Defender of the Crown thread
 

*Mods, can we please have sub-folders for each of the new campaigns?*

I thought I'd have a play around with this mini campaign first, given as it's the smallest of the three new versions of the game. For my first game, I tried an Impossible Warrior and promptly got thrashed in the second fight. I had a poor variety of troops at my disposal, and so I had to go with a team of both types of droid, Beholders, Griffins and Alchemists. I wasn't happy with these guys at all.

For my second game I am playing a Hard Warrior and I'm happier with the selection of troops. I managed to score 2 Paladins straight away, as well as Royal Griffins, Evil Beholders, Guardsmen and Bowmen. I'm happier with this team but we'll see how we go....

I wonder how you use the editor to make it so that you can play defender of the crown campaign but without those special arenas? I'd like to play it so that the enemy armies are bigger but the arenas are normal so the enemy doesnt have advantage because of the arena.

Well, I like the fact that there are few battles but each is unique. So the second battle is the lightning field, and the third the barracks. This 3rd battle was very difficult due to my being outnumbered and of course the barracks spawning more units. I managed to win in the end (on Hard) after 33 rounds, but I definitely should have tried to take the barracks down earlier. I have been using a lot of the lightning ball to thin the enemy out as my main dragon attack.

Team of Paladins, Royal Griffins, Demonologists (love these guys!), Guardsmen and Inquisitors. Everything ended up getting chomped except for the Paladins, but the Demonologists are worth their weight in gold for the Demons that they spawn. And I love the fact that this isn't a one-off ability. Shame there's not an unlimited supply of them.

So now I am left with a measly 6 Paladins, but 185k to build up my team for the next fight. Really liking Defender of the Crown - for someone who's played KB for a long time now, I really appreciate having less fights of greater challenge than more fights of lesser challenge.

I too, really like Defender of the crown, it brings a diversity to the table that neither AP or TL had, namely battles where winning is everything, and it doesn't really matter if you wipe your army, because you'll want to replace it anyway. Plus the unique terrain of each battle.

Especially the 'twist of the twist' in the last battle. Won't spoil it as I assume most people haven't reached it yet :)

I got as far as the barracks with my impossible mage game, in the first 2 fights my complete army got wiped. I'm still not sure if doing the quest for 20k is worth it or not, I only had money left for 2-3 full stacks of units.

i don't have the game yet, but i would love to join the theory crafting!

care to include more details so i can do things on paper?!;)

I just beat my Impossible Mage of Defender of the Crown. Sorry, I could not do it with No-Loss.

I scored around 684 or so, I suppose all that experience from playing the normal game really paid off. Although the score seems semi-low.

I abused the Summon Phoenix spell.

I definitely like this type of game play since you have enough resources to fork to different strategies yet, you don't have any way to "farm" up your resources either.

I really love this game. Phoenix spell never really worked for me in my set up... Hundreds of strategies are possible

So Impossible can be done, which is great. Looking forward to playing this one extensively. :-P

Well, I finished my Hard Warrior game. It was very easy in the second half. Impossible is definitely the difficulty to play on in future. I did enjoy it though. You could probably play an Impossible campaign in 2 hours or so, which is great for one session, and because of the random nature of it, it will be necessary to use different troops. Great.

So yeah, wow. This is actually tricky. I tried it once or twice and kept feeling that I must be doing something wrong.

The luck of the draw here is super huge though. My first try, the first battle had a bunch of Choshas, and Gobots as the army... causing a large number of constantly spawning and powering up bad guys to deal with. Uggh.

I rather dislike the dragon usage in this. Since you don't start with any good XP granting abilities, you have a really hard time getting to 'the good stuff' with him, making it especially hard on a Warrior. Doubly so since more leadership doesn't help if you can't afford a real army.

Well, I was going to try a no loss Impossible game, but I don't see how I can do it. I thought Mage would be possible, but when you start the game you either get the first stack being the Choshas/Gobots or Demon Army/Fire Arrow. I thought it might be possible just to use both type of droids (with the medallion that reduces leadership for them) but I can't seem to keep them alive long enough for no losses.


Anyone got through this first first on Impossible without loss? I thought it would depend on initial army selections but I can't find any tough units like Trolls etc.

well...this is as far as i can get under impossible-no-loss-mage with only droids(no engineering badge)

the snake boss on the dock is too much for me because all the magic-damage-units that he brings...

maybe its possible if you save/load for a good game where the snake boss brings mostly physical-damage-units.

I had landed on Rhea to finish the Orc March and decided I had done this one enough. I went to the menu and selected Crown and it restarted the game?

Can't just go form one campaign to another, without restart?

No. I guess they all use a different session file, which is loaded as the game starts.

It's not that much of a pain :)

So no losses on Impossible is currently looking uh....Impossible? :-P

if we can obtain some really OP artifacts/scrolls through restarting.

then we will need to save/load repeatedly in the first 3 fights(merchant/2 boss) such that we obtain 3 wanderer scrolls/expensive scrolls so that we can sell them for gold and buy those OP artifacts/scrolls. and don't forget to sell those scrolls you begin the game with.

we will also need to buy some artifacts that we can upgrade (upgrade means more fight, which then means more chests which means more gold, not mentioning more experience)using invis + green dragon, or somehow abuse the night time regeneration of troll skin...

it's DEFINITELY doable, but is it even a remotely enjoyable process, i doubt it.

Yeah, I was worried that it would be tedious, so I'm giving up on no-losses for now. In my Impossible Mage game, I decided to do the 20,000 fight for medals straight away, given that I didn't have much to spend my money on due to puny leadership. It's useful given that you will also advance a level, meaning that the Mage can either have Distortion 2 or Order 2. I decided for Order because of Healing and Summon Phoenix.

So the first proper fight either seems to be against gobots etc or scoffer imps. I got the imps this time. It's probably possible to no-loss this fight with just the two droid stacks (I've got the leadership medallion), but the Mage has such low leadership that I only had I think 11 Repair Droids and 7 of the other ones. The enemy hero keeps using Fire Arrow on the droids, and my Phantom spell is only at 25%, meaning that I'm only getting 2 phantomed Droids. Hence I can't seem to keep the droids healthy enough to manage no-losses like this. I suspect it would be easier as a Warrior with higher leadership.

So I bought some comparatively high hp units, Griffins and Alchemists, and did things the straightforward way. Ancient Phoenix is a godsend here and you can use the cursed crosses to take down the enemy (just gotta keep your units of the way - which is hard as the imps cast that enrage ability). Managed to get through this for the loss of 2 Alchemists and 2 Griffins. Possibly I could have chosen Distortion 2 for the increased Phantom power, and then done the droid only path, but I suspect that this won't work in subsequent fights anyway, and you really need summoned units such as the Phoenix.

That's as far as I got so far. :)

actually i just finished the first island with no loss!!! of course impossible, and of course mage!!!(i don't think it's doable with another class, at least not as easily)

engineering badge + droid team + stacking int and leadership is the way to go. i got lucky with the lightening boss, his one group of 50 gorgul was blocked by his own brontor haha.

but the hardest fight has to be the snake boss on the dock, boy i had to load like 10 times! things would look good and then he starts icesnake or his toops get a lucky crit and i would have to start all over again...i am so happy that i killed him!!!

so i guess no loss is possible then!

please find attached my SS of fighting the snake boss and my equipment+talent setup!

apparently in the next phase, you won't be able to buy droids, so, before you leave the first island, buy lots of droids!

first fight on the second island is not easy, luckily i managed to keep my no-loss status!

had to save/load quite a few times because book of evil sometimes really hurts.

next fight also no loss!

i am going to bed, i am right before the final fight of the second phase.

As a paladin I got enough leadership to pick up red dragons after the first fight, and fought the rest of the battles with no losses... but not the first one.

That one seems to be a bit of a 'luck of the draw' scenario. I can totally imagine a split stack of repair droids and an engineering badge being nice... but the odds of getting that doesn't seem very good.

I wish that your budget for items was separate from your budget for troops.

Hi guys, I haven't played much KBCW since SC2/work/family is keeping me busy right now, but it looks quite nice!

Just thought I'd mention, AFAIK, your initial dialogue determines what the army composition of the first enemy would be: lizardmen, orcs, or demons. So for example if you plan on restarting a game till you get elves for their ents/ancient ents, then don't take on the demons (imps) or the orcs (catapults).

Interestingly enough in the first battle the lizardmen seem to have the most melee, allowing the 2 curse crosses and even the 2 walls to help a lot.

EDIT:

Experience chart used for DotC seems to be different from the other 3 campaigns. I noticed this from the bug that exists in the high score screen; a KBAP game I finished at level 61 jumped to level 65 while displaying the same ending XP amount. This is not the case when I try to view the same high score entry when the other 3 campaigns are "loaded" (the game is restarted to "load" a different campaign from the current one "loaded").

While given the shortness of this campaign it makes sense to make it easier to level up your character, it would have made more sense to maintain a different high score screen for each of the campaigns, or use a different formula to make a high score in one campaign comparable to another.

Hi loreangelicus! I've been playing a lot of SC2 myself, and KB:C, and work and family. :) For those who are new, this guy is one of the masters of King's Bounty games, so listen to him!

I did not realise that that dialogue choice at the beginning did anything! Thanks for the heads-up.

I'm trying Impossible Mage No losses myself with a different army setup. Good old humans - Paladin (only 3 of them - very annoying given that for the third fight I could have had 6), Horsemen, Royal Griffin and Archmage. The third fight was especially difficult given that the enemy hero loves to spam fireballs. Couldn't use my Royal Thorns for this very reason. Finally managed to do it without loss after many reloads. The tactic is to use level 3 Ancient Phoenix (VERY useful here) and Demon Portal 1/Healing 3. Not easy at all. Most importantly, you've got to avoid having any 3 of your units in adjoining hexes, or you'll get a fireball on your head. VERY difficult given that you'll need to have units clustered together for the Paladin's resurrection if you lose a single unit. I finally managed to do it without need for resurrection, but it was about 10 tries before I got it.

So 3/6 fights down with human + Royal Griffin build. :cool:

I did it!

At last, I managed to finish my Impossible Mage game. I used human troops on the first island and the first fight on the second island. Then I switched to a single Emerald Dragon for the 5th fight, which proved very easy, and just 2 Emerald Dragons for the last fight.

The final fight was VERY difficult like this, and took many reloads. Here's how I eventually did it. I had been using Ancient Phoenix as my main attacking weapon (see my combat statistics in that regard :cool:) but I found it not so useful on this last mission as it died too quickly. I was really struggling and thought I might not be able to do it when I found the Peacefulness spell for sale.

So Peacefulness on Emeralds Dragons -> 1200 hp. Then alternate Magic Spring III (which the Mage starts with - luckily), Healing III when required, and most important Avenging Angel III to actually damage the enemies. This involved a LOT of flying around the map to get into corners where the weakest enemies would hit my ED. For mana, I was getting +4 a round early on, and was using Mana Accelerator and the ED's Mana Drain. All of this sounds good, but it was still very, very marginal. I managed it on about the sixth attempt.

So, we've demonstrated in a few days that Defender of the Crown can be defeated on Impossible with no losses as a Mage. I suspect it would be much harder with the other classes, but if you got a good stack of Paladins I'm sure it could be done.

Had a lot of fun doing this - DotC is great as there's NO GRINDING at all. Just six main fights, all of which pose different challenges.

First off, congratulations! The Phoenix definitely looks promising for the mage for this low to mid level campaign.

And thanks for the intro. :) Though I must say that I don't play KB as much as the other hard-core KBers since I only complete each game once.

Anyways, things I noticed for this campaign:

1) One day campaign, and doable very quickly. Trolls seem to spawn at the latter shops, so Impossilbe-(any class) could just finish the last few battles at night and still complete it in one day. Stoneskin is everywhere, and Paladin even starts off with Divine Armor.

2) If going for a high score Paladin is the go-to class. Medal (from giving 20k gold) provides +5% XP and Learning 1 provides +10% XP right off the bat. Remember, it is a lot easier to level up in this campaign, so that +XP means a lot. See base score computation below:

(100 + (100 - 1 day))*(1 + (0.02)*(total levels + 1 quest))

So a level 16 character on impossible gets 664, getting +10 to the score for each level higher.

3) Sadly, if you want to grind you still can. I've restarted a couple of games and some spawned many upgradeable items. That means more XP/gold and more chances of grabbing an Ancient Knowledge scroll from a dug up chest. Sure, money is a problem, but you are given a very easy battle at the start to try and dig up a wanderer scroll (which if it is not an AK you could just sell for a lot of gold). Note that just one AK covers more than half of your required battles (not counting item upgrades).

4) Due to the shortness of this campaign it's hard to build up the "perfect army". So you needs troops that are "just great" by themselves. Droids at the start, trolls and dragons at the end.

This is all theory though. Money is definitely a problem for a no-loss high score run to buy your army, upgradeable items, and the decision to give 20k for an extra +5% XP. I'll give this one a try sometime soon. :)

Yes, money is definitely a problem here, especially if you spend the 20,000 initially for the medals like I did. The upgrade items I had were much too difficult initially (of course) but maybe I could have done them before the last fight. I've never been one for trying to maximise the score though. One good thing about DotC - you WILL finish on Day 1. :-P

I play this yeasterday :)

Well done hotfix. Beating the game on Impossible is always a challenge to begin with. Did you manage to do it without losses (can't tell from that screenshot)?

Yesterday I finished the game on Impossible with Paladin. Seemed like the best tactic is to max out the Holly Anger skill and pick Demons as enemies. And it worked, first three battles were pretty easy compared to ones in my previous attempts. Also, 20000 gold for medals seems like too much, but it isn't, especially since you can take 20000 gold from that random guy in the first castle. One or more 5th level units + Healing spell was also very helpful.

Yup! Paladin is definitely the best way to go for an easy run (choosing demons defines your first 3 enemies, then reload/jump to the next island till you get undead), and is also the best way to go for a high score run (Learning 1 right off the bat, then Learning 2 after the super-easy medals battle, then Learning 3 after the 1st serious battle).

Then after the 1st serious battle just get a level 5 Heal-able unit and your off-the-bat Heal 2 just makes it smooth sailing.

Attached are screenshots of my first 2 battles; I even grabbed an Ancient Knowledge scroll on the second battle. After the second battle Trolls and Red Dragons were available, so after doing a test battle with the 3rd enemy using 1 Troll in broad daylight and completely owning that battle with Heal 2, I lost interest and stopped (for now).

Wait, so the random fool in the castle hands you 20k before you leave the 1st island? Great... so much for what seems to be the only challenge left in my game, accumulate/budget money. Not surprisingly enough among the overpowered units/items available after the 1st serious battle a shop was selling FOUR Ancient Knowledge scrolls. 20k a pop (I think I only need one more), and I'm looking at 15k worth of upgradeable items, so I need 35k before leaving the 1st island.

I already have 15k after the 1st serious battle, and would likely get 3k+ each on the next 2 battles. Paladin also starts with Inquisitor's Blade (8,250), Healer's Jacket (3,500), and 3 Divine Armor scrolls (5,400 total). But with an extra 20k I don't even have to sell those items and still purchase an extra AK, 2 total, so 10 battles with AK on (5 sure battles and 5 extra battles for possible item upgrades).

While I think this campaign would have been better if level 5 units were only available on the 2nd island, people would probably have just restarted till they got droids and walked over the first island anyways. Oh well, shorter campaign, easier to abuse. :)

EDIT: (2010-09-24)

Added the screenshot of the next battle. I bought one Troll, placed my 3 Paladins in reserve so that the pet dragon gains a bit more XP, then went to town. Just to show you how overpowered this setup already is I did the combat during the day, so no regeneration to full health every turn for the Troll. As such, I had to use Heal 2 (2 mana, 200+ HP healed per use) every 3 rounds or so. Also note that the enemy hero did not use a single point of his 100 mana pool. I'm guessing he had no direct damage spells and only had a bunch of debilitating spells, most of which don't work on my level 5 Troll.

Started to use the AK for this, got 2,294 XP and level 8; tried the battle without AK and got only 1,638 XP and level 7. On both occasions I already have Learning 3 (+20% XP) and the medal (+5% XP).

I have loose people in the battels... But I dont care about that...Most important is win the battle?

You dont get more points on highscore if you have loose people in the battles?
I see someone here have not loose army in the battels but I get higher highscore :D
What is most important get higher points?

My goal in games is come high on highscore list :-P

I say to each his own, my good man. I know some people on this board who don't care about the score, some people who don't care about no-loss, and some people who don't care about any challenge goals at all and just want to play this game to completion at easy settings.

I, for one, like both the high score and no-loss goals; I'll try to beat your score and post my results here, whether I am successful in beating your high score or not. :)

EDIT:

Screenshot of 3rd "serious" battle, 4th battle if you count the medals battle. 1 Troll in the morning, still no contest whatsoever. More surprisingly is somehow my gold jumped from 15k before this battle to 89k! Screenshot say I only got 16.5k from the battle, plus the 4,200 I dug up via the chest. Must be a reward for completing the 1st island, as I also suddenly got the scroll "Sheep".

So now I can buy all the items and AK scrolls that I want...

Level 11 after this battle; jumped 3 levels from level 8.

so you are rocking a warrior?

no loss so far or?

Yeah you seem to get a cash bonus for reaching the second island - it's in the vicinity of 50,000 gold I believe. Looks like you won't have any trouble with no-losses here. I restarted the game at least 10-15 times and I only had Trolls on the first island once.

Nope, Paladin is the way to go if you want a high score. You get to reach Learning 3 faster (+20% XP) and the XP medal is higher (+5% XP, +3% XP if mage, didn't quite check with warrior). This is because this is a low level campaign, so getting the XP bonus fast via the Paladin class skill tree is more important.

No loss so far, see my screenshots posted a page back showing the first 3 fights. Note that only the 1st serious battle could be considered tough, and it's not even THAT tough. You could spawn as having units from elves, humans, or dwarves. Humans get Paladins, dwarves get droids, elves get... ents? Might as well restart the game if you get elves. :)

Then your dialogue choice dictates what your next 3 enemies would be: lizardmen, orcs, or demons. With the Paladin skill Holy Anger, choosing demons is a given. Did I mention that the Paladin class starts with Exorcism level 2 even though there are zero points in the Distortion Mage skill tree? :)

Troll is not the optimal choice, dragons are better (Reds in particular), and you almost always get dragons after the 1st serious battle. The reason I went Troll is because they are cheaper gold-wise (I thought gold would be scarce) and XP-wise, and as my screenshots show you don't even need to abuse their nighttime regeneration since Paladin starts the game with Heal level 2.

Actually, the easiest and most optimal way to clear the 1st island is to restart the game till you get dwarves for their droids (1 in 3 chance); Engineer's Badge is optional, though it seems to almost always spawn for me whenever I get dwarves. I just continued on with my game since I lucked out and was able to dig up an AK scroll in the 1st serious battle; that definitely offset me spending 4,500 gold total for 3 Paladins whom I don't need anymore once I got 1 Troll.

EDIT: (2010-09-25)

I already mentioned before that the initial dialogue dictates what race your first 3 core enemies would be: lizardmen, orcs, or demons. It should also be noted that when jumping from the 1st island to the 2nd island you also randomly get the race of your next 3 enemies: humans, dwarves, or undead (which completes all 6 race types); just keep on reloading from a previous save from before the jump and you would eventually get your enemy of choice.

This is why going Paladin for this campaign is so overpowered. Not only do you start of with Inquisitor's Blade, Healer's Jacket and 3 scrolls of Divine Armor which you could sell if you don't like them, you also start with Lightning 1, Heal 2, Dispel 2, etc. And most importantly: starts off with Exorcism 2 and could tech up to Holy Anger 3 real quick. So if you take Demons as your first set of enemies and Undead as your next set of enemies... seriously, even just the part where Holy Anger has -15 Defense against enemy demons and undead is IMBA enough.

And it definitely doesn't hurt the Paladin to be the best class to get +XP bonuses.

EDIT: (2010-09-26)

Battles 5 - 8 attached; first suppression battle was an upgrade to Steel Belt, next was an upgrade to Magician's Cloak.

I still have the last battle left, plus a couple more suppression battles. Already using Trolls at night, which may not cut it against the more powerful suppression battles, though the off-the-bat Paladin spells (Peacefulness 3, Divine Armor currently at level 2) plus Diploma of Anti-Magic and the Magician's Cowl help a lot. Worst case scenario, I chicken out and just buy the Black Dragons available at one shop.

Already at level 19, so definitely breaking level 20+ here and breaking the high score mark of 700+ for this campaign. Now if only I had more time to play...

EDIT:

Level 21 after Magician's Cape upgrade suppression battle, screenshot attached.

Apologies for the double-post, but my previous post already had the max 5 attachments.

New bar for the DotC high score set at 763:

Impossible Paladin
Level 26
No-loss

1 medal battle, 6 regular battles, and 6 item suppression battles; 13 battles total. Screenshots of 13th battle and high score highlights and combat statistics attached.

A very interesting ultra-short mini campaign. I had a lot of fun here since I got to use Trolls and Black Dragons, both of which I never used extensively in KBTL and KBAP. :)

when did you get your first troll?

After the 1st demon battle; I have screenshots of my first 9 battles posted on this page and the previous page. This is actually my gripe with this campaign, having level 5 units available after the first serious battle (not counting the medals battle). I had 2 trolls and 1 red dragon available, making succeeding battles in the 1st island very easy.

Below was my unit composition for the battles:

medals battle: 1 paladin
1st demon battle: 3 paladins (this battle unlocked 2 trolls and 1 red dragon)
2nd demon battle: 1 troll
3rd demon battle: 1 troll
1st suppresion battle: 2 trolls
1st undead battle: 2 trolls
2nd undead battle: 2 trolls (this battle unlocked 17 trolls and 13 black dragons)
2nd suppresion battle: 6 trolls
3rd suppresion battle: 7 trolls, 3 black dragons
4th suppresion battle: 8 trolls, 3 black dragons
5th suppresion battle: 9 trolls, 4 black dragons
6th suppresion battle: 9 trolls, 4 black dragons
3rd undead battle: 10 trolls, 4 black dragons

The black dragons made the suppression battles quite easy, and each suppression battle done just made your army all the more stronger: more XP/gold/leadership/hero skills/pet dragon skills. The snowball effect of the suppression battles was only compounded by the fact that I believe they fixed the XP and gold reward system for said battles; a tough suppression battle now gives a commensurate reward (which wasn't the case in KBTL and KBAP), in my case getting as high as 10,847 XP and 55,500 gold (this with applicable paladin skills and item bonuses though).

Like I said before, they could have made this campaign harder by making level 5 units available only in the 2nd island, or maybe even not making them available at all for this short campaign, but everyone would just go dwarves for the droids (though suppression battles with smallish stacks of droids would be a nightmare :)).

in order to reach a high level close to 30:

1, lots of upgradable items for extra experience/gold/scroll. droids are fine, but not good if you do suppression fights, because they are vulnerable to magic.

2, get an ancient knowledge scroll early on. preferably out of the chest you dig out during the 20,000 gold medal fight (first fight)

3, abuse troll's regenerate, it works great, although this isn't really necessary. a resurrection scroll with a balanced team of level 4 units would also do the job, but it would require a lot more time and effort.

A mighty fun campaign. In my opinion, it's more like a learning by doing tutorial, which forces you to carefully evaluate your units, carefully analyze and pick your troop setup, and so on.

You can easily fool around to get a higher level, for all I see. Lore found it out, and good work. However, it does take a lot of fooling around and a lot of digging. There are plenty of upgradeable items though... With level 3 learning and hand of necropolis (it spawns) you can get to a higher level, but it's all the same. This is the next campaign where level 5 units own everything when properly utilized :)

Yup! All of the above, and most importantly, take the Paladin class for a fast-tracked Learning 3 and more powerful +XP medal (sorry Warrior and Mage, no high score for you).

Hi DGD, nice to bump into you again in the forums. :) Nope, (thankfully) it didn't "take a lot of fooling around" as like I mentioned in an earlier post, the same shop that sold 2 Trolls after the 1st demon battle also sold 4 AKs (see screenshot); I already dug up 1AK, so I just bought "two extra". :rolleyes:

I still think level 5 units should be "banned" from low level campaigns like this. Just my 2 cents, though I did enjoy how my Trolls and BDs stomped the living daylights out of everything that crossed their path. :) Imba!

a current game that I am in, impossible, mage, no ancient scroll or any experience artifact, no troll...I managed to do these suppression battles so far with the help of a resurrection scroll I found in one of the shops on the second island:

simple ->runic sword (1)
steel ->spiked boots (1)
novice's dress->dress of the mages(1)
traveler->druidic->staff of the high druid(2)
bronze->silver ring(1)
officer->colonel->general->marshal baton (3)

will do silver->gold ring next time, and then TRY to do silver shoes->perfect shoes.

so if i manage to do the last two, it's 11 suppression battles in total....

please find attached SS my hardest fight so far (general->marshal baton):

a whooping 5340 experience! no troll, so took 150 turns, most of which was used to resurrect my cannon fodders.

regarding class choice: early on paladin would rely too much on having a troll.

also, how does "Holy Armor" work? what does the term "number" mean?

also, question for lore, why do you use black dragon? you can't heal black dragon right? so there is nothing you can do if it gets attacked...and also, if you slap on a peacefulness and magic-spring on a red dragon, you have 9 more defense and 305 more health plus you can heal him!!!

Sorry, I didn't take Holy Armor so I don't know how it works.

I took the black dragons because they have a base 80% magic resistance; add the diploma of anti-magic/magician's cowl and you have 95% MR, very good for taking out the red gremlin towers during suppression battles. I had leadership for 4 of them, and the key was to split them up into 4 stacks so even if one stack is near death the others could still fight on.

Good luck on your attempt! Do keep us posted on how it goes. :)

i am going to try to upgrade "perfect shoe", it's my 11th and last suppression battle before the final fight.

all-elf-team with max morale!

you will see that my black unicorns are quite OP if you look at the second picture.

btw lore, i wanted to ask, what items did you suppress?

Just finished this on "hard" with a mage - Score was 539. That last battle was pretty rough; my character was only a level 14. Stupid demon portals!

steel band --> steel belt
fine boots --> golden boots
ballroom dress --> dress of the princess
magician's cowl --> magician's cloak
magician's cloak --> magician's cape
snake ring --> snake ring of wisdom

The red gremlin towers couldn't throw magical attacks at the black dragons (unless it was a counterattack, wherein they did roughly 12-18 damage to the BDs while BDs do 250+ damage to them), so they either buffed their troops or cast Lightning on my Trolls (which not only were regenerating, but also had Peacefulness cast on them).

from the looks of it, items that require more than one upgrade are the best, not only you get more fights, but also the final upgrade(if doable) usually yields way more experience.

it also has to do with item-level, i remember trying to upgrade something and a stack of 27 arch devils jumped over and i was like "whaaaaaat?"

and the upgrading fight can be really really hard, the battle I am still trying to beat, the gremlin towers themselves have 14000 health...

now, who has the patience to save/scan for a new save, where

1, troll/resurrection scroll is available.

2, ancient knowledge scroll is available (repeatedly loading/digging for an ancient knowledge scroll is simply not practical).

3, 15+ish suppression fights. you need the baton(3)/2 weapons(4)/bronze ring(2)/and around 5 one-upgrade items.

4, extra experience% items like hand of necropolis.

Ouch! Even with the extra levels I don't think level 5 item suppression could be done in this campaign; unless you get lucky and the item generates:

1) all evil gremlin towers
2) all enemies are slow melee
3) black dragons are available for you to actually win such a fight

As for the save game file, I have trolls, resurrection, AKx4, hand of necropolis, and 6 item suppression battles; but even if I gave it to you the best that could be done is to match 763. :(

This is why I hate the concept of AK scrolls. In KBTL there was technically a max possible score, but with the introduction of AKs in KBAP there is technically no max; it just depends on how lucky you are. And this is the same reason I take no offense in using the KBScanner; if I am to play the campaign only once and I am going for as high a score as I could, then I would like to make sure that I remove most of the luck factor involved in acquiring +XP items, so that my planning and efforts would yield maximum results.

i actually managed to win the fight, but in the end, the single druid that i left to give me mana spring charges summoned a bear and i killed it without noticing that it was standing on top of the corpse of the last unit that i needed to rez..."head explodes*

the fight itself is not hard, fear + fire arrow the team of 3200 fairies. (ouch if you don't fear them and let it touch you), kill friendly gremlin tower(only 1) save/load to make sure you don't let the friendly gremlin tower summon units. kill 1900 dryads(two teams...) and thousands of thorns they summoned(thorns are bad because they will make your corpse disappear). kill 170 black unicorns and almost all fairies (leave a small a mount of fairies as it attacks without retal) kill almost all druids (leave a small a mount of fairies as it attacks with cloud and summons bears for manaspring) let all troops die (at a safe place so their corpse are in a corner or something) but one single stack of black unicorns, just slap on mana spring and resurrect when needed, use him to kill all the gremlin towers then start resurrecting the other units in one corner while the fairy and druid hit you in the other corner.

so ya, level 5 suppression is definitely possible as long as there are HUGE stacks of level 1 units that can be crowd control'd, and no big stack of level 5 units(like 27 archdevil).

because 3200 fairy is probably equivalent to 27 arch devil in leadership but in reality the former is much much easier to handle.

here you go!

have no idea why it says 600+ werewolves, i had less than 150. 250+ turns lol, the fight took over an hour of real life time!!!

but yes i waited until "night" time and man those werewolves do TONS of damage.

as you can see in the second image, after the fight i dismissed all those troops and bought black dragons! the final fight will be a piece of cake!

yay, i think i did pretty good as a mage without any extra-exp artifact/ancient scroll. it's funny how the "final fight" gives LESS exp than the suppression fight for perfect shoes. and also, the final fight lasted 10 rounds where as the suppression fight 250+ rounds...

question for lore: if you abuse troll then did you have to wait until "night time" which would be day 2...

You cast Phantom on the werewolves a bunch? Maybe dupe with archmage? The post battle thing will show damage done by summons, and the total number of them for the fight.

That is definitely a massive score for not even using a single +XP item, congratulations! And this is where the scoring fails, since you definitely went through a harder game than I did (I didn't take on any level 5 item suppression battles, which is A LOT harder than any of the built-in fights in this campaign). I definitely tip my hat off to you. :)

Night time is still part of day one, and it starts at 21:00 (9pm). I actually had to leave my game unpaused for a couple of minutes to get to nighttime. With such a small island, it was quite easy to clean up everything by 23:00.

I was initially confused by your score though; 747 seems odd since if you finished the game on day 1 and impossible difficulty at level 25 then your score should have been 754 (level 24 gets 744 and level 26 gets 763). But now I understand why you asked about the troll nighttime tactic; you used the nighttime trick on the werewolves and finished the game in day 2.

From KBTL and KBAP I developed the habit of always pausing the game when not in combat or not doing anything. But this is just a pausing the game "tactic"; no biggie, I'm sure you could have done it in 1 day as well if you wanted to.

ya i didn't know that night time starts at 21:00. i went to cook some food while un-paused and came back and it was a bit after midnight and i thought: perfect!

thanks for the compliment!

do you use the KBscanner? if so, what's "Troll" and "scroll ancient knowledge" called exactly? I am trying to save/scan a save where i can get both ancient knowledge scroll and troll. so if you don't mind, load up the good save that you had, the one with troll and ancient knowledge in one shop, and then look at the scanner report and see what exactly those are called please.

nope didn't use phantom.

i also had this problem with vampires, so i am thinking it must be either the "shift/transform" ability (i am pretty sure that it's this one that messes the computer report up), or the bloodsucking ability (werewolves have a 30% chance of sucking a percentage of casualties to regenerate during night time, but i only had like 5 regenerated so i don't think it's this one)

You already have it correct: "Troll" and "Scroll Ancient Knowledge", though for AK I just ctrl-F for "knowl".

You might as well make sure that you have a lot of suppressable items. In my case, while I had 4 AK scrolls (and one dug up AK) available, I only had 6 suppression battles available; not that I'm complaining much, mind you. :)

Good luck again! If you do make another DotC run, join me afterwards at CotA. :)

this version's translation seems messed up...

for example, there is no scroll anymore, and the spell names sound like google translate...

i am doing a paladin run and the only thing that sounds close to magic spring is this
Crystal Valley Magic Tower spell_magic_bondage 4 lizard
:confused:

Hmmm... make sure your KBScanner settings are correct, like pointing to the right loc_ses.kfs file (in Windows 7 it looks something like "C:\Program Files (x86)\1C\King's Bounty. Armored Princess\sessions\addon\loc_ses.kfs") and make sure you have the "Translate object codes into text" checked.

I've attached a sample report file to give you an idea of what the proper output should look like.

You don't happen to have a non-English version, do you? :)

oh thanks lore. i was pointing to the wrong kfs.

Warrior = Hard

Really struggling against the Chosha's in the first fight. He ghost blades my priests everytime (no resurrect) END OF FIGHT

So, 2 paladins, griffins, beholders, archers and priests are the best units I have access to.

Can't see how i'm going to win the first fight with no losses lads.

KBH, try this tactic:

1) just use paladins, get as many as you can, an separate them into stacks of 1 unit each
2) do not move forward, just keep on taking a defensive stance (increasing your defense, making your paladins even harder to kill), even if some melee enemies are pounding on them
3) cast heal on the paladin that the enemy hero casts ghost blade on; if you don't have heal available (it should be a common enough spell to be sold at shops) restart the game, it is impossible to no-loss without it
4) spam ball of lightning every round; this would eventually reduce the largest enemy stacks down to size
5) once all melee enemies are dead (most likely suicided themselves to the 2 crosses on the battlefield) then dragon kick one of the crosses twice to kill it; move all of your paladins to that side of the battlefield and start moving forward to finish off his missile troops; start pounding on the wall on that side if you want
6) dragon kick the last cross twice to kill it; now it is safe to just take the center opening

Taking the first "serious" battle unlocks powerful level 5 units. Even if you don't unlock a Troll, you will always unlock one of the dragon types, so its easy-breezy after that, even on impossible difficulty.

Awesome!

Yeh i've used the split tactic before as paladins HP is 200 so

ta very much

ps

cant heal yet :(

EDIT

I paid the guy standing outside the castle 20k, won a fight and he gave me loads of awards..money well spent?

You are playing on Hard so you should have excess money to spend on it; I'm not sure if you have THAT much excess though (I played on Impossible). Note though that on Impossible Warrior starts with the least amount of money (18k, Mage gets 24k+, Paladin gets 30k), not even enough to take the medals before the first serious battle. On your Hard game, just make sure you have enough money to buy dragons/level 5 units after the first serious battle.

It's definitely worth the money to get the medals, its just that you might just want to hold off from getting it at once.

I'm stuffed really as I can't heal

EDIT

Reloaded several times using warrior and its always the same, no healing ability....

new high score!!! 783!!! using a MAGE!!! (impossible+no loss of course)

i messed up my scroll of ancient knowledge, so if properly played, level 30 should be doable!!!

with gloves of necropolis+3/3 learning+ancient knowledge, the final upgrading of arch-mage's staff gave me a whopping 20k experience!!! (see second SS)

being a mage requires A LOT of saving/loading until you figure out the right strategy.

please find attached two seemingly impossible battles. especially the one with droids...

My problem is the battles starts with 7 chosas that's it right there. I cant kill them quickly enough and they spam me to death with worms and ghost blade lol

MY WORD THE BOYS DONE IT!!!!! LMAO

No healing, no resurrect using only 3 R Griffins and 3 paladin. One of my Griffins was down to 1 health and would not have survived another round (ghostblade) i'm certain.

What a game, what a gamer :)

FFS!!!!!

Bloody snake hero and is his bloody poison skull spell grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

DON'T PICK THE FIRST OPTION THEN.

first option=lizard
second=orc
third=demon

try second or third option in the first dialogue.

personally i always pick the second one(orc), because:

1, first orc hero has poison skull, which hurts a lot less.
2, second orc hero has only 5 mana.

I did it anyway :cool: Didn't pay enough attention to the opening dialogue mate.

Congratulations!

It is interesting to note that only 17k or so of experience separates level 26 and level 28, so I think level 30 is possible; also note that getting level 30+ allows you to break the 800+ mark in the high score for this campaign, a worthy goal. :)

I'm struggling again lads with the 4th fight

:(

Sorted, just kept killing his evil books with the Red dragon, pretty easy once I sussed that out. I was lvl10 and he was lvl18 invincible lol

That's normal, mate :) Defender of the crown is a really tough campaign in general.

i am in the process of trying to break level 30.

anyone else?!

After having mentioned this goal and as hypocritical as it may sound, I'll pass for now... I barely have enough time to play CotA, and after playing that I might jump to KBCW first.

While DotC is very short, I'm sticking to playing a campaign only once for now. Good luck on your attempt! I believe we are very close to seeing the maximum possible score for DotC. :)

Completed no losses Hard/warrior campaign = 559

Not so good that score but didn't/couldn't upgrade every item. Enjoyed the last battle with my T-rexes and dragon egg armies :)

scroll of ancient konwledge on Dotc?? random i bet, i havent had any .. fnished with lvl 19 lol ;p

Definitely random, but I think the devs made it possible so that people who go for high scores could push this campaign a little bit more than a regular run of it.

AK scrolls definitely have a chance of spawning after the first serious fight, at one of the buildings beside the castle. That it spawns at all in a location this early only means it is intentional (to some extent). My game sold 4 in the said shop.

Is this game really random? I have been playing it for at least 10 times in the last week and I never got some troops. I never get orcs neither to recruit nor to fight against and the same stays true for demons. And as far as I remember only once in all my playthroughs I got to fight against orcs.

I have to mention that I modified logic.txt to be able to play on normal but with much tougher enemies (like impossible). Is it possible to have affected the randomness? (in OOTM or AP this didn't occur). I onky modified their leadership so it shouldn't be an explication for my problem.

On the first island you could have humans, dwarves, or elves as troop selections, and this is random.

The enemy is not so random though; on the initial dialogue your "guess" (in the form of a question) as to what enemies you are fighting against would determine which enemies you face in the 1st island: orcs, lizardmen, or demons.

Oh, my mistake, I didn't pay absolutely any attention to that question :). I guess it's alright then, I'm going to play some more :)

I have restarted the game many many times but couldn't make it to spawn more than 4 paladins. And even that 4 paladin stack spawned only ONCE. Usually i get 1 or 2 paladins at temple. And no paladin after first fight. Is it normal??? :confused:

Also how may i go to the lighthouse. It is a shop so it should be possible to go there, but i don't see any option for going there. :confused: