Archer army

[DGDobrev]

Well, all I can say is - get to the boss battles and see how many of your archers will die in the first mass attack. This is a good way to discover how your army will fare against them.

Know that the Spider webs your ranged units every time they attack for 2 turns. This means that if you shoot with all your archers, they will not be able to attack and will be immobile for 2 turns. Very inconvenient, to say the least

Please keep in mind that I'm always analyzing from impossible difficulty point of view... I assume that on normal, an archer party may do really well against bosses, because they have less attack, less defense, and less health.

[ivra]

It has been mentioned many times in this forum; the importance of Resistance in boss fights. I experienced it first hand in my impossible mage game in the fight against Baal. I had about 29k Leadership (including Flaming Eyes) and used an undead setup with Necromancers, Vampires, Ancient Vampires, Bone Dragons and Death Knights. I attacked with the vampires and the death knight. I had also put Stone Skin on the death knight. In one attack K'Tahu attacked my ancient vampire stack and destroyed it in one blow (Can bosses score a critical hit - this sure felt like one). Later the same attack killed only 5 of my death knights (out of ca 200)...

[DGDobrev]

Well, archer-type units have few or no resistances. This is a major problem even if you get all the necessary resistance items

[MaroonMaurader]

With a high-level, high-leadership army you can take down frog and spider so fast they don't have time to really hurt you.

If you are so stupendously luck you truly get *all* the necessary resistance items, and are using the gift bag, I believe you can get (and equip) a base +52% physical resist: leather dress, crystal ball, twinkling boots, scaly set, guardian angel 3. If it's possible to get multiple crystal balls it rises from there (I've never gotten any, but see it there in the items file). Toss stoneskin on top of that, and Driller, K'Tahu, and Baal are fairly ineffective against any army.

While wearing that equipment, you can also get magical resistance up to 92% easily: add in the gift-bag helmet for 50% and the anti-magic diploma for 25% to the 17% from leather dress, crystal ball, and guardian angel 3. Then Gremlion is also not going to hurt you too much either.

So I think the answer would be... yes, if you are really, really lucky.

[Zechnophobe]

Ktahu's first action is going to be to do thousands of damage to all your archer stacks. You will cast stoneskin on one stack, and do some damage... and he'll either do the same thousands of damage again, or summon a bunch of units that will go to melee range with your guys and prevent them from shooting him.

I really doubt that is going to work out well. Even WITH all the luck listed above.

[MaroonMaurader]

The first round would be brutal. But say you make it through the first round with at least most of your army intact (which seems likely if you have 52% physical resistance).
If you have tactics 2, you can plant some guard droids in his weakspot before starting the battle, and that should encourage him to move on round 2 instead of summoning or attacking (70% chance I think). I'm going to guess it's something like a 50/50 whether he summons or mass-attacks on round 3 (and I'm just making that up; I have no clue what the actual odds would be); then another 70% chance that he moves on round 4 if you kept units in his weakspot when he moved. So maybe 1/4 times he'll go mass attack, move, summon, move in the first four rounds. When he moves you're in great shape - it's basically a free turn. When he summons, high-leadership, high-damage, high-crit., high-attack archers with quickdraw 3 boosting initiative should kill most or all of his summons before they ever get a chance to go, meaning it basically just wastes a turn for him and for you. And by turn 5, most of your units have stoneskin so you'd actually prefer he start using his mass-attack instead of summoning, as it lets you kill him faster instead of wasting time shooting his minions. At that point it's just a question of whether you'll have enough mana left when he finally dies to restore your casualties.

For this you want a number of things: defense, intelligence, and mana. So beyond the twinkling boots, scaly set, leather dress, and crystal ball, you want anything and everything that boosts those. However much damage you take in the first round, in the entire rest of the fight you're unlikely to take a fraction that much because after that, his attacks will be hitting 92%-resistance units.

With power of spirit 3, resistance 3, caution 3, and Titan's Armor, you're looking at a 22-point boost to defense right there. Add in another 8 points maybe from training dummies and whatnot plus the natural warrior skill, and you're looking at a 30-point boost to defense. You really ought to be able to come up with items giving another +10 defense for defense 40, meaning you're lowest-defense units are elves with defense 65. As his attack is 84, you're looking at something like a 1.6x multiplier to damage. His base damage is about 3.5k. Then consider you also have a 0.48x multiplier to damage thanks to physical resistance the first round; further add in the 20% decrease due to caution 3 (I think... if the 20% decrease adds to the physical resistance instead of multiplying it's even better, but I'm not sure how it works), and you're expecting about 2200 damage in the first round. Odds are good you'll take no more than 3000 damage over the entire course of the fight to your most-damaged unit (likely the elves).

With rage eater, Mag Rage, and Magical Flow, it's not that difficult to have an effective mana-pool after all's said and done of 225 mana if you're willing to wait long enough after the fight to get your rage all transferred to mana. That's enough to phantom the repair droids 3 times, and cast 6 level-3 resurrects. As the resurrects are being split between 3 units, that's 2 resurrects per unit. So you need each level-3 resurrect to restore about 1500 health. That's a high intelligence for a warrior, but nothing absurd - particularly given that you've got a number of equipment slots still open to shove with +int items if necessary.

That's my estimate. The easy way to test this, IF you happen to have a save-game with a hard difficulty warrior just before fighting k'tahu, would be to load that game, use the console to add the items you want, and try it (it might take a few shots to persuade him to summon on round 3 instead of using his mass-attack again, and to move on rounds 2 and 4). As I don't have that save game, it's not exactly easy for me to test.

[ckdamascus]

Wow, I was just looking to see why Hento says Horseman do not count as "melee" and if that means neither the driller or battle axe work with them.

That said, I have happily defeated Ktahu with Elves, Hunters, Bowmen, Paladins, and Royal Griffins. Warrior class, gift bag, impossible, no-loss.

Honestly the royal griffins were mostly for show. Not sure if the morale drop from using goblins would kill me, but they are pretty tough too.

Only possible with the gift bag for the critical hit items. Only had twinkling boots and leather dress. Mass "defense" will never win (despite what everyone says) with such fragile troops.

Key points to win
- 100% critical hit on ALL 3 archer stacks.
- Occasional Mass resurrection with paladin and turn back time.
- Phantom with paladin.
- Properly hitting K'Tahu to minimize the AoE damage.
- Killing K'Tahu very fast.

Ultimately the answer is hit hard, hit fast to force him from not using his AoE as much. Kill him very quickly (12 rounds for me, and that was with a couple of rounds of "phantom" healing) and have a very efficient resurrection method (archer circles around the paladin).

I probably literally killed him in 10 rounds?