Beating Spider-boos

[Writhan]

I took out spider as level 17 mage with the current spec:

Army:
Dwarfs (High morale)
Giants (High morale)
Cannoneer (High morale)
Cyclops (Normal morale)
Evil Beholders (Normal morale)

Spells:
Flame arrow (Rank 3 ~900 damage)
Teleport

Strategi:
Nearly every single turn, I flame arrowed the spider boss. Only when I was abit overrun with spider babies, I smacked them one instead. I had my archers placed in the center of the screen, and simply kept shooting at him. Nothing special here. What I noticed however, was whenever I engaged him with a melee unit, he either hit me, or summoned new spiders. So what I did was, simply place either my dwarfs or my giants in his face, so he had a choice what to do. It didn't matter to me if he hit them, as they could take a huge beating. I never attacked him with them, I simply just placed them on defensive stance so they took less damage. Whenever he digs down, and moves to a new location, I teleported one of the tanker units (Whichever one could reach him) over to him immidiately. Worked wonders.

I tried earlier by letting him spam summon spiders (Not engaging in melee), which resulted in me getting massively overrun eventually.

Good luck though.

[ureal]

rather easy boss I used royal snakes cast berserk on it and just let it lose on the boss, I place my range units in the middle and use my shamans to summon death totem and life totems. My range units attacked the spider, my griffin attack the smaller spiders.

[Gatts]

on easy and normal dif both kraken and spidy where no real issue for any combination of army I had.

But on Hard and Impossible it started to be an issue.
Both spidy or kraken fights can cause a lot of trouble as even if the boss is defeated, still the hatchlings are there (when the combat takes too long, it starts to be like real problem : in Kraken 2x 500 devilfish and raising each next turn, with spidy even more spiders are summoned, and not only 2 stacks but 3 or four).

As I didn't want to wait till my firepower (leadership mostly) is on much higher level, I beat both kraken and spidy with undead army (problem is that only ghosts and vamps survived... where the funny thing is that gosts even if not controlable later on, survived with + 100% ~ 500% more than at the beginning.

Vamps on the other hand are great as have no retaliation - so they can attack the boss w/o any reaction.

If undead are not the choice for you, Kraken can be beated by bandits and snakes (both have distant attack - which does not provoke retaliation, in the other rounds they can clear devilfishes)
also it is good to have one unit stack that is not of high importance to you but has enough health (casting stone skin or other defence spells helps too) let this unit stay near the boss (spidy or kraken) so the boss will attak instead of summon... by this you can protect your archers much better.

For the spidy are snakes and bandits not the best units (are far to weak, well, the blue snake kings are not weak, but I mostly ever had better units already) so here I would advise to build (if bandits nor undead is a solution for you) army of archers and duplicate them with CLONE spell, defending them with one strong army (like giants?)

[Llam4]

I managed to farm this boss for almost an entire level with minimal casualties. When I killed the boss, it was dropping stacks of almost 600 spiders.



I had about 8,500 leadership so I had within 10% of the max:
Giants
Shamans
Alchemists
Cannoneers
Archmages

First, I started my units in a position where they could all easily fit in a corner. I put my giant up front by the spider (until he moved) to take damage instead of spawn spiders on some turns, and I could heal the troop every turn. Immediately, I had my shaman troop build a wall of totems around my army. 7 stomping giants in conjunction with multiple death totems proved very effective against the mass spawns of spiders. I dedicated the Alchemist and Archmage troops to helping pick off spiders. My giants stomped every other turn, and hit the boss every other turn (while it was on the correct side). My shamans were constantly building totems, I even used "gift" a couple times to speed it up. My cannoneers were the majority of damage to the boss, using their triple cannonball attack. The rest of the time they helped pick off mobs.

By the time the boss was down within 1k HP the spiders were up to 550 stacks and were starting to tear down my totems. I didn't lose any units until the final turn, when 2 stacks got to my alchemists/cannoneers.

[Daedalus]

had 5400 leadership, beaten the boss after 28 turns of combat with me 2 cyclopses, 3 giants, 30 shammies, 30 evil beholders and 21 alchemists (which did nothing), lost 1 giant, 1 shaman and 3 evil beholders.

trick i used was to phantom my shamans four times and put wards all over the place so the spiders always landed next to my giants which got healed every so often by the lifewards and the dancing axes.

[LiveInABox]

^^yeah same here. just got to this boss...8800 leadership, level 15 (well 16 now after beating him). He was easy (on normal diff). I lost a few bears that was it..

Polar bears (50)
Giants (5)
Shamans (45)
Royal Snakes (140)
Evil Beholders (45)

Royal snakes were on beserk and killing the spiders that dropped in 1 hit and doing massive damage to the boss, the bears were focused on the boss doing 2000+ with the odd bless, shamans were phantomed and using totems and magic axes (great spell) and the beholders were doing decent damage to the boss as well. The Giants did nothing much except take damage..dont like em, way too slow and both the pound and their main attack are pretty weak i think.

[LiveInABox]

actually changed my mind, giants are really usefull for keeper battles..

[barnabas_666]

I think strategy with totems is very funny

cca 11 totems


2 griffins lost, because I had no mana to cast Gift on Inquisitors

[gogolmax]

Great tactics, folks!

It was handy to leave Feanora as a frog, this increases attack of spiders by 100%.
Hint: Kiss her only after the battle

I managed to beat the giant spider with a Level 15 hero using:
Dwarves (High morale)
Cannoneers (High morale)
Giants (High morale)
Miners (High morale)
Alchemists (High morale)

It was a rather tough battle and I lost many troops, using "frog-shaped" Feanora and using Giants instead of hyenas ("earthquakes" are handy for those hordes of spiders) did the trick.
I also tried to attack the spider queen as much as possible, except for the giants who earthquaked or hit some spider troops.

Not a very original tactic compared to your results, but maybe some additional hints...

Cheers, gogol