Honorable good bye to KBAP- single green dragon challenge

[axelle]

Originally Posted by impy

Thanks for the feedback
It may look impressive, but it is down to breaking down all the components of the battle. Look at the battlefield - the centre is blocked for melee units, so they will very hard time to get to you. So you can leave them for later, and concentrate on ranged units.Shooters - magic dealers and physical dealers. Since dragon has higher magis res., you have to deal with bowmen first. So fear them for 3-4 rounds, repeat if neccessary. You have Concentration 3 = 8 mana/round + occassional pet dragon mana ball, so you can easily afford 2 x fire arrows or even fire rains per round to anihilate the shooters. Use fire arrow to ignite bowmen and bring their numbers down while under fear. Once shooters are down, poison skull cerberi, fire arrow others. Just fly around in the meantime. As you can see from 2nd screen shot it is all doable at level 23 or so while having only cca 60 mana starting pool.

have you tried one team of ancient vampire or vampire (almost equally good where ancient vampire is faster but vampire has a better damage/health ratio thus more blood-sucking power), here is a SS from KBTL...impossible, level 15 mage, 91 regular vampires...



even if the opponent has only 1~2 living troops, you can usually leave them till the last and suck all the casualties back...the only downside to this strategy is against ALL-UNDEAD or ALL-PLANT teams, but that's why you always carry a big stack of repair droids with you, 1, you can sacrifice them to make new vampires when your leadership increases, 2, you can demolish those tough cookie anti-vampire teams easily with 2 droids as most of them do physical damage.

[clinek]

does that really say "turn 481"?

[axelle]

Originally Posted by clinek

does that really say "turn 481"?

yes...

simply because in KBTL, spells and burns/poisons do a fixed amount of damage...so it took me quite a while to kill those large stacks. it's really all because i was only level 15 yet wondering around in an area that shouldn't be reached around level 25...i let 2 teams of imps hit on mana-spring'd vampire to generate mana while killing the big stacks that couldn't reach me with magic-pole axe...

however in KBAP, burns/poisons do a PERCENTAGE-based damage, so any stack shouldn't take more than 10 fire arrow/poison skull to kill.

[Zechnophobe]

That battle has more turns in it than some of my entire games I think .

All melee army, basically, or I'm sure that would have simply not worked. Though if you have rage for timeback perhaps. Hmm. Been a while since I played TL.

[Metroplex]

impy, once you've finished with this latest challenge of yours and while you wait for KB: Crossworlds, give Disciples 3 a try, it's really good!

[impy]

Hello, thanks again for the feedback. Regarding how to beat bosses, i'm not sure if it is a good idea to tell you, since there will be nothing left for you to discover (although there may be better tactics than mine). Few tips then as a preparation for the boss fights and very end
a) bosses are to be dealt with at the very end of the game, level 53+, after everything else is killed, money spent on extra runes etc. etc.
b) dig & save wanderer scrolls for bosses only and if struggling then Reha or top end heroes as well. some may seem insignificant, but they're not. Example : flaming Eyes increases leadership, so what, you only have 1 dragon. But it increases the strength of mystic egg. Critical hit scroll is for your summons etc.
c) apart from investing in bulletproof skills & spells, save crystals and runes. Crystals you can always spend in battle when pushed, spending runes limits your strategy. Example: I am currently level 37 with green dragon and have 40+ might runes. Why? I still do not know whether to go for Anger 3 or Caution 3 or Onslaught. I won't do anything until
certain
d) do not underestimate your dragon. With 42% phys. resist (10% + medal + twink.boots + slipp cuirass) and stone skin you only receive 18% phys. damage further reduced by 2/3 because of super high defence (140+), that is only 6% phys. damage! So if 150 cyclops attack you doing 70dmg it will be reduced down to 630 dmg and you will survive the attack. Similar with magic attack etc.

Boss fights.
Have demon portal, Summoner 3, living book ready. That way you can bring in cca 15000 hit points = 40+executioners for 30 mana at estimated intellect 60++. Don't forget with belt of the victor they will have extra 50% defence, that is what we call meatshield!
1) spider. No direct damage so protection of your dragon is your only concern. Fly to a corner, cast portals around you. Once protected, have a drink, and finish spider first with any spell you like. Replenish portals if necessary.
2) frog. slightly more annoying due to spit but vulnerable to fire. Tactics the same. hide in the corner, surround with portals, use fire balls, help yourself with Fire bow + necklace of fire something for ultra strong fire arrow if low on mana
3) gremlion. yes, gremlion is easier than driller. Make sure you have 95 magic res. = chaos crown, magician cape, some Elon regalia etc. Gremlion summons up to 5 towers, magic damage dealers are not a problem. immediately kill summoning towers, i think they have 11000+ hit points with death star + fire arrow. That is why you need to save double spellcasting for these moments. Cast fire arrow, occassionaly heal dragon, use calm rage. If gremlion brings in too many summoning towers, restart.
4) driller. Have stone skin on all the time, in case get nastily hit. Stay back, keep casting demon portals a lot. When you summon archdevils, stone skin them and use them to bash driller. All other summons just defend and eat up driller's attacks. Driller has a higher probability to attack 2 creatures standing in the row, so make sure you have some useless summons standing in the line, and never anything in front of the dragon.
5) baal. cannot comment. Yet..
6) ktahu. Bad news. You CAN survive his first attack and he IS defeatable. I come close to defeat him, but you need huge pile of luck and i was not willing to try it many times. Maybe later. So here we go. Ktahu attack 102, damage 3000-4000 physical. Has initiative 12 so you must survive his first attack before any spellcasting. Your defence will be 130+, which is certainly achievable looking at my current game, and without sacrifying any slots for defence items. Your maximum phys. resistance you can hope for is: 10 (start)+7(medal)+15(tw.boots)+10(slipp.cuirass)+5( leather dress)+5(crystall ball) = 52%, further enhanced to 66% with Caution 3 in the first round. After all the precise calculations (see info thread) his damage will be 512-683, which you will survive. Even taking off "slot wasters" - leather dress + c.ball will change his damage to 636-849, which is OK. Now i just copy and paste what i already wrote in another thread
i) first round : survive ktahu physical attack. It is doable as i mentioned earlier. Heal, stone skin, hide in the corner where dragon can be attacked by 2 creatures only.
ii) ktahu summons units. preferably 2 units of hayterans. Point is, that the whole battle with ktahu would be very long 40+rounds. Eventually the whole screen will get filled up with lizardmen summons. After killing ktahu one has to kill them all as well. My idea was to let hayterans which cannot reach dragon to lay eggs and have half a screen filled up with low numbers of hayterans, which can be easily killed by a few fire rains at the end.
iii) dragon stays in the corner. Ktahu's attack does about 250dmg. So every 5 rounds cast stone skin, every 3 rounds heal spell. In between fire arrow to ktahu, occasionally calm rage or magic spring.
iiii) once lower on mana, save mana for stone skin, start using scrolls for damaging ktahu - my scrolls alone could do 70000+ damage!
iiiii) this strategy works perfectly, got ktahu down to 80000 hit points and started to dance around my pc. But then the inevitable happened. Ktahu summoned gorguanas (again). Not a danger damage-wise, due to my 95% magic resist, but double damage for 2 rounds ability. That immediately brings ktahu damage to 500/round. I killed them easily the first time while i could cast two spells /round. When it happened again, after turn 30,I was effectively forced to cast heal every round and at some point 10000 death star to eliminate gorguanas. But then I could not heal or cast stone skin = game over. The only way to go then, is not to use up those 6x 2 castings/round at all, and save them only for the moments, when gorguanas appear. But it's gets soo messy.
so if you really get lucky with low gorguana summons or play super carefully for many turn it can be done

p.s. i am aware of Disciples. Do you remember ugly fat useless creature in Disciples2? It was called IMP, and that's where my nick comes from

[clinek]

its not k'tahuu that worries me, its baal. Of course the first attack of k'tahuu is surviveable but baal's sword does almost twice as much damage. Even with your high defense, keep in mind that you are still open to fire damage. The imps in large numbers will surely do some decent damge on top of the 4-5 hundred damage you got dealt from baals sword attack. Also, dont firget that archdemons have the halve ability. They will take your health down to 400 with one shot even if there are only 2 of them in the enemy army. there is also no way to avoid killing some units because bill gilbert is a shit head who kill too many units at the beggining causing baal to summon a higher leadership amount of each unit. It will only take one bad round (which is inevitable) for you to heal yourself after an attack, an archdemon to halve your health, imps to bombard you with fire, then baal to hit you with his sword and wipe you out. There is no way to avoid that from happening. If you do it, i will be impressed, i just dont see how it will be possible.