Beating Spider-boos

[laffwis]

Hi, i found out how you can beat the spider boss in lower hardar (?)

the first time i fight against him i lost badly because i was focussing on the spiders the boss threw into battle. but the point is that everytime you beat one stack of them the boss throws in stronger ones. so i changed my tactics. and be aware that the boss changes its positon! keep that in mind!

what we do is basically attack him with our hero's spells and from the distance. i fought him with alchemists, orc shamanes as distance fighters and some strong units with high HPs and defence level during that time of the game, like bears!

the basic tactic is, you keep all the spiders away from the your shamanes and alchemists and dont fight them!!!!! (just concentrate on the spider since it has pretty much HPs (20.000 i think)

so when you start the battle, the best you place the distance-troops in the middle between your meelee-combatant and leave the distance-troopers at the edge of the field. next to do is you surround the distance-troops with your meelee-troops and protect them. but leaving one square free for the healing totem of the shamane, which heals your troops after every round!!!!

the advantage of the alchemists and the shamanes are, they have very powerfull spells. which do a lot of damage from the distance and recharge!

now fight the boss with your "fire arrow" spell, very effective and cheap (should be upgraded to leve 3 already), just concentrate on firing at him with your spells and your distance-troops and dont attack the spiders with your troops, they are just there to keep them away from your distance-troops. if you attack them, that means they attack you twice a turn, one time through retaliation and and the second time in their turn. so just ignore and keep passive.

but thats not it, the boss will changes its position and then your distance-troopers will be directly next to the spider. dont attack him (so he wont attack you) after he changes his position again. during that time use your hero spells.

it worked quite well with this method. hope you try out and give feedback :)

[PHJF]

Really? he only ever throws stacks of ~70-170 venemous spiders, which can most often be killed in a single attack. Then he often wastes and *entire* turn simple changing positions, which has nearly no effect on your ability to destroy him.

[Saridu]

Not so PHJF the spider stacks get bigger and bigger (Like the Kraken) as he resummons them, in the end he was dropping down 350 spider stacks!

Nice strat but I faced it completely differently, I'm a paladin by the way.

My first attempt he wore me down (and I was at the start of the dwarven quest), so the second time, after I had finished the dwarves I went back in with , cannoneers, swordsman, dwarves, polar bears and something else, but those were the main components. Right, nighttime tactis maxed (It works underground as well) and Frenzy maxed. Cast mass haste and my swordsman and dwarves and bears went wild, basically for every unit they killed the frenzy gave them enough att to kill the next summoned stack. Cannoneers just sat in the middle and Salvoed once in a while.

[Raider]

Hmm, if you want the boss levels to be easier simply play on impossible difficulty :) Seriously, the main quests are incredibly easy on this difficulty level, i have more problems with random walking monters on the map

I beat the spider boss without taking any damage whatsoever. I was lvl 17 at the time, my army composition - Canoneers, inquisitors, evil eyes, cavaliers and royal snakes. This is one of the only battles where i actually used fits of energy or however the spell is called but it wasn't necessary

The stacks don't grow but instead depend on the spider's healts - from 50k to 33.333 health the spider throws 130-240 spiders to reach something like 250-400 for when the health is below 10k and the spider teleports for the last time. Anyway almost all the units were able to inflict enough damage to kill the little spiders from the first shot and after that i used the remaining troops to inflict damage on the spider queen

[Writhan]

I took out spider as level 17 mage with the current spec:

Army:
Dwarfs (High morale)
Giants (High morale)
Cannoneer (High morale)
Cyclops (Normal morale)
Evil Beholders (Normal morale)

Spells:
Flame arrow (Rank 3 ~900 damage)
Teleport

Strategi:
Nearly every single turn, I flame arrowed the spider boss. Only when I was abit overrun with spider babies, I smacked them one instead. I had my archers placed in the center of the screen, and simply kept shooting at him. Nothing special here. What I noticed however, was whenever I engaged him with a melee unit, he either hit me, or summoned new spiders. So what I did was, simply place either my dwarfs or my giants in his face, so he had a choice what to do. It didn't matter to me if he hit them, as they could take a huge beating. I never attacked him with them, I simply just placed them on defensive stance so they took less damage. Whenever he digs down, and moves to a new location, I teleported one of the tanker units (Whichever one could reach him) over to him immidiately. Worked wonders.

I tried earlier by letting him spam summon spiders (Not engaging in melee), which resulted in me getting massively overrun eventually.

Good luck though.

[ureal]

rather easy boss I used royal snakes cast berserk on it and just let it lose on the boss, I place my range units in the middle and use my shamans to summon death totem and life totems. My range units attacked the spider, my griffin attack the smaller spiders.

[Gatts]

on easy and normal dif both kraken and spidy where no real issue for any combination of army I had.

But on Hard and Impossible it started to be an issue.
Both spidy or kraken fights can cause a lot of trouble as even if the boss is defeated, still the hatchlings are there (when the combat takes too long, it starts to be like real problem : in Kraken 2x 500 devilfish and raising each next turn, with spidy even more spiders are summoned, and not only 2 stacks but 3 or four).

As I didn't want to wait till my firepower (leadership mostly) is on much higher level, I beat both kraken and spidy with undead army (problem is that only ghosts and vamps survived... where the funny thing is that gosts even if not controlable later on, survived with + 100% ~ 500% more than at the beginning. :)

Vamps on the other hand are great as have no retaliation - so they can attack the boss w/o any reaction.

If undead are not the choice for you, Kraken can be beated by bandits and snakes (both have distant attack - which does not provoke retaliation, in the other rounds they can clear devilfishes)
also it is good to have one unit stack that is not of high importance to you but has enough health (casting stone skin or other defence spells helps too) let this unit stay near the boss (spidy or kraken) so the boss will attak instead of summon... by this you can protect your archers much better.

For the spidy are snakes and bandits not the best units (are far to weak, well, the blue snake kings are not weak, but I mostly ever had better units already) so here I would advise to build (if bandits nor undead is a solution for you) army of archers and duplicate them with CLONE spell, defending them with one strong army (like giants?)

[Llam4]

I managed to farm this boss for almost an entire level with minimal casualties. When I killed the boss, it was dropping stacks of almost 600 spiders.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v206/Llam4/spiderboss.jpg

I had about 8,500 leadership so I had within 10% of the max:
Giants
Shamans
Alchemists
Cannoneers
Archmages

First, I started my units in a position where they could all easily fit in a corner. I put my giant up front by the spider (until he moved) to take damage instead of spawn spiders on some turns, and I could heal the troop every turn. Immediately, I had my shaman troop build a wall of totems around my army. 7 stomping giants in conjunction with multiple death totems proved very effective against the mass spawns of spiders. I dedicated the Alchemist and Archmage troops to helping pick off spiders. My giants stomped every other turn, and hit the boss every other turn (while it was on the correct side). My shamans were constantly building totems, I even used "gift" a couple times to speed it up. My cannoneers were the majority of damage to the boss, using their triple cannonball attack. The rest of the time they helped pick off mobs.

By the time the boss was down within 1k HP the spiders were up to 550 stacks and were starting to tear down my totems. I didn't lose any units until the final turn, when 2 stacks got to my alchemists/cannoneers.

[Daedalus]

had 5400 leadership, beaten the boss after 28 turns of combat with me 2 cyclopses, 3 giants, 30 shammies, 30 evil beholders and 21 alchemists (which did nothing), lost 1 giant, 1 shaman and 3 evil beholders.

trick i used was to phantom my shamans four times and put wards all over the place so the spiders always landed next to my giants which got healed every so often by the lifewards and the dancing axes.

[LiveInABox]

^^yeah same here. just got to this boss...8800 leadership, level 15 (well 16 now after beating him). He was easy (on normal diff). I lost a few bears that was it..

Polar bears (50)
Giants (5)
Shamans (45)
Royal Snakes (140)
Evil Beholders (45)

Royal snakes were on beserk and killing the spiders that dropped in 1 hit and doing massive damage to the boss, the bears were focused on the boss doing 2000+ with the odd bless, shamans were phantomed and using totems and magic axes (great spell) and the beholders were doing decent damage to the boss as well. The Giants did nothing much except take damage..dont like em, way too slow and both the pound and their main attack are pretty weak i think.

[LiveInABox]

actually changed my mind, giants are really usefull for keeper battles..

[barnabas_666]

I think strategy with totems is very funny :grin:

cca 11 totems
http://a.imageshack.us/img443/1082/totems2j.jpg

2 griffins lost, because I had no mana to cast Gift on Inquisitors
http://a.imageshack.us/img830/3927/spiderend.jpg

[gogolmax]

Great tactics, folks!

It was handy to leave Feanora as a frog, this increases attack of spiders by 100%.
Hint: Kiss her only after the battle :-)

I managed to beat the giant spider with a Level 15 hero using:
Dwarves (High morale)
Cannoneers (High morale)
Giants (High morale)
Miners (High morale)
Alchemists (High morale)

It was a rather tough battle and I lost many troops, using "frog-shaped" Feanora and using Giants instead of hyenas ("earthquakes" are handy for those hordes of spiders) did the trick.
I also tried to attack the spider queen as much as possible, except for the giants who earthquaked or hit some spider troops.

Not a very original tactic compared to your results, but maybe some additional hints...

Cheers, gogol