Favorite units / items / spell combo's (no rune mage / paladin)

[Hyvel]

What's everyone's favorite strategy, using a combination of units and/or items and/or spells? I'm looking for some inspiration for my next playthrough. As anything involving rune mages and/or gathering around paladins gets boring quickly in my opinion, I'd rather hear some other suggestions. As such it doesn't have to be zero losses for me, but I do play on impossible, and any strategy would still need to limit losses to be realistic I guess.

I'll start with some that I've used, including most of the usual ones:

- Royal snakes + the 3 additional damage snake rings and snake boots (I had 2 rings with my viking playthrough, but I heard someone even had 3 with a soothsayer class)
- Unlimited retaliation from demons / griffins + 95% physical resistance from items / spells, possibly in combination with target. In particular I never get tired of the demons getting non stop additional attacks when being swamped.
- Mass summoning army: Dryad + Royal Thorn + Demonologist + Druid + Demon/Engineer/Royal Griffin, ideally with Crown of Blackthorne + Whip + Assassins dagger for maximum damage from Royal Thorn + thorns summoned by Dryad and Royal Thorns. I really enjoyed this build, blocking the entire field with summons, but battles tended to last a while.
- Black knights + zlogn. Not possible in this game, probably for the better as is grossly overpowered and gets really repetitive
- Droids. Obviously overpowered, and simply boring.
- Goblin army - was overpowered in Crossworlds, but I think goblins might have been nerfed a bit now, not 100% sure though
- Orc army: again I think the backbone (Orc Veterans) might be nerfed a bit compared to Crossworlds...anybody sure on this one?
- Summoning mage: Book of Evil + Chaos Dragon + Ancient Phoenix. Fun to try once, but I found it to get old rather quickly as well.
- Alchemist + Engineer "melee" + crit hit chance items + dwarven leadership items. Both units have very wide damage range, so benefit greatly from critical hits, and can both hit multiple enemies from (mid) range. Was very powerful, but I couldn't resist and kept summoning droids with the engineer, so it got boring again.
- All girl army: dryad, forest fairy, lake fairy, demoness + whip / assassins dagger...I think the girl boosting dresses are no longer in the game right? Must be to prevent a cross dressing Olaf? I haven't tried it in Warriors of the North, but with the amazing Warrior Maidens added in the mix, this could still work very well.
- Soothsayers: I found Loki's touch to be extermely useful, and their basic damage is excellent as well. Some minor heal/resurrect, decent health, good initiative make for a borderline overpowered unit.

Things I haven't tried, but would be interested to hear if anybody else tried:
- Anti - undead army of priests, inquisitors, unicorns and black unicorns. Should be excellent against all the undead, and both unicorns again have a high max damage, so critical hits should be nasty.
- Spider army + 50% damage belt + whip / assasins dagger. Great damage output, but impossible to control losses somewhat?
- Demoness + Ancient Ent to get the Ancient Ent directly into melee range to use their amazing melee stats + rooting ability
- Any combination of Orcs + Vikings: there seem to be a bunch of Orc + Viking items: anybody found a particularly good combination?
- Imps / scoffer imps / cerberi: Anybody food a good combination for (some of) these units? They seem decent to me, but I never used them much.

[Belgarath]

My favorite army remains the 4 Dragons and Archdemon army... In WotN i have swapped the Bone Dragons for Ice Dragons...

Not the most powerful perhaps, but fun to use and all the Dragons have useful special abilities and can take a hit... (And you can start using them very early on if you make sure to get a scroll of Call Colossus from King Hauck on Vestlig and feed it to the Raven...)

Using them on my Skald now, items he has are Demetrius (for max Archdemons), Heart of the Dragon and Draconix (for max Dragons), Metamorphic Axel, Elven Crown, Sandals of the Martyr and the Marshal's Baton (max leadership). Rounding it out is the Belt of the Victor (now called Winner's Belt) for great defense on my critters and extra speed...

With Tactics i can get a nice first strike with my Dragons, supported by some decent Rage and Magic damage (and the Boiling Lave from the Archdemons)... Then it's usually just mopping up what is left...

[ckdamascus]

My favorite army remains the 4 Dragons and Archdemon army... In WotN i have swapped the Bone Dragons for Ice Dragons...

Not the most powerful perhaps, but fun to use and all the Dragons have useful special abilities and can take a hit... (And you can start using them very early on if you make sure to get a scroll of Call Colossus from King Hauck on Vestlig and feed it to the Raven...)

Using them on my Skald now, items he has are Demetrius (for max Archdemons), Heart of the Dragon and Draconix (for max Dragons), Metamorphic Axel, Elven Crown, Sandals of the Martyr and the Marshal's Baton (max leadership). Rounding it out is the Belt of the Victor (now called Winner's Belt) for great defense on my critters and extra speed...

With Tactics i can get a nice first strike with my Dragons, supported by some decent Rage and Magic damage (and the Boiling Lave from the Archdemons)... Then it's usually just mopping up what is left...

Belt of the Victor is in this game?!?! What class are you again? I'm curious if it has a higher likelihood to spawn as a Skald or not.

[Belgarath]

I am a Skald, but i must confess it did not spawn in my game, so i just "gave" it to myself (could not find anything decent to fill my Belt slot...)...

It IS in the game though, but it's now called Winner's Belt...

Ps, Gloves of the Destroyer are also in, found those in the Dragon's lair on Merlassar in several playthroughs...

[Hyvel]

My favorite army remains the 4 Dragons and Archdemon army... In WotN i have swapped the Bone Dragons for Ice Dragons...

Not the most powerful perhaps, but fun to use and all the Dragons have useful special abilities and can take a hit... (And you can start using them very early on if you make sure to get a scroll of Call Colossus from King Hauck on Vestlig and feed it to the Raven...)

Using them on my Skald now, items he has are Demetrius (for max Archdemons), Heart of the Dragon and Draconix (for max Dragons), Metamorphic Axel, Elven Crown, Sandals of the Martyr and the Marshal's Baton (max leadership). Rounding it out is the Belt of the Victor (now called Winner's Belt) for great defense on my critters and extra speed...

With Tactics i can get a nice first strike with my Dragons, supported by some decent Rage and Magic damage (and the Boiling Lave from the Archdemons)... Then it's usually just mopping up what is left...

I like the idea of not having to complete 50% of the game before having access to your preferred creatures.
The boiling lava is also interesting...stacking that with the Giants earthquake, and adding some more AOE from Cerberus,druids, maybe necromancers....any other AOE critters?

[Belgarath]

The (Scoffer) Imps? Fireballs galore... :)

[torquemada]

Soothsayer: greasy mist + Ancient pheonix
Emerald dragon with stoneskin + divine armor
Royal thorns or Dryads + mirror image = flower power (Gift would work here too)
Lvl 1 blizzard + lvl 3 blizzard + Lord of the North against demon army
Oh so that devilfish hit you for 10k+? lvl 3 Pain mirror
And ofcourse the classic poison skull on big stacks (have seen periodic damage of around 10k)

[Doombrew]

On my first playthrough with my Viking on hard I used:
Demonologists
Soothshayers / Druids
Maiden Warriors
Royal Griffens
Rune Mages

I tried getting 0 Loss through the whole game tho.
Tactic been: Taking down the enemies ranges in the first round or get them in Meleerange, so they can't shoot.
Maiden Warriors move in range and use Attack Rune + Spearshot
Royal Griffins move directly to the enemies to take all the damage and deal a lot (Furious: Always retaliates against enemy attacks)
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Druids use "Train" (To tame enemy wilds); summon if you need some cannonfodder or use their basic attack at packs for great damage & massive rage-gain.
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Soothshayers use basic-attack on ranged enemies; Loki's Touch if there are non, Ice Storm if nothings possible - Waiting is also a viable option if an enemy gets low enough for Loki's Touch.
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Demonologists summons deamons (what else? ;)); Using their "Thread of Life" at the end to revive fallen allies.
Rune Mages usually use "Phantom" on Maiden Warriors (they use Spearshot, then use "Call to Valhalla" to revive the Royal Griffins and in their last round they "Wait" to be cannonfodder and then attack something you like to be gone soon).
If you need some blocking very soon, use "Battle Cry" in the very beginning; Move your Royal Griffins not the full range (1 Hex left) and use their "Cheer". Then you should have enough initiative with them to cast phantom on your Royal Griffins, which then move towards to unit you wish to block and cast "Heavenly Guard".

Most used spells with this build:
Summon Phoenix(More blocking / Damage / Cannonfodder),
Call of Nature(More blocking / Cannonfodder),
Battle Cry(Self-explaining),
Slow(Saving your base units from getting hit mad without having Call to Valhalla ready),
Haste(Mostly used for your Royal Griffins to engage soon),
Calm Rage (You will have LOTS),
Runic Word (For the Rune Mages),
Gift (Mostly used for your Warrior Maidens to revive allies).

Going to try something new with my Soothshayer on impossible now; Just had a lot of bad luck with the available troops on my viking. I used an unpatched version and fixed some common problems with the help of editing the .lua files
I had to use the console twice to give myself the Horn of the black unicorn (Which I didn't get after killing it) and to put the value of my rage "normal" again, after I bugged it with Calm Rage.


Going to update this post soon.

[dainbramage]

Of the new units, my favourites are:

Warrior maidens - fast, durable, good damage especially with spear, no retal (sometimes) and have an extremely powerful revive to boot.
Berserkers - they simply they do an obscene amount of damage, that's about all there is to it. They're somewhat fragile and don't have any special talents, but to me that's mitigated by their ability to OHK their own leadership (or more) of enemy units.

Sadly with the removal of the dragon heart and changes to rune mages, my favourite CW army is no more (red+green+black dragons/archdemons/rune mages). And warrior maidens would make a fine addition to an all-female team if anga's ruby or the princess set was reintroduced.

[Fatt_Shade]

Sadly with the removal of the dragon heart ...
Who said dragon hearth is moved from game ? It`s in game files items.txt and eng_items.lng also. You just had bad luck with item random distribution.

[messiahgov]

Yea the Dragon Heart is still there, I got it somewhere. Maybe through a quest, idk.

[linhtran]

hmm...favorite combo?
My current all-Mage party...
Rune Mage - Good damages and skills.
Druid - becoming my favorite thanks to their spread damages. First and second skills are okish, third one is useless.
Archmage - decent damages but skills are good for shocking enemies and third skill can be used in combination with trap.
Demonologist - bad damages but good skills.
Shaman - a lot of totems to distract enemies so it's good.

Another unit combination is the Plant one:
- Ancient Trent - good damages + VERY tough
- Trent - decent damages + faster than Ancient Trent
- Faunt - bad damages, good skills though + resurrect plants.
- Spitting Thorn - Main Damages dealer in the group
- Royal Thorn - decent damges + very good skill

Retaliation Army:
- Demonologist - bad damges but good summoning and Resurrection skill
- Executor - Great damages, great skill, great abilities.
- Demon - see above
- Royal Griffin - Tough and good skill of summoning another unlimited retaliation ally.
- Griffin - Good damages and very tough with right protection.

Move-one-more army:
- Paladin
- Jarl
- Demon
- Executor
- Orge

[torquemada]

Doom + Hel's Messenger does crazy damage, I've seen 65k so far. Ofcourse it depends on the stack size.

[ElCapitanSergio]

Here I am, several years later trying the game and looking for a good combination. Guess I should have tried it long ago before loosing tons of troops but whatever...
I found the Rune mages + Demonologists + Jarls + Warrior Maidens to work very good (2 stacks of rune mages)
I usually cast armaggedon lvl. 2, spawn demons with Demo, then clone 2 stacks and summon as well, then just let the demons weaken the enemy and resurrect some troops with the maiden and 2 remaining clones of Demo before enemies get crushed by the summoned demons and clones.