Trouble with Bass Azz Beholders in the Mines

[jfp3]

Ok so now I'm doing the Creighton Mines...and there is a nasty horde of High Level Beholders in there. Can anyone enlighten me as to the best troops to use to go after them? My humans keep getting put to sleep. Are Thorn Warriors and Bears suitable? Snakes and Fireflys maybe?

Help!

[Quelthos]

What are the best units you have access to? You listed a lot of melee units. Archmages, cannoneers, and beholders are probably good choices because they can hit from range, have decent health, and shouldn't be as likely to fall asleep. You could also put glot's armor on a ranged unit if you have it. You could use something like fireflies + haste to cross the map quickly, but you risk them being isolated vs. any enemy ground troops. Gryphons with some form of shield spell might be a better choice.

[jfp3]

Thanks for the input. Can't get the Griffons until I find more of the red ore in the Mines to complete the quest. Was offered them when the crown was returned, but when I went back to get them (I thought they'd be good here too), they were no longer offered. Nice but frustrating twist in the game.

Yeah I'll try non-human units for this one. They are harder to defeat than the damn Ahey castle with the same force make up (mine).

[Vilk]

Beholders attack with magic and evil beholders has their special talent that can be disturbing. That's probably not a tactic available to you but target level 3 plus stoneskin at first round with Archimage shield is a good tactic to use on Archimage that are magic protected from base. You could even try this with stoneskin at second round if you cannot cast two spells.

If you face only normal beholders then target level 2 is enough.

If you already has lena ball a good move is also use it in this way: has a unit that wait end of turn and take care to let open some long straight path to enemy unit. Then before moving your last unit throw the ball where it is the best to damage highly one Beholder stack. I like combine this, when possible, with the tactic mentioned above against beholders. The lena ball does 100% more damages for each square run until enemy unit is hit.

EDIT: A secondary option against evil beholder is to use mass haste to have all your units moving before a large stack of them so this pack cannot use its special attack against one of your units. You probably didn't organized you character to be able to do all of that but that's definitely possible to have at this point of the game and quite sooner, except the lena ball.

[jfp3]

Yeah good tactic to try there V. I don't have the Lena Ball spell yet but looking forward to it :-)

I did however get in there with a maxed out stack of high level Snakes, and Spiders - Bears, Wolves and a huge stack of Lake Fireflies. I took out the Beholders easier than I would have thought....and raced with the Rage to take out 2 more large enemy stacks. The last fight was rough though and I ended up with only a handful of bears & snakes, and about half of the Spiders left over. All in all it was a great, but costly run. BTW, Beholders can put pretty much anything to sleep. So it was good to find that out for the future.

Having cleaned out the Mines and gotten the Ore for the Dwarf Gilt - I went back and finished the Griffin Painting quest and ....it was nice to see he once again offered me a huge stack of Griffins for sale.

I now head to Upper Hadar at the head of a huge Human Army with Griffin support. This will be fun :-)

[Razorflame]

human armies are the worst to have:)

you might reconsider taking humans
the only 2 god human units are(and ONLY b/c of their abilities) inqi's and archimages

[DGDobrev]

I disagree :) Human armies are pretty good. Keep in mind that Calinda had a mostly human army in his quick victory - with most of his army being archers, inquisitors, archmages and horsemen. He did have cannoneers and the 2 types of archers from the elves.

It's easy to revel in the power of the skeleton archers with dragon arrows, the power of target + faeries and dryads, but all of this is generally costly to replenish, especially time-wise.

EDIT: Wait till you get Armored princess. You're going to love the humans there. Paladins (resurrects everything in the surrounding 6 cells around them and are decent tanks) + Archmagi (still have magic shield) + inquisitors (still good 1-time resurrect) + gift + some resurrection + pretty much any other troop will do means you're in for slim to none losses in the battle.

[jfp3]

At this point I'm down to only 1 full stack of Archmages available to me and I left them at the King's Castle for future use. They seem to be hard to come by now. Unless of course I will find more availble to me in the Dwarven Lands, I'll be leaving the Archmages safe for a while. If I had brought them into the mines, I'm sure most of them would have been toast by now.

[Vilk]

Human Archer aren't that good nor priests. Priest are excellent units at the beginning because of their healing talent and wide availability. After that priest becomes almost useless. In fact almost all human units aren't good but Inqui and Archmage that are required for a record, Horsemen and Knights that are excellent, Sea Dog that are very good.

Calinda game doesn't reflect the best choice in general but more an excellent choice and perhaps the best for the special constraints involved to achieve such record.

For example:

With Anga Ruby, a women army is extremely powerful. But getting that Ruby and attempt finish the game in 7 days is probably totally incompatible.
One point is about resources available. The only strong unit available at the beginning are Horsemen.
Another point is about using warrior and lack of magic support, with stronger magic support Knights are quite more interesting than with few magic and no Higher Magic skill.
One more point is that when attempting such record you don't have time to make many change to your army and the Calinda final setup is certainly very well balanced for most type of fights.
I'm using Cursed Ghosts is it's clear that in many fights with a mage they are a better choice than Horsemen.
Calinda setup has a strong weakness, no lower level close combat units allowing using time back sooner, that's a huge disadvantage until you get that ability to use it on horsemen, this can take a lot of time.