Travel update.
level: 33. Unused runes: 465. Still going with Linguistics 1, Distorsion 1, Scouting 1. My ultimate goal is to get with only these skills all the way to k-tahu. Then one will have to probably boost Distorsion for stone skin & phantom purposes.
Difficulty has been somewhat lowered but it is still gruesome. The most difficult part was level 15-25, from entering Verona until I was strong enough to defeat continent scroll guardians. Now all maps opened, finally got Inquisitor blade. Torkve now comes with 20 runemages! Btw. apart from all those boosts for runemages coming from spare runes, they also get +10 to all resistances including astral, haven't checked precisely when.
No order magic hurts, since I cannot dispel burning/poisoning/sheep.
Before I embarked on this challenge I thought a lot how I am going to do it. Since there were no restrictions placed on pet dragon, he was going to be my main weapon. One has to play conservatively, since ressurection options are limited. Distorsion 1 gives cca 20% phantom on paladins, which was very little since i had only 30-70 paladins before acquiring Inq.blade, plus I had very little mana. Problem then was how to get a lot of rage for pet dragon with conservative play. So this is how I played : round 1 - royal griffins move 2 tiles forward and summon. Rune mages move 2 tiles forward and summon. Summons stay during battle mostly in the middle blocking the enemy. Not too close to my army in order not to get my main forces hit by incoming enemy, and not too close to enemy back rank , since it would be out of safe reach of royal snakes and paladins. Hero casts phantom on inquisitors. (Phantomed inqisitors are frequent target of the enemy range units, so it helps) Now inquisitors cast holy anger on melee units, paladins cast extra turn on summoned inqusitors, sum. inquisitors cast holy anger. Second round royal griffins cast cheer and after some skirmish there is more than enough rage for ball of lightning. If there is enough rage for another one, cast awaken dragon. Summoned units most of the time just reposition and defend in order to hold enemy for as long as possible.
Obviously it is preferable to have maxed rage when entering battle. For normal fights it is not that imortant, but for hero fights & scroll guardians it is crucial. I therefore always leave "pre-allocated" weaker wandering army close to main fight; in order to charge up once i am ready for big fight. Another interesting tactics (brute force) which makes army with high number of paladins pretty much indestructible is as follows: Upon starting the battle (or after some initial lightining balls) cast maxed out mana ball close to army and leave it. Continue doing the same every round until end of battle with only few enemy archers left. Now start colecting those mana balls giving you 100-200 or even more mana in total. Use mana for phantoming paladins and resurrecting. Adios
PS. whose brilliant idea it was to give already very very overpowered droid combo - extra skill and boost to repair coming from Neatness which is an excellent skill for all classes anyway
. I can only think of marketing dept. - attracting new players by introducing smooth Impossible run which may appeal to some