Wow! You couldn't use that strategy before, as they didn't open until you got the map (or perhaps it was getting quests later as I could only go to Dragandor from the Catacombs at first).

If you have 2 Green Dragons, you should be able to defeat the Dragon in Portland.

Sounds like you're doing well!

/C\/C\

[RadiantB]

Hey everybody

I just played for an hour of two and I really like that you can start as a demoness or vampire with awesome troops.
But then I entered Whitehill and Portland and i was surprised that the islands were so empty, there's hardly anything to pick up.
Are the other island better or did the developers not have enough time to finish the game ??

[DGDobrev]

Matt, the platforms are indeed broken at first, they open up after you visit Atrixus the second time after you free the Spirit (you can get there through the Portland catacombs in the graveyard). I recall seeing 2: one leads to the demonologist guy (wasn't a girl, my bad), and the other to the demon traitor you need to eventually kill.

[Zhuangzi]

Hey everybody

I just played for an hour of two and I really like that you can start as a demoness or vampire with awesome troops.
But then I entered Whitehill and Portland and i was surprised that the islands were so empty, there's hardly anything to pick up.
Are the other island better or did the developers not have enough time to finish the game ??

Whitehill is completely empty, nothing to loot at all, which I admit is very strange. Not so Portland though, that should be full of enemy stacks and loot.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Matt, the platforms are indeed broken at first, they open up after you visit Atrixus the second time after you free the Spirit (you can get there through the Portland catacombs in the graveyard). I recall seeing 2: one leads to the demonologist guy (wasn't a girl, my bad), and the other to the demon traitor you need to eventually kill.

You know, I guess I got so caught up in doing the quests from Portland and onward to check back in the Catacombs to see when they'd open up the passages back to Atrixus, Portland, and Tristem and I could have gone back via the Portland portal as you mentioned.

You know what's funny, is that I actually went through that portal back to the Catacombs through the Portland portal, but must not have thought to check to see if the travel restrictions had been lifted!

So I guess I kind of forgot about checking, but that means that with Blackie you should be able to kite around Tristem and Atrixus and get a lot of goodies to aid in your Portland and beyond efforts.

Verdelet's units would have made Portland so much easier! Oh well, I guess I did it the hard way! :)

I'm not sure if you can kite around the units guarding the Troll / Ogre shop in Tristem, but if you could get to that shop, you'd get those units pretty early as well. The Shaman by the shore sells the new units (I think they are called Orc Shamans or something like that). They have Empathy, which is a really important spell for deflecting damage to another unit (and like I mentioned before, you can pick an enemy troop).

I guess, though, that none of this helps with the Shelter and Whitehill battles, but it is still great to know!

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

53 fights done now, Monteville is about 50% complete. The chokepoint for me now is that Black Dragon on Portland. I know I will have to kill it soon but with no resurrecting troops other than the Demonologist, I don't think it can be done without a level 5 unit.

[zjazd18]

I've attached pictures of the 3 Whitehill stacks (in the order I defeated them) so you can get a feel for what I was up against compared to what you may have faced.


Ah i see, 4 traps, but still that last stack looks vicious.

53 fights done now, Monteville is about 50% complete. The chokepoint for me now is that Black Dragon on Portland. I know I will have to kill it soon but with no resurrecting troops other than the Demonologist, I don't think it can be done without a level 5 unit.

You can skip this fight for later. At Monteville in one of the castles guy gives 2 or 3 wanderer scrolls for free. Call of colosus or dragon of chaos will defeat that fight easily. Also you can abuse trap but it's kinda lame memorizing where dragon will land.

My update is as follows mage/vampire cannot do no-loss impossible start, there isn't enough beef or damage to do guardians of light.

[DGDobrev]

90 fights in, same lineup: 2 Greens, 2 Reds, Demonologists, Shamans, Demons. If I had a 3rd Ranged unit, I would use it: the demons are pretty much a mop up squad for anything that gets close to my rangers. At Inselburg now, fighting anything I see.

Game has sure opened up. I like where it is going.

Zhu, the Black dragon in Portland is easy if you leveled up your companion's Orc Sword basic skill well enough. If you have, just gulp a rage potion and unleash. Necromancers might help, as they drop the Black dragon's HP down to 800 with PLAGUE, making it possible for Blackie (or in my case Doncho, cause I wanted my lil dragon who gave me the signature back) to drop it down in a hit.

If everything's ok, this battle can be over on round 1.

[RadiantB]

Whitehill is completely empty, nothing to loot at all, which I admit is very strange. Not so Portland though, that should be full of enemy stacks and loot.

ok thanks :)

[Zhuangzi]

90 fights in, same lineup: 2 Greens, 2 Reds, Demonologists, Shamans, Demons. If I had a 3rd Ranged unit, I would use it: the demons are pretty much a mop up squad for anything that gets close to my rangers. At Inselburg now, fighting anything I see.

Game has sure opened up. I like where it is going.

Zhu, the Black dragon in Portland is easy if you leveled up your companion's Orc Sword basic skill well enough. If you have, just gulp a rage potion and unleash. Necromancers might help, as they drop the Black dragon's HP down to 800 with PLAGUE, making it possible for Blackie (or in my case Doncho, cause I wanted my lil dragon who gave me the signature back) to drop it down in a hit.

If everything's ok, this battle can be over on round 1.

I've gone a different way so far: Carrius Marrius or whatever his name is in Monteville gave me a Call of Colossus scroll for completing a quest (not fighting this other woman?), so I waited until I was up to 3000 leadership and bang, 2 Archdemons. Man, those guys are seriously overpowered. I killed the dragon with an Archdemon only army but the bigger battle by far was the King of Portland. I had the rest of my team (Demons, Demonologists, Necromancers, Cerebuses) but the issue was the two stacks of Priest of Light and one puny archer stack! I had a lot of trouble with this (level 11 I think) but eventually I figured it out. One stack gets converted by the statue rage skill, one gets the Fear, and the third gets pounded with everything else. Fight took 16 turns but by the end the map was full of Demons and Ghosts etc. :-P

I'm ready to say this: this is the best fun I've had with King's Bounty since Armored Princess, and that was back in 2009 or so!

[DGDobrev]

Aaaaaaah, I so wanted that Call of Collosus scroll!!! And I never got it, maybe cause I traded my 3xRes scrolls for the dark variation of it. Worst thing is, I have never ever gotten to using it. Bummer.

I haven't beaten the king of Portland yet, but I am in no no hurry. He is slim pickings with this squad, mainly because of the new teleport spell. I love it. NO more island to island sailing!!!

Hit level 17. Maxed Learning (+30% XP) and max Order Magic for Level 3 dark Ress. I still have tons of runes to decide what I wanna do. The Lord perk sound really nice, and it costs a shitton of stuff. We will see.

Good times :D

(Good times translation: Lots of fun = Impy, get the freaking game, get playing and start concocting challenges!!!)

Steam name is DG Dobrev, btw. Invite me, everyone's welcome.

[MattCaspermeyer]

@Lordwiki PM'd me asking how I defeated the knight that stole the Demon baby.

I thought I'd post here how I did it so that everyone struggling with this battle can benefit.

I've attached our starting armies so that you can see what I was up against and compare it to your situation.

This was a tough fight!

As you can see I only had 5 Scoffer Imps, 2 Blood Priestess, 1 Demon, 2 Demonesses, and 9 Imps vs 12 Guardsmen, 73 Peasants, 18 Bowmen, 72 Peasants, and 145 Peasants. I only had 15 Mana and Fire Arrow for my spell and so I cast it 3 times (once each turn) and that was it for that. I was level 2 and had Power of Spirit and Diversion at Level 1 in the Paladin skill tree for 1 trap.

The key for me, was to prevent the Bowmen from using their Cold Arrow attack because once they do you won't be able to do no loss.

You can use the Imps and Scoffer Imps to work on whittling down the Peasant stacks with their Fireball.

The Demonesses need to move one hex forward to protect your Imps as well as block the Bowmen from escaping and then swap the Demon troop with the Bowmen. The Blood Priestesses also need to move one hex forward for the same reason and then you can use their Bleeding skill on a stack of your choosing. One note about effects like Bleeding: it does more damage the more units there are in an enemy stack. Keep that in mind for selecting a stack to use it on.

You can use the Demon's Run ability to run away from the big stacks, you can use their Bloody Pentagram to increase the morale of your troops, and summon a stack that is going to be used to keep those units away from your troops. Use them to take advantage of that one trap on the battlefield as well.

With this in mind, you should have no trouble whittling down the Bowmen until your Demonesses can Charm them. You should then be able to use the Bowmen's Cold and Fire Arrow abilities on the enemy while marching the Bowmen forward so that they can be used as a meat shield to protect your Imps and female warriors if needed.

Depending on how long you can keep your summoned troop alive, use them to be the first attack and let your Demons attack without the troop being able to retaliate. This will make those stacks more manageable. Your Demons are going to have to absorb a lot of damage in the end, but try to do this until your summoned troop is killed.

Don't forget about the Scoffer Imps' Sneer ability - it can be instrumental with protecting your Demon troop from an inopportune strike. Use the order of movement of the enemies to block each other so that it takes them longer to march down towards your troops / prevents them from attacking your Demon and his summon.

Position your Imps so that their strike and return ability allows them to attack the enemies without the enemy being able to move forward and hit them. That no retaliation is key for whittling down tough stacks.

Remember that the AI attempts to move as close as possible to your troops while still being able to attack. They will never move without attacking or using a special ability (unless something prevents them) so you can use your Demon and summoned troop to prevent them from moving forward towards your softer troops (and you can use them to run further away for another Demoness swap down the road).

You may need to have your Demon troop absorb a ton of damage where they are down to only about 20 to 30 health, but you can also let your Demonesses (and Cerberi if you use them) absorb some damage, too.

Lastly, don't forget about your recharging abilities as you may need to use swap to move an enemy far away and another summon from your Demon troop later will really be key.

This is essentially how I did all the tough early battles, by the way, including this one, the big spider stack in the Catacombs (I also attached a picture for that battle), the 3 Shelter fights, and the 3 Whitehill fights (I used Cerberi instead of Blood Priestesses for most of the other battles).

You can see that you are maximizing your unit abilities, using traps, and trying to keep the most damaging enemies away from your soft troops. Your high hitpoint units can be used to absorb damage so that they only have 20 to 30 left. Lastly, you need persistence - I kept trying and you can get a feel for the tipping point of a battle.

Good luck if you're struggling with these early battles and keep these strategies in mind!

:-)

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Very good tactic, Matt. The game forced me to try something else though... I did it by ditching the low-HP imps completely, as the enemy hero was "healing" them all the time and there was no way to prevent them from being killed. Instead, I split the Demoness stack in 2. This allows for more swaps around the battlefield, thus allowing you to kill stacks of archers safely, and get your troops out of the fray if necessary.

I love this fight. Makes you really think and get creative.

[zjazd18]

The knight is rather easy fight, but that big spider stack is indeed very difficult. I guess it all depends how game rolled your enemy stacks. Demoness start seems so fun, and well put with starting troops and stuff you can do. Vampire has vampires, zombies, ghosts, and both skeletons - like there is no hp in compassion to demoness troops. Matt did you manage to do guardians of light with vampire ? I guess that should be nice challenge for Impy.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Very good tactic, Matt. The game forced me to try something else though... I did it by ditching the low-HP imps completely, as the enemy hero was "healing" them all the time and there was no way to prevent them from being killed. Instead, I split the Demoness stack in 2. This allows for more swaps around the battlefield, thus allowing you to kill stacks of archers safely, and get your troops out of the fray if necessary.

I love this fight. Makes you really think and get creative.

That is an excellent tactic, DGDobrev, and one that I had considered, but fortunately I was able to get by with the Imps / Scoffer Imps since they are your only ranged troops for Demoness. I don't remember all the details of that fight, but I guess I was lucky that he didn't heal my Imps to where they died (if he used the heal spell at all - I just can't remember as that was two months ago!).

Nonetheless, having another Demoness does have the advantages that you state, the only downside is that you won't be able to charm as high leadership troops as you could with 2 Demonesses, but the extra swap is probably worth it in the end.

The knight is rather easy fight, but that big spider stack is indeed very difficult. I guess it all depends how game rolled your enemy stacks. Demoness start seems so fun, and well put with starting troops and stuff you can do. Vampire has vampires, zombies, ghosts, and both skeletons - like there is no hp in compassion to demoness troops. Matt did you manage to do guardians of light with vampire ? I guess that should be nice challenge for Impy.

Yah, I guess game variability makes all the battles pretty personalized for your playthrough. That's why I've posted the starting pictures so that at least you can see how different the enemy stack is from what you're facing and also give you a feel for what is doable.

I've only played Demoness and have just finished Oakarland and Aralan, but all the comments here have me itching to try the other classes, at least through the Whitehill fight. But I'd really like to finish my current playthrough before I restart with another class...

It sure sounds like Orc and Vampire are much harder, although with Vampire at least Ghosts and Vampires can life steal. With Orc and Demoness, you don't have any healing whatsoever.

Does Orc get the Goblin Shamans (or whatever that new unit's name is) or at least 1 Shaman at the start? If you had one Shaman like the Demoness has 1 Demon that would be huge. Too bad for Vampire they don't give you 1 Necromancer. Seems like that would balance out the other classes as you get 2 level 4 troops with Demoness you should at least get 2 level 4 troops with the other classes as well.

Oh well, I guess that's part of the challenge! :)

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Phew, I'm up to 102 fights without loss now, meaning I get the third level of the Grand Strategian medal. I hit the wall a bit at about fight 90 in Inselburg. My team, which I really liked, just wasn't doing it anymore. It consisted of Demonologists, Necromancers, Archdemons (only 2), Demons and Demonesses. This is a great team for spawning units and playing havoc with the enemy, but it's a bad team for keeping everything alive with no resurrection ability.

So, level 5 units it is...

My new team consists of ALL level 5 units in Black Dragons, Reds, Greens, Archdemons and I just got 3 Ice Dragons out of a second Call of Colossus spell. So I think I should be better able to keep everything alive. The next problem I expect will be poor access to more dragons. I have 2 Red Dragon eggs but that's it.

[DGDobrev]

You got Archies? Grats. I didn't.

My Call Collosus scroll gave me trolls, which was great news. I was very hyped up about the idea of trying to play with Dark Paladins + Phantom, as I am so used to that playstyle, but I wasn't meant to be. Not yet at any rate.

Neoline DG is level 27, 140 fights in. My lineup consists of Red Dragons, Giants (had to ditch the Green Dragons cause I have no way of replenishing them) after the dwarf castle fight, Demonologists, Shamans, and Trolls.

I am very interested to find out how do you get to Galenirim. I have a bad feeling it has something to do with that baloon, and you need silk from spider eggs for it. Well, I had like 200, and I sold them cause I didn't know better. Now I need 100 more, and have like 60 of it.

I am also wasting a lot of time going back and forth, but that's nothing out of the ordinary. I don't know how the quests go yet.

So far so good. I am quite enjoying this :)

[zjazd18]

I'm at final boss atm, level 73, 450 fights no-loss (haven't done any item upgrading fights) so you get rough idea how long the game is. Still have like 10 quests to do but I'm gonna pass on them as I'm quite burned from the game. Last fight seems fun, but nothing spectacular, just adds spawning I need to replace my dragon riders as there is unavoidable damage, so they are no good for no-loss approach.

Galenirim is pretty late game location like 50s or so, and you get it from the maps. The baloon quest is important tho, as it leads to your ability to fly, so definitely look out for those spider eggs.

[Zhuangzi]

Lucky for me, in this playthrough, I didn't bother picking up all those spider eggs in the Catacombs. I guess I'd better go back there and start picking. :-P

450 fights? Christ, this is going to take a while then. DG - where do you get those Dark Paladins? Haven't seen any yet.

[MattCaspermeyer]

I'm at final boss atm, level 73, 450 fights no-loss (haven't done any item upgrading fights) so you get rough idea how long the game is. Still have like 10 quests to do but I'm gonna pass on them as I'm quite burned from the game. Last fight seems fun, but nothing spectacular, just adds spawning I need to replace my dragon riders as there is unavoidable damage, so they are no good for no-loss approach.

Galenirim is pretty late game location like 50s or so, and you get it from the maps. The baloon quest is important tho, as it leads to your ability to fly, so definitely look out for those spider eggs.

Wow! I'm only level 65 with 447 no loss fights, but I have fought every artifact upgrade battle so that's maybe why I have so many more fights for such a lower level.

By the way, some of the Gremlin Towers have 60 to 70k hp!

I know what you mean about being burnt out - I've been a bit bored with it since about level 50, but I guess I'll finish as many quests as I can to be thorough.

I did have 6 Scrolls of Ancient Knowledge and just started using them so hopefully I'll be getting a lot of experience for these last batch of battles. I just need to dethrone the Galenrim King and then I'll just have Helvedia and Atrixus left.

By the way, why don't they show the Wanderer Scrolls active any more on the right side of the screen? Did they not have it in WotN / I&F, either? It'd be nice to know which of my Wanderer Scrolls are active as in AP / CW.

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Lucky for me, in this playthrough, I didn't bother picking up all those spider eggs in the Catacombs. I guess I'd better go back there and start picking. :-P

450 fights? Christ, this is going to take a while then. DG - where do you get those Dark Paladins? Haven't seen any yet.

Dark Paladins become available after you complete the Portland quests of dethroning the current leader.

As an aside, be sure to pick up on the spider eggs, etc. when you see them as you never know when you might need them in the future.

Some quests do provide you with them - there's a quest in Aralan where you need to bring someone 1 Spider Egg, 1 Dragonfly Egg, 1 Griffin Egg, 1 Thorn Seed, and 1 Ent Sprout. I was wracking my brain as to where I had seen a Griffin Egg, when I realized that they placed armies on the island for you to fight to get each item. In fact each item was a quest item that you couldn't use.

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Exactly, I got Dark Paladins when dethroned the portland king, but they were only measly 14, when I could command over 40, so it makes very little sense to use them, unless you feel very comfortable with the sacrifice spell. So I opted out of using Dark Paladins for the time being.

Working my way through Tristem now. There we have 2 maps I want :) Both guardians count as deadly, so it is a challenge.

[zjazd18]

Wow! I'm only level 65 with 447 no loss fights, but I have fought every artifact upgrade battle so that's maybe why I have so many more fights for such a lower level.

By the way, some of the Gremlin Towers have 60 to 70k hp!

I know what you mean about being burnt out - I've been a bit bored with it since about level 50, but I guess I'll finish as many quests as I can to be thorough.

I did have 6 Scrolls of Ancient Knowledge and just started using them so hopefully I'll be getting a lot of experience for these last batch of battles. I just need to dethrone the Galenrim King and then I'll just have Helvedia and Atrixus left.

By the way, why don't they show the Wanderer Scrolls active any more on the right side of the screen? Did they not have it in WotN / I&F, either? It'd be nice to know which of my Wanderer Scrolls are active as in AP / CW.

/C\/C\

Yea i have more late game battles, and less early ones from item upgrading etc. I fought most of my battles with 10%exp bonus from items, and ofc learning maxed asap. Once you pop AK and do these late game hero battles levels will fly like crazy. Last 3 battles at whitehill gave me 3 levels so yeah it's pretty ridiculous. Still miscalculated my AK scrolls and have 2 left, so go spend them while you can, just save 1 for these last battles.

Those towers have huge hp but no damage from what I've seen. There are some quests with battles with them and they were doing like 200dmg lightning with no ricochet. So definitely the ones spawning more troops are more annoying.

Yeah that must be a bug with those wanderer scrolls not showing up remaining duration. Kinda annoying but at least they work ;)

Still haven't killed last boss, gave up at turn 50ish and boss still had like 3/4 of hp remaining. Will do it later as I got into Pillars of Eternity beta, and man did i love baldur's gate series.

EDIT: Realized something while writing this post, went to try it out and boss went down on first try. Won't spoil it for you guys, if someone cant beat it pm me, but strategy wasn't really creative or anything.

[DGDobrev]

Congrats :)

The game really opened up for me now after I got the 2 Tristem maps. So I went on an explore/steal spree, and opened Galenirim, Bear Butte, Sandy and Amazonia. Being able to port between islands is amazing, as you need to finish a lot of cross-island quests.

I think I have only 2 undiscovered islands now, and I will get those 2 eventually as well. At level 30, my lineup is Archdemons, Demonologists (+Phantom, it's amazing), Shamans, Trolls and 4 Reds. Still looking for something to sub the Reds with... I think I saw cyclopses somewhere. They will sure pack a punch from range till I find something better.

Sadly, still no luck with the Dark Paladins.

[zjazd18]

Congrats :)

Sadly, still no luck with the Dark Paladins.

Thank you.

Have you been to Inselburg? I got my paladins from there(shops around castle) and some from Portland castle (20 or something like that).

Haven't seen them anywhere else and their numbers are really low, but Recruiter skill in demoness tree really kept me fully stocked on paladins.

[DGDobrev]

Inselburg has none. I have gotten 14 from the Portland castle, and checking the shops in the same area, saw 15 more. So that's a grand total of 29. I think I saw some more on Sandy, but I also found a lot of Archies and Trolls there, so I will be ok for the time being. The shamans shine in a level 5 setup, and Demonologists + Phantom can res level 5 units easily.

Eventually, I would love to get more Dark Paladins, though, cause I want to use them is a similar setup as yours. I kind of envision my late game with Dark Paladins, Knights or Dark Knights, Executioners, Demons and Demonologists. Level 5 units become a pain to resurrect after a certain level, as the enemies grow quite powerful, so level 4 army, as in KBAP, looks like the way to go.

[MattCaspermeyer]

@zjazd18 is right about the Paladin Recruiter skill - I've been using it for almost 200 fights and have been using it to keep my ArchDemon stacks maxed out.

I have 183 ArchDemons in reserve with two stacks of 20 and 19. I've probably recruited 193 of them.

I think, though, they changed the recruiter percent from 6 to 3% of your total Leadership; My ArchDemon Leadership is 1170 now (due to bonuses) and I have about 44k Leadership and 3% of that is 1320. It seemed like you needed to have enough Leadership for at least 1 troop for it to work so it is better used with level 4 and below troops. Since it was 6% before, I was able to start recruiting ArchDemons around 25k Leadership or a touch higher.

So you should be able to max out your Dark Paladin (or whoever else you'd like) stack, once you get it, pretty easily. I don't think it works with Dragons, though, and certainly not with Dragon Riders (I think these troops are not available in any normal shops, only special ones) as I have never gotten any of those troops from it.

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Question: after my main lineup has filled up, will recruiter start increasing the reserve troops? So far it hasn't happened. I am looking at 30 Dakries and 10 Knights for like 10-15 battles now.

[MattCaspermeyer]

For me, after each battle I get at least 1 ArchDemon in my reserve slot and sometimes if I have a slot or two one or more additional troops. That's why I have so many ArchDemons in reserve.

It depends on which troops you summon, although, it seems like the description is not accurate with respect to how many you get. I remember having Executioners in my reserve slot and it seemed like I'd only get 1 or 2 even though I should have been getting more. I also seem to remember getting 2 ArchDemons every now and then.

The bottom line is that it should be adding units to your reserve slot, but I think they have to be summoned creatures (not sure why I'd get ArchDemons, though, unless it is counting the Demonologist spell - which I haven't used in a really, really long time).

Hmmm... does Phantom work?

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Phantom works as it did in KBAP, on units of level 1-4, giving you up to 40% of their stack to control as a secondary unit for 3 turns (if it's not dead by then, it disappears). I use it on the Demonologists, as they are my do-it-alls right now: resses, summons, etc. Phantoming a Demonologist gives you additional res, another cannon fodder (summon), and 1 basic attack. What's not to like :)

read your post before. I was level 30ish when I got an Archie just like that from recruiter (Leadership was like 16k at that time). Interesting. Still looks completely random to me, and I don't get it to proc after every fight, or so it seems.

[MattCaspermeyer]

No - sorry I wasn't clear, I meant does Phantom count as a "summon" spell?

Probably not since you didn't get any Demonologists when you used Phantom on them.

I'm not sure why ArchDemons count as a summon unless it is because of the Demonologist spell.

So perhaps, you can't get any "Traitor" troops because they don't count as summons.

Hmmm... I guess you need to use Sacrifice, possibly with Hypnotize to increase non-summonable troops.

I wonder if anyone has gotten any Orcs or Undead via the Recruiter skill.

I've gotten many troops from the Call of Nature spell so you can get Royal Griffins, etc. I've actually disbanded a bunch because if you have open army slots, you'll just get some recruits whether you want them or not.

/C\/C\

[zjazd18]

Recruiter only works for troops that were used in battle, but if you put 2 units that you want in reserve slot and use them in battles you will be getting a lot of them. It also works as disadvantage if you want to fill up your ranks to max asap, and you may be already maxed at one unit, and recruiter keeps giving that unit to you in reserve slot.

What i did was keep 2 recruiter slot occupied with 2 units 1-1 stacks of the troops i needed the most. So that way, i was getting exactly what i wanted. When my army was full i would wait for level up, feel up the 2 units that i already had in reserve, dismiss them and split other 2 units into reserve with 1-1 numbers. My 5th slot was Dragon Riders and sadly you can't get them from Recruiter.

You can also get units that were summoned during battles, i was getting units from my necromancer raising dead ability that i never had in my army. So you can get black knights even without using them if you had necromancers or Call of Death spell i guess.

BTW anyone knows how to mod the game in the way that vampire starts with phoenix spell? :-P

[DGDobrev]

I gotcha now. Yeah, Phantoming won't give you any extra troops. And I also get that I must find a way to incorporate the Darkies in combat so I can somehow grow them. I personally dislike sacrifice: it is way too risky of a spell, even though it works great with Trolls at night or underground, as you can potentially have a huge supply of ever-replenishing HP.

I guess I should find some easy enemies to kill this way. Sucks: it will take a very long time to grow a stack from 30 to max leadership this way. How about 2 stacks? Lol.

As for Phoenix? Don't we all wish. I hope the Russian buddies work on the game scanner as they did for KBAP. At least then you can scan your games and tell if you get the spell in the early stages of the game.

[Zhuangzi]

Finally finished that quest in Inselburg to get the king on the throne etc. What a pain in the ass! But there are 85 Dark Paladins there, which I'm very happy about because there were none in Portland at all. Until this point I had been struggling a bit with all four types of dragons (Red, Green, Black, Ice - not Bone :) ) and no fifth unit because I only had two Archdemons. The problem, as usual for KB games, is access to the units you want. There's nowhere to buy any dragons at this stage of the game, so I guess I will now stash those dragons and go back to level 4 units + Phantom + Resurrection, same deal as in previous KB games.

Having said that, the game is really enjoyable and I have to say that the first three islands are excellent in terms of map design, quest design, etc etc. I rarely felt like I was grinding for grinding's sake. On the other hand, Darenbam seemed pretty boring to me, reminding me of all those shitty Viking islands in WoTN :-P

[DGDobrev]

If you have 2 Archies, or a well upgraded Orc Sword skill for the spirit you might wanna beat the dragon in Portland, and then do the quest to give him a princess. This will make him an ally and move him to the Shelter. He sells Red and Black dragons, and may have an egg or two to boot.

My game looks to be devoid of Dark Paladins, so I am growing them on my own. It also seems devoid of Knights, so I may go for Black Knights instead, as you can make those yourself from prisoners. This is bad, as I have opened all islands but 1. I hope I can somehow get more to spawn, cause I can't say I like fighting handicapped.

[MattCaspermeyer]

BTW anyone knows how to mod the game in the way that vampire starts with phoenix spell? :-P

That's easy! I am a modder after all! :)


Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Darkside\sessions\dar kside (there is no space there in "darkside", I'm not sure why the forum is adding a space there as there isn't one in my actual text)
In there you will find ses.kfs - copy that file to somewhere else on your hard drive (this file is actually a ZIP file)
Extract the contents to a subfolder where you copied it ("ses" is s good name - I use 7Zip and you can right click on ses.kfs and it will have "Extract to ses\" as an option)
Go to the subfolder where you extracted the files and open HERO.TXT in Notepad
Find "hero_mage {" section towards the bottom of the file
Find the "start {" section under hero_mage {
Find the "spells {" section under start {
Add "spell_phoenix=1" to that section of code (valid spell names are in SPELLS.TXT). Be sure you spell it properly, otherwise game will crash when starting a new game!
Save HERO.TXT and exit from Notepad
Copy HERO.TXT to either:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Darkside\data\mods (you'll need to make the mods folder under data as it does not exist normally) - this will affect all sessions (but Dark Side is the only session right now; however, in the future there may be more than one session)
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Darkside\sessions\dar kside\mods (once again that space in "darkside" is not there and same as above - you'll need to make the mods folder) - this will affect only the Dark Side session (and not other sessions if you have them)

That's it!

By the way, I couldn't resist looking up what the recruiter skill does, here is the ignore list (from ADDON_ARENA.LUA):

local unit_ignore = ",dragon_rider,horseamazon,clown,powerman,ork_scout ,priestes,blackdragon,bonedragon,dragon_ice,greend ragon,reddragon,vampires_cloud,girl_with_flower,ic e_minion,subturn_handler,digged_brontor,infernodra gon1,infernodragon2,infernodragon3,"..
"dummydoll,movingsphere,phoenix,phoenix_young,phoen ix_old,griffin_spirit,gobot2,evilbook1,evilbook2,e vilbook3,ram,orb1,orb2,orb3,lava_golem,lava_golem1 ,lava_golem2,lava_golem3,lava_golem4,lava_golem5";

So it looks like you should be able to get anyone not in the list above. I'm not sure why "ork_scout" is in the list, but whatever.

If you have a Necromancer and they Raise Dead, then the following additional units can be added to your army (they are added without any skills so long as the Necromancer is in your army (the Necromancer is not a pawn and its belligerency is 1, i.e. human):

if name == "necromant" then addUnits(3*size*lead/100, {"skeleton", "archer", "zombie", "zombie2"}); end;

Also, I've briefly gone through the code and it looks like the enlister (Recruiter) skill selects a random troop from your army slots and then cycles from that number forward, wrapping around as needed. So for example, if it picks 4, it will add 4, 5, 1, 2, 3 in that order per restrictions. It also goes last in the code and so if you have items / the Puppeteer skill, they will populate the list first and then it will add units from the Recruiter skill. If a unit is added to the list from Recruiter and the list has 4 or more entries, then it won't add any more units (so in the example above, if you had 5 units in the list already, it would add your army from slot 4, but then that would be it).

Since I had just Dragon Riders (in the exclude list) and ArchDemons as the only troops in my army and since I had ArchDemons also in one of my reserve slots, it would always select the ArchDemons (since that was the only troop in my army that it could pick that was not in the ignore list and it adds at least one - this was even with having Puppeteer and summoning troops from the ArchDemons and Call of Nature spell). If I also had a spare reserve slot, then one of my summoned units would go there.

So if you want to recruit troops of a certain type, having them in more than one slot will increase your chances of picking them and as @zjazd18 mentions, putting a unit in the reserve slot will effectively force it to pick that troop, but only if they are added to the list with the above restrictions. If you don't have the Puppeteer skill, then you should be able to have 4 out of your 5 troops in your army and to the list; however, if you have a Dark Knight in reserve and they are in unit slot 3 and it starts at 4 (cycling to 3 last), then they won't be added to the list. Putting them in 2 army slots guarantees them being added to the list and since you have an army in reserve it should then pick them. At least, that's what it looks like the code does.

By the way, I was confusing the Puppeteer skill with the Recruiter skill as the Puppeteer skill allows adding of summoned units to your army. Here is the code that adds them to a table that serves as a list of possible candidates to add to your army:

table.insert( tab_verbovka, { l = math.floor(size*lead*skill_power_puppeteer/100), n = name } )

Note that the function will floor so if you don't have enough leadership and it is less than 1 it will be 0. "tab_verbovka" is the list of possible candidates to add to your army.

With respect to Phantomed units, as long as they are temporary and not pawns and their belligerency is 1 then there is the possibility of adding them via the Puppeteer skill. As far as I can tell, Phantomed units meet this criteria (my only question mark is their belligerency, but I think it is 1 since that means they are controlled by a human). So I think the Puppeteer skill is another way to grow your army via the Phantom spell. Someone will have to try it and let me know if they are able to get Phantomed units added to their army via Puppeteer.

From what I can tell, the above seems right with respect to how I think the code works. The only way to tell, though, is by running it through the LUA debugger. I don't have the time right now, but I may try to do this in the future...

/C\/C\

[zjazd18]

Damn, Matt dropping some knowledge on us. Thanks for the information, but i went ahead and used magicbook cheat to have some fun with vampire. BTW using that modification would cause to get "cheater" at the end of the game?

I'm completely positive that it is impossible to do early game as vampire without better spells than the ones you get from first quest(i'm talking no-loss impossible ofc).

[MattCaspermeyer]

I don't think mods will show as cheater, just cheat codes.

I have not tried Orc / Vampire, but people on the Steam forums said they did both classes no loss impossible during EA.

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Phantoming with Puppeteer? You got it, as soon as I can afford the runes to get it. I will post my findings here as necessary. Any way to grow Paladins or Knights is welcome as I still can't find any more than what I have. I personally prefer Knights to Dark Knights, as the Knights start off with great morale, which means more damage, while the Dark ones need to fight a bit before they accumulate the extra attack bonus. It was so easy with the good old Splinter of Darkness item in KBAP/CW, but so far I haven't seen it show up in my game. It might still be in, though.

EDIT: Yeah, I am a big idiot. But of course Inselburg has lots of Dark Knights and Dark Paladins - I just wasn't looking where I should have been. After you create the Twilight order on Inselburg, all kinds of shops open around the castle, selling all kinds of goodies - but I was squarely not paying attention to that. In the castle was also the Amulet of the Twilight order, that for a whopping 88k gives you 20 mana, +2 Morale of traitor Troops, and a freaking -20% Leadership to traitor troops. Holy hell - 163 leadership Paladins and 119 leadership Knights. Where has my head been til now?

[MattCaspermeyer]

You know, I was going to ask if you had hooked Leo up with Julia and checked around the castle, but thought you had.

Oh, and one thing about the Recruiter / Puppeteer is that the units have to be there at the end of combat for them to be added.

Phantomed troops are usually gone by then, so you'll have to make sure that they are there at the end, otherwise they don't count.

The function "army_update_postcombat" is run at the end of the fight and so it only surveys the battlefield at the end, so if you summon troops and they die, then they don't count either, and for that matter, if you have a stack in your army that is killed then they don't count as well.

Keep that in mind...

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

My observations exactly. I was able to get all kinds of demons, executioners, cerberi, imps and dark paladins, as I usually use them for a phantom-res tactic close to the end of the fight.

Allrighty, so it does work, we just need to make it work :)

EDIT: Ok... while I understand why the devs wanted to make burning, poison, cold, etc. more viable, this is kind of ridiculous. Since when we can't remove those conditions? Dispel is like the worthless thing ever now.

[aghiuta]

Finished the game on normal with demoness, it was fun, you really improved the quests now.
I managed to break camilla's quest, SPOILERS to follow:
i killed 6 dwarfs, and when i got back to camilla's island she already had all 7 as ghosts. Killed them, killed her, and after that when i met the last normal dwarf and killed him the quest remained at kill camilla, but she was dead so the quest remained as unfinished.
SPOILER END
For those wanting to replace the reds and other lesser troops, get the Dragon riders from your blackie, they are expensive but gold is abundant, and they rock, without being OP, i usually orc shield them in all fights because they are so hard to get, and limited.

Just for reference my setup for the demoness: Archdemons, Demons, Demonologists, Dragon riders and Shamans, first four spam summons, especially with phantom archies, and the shamans distract with totems or heal all with axes, they can heall all living troops, even dragon riders, which is really useful.
With demoness using Demetrius class III, heirloom sword, and Burning cloak to reduce the leadership costs for demons an Archdemon is down to 510 leadership, so i can pack a whole lot of them.

[zjazd18]

Well i was telling you earlier about shops around castle on Inselburg. :-P

Shield of Rage gets rid of post damage effects, it's second best talent in might talent tree in my opinion.

I would love to be wrong about vampire start but i tried many start/spell combinations and there is couple things that are unavoidable. For example there is not a single unit that can survive ranged attack from elfs in elf guardian of light stack. So only luck with diversion could possibly prevent that to happen in first round. Fights against spiders/snakes in catacombs are very hard as well if stack has thorn hunters they always attack skele archers so you have to bench them and they are only source of reliable damage.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but even with magicbook cheat only way to some battles was phoenix - not even level 1 could cut it, had to be level 2.

Currently I'm on portland already and having lots of fun, with huge spell selection from the beginning it's really refreshing. Only restriction i put on myself is that spells from scrolls are not allowed.

[DGDobrev]

You did, but I did not realize what you meant - I thought you mean all the inns and bullshit. Keep in mind that I am playing the game for the first time :D

Then again, I feel in a profoundly commanding position now. Battles fly by, and all I need to worry about is to avoid losing a single knight or demonologist. It is also absolutely ridiculous how much attention the AI pays to stuff like totems and volcanoes. With an Archie and/or a Shaman, you can keep at least 1 enemy troop occupied at the same time.

Shamans shine in KBDS, mark my words. You can use them for so many tasks, it is absolutely ridiculous. I have never liked a unit so much since the Paladins in KBAP. Shamans plant totems, heal your level 5s, act as mop up for any troop that shows up close to your rangers.

Also, I have grown to like the Wizards. In Battle Trance, they can halve enemies like nobody else, provided their leadership is higher. My current setup consists of Archies, Demonologists/Dragon Riders/Wizards, Dark Knights (give an extra attack to a Battle Tranced Wizard is OP), Dark Paladins and Shamans/Wizards. It takes a bit of babysitting to keep the low-hp troops safe, but they sure hit like a ten ton truck. Teleport is a great spell to have along this squad too, as you can put a Knight right up the ........ of the enemy and have them execute their circle-swing attack for HUGE damage. And then port them back for ress and recuperation. So satisfying... haven't felt so good since KBAP.

[aghiuta]

You captured the feel of this game, it just feels good, and i might be wrong but some of the stacks at the end seemed to be generated lvl up according to your lvl, which is great. I finished at lvl 72 i think and some stacks were still shown as strong, with huge numbers in them, which was delicious with my half.

[DGDobrev]

I just feel that impossible can rock the no-loss game, as it has been since KBAP. It is an exhilarating experience. Every battle counts. Paying attention counts. Knowing your stack size counts. Knowing what you can do vs various lineups counts.

I feel kinda reborn :D That is what KBAP/CW used to thrive on. And of course, all maps open in KBDS now. Lets see what the future has in store for us. I really wanna try the Dragon Riders before I swap them out for lvl 4s, like Executioners. Those guys are amazing with Stone skin and Mana Spring.

[travelingoz]

Well i was telling you earlier about shops around castle on Inselburg. :-P

Shield of Rage gets rid of post damage effects, it's second best talent in might talent tree in my opinion.

I would love to be wrong about vampire start but i tried many start/spell combinations and there is couple things that are unavoidable. For example there is not a single unit that can survive ranged attack from elfs in elf guardian of light stack. So only luck with diversion could possibly prevent that to happen in first round. Fights against spiders/snakes in catacombs are very hard as well if stack has thorn hunters they always attack skele archers so you have to bench them and they are only source of reliable damage.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but even with magicbook cheat only way to some battles was phoenix - not even level 1 could cut it, had to be level 2.

Currently I'm on portland already and having lots of fun, with huge spell selection from the beginning it's really refreshing. Only restriction i put on myself is that spells from scrolls are not allowed.

I've purchased the game and tried a few different starts so far on vanilla vampire impossible. It is possible to get your Chaos Magic up to lvl 2 at lvl 4 if you're lucky with might runes at level up, but you simply won't have enough time, with one cast per round, to be able to CC/kill all the Black Gate Guardian's troops before they get close enough to start inflicting losses on your army. And this is only possible if you open some snake eggs as your necro army cannot deal any significant damage to the enemy. I defeated all of the armies in the catacombs, except the one that has tons of fire spiders by using a stack of snakes, but the red snakes simply have too low HP and once 1 dies......... I seem to remember that there was a way to change the result of the opened "container", if you could manipulate/get green or even blue (royal) snakes or spiders from those eggs, I do believe it's doable with the right spells on vanilla. For example, if you got Chaos Arrow and Snow Storm from the tree stump and Clarissa, and some lvl 2 or 3 snakes or spiders from containers.............
From many restarts, Clarissa will give you a LVL 2 scroll, like Magic Shackles from time to time, so I guess getting Phantom from her is "theoretically" possible......

[zjazd18]

Farthest i've gotten without cheat was beating black gate guardian using level 2 trap, trapper medal, and diversions level 1.Also with that setup it's possible to beat dwarf guardian of light as he has no ranged units.

Those eggs only give red spiders, and cave spiders, tried alternating them and simply nothing else comes out.

I've tried searching steam forums, and didn't see anything about impossible no-loss. Only impossible with loses, and abusing uncontrollable stack of spiders. If someone managed to do it, definitely didn't brag about it.:grin:

I restarted game many times, and best spell i saw was trap. Even if you get phantom it's too weak early on.

[travelingoz]

If you could get snow storm and trap....... it may be possible to create a "choke point". But as you say, how do you deal with the ranged troops when all your army has such low HP........:rolleyes: Perhaps a 'fair' mod would be allowing your vamp to start with 2 necromancers. Problem being, you would still have to be lucky enough with runes to get Chaos LVL 2 AND Distortion LVL 1...........I have also got Magic Spring" from Clarissa, but your army doesn't have any 'meat shields" or summons so that's useless too........ sigh
Impy! Where are you??????????????

[travelingoz]

Farthest i've gotten without cheat was beating black gate guardian using level 2 trap, trapper medal, and diversions level 1.Also with that setup it's possible to beat dwarf guardian of light as he has no ranged units.

Those eggs only give red spiders, and cave spiders, tried alternating them and simply nothing else comes out.

I've tried searching steam forums, and didn't see anything about impossible no-loss. Only impossible with loses, and abusing uncontrollable stack of spiders. If someone managed to do it, definitely didn't brag about it.:grin:

I restarted game many times, and best spell i saw was trap. Even if you get phantom it's too weak early on.

So what do you all think about giving the Vampire 2x necromancer and 1x black knight to start? Would that be "kosher" ????????

[zjazd18]

That would be awesome, but is it hard to mod something like that? As Matt proved, giving phoenix spell at start is pretty easy to do so i would go with that approach if i were to start over.

[MattCaspermeyer]

The starting army is 2 lines above the starting spell list in HERO.TXT. Note that you can change your starting Leadership and give yourself a Bone Dragon! You can give yourself more runes, gold, etc. - they are all there under the heading for the hero type you wish to change.

Note that the unit names for your army must match their ATOM - look in SPECIAL_PARAM.TXT and you'll see a bonus for "sp_lead_all" that is close to the top of the file. All the official ATOM names are listed there and you can put whatever you want in HERO.TXT - you can even expand it all the way out to 7 units (from 3) if you'd like, just make sure you terminate it properly (i.e. no | is needed at the end, just the unit name, "|", and number).

Once again, a misspelling here or improperly specified army list will crash the game when starting anew so just be careful and make backups of everything.

By the way, it'd be nice to use the Demoness as a template and devise a fair starting army for the other classes if they are underpowered or don't get any good units from their starting location. I have not played the other classes, so I don't know what you can get...

So who's equivalent to 2 Demonesses and 1 Demon for Orc / Vampire? Maybe you can even toss in 5 Cerberi for comparison between armies you should have by the time you get to the Catacombs with all 3 classes.

/C\/C\

[zjazd18]

There is no equivalent. You start with skeleton archers, zombies, and ghosts. Then from the beginning (no fighting) you pick 2 vampires and skeletons. That's all, there is shop but it has same troops - skeletons and zombies. So there is no compassion in term of quality of the troops. Orc is pretty weak as well but i don't remember what he had, as i had no desire to play that guy. Necromancers and Black Knight would definitely even things out, but still not sure if it would cut it.

[sethmage]

I played the game from the first week of early access as a vampire, Daert at the start had 2 necromancers (on the side note his attack does more damage than it should do) and I don’t remember how many ancient vampires (they have +100hp and can regenerate), but it was breeze on impossible without losses from the get go. If you could get even 1 necromancer at the start that would change the game enormously, he has 3 rise dead, that alone would keep enemy units busy for most of the battle.

Bagyr has access to Veteran orc, regular orcs, hyenas and goblins (and by access I mean to pick them up, no buying), since I’m writing this from work I can’t check exactly the name of them, however they have only 10HP! that I remember, any dwarf farts and he dies. He definitely needs shaman to keep him alive since there is no other way to keep him healthy.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Wow, there does seem to be quite an imbalance between starting Demoness and Orc / Vampire.

Okay, I'm down to the final boss fight! 509 no loss battles in and I'm level 74.

I've been basically playing my "no res" party since level 30 or so of just ArchDemons and Dragon Riders.

I've tried a couple of fights with the boss and so far it is hard to prevent damage (about 4K worth in one shot from the big boss) - I've tried just Dragon Riders a couple of times, just ArchDemons a couple of times, and both together.

I'm a glutton for punishment, though, and I'm going to see if I can try to do it with just that group of units. I used up all my Ancient Knowledge scrolls, but have 10M gold. So I guess I could fight the Golem in the Shelter (@500K a pop) and try to get to level 75, not that it would make that big of a difference.

I do have a scroll that gives you -20% Leadership so I'm going to use that one and then I forgot that I have at least 1 each of all the other scrolls (or can go buy them) so that I should be able to go in with +10 Attack, Defense, and Intellect, +15% Critical Hit, +30 Mana / Rage (I guess I need to learn Calm Rage) to max out my hero's stats.

So we'll see how it goes, if I can't win with no loss using that group, then I have plenty of money to go buy other troops...

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Hurray!

I basically just went with what I had and just went with a single stack of 43 ArchDemons and was able to finish off the big boss!

I didn't even use any Wanderer Scrolls.

If any one wants to know strategy, let me know.

510 total no loss victories!

I posted pictures of the victory, my final score (only 600, oh well), and my combat statistics for the game so you can see what I used. I tended to still sail around a lot, so that's probably why it took so long (I was being cheap to save that gold - since I ended up with 10M I guess I should have taken advantage of it more).

I didn't finish all the quests, but most of them had to do with stuff in the Shelter (and the descriptions aren't clear how to finish them such as Engineering Department or Military Department). The only other quest I couldn't finish was to bring 3 spells to the Shaman in Bear Butte, but I only got 1 of the scrolls as the other two never appeared in my game (or I didn't know where to find them).

/C\/C\

[zjazd18]

Grats Matt. Judging by how fast the boss fight ended i'm guessing u used similar strategy to mine. How come you spend 96 days, have you traveled a lot by boat or what? I ended at day 19 and was really careless about optimal travel route, although i'm used to abuse pause button like crazy from doing speed runs in previous games.

Anyways now you are free to go and figure out start of Vampire or Orc. Maybe it's possible to do it without alternating starting troops/spells.:grin:

[DGDobrev]

Well, I am also taking my sweet time traveling a lot by horse and such, mainly because I don't know the quests yet and sometimes I spend in-game hours running here and there... In any case, KBDS sure has tons of quests: Matt has 134 completed vs the 86 from KBAP, so we get like 50 more quests here. Awesome, I was looking for that number :)

Congrats Matt, I just hope I am able to beat the final boss as easily as you managed.

[aghiuta]

with my demoness i had 138 completed quests, 7 unfinished and 3 failed (sometimes you have to choose), but in my orc run i found some new quests that i skipped with demoness by simply killing the target (like the damaging steel + luring castle guard)

[MattCaspermeyer]

Grats Matt. Judging by how fast the boss fight ended i'm guessing u used similar strategy to mine. How come you spend 96 days, have you traveled a lot by boat or what? I ended at day 19 and was really careless about optimal travel route, although i'm used to abuse pause button like crazy from doing speed runs in previous games.

Anyways now you are free to go and figure out start of Vampire or Orc. Maybe it's possible to do it without alternating starting troops/spells.:grin:

Yah, I guess, I like to sail around a lot! I was being cheap and saving the teleportation costs, but I ended with over 10M gold so I guess I had nothing to worry about.

I'm think of starting a what's your favorite boat thread! I posted a picture of the boat I ended with - love them Griffin sails! :)

[MattCaspermeyer]

with my demoness i had 138 completed quests, 7 unfinished and 3 failed (sometimes you have to choose), but in my orc run i found some new quests that i skipped with demoness by simply killing the target (like the damaging steel + luring castle guard)

Yah, here's my incomplete quest list (2 failed - I picked Marie Everhart over Skewbite and Blackbeard (hey! Didn't he look like Blackbeard from Pirates of the Caribbean now that I think about it?)):

Enlightenment (couldn't find Berserker or Battle Cry scrolls in my game)
Improving the Dark unit's Critical Hit (this quest is only a small improvement)
Improved Attack (this quest is only a small improvement)
Sabotage Media (I went back to him before Whitehill and there was nothing to do)
Improved Defense (this quest is only a small improvement)
Dragon Riders (not sure how many more princesses I need to finish this one)
Engineering Department (not sure how to complete - do I need to fight the Golem once?)
Military Department (not sure hot to complete - do I have to bring him a ton more prisoners?)

So those were the ones I didn't finish - between Krit, Attack, Defense, and Res All, I picked Res All. I guess I had enough artifacts to do another but +5 Attack, Defense, or Krit seemed like no big deal.

Anyone know how to complete Sabotage Media, Dragon Riders, Engineering Department, or Military Department?

/C\/C\

[zjazd18]

For military department i think at 10000 prisoners quests progresses forward. Also i don't think there are enough great artifacts to complete all of the Improve stats quests.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Well, I am also taking my sweet time traveling a lot by horse and such, mainly because I don't know the quests yet and sometimes I spend in-game hours running here and there... In any case, KBDS sure has tons of quests: Matt has 134 completed vs the 86 from KBAP, so we get like 50 more quests here. Awesome, I was looking for that number :)

Congrats Matt, I just hope I am able to beat the final boss as easily as you managed.

I'm sure you'll be able to do it!

By the way, keep an eye on your spell power as your Intellect goes up in the game because I was quite surprised by how much the spell power of certain spells increased.

By the way, I think the first challenge is "no res" party!

I never used any resurrection abilities the entire game!

Not any units that had resurrection abilities like Dark Paladins, Dark Inquisitors (is that their name?), Demonologists, (are there any more?) and I never even used the Resurrection spell. We are the Dark after all - death and destruction should be our game! ;)

I can also see the "no archies" (no ArchDemons) challenge!

I really enjoyed playing them as they were finally awesome level 5 units. I had improved them in my H3B mod for TL (they had an "Amalgamation" ability where they could cast a random spell on enemy troops that could either Sheep, Pygmy, or Blind), but I think (even though they are overpowered due to the AI focus on Volcanoes) the devs got them right for the most part. They should be able to summon troops, send down Fire Rain, and cause Volcanoes to appear from the ground! :)

I, for one, would be sad not to be able to use them in a game! :cry:

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Wow, well done on you guys for having completed the game no loss already. You are way ahead of me. This game is a massive time sink. Apparently I've logged 71 hours already (about 12 were pre-release) and I'm only up to 160 fights and level 30 or so.

Like DGD said, getting those maps on Tristem are really important to opening up the rest of the islands. The others mainly seem kiteable. I've used a whole heap of different units looking for a combo I really like, but currently I'm using Dark Paladins, Dark Knights, Wizards, Archdemons and either Red Dragons or Executioners. Just killed the king in Baraz-Gund or however that's spelled.

[DGDobrev]

Tell me about the time sink... The way I am looking at it, to complete this game properly, you have to log like 150 hours in a single campaign. 81 hours in, 230 fights, level 42, and I don't know if I am even halfway. Seems we play similarly with Zhuangzi, my lineup is Paladins, Knights, Archies, Demonologists and Wizards. These freaking wizards... I don't know how helpful they will be in the late game, but there are no better halvers right now.

Working on clearing out Neoline's home. Lots of trash and meat, you know :P Spoils the whole sulfur paradise.

[zjazd18]

Challenges will be fun, but they will have to exclude dragon riders as well, no halving, no paladins and it's good starting point for a challenge.

At the moment I'm trying to do sick damage army. What i have in plan is fairies with chaos breath, female bonus items, +1damage items, breakthrough in magic skill tree for magic resistance shred. Dunno what the rest of party will look like, but i think paladins and archmages will find their spot. But I play really slowly this time around, like few battles a day, so it will take a long time before anything starts to shape up.

Yeah the game is very long, and i felt bored at the few last levels, but really it's quite expected tbh.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Wow, well done on you guys for having completed the game no loss already. You are way ahead of me. This game is a massive time sink. Apparently I've logged 71 hours already (about 12 were pre-release) and I'm only up to 160 fights and level 30 or so.

Like DGD said, getting those maps on Tristem are really important to opening up the rest of the islands. The others mainly seem kiteable. I've used a whole heap of different units looking for a combo I really like, but currently I'm using Dark Paladins, Dark Knights, Wizards, Archdemons and either Red Dragons or Executioners. Just killed the king in Baraz-Gund or however that's spelled.


Tell me about the time sink... The way I am looking at it, to complete this game properly, you have to log like 150 hours in a single campaign. 81 hours in, 230 fights, level 42, and I don't know if I am even halfway. Seems we play similarly with Zhuangzi, my lineup is Paladins, Knights, Archies, Demonologists and Wizards. These freaking wizards... I don't know how helpful they will be in the late game, but there are no better halvers right now.

Working on clearing out Neoline's home. Lots of trash and meat, you know :P Spoils the whole sulfur paradise.

It took me 214 hours and literally just over two months to finish my game (I started June 23rd and finished August 28th)!

It took me 250 hours to beat WotN and there was one battle (where you play the Elf hero) where I couldn't do no loss. This was from June 4th, 2013 through November 29th, 2013 (although I was modding and played some other games through that playthrough).

So you can see that I tend to be a very slow player.

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Anyways now you are free to go and figure out start of Vampire or Orc. Maybe it's possible to do it without alternating starting troops/spells.:grin:

Well I played about 4 hours last night with Vampire, no loss impossible.

It certainly is significantly harder than Demoness.

Portland is a lot smaller than Atrixus with respect to what you can explore before you have to go through the portal to the Catacombs.

You guys are right, the starting army is really lame - 11 Skeleton Archers, 5 Decaying Zombies, and 2 Ghosts. You then pick up 2 Vampires and 5 Skeletons. You can then buy more Decaying Zombies and Skeletons in the Zombie shop before you go to the Catacombs.

Starting spells are Poison Skull and Slow and you get a Plague Scroll.

I couldn't even do the first Catacombs fight without having to ditch everyone but the 2 Ghosts and Vampires and that fight took a long time for me to no loss it because of the Thorn Warriors.

I decided to skip all the other Catacombs fights and just work my way to the Shelter to see how 2 Ghosts and Vampires would fair. You can do the Black Gate fight with just 2 Vampires separated into 2 stacks by putting them in one of the corners so it is 2 stacks of 1 Vampire versus 3 of the Dwarven troop stacks. I also had Poison Skull and it reduced the stack sizes so that the Vampires could handle them without dying since they regenerate.

I then went on to the shelter and a single stack of 2 Vampires can no loss the Dwarf Shelter stack if you turn them into Bats and then kite around the map whittling them down and using your Poison Skull, but it took over 100 rounds. I took a stab at the Human and Elf stacks and a different strategy would have to be used (the Vampire Bat kiting strategy won't work with them).

So I'm not sure how much more effort I want to put into no loss Vampire - I'll probably go back to my save in the Catacombs and try to defeat the other spider stacks, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to get another level out of it when defeating the Dwarven Shelter Guard stack later.

I was really hoping that I could get Chaos Magic Level 2 and pump up my Poison Skull spell, but I was a Might Rune short at Level 3. I need to get to level 4 to be able to get Chaos Magic Level 2 and when I went ahead, I ended up putting 2 levels in Concentration to get me more level 1 Poison Skulls per fight (that's 21 extra mana for 4 additional Poison Skull casts during a 15+ round fight).

I'm not even sure if level 2 Poison Skull will do me much good.

So that's where I am, I'm not sure how much more I want to try before I switch over to the Orc to see if he can fare any better.

It may be possible with fights with lots of living creatures to go with more of an army if you can resurrect your troops via the Eviln, but I don't understand the mechanics of how it works. It seems like if the Vampires kill a living (non-plant) troop there is a good shot at getting Eviln to appear, but not so much with the other Undead troops.

I'll probably have to look into the code to see how it works.

I did get Magic Shackles from the Clarissa quest, but that spell doesn't seem like it is going to help me very much at the beginning of the game.

By the way, the reward for Clarissa's quest is either a level 1 or 2 Distortion or Chaos Magic Scroll so it is possible to restart the game and get one of the following spells as a reward for this quest:


Distortion:

Level 1:

Blur
Haste
Precision
Slow
Stone Skin
Time Shift
Whirlwind

Level 2:

Berserker
Flammable Oil
Magic Shackles
Magic Spring
Pain Mirror
Snow Storm
Trap


Chaos:

Level 1:

Chaos Missile
Fear
Flaming Arrow
Frost Grasp
Poison Skull

Level 2:

Chaos Weapon



So that's what we've got to work with playing Vampire as far as another possible starting spell since you get it after just one fight.

Anyway, it'd be interesting to hear if anyone who's trying Vampire can no loss through Whitehill with the original released (V1.5.1047.1747) build as someone mentioned here that you used to start with 2 Necromancers and Ancient Vampires during the EA.

As an aside, I could see giving the Vampire some additional low level spells to help during the early game - he starts with only 3 spells (Poison Skull and Slow and Plague as a scroll); whereas, the Orc starts with 4 spells (Slow and Haste and then scrolls of Berserker and Fear). Why would a Warrior (Orc) start with more spells than a Mage (Vampire)? Seems strange to me. The Paladin (Demoness) even gets Hypnosis, a "Level 5" scroll. Seems like there needs to be something done for a starting Vampire - I could see Evil Book being a good scroll to give to the Vampire at the start of the game (it is just a Level 3 scroll - same as Plague).

I think if I were to try to help the Vampire's starting situation, I would swap Plague for Evil Book and give that a try since they are the same level of spell.

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

I absolutely agree with that. While Poison skull is a rather good spell, it does little to help the Vampire in the early game, unless you specialize. We sure need some balance there. I can perfectly understand the devs opting to make a game with 3 different heroes with 3 different play-styles. Let's face it, KBAP plays the same with any class, only difference being the early game.

Then again, you must expect that people will want to do no-loss, and at least give a simple option for that. Or at least a chance... With the spells you listed, I see no chance for the Vampire.

[Zhuangzi]

Wow, 200+ hours, Matt? I can well believe it as I am up to about 65 hours on this playthrough and I'm only at level 33. And if you can't beat the Shelter fights as a Vampire Impossible No-loss, then I certainly don't think I will even try!

Hopefully by the time I'm finished with the Demoness, we'll have a patch addressing these balance issues.

[DGDobrev]

I absolutely agree.

Well, my Neoline is level 45 now, 250 fights in. Still feels like I'm in mid-game, lol. Cleared out Atrixus, and having a great time :)

[impy]

Well, hello everyone,I finally got the game and did some serious playing this weekend. I was hoping for open world right from the start, as in Legends or Armored Princess, which is great for various challenges once you feel saturated with standard gameplay. Here however are those compulsory fights (around 20) plus Portland offers very limited choices, but it is still a lot,lot lot better than Wotn. Game really opens once you defeat first scroll guardians on Portland.
I have done only 60 fights so far but I thought I summarize in detail what is a good approach to do early demoness no-loss impossible. Please, update it for future generations of gamers!;)

1) start a game and save. Now using old codes, which still work, for example - "doublearmy" or "leadership XXXXX" get some army in order to check what lies ahead. It will save you some frustration believe me. You want to check the following:
1a) check the position of volcano in fight against knight hero on Atrixus. First, everytime I checked this battle volcano was there, but I am cannot be 100% sure if this is permanent or random . Let's just say it is better if it is. You also want volcano preferably on enemy half of battlefield, not in the middle, and definitely not on your half. With volcano close to enemy, it will seriously cripple his units and it will be much easier battle.
1b) do only compulsory fights and get to Whitehill to see the strength of the weakest stack. I am talking hard learned lesson here. When I started this game, I did not want to check the forums and spoil the tactics for me. Once I arrived to Whitehill with more or less struggle no loss, I was taken aback by the strength of even the weakest stack. Honestly, it was brutal. I checked the forums to see if other people had hard time, but hardly any mention of this. And then on page 4 of this thread I see pictures MattCaspermeyer posted with these stacks. And the first picture , the weakest one is almost walk in a park! Compare it to what I had as the weakest stack. It means, there is some variation in starting leadership of those stacks, so in order to save yourself frustration, check this beforehand.
2) start the game properly now and defeat everything on Atrixus. Dismiss fire elementals, they are so weak it's not even funny, blood priestess are not good either.
3) invest in diversion skill asap and start trapping those enemy units. Seriously, if you have not trapped the unit in some easier battle, replay the battle. The idea is to have 10 trapped units by the time you hit Shelter battles, which gives extra trap plus 25% extra damage. By the time you're doing Whitehill, you should have Diversion 3 and 4 traps.
4) proceed to catacombs. Here you have to defeat everything but the strongest stack of spiders. The reason is, there are precisely 21 battles before you hit Whitehill battles, and 20 no loss battles give Grand Strategy medal = extra 200leadership. So big spider battle is optional, all others pretty much compulsory.
5) I cannot give precise tactics on some bigger spider/snake battles or Shelter battles. Some general ideas are:
5a) you don't have to furiously shoot down the biggest/fastest stack that is approaching you. Instead, concetrate on some smaller enemy which maybe got trapped at the back. Once big stack gets close to your units, swap it with weak stack at the back via demoness exchange skill. This can be used repeatedly in battle, and not just for swapping demon with archer/weak unit at the beginning.
5b) sometimes due to strength of enemy stacks you do not want to send demon to enemy ranks right away. In the other words, apart from sturdiness, demoness contribution is low, becasue she is slow. consider dropping her and create two stacks of scoffer imps and fool enemy with sneer skill.
5c) talking about sneer skill. My favourite use, (especially during Shelter battles, where battlefield is divided in half) is to block the passage to scoffer imps by my stacks right where 3hex gaps are on one side. You let enemy approach on the other side for 2-3 turns, and then casting sneer with blocked way will send enemy all the way back to go around.
6) once you arrive at Whitehill, you only need to defeat one stack. You get Blackie and by far the best skill to use (and later in Portland) is Jealousy. Start the battle with maxed rage via potion of rage and cast it close to biggest level2 melee stack. This stack will go around crippling or even destroying its own shooters etc. Go one hex forward with demoness and swap demon with archer unit. Move out of reach of this teleported unit with imps before you shoot. The idea is, so archer stack cannot move away and shoot, or hit weak imps, so it has to go for demoness. If you lucky, it will even miss. If battle is difficult, restart few times in order for Diversion skill to sabotage in the first round 2 stacks and the stacks you want. Ideally, it will incapacitate melee unit on one side and archer on the other side. You then swap demon with unaffected archer unit, and create summon with demon. Since melee unit on this side won't move in the first round, and melee attack of shooters is weak, your summon will survive round one.

Like I said, i only have done about sixty battles, but there is this idea for a challenge - good old - how far you can get with single black dragon (hmm, never heard of that one before:grin:). You can get the dragon quite early actually. Once you reach Portland, develop Blackie in terms of Jealousy and Orc Strike only. Orc Strike will do some serious damage and combined with traps, you can defeat the black dragon.

[zjazd18]

Whitehill was brutal for me too, and they were only fights i didn't manage to do no-loss and it was required to do all 3 stacks when i started. Dunno how my stacks looked compared to matt/yours but i didn't see any hope, although i didn't have level 3 diversion/trapper.

Black dragon challenge should be easy for vampire, the summons are really strong in this game, early game phoenix, then call of nature.

As for vampire start, problem are archers, rest you can kite for days with vampires. In Elf Guardian of Light stack, there are elves that basically kill something in 1 shot, if it hits 1 vampire it dies. Trap doesn't help against them, and there are like 100 fairies that can't be trapped. Poison skull isn't reliable enough even on level 2 it can do really low dmg.

[Zhuangzi]

Sounds like you had my luck with random numbers of units in a stack, Impy. First time I tried no loss I got stuck with a huge stack of Fairies in one of those Shelter fights, but when I restarted and got back to the same fight it was much easier. I didn't do that hardest spider stack either, but like you say once you get Blackie it gets much easier.

Having said that, no loss is a challenge in this game for sure. I am up to 196 fights without loss now, about level 34, and I'm not entirely sure where I ought to be concentrating on. For a long time now most of the available stacks on most islands are Very Hard and above. It's hard to know the correct order of islands in terms of difficulty.

Obviously it's Portland, Monteville, Inselburg in that order, but after that I have been all over the place fighting whatever seemed easiest. I finally cleared out Draganador and also Baraz-Gund, and after quite a few easy fights on Tristem I can pick and choose to a large extent.

I really enjoyed those first three islands a lot - I thought the map and quest design was excellent. The other islands are good too but I have to say I prefer the sense of being more or less 'stuck' on one island and having to fight my way through it, rather than being able to teleport all over the world looking for the next easiest fight. Ah well, at least I don't have to use the boat...

[DGDobrev]

So far I have been doing it in this order: Portland, Monteville, Inselburg, Darenbam, Baraz-Gund, Tristem, Dragandor, Sandy/Bear Butte (seemed the same difficulty at this point), Atrixus, and now I am tormenting the amazons.

Sure takes some porting between islands, due to the nature of the quests. I think we got a bit spoiled by KBAP's linear quests. These ones here need you to think a little, and expect you to be a bit more involved in them, especially since, the way it looks, there are 50+ more quests in KBDS than there were in KBAP. I love the porting here and there - while it takes away the "find the fastest route" game option, it makes for much less punishable game experience if you miss something. Keeping in mind the game is 100+ hours a play-through, I can only smile at this addition.

Also make sure you check the map guards. Some are in places that allow you to kite them just enough to steal the map they are guarding. It never hurts to open a new area :)

EDIT: they really need to make your summoned units a bit smarter. My summons have adopted a hobby: seek out traps and fall in them :D

[Zhuangzi]

Sandy Island seems a bit easier than Bear Butte to me, not so much in terms of the leadership but just the quality of enemies. In this game the effect of poison, burning and bleeding just seem very, very overpowered, so certain enemies are a royal pain in the ass. I never want to see any of these suckers again:

Alchemists (uh, so tough, and poison bombs?)
Ice Spiders (stacks of 300+???, one shot killing some of my Archdemons?)
And those new things, I forget their name, that cast Empathy? Screw that.

Those Priests of Light are hazardous too with their mass heal, but you can always cast Fear on a stack of them.

Jealousy is far and away the best Rage ability. Like in previous KB games abilities that do a fixed amount of damage are woefully underpowered by mid-game. Black Hole looks nice but barely scratches them.

[Loremipsum1]

Well I played about 4 hours last night with Vampire, no loss impossible
....
I think if I were to try to help the Vampire's starting situation, I would swap Plague for Evil Book and give that a try since they are the same level of spell.

/C\/C\

I don't think Evil Book is sufficient to help the vampire PC. The fight with the elven Guardian of Light is too hard; the elf stack in that fight has higher initiative than any undead units, and it will kill at least one vampire (your tankiest units) on the first move of the first round. You could try picking up some Scoffer Imps from the shelter, which would allow you to cast one spell first, but I don't think that'll allow you to win with no losses.

What I did to make the vampire PC viable for no-loss was to mod the game such that he starts with a single ancient vampire. This seemed fair (Demoness starts with *two* level 4 units) and is still quite a bit less powerful than the vampire's start in Early Access.

The early game's still hard as hell with this, but it can be done. I just finished Whitehill now. :) The elf battle took me 50 rounds and a little luck; the single Whitehill fight I could handle took me 90 rounds. (I got a Magic Spring scroll, so my main tactic is to nuke down the ranged units as quickly as I can, then hit and run with Magic Spring and Poison Skull, changing to bat form when needed to avoid heavy-hitting melee. This is hardest in the elf fight, since they have three 4-speed attackers, one of which can soar across the chasm. Still, it's doable.)

[DGDobrev]

Actually, Amazonia is an easy island, especially if you have Stone Skin and Teleport and Wizards for the 50% damage reduction. Most of the enemies are physical, so you can stick a Dark Paladin with Magic Shield from the wizards right up their throats, have it attack, then Dark Knights give him second wind to attack again, and then you follow up with even more stone skin or teleport on the dark knights as needed.

In my play-through, I managed to obtain Turn Back Time, which is an awesome spell ever since KBAP. Took big losses on a stack? Turn Back Time and laugh you freaking ass off. I love that strategy.

The Amazons look a bit intimidating, but they are relatively easy to deal with, as long as you can cope with the momentary losses. Still, it is not an island I would recommend a level 35 or less person to do. You need to be able to protect your troops adequately. But then again, if you can get a stack of amazons to help you, it is huge. In my game, I have 2 items that improve damage -+1 physical and +1 Fire, and Amazons with their decent range shine with it. I will most likely not bring them to the final battle, but they are a great sub for the Archdemons now, as they can outdamage them easily.

BTW, I am discovering that Turn Back Time crashes my game a lot. While I understand that it is kind of overpowered, I don't like the failsafe against it :D

[aghiuta]

If you use the right army, meaning exploit a bit the new mechanics, the game gets real easy. I can frack up invincible armies without losses, even if they have 5-6 stacks of archers.
My setup now Archdemons, Dragon Riders, Demonologists, Shamans, Giants.
First 3 are used to summon block the enemy archers.
The shamans spam totems which the mobs seem to love to go after, so with the right placement among some traps you can kill the turn of several mobs.
Giants are great for the hit all skill which works great with half.
For rage use fiery passion skill from demoness to box the enemy if needed, or even jealousy, or just black hole/shield them for damage and maybe half.
For spells poison rain is extremely destructive, especially if you have 5 enemy mobs that you clustered together with black hole. Or use Blizzard for several, giving a nice frozen stats.
Take advantage of bleeding/burning/poisoned/frozen which can take out a lot of mobs, and add half to it and all fights become easy.

[zjazd18]

Yeah the game is pretty easy in mid/late game, in my play through i thought the halving was the main problem. This skill is so ridiculously overpowered it's not even funny, especially on impossible where stacks are huge. The damage from halving is absurd on big stacks, not to mention it also gives rage for the damage dealt. It's a single player game so i guess balance is not as important, as you can choose not to use overpowered tactics, and you won't feel like you are having disadvantage against other players. I'd shift some difficulty from early game into late game, especially on impossible. The pinnacle of difficulty are few earlygame battles, and i feel it should be other way around.

[DGDobrev]

True that. I keep on using my underpowered Paladins, Knights, Wizards, Demonologists, Amazons lineup. 4 of the troops are lagging hopelessly behind (meaning 30 or less on the total leadership stack), waiting for recruiter to fill them up :)

Neoline DG is 50 now, so I moved on to Galenirim. Fights are still a breeze :)

EDIT: Btw, I think wizards do better with halving than Giants. Giants are a level 5 unit, so you don't get any bonuses to halving (it is still leadership vs leadership), or any option to use the Second Wind skill. You need to wait till the ability recharges, while wizards can do it any second turn. Knights can boost Wizards in a way that they can do Battle trance 3 times in a row, meaning 3x 15% chance based on leadership between stacks. That halves enemy stacks like no tomorrow. Combine it with Jealousy and you have an easy fight to control. Regardless of what the enemy has to offer. maybe I should try Wizards + Giants. That would be wicked, but then again, I don't have the dark heal spell - I only found 1 (!) heal spell, which I have been using on Demonologists, Trolls, etc. So in essence, your mileage will always vary, depending on the game. And I need more to turn it into a darkie heal spell...

I also consider halving to be overpowered... This promotes using AOE units much more often now: Giants, Wizards, Archdemons, etc. :D

[RaulIgnat]

Anyone found anything good in that tree stump next to Clarissa`s hut ? I sometimes got Call of nature scrolls or some weak items but im just curious what else can you get from that place.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Great post, Impy!

Without comparing notes it is hard to tell for certain, but for the most part, it sounds like your strategies were similar to mine. I didn't use any of the cheat methods to look ahead, but I did mention that I ended up going back to my Atrixus save when I first got to the shelter as I realized that I should try harder to complete the Demon child quest, focus my skill tree on improving Trap since it was pivotal to dealing damage early for Demoness with the limited troop availability, and I also wanted to defeat that big spider stack in the Catacombs.

I think you could probably do the big Catacombs spider stack if you wanted, but as you said, it is not important at this stage of the game (except for having a little more experience - and maybe bragging rights ;)).

1b) do only compulsory fights and get to Whitehill to see the strength of the weakest stack. I am talking hard learned lesson here. When I started this game, I did not want to check the forums and spoil the tactics for me. Once I arrived to Whitehill with more or less struggle no loss, I was taken aback by the strength of even the weakest stack. Honestly, it was brutal. I checked the forums to see if other people had hard time, but hardly any mention of this. And then on page 4 of this thread I see pictures MattCaspermeyer posted with these stacks. And the first picture , the weakest one is almost walk in a park! Compare it to what I had as the weakest stack. It means, there is some variation in starting leadership of those stacks, so in order to save yourself frustration, check this beforehand.

I'd agree with you that the first Whitehill stack I faced was easier (at least it seemed, anyway) to the Shelter fights I had just done; however, those fights (and the big Catacombs spider stack) had "trained" me for the Whitehill fights in what tactics to use, etc. and so I actually think the Whitehill fights are fairly tough, for no loss anyway, but they seem easier because we are just better players by that time.

It is interesting that they changed it from all 3 to just 1 of the Whitehill fights as your stack was weaker than my final stack (although I'm guessing you were level 5 when you fought them and I was level 6 with 3 more Imps / Scoffer Imps for the 2nd and 3rd Whitehill stacks). Using your stack as the baseline, here are the relative strengths of the stacks I faced compared to yours (this is based on stack leadership):

Stack 1: 70.0%
Stack 2: 81.5%
Stack 3: 111%

So I wonder if this is just variability or a change to make them tougher since you only had to defeat 1 of them. Of course, leadership is not the only gauge for how hard a stack is, but you'll note that when comparing all the stacks, they all have 3 shooters and 2 melee troops, and the Inquisitors tend to use their res ability on turn 1 so they are not as big of a problem as Bowmen or the Priests of Light (at least on round 1 anyway).

At any rate, I think between your and my posts people now should see what the difference in variability is and how possible no loss is comparing against these stacks.

I really think that once you get the strategy down that you can handle quite a bit of variability in stack size with these troops because they all have essentially the same structure of troop types. It is just as easy for your Demoness to swap a stack of 40 Swordsmen or 28. As long as these concepts sink in, no lossing these stacks shouldn't be a problem if you're persistent. :)

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Keep this going guys. I think that we are close to finding a good formula (spells + units) for a no-loss for a Vampire. It mustn't be too overpowered, yet it must still be a challenge. It is quite all right if it is a mod in my opinion, like an edited save. If someone did it, other can do it too. And then we can move on to the Orc.

[MattCaspermeyer]

I don't think Evil Book is sufficient to help the vampire PC. The fight with the elven Guardian of Light is too hard; the elf stack in that fight has higher initiative than any undead units, and it will kill at least one vampire (your tankiest units) on the first move of the first round. You could try picking up some Scoffer Imps from the shelter, which would allow you to cast one spell first, but I don't think that'll allow you to win with no losses.

What I did to make the vampire PC viable for no-loss was to mod the game such that he starts with a single ancient vampire. This seemed fair (Demoness starts with *two* level 4 units) and is still quite a bit less powerful than the vampire's start in Early Access.

The early game's still hard as hell with this, but it can be done. I just finished Whitehill now. :) The elf battle took me 50 rounds and a little luck; the single Whitehill fight I could handle took me 90 rounds. (I got a Magic Spring scroll, so my main tactic is to nuke down the ranged units as quickly as I can, then hit and run with Magic Spring and Poison Skull, changing to bat form when needed to avoid heavy-hitting melee. This is hardest in the elf fight, since they have three 4-speed attackers, one of which can soar across the chasm. Still, it's doable.)

Great ideas, Loremipsum1! :)

I have not tried to see if the Evil Book will help, yet.

The problem with vampire troops is that they regenerate every round. So this makes it tough, I think, to give the player starting (Ancient) Vampires and coupled with the no retaliation, you can do pretty amazing things with just a few of them. I think the developers tried to keep this in mind with respect to impossible no loss when playing Daert.

I've noticed from my experience with Daert is that Vampire troops can get into a corner and limit the damage to just 3 troops if there are no ranged attackers. The enemy stack sizes are just large enough (especially the thorns) to do more than 70 damage, sometimes. You need to whittle them down a bit, but then if there are two or three armies attacking the Vampires then they can kill at least 1 of them. So you end up trying to kite them around, but it is a lot harder with the limited space of the Catacombs fights.

I'm not 100% certain, but I think 1 Ancient Vampire would be able to solo all the fights to at least the shelter and he could easily do the Dwarven Shelter stack (I know that since I as able to do it with the 2 Vampires).

That's why I was thinking the spell route may make no loss possible (and it goes with the fact that he is a mage), while keeping the starting Vampire troops as they are. Also, I don't think we should be going over about 20 to 30 rounds to do no loss, otherwise, it just gets tedious.

I certainly, though, like your idea of trying to balance Daert's starting troops with Neoline's. I think in all fairness, with respect to troops, that 1 Demon is equivalent to 1 Ancient Vampire or 1 Black Knight and that 2 Demonesses are equivalent to 2 Necromancers.

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

BTW, I am discovering that Turn Back Time crashes my game a lot. While I understand that it is kind of overpowered, I don't like the failsafe against it :D

This has been a problem since EA and it has been reported. I'm not certain why it hasn't been fixed, yet.

I just steered clear of it since I didn't want to deal with the crashing issues.

/C\/C\

[Loremipsum1]

Great ideas, Loremipsum1! :)

I have not tried to see if the Evil Book will help, yet.

The problem with vampire troops is that they regenerate every round. So this makes it tough, I think, to give the player starting (Ancient) Vampires and coupled with the no retaliation, you can do pretty amazing things with just a few of them. I think the developers tried to keep this in mind with respect to impossible no loss when playing Daert.

I've noticed from my experience with Daert is that Vampire troops can get into a corner and limit the damage to just 3 troops if there are no ranged attackers. The enemy stack sizes are just large enough (especially the thorns) to do more than 70 damage, sometimes. You need to whittle them down a bit, but then if there are two or three armies attacking the Vampires then they can kill at least 1 of them. So you end up trying to kite them around, but it is a lot harder with the limited space of the Catacombs fights.

I'm not 100% certain, but I think 1 Ancient Vampire would be able to solo all the fights to at least the shelter and he could easily do the Dwarven Shelter stack (I know that since I as able to do it with the 2 Vampires).


Yeah, that's correct, unfortunately. All the battles through the Black Gate were trivial, barring two giant stacks in the catacombs. Though, as you point out, the same is true with the default troops.

I definitely understand your concerns about ancient vamps being too strong, and before I did the Shelter fights, I had that concern too. After my first few attempts at the Elven Guardian, my concerns were resolved. :) 140 hit points is still fragile enough that the player will die if he gets hit by most melee stacks; the only difference is that it gives him a chance to survive the initial volleys from the enemy's ranged troops.

If anything, I think my setup is a little too weak; I don't think it's possible to beat the Shelter Guardians with it unless you get a scroll of Magic Spring from Clarissa. I'm not sure how to resolve that. (Other than swapping out your starting plague scroll for a scroll of magic spring, I mean.)


That's why I was thinking the spell route may make no loss possible (and it goes with the fact that he is a mage), while keeping the starting Vampire troops as they are. Also, I don't think we should be going over about 20 to 30 rounds to do no loss, otherwise, it just gets tedious.


I like this idea in the abstract, but based on earlier posts in the thread, even giving Daert something as extravagant as Summon Phoenix still makes that fight pretty tight. (And it comes at the expense of breaking the game a little earlier in the post-Whitehall sections.)

[zjazd18]

Phoenix in my opinion isn't that outrageous, but it has to be a scroll, so you don't have enough magic crystals to get it to level 2. Demoness gets hypnosis so it sounds fair.

Other option i considered is last hero, only thing i don't know is if troops take damage when the battle ends, if not some nice planing can lead to no loss victory. Haven't tested it as i went with phoenix approach.

Damage spells simply don't cut it, even the most powerful ones.

[travelingoz]

Phoenix in my opinion isn't that outrageous, but it has to be a scroll, so you don't have enough magic crystals to get it to level 2. Demoness gets hypnosis so it sounds fair.

Other option i considered is last hero, only thing i don't know is if troops take damage when the battle ends, if not some nice planing can lead to no loss victory. Haven't tested it as i went with phoenix approach.

Damage spells simply don't cut it, even the most powerful ones.

After some more playing around, the dwarven ore trailer behind the castle will spawn between 2500 and 7500 gold, 6-7 crystals or a high level scroll like Call of Death or even Phoenix! However, a young phoenix will die to 1 good hit from a stack of 14 miners or 2 hits from anything else and it costs 20 mana. So given that it is 'possible' to get a higher magic scroll early game, I thought I'd try giving my Daert 2 x ancient Vamps, 2 x necromancers, and 1 x Fire Rain scroll to start. All you need to do is the first fight and visit Clarissa and the other hut to get to lvl3. Check how many might runes you have and Chaos Lvl 2 is possible by the time you reach the black gate. I left the 2 big fire spider stacks in the catacombs alone and manged no loss all the way to Portland, although i did have to restart several times and one or 2 of the fights in the shelter went to around 40+ rounds. It was still challenging and I didn't feel it was overpowered in any way as 1 misstep would result in losses. With the very low leadership of the Mage, you cannot have more than 1 Ancient Vamp or Necromancer in your army until the second shelter fight when you get lvl5 and in fact as i only used the Necromancer in 1 fight in the catacombs I think so they are not necessary. I basically just cast Fire Rain 1 or 2 times at the start, depending on how the stacks were arranged, then thinned them out further with Poison Skull Lvl 2 and Slow if the kiting was getting too hard. Now that I've made Portland, the game is looking good!
So I would start with 1 x Fire rain instead of Plague and 2x Ancient Vamps as starting troops and I think that should provide enough challenge!

[DGDobrev]

As soon as I am done with this play-through, I will also give a thought about the vampire :)

But for now: THAT MORALE!!!

Thanks to it, I can mow down enemy stacks easily. Just get those knights nice and fully surrounded with teleport, execute the whirling attack, have them eat tons of damage, Turn back time at the end of the next turn, and then lol. :D

[Zhuangzi]

Yeah, it's because of that 88k item, isn't it? We are playing similarly, DG, like you said before. I have Dark Paladins, Dark Knights and Wizards, all with insane morale, and I just bought a Turn Back Time scroll for use with the Knights. My fourth and fifth units are currently Archdemons and Executioners. For the Archdemon you need to use level 3 Healing (after doing the relevant quest to make it 'dark') and the others are all there to slaughter big stacks. And then with Phantom if I lose too many for one resurrection, there's the old Paladin + Phantom routine.

You are way ahead of me now - I'm level 39, just having cleared Sandy Island except for the final bosses and Tristem, same deal there.

[DGDobrev]

My problem is that even though I am over 50, I can't use dark healing - apart from the scroll I have in my book, I can find no other. Maybe it wouldn't have been a bad idea to script at least 3 of each in the game... Or if they did, I haven't found the others. So no Archdemons for me.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Yeah, that's correct, unfortunately. All the battles through the Black Gate were trivial, barring two giant stacks in the catacombs. Though, as you point out, the same is true with the default troops.

I definitely understand your concerns about ancient vamps being too strong, and before I did the Shelter fights, I had that concern too. After my first few attempts at the Elven Guardian, my concerns were resolved. :) 140 hit points is still fragile enough that the player will die if he gets hit by most melee stacks; the only difference is that it gives him a chance to survive the initial volleys from the enemy's ranged troops.

If anything, I think my setup is a little too weak; I don't think it's possible to beat the Shelter Guardians with it unless you get a scroll of Magic Spring from Clarissa. I'm not sure how to resolve that. (Other than swapping out your starting plague scroll for a scroll of magic spring, I mean.)



I like this idea in the abstract, but based on earlier posts in the thread, even giving Daert something as extravagant as Summon Phoenix still makes that fight pretty tight. (And it comes at the expense of breaking the game a little earlier in the post-Whitehall sections.)

Phoenix in my opinion isn't that outrageous, but it has to be a scroll, so you don't have enough magic crystals to get it to level 2. Demoness gets hypnosis so it sounds fair.

Other option i considered is last hero, only thing i don't know is if troops take damage when the battle ends, if not some nice planing can lead to no loss victory. Haven't tested it as i went with phoenix approach.

Damage spells simply don't cut it, even the most powerful ones.

After some more playing around, the dwarven ore trailer behind the castle will spawn between 2500 and 7500 gold, 6-7 crystals or a high level scroll like Call of Death or even Phoenix! However, a young phoenix will die to 1 good hit from a stack of 14 miners or 2 hits from anything else and it costs 20 mana. So given that it is 'possible' to get a higher magic scroll early game, I thought I'd try giving my Daert 2 x ancient Vamps, 2 x necromancers, and 1 x Fire Rain scroll to start. All you need to do is the first fight and visit Clarissa and the other hut to get to lvl3. Check how many might runes you have and Chaos Lvl 2 is possible by the time you reach the black gate. I left the 2 big fire spider stacks in the catacombs alone and manged no loss all the way to Portland, although i did have to restart several times and one or 2 of the fights in the shelter went to around 40+ rounds. It was still challenging and I didn't feel it was overpowered in any way as 1 misstep would result in losses. With the very low leadership of the Mage, you cannot have more than 1 Ancient Vamp or Necromancer in your army until the second shelter fight when you get lvl5 and in fact as i only used the Necromancer in 1 fight in the catacombs I think so they are not necessary. I basically just cast Fire Rain 1 or 2 times at the start, depending on how the stacks were arranged, then thinned them out further with Poison Skull Lvl 2 and Slow if the kiting was getting too hard. Now that I've made Portland, the game is looking good!
So I would start with 1 x Fire rain instead of Plague and 2x Ancient Vamps as starting troops and I think that should provide enough challenge!

This is all really interesting information and these are great suggestions!

By the way, I performed a little experiment with the Evil Book. Honestly, it is not much help as level 1, but if you could get it to level 2, then it may be helpful later. The only problem is that you need to get your Chaos skill to level 2 and I'm always 1 Might rune short at Daert level 4. So you'd have to get to level 5 before you could get any of your Chaos spells to level 2, at least from my playthroughs so far.

I did an experiment where I gave Daert all the spells in the spellbook via the "magicbook" cheat. My army was just 2 Vampires and 2 Ghosts and I was attacking the 2nd largest spider stack in the Catacombs. The only spell that was remotely useful was Phoenix.

The only problem with Phoenix is that why would Daert start with it, either as a scroll or spell? Perhaps the reason is that a Phoenix deals with reviving the dead and maybe he had one since he wanted to do some research with it. I think we should try to avoid Order spells unless they are specifically dark.

I've also devised a point system for the starting spells of all the heroes (1 point for each spell level):


Orc: 5 points (3 level 1 spells and 1 level 2) / 2 points in learned spells, 3 points in scrolls
Demoness: 8 points (1 level 1 spell, 1 level 2 spell, and 1 level 5 spell) / 3 points in learned spells, 5 points in scrolls
Vampire: 5 points (2 level 1 spells and 1 level 3 spell) / 2 points in learned spells, 3 points in scrolls
So you can see that as a Mage, Daert doesn't even start with the highest spell points based on the starting level of his spells. I could see us, as a change, giving Daert 11 or 12 spell points to select his starting spells. Of that I could see going with 4 to 5 points in learned spells and 7 to 8 points in scrolls.

Another problem is his starting low Mana. it should be up to 27 by the time you hit the Catacombs.

When I had all the spells, I looked through them to see which ones had really low Mana costs at level 1 so that you'd be able to cast some with your low starting Mana. Here is a list of all spells that are 5 Mana or less (with some analysis towards their utility for an early Mage) the format is Spell Name (Mana/Spell Level) and bold spells are what Daert starts with:


Order (Sanctuary):

Dispel (5/1): not very useful due to inability to dispel most side effects
Helplessness (2/1): starts with -30% defense (enemy unit defense is most likely too low for it to make much difference, although it is very cheap!)
Healing (3/1): no help, damages your troops
Last Hero (5/1): 0 damage until the spell is removed on level 1&2 troops (not sure the utility since a recast removes the spell first (thereby causing damage) before reapplying it and you probably don't need it at the end since enemy damage output should be minimal; the only exception to this is if the spell is coupled with Time Shift then you can hold onto it for a much longer time, but troop level severely limits the spell's utility @level 1)
Shelter (4/1): protects your troop from any damage (this could be really useful for soloing a stack)
Dragon Arrow (3/2): only useful (possibly) if you have Skeleton Archers
Empathy (3/1): deflects damage (starting at 10%) to an enemy (could be very useful for a Vampire and is effectively a 10% resist all damage that increases as your intellect increases)
Magic Axe (5/2): direct damage spell starts with 100 damage (the only units through Whitehill with Physical Resistance are Cave Spiders, Swordsmen, and Guardsmen) and gives very reliable damage
Battle Cry (5/2): gives +1 initiative to level 1&2 troops (probably not very useful)
Peacefulness (5/3): increased health with decreased damage (may be useful for a unit to absorb damage)
Titan Slayer (5/3): increases damage to level 5 units, but there are none through Whitehill so useless
Warding Healing (5/3): delayed healing, but given as a reward for a quest later (plus I think it only works on troops of the Light early)
Power of Night (5/4): increases damage of your troops, starts at +10% (may be useful, plus the only truly dark spell in this tree)
Distortion:

Stone Skin (3/1): +20% Physical Resistance @level 1 (good for protecting against Physical damage)
Precision (2/1): starts with +25% damage (works with all Shooters so useful for Skeleton Archers and Necromancers only)
Berserker (2/2): +75% damage to level 1&2 troops (damage output is really good, but only to level 1 and 2 troops)
Flammable Oil (5/2): -20% ranged damage / Fire Resistance (may be useful against the Bowmen / Elves later)
Blur (3/1): starts with -15% Critical Hit on your troop / +5% evasion (I originally thought this was +Critical Hit, but since it is not it probably isn't very useful and +5% evasion is not even worth it as a cast)
Haste (3/1): +1 speed (only helpful for getting away from the enemy)
Slow (5/1): -1 speed (only helpful for slowing enemies from getting to your troops)
Whirlwind (5/1): 50 damage and knockback of level 1-2 troops (knockback may be useful, but damage is too low, although level requirement is probably not much of a hindrance)
Mana Spring (5/2): regenerates mana (perhaps very useful if applied to a unit that can absorb damage)
Pain Mirror (5/2): reflects 60% damage (not very useful for no loss unless unit being damaged is temporary)
Time Shift (5/1): extends spell life randomly by 2 rounds (very useful if only 1 bonus spell on target and that is the spell that you want to extend, otherwise possibly useful, but randomness may detract from utility, although most spells only last 2 or 3 rounds @level 1 so probably hard to use for more than 1 spell anyway)
Trap (5/2): 80 to 120 damage, but target must move onto trap (proved very useful for Demoness (as a skill and a way to increase damage via the medal), but probably not useful for Vampire)
Target (5/3): AI of level 1-2 focuses on target (useful for temporary units or units that can absorb a lot of damage, may protect lower level troops that need to move away)
Teleport (5/3): starts with a teleport range of 4 (this spell could be very useful)
Calm Rage (1/3): converts rage into mana (quite a bit more useful than Mana Spring due to immediate increase in mana and incredibly low cost - only 1 Mana!)
Pygmy (5/4): -20% to stack health and damage (effectively a temporary 20% kill all to a stack, but small stack size limits its utility early)
Chaos:

Flame Arrow (5/1): 75 Fire Damage (useful at whittling down stack size over many rounds)
Poison Skull (5/1): 40 to 140 Poison Damage (useful at whittling down stack size over many rounds)
Frost Grasp (5/1): 80 to 100 Freeze Damage (probably the best damage spell early due to 0 Cold Resistance among enemies)
Weakness (5/3): causes target to do minimum damage (great against enemies with large damage ranges)
Kamikaze( 5/3): causes 130-200 damage from exploding friendly target (could be very useful if able to create temporary units)
Chaos Weapon (5/1): 25 x 3 damage of random type to target (could be useful to whittle down enemy stacks over many rounds)
Plague (5/3): starts with -15% to health, attack, and defense (similar to Pygmy, except effect is not quite as useful and once again utility limited by stack size)

Of the Order (or I keep forgetting they are called Sanctuary now) spells, Power of Night is the only one that seems well suited for Daert, but it is 4 points out of his 11 or 12. Helplessness is so low in Mana that it seems like it would be good to just throw it in there. Empathy would be an excellent spell to give to Daert, but it doesn't really seem like a dark spell (although it seems like it would go well with casting on a Black Knight if he had one at the start and it could reduce damage to Vampires as well to protect against loss of one of their units).

Of the Distortion spells, I could see Stone Skin being very helpful as well as Calm of Rage (but starting with Calm of Rage would seem a little strange maybe). Pygmy would also be really good, but its similarity to Plague kind of makes it seem strange for Daert to have it instead of Plague at the start of the game. It is also 4 points.

Of the Chaos spells, I really think Daert has to start with Poison Skull since it is essentially an Undead spell. I think Frost Grasp (due to its cold damage) is also well suited as an Undead spell in a way (it's almost like a grasp of death) and no units have immunity to Cold Damage through Whitehill. I think Kamikaze would be very fun coupled with a Necromancer or two in Daert's starting army and seems to go really well with a Necromancer. I still think Plague should be swapped with Evil Book as that is a perfect Undead spell.

So here's my starting spell recommendation based on the point system I devised (let's use 12 points with 5 points of starting spells and 7 for scrolls):


Spells:

Stone Skin: 1
Poison Skull: 1
Weakness: 3 OR Teleport: 3
Total = 5
Scrolls:

Kamikaze: 3
Evil Book: 3
Frost Grasp: 1
Total: 7

Okay, feel free to use this point system if you think it's fair and come up with your own list (if you want to use spells that I didn't list, just look in SPELLS.TXT for the spell's level - it is on the profit= line). It does kind of force you to want to go for the Chaos skill first, but I think that makes sense as an Undead Mage and if you find other spells then maybe you'll want to go to the other spell schools.

Next we have the problem of Daert's starting army. It is very paltry (you can only get max Decaying Zombies and Skeletons through to the Shelter since you can buy extra from the Zombie Miller). Since you can buy either, I don't think it makes sense to start with either Decaying Zombies or Skeletons - go buy them if you think they may be useful.

To synergize with the spells I selected, I think you should start with 1 Black Knight (since you can use Stone Skin on them) and I think 1 Cursed Ghost might be a neat starting troop because of their Ghost Cry (and you can Stone Skin them for 70% Physical Resistance). Both could use Evlins to heal their damage. Lastly, in order for us to be able to get any use out of Kamikaze, we need to have a Necromancer so that we can use their Raise Dead skill and then Kamikaze some troops.

That uses up the 3 starting slots, although we could use more troops, traditionally, you only start with 3 starting troops. Here's what I think we can do with the friendly troops in the castle: change the Skeleton Warriors so that you get 5 Vampires and change the Vampires to Cursed Ghosts. This would give you plenty of Vampires through to the Shelter and allow you to add Cursed Ghosts to your stacks as you level up. This would allow you to use their Ghost Cry and their life steal should be sufficiently high to help them recoup losses.

That would give him some extra level 3 troops hopefully enough for the Shelter and synergize well with spells / scrolls in his starting spellbook. You then get another scroll from Clarissa and possibly more scrolls before the Shelter.

Your starting troop makeup would look like this:


1 Black Knight
1 Necromancer
1 Cursed Ghosts

And then you'd get the following additional troops:


5 Vampires
2 Cursed Ghosts

I think this starting group would be quite fun and coupled with Evil Book, Kamikaze, and Frost Grasp when Daert Gets to level 3 should make for a really fun start for Deart no loss, while still being challenging, I think.

Not sure if it will work in practice, but it looks good on paper, at least! :)

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

By the way, I did try the following with Vampire:

Spells / Scrolls as listed above, and I chose Weakness over Teleport.

Hero's starting army:


1 Black Knight
1 Ancient Vampire
1 Cursed Ghost

And here's who you get in Daert's castle at the beginning as friendly troops:


2 Necromancers
5 Vampires

I'm now in the Shelter Basement and I have to say this is probably too easy so far.

I had no problems with any of the stacks in the Catacombs except the big one. I was able to go to Dragandor, kill the stack in front of the gate, then get level 4 to get Evil Book to level 2 with level 2 Chaos in the skill tree.

I was then able to take the big Spider stack down. This was actually harder than the Dwarven and Elven stacks in the Shelter. The only Shelter fight that gave me trouble was the Human stack, but it only took a couple of tries to no loss them.

I finally got enough Might Runes to get Chaos Level 2 when I was Level 4. This is key in this setup. If you don't get enough Might Runes then I don't think you'll be able to beat the big Spider stack with two Level 1 Evil Books, but maybe.

I may try to continue, but I think I'm going to restart with what I mentioned in the previous post since this starting setup was a touch too powerful, I think.

I couldn't use the second Necromancer until I get to the Shelter anyway since I didn't have enough Leadership, and so I think it will be better to try the Cursed Ghosts and see what they can do.

This might also allow me to defeat that stack without getting Level 2 Evil Book if the Runes don't fall my way.

I was actually able to use Kamikaze Level 2 with a raised spider stack to great effect on the big Spider stack and it was major fun!

So I really like this spell setup as it allows Daert to be an actual Mage at the beginning of the game. I pretty much used at least each spell once through my current play.

Evil Book was very critical with this build, and Stone Skin was very helpful with my 1 Cursed Ghost / Black Knight stacks. Frost Grasp came in handy against the Fire Spiders, Poison Skull against the Cave Spiders, and as I mentioned above, Kamikaze worked really well! I used Weakness once or twice to minimize damage from Cave Spiders.

In this game I got (for the first time) spells from the Hidden Cache: two Time Shift scrolls and then from the Ore Cart in Dragandor I got two Chaos Gifts scrolls. I don't have enough Crystals, though, to learn Chaos Gifts, but that spell is great to get early.


***EDIT***

Okay, I went ahead and no lossed through the first Whitehill battle. So that setup is too easy for Daert. Will experiment some more...

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Awesome post. We can pick like 3 best options, do 3 edited saves, and the people who like the idea can try them. We can name Daert somehow for each of the 3 saves and everyone can tell where did he feel the most challenge and the most satisfaction out of it - and if they managed to do the shelter fights. I think this will be a good base for comparison :) Besides, I think all the shelter fights must be compared to the difficulty Neoline has with them. If it feels roughly the same, then we have hit the spot.

[MattCaspermeyer]

So here's my starting spell recommendation based on the point system I devised (let's use 12 points with 5 points of starting spells and 7 for scrolls):


Spells:

Stone Skin: 1
Poison Skull: 1
Weakness: 3
Total = 5
Scrolls:

Kamikaze: 3
Evil Book: 3
Frost Grasp: 1
Total: 7

Your starting troop makeup would look like this:


1 Black Knight
1 Necromancer
1 Cursed Ghosts

And then you'd get the following additional troops:


5 Vampires
2 Cursed Ghosts

/C\/C\

Here's the winner! :)

This combination gives a lot of different possibilities for Daert. I don't think it is overpowered as it provides a good challenge through the Shelter and onto Whitehill and allows him to be played as an actual Mage! :)

With this group of units, you should be able to no loss through Whitehill.

Honestly, due to the fact that you now have to defeat only one of the Whitehill stacks, the toughest part of the game is now through the Shelter fights. Since you have 1 Rage Potion, all you have to do is drink it and use Jealously and the easiest Whitehill stack is no problem.

Before, with doing all 3, you had to save that potion for at least the second stack meaning you had to do at least one battle with no rage accumulation. Which was a lot harder.

I can post the modded files in the future if people are interested, but I'm going to next look at the Orc and figure out what his issues are and see what we can do there.

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Good stuff, Matt. I'd be interested at having a crack at the Vampire no-loss challenge with this build. :cool:

[impy]

Gentlemen, hold your horses!
I believe it is possible to kill elven Shelter guardian no loss, with original settings and army that is, but everything has to work like a clock. You will need a) specific strategy for current battlefield , b) flawless running around c) no luck during battle actually, everything makes sense and no lost turns in round1 via Diversion are needed d) unfortunately tons and tons of tests until you get specific conditions before and during battle.
Now I have for you 2 screenshots. One at the round 1 so you can see the stacks, trap etc. and two is at round 9, when battle becomes trivial. More on that later.

- using codes i tried good few times a journey from beginning of the game to just before Shelter battles. You always end up either end of level 4 or early level 5, assuming skipping one big spider stack in catacombes.. It is interesting to note though that there is some variability in total gained experience from early battles ( meaning leadership of stacks in catacombs where most of battles take place). I tried skipping spider stack near dwarven castle and not using Clot of darkness at all, and still got to level 5 without dwarven battle on one occasion. Or I played using the Clot and fighting this stack and ended up level 4 only. It seems to me, and people confirm as well, that dwarven battle is mostly just mouse clicking exercise, you can always make it to level 5, so that is not a concern here.

- I tried all sorts of skill combinations at level 5. The best combination of skills looks to be Concentration 2, Meditation 1, Diversion 1, Distorsion 1. It gives whooping 33 starting mana, so although it is only level1 Poison skull, you will be casting it for quite a few rounds, occasionally squeezing in slow spell if needed. On the side note - I never played any of the starting battles leading to Shelter with Vampire. Although more challenging than with demoness, they can be all done apart from big spider stack. Correct me if I am wrong.

- you play with one stack of 2 vampires only. Other units would die miserably

-it is absolutely imperative to start the battle with vampires standing not in the middle , but only on the left spot in order to attract the werevolves from the right side to chase you through the left side - see screenshot 1.

-the first elven shot, which is critical, does almost 10dmg per elf. So once the starting amount of elves is 8+, one vampire will die. 6-7 is fine.

-battle consists of three phases. Phase 1. Dealing with shooters, which has to be done first. You melee attack is weak, survivability is low as bat, so nuking shooters with spells (and trap) is primary concern. Phase 2. Dealing with Fairies. They have the same speed as werewolves, but can cross the middle "non-hex" part of battlefield and are therefore much more dangerous. Phase 3. Dealing with werewolves at the end. Now Phases 1 +2 are not that difficult, if the werewolves in Phase 3 did not have regeneration ability both in elf and wolf shape. You just cannot do with 2 vampires 55dmg in one round. Hence the necessity of magic spring spell and bringing down werewolves with poison skulls. Now I really did not want to go with Distorsion 1 route, much rather Chaos 2 for bringing down stack down quicker, but it just does not do enough damage by the time you run out of mana. I even considered getting trapper medal for 2 traps before shelter, it is still not strong enough. You must have distorsion 1.

-important note: everything you do on battlefield, affects the damage of poison skull you are about to cast . Keep that in mind, because the spell damage can vary greatly. Sometimes moving 1 hex forward or left makes a massive difference. Believe that I calculated various branches of moves and corresponding spell damages up to round 5.

-now i can only describe what I have done in my battle from screenshot 1 in beginning of battle till round 9, which is screenshot 2. Start with vampire to the left as described, let the elves shoot, you will heal damage anyway. no need for diversion to incapacitate anyone, but observe the location of trap. Poison skull on elves, 1-2 down. vampires stay in its form, 1 step forward, no sidestepping yet. Round 2, elves shoot, you heal, 3 stacks will almost reach you, transform vampires, cast poison on elves again, and move 3-4 hexes to the left. And here it comes - single most important point in this battle = Fauns, you are still far away from them to receive full damage from their ranged attack. They have speed 4, so they move forward 3 squares and are about to shoot, but there is your trap. It does not end here for battle to be easily won. You have to leave standing ideally one, at most two 2 fauns standing. The trap can kill anything between 10-12 of them I think. The reason for leaving one alive is twofold = it will get in other units way, and secondly it will be used for mana spring triggers later on. Also, as you noticed you just saved yourself 2-3 spellcasts of poison skull right there. Do not underestimate the importance of 1 faun. Since you poison skull is weak you will have to run around the battlefield for about 9 rounds before pretty much only werewolves are left. First 4 rounds = 3-4 poison skulls on elves, 5-9 rounds poison skulls on fairies. If you get cornered, use occasional slow. Screenshot 2 shows the beginning of Phase 3. Just move through the middle, use mana spring and bit by bit destroy werewolves. Unfortunately, I do not have final victory screenshot, since I did not have mana spring, was just testing my theory, but i believe it is rather elementary at this point. All you have to avoid is werewolves coming from both sides.
So you are going to need this :
1) mana spring scroll from Clarissa
2) only 6-7 elves in your Shelter Battle
3) position of placed trap close to Fauns as you can see in my screenshots or similar, you know what I mean (this is probably the hardest to achieve)
4) follow the above

[DGDobrev]

I was pretty sure there would be a way, and you found it. I kinda dislike all the ifs: mana spring (can scan the save game for it, so no biggie), fewer elves & trap placement (those are pure luck and there is no way for you to know - you could play for hours just to discover it was for naught) - I wonder if you can cheat yourself into the shelter just to check how it looks, but the trap is still a big if, as you won't have the skill if you go peek at start... but... once you get through this, the game is pretty much won for you, so... Might as well be worth it. I had that trap exactly on the same spot as impy with the Demoness, and in one of the fights the Fauns squarely suicided on it, so I can confirm that a trap in that spot is extremely useful. I can also confirm that level 1 poison skull will do as long as you can force it to inflict over 100 damage by moving now and then.

Impy's analysis is based on the premise that every fight plays the same and the AI does the exact same thing, the only thing that changes the outcome of the battle is you. If you cast Poison Skull immediately at the start, or after moving a hex to any side, you will always get a different outcome and a different damage amount. The battle must also run in a perfect tick-tock rhythm - and if necessary, you need to write down what happens in each occasion, so you can adapt accordingly.

This is really high-grade tactical combat where your actions must not deviate by a hex. I doubt many people can do it, but it is doable. I also know how, but sometimes I get too frustrated to do it properly :P

[MattCaspermeyer]

Gentlemen, hold your horses!
I believe it is possible to kill elven Shelter guardian no loss, with original settings and army that is, but everything has to work like a clock. You will need a) specific strategy for current battlefield , b) flawless running around c) no luck during battle actually, everything makes sense and no lost turns in round1 via Diversion are needed d) unfortunately tons and tons of tests until you get specific conditions before and during battle.
Now I have for you 2 screenshots. One at the round 1 so you can see the stacks, trap etc. and two is at round 9, when battle becomes trivial. More on that later.

- using codes i tried good few times a journey from beginning of the game to just before Shelter battles. You always end up either end of level 4 or early level 5, assuming skipping one big spider stack in catacombes.. It is interesting to note though that there is some variability in total gained experience from early battles ( meaning leadership of stacks in catacombs where most of battles take place). I tried skipping spider stack near dwarven castle and not using Clot of darkness at all, and still got to level 5 without dwarven battle on one occasion. Or I played using the Clot and fighting this stack and ended up level 4 only. It seems to me, and people confirm as well, that dwarven battle is mostly just mouse clicking exercise, you can always make it to level 5, so that is not a concern here.

- I tried all sorts of skill combinations at level 5. The best combination of skills looks to be Concentration 2, Meditation 1, Diversion 1, Distorsion 1. It gives whooping 33 starting mana, so although it is only level1 Poison skull, you will be casting it for quite a few rounds, occasionally squeezing in slow spell if needed. On the side note - I never played any of the starting battles leading to Shelter with Vampire. Although more challenging than with demoness, they can be all done apart from big spider stack. Correct me if I am wrong.

- you play with one stack of 2 vampires only. Other units would die miserably

-it is absolutely imperative to start the battle with vampires standing not in the middle , but only on the left spot in order to attract the werevolves from the right side to chase you through the left side - see screenshot 1.

-the first elven shot, which is critical, does almost 10dmg per elf. So once the starting amount of elves is 8+, one vampire will die. 6-7 is fine.

-battle consists of three phases. Phase 1. Dealing with shooters, which has to be done first. You melee attack is weak, survivability is low as bat, so nuking shooters with spells (and trap) is primary concern. Phase 2. Dealing with Fairies. They have the same speed as werewolves, but can cross the middle "non-hex" part of battlefield and are therefore much more dangerous. Phase 3. Dealing with werewolves at the end. Now Phases 1 +2 are not that difficult, if the werewolves in Phase 3 did not have regeneration ability both in elf and wolf shape. You just cannot do with 2 vampires 55dmg in one round. Hence the necessity of magic spring spell and bringing down werewolves with poison skulls. Now I really did not want to go with Distorsion 1 route, much rather Chaos 2 for bringing down stack down quicker, but it just does not do enough damage by the time you run out of mana. I even considered getting trapper medal for 2 traps before shelter, it is still not strong enough. You must have distorsion 1.

-important note: everything you do on battlefield, affects the damage of poison skull you are about to cast . Keep that in mind, because the spell damage can vary greatly. Sometimes moving 1 hex forward or left makes a massive difference. Believe that I calculated various branches of moves and corresponding spell damages up to round 5.

-now i can only describe what I have done in my battle from screenshot 1 in beginning of battle till round 9, which is screenshot 2. Start with vampire to the left as described, let the elves shoot, you will heal damage anyway. no need for diversion to incapacitate anyone, but observe the location of trap. Poison skull on elves, 1-2 down. vampires stay in its form, 1 step forward, no sidestepping yet. Round 2, elves shoot, you heal, 3 stacks will almost reach you, transform vampires, cast poison on elves again, and move 3-4 hexes to the left. And here it comes - single most important point in this battle = Fauns, you are still far away from them to receive full damage from their ranged attack. They have speed 4, so they move forward 3 squares and are about to shoot, but there is your trap. It does not end here for battle to be easily won. You have to leave standing ideally one, at most two 2 fauns standing. The trap can kill anything between 10-12 of them I think. The reason for leaving one alive is twofold = it will get in other units way, and secondly it will be used for mana spring triggers later on. Also, as you noticed you just saved yourself 2-3 spellcasts of poison skull right there. Do not underestimate the importance of 1 faun. Since you poison skull is weak you will have to run around the battlefield for about 9 rounds before pretty much only werewolves are left. First 4 rounds = 3-4 poison skulls on elves, 5-9 rounds poison skulls on fairies. If you get cornered, use occasional slow. Screenshot 2 shows the beginning of Phase 3. Just move through the middle, use mana spring and bit by bit destroy werewolves. Unfortunately, I do not have final victory screenshot, since I did not have mana spring, was just testing my theory, but i believe it is rather elementary at this point. All you have to avoid is werewolves coming from both sides.
So you are going to need this :
1) mana spring scroll from Clarissa
2) only 6-7 elves in your Shelter Battle
3) position of placed trap close to Fauns as you can see in my screenshots or similar, you know what I mean (this is probably the hardest to achieve)
4) follow the above

Great post, Impy!

If you get the Phoenix scroll from the Ore Cart in Dragandor, you can also do no loss.

I went back to my original save and added Phoenix via the "magicbook" cheat and was able to defeat both the Elven (fairly easy) and the Human (much harder) stacks with just my 2 Vampires via the Phoenix spell @level 1. You don't even need level 1 Diversion to do it, although it doesn't hurt if you want to get it.

In both cases, 1 of my Vampires got killed, but I was able to get them back up to 2 before the fight ended.

***BEGIN EDIT***

If you do find the Phoenix scroll in the Ore Cart, then you can get it to Level 2 by putting 1 point in Bibliography so that when Daert is Level 4, he can get Order Level 2 and with the discount, Phoenix Level 1 is 8 Crystals and Level 2 is 13 for a total of 21. You should find 17 to 20 Crystals and Daert starts with 4, giving you enough for Phoenix Level 2.

If you do this, then the Shelter fights are cake for no loss.

***END EDIT***

You next need to see if your strategy will work for the human stack as I think this is the hardest of the Shelter fights if you play Daert. I verified that Phoenix works on both the Elven and Human stacks (the 2 Vampires can do all the required battles through the Dwarven Shelter stack as that is what I had done before I stopped and started to explore alternate starting scenarios).

The problem with both of these strategies is you have to keep restarting until you can either get Magic Spring (much easier) or run ahead and check the Dragandor Ore Cart (takes much longer to check).

I don't think this is right - you should be able to take any game and no loss it if you follow the proper strategy. Currently, if you don't get Mana Spring then you have to get Phoenix. If neither falls into place, then you have to restart the game. Perhaps other strategies will be posted, but right now these are the only two we know about.

So I think there needs to be a change made as so far it seems that Neoline can do no loss with pretty much any starting enemies due to her troop complement. The same cannot be said about Daert.

-important note: everything you do on battlefield, affects the damage of poison skull you are about to cast . Keep that in mind, because the spell damage can vary greatly. Sometimes moving 1 hex forward or left makes a massive difference. Believe that I calculated various branches of moves and corresponding spell damages up to round 5.

Impy's analysis is based on the premise that every fight plays the same and the AI does the exact same thing, the only thing that changes the outcome of the battle is you. If you cast Poison Skull immediately at the start, or after moving a hex to any side, you will always get a different outcome and a different damage amount.

By the way, these statements are not necessarily true. It is a bit complicated to explain, but the sequence of events is what is important and the locations of all the battlefield troops effect the seed of the random number generator, but not within a troop's turn as long as they only move and don't use any abilities. If you cast a spell and then move your Vampires, there will be no difference between moving your Vampires and casting the same spell so long as the target is the same (and your Vampires do not use a skill or end their turn).

I tested this out and no matter where I moved my Vampires after combat had started (without finishing their turn or using their transform ability), the Poison Skull damage was the same to the same target; however, if you move your Vampires to a different slot in your army and then start, you've changed the starting location of at least one battlefield troop and now conditions are different and events will change. I think this is what you guys mean.

Also there is an issue with the first time you fight a battle and then fight it again when reloading the last save with the Diversion skill such that different armies may lose their turn. It was this way in WotN, too, but the differences are only between the first fight and the second. The behavior when loading from a save will always be the same, but not necessarily when you save a game, immediately fight, and then reload it and immediately repeat that fight.

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

I think the save game scanner can fix that as long as we find out which one of the mine carts in Dragandor actually gives the phoenix spell, and how is it called. I have no qualms starting and saving 50 games before scanning them all and checking for stuff. It will be a rather fast check.

Since I don't know if anyone updated it since KBAP, you can get it from here:
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=33960&highlight=save+game+scanner
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=11780&highlight=save+game+scanner

Thin is, I think steam saves for KBDS are a bit different for KBAP, so it might take a bit of fooling around to get it working. Or alternatively, if you can use another program to read the steam files used to save the game, I guess it can be used too.

[Loremipsum1]

Wow, great job, Matt and Impy!

My own test games both spawned significantly larger stacks (the one I made it in had 9 elves, 2x 13 werewolves, 96 fairies, 10 fauns); I didn't realize it varied quite so low.

Impy, interestingly enough, your strategy was almost exactly the same as mine with the single ancient vamp. Did you play through to Whitehall? I'm wondering how likely it is that the RNG gives you three unwinnable fights there.


Since I don't know if anyone updated it since KBAP, you can get it from here:
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=33960&highlight=save+game+scanner
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=11780&highlight=save+game+scanner

Thin is, I think steam saves for KBDS are a bit different for KBAP, so it might take a bit of fooling around to get it working. Or alternatively, if you can use another program to read the steam files used to save the game, I guess it can be used too.

It was updated for WotN; I'm not sure what changed between that and AP, but you can get the WotN version here, halfway down the page:

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=35533&page=2

I thought that thread was difficult to follow; the main thing you have to do make a save game scannable is:
1. Within the save folder, copy "data" to "savedata".
2. Create a zip archive containing savedata, crc, info, and name, all at the top level. (If they're in a directory, it won't work.)
3. Change the .zip file to a .sav file; so, for example, if it was Vamp.zip, it'd be Vamp.sav.

And that works. KB_DB_EDIT could conceivably edit a save game to ensure that the ore treasure is a Phoenix scroll.

[DGDobrev]

Ok, it works. Now we need to know which cart exactly contains the scroll and how is it called. I have a save right now, with a phoenix spell in a chest in dragandor, but I don't know if it's in the explorable area or not. No magic spring though. This will make for fun poking around. I will sure spend some time toying with it.

[MattCaspermeyer]

I was fiddling with this this morning as I also have a save with the Phoenix scroll (it is in one of my modded games), but I'm not at my computer right now, so this is from memory:

In the savedata.txt file, search on telega_ore_box and you should find the first occurrence in savedata.txt is the correct one. This should be dragondor_embyro_13 (note that it is spell as "dragondor" with an "o" instead of the spelling we see in the game "dragandor" and you can also search on this as it should be unique for the file).

Just a few lines lower you will see the entry for "spell_phoenix" - your Phoenix scroll.

By the way, I'm conducting a test right not and have created at least 35 new games and have not seen it pop up again. I have actually seen Power of the Night twice and Flame Arrow once, so Phoenix is not the only spell you can get from the Ore Cart.

I'm going to keep creating batches of 5 savegames and processing them until I see it again and give a statistical breakdown of what you get from the Ore Cart in Dragandor.

I did try changing Power of Night (spell_dark_knight) to Phoenix (spell_phoenix) and using KB_DB_EDIT, but it crashes when trying to compile the file. So it may need to be updated for the new KB games.

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Gotcha. I found it. You should open savedata.rpt with any text editor (I use notepad ++) and look for the following line:

dragondor.embryo_13 Vagon money 2300

So in this case, there's cash in the wagon. No luck there... Matt, have you checked in where the Magic Spring spell is supposed to spawn? I will jump in the savegame testing process as well.

[Zhuangzi]

Okay, some thoughts on the endless saga of Demoness Impossible No-loss...

I'm up to level 48, having just roflstomped my way through Okkarland against Very Hard and Deadly stacks.

Wizards are ridiculously powerful. Buffed by the Archmage staff, given ridiculously high morale by the Amulet of the Twilight Order (Heroic), halving stacks like crazy with Beserker level 3 (15% chance of having PER attack, and the Wizard hits three stacks with one attack when he's in the Fighting Trance). I've picked up a couple of items that increase Crit chance - Undead Master Belt +5% and, even better, a Dagger of Judgement, +20%!!!, that I got from a treasure chest in battle :cool: So the Wizard has a Crit chance of 59% and I feel sure that he's halving enemies more than 15% of the time (is this chance affected by whether it's a crit?) I just know that when I finish the game, Wizards are going to be my biggest damage dealer BY FAR.

The rest of my team consists of Dark Paladins, Demons, Executioners and Demonologists. You could use whatever unit you liked in the place of these last three. The only essentials are the Wizards for damage dealing + Magic Shield and the Dark Paladins for resurrecting. At a certain stage of this game, roughly from fights 120-170, I was struggling to win some battles no-loss. I was having to redo fights and look for the easiest fights. But once you get a stack of Dark Paladins, it's game over. Sorry, you also need Phantom in case you've taken too much damage for the initial resurrection, and Calm Rage too. But once you have these spells, we're back to the old Paladin + Phantom + Calm Rage infinite resurrection trick. My main problem here was that there was only about 130 Dark Paladins available in my game, and my current leadership (32k) allows for over 250, so I've had to use Sacrifice to fill out the stack, and this is tedious because I only have Sacrifice at level 1, not wanting to waste the crystals.

Is it just me or are crystals really scarce in this game? I only have about 12 spells learned and I never seem to have enough, so I've taken to buying all the trashy artifacts etc available in the game and destroying them for the crystals.

At level 48 I've cleared all islands except Amazonia (which I'll do next), Galenirim and Aralan, and also Helvedia. I'm up to 269 fights without loss, and I'm guessing that with some failed quests that I couldn't be bothered with (such as when they conflicted with other quests) I must be looking at about 400-450 fights for the whole game.

[DGDobrev]

Crystals are indeed scarce, so breaking items becomes a must at one point. Not that I mind, with so much gold and so much stuff to buy, it is quite all right.

I am nearing the end of the game. Level 71, finishing off stuff here and there. I have only a few quests left that I need to finish - the one about the Ancient Oak and a few assignments for the council in Helvedia. The Oak bugs me though. I have the primordial flame, but I don't see any guardian stacks around it. I think it is because I don't have the stupid Silver Axe. Gotta roam around the maps a bit and see if someone sells it, or look for ways to acquire it.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Gotcha. I found it. You should open savedata.rpt with any text editor (I use notepad ++) and look for the following line:

dragondor.embryo_13 Vagon money 2300

So in this case, there's cash in the wagon. No luck there... Matt, have you checked in where the Magic Spring spell is supposed to spawn? I will jump in the savegame testing process as well.

No need - just start your game and get through the two dialogues and hit "q" to bring up the Quest Dialogue. You'll see which spell you get right there!

Simple as pie! :)

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Is it just me or are crystals really scarce in this game? I only have about 12 spells learned and I never seem to have enough, so I've taken to buying all the trashy artifacts etc available in the game and destroying them for the crystals.

Crystals are indeed scarce, so breaking items becomes a must at one point. Not that I mind, with so much gold and so much stuff to buy, it is quite all right.

I'll third this - I always felt like I didn't have enough and like you guys I just bought artifacts for conversion to Crystals. Daert gets a discount with his Bibliography skill so I think it is more of a problem with Neoline and Bagyr.

/C\/C\

[travelingoz]

I'll third this - I always felt like I didn't have enough and like you guys I just bought artifacts for conversion to Crystals. Daert gets a discount with his Bibliography skill so I think it is more of a problem with Neoline and Bagyr.

/C\/C\

Yep, major shortage of crystals here, too! I've only learned the spells I've absolutely needed, and waited until I had Bibliography LVL 3 b4 upgrading.

As far as progress goes; It's Day 6 Monteville is all done, I've just started with Insleburg, and have already convinced Madame Curie to come back to the shelter. As with previous games, the difficulty seams to vary between a few restarts and a walk in the park! I have to say the major challenge thus far has been finishing fights with full mana as I only found the Calm Rage spell in a battlefield chest late last night.

Daert is at LVL19 and has just gotten the Archmage abilty, so he has 32 Intellect and 145 Mana. I'd like to buy the Archmage Staff from the shelter but I've forgotten what affects it's morale, so some help here please someone????? :-P

My army at the moment is 1 x Troll and 2 x Ice Dragons (Call Scroll), 2 x Red Dragon 2 x Black Dragon (from Shelter).

[DGDobrev]

No need - just start your game and get through the two dialogues and hit "q" to bring up the Quest Dialogue. You'll see which spell you get right there!

Simple as pie! :)

/C\/C\

Gotcha. So in essence, we need to scan only the games that give Magic Spring as a reward for the phoenix in the wagon. That will take some doing :D

As for the Archmage staff, I think it drops when you fight Archmages, and rises if you have them in your army.

[DGDobrev]

Ok I am done! I did the last fight with my fave squad: Dark Paladins, Dark Knights, Wizards, Demonologists, Amazons. It was great, I never felt a unit go out of place, and everyone usually had an opportunity to hit something.

Now I am all for the Vamp Phoenix/Magic Spring play-through. It's gonna be fun.

I am sad to say that the last fight was underwhelming. I am happy to say, that with a mod, it will be awesome. Just give the spirit more health, let the stacks be bigger, more diverse (like add level 5 units), and up the spirit damage a bit. Even on impossible, I knew I could win the fight right off the bat. I would also recommend banning ranged units on the mod, as they can be exploited to oblivion. Let the spirit summon melee units only.
EDIT 2: Or just let the stacks grow in leadership. Why? First it nullifies your leadership bonus for halves, and second, it is even more challenge.

In any case, I had a blast. I couldn't finish the Harlequin spy quest, but I assumed you need to take those guys in various fights, and I was already too deep into the game, that I barely had any stacks left for the guys to do something. Unless I misinterpreted the quest. If so, big deal :)

In any case, even though I never finished KNWOTN, this game sure feels like KBAp/CW. Give it a few mods, and it will do as well as the last one. I like it. It made me feel involved, especially in the quests. I loved how they revolve and how the quests deviate from the EXCLAMATION MARK games, where you just go to that guy and you done. You finally get to think based on the clues in the quest. This is the game that flies in the face of other games that just slams easy quests in the people's faces and makes them feel good. If you really want to play this game, your best friend is the notepad. Note all you did, how you did it, and what the npc's told you.

Broaden your horizons. Stop being linear. Expect more. This is how you know the game is good. Cause it tells us not to.

EDIT: It has to be said, that traps, while being awesome in the early game, are a huge hindrance in the late game. Your summoned troops adopt the "walk on traps" hobby, and they stick to it big time. I suggest you lol at them and keep going. I had tons of lols at cerberi/executioners faced with like the enemy's last 5 fairies walking into a trap that is absolutely not in their way. Go baby go! Go baby go! Go baby splat! Um, whoopsie!?

[Zhuangzi]

Congrats on finishing the game and achieving this challenge, DG. 489 fights? Looks like I am at least 200 fights away, which will take me a couple of weeks, I guess.

Glad you enjoyed the game - I feel like this is the first proper sequel to AP we've had, and the third excellent KB game overall. :cool:

[DGDobrev]

Well, I never used morale items, and I never went for EXP gear. If you do, you will do better than me. While Martin feels like a good companion, based on your mileage, Roin can be heaps better.

In my game I still had only 1 healing spell, and I never managed to finish the Life Light (only 2 in my game, so I didn't even care buying it) and Healing (only 1 in my game) quest for the Magic department. Go level 5 units for me? No, no, no. Huge no :D

[Zhuangzi]

Sadly, I think that no-losses eventually precludes you from using level 5 units anyway, as they can't be resurrected. I know people have done Troll or Black Dragon only challenges, but for a game with about 500 fights, I want each fight to be over as quickly as possible. DG - I see from Steam that you have played something like 128 hours for this single campaign - how does that compare to most AAA titles? :-P Methinks we have got our $25 worth already.

[DGDobrev]

Correction. I paid €17.99 :) I like what I got from my game, and I think we can do it with level 5 units too. I am looking forward to such a play-through, nbut I wanna see the Vamp do it now. We know now that the Magic Spring start is the key. I will scan saves on a daily basis. Lets hope one of us gets lucky.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Congrats, DGDobrev!

You crushed my score! :)

I guess next time I shouldn't be so in love with my boat - 96 vs 23 days! ;)

By the way, my playthrough was only level 5's (ArchDemons and Dragon Riders) no res party so it is pretty easy to do with those troops.

You also play really fast as it took you less than a month, whereas it took me 2 months!

Enjoy your victory for a few days! :)

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Thanks :) Well, everyone's mileage will vary - I had absolutely no chance to play level 5's. That healing spell pretty much forced me into using this lineup. If I could at least use stoneskinned Archies, it would have been different, but it wasn't to be.

All I can say is, there will be no victory celebrations. Gotta scan saves for magic spring + phoenix. One will pop up someday, and I will post it, and the we can all have loads of fun.

[MattCaspermeyer]

With Empathy and Warding Healing you can still do Level 5 units, so you don't necessarily need the Healing spell.

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Regarding the scanning... how crucial is the magic spring? I am trying to get both spells to spawn in early game, but so far I'm having no luck. I had all kinds of stuff showing up in that wagon: money, crystals, fireball, invisibility, ghost blade, corrosion, sacrifice... but so far no phoenix.

[MattCaspermeyer]

I think Magic Spring is needed for Impy's strategy, but nothing is needed except Phoenix for the one I posted.

In fact, the Phoenix strategy is much easier since you can get it to level 2 when you reach level 4. Since I defeated both Elves and Humans with Phoenix level 1, level 2 will be no problem.

Clarissa's reward is a level 1 / 2 distortion / chaos spell so it has a lot of variability due to that. I have not found the Ore Cart variability list, yet, but it seems to be limited to:

Money
A Rune
An Item
A Spell (of level 1 up to it seems level 4)
Crystals

So that seems like it would have a lot more possibilities, although, I think it is the same chance for each of the above, and then there is variability within each category.

/C\/C\

[Loremipsum1]

I did some scripted save game creation and analysis (don't ask) with over a thousand newly created games; apparently, the ore cart in Dragondor has a phoenix scroll 0.5-1% of the time. So the magic spring is definitely easier to get (showed up maybe 6% of the time), but has the side effect of relying on there being less than 8 elves in the elf stack. (I don't know the probability for spawning <8 elves, but it seems like it's not that great.)

[DGDobrev]

Gotcha, so this means I can scan more saves, and not exclusively the magic spring ones.

[MattCaspermeyer]

I found 2 more spell combinations that will definitely work and 2 others that have a chance of succeeding. I've seen Power of Night, which is a 4th level spell given twice from the Ore Cart and so I think you should be able to get up to 4th level spells from it.

These first two are fairly easy fights:

Evil Book (level 3 spell so should be given by Ore Cart, although I haven't seen it yet) @level 2 cast twice makes both Elven and Human Shelter fights pretty easy. You can also get your Poison Skull to level 2 if you need it to help out your 2 books, although that is a total of 47 Mana. You need 1 point in concentration, 2 points in Chaos and 1 point in Meditation will really help with your Mana. Try to get as close to 40 Mana as you can so that you don't have to wait very long to cast your second book.

Demon Portal (level 4 spell so I think there is a possibility of it showing up in the Ore Cart unless it is excluded in the criteria somehow) @level 1 cast twice (you need 1 point in Concentration, 2 points in Meditation, and 1 point in Chaos so that you have at least 39 Mana and on round 2 you'll get +1 and have exactly 20 Mana so you can perform another cast) and you can fairly easily defeat both Elven and Human Shelter stacks (note that twice @level 1 is better than once at level 2 for this spell).

These next two are pretty dicey, but they have a shot at working:

Ball of Lightning (I have gotten this from the Ore Cart so I'm going to try this game and see if I can do it for real). You need to get this spell to level 2 and so that means 1 point in Meditation and 2 Points in Order. I had two points in Concentration in my test and so I think you're going to need to be level 5 so that you can get Concentration to level 2. The Human stack is very easy with this spell, but the Elven stack is really hard. The trick here is only use level 2 of this spell if you need to (for example, the Fauns are killed with a level 1 Ball of Lightning). You should have just enough and I think you need to be Daert Level 5 do the Elven stack. Mana is very important here, level 1 Ball of Lightning is 8 Mana and level 2 is 14. I had 42 Mana in my experiment, which allowed 3 casts @level 2 and I also had Concentration level 2. This might not be doable in reality and I used every point of Mana on the Elven stack.

Avenger (level 2 spell, but Order so cannot get it from Clarissa so must get it in the Ore Cart). You need to get this spell to Level 2 so that means you should put 1 point in Meditation and 2 points into Order. You should then have 1 point in Concentration so that you'll be at least able to cast it twice over the course of the fight. I also had Time Shift in my experiment, but I don't think you can get Distortion level 1 and Concentration, but it can be used to inexpensively extend Avenger if you need to so this might also work. Note that the Human stack is a lot easier than the Elven stack and so you should take out the Human stack first.

I also tried several other combinations, but nothing else has worked so far on both stacks. I'll try some more attempts if other spell strategies come to me.

Okay, your mileage may vary, but if you see these as options from the Ore Cart, then try them out as well as they may work for you.

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Ah, craaaaaaap!!! I had spell_demonologist show up in the ore cart and I was almost certain it was the demon portal. I knew it, I should have kept the save. Damn...

Otherwise I can confirm that any spell can spawn there. I had even level 5 spells like resurrection, spawning. Now I am making batches of 9 saves and scanning them as necessary. Now that we have more options, I will make sure I keep all those saves.

THERE WE FREAKING GO!!! After deleting one demon portal save, and beating my head a bit over that, I had a HUGE stroke of luck. In just 9 saves I found 2 with Demon Portal and 1 with Book of Evil - whoa, whoa, hold your horses, that is NOT the good news - the good news is that there are actually 2 (!) scrolls of Book of Evil in the ore cart!!! So you got a scapegoat scroll for a free level 1 Book if anything goes bad in any one of the fights!

I am so gonna test this game. I already checked the ore cart (it is right next to the dwarven castle) and both scrolls and happily lying in it. While Clarissa's scroll isn't useful at all, I managed to excavate a chest with 2-3 scrolls of Slow, which is also great news.

I have zipped the file with the book of evil for you, and I can add the other 2 with the Demon Portals if you want, but since Matt says this is the easiest option of them all, I uploaded the Book of Evil one first. Just make sure you don't overwrite any of your important saves, should it happen to have the same number when you unzip in the save games folder - C:\Users\(username)\Documents\my games\Kings Bounty The Dark Side\$save\base\darkside.

Let's see how well will that work.

[MattCaspermeyer]

These next two are pretty dicey, but they have a shot at working:

Ball of Lightning (I have gotten this from the Ore Cart so I'm going to try this game and see if I can do it for real). You need to get this spell to level 2 and so that means 1 point in Meditation and 2 Points in Order. I had two points in Concentration in my test and so I think you're going to need to be level 5 so that you can get Concentration to level 2. The Human stack is very easy with this spell, but the Elven stack is really hard. The trick here is only use level 2 of this spell if you need to (for example, the Fauns are killed with a level 1 Ball of Lightning). You should have just enough and I think you need to be Daert Level 5 do the Elven stack. Mana is very important here, level 1 Ball of Lightning is 8 Mana and level 2 is 14. I had 42 Mana in my experiment, which allowed 3 casts @level 2 and I also had Concentration level 2. This might not be doable in reality and I used every point of Mana on the Elven stack.

Yes! This one works! I couldn't get my Concentration to Level 2 because I ended up being 2 Magic Runes short, so I decided to go the Spirit Tree Diversion route and was able to do it.

I had "small" stacks of everybody including Werewolf stacks of 8 and 9 units and so I used Ball of Lightning Level 2 on a stack of 80 Sprites and 9 Werewolves and it easily took them out.

The Fauns ran into the trap that Impy pointed out and with a fortuitous strike I was able to take the stack of 8 Werewolves out with Ball of Lighting Level 1 and my Vamps.

I was down to 1 Vamp at that point due to 7 Elves, but the Sprite death had left an Eviln and I was able to get back up to 2 Vamps and then the Vamps + a Level 1 Poison skull took down the 7 Elves!

I was very fortunate in this battle and had to adapt to the fact that I couldn't get Concentration up to level 2. I'm not sure if Level 2 Concentration would have been better than Diversion, but it would have given me a third Ball of Lightning Level 2 cast on round 5 if I made it that far, but the Diversion Trap took out those Fauns so maybe Diversion is better if you get Ball of Lightning in the Ore Cart than Concentration Level 2.

I posted pictures of the battle, to give you a feel for how it went down and how fortunate I was! You can see by the second to last picture that I've got him!

By the way, Ball of Lightning Level 2 can handle up to 99 Sprites and 12 Werewolves, but I really think you need a third cast of Ball of Lightning @level 2 if your second Werewolf stack is 11 units. Then there's still probably 8 Elves and 11 Fauns to deal with and so that just might be too much for this setup.

Nonetheless, it can work if you have an Elven stack on the smaller side (and the Human stack is way easier and I was level 4 when I did them and 5 when I did the Elven stack).

Note that I did have to kill one of the easy Catacombs stacks because when I skipped all those fights I was 14 exp short of level 5 when facing the Elven stack - ugghhh!

So I went back to my Catacombs save and took out an easy stack that was worth a whopping 23 exp! Just enough to get me to level 5 after I defeated the Human stack in the Shelter!

Whew! Very close battle! :)

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Good job, Matt :) I am doing well too, killed the Dwarven and Elven stacks. The elven stack was a huge bother. In my save, there are freaking 8 elves and it was extremely difficult to keep the 2 vamps alive. I managed, but I was forced to use the scroll Book of Evil, cause best I can get in terms of mana is 36 if I pick Order, and that is nowhere near adequate for a second, so I opted for +1 Atk/Def/Int combo with 34 Mana, which actually managed to save my vamp - the elves hit for 68 rather than 70, which kills the 1 vamp. Lol :D

Now to see if I can manage with the human stack. With one lvl 2 and one lvl 1 Book of Evil it should be doable. Let's see.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Depending on what I got, I usually end up doing the Elven stack last since I try to get level 5 from either the first or second stacks.

You know what the worst thing is?

It seems like you get the least amount of experience for the toughest stack! In my game, I got 50 for the Dwarves, I think 63 for the Humans and then only 47 for the Elves!

Those amounts are so small, I know, but still it is just a bit insulting that you get the least experience from the hardest stack!:rolleyes:

By the way, I way able to take out the 3 basement stacks and the first Whitehill stack with the Ball of Lightning strategy so it is good.

You won't believe how long some of the basement fights went! I had one go over 200 rounds! I get a little bored once I get past about round 30 and really bored after round 50, but I was in a situation with 2 50+ Cave Spider stacks and I was able to get into a repeatable loop as I whittled them down with the 2 Bats before I could go into Vamp mode.

This is crazy to have to do this so early in the game for no loss.

I think I'm going to shift gears a bit and start checking out Bagyr's situation some more...

/C\/C\

[Snow11]

Hey DGDobrev, thanks for the save. With it I managed to kill all the guards somehow. The elven stack was easy but the human was so freakin impossible.

The books of evil were so useless that in the end I killed the hordes of priests and archers mostly with poison skulls and incredible luck. At 1 point I was with 1 vampire bat with only 1 hp :grin:
I also used the 1 book of evil scroll(to slow the melee) and 1 slow scroll. I made the mistake not to take Diversions skill and also ended up with only 34 mana.

I dont see how you can win with books of evil since thay die so fast from the melee and their dmg is not that great. Even if rank 2 book manage to cast 2 lighting spells on the range units, it's still not enough to hurt them.

[DGDobrev]

Yeah, I am seeing that myself. Ever since Matt and Impy started giving ideas what spells are best, I just started scanning saves for them, and this one looked best, so I posted it. I seriously thought it will be much easier than it is with the books.

The human stack indeed looks to be the biggest problem for Daert. I am still trying to fool them somehow, but I am kinda running out of ideas. So far 1 level 2 book and lots of poison skulls look the be the best option for me, but sooner or later one of those ranged stacks destroys my vamp.

I guess I need to try other spell combinations, maybe like demon portal. Phoenix looks to be the best option, but is still very hard to find a save that has it. Maybe I should just fall down to impy's strategy and try to do it with Magic spring only, but I really don't know how those 2 vamps can survive all those ranged attacks at once if I am forced to fly about in bat form.

I certainly haven't given up though. The is a way for Daert to do no-loss, it is absolutely clear now.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Glad that you did it, but here are some tips with the Evil Book strategy:

You may need to do an easy Catacombs spider stack or two to ensure that you get Level 5 Daert for the final stack whichever is tougher between the Elves and Humans to get more Mana (I actually had to do this in the Ball of Lightning strategy, too). It seems more likely than not that I end up a few exp short of level 5 and so I need to do at least one or two of the easy stacks in the Catacombs to push me over. You should be able to start with 36 Mana for the harder fight and with at least Level 1 Concentration you are no more than 4 rounds from your second Evil Book level 2. Level 2 Meditation is better than Level 2 Concentration and both cost 8 Magic Runes. Level 2 Meditation will get you 40 Mana. I was 2 Magic Runes short, however, in my Ball of Lightning playthrough when I got Daert to Level 5.

You also need to have 2 Evil Books @level 2 versus the Swordsmen / Guardsmen so ensure that your book stays away from them until you get that second Book because one level 2 Book is not good enough against both of them. It can handle a single troop, though, so place your Vamps' starting position to split them up (especially the humans) if you have to fight one to recharge your spell.

Both the Priests and Inquisitor's / Sprite's and Faun's damage is Magic (well half the Faun's anyway) and so try to get them to attack the book or if your book needs to reload its spell attack then attack them to recharge it.

In my test, I actually found the Human stack much easier than the Elven stack, but it just depends on how much they attack your Vamps versus your Books and the spells your Book casts. If it is casting Slow, for example, then use it on a fast troop. If it is casting Lightning then use it to cast on a troop for maximum damage, etc.

You also really need to have it be a damaging spell on its first cast, otherwise it gets way harder. A Poison Skull, Ghost Sword, Magic Axe, or Lightning works wonders on a first cast and this has to be cast on either the Elves or the Inquisitors. Position the starting location of your Vamps, change the time in the round when the spell is cast, etc. to get it to change if it is not good. Sequence of events is everything!

Lastly, remember the goal of your Evil Books for both stack types: 1) for Humans, once you get rid of the ranged troops, the fight is over and 2) for the Elves, once you get rid of the melee troops, the fight is over.

As a variant, you may decide to do 2 Points in Meditation and 1 in Concentration / Chaos so that you can do 3 Level 1 books (but in my experience this is not as good and requires 45 total Mana).

Anyway, glad you were able to do it!

:)

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Okay, I went and downloaded DGDobrev's save and I was able to defeat both the Shelter Elven (easier) and Human (harder) stacks using the double Evil Book @level 2 strategy.

I did defeat the 3 easy Spider / Snake stacks in the Catacombs such that when I defeated the Shelter Dwarven stack I was level 5. I put a point into Order to get me up to 36 Mana and was able to cast my first Level 2 Evil Book and then by splitting the Werewolf stacks it was able to work on the Werewolf and Sprite and then on round 5 as it was close to death I cast my second Level 2 Evil Book. The first one had taken the 8 Elves down to 4 and then only lasted another turn or two, but by that time, the damage had been done and the Sprites and Fauns were gone. My Vamps then helped take down the Werewolves with the second Evil Book as it had gotten the Elves down to 1. Starting placement of your Vamps made a difference between 1 dying and not.

As far as the Human stack, they were much tougher, but once again I split the Guardsmen and Swordsmen (moving towards the latter since they did less damage). I did have a fortuitous Lightning Bolt take out 14 Bowmen, 9 Priests, and 3 Inquisitors when my first Evil Book was about 50% health. This allowed my Vamps to switch to Bat mode and slap the second Evil Book right next to the group of shooters. After that I managed to take out the rest of the shooters and then my second Evil Book was able to take the Swordsmen and Guardsmen down to about 50% when it finally died. As I mentioned above, once the melee troops are the only ones left in the Human stack it is just a matter of time before your Vamps can slowly take them down and finish it. I actually probably could have done better as I forgot to cast Poison Skull when I had gotten 7 Mana and had let my Evil Book absorb 76 damage from an Eviln, which I was trying to get the Swordsmen to hit, but at this point it did not matter since there were only melee troops left.

Compared to Ball of Lightning I'll say that it was a bit easier, but all these strategies (except for maybe the Phoenix which is very easy @level 2) are fairly dependent on finding the right sequence of events.

By the way, I did a little experiment and Runes given during levelups are dependent on the area. I used the "levelup" cheat when I was in Portland to level 5 and I had enough for Meditation Level 2, Concentration Level 1, and Chaos Level 2 when I was level 5; however, since I made level 4 in Dragandor and Level 5 in the Shelter the Runes given were then different and I couldn't get Meditation Level 2 so that's when I went with Order Level 1. Note that I could have also gotten Diversion if I wanted instead of Order Level 1, but I never tried that strategy to see if it was better or not.

If you can get Meditation to Level 2 when Daert is Level 5, then all these strategies are a lot easier when you start with 40 Mana instead of 36. To have a chance, though, you should probably take out the 3 easier Spider / Snake stacks in the Catacombs to give yourself a chance of reaching level 5 after defeating the Dwarven stack.

/C\/C\

[Snow11]

I'm glad you made it Matt.

In my game I even got 1 magic rune from a chest in the fight before the black gate but at the end I was still 1 rune away for lvl 2 Meditation.

Anyway, with 36 mana and your strategy I'm sure it can be done with not too many tries.
Even with 34 mana and enough tries I think it's doable with evil books, however this is a huge problem for me since my pc is so slow that it takes literally 5 min every time I try to load the last save.

[DGDobrev]

Awesome, Matt, congrats :)

I think you can only hit meditation 40 if you get lucky with the rune/level giveaways. I think there are 3 or 4 combinations, and if you luck out with a good one, you can get twice the max amount of magic runes for the mage, but since the game selects a random line of those 3 or 4 combos, there is no way to be certain.

[MattCaspermeyer]

By the way, since it is possible to get any spell, I'm wondering if Calm Rage would push you over with just Poison Skull. I have not tried this strategy, but if someone gets Calm Rage from the Ore Cart maybe they could try it out and let us know if it will work since they'll be able to convert that early Rage into Mana for more Poison Skull casts.

Hmmm...

/C\/C\

[Snow11]

I think that calm rage won't be a good idea because the biggest problem you have is how to make enough dmg on the rangers before the melee force you to go in bat form. Without book of evil or other summon to slow them down it takes them 3 rounds to reach you and with 36 mana you can cast poison skull r2 the first 5 rounds.

In my game I managed to clear all 3 stacks in the castle's basement which was really hard but at least I didnt have to rely on insane luck.
The first stack against the spiders I used the battlefield to tank them. There was a close spot in the corner where i left my vamps, then I cast r2 Book of Evil next to them so that thay could be attacked only by one stack. Since the spiders dmg is poison the book could tank 3 stacks for fairly long time, enough to get mana for second book.I think it lasted for 8 rounds because at least in 2 rounds I had 2 books on the field.

The second fight against the 3 big stacks of snakes was the hardest. I had to make the book to tank and dmg the royal snakes alone so that it wont die in 2 rounds. I used 1 scroll of magic shackles when thay were close to avoid the snake bite, and 2 slow scrolls on the other snakes. Once the royal snakes were dead I got enough mana for second book to reduce the numbers of the red snakes and after that it was easy.
After the second fight I finally got to lvl 6 and with r2 Concentration and r1 Diversions the third fight was much easier.

Then the real challenge comes in whitehill where you have to kill at least one of the guards and each of them have like double the size compared to the human guard in Shelter, while you are still with your good old 2 Vampires :grin:

So I used rage pot for 10 rage before the fight.
The first round the inquisitors skipped their turn thx to diversion which is good becouse thay were the strongest range and the other 2 already wasted one of my vamps. Then I used the jelousy skill from blackie on the 1 big stack of melee and thanks to some bug thay remained red even after the statue disapeared. That way slaughtering all the mean priests and archers for me :grin: After that it took me 230 rounds to finish the guardsmen.
Thanks to this bug it all went fairly easy which is good because i didnt want to start all over again with phoenix spell.
Whithout the bug I dont think it was slightly possible to win any of the fights with my setup of 34 mana. May be with 40 mana and 2 rank2 books from start and alot of luck it would be more possible but those rangers were really scary.

[MattCaspermeyer]

You may be right about Calm Rage; however, I was thinking if you got a good Distortion Scroll from Clarissa then you could put 1 point in Bibliography and then there may be a possibility of getting Distortion to Level 3 when you reach level 5. You can at least get it to Level 2, but not sure if there are any level 1 / 2 Distortion spells that would work well with Calm Rage.

Anyway, just another thought to try to vary the starting strategies for Daert.

Great job, by the way, with the Basement and Whitehill stacks!

I didn't have as much trouble as you had with them - the Spider stack was easy as you mentioned, and I did put a point in Diversion which really helped with the Royal Snake stack. The key there was to get the Royal Snake on the Evil Book and the Swamp Snakes and normal Snakes after your Bats. I was then able to cast my 2nd book 4 rounds later and they both ganged up on the Royal Snakes and took them out. In the meantime, the Snakes had moved to attack the two books and then they took him out, too. Lastly, the Swamp Snakes engaged the books and then was able to beat both of them but since I was down to just Bats versus 1 stack I just cycled them down and finished it.

The other snake stack was about the same - I was able to get two Swamp Snake stacks after the Bats and the rest went after the Evil Book. It is very important, by the way, to work on the normal Snakes first because of their Stun ability. So once again, I was able to get my 2nd Evil Book when the 1st was down to about 1/3 health and then the two were able to gang up on the normal Snakes and take them out. The other 2 Swamp Snake stacks had been split where the weaker stack was on my 1st book and the stronger on my 2nd. I did this while whittling 3 of the 4 Swamp Snake stacks down such that when both books were dead I was able to use the Bats to keep attacking all but the strong Swamp Snake stack (while that stack kept being blocked by the other snakes) such that I killed all the other stacks (the Bats' Life Steal kept them close to full health) and just the large Swamp Snake stack was left. At this point, I performed the cycle and slowly whittled them down and finished it.

I actually thought the Whitehill stack was fairly easy - there was 1 stack of 79 Swordsmen and 23 Priests to go with the Inquisitor and Bowmen stacks! The key here was to cast Jealousy such that the 23 Priests became the jealous troop. By the way, I know how that bug you mentioned works: If a stack is controlled by Jealousy and they step outside of the range of the Statue (which happens a lot with ranged units), then they will remain under its control and as long as they are not within the range of the Statue when the spell expires, they'll stay under its control. So I had this work to great effect as the Swordsmen took out the Priests. I was then able to get my Evil Book up to his Inquisitors and Bowmen and by the time the Swordsmen had gotten to my book I cast a second. The two books easily took out the remaining Bowmen and Inquisitors and then the Swordsmen was able to take out both books, but by that time their numbers were in the 20's and then I did the "BatCycle" to finish them off! It took about 50 rounds. I probably could have done better if I had used Orc Strike twice on them instead of the stupid Necromancer ability, which is not very good in my opinion. I also had 1 Vamp killed by the Inquisitors that moved first at the start of the fight, but then the Bats Life Stole their way back up to max health when just the Swordsmen were left.

I also had forgetten to equip the sword for all but the Whitehill battle (not that +1 Attack would have made much of a difference).

Overall, this strategy is quite a bit easier than the Ball of Lightning which really requires you to BatCycle troops in virtually every fight!

I also didn't get level 6 until after I had defeated all the Basement stacks and completed the quest (which shows how variable the experience gain is because I also did the 3 easiest stacks in the Catacombs). I also had 36 Mana and didn't pick any skills when I leveled up to level 6 and so I had 1 Might, 8 Spirit, and 7 Magic Runes that I didn't use. I figured I'd see if I could do it as is and if I couldn't then I'd look to a skill for help.

So far the verified winning no loss strategies are: 1) Ball of Lightning and 2) Evil Book. Both situations require the spell level to be 2.

I know for a fact that Phoenix Level 2 will work because I was able to do it with Phoenix Level 1, but in my experimental game. I also got Demonologist and Avenger to work in my experimental game, but Avenger is pretty tough due to the fact that you have to let units strike you. This is all through the Shelter fights. As far as the Basement is concerned, I don't think Avenger will help you there so you're going to have to kite those stacks and just dig up the artifacts. Avenger has a shot at working on the Whitehill stacks because you just got take out the shooters.

By the way, in all my tries so for with the latest build (V1.5.1047.1747) the middle Whitehill stack is the easiest.

Also, if you go Order you should have enough Might Runes to boost your Rage - this is what I did for Ball of Lightning and it allowed me to use Jealousy twice and use the Rage Abilities more often which is a huge help in this fight.

Lastly, I just invented a new KB term: BatCycle! This means to whittle slower troops down via your Bats as you essentially move about the battlefield in a circuitous manner, thereby guaranteeing no loss! :)

/C\/C\

[Snow11]

BatCycle! I like that and I use it alot even after the whitehill. Right now with 26 bats and few spells it's alot of fun :) I didnt even pick up the Demonologists or any other units, I wanna see how far I can go only with vampires and hopefully with ancient vampires if I get some.

As for the whitehill fight, when I did it I didnt know that you can do only 1 fight. So I gathered all 3 close to each other and was planning to keep 10 rage and most of my mana for the second fight, and do the same for the third fight.
However without saving rage or mana it could indeed be much easier even without the bug.

About other spells that will work for no loss strategy I think that Demon Portal r2 will be beast. With r2 the spawned demons should have more then 1400 leadership and if you get executioners thay will eat everything like it's a piece of cake :twisted:

[MattCaspermeyer]

I gotcha on the Whitehill fight - taking all 3 out would be a lot harder since you'd want to chain fight them like you were setting up to do and attempting to conserve Mana.

The only problem with Demon Portal level 2 is the randomness. When I tested it, I kept getting Imps / Scoffer Imps (I think once I got a Cerberus) and since the total Leadership of two Level 1's exceeded a single Level 2 then it was better to go with two casts @level 1; however, as you mention, if you can get a single Level 4 unit, then the fight will be easy - I just wasn't so lucky. Going with Chaos Level 1 will ensure that you have Meditation Level 2 at Daert Level 5 (4 if you're lucky) for 2 Demon Portal level 1 casts.

I would not pick higher than Level 1 Chaos until you defeat the Dwarven Shelter stack so that you can either pick Meditation Level 2 or Chaos Level 2 as the situation is warranted for the Elven and Human stacks. Give yourself some flexibility so that if you are lucky and can get a Level 4 Demon troop then go that route. If you can't then go with more Mana.

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Finished at last! 133 hours later and I'm finally done with my Impossible Demoness No-loss game. I found it challenging in the early game and then again from about fight 120-180, but after that it was very easy and as others have mentioned the final fight is a walkthrough. You'll need Teleport 3 to do it though (at least the way I did it).

Level 74, 131 quests with about 3-4 I couldn't be bothered finishing including the Demon lords of Helvedia. 451 fights which is at least 20-30 less than I could have done with all the various pointless upgrade fights I had available, but I knew the xp wouldn't add up to much so I didn't bother.

Basically I used Dark Paladins, Demons, Wizards, Demonologists and Dragon Riders for the last 100-200 fights, but I swapped the Dragon Riders for Executioners for the final fight. My Wizards have ended up doing an absurd 41% of my total damage due to insanely overpowered Halving ability. With Fortune's Smile my troops were doing about 90% crit at the end.

In the final fight I just used Teleport 3 every turn to put one of the tanks in a corner, which would do about 10k damage per whack. Then all I had to do was time it so that there were some junk enemy units on the battlefield when I killed the Spirit (dwarves) and then I could Phantom + Resurrect to my heart's content.

I really enjoyed King's Bounty Dark Side but I doubt I'm game for a second run-through anytime soon (famous last words!) Hopefully the devs will patch it so that the other two races have a chance at no-losses, else it'll be Matt's mod. I thought that this was easily the best KB game since Armored Princess. My only complaint is that is so loooooooooooong, but I loved the Shelter concept and a couple of the late islands, especially Aralan, were as much fun as the first three islands which I thought were probably the best. For a game with 450 fights I didn't feel like I was grinding pointlessly very much. Sure there were a few bugs and I did get some CTDs very occasionally and having to reload a frozen battle from time to time, but overall it is very stable.

This is a real return to form for the King's Bounty series after the mediocre Warriors of the North. Well done, devs! That was the best $25 I ever spent. :cool: :lol:

[DGDobrev]

Good job, mate, good job :) I am very glad you enjoyed yourself. As you said, that's the best 18€/25$ we ever spent on a King's Bounty game, albeit a huge time sink. The devs really went balls to the wall on content with this one, improving many aspects of the game, adding branching quests, where decisions actually matter. We sure can't complain.

I am also not so keen on a run soon, cause I am moving to another city and I will be quite busy + I may not have internet for a while - we will see how long, depends on how quickly the company that installs it reacts. Could be just a few days, could be a week or two. I still have internet at work, so when I'm doing the night shifts, I will be lurking around, checking on Matt's progress. That guy can think really constructively and there is much sense in his ideas.

[Zhuangzi]

I had a try at Daert and managed to get to the Shelter using the 2 Vampire trick. I also managed to destroy the Dwarven stack (no ranged units) by running the vamps around and hitting the enemies with their last move of a turn. Took 109 rounds. :-P But I can't seem to do anything at all about the Human or Elven stacks, not like this. Ridiculously tough. I only got money out of the Ore Cart so all I have is Poison Skull. I put two points in Concentration but it isn't working. :confused:

[DGDobrev]

This is a very hard battle. I think the closest one to finishing it with minimal scanning was Impy, who proposed to restart till you get magic spring and play with diversion for a trap. Then again, you need to kill the elves quickly, and drop the fauns to 1-2 so that they don't damage you much while you're flying around with magic spring on you. Will take many turns, but it is perfectly doable.

However, I don't know if magic spring would be enough to get you through the human stack. They have way too many ranged units...

[ckdamascus]

I can't even brute force it with losses. With 100+ fairies and 24 werewolves, it's only a matter of time before they catch up to my vampires or wipe my sacrificial tanks. Werewolves can also mass fear my shock troops, so it's back to crappy 2 vampires doing little damage. This run through I had level 2 traps which is actually really good for damage but too many units and fairies can hover over the traps.

I don't really like modding the game, nor would I like to start easier than impossible. Even if I kept re-starting, I'm not sure what would win easily since even phoenix might get overwhelmed.

Sad about this. I wonder if the devs plan on releasing a patch soon to address this.

[Zhuangzi]

Good point - I was curious to see whether I could kill that Elven stack at all with my two vampires and the junk units from the Shelter, and guess what? I can't either. I figured I needed to use a lot of poison skull on the fairies initially due to their 5 hex movement, but the Werewolf Elves always ended up killing me. I tried 3 or 4 times.

Has anyone actually gotten further than this at all as Daert on Impossible? I guess with the Diversions 2 it might be possible. I put my runes in Concentration for this playthough and that was clearly a mistake.

[MattCaspermeyer]

The strange thing about all this is that two Vamps can do everything but the Elven and Dwarven stacks (well skipping the two hardest Catacombs and the Dragandor Spider / Snake fights).

If you read back in this thread, you'll see where I posted several different strategies to do this, but all rely on the spell you get with the Ore Cart in Dragandor.

I'll re-summarize them here. I've put two to actual practice through Whitehill no loss (including all the stacks except maybe the big Spider stack in the Catacombs):


Ball of Lightning (exceedingly hard, but doable).
Evil Book (kind of hard, but doable).

The Evil Book was from DGDobrev's save, although since I've gotten a save game of my own with Evil Book (note that you must get your book to level 2), but I haven't gotten any of the other spell combinations legitimately that I tested via the "magicbook" cheat to see if they would work; however, they are:


Phoenix (super easy - I did it with the spell at level 1 (harder, but way easier than the two above), and getting it to level 2 is cake and a level 2 Phoenix will tear everyone up).
Demonologist (not as easy as the Phoenix, but easier than Evil Book; however, I did do it when I was able to cast one after another (level 1) since I had 40 Mana in my experiment - getting 40 Mana is easy, though, because you only need 1 point in Concentration, 1 in Chaos, and you should have the runes to get two points into Meditation when you are level 5 (maybe level 4 if you're lucky), which hopefully you are when you fight the Elves / Humans - also level 1 is better than level 2 unless you are super lucky and get a level 4 unit (I did it with two stacks of lowly Imps) so save your runes until you have to fight the Elves / Humans and then decide your path as I think you need Bibliophile to get Demonologist to level 2 due to limited Crystals).
Avenger (about as difficult as Ball of Lightning or even harder, perhaps, but all the ranged troops get decimated as they attack you and you may need to augment this with Time Shift (you sometimes get this from Clarissa or the Hidden Cache) for a low cost extension of the spell) and you also augment this strategy with your Poison Skulls (this time you need 2 points in Order and with Meditation that is only 3 skills so you should have extra runes for other skills, possibly including at least level 1 Diversion). You also probably want to use those Might Runes to bump your Rage up for the Whitehill stack so you can cast Jealousy at least twice.

Of these 3 that I have not tried in a "real" game, this is through just the Shelter. However, all but Avenger seem doable through Whitehill as well, whereas with Avenger it may not work with the Basement stacks because you have to be struck (although you can kite those troops and skip them so it doesn't matter). The Whitehill fight is actually easier than the Shelter Elven / Human fights because of Jealousy.

I was thinking that it may also be possible to use Calm Rage with your Poison Skull if you got that spell, but have not tried it. I have tried many other spell combinations, but nothing else has worked so far.

Note that if you go the Order route (i.e. Ball of Lighting / Avenger then you should try to get at least level 1 Diversion since you should have the runes for it). Also, you don't need anything special to defeat the 3 easiest Catacombs fights, just use your Poison Skull - they are hard, but good training for using your Vamps effectively. If you do this, you should be level 5 after defeating the Dwarven Shelter stack, making the Elven / Human stacks much easier (if you skip those 3 fights, then you may have to do one of both of the remaining stacks @level 4, which is much harder).

Although you need the right strategy to win with these methods, the chance of getting one of the above spells is exceedingly low. So that's why I started the other thread (http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=228683) to talk about changing the game since I think any game should have a chance at no loss if you employ the proper strategy and who wants to be starting new games and scanning them with the save game scanner to be successful?

By the way, has anyone tried Bagyr? If you think Daert is hard, try him! :-P

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Okay, I'll use the save game scanner and get myself a save with Evil Book in the Ore Cart. That's where I'm going to find it if anywhere, right? And other than that I'm just using two vampires running around the map in vampire mode, right?

Yeah, Bagyr. My save with him is no further than Captain of the Guard. :o

EDIT: sigh, I don't think I know how to use the scanner properly, unless there's a new scanner specific to Dark Side. Whenever I try to run the scanner it says Scanned Files: 0

Can someone either explain what I'm doing wrong or send me a save with the Evil Book? The saves are in My Games and the loc_ses file is in the steam directory, right?

[DGDobrev]

This is the post you need: http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpost.php?p=478063&postcount=4

The guy explained it rather well, I have been using his way of scanning for now, and that's how I found the Book of Evil save.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Right, and see this post (http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpost.php?p=706168&postcount=136) for what to search on and note that is DGDobrev pointed out here (http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpost.php?p=706169&postcount=137) it is "dragondor.embyro_13" with a "." instead of an "_" as I had originally remembered.

That is also right about the 2 Vamps, although you can pop your Ghosts and Zombies in your reserve if you'd like instead of disbanding them.

I have a save with Ball of Lightning if anyone is interested in trying that out...

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

I found another spell combination that will work - Kamikaze level 2. Coupled with Poison Skull level 2, this spell combination could actually possibly be the second easiest that will work (behind Phoenix).

When I did my original pass through the spells, I had neglected to notice that Kamikaze now works on enemy troops. So I did the "magicbook" cheat and it can work wonders on the Sprites and Werewolves. You may lose a Vampire as you run around the battlefield awaiting the 3-turn delay, but once it goes off - BOOM! It took out half of the 77 Sprites and halved a Werewolf stack - ouch! Then the next round the next bomb finished off the Sprites, Werewolves, and Satyrs. The third round (with the other damage) took the last Werewolf stack down to 4. That was very good use of 30 Mana.

On the Humans, it took out 11 Priests and half the Bowmen! And then the other bomb finished off the Bowmen. Two Level 2 Poison Skulls took out the Inquisitors and then I just had the Swordsmen and Guardsmen left.

This is fairly easy to do.

I didn't even get Diversion Level 1, but it may be possible when you reach level 5 to be able to get Diversion to Level 1, which will make it even easier or go with skills to give you more Mana.

I just got a savegame with Kamikaze, so if anyone wants me to post it let me know (I haven't even started playing it, yet).

So if you get a savegame with this spell, then give it a try! :)

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Thanks to both of you for the help. After MUCH stuffing around I finally have the scanner working on the five save files I created. Sadly, 3 seem to give gold, 1 Cold Grasp, and 1 spell_reaction, whatever that is? No Evil Book or Kamikaze. So if either of you wants to PM me a savefile with either or both of those spells in the Ore Cart, that would be much appreciated! :cool:

EDIT: did another 10 - 6 gave gold, 1 Fire Arrow, 1 Fireball, 1 Hunter Armor, 1 other spell which I've forgotten :(

[ckdamascus]

Thanks to both of you for the help. After MUCH stuffing around I finally have the scanner working on the five save files I created. Sadly, 3 seem to give gold, 1 Cold Grasp, and 1 spell_reaction, whatever that is? No Evil Book or Kamikaze. So if either of you wants to PM me a savefile with either or both of those spells in the Ore Cart, that would be much appreciated! :cool:

EDIT: did another 10 - 6 gave gold, 1 Fire Arrow, 1 Fireball, 1 Hunter Armor, 1 other spell which I've forgotten :(

I gave up and just modified the starting troops to give me two ancient vampires and two necromancers.

Praying for the perfect saved game AND enemy spawning with less than normal troops (I always had 8 elves which would one shot my vampires before I could react) is not my idea of KB fun.

It also means you are completely forced to a single or tedious path.

Just go to the original ses.kfs file, back it up, rename ses.kfs to ses.kfs.zip, extract to ses.kfs folder.

Edit hero.txt

Refer to
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpost.php?p=705994&postcount=84

[MattCaspermeyer]

Okay, here are all the ones I've been able to generate so far:


Ball of Lightning (really, really hard!)
Evil Book (hard, DGDobrev also has one here (http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/attachment.php?attachmentid=14836&d=1410006816))
2 Kamikaze's (not as hard, the first gives 2 scrolls, the second gives 4) - I haven't played either of these, yet so give them a shot!

Good luck and enjoy! :)

See DGDobrev's instructions here (http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpost.php?p=706223&postcount=157).

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Thanks ck and Matt. ck - I can see why you got frustrated. We are forced to do something 'outside the box' just to make a start in 2 out of 3 races on Impossible. I love this game but I really hope we get a patch to address this severe balance issue (we probably won't).

Matt - thanks for the saves. I will have a try at Kamikaze 2 first. Cheers. :cool:

[DGDobrev]

Wowie! Matt, that sounds really awesome. Could be well, well, really well worth a try. I will give it a go sometime.

[Zhuangzi]

I've made a bit of a start on the Kamikaze save, haven't got far year, but I was delighted to find that I had a Frost Grasp scroll in my spellbook. I never used Frost Grasp at all on my first playthrough but I'm finding it to be superior to Poison Skull and it costs the same 5 mana.

[Zhuangzi]

Ugh, I'm stuck on this game at the same spot, having killed the Dwarven stack but not being able to get the Elven or Human. I am a few point short of Level 5 and I don't have even one point in Diversions, but I have Chaos 2 with Frost Grasp, Poison Skull and Kamikaze all at level 2.

The problem is that Kamikaze, while devastating, takes 3 turns to explode. Against the Elven stack, the Hunters (9!) one shot my Vampires, like ck said, and the Human stack isn't much better.

So I think Kamikaze is a bad spell for this fight. Back to the drawing board. I'll try Evil Book next.

[ckdamascus]

Ugh, I'm stuck on this game at the same spot, having killed the Dwarven stack but not being able to get the Elven or Human. I am a few point short of Level 5 and I don't have even one point in Diversions, but I have Chaos 2 with Frost Grasp, Poison Skull and Kamikaze all at level 2.

The problem is that Kamikaze, while devastating, takes 3 turns to explode. Against the Elven stack, the Hunters (9!) one shot my Vampires, like ck said, and the Human stack isn't much better.

So I think Kamikaze is a bad spell for this fight. Back to the drawing board. I'll try Evil Book next.

Human stack was pretty evil even with the demoness army since they could "heal" you for bonus damage.

In my game, I just beat the elven army which had 8 elves but only 75 fairies vs the 110+.

You need some sort of tank or a lot of continuous crowd control. Even though I have ancient vampires and necromancers, it's still somewhat tricky to get a no loss. However, I didn't get any extra useful spells. Time Shift and Hex. :)

[MattCaspermeyer]

Did you do the Catacombs stacks? You've got to at least do the 3 easiest ones (I know, they can sometimes be really hard, but you've got Frost Grasp so that makes them easier) to guarantee that you get level 5 after taking the Dwarven Shelter stack out or at the very most the Dwarven and Human stacks. The Human stack is very easy with Kamikaze, I'm telling you. See if fighting them will push you over.

For the Elves, you've got to do your best to position your Vamps so they are not one shotted, but if they are it is okay, because in Bat form you can regrow your numbers - don't forget that!

Also, positioning of your Vamps with both the Human and Elven stacks at the start of the fight is everything so experiment with positioning to maximize their regeneration in Vamp form and giving you the opportunity to transform to Bat to then escape. Don't forget, also, that once you transform you automatically heal to full health, so waiting for everyone to move and then transforming is often the difference between living and dying.

Losing 1 Vamp is no biggie in any of the fights, as you can regrow them towards the end of the fight back to their original numbers so don't worry if you lose 1. Transform back to Vamp if that last Bat looks like it is going to die, to get the full heal, and to heal for easy addition of Bat #2 when regrowing!

I'll be trying this game later and we'll see if I can do it - I know you can, just keep trying! :)

***EDIT***

Okay, I see what you're up against - 108 Fairies and 9 Elves, oof! You only got 4 Werewolves in one stack, but I'd rather have 11 and 1 less Elf, but this is what we got to deal with. I say you have to be level 5 to do this one, but there is a wrinkle since the Fairies can dispel your Kamikaze! I just went ahead to see what you had to deal with, but I can see needing to get as much exp as possible to be level 5. I didn't check the Human stack out, but I don't think it'll be a problem compared to the Elves, so do the Elves last. You will lose 1 Vamp because the min damage is 9x8 = 72 (you might get very lucky and not lose one, but I wouldn't count on it). So you'll have to make it up at the end of the fight.

Feel free to switch to the other Kamikaze save because I can see that this one is probably going to be exceedingly hard. I'll still give this one an honest effort, though later...

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Matt, in that game I left the two hardest Catacombs stacks, which meant I was just a few points short of Level 5 by the time I hit the Shelter and defeated the Dwarves. I am trying the other Kamikaze save instead in the hope that it will prove easier. I don't know how you or anyone else manages to whittle down those huge stacks of spiders in such a small arena. I can manage all but two of them. I guess I will try again! I am wondering whether I ought to prioritise Diversions 2 somehow. I don't know if it's possible to get Diversions 2 and Chaos 2 by level 5...

[MattCaspermeyer]

I'm not gonna lie: this battle with the Elves pushed me to my limits, in fact I had essentially given up and was going to post here in the forum that I didn't think it was possible.

However, I went back at it again and I was able to do it!

First and foremost thanks to Frost Grasp, I was able to do the 3 easiest Catacombs stacks and the Spider stack in front of the Dragandor gate. These fights will give you enough exp to get to Level 5 after defeating the Dwarven Shelter stack.

Everything had to fall into place right with the Elven stack fight - one misstep and you'd die.

I also had to resort to a tactic that I don't like to use, but the Diversion skill's effects change if you save the game, start the fight, reload, immediately save again, start the fight, reload the newer save, save again, and start the fight - if the troops that you want get Diverted, then you reload the older save when trying it again. If not, then you load the newer save and repeat the above steps until the troops that you want to be Diverted are affected and then proceed to use this save game as your basis for trying to defeat the Elves.

This was actually the first time I used this strategy to do a fight no loss.

So with this strategy, I was able to get the Elves and Lake Fairies Diverted on round 1 and the 4 Werewolves stack killed themselves on the trap. You can't get any better than that! After this, finding the right sequence was exceedingly difficult, but I took the Elves from 9 -> 6 with Poison Skull Level 2 on round 1 (so that the Elves could no longer kill one of my Vampires at the start of round 2), and the Fauns from 13 -> 2 with Poison Skull on round 2 (and then the Poison took them down to 1). On round 3, this is the key, I used the Kamikaze scroll since the Lake Fairies have the Dispel ability. By this time, on round 3 the 12 Werewolves and 108 Lake Fairies were a hex away from my Vamps and so I had to transform to Bats, but you have to wait until everyone does their turn so that you can take advantage of your Bats getting full health on the transformation. On round 4, the Lake Fairies dispelled the Kamikaze on them, ending their turn and allowing my Bats to escape. So then I cast Kamikaze Level 2 on the Werewolves before they began their turn and then ran away as far as I could. The Elves were down to 5 at this point due to the Poison and the Fauns at just 1 were pretty much irrelevant at this point. I then had to position my Bats to get the Lake Fairies to position themselves so that they'd take a route that would allow my Bats to keep escaping. I then took the Elves from 5 down to 1 with a Poison Skull. On the next round I had to use Frost Grasp to damage the Lake Fairies so that they were small enough after the bomb went off not to hurt me too much. I then positioned my Bats so that I could get the Lake Fairies and Werewolves to be adjacent and 1 hex away when the bomb went off. It took out 8 Werewolves and the Lake Fairies were down to about 44. I was also able to transform back to Vampires and I still (luckily) had 2 left (they were probably down to 5 hp when they regenerated). They were able to regenerate and stay at 2 as I then used another Kamikaze scroll on the Lake Fairies and then another on the Werewolves, which were still at 4 units. Unfortunately, the Werewolves transformed on me canceling the spell, but I was able to take them down by regenerating Mana and using a Level 2 Frost Grasp on them leaving 1 left. I then had enough Mana to cast a Level 1 Frost Grasp later to finish them off and the rest was history!

I probably tried this fight 50+ times to get the sequence right!

The key to this fight was to Divert the Elves and Lake Fairies on round 1 because without this, there is simply no way to do it. The next key was using the Kamikaze scroll saving me 5 Mana (I had been casting it @Level 1 since I knew the Fairies would dispel it, but I really needed that 5 Mana to cast Frost Grasp @Level 2 on the Fairies later) so that I could take the Elves from 5 down to 1 and use Frost Grasp to kill about 20 Fairies (using the scroll left me with me exactly 7 Mana for me to cast it @Level 2 on the exact round that I needed it).

As you can see, everything had to fall into place, with most damage being at least above average and sometimes even close to maximum (especially to take that pesky Faun stack from 13 down to eventually 1 unit).

I then did the Human stack, which was actually pretty easy since you just cast Kamikaze Level 2 on the Priests (13 of them) and then the Bowmen (18 of them) on the next turn. Two casts of either Poison Skull or Frost Grasp took the Inquisitors down to 1 or 2 and then I finished them off with another spell (@Level 1). At the end of round 3 the first bomb went off, and then the second on round 4 killed the remaining Priests and Bowmen. Lastly the Guardsmen and Swordsmen are severely damaged with another Kamikaze at Level 2 and then I whittled them down the rest of the way as they were the only troops left.

By the way, it is better to get Concentration Level 2 rather than Meditation Level 1 for the Kamikaze strategy, because you only get +6 Mana with Meditation, but over a 20+ round fight you'll actually regenerate enough Mana for at least 2 extra spell casts (you'll essentially regenerate 27 Mana compared to just 12 or 13)! With this I only had 28 Mana at the start of the fight.

If you don't get Lake Fairies, but rather Sprites, then the Elven stack is significantly easier (I had Sprites in my test) as they only move 4 and can't dispel your Kamikaze's. You simply cast Kamikaze once each on the Sprites and 2 Werewolves and they should almost all be dead after all the bombs go off and then just work on the Elves with a Poison Skull / Frost Grasp or two and you're good to go!

I sure hope the other save game has Sprites instead of Lake Fairies because this was even harder than the Ball of Lighting!

I haven't done the Basement or Whitehill, yet, but the Elven Shelter stack is so much harder than those, I'm not worried.

By the way, I repeated the fight to take some screenshots - I probably don't need to use the remaining 2 Kamikaze scrolls as they can't hurt me any more towards the end.

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Crap, well done. I have tried and tried but I can't seem to do either of those fights currently. I am playing the other Kamikaze save so my stacks are different. I may have to restart AGAIN with your game. :mad:

[MattCaspermeyer]

Okay, finished up the fights through Whitehill no loss with the 4 Kamikaze scrolls in the Dragandor Ore Cart save game.

Some of the Basement stacks were a little tricky, but once you figure out which unit is going to be in the middle when that Level 2 Kamikaze goes off, you can really optimize the damage output of that spell.

By the way, Level 2 Diversion is possible @Daert Level 6. In this game, the exp was lousy as I needed to kill all 3 Basement stacks and complete the digging quest to get to level 6.

Whitehill was a little tricky because the easiest stack ended up not being the easiest and so I switched to a harder stack. With the harder one, I used the Jealousy feature where a ranged stack that runs away from the Statue stays Jealous after the Statue disappears. That made it really easy.

Overall, this was easier than the Ball of Lightning strategy except for the Elven Shelter stack, which has been by far the toughest no loss fight I've done so far with Daert and these save games.

I sure hope the other Kamikaze save game has Sprites because then it would be a lot easier.

By the way, I think we need some more options about what Daert says back to the Spirit of Darkness for when we defeat the Shelter Guardians:

Spirit of Darkness: "Daert, did you kill the Guards of Light?"

Daert:

"Yes, it was not difficult."
"I will come back soon with a report! (Leave.)"
"Yes, it was so easy that I'd like to take on the Light with just 2 Vampires and no spells for the next 500 fights!" :-P
Are you freaking kidding me? What the holy @#$% was that?!
I bet if Neoline drew the shortest straw it would have been easy! :-P

I'd really like to hear what you would say to the Spirit of Darkness after completing Daert no loss through the Shelter! :-P

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

A couple of things for anyone else crazy enough to try this (I haven't finished the final two fights yet)...

1. You MUST be level 5 by the time you defeat the Dwarven stack, the first of the Shelter stacks.

2. By level 5, you've spent your runes on Diversions 1, Concentration 2 and Chaos Magic 2. You'll have about 4 Mind and 4 Magic runes to spare. This is so that you can have a pool of about 50 mana for each fight, you can cast Level 2 Kamikaze and Frost Grasp, and you have one trap on the field (and a chance for troops to lose their turn, which as Matt explained, you'll have to abuse to get through these last two fights).

3. You need to do 10 fights to get up to Level 5 by this stage. These are 3 on Portland (easy), 3 in the Catacombs (quite hard - all but the two biggest spider stacks), 1 Spider in Dragandor (very hard), 1 when you get Bagyr/Neoline (very easy), 1 Captain of the Guard (quite easy now that you are level 4) and the Dwarven stack in the Shelter (easy but time consuming).

4. All of these fights are using just 2 Vampires. You could use the Ghosts as well to draw enemies away on certain fights. You will have to learn how to use Vampires optimally, which means learning exactly when to move and transform them. The great strength of Vampires is that they regain ALL hp when they transform, so it's very important to learn to use the Wait command strategically.

5. Having said all of the above, I've been banging my head against the wall with this over the past couple of days. :-o

[DGDobrev]

Good job guys, good job :) You are lining up the stars and planets for poor Daert like expert tacticians. I don't know if I feel masochistic enough to try this myself, but I do know I will have a go at it sometime in the future.

[Zhuangzi]

I can't do this! I am up to these two fights on BOTH Kamikaze games and I can't manage either stack in either game. Very sad.

The amount of reloading and resaving you need to do to get those particular troops diverted, geez. I guess if I got the EXACT two troops diverted (Elves and Lake Fairies) I might be able to do it, or not.

The other Kamikaze save is easier in some ways and harder in others.

9 Elves -------------------- 9 Elves
12 Werewolves----------- 13 Werewolves
108 Lake Fairies --------- 83 Forest Fairies (okay, that's better!)
4 Werewolves ------------ 13 Werewolves (ouch!)
13 Fauns ----------------- 10 Fauns

So yes, I can see that the Forest Fairies are easier (and slower) BUT you can't force them to skip their move by dispelling, and with the extra stack of Werewolves, christ.

And the other fight...

10 Guardsmen ----------- 12 Guardsmen
13 Priest of Light--------- 15 Priest of Light
18 Bowmen -------------- 21 Bowmen
7 Inquisitors of Light ----- 8 Inquisitors of Light
19 Swordsmen ----------- 12 Witch Hunters (and they dispel the bombs!)

I have tried various tactics on all four fights. I have tried to get two troops diverted through laborious save scumming. I have tried splitting the vamps or keeping them in a pair. I've even tried loading up with ranged units and hoping to get lucky with what their ranged units shoot at.

Nup, not working, not ever. :-x

[MattCaspermeyer]

Okay, I think you need to practice on the Human fights in both of your saves first.

Believe me, you won't believe how much easier they are to do than the Elven stacks.

You may find that with both Elves and Humans placing both Vamps in your leftmost slot will work the best for you.

Doing this ensures that the Werewolves by the Fauns move to the their right (your left). For the Humans, it won't matter as the Guardsmen will go down one path and the Swordsmen the other.

You actually can stay in Vampire form for both Human fights until the melee troops are basically right on you. It is very important that the Priests do not Heal and kill both of your Vamps. Losing one is okay - don't sweat it, it's easy to regenerate on the Guardsmen / Swordsmen later.

For the Humans, cast the first Level 2 Kamikaze on the Priests and then the second on the Bowmen. Then use Poison Skull / Frost Grasp Level 2 on the Inquisitors.

By the time the melee troops are upon you, careful waiting, moving to escape, and then being second (after the Inquisitors) will allow to escape in Vampire form and then the Priests and Bowmen should be dead by the time you need to transform to Bats with just the melee troops and maybe an Inquisitor or two left. Finish them off with a Level 1 damaging spell and then BatCycle the melee troops saving up to cast a Level 2 Kamikaze on them to make the BatCycle go faster.

Practice on that Human squad until it is easy (do both in both games so you get good practice).

For the other game with the Sprites, believe me, this is easier than the Lake Fairies as the extra Werewolves are mostly irrelevant (so long as you don't forget that you can't use your Vamps to kill them). You do have 9 Elves, so only worry about getting them Diverted (I guess if you Divert both the Elves and the Fauns, that is a bonus).

Position your Vamps in the leftmost spot so that the Sprites and Werewolves go the right (your left) path. You need to cast at least 2 Kamikazes on the Sprites and Werewolves (that are closest). You'll eventually work your way away from them on the right side, switching to Bats to escape. On round 3 you'll have to work on the Elves with Poison Skull Level 2, but be sure to save enough Mana to cast another Kamikaze on the last stack of Werewolves (if you can cast a third Kamikaze on them on round 3 instead of Poison Skulling the Elves do it, but you'll just have to see how it goes).

What makes both of these fights difficult is that the 9 Elves can Double Shot kill (barely) one of your Vamps on round one. If the above does not work, you'll have to Poison Skull the 9 Elves on round one so that they do not kill a Vamp on round two. But, this delays your Kamikaze's, although this worked for me with the Lake Fairies.

Sequence is everything for these fights as well as subtle positioning of your Vamps to get units to use more action points, you may have to experiment with who you put the Kamikaze on first. As a note, there are situations where Kamikaze will make troops skip their turn. Something to do with casting it on a higher initiative troop, so you may find that you need to do this thereby causing lower initiative troops (maybe just one) to skip their turn, but be careful because more likely than not, it causes troops to separate when you want them bunched up for that kaboom! I've seen this happen a lot, especially in the Basement when I'm trying to defeat those guys.

Good luck, maybe I'll try the other Kamikaze game later...

/C\/C\

[MattCaspermeyer]

Rejoice, my friends!

The Phoenix has arrived!

You can skip all the Catacombs fights (but be sure to get all those Crystals, though), skip the stack in front of the gate in Dragandor and just run to the Ore Cart. Get Level 4 Daert and let the fun ensue!

I finally got another elusive Phoenix scroll (4 of them!!!!) and am posting the save here. I actually got one with one of my Daert modded games, but never used it since I went Chaos in that game.

There is one note to be careful about with Phoenix, and that is the fact that the Bibliophile skill is bugged. If you pick it first, it will not give you the Crystal rebate. So make sure you pick it second at least, or last if you're really worried. I had forgotten about this and was short on Crystals when I was in front of the Inn and was like - doh! So I had to go back to my Portland save and pick Meditation first.

You should only need 8 and 13 Crystals for Phoenix Level 1 and 2 so if you see 10 and 15, then that means Bibliophile is not working if you picked it. You should find 18 Crystals (the max!) in the Catacombs, plus the 4 you start with gives you 22 with one left after you get Phoenix up to Level 2.

You'll be amazed how easy all the fights are, and you might only have to think a little bit in the Basement with the Snake stack. Otherwise, even the Whitehill fight will be super easy and you can actually relax and honestly reply to the Spirit of Darkness and say:

"Yes, it was not difficult." :grin:

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Awesome, thanks so much for bailing me out of having to complete those absurdly difficult fights! The Phoenix, as expected, dominates the battlefield and won those 3 Shelter battles very easily indeed. So it seems that no losses is possible as Daert after all! But you will need Matt's save and the Phoenix scroll for sure.

Here's how you do it:

Kill Portland stacks, 3 of them, which are a bit harder than usual because you don't get Frozen Grasp in this save!

Ignore those Catacombs stacks, all of them! They would be very hard with only Poison Skull, so thank God it isn't necessary to do them. But VERY IMPORTANT make sure you pick up ALL 18 crystals. You will have 22 in total.

Go into Dragandor, ignore the Spider, pick up your lovely Phoenix scroll (x4!!) and talk to the king. Level up to 4. Now for the hard part. Like Matt says, you need Bibliophile or you won't have the crystals to Level the Phoenix up to Level 2. So you want go do Meditation, Bibliophile, Order 1 and 2 at level 4. Now you can JUST level up the Phoenix to Level 2.

Phew, that was the hard part. Now for the fun! Go talk to Bagyr and Neoline, fight the guard (don't waste the mana on this fight) and then fight the Captain of the Guard. It's very strategic how you win this fight. I've done this step by step. :-P

1. Make sure you have 25 mana.
2. On turn one, open your spellbook.
3. Press the 'I WIN' button.
4. Win. :cool:

Same deal for the three Shelter stacks. In fact the Human one still managed to get one of my Vamps with their healing, so I had to regenerate the Vamp, but otherwise it was a complete walkover. The Dwarven stack NEARLY killed the Phoenix once (:rolleyes: ) but not quite. So I'm in the Basement and I don't expect it will be very difficult. The hardest thing now is waiting for my VERY slooooooow mana regeneration.

Thanks again, Matt!

EDIT: Okay, so I've finished the Basement (killed 2 out of 3, left the Snakes) and Whitehill (again, killed 2 of 3), so I'm up to Portland and, as we know, this is where the game opens up. I've done 12 fights and you could easily do as little as 9, I think, by this stage of the game. Daert's start is absurdly difficult (not as hard as Bagyr's!) and it's only because of the Phoenix that I was able to get through so easily. I think I've probably lost the motivation to actually continue with this game for now, but I may come back to it later.

tl;dr - use Matt's Phoenix save if you want to do a no-losses Impossible challenge as Daert.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Yay! The Phoenix is breath of fresh air, isn't it! :cool:

By the way, I think even if Bagyr got 4 Phoenix scrolls he might be able to do through the Shelter no loss - hmmm...

Very funny post by the way, @Zhuangzi! :)

I think almost all my fights were Phoenix 100% damage, Vamps 0% (slackers! ;)). I think the only fight where they joined in (after Portland anyway) was the Basement Snake stack.

I didn't even disband any of my troops and just tossed them in the Shelter / my Reserve when I was doing the real fights!

Well, since I've been struggling with doing all these no loss battles, I finally figured I'd go forward with the Phoenix since it is so much easier than the others.

Since I was such a dope and didn't realize I could go back to Atrixus / Tristrem when I played Neoline the first time through the Catacombs (I thought I had to get their maps first before it would allow me to return!) I've been wondering around both places and I'm amazed by how much stuff you can get for free! All this gold lying around and chests to dig here and there, dummy stacks to kite to get the goodies, troops that want to join, I'm like a kid in a candy store! :)

I got 12 Demons (not that big of a deal, I guess) and then in Tristrem there are 70 Shamans! Wow! Since my 2 Vamps have been playing all these no loss games, I figured I'd just have then sit in the Shelter, relax, and shoot the breeze with Neoline and Bagyr while I use all these free guys! I also bought 20 Demonologists while I was in Atrixus so that I have 3 Demons, 3 / 2 Demonologists, and 3 / 3 Shamans.

I basically already have enough Crystals for Phoenix Level 3 and I only fought the Horsemen in Portland so far (although I did use a little Phoenix to whoop up on the Catacombs stacks and that Spider stack outside of Dragandor for a little payback from the other games :evil:). I went with Bibliophile Level 3 since I was so short on Crystals in my Neoline playthrough and so just need to get to Level 7 to get Phoenix Level 3.

I'm wondering if Demon Portal is going to work better with Daert as the Leadership is close to my own right now as I bought that while I was in Atrixus, too.

By the way, I was wondering, does anyone know that if you talk to the two shop keepers in Atrixus does that start a clock on how long you have to rescue Pacca? The say she'll be executed in a couple of days so I was wondering if that is game days or it is just scripted and it doesn't matter. At any rate, I didn't want to chance it, although one of them sells some Executioners so I ended up not talking to either of them just in case since I won't be able to do Atrixus for a good while anyway.

So I'm back in the Shelter about ready to set out back to Portland. This time I'm going to use teleport unless I'm really low on gold instead of sailing all over the place, although I miss my Griffin Sails Ship :( - certainly beats the Checkered Sails one! :-P

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Definitely use Shamans in this game, then. I didn't use them at all in my Neoline game, but I'm up for something different. Demons are great too, of course. I kinda thought it would be cool to keep the Vampire theme as much as possible, but I suppose that will have to wait until Monteville.

The Pacca quest definitely isn't timed. I left it unfinished for most of my Neoline playthrough.

By the way, people on the Steam forum are complaining about Bibliophile being bugged - something, apparently, is 'resetting' the discount somehow? But they don't know what. So I would try to monitor that situation, or you'll end up using more crystals than you intended. It may be that it isn't worth spending more runes on Bibliophile for this reason.

Definitely teleport this time :) DG Dobrev and I both finished on day 23 as Neoline and he beat me by about 40 points, 2080 to 2040 or thereabouts. He did way more fights than I!

[ckdamascus]

Definitely use Shamans in this game, then. I didn't use them at all in my Neoline game, but I'm up for something different. Demons are great too, of course. I kinda thought it would be cool to keep the Vampire theme as much as possible, but I suppose that will have to wait until Monteville.

The Pacca quest definitely isn't timed. I left it unfinished for most of my Neoline playthrough.

By the way, people on the Steam forum are complaining about Bibliophile being bugged - something, apparently, is 'resetting' the discount somehow? But they don't know what. So I would try to monitor that situation, or you'll end up using more crystals than you intended. It may be that it isn't worth spending more runes on Bibliophile for this reason.

Definitely teleport this time :) DG Dobrev and I both finished on day 23 as Neoline and he beat me by about 40 points, 2080 to 2040 or thereabouts. He did way more fights than I!

Hah, I was the one who had the bugged bibliophile and posted it on steam. :) However, it might have been a one-off thing. Cost me about three hours of time as I had to reload.

It is working 100% now and it is pretty much mandatory for the vampire if you want to use nice spells.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Guys, I'm pretty sure it is only when you pick Bibliophile first as Daert.

I can repeat this (I had to go back to my Portland save because I've actually seen it before, but forgot about it) as if you pick it first, then Meditation, you won't get the rebate, but if you don't pick it first than you'll be fine.

I have Bibliophile @Level 3 and it is only 10 Crystals for Level 3 Phoenix when it should be 20.

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Awesome Matt! Someone was bound to get the Phoenix eventually. Glad it was you, I gave up after scanning over 250 saves total. Congrats, I will have a go at it sometime as well. I still have no internet at home, so I have been amusing myself with scanning saves, but it wasn't to be. Then I remembered I haven't finished Divinity: OS, and ditched KBDS for a bit till I fool around with D:OS. Now I may be back to KBDS sooner than expected. Holy hell, huge congrats on the find.

EDIT: Ok, gave it a go. I expected it to be an easy going, but not this ridiculously easy. I think I lost only a single vamp to the human stack. Oh boy, oh boy... Phoenix sure rocks.

[Zhuangzi]

Yeah, that Phoenix sure does own the battlefield early on. I think Matt is continuing to play as Daert and has his Phoenix up to Level 3 early on. :cool:

Me, I don't have the motivation to continue with Daert right now. I will come back to it though. Right now I'm playing Wasteland 2, which is basically a modern sequel to Fallout 2. Having a lot of fun with it.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Yah, so far Phoenix is super easy - I did the ol' kiting to Helvedia trick to pick me up an Arch Demon to take on Oncologon (or however you spell his name), but I want to play different units this time, so no Arch Demons for me the rest of the game (well, unless I get them from Demon Portal)!

In fact, I think I'm going to see what I can do about limiting my use of level 5 troops to maybe just Bone Dragons since I'm Daert and maybe the Orc and Neutral non-dragons (like Trolls and Cyclops).

So far I've been having a ton of fun with Demonologists and Shamans and was able to complete all the Portland quests very easily. The Shamans work really well with troops that can't heal early in the game.

In fact I was amazed at how effective the Shamans are as I was able to defeat the two "weak" and "very weak" (mislabeled) humans stacks for Lucia using them with the Ancient Phoenix (I still had 1 Arch Demon and 1 Red Dragon to go with two stacks of Shamans and 1 Demonologist stack when I did these fights).

I briefly tried Vampires / Ancient Vampires with my Necromancers, Demonologists, and Shamans, but they were mostly sitting there doing nothing and since you can get them from the Necromancer's Raise Dead, I ditched them and got me some Dark Mages (neat!) and went back to Tristrem and got me some Catapults.

So now my army is Demonologists, Shamans, Dark Mages, Necromancers, and Catapults. We'll see how long that lasts, but I actually had fun with the Catapults in my Bagyr experiments so I figured it should be fun.

I actually might go all ranged until the Ancient Phoenix starts to lose its power, but right now, I've actually been casting it at just level 2 sometimes due to level 3 being more than what I need for some of the Monteville fights.

I figure I'll eventually need to replace the Catapults with a level 4 troop, but I don't have any other level 4 ranged troops available right now. I could go with Dark Horsemen for a ground troop as there seems plenty in Portland, but with the demon summons and raised dead with the Phoenix there's no sense in needing a melee troop right now since I can produce them on the battlefield.

I've also been using teleport a lot so far and the only time I think I'll not use it is when I have to sail to a new island like I did with Monteville. I guess if I really wanted, I could kite from Helvedia to Inselburg.

I'm really amazed at the number of places you can go with kiting and teleport.

/C\/C\

[ckdamascus]

It's amazing how the devs addressed some old issues I had, including how mages have way too much downtime between fights due to slow mana regeneration.

Anyways, I hate how long it takes to do some of the battles. Summon storm / shaman totem delays are enough for me with the Neoline build.

I'm just doing the old fashioned solo black dragon + Armageddon. Tried using female vampires + chaos gifts but that's actually way worse and mana intense.

Some battles are a little tricky (black + ice + red dragon fights) but so far having a VERY fast run since the big battles are done much faster now.

I can't wait to do Bagyr's run since the "orc warrior" has some very nice high damage mods that work well with orc units. Although I loathe having to resurrect against stupid geyser spells and insane stacks of doom. Ah wells.

[DGDobrev]

I gotta admit I also pressed on with Matt's save. I also got Phoenix Level 3 very early, which made the whole Portland (including the pure chick) a breeze. I didn't go to Helvedia at all. I did go to Atrixus, however, and picked up some Archdemons, Demons, and Demonologists, and then some Necromancers from Monteville. I did beat the dragon with that setup (Plague rocks vs Blackies) and gave him the Portland princess. I am just a few hundred leadership short and I will start the good old "How far can you go with 1 Black Dragon" challenge just for fun. Impy's post really hit my good old KBAP soft spot.

There are some awesome items in Matt's save: I am well over 100 mana on level 8 because of them. That's just amazing. All I can say is, thanks Matt, for giving me the urge to do another play-through. It will surely be a great one. Just... a few hundred more leadership...

[Snow11]

Playing as mage I find Call of Nature to be absolutely overpowered. At 36 lvl with 50 intelect, mage talants and Living Book(+20%), rank 3 Call of Nature have 277% of normal power. That means that the animals I get have my max leadership but with 277% attack/defense, health and damage. So not only their dmg is brutal but because of their hp thay can tank really well. While my normal stacks do 2-3k crits max, the animals do 15-20k crits every single time :shock:

[DGDobrev]

True, and you should check how the phoenix looks. At level 18, I am looking at an Ancient Phoenix with over 2.5k HP and over 700 pure fire damage... Give him a bear buddy with call of nature and you dont need to worry anymore...

[ckdamascus]

True, and you should check how the phoenix looks. At level 18, I am looking at an Ancient Phoenix with over 2.5k HP and over 700 pure fire damage... Give him a bear buddy with call of nature and you dont need to worry anymore...

Haven't gotten phoenix yet (and I'm level 56), but book of evil has been way better for me since you can cast more than one and if you are lucky they do WAY more damage with their spells.

Honestly, with the retarded strong armies the game throws at you, I think it's "fair". At least I don't want to go through very slow combat. It makes me wonder if the demoness/paladin class is once again the shafted class at the end even if it has the "easier" beginning.

That said, there are a lot of subtle things I like about darkside. They give you enough rope so the RNG doesn't break your game. My last game as demoness/paladin, the phantom spell never showed up at all and that's usually the make or break spell.

[Snow11]

It's true that phoenix is very powerfull in the beginning but because it's not affected by your leadership it's power start to fall behind after middle/late game.
At my lvl, ancient phoenix have 500-1k dmg and less then 4k hp which means that it can get killed from 1-2 hits if i'm not carefull with him. In comparison the animals from call of nature not only have more dmg but their total hp is more then 30k no matter what lvl the animal is.
Not that i'm complaining how overpowered call of nature is but it's certainly one of the skills together with the halfing talant that make the game alot easier and faster to play.

[DGDobrev]

I actually am going to try to do the One Black Dragon only challenge without using halving for as long as I can. I wonder how that will work. If I see that I am getting summarily trounced, then I will change stuff around. I will, of course, keep plenty of runes at the ready to do so :D

EDIT: I know for a fact that Impy did it, but he is a much better tactician and much more patient and considerate than I am...

[impy]

DG, thank you for your kind words. I am just a normal guy who likes sweets:grin:
I personally did not use halving skill in my playthrough - see screenshot at level 75, pretty much end of the game. Whole game I followed my old approach which I believe made me a better player - I only spend runes when there is no other way forward, not when I want to. During game I simply did not feel I needed to spend practically any runes in might tree. Apart from very early access to Atrixus etc. I also defeated properly every scroll guardian before progressing. You can guess why - truth to be told level 3 Nature Call is extremely powerful, and this challenge is actually a bit easier than good old KBAP attempt.

Now interesting thing DG, we played solo Black dragon in KBAP + Gift bag (remember that?) environment, but never actually done in Crossworlds. The problem is astral damage from newly introduced orc race, however there are new interesting spells ( gizmo ...) That is what I am playing at the moment.

[ckdamascus]

I'd speculate that halving is probably a suicidal build or painfully slow one for mages because you simply don't have enough runes to get enough happy rage control.

You sort of need enough rage for decent "jealousy" skills and there aren't enough might runes for you to max your magic tree (which is far more efficient for you anyway thanks to the Archmage skill).

At least, this is from a perspective of a non-targetable core unit+ nuke spells and disposable summons approach.

More troops is more liability especially for the lackluster leadership mage.

[edit] oh wow, noticed impy still has so many might runes. I wonder where all of mine went? I'm guessing still in the mage tree as I have like 90 spirit runes which I don't plan on using. :(

[DGDobrev]

Ok, Impy, I don't even want to ask how many double-calls of nature you can do with those 346 mana... Whew. And sure I remember the gift bag bonus content. It had some really nice items. Then again, I never tried the 1BD challenge in crossworlds, I just played the new stuff. You should have better insight there.

What I am noticing at the moment (level 27), is that you can easily do the fights one after the other with minimal downtime. Calm Rage is awesome, and if you have a spare double cast at the end of the fight, double calm rage will give you full mana easily. If the Demoness play-through can be compared to Daert's, then all I will be using are just a few of Blackie's skills: Jealousy, Orc Strike and Orc Shield. I think Orc Shield will be very useful, as it absorbs a decent amount of damage and this will be a good way to keep the solitary dragon alive awhile longer. We will see. I am still in the early game, where fights are a breeze with Phoenix + Call of Nature.

[ckdamascus]

Ok, Impy, I don't even want to ask how many double-calls of nature you can do with those 346 mana... Whew. And sure I remember the gift bag bonus content. It had some really nice items. Then again, I never tried the 1BD challenge in crossworlds, I just played the new stuff. You should have better insight there.

What I am noticing at the moment (level 27), is that you can easily do the fights one after the other with minimal downtime. Calm Rage is awesome, and if you have a spare double cast at the end of the fight, double calm rage will give you full mana easily. If the Demoness play-through can be compared to Daert's, then all I will be using are just a few of Blackie's skills: Jealousy, Orc Strike and Orc Shield. I think Orc Shield will be very useful, as it absorbs a decent amount of damage and this will be a good way to keep the solitary dragon alive awhile longer. We will see. I am still in the early game, where fights are a breeze with Phoenix + Call of Nature.

Be wary of not letting your rage skills grow if you take the calm rage approach too much. I'm only level 57ish but I'm always worried I need stronger rage skills like the orc shield and jealousy.

[impy]

Ok, Impy, I don't even want to ask how many double-calls of nature you can do with those 346 mana... Whew. And sure I remember the gift bag bonus content. It had some really nice items. Then again, I never tried the 1BD challenge in crossworlds, I just played the new stuff. You should have better insight there.

What I am noticing at the moment (level 27), is that you can easily do the fights one after the other with minimal downtime. Calm Rage is awesome, and if you have a spare double cast at the end of the fight, double calm rage will give you full mana easily. If the Demoness play-through can be compared to Daert's, then all I will be using are just a few of Blackie's skills: Jealousy, Orc Strike and Orc Shield. I think Orc Shield will be very useful, as it absorbs a decent amount of damage and this will be a good way to keep the solitary dragon alive awhile longer. We will see. I am still in the early game, where fights are a breeze with Phoenix + Call of Nature.

Well, well, if 346 mana looks impressive, I dug out the save at level 79, just fooling around shelter before hitting the final battle and came up with - 492 mana.. With scroll Magical Flow it comes to 522mana. I think even 346 was too much, because Transmute skill works a bit differently now, you also have winds of Magic. But I did play with summons only, not with direct damaging spells really. This could be an idea for another challenge - something like 100% or close damage by spellbook, I think we actually done this in Crossworlds, right?
One of the reasons I did not spent points in Might tree is absolutely overwhelming amount of Rage boosters in the game, bit unbalanced possibly. I had 75 potions of rage left at the end and i was playing specific challenge rather than standard gameplay.

[DGDobrev]

Yes, we did it on KBCW. I dug up my old screens and I have 80% book damage, cause I abandoned the 1 BD challenge on lvl 43 and switched to 1 stack of Black Knights + Eviln. Well, Call of Nature and Demon Portal weren't working the same way as they do in KBDS now. I don't even recall using them so extensively, cause they did not provide sufficient amount of troops - and the ones you got could only survive a few hits, so you were much better using Gift + Paladins than wasting so much mana on Call of Nature, for example.

[BB Shockwave]

Wow, 23 pages. I guess you guys must be really, really "hungry" for TBS games that you play this really flawed subpar expansion for such a long time. Me, I went back to playing Crossworlds, and recently, Etherlords II. So much more enjoyable without unbalanced maps and units.

[DGDobrev]

BB killed the forum :P

[wyatan]

Well, the start of the game is clearly not balanced, at least on Impossible, which is doubly a shame since that's where people make first contact with the game, and since the game spent quite some time in Early Access so you'd think the devs would have had some useful feedback.

I gave myself a coupla Necromancers and an Ancient Vampire, and I wouldn't as Sethmage say that it was a "breeze". I found it actually pretty tough at times (aiming at no loss), but doable in the end.
Then I went as soon as I could for the single Black Dragon stack, and there the game was a breeze.
First (until about fight 200) with the Armageddon approach.
Then transitioning to Call of Nature.

Now, that spell is indeed way OP in its current version. It does turn the game into easy mode.
Only the two chained fights presented a challenge (easily solved by making sure only one stack lived through the first fight, and then using a combination of Orc Shield and Last Hero to make sure it lived through the second fight).

I've started an Orc run next.
Now, forget about no loss.
On Impossible, simply making it through the Shelter/Whitehill fights doesn't seem achievable without resorting to the uncontrollable stack trick.

That's... pretty dumb.

On the other hand, I'm now having a blast with a pure Orcish army (Shaman x2, Veterans, Chieftains, Spirit Talkers).
Not playing that one originally as "no loss", but as "minimal losses". I'm roughly half-way through (Tristem and Dragandor done), and now in "no loss" mode.

Not sure if I'll be able to keep it up through the really crazy parts (late demon/elven lands), but we'll see.
Then they'll be the issue of the last fight where the Orc player gets completely shafted obviously.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Certainly agree with the imbalance of Daert and Bagyr!

By the way, my teeny, tiny mod that balances the starting conditions of Bagyr and Daert is here (http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpost.php?p=706911&postcount=8)!

No loss with Deart and Bagyr should now be possible under any start condition!

Enjoy! :)

/C\/C\

[Ezrekiel]

Wow, what a useful thread!

I have recently started a normal difficulty (no loss) run with Daert, and I learned a ton reading all of this, thanks a lot guys!

Guess I still need to become a lot better before I can do those initial fights on impossible, but I'll get there eventually 8-)

[iregev]

Ah, craaaaaaap!!! I had spell_demonologist show up in the ore cart and I was almost certain it was the demon portal. I knew it, I should have kept the save. Damn...

Otherwise I can confirm that any spell can spawn there. I had even level 5 spells like resurrection, spawning. Now I am making batches of 9 saves and scanning them as necessary. Now that we have more options, I will make sure I keep all those saves.

THERE WE FREAKING GO!!! After deleting one demon portal save, and beating my head a bit over that, I had a HUGE stroke of luck. In just 9 saves I found 2 with Demon Portal and 1 with Book of Evil - whoa, whoa, hold your horses, that is NOT the good news - the good news is that there are actually 2 (!) scrolls of Book of Evil in the ore cart!!! So you got a scapegoat scroll for a free level 1 Book if anything goes bad in any one of the fights!

I am so gonna test this game. I already checked the ore cart (it is right next to the dwarven castle) and both scrolls and happily lying in it. While Clarissa's scroll isn't useful at all, I managed to excavate a chest with 2-3 scrolls of Slow, which is also great news.

I have zipped the file with the book of evil for you, and I can add the other 2 with the Demon Portals if you want, but since Matt says this is the easiest option of them all, I uploaded the Book of Evil one first. Just make sure you don't overwrite any of your important saves, should it happen to have the same number when you unzip in the save games folder - C:\Users\(username)\Documents\my games\Kings Bounty The Dark Side\$save\base\darkside.

Let's see how well will that work.



This save is great.
However no Dark Paladins.
I eddited it using the scanner to add them in the Iselburg,
If you want it I'll post.

[bach_hoang_son]

Sorry for necro this, and my English as well.

I bought Dark Side last year, but not played it until today.
I choose Demonesses, never played Paladin before, Impossible Difficulty, and aim for a no loss campaign, finish all quests :D

Right now I'm stuck at one of the very first quest, the rescue "Demon Cubs" quest.

I have 2 Demonesses, 1 Blood Priestess, 4 Cerberus, 1 Demon, 5 Scoffer Imps.

I've used all knowledge I collected from TL, AP, CW, WotN, but I still loss troops in this fight TT

Could you guys tell me how to remain no loss after this fight ??? I can't pass the portal now, the quest will be marked as "failed".

THanks, and sorry for my ENglish, again.

[Zhuangzi]

Three years later, I've finally come back to Dark Side to finish MattCasperMeyer's 'Phoenix Ore Cart' Vampire save. I knew that the rest of the game would be fairly straightforward to achieve no-losses, and it was, EXCEPT the final battle against the Spirit of Light.

The Vampire (Mage) ends up with very high Intellect in this game due to a skill which gives you an extra point of Intellect for every learned skill in the Mage tree. I had 109 Intellect by the end, including FOUR Rings of the Snake King! Early on I was using Ancient Phoenix a lot to inflict damage, but even that eventually becomes ineffective around level 40-50. Thereafter I used Dragon Riders a fair bit, and when I got bored of the grinding I started cheesing with Dragon Riders + Armageddon, which I did for the last 100 battles or so.

This doesn't work in the final battle, however, as the Spirit of Light will hit you on Turn 1 and you can't Resurrect or Turn Back Time on Dragon Riders. I tried a lot of other combinations without much success. By this stage my Fireball was doing 13k damage on the Spirit but I was still losing troops too fast (especially if I used Armageddon too). Eventually I remembered that Call of Nature is REALLY overpowered in this game. It's a spell I never really used but it is ridiculously strong. I summoned a stack of Royal Griffins on Turn 1 which did about 20k damage per hit to the Spirit. I just used one stack of Dark Paladins meanwhile. By Turn 12 the battle was over and thus at long last I was able to complete a no-losses Impossible run as the Vampire, but only with Matt's save with the Phoenix in the Ore Cart :)

[ckdamascus]

Three years later, I've finally come back to Dark Side to finish MattCasperMeyer's 'Phoenix Ore Cart' Vampire save. I knew that the rest of the game would be fairly straightforward to achieve no-losses, and it was, EXCEPT the final battle against the Spirit of Light.

The Vampire (Mage) ends up with very high Intellect in this game due to a skill which gives you an extra point of Intellect for every learned skill in the Mage tree. I had 109 Intellect by the end, including FOUR Rings of the Snake King! Early on I was using Ancient Phoenix a lot to inflict damage, but even that eventually becomes ineffective around level 40-50. Thereafter I used Dragon Riders a fair bit, and when I got bored of the grinding I started cheesing with Dragon Riders + Armageddon, which I did for the last 100 battles or so.

This doesn't work in the final battle, however, as the Spirit of Light will hit you on Turn 1 and you can't Resurrect or Turn Back Time on Dragon Riders. I tried a lot of other combinations without much success. By this stage my Fireball was doing 13k damage on the Spirit but I was still losing troops too fast (especially if I used Armageddon too). Eventually I remembered that Call of Nature is REALLY overpowered in this game. It's a spell I never really used but it is ridiculously strong. I summoned a stack of Royal Griffins on Turn 1 which did about 20k damage per hit to the Spirit. I just used one stack of Dark Paladins meanwhile. By Turn 12 the battle was over and thus at long last I was able to complete a no-losses Impossible run as the Vampire, but only with Matt's save with the Phoenix in the Ore Cart :)

Omg man! Good job! All this talk brings back good memories, but I don't know if I have the power within me to try it again. :)