marauders: a good unit on impossible mode
 

I hired some marauders in Debir and was very impressed by its search ability. They can search corpses twice and generate about 600~700 gold in each battle , which helps a lot on impossible mode. :grin:

Compared to guardsmen, marauder is a little weak but have an ability to attack one space away from the enemy, which is really useful since I am trying to achieve no casualty. The downside is the morale of priests is lowered by the robber property, but it's not a big deal to me.

Please excuse me if everyone knows this already. I am really thrilled by this game. After the disappointing Heroes of Might and Magic IV and the end of 3DO, I gave up on this kind of strategy game. I never tried HOMM V since I heard it's made by some Russian company. I have to admitted that I was biased toward PC game companies in Europe and I am glad that I was wrong. I still don't like the storyline and dialogue of armored princess but I enjoyed the tactics part a lot.

Should I give HOMM V a try? Any comment is appreciated.

By the way, some posts said trap is a good spell. Could someone tell me the reason? I just started the game recently and now I am at the second island. Being a hardcore strategy fan, I am proud (or stupid:rolleyes:) to start my first game on impossible mode.

Depends on if u have money problems, but in my case i never had money problems on impossible so marauders are useless for me. And for a low level stack unit, royal snakes are faaar better than marauders. Trap is good for maintain the enemy in place, but sometimes (and on impossible mode almost all the times) the enemy will evade the trap taking another way, so u can use the trap to mark the path u want the enemy troop to make. But I played a lot impossible matches, and i never use trap anymore, maybe sometimes (i did an abuse of trap spell some games a go only for raising the trap medal). But there are a lot of powerfull spells, not only trap.

About HOMM V, its not a bad game if u played it 6 - 8 years ago, but nowadays i really dont recommend it to anyone. I looked at it some days ago and the graphic quality is just horrible (as logical so u cant use high resolutions), and the fight system almost the same. The good thing is that u can hire a lot of races/factions, but the bad graphic quality makes that u cant stand in front of the screen more than 10 minutes.

HOMM V is on my hard disk only because of multiplayer/hot-seat mode.
Apart from that, KB is superior in almost any aspect

Thanks for the detailed replies. I am relieved to hear that money is not going to be a problem later.

N3MES1S, you are right about royal snakes. They are very good and form my first line of defense. (The only complain I have is why they don't have 9 heads:roll:) I used marauders to replace guardsmen because I want to avoid casualty. I hesitated when I made the decision since I was not sure whether it's worth the cost. But it proved to be a good investment and I am going to keep marauders in the army for a longer time.

And thanks for the comments about HOMM V. I will stick with armored princess then. I am just missing 3DO and Strategic Simulations Inc.

p.s. For members here never try marauder's search ability. Here's some information. After one typical battle in Debir, the prize was about 150 golds, two chests dig offered about 100~500 golds or some scroll, and marauders found about 600~700 golds. (Sorry I can't be more accurate because I have the game at home.)

mauraders die easily later on;-)

but i gues u ain't going for a no casualty so should be fine


and about homm5 it's a great game;-)


mostly because it got a nice mp feat
u can battle your strats vs other players

kb:ap is gonna get boring after some time when u know u can beat all with ease and have no more challenge


homm5 got a nice story line though;-)

Homm5 is at least more VISUALLY impressive. It's not a bad game either, just not as solid on the mechanics as KBAP is.

As for Marauders... I think you will realize like most people do, that the money they make from looting corpses ends up not comparing to the extra money you pay to replace the losses for them. And then You'll get Demonologists, dragons, or Beholders or something, and never switch back.

Trap is good because it can 'negate' the turn of an opposing unit if used correctly, and on certain choke-pointy battle arenas can slow down a large number of enemies.

WTF????

more visually impressive??? lol. u should be talking about another game. I played HOMM V 2 weeks ago and the graphics are really really bad. The thing is, if u have an old monitor that only supports lower resolutions, maybe the graphics are not too bad for you. But i dont see the sense on playing HOMM V, even with the multiplayer (btw the online mode is almost killed). If u have AP, u can try HOMM V, but i dont see the point.

About trap, if u raise its level to 3, and have good intellect, traps are awesome, but u need to raise it to the maximum level, if not, on higher levels the only thing that trap do is to slow the enemy, but the damage is useless.

Well, HoMM V most definitely have much better unit death animations. And the town fly-by camera (plus those town music) are awesome when you first started playing. :)

I won't compare HoMM V to KB - IMO they are focusing on different area. I have Civilization V + Beyond the Sword (only for playing Fall from Heaven 2 mod), HoMMV plus its two expansions, plus KB:AP installed. They are different types of strategy games and each serve their purposes well.

This is not topic about HOMM V vs KB. Tt was discussed many times already.

Better unit death animations??? lol... well if u say so. A 7 frames animations on hoom v.. AP is far better in all aspects.

JUN006, now u are using royal snakes and marauders, but on later islands u will discard marauders for sure (they are useless on later islands) and royal snakes are better, but maybe u will discard em too for a better level 4 unit.

So... you wanna hook a brother up with that CIV 5? Shouldn't FFH3 be on that? How does it work with Hexes?

Thank you everyone for the replies. It's a nice surprise to see so many helpful replies appeared. :-)(consider how quiet the forum was.)

Now I am on the second island and won exactly 30 fights without loss. Here are the details of the army.

Royal Snakes 32/32 (I brought some reserves when I left Debir.)
Inquisitors 19/19
Royal Thorns 3/5 (I almost missed it.)
Archmages 5/10
Marauders 44/65

Archmages are very useful to me so I have to kick priests out of the team. (hard decision consider that Amelie is a warrior and haven't learned order magic yet, so no heal spell) Well, it's not as hard as I thought, at least I don't need to use heal scrolls. And marauders are pretty active as a secondary melee unit with a high initiative 6 and swiftly strike.The bonus from marauders is about 700*15battles = 8500 extra golds. I have bought a snake boots 6000 golds, officer's baton 8000 gold, pirate's halberd 20,000 golds(+3 attacks, 5% extra gold after battle)

Now I am ready for Bolo with 2056 leaderships and a scroll Call Colossus. So what do you think is the best 5 unit? I want to keep marauders as long as possible;) Right now I am thinking about getting a red dragon. Amelie's mana pool is only 12:-( and I can't imagine how to take full advantage of black dragon. Or there are better choices?

p.s. kcwong, I assume you were talking about CIV IV, not CIV V, right? I just checked the official site again and the release date is this fall.:grin:

Red Dragon. Why settle for second best? It is also exactly in line with your leadership right now.

And I'm going to predict at about level... 15 you'll stop using Marauders. Depends on how Rusty Anchor goes. Just a hunch.

To the author: King's bounty is also a made by a russian company. They understand gametesting is the way to get a better and more balanced game. I wonder if it would be a bestselling game, had they hired som decent marketing employees...?

Anyhow. I used those Marauders alot in my first playthrough. The extra gold harvested was usually worth more than the casualty cost. However I learned that getting some higher hp troops, or some summoning troops can eliminate the fear of loosing units at all. and eventually that will get you rich.

But if you already had 30 no-loss fights before Bolo, I'm pretty sure, you'll have no trouble reaching the final phases of the game. That is, if you aren't palying on easy.

Trap can stop even black dragons, who are immune to spells. Just place the trap, where the dragon will land. With tactics you can place two adjecent troops and spread the rest. This way you'll lure the dragon to move, where you want it to. Any other lvl5 unit immune to slow/fear/sheep etc. can be stopped by a trap. AND you can benefit from the huge dmg + poison bonus added by upgrading it to lvl 3 with a mage.

maybe not THE best spell in the game, but certainly one of the better

except for the thing that on impossible mode, even if u drop a trap where u think the dragon will land, dragon will land on another place, xD. Almost i discarded the trap spell (well, i didnt need it anyways) for that reason. I only used trap on impossible to change the path the enemy will take. But with a warrior, it is hard to raise trap to level 3 and with good dmg.

i find trap a perfect spell

not only it stops units who use running(which is really nice)

it could also lead to trapping their own units

and combined with a fireball/fire rain/ ice snake after

it's boom boom:)

AI doesn't change with difficulty settings. Maybe because there is no real AI and only some game mechanics, whick works similar on all difficulties?

If you place two non-fireresistant units adjecent to each other and the ohers spreaded out, the Black Dragon will ALWAYS fly to the same place. Its because game mechanics will tell it, that here it will do the most damage. If you leave the opportunity to use the ability however, the BD will instead fly across the units, since now this is the most damaging attack.

works with easy to Impossible setting.

Well, i really dont know if the ia changes on impossible, but the fact is, everytime i tried to place a trap in front of the supossed place the dragon will land, it flies to an adyacent trap cell and attack another enemy, even if that enemy is fire resistant. Maybe is just random luck, i need to say that now always happens and sometimes the dragon places on the trap. But that is not happening too many times xD. Maybe is something with the army configuration or something else, i really dont know.

the ai is random when it places dragons
or movements paths
based on your unit position and spell usage

I just did some gametesting to prove my point.

I loaded an old impossible mage save game, and quicksaved outside the dragon cave in Montero. I then replayed the fight a dozen times with different lineups. I had 2 stacks of shooters incl. droids, Black dragons 2 Melee tanks and 2 melee dmg dealers to mix the lineup as much as possible.

I only had Tactics level 1, and couldn't afford to buy enought Might Runes to get it to level 2. That means I could only make the enemy land in 4 different places, where I could lure them to land in a mine using the 2 adjecent units strategy. A more comprehensive testing would force me to load an older game and save those extra might runes for this test. Also I should try it in different difficulties, but I'm simply to lazy for this.

In a dozen attemps and with more than 20 mines I didn't fail one single time. There were 2 stacks of Black Dragons in the enemy army, and both dragons landed on a mine every single time no matter what units, I used as scapegoats, and no matter where I placed them. As long as I made sure that only 2 places on the battlefield could the enemy hit 2 units at once. It's failproof.

I haven't studied the game mechanics, but there is no such thing as an AI. An AI would not land on the mine, but mechanics telling the troop to hit where it hurts most will.

Also when the enemy keeps shooting at those repair droids despite their high defence, it's not because the troops are "clever". It is because, the game mechanics has put more "aggro" in som units, than others.

When the trap placement occasionnally fails, it's usually because there are several equally good places to put the trap. Or there simply is nowhere to hit more than 1 target with the breath.

If a trap is invisible to the AI (as it should be), the move makes perfect sense.

Yep, and the Mechanics also tell the enemy what unit of yours is the most difficult (IE, number of unit*HP and also taking into consideration what damage it can inflict). Repair droids are quite sturdy and numerous for a shooter. And just wait until you meet enemy mages or creatures with magic attacks, they will always go for them with spells...

Dear god, so much gold
 

On my current no loss impossible, with minimal kiting (some maps were left completely open some reason) mage, I had something like 500k after clearing verona and selling every duplicate scroll I could find. To be fair I also bought every item available for neatness lvl 3. The point being, I looted every corpse ever, and some verona stacks will net you 5k. Incidentally, I was lugging around 23/400 marauders. Ancient phoenixes ftw. You only need to dig for runes and scrolls.