Impossible Mage, No Losses

[Zhuangzi]

Well, it has been quite difficult through to about 130 fights. The period between about 60-140 fights seemed to be the hardest in my Warrior game, and it's even more so here as a Mage. But I can see that soon the game will be a lot easier and by level 40 the Mage will probably be stronger overall.

Two Dresses of the Magess' really helped to boost Intellect and leadership, and so now I am up to about 10,000 leadership at level 27. I have the Dead Skull down to 12% and Intellect already at 38, so I think about 45 or even 50 will be the final Intellect. With Higher Magic and Destroyer, I think I am going to kick ass toward the end of the game.

I also finally got my Trapper 3 medal, so that's really useful. 4000 damage per Trap. What I really need now is to kill the paladin with the Inquisitor's Sword as I have the other two items for the set. This will have a double whammy effect - the Inquisitor Sword allows for 20% more Inquisitors and Paladins, and the set gives +3 morale to all humans! So I have waved goodbye to my beloved Royal Snakes in favour of Giants at the moment, but eventually I will go for Horsemen instead.

[Zhuangzi]

Just had the longest and in the end most successful and satisfying fight I can remember in all my KB playing. I had just ticked over to level 40 but Elenhel didn't challenge me straight away (he must have a chance to challenge after every subsequent fight?). So I fought Demenion's castle for the stone and THEN Elenhel attacked. I was starting the fight with about 20 mana but I really didn't want to have to reload and replay the Demenion fight, so I gave it a try.

I had heard that Elenhel loves to spam level 3 Geyser but at first he seemed to be using Call of Nature instead, which is a terrible choice for 40 mana and gives something like 150 Red Snakes or something. But Elenhel did start using Geyser after a while and I took a great deal of damage from his units. The Inquisitors especially took a hammering and at one stage I was down to 11 of them! I really should have used Target more.

Anyway, I just about managed to keep the Inquisitors alive, and I was down to about 20 Horsemen and maybe 40 Knights. I could win the fight, but with no losses?

So I left one Necromancer alive and started the arduous task of trying to regenerate health/mana/rage. I started off by Phantoming level 1 Inquisitors (15 mana) as I planned on regenerating my mana/rage that way (I have 25 for 25 Mana Accelerator). After a while I realised that this wasn't going to work, at least not for hundreds of turns. I was about to give up when I thought about Magic Spring again. But how could I make it effective without using Target?

Then I had a revelation. The 1 Necromancer does an area attack for maybe 5 damage per hex, so if I clustered my units together and cast Magic Spring on the middle stack, the Necromancer would always hit it! By trial and error I discovered that level 2 Magic Spring was the most effective - costing 7 mana, it generates 15 mana over three turns. So I was gaining 8 mana every 3 turns, which meant that over time I could generate enough to Phantom Paladin my troops back to full health.

Took 111 turns in total. Screenshots attached.

[DGDobrev]

Good work I remember doing something like that in my game. His geysers are simply way too ridiculous damage-wise, but that is to be expected with his 40+ intellect. As for call of nature, I was really happy to see him use it - if he went geysering from turn 1, I would have been left with a single paladin stack in the end...

[Zhuangzi]

Done! The game was a breeze after level 40 - this is where the Mage ends up being more powerful than the Warrior, IMO. I had four Flaming Eyes scrolls so I saved them up for Zigaldis, the big lizard whose name I've forgotten, and Bhaal. Also plenty of other Wandering scrolls to give me ridiculous stats of 35 Attack, 33 Defense and 60 Intellect for the last few battles. I managed to get my leadership up to 32,000 with Flaming Eyes, which is much lower than the 47,000 I had for with the Warrior.

But it didn't matter. Against Bhaal, my spellbook usage was Haste + Geyser in turn 1, then Stone Skin x 2 on turn 2, followed by more Stone Skin, Divine Armor, Magic Shield and Geysers when Bhaal brought more demons across. I managed to screw up my first try at this though - you really do need to preserve a stack of Scoffer Imps if you can for the long resurrection. On my second try, I was preserving a stack of Scoffers until Bill Gilbert's Archers shot them just before they flew off the burning ledge.

I was so annoyed and I thought I would have to start again. After killing Bhaal all there was left was 7 Demons, so I tried without much luck to run around the map having slowed the Demons, trying to resurrect. It wasn't working. Then the Demons spawned 11 Scoffer Imps, and I've never been happier to see those Imps in my life! Killed the Demons and used Calm Rage to stock up on Mana for Resurrection. No problem - zero losses.

In general I found the Mage quite a bit harder in the earlier stages. You really have serious leadership issues on Impossible as a Mage, and it's not until past level 45 that you've really reached your full potential as a spellcaster. I just smashed my way through Elon and Reha with Geyser, which is insanely powerful when you have 50 Intellect. (About 5000-6000 damage x 8 stacks)

I just improved on my score by about 25 or so, but it's still in the 1400s as I took until day 28 again. I just can't keep the time down. That's the one thing I can't do with this game.

I was surprised to see that Archmages did the most damage, 22.5% This is because of the two Dresses of the Magess I had, which must be the best item in the game for a Mage. +4 Intellect, +800 leadership and +30% Critical chance for Archmages is insanely good. Two of them were enough that the Archmages ended up with a 95% Critical chance.

Oh well, it's been fun but it's really time for a break from KB:AP. I've been playing this so much over the last month it's caused marital stress. My wife is not happy. But I've had more fun playing the King's Bounty series over the past 15 months than I've had with any other game in the past ten years

And I literally mean that. I never thought anything would top Master of Orion 1 + 2 and Jagged Alliance 2 for me, but King's Bounty is just as good as those great games of the past.

[Petwin]

And I literally mean that. I never thought anything would top Master of Orion 1 + 2 and Jagged Alliance 2 for me, but King's Bounty is just as good as those great games of the past

I almost agree. King's Bounty is up there with MOO2, XCOM, and WarCraft3. But I liked Homeworld (all 3 of them) even more.

[travelingoz]

Well done Zhuangzi!

[MaroonMaurader]

*Now* I know the true meaning of frustration.

Level 59, 1,604,784 experience. Level 60 requires 1,606,500. However, I have finished my impossible no-loss mage game, so that's something. If someone wants to tell me how to attach screenshots I'm happy to do so. I also have a save from before Baal, but forgot to grab a save from afterwards and am really not too interested in playing that again. The fight wasn't too difficult, but slow and chancy. It took three tries because the first time I accidentally killed off the imps I was saving before I resurrected my griffins, the second time because something died on top of my griffins' corpse so I couldn't resurrect them. I'd never played AP before (although I'd played through TL once, and played a lot of heroes 3), so I didn't even bother trying to do things quickly. It took me 79 days to finish, and my score was a measly 721.
87 quests completed.
1079 crystals
318 battles
516,219 enemy casualties
0 casualties suffered
77% damage by troops
23% damage by spellbook

Most effective troops...
Archmage, 15%
Knights, 14.6%
Tirex, 13.5%
Red Dragon, 12.2%
Inquisitor, 11.6%
Royal Griffin, 7.7%
Paladin, 6.9%

level 39 pet blue dragon
and of course, all medals at level 3 (although I only spent about 21,500 rage).

I kited my way as far as I could go before fighting, getting up to level 21 before my first post-tutorial fight. My game didn't spawn a Tekron map, so I'd gotten basically all goodies from everywhere but Tekron and Monteron at this point. That included enough runes to get to learning 3, 2 hands of the necropolis, the Shark's Tooth, Elenhel as a companion, and 102 chests opened. Then I grabbed one troll and proceeded to clear every enemy before verona (picking up the Memoirs of the Marshal from the Dragon Trap mini-quest), and all non-heroes at Verona. I kited Monteron and Tekron, then decided my single Troll wasn't strong enough to make it too much further and I needed a full army backing him up. It was pretty clear I'd want inquisitors and paladins, and archmages also seemed obvious. I bumped into DGDobrev's write-up about his impossible mage attempt and decided to steal his last two units - Tirex and Gorguanas. The Tirex were awesome, but I never really felt like the gorguanas were pulling their own weight. I should mention that somewhere in here I picked up 2x dress of the magess, which made my archmages into unholy killing machines with 96% critical chance.

That army carried me a ways further, but eventually it got a little stale and the Tirex's devour corpse ability stopped being used frequently (I just wasn't killing stuff that fast), so I switched out the lizard people for red and green dragons. Ultimately the dragons began to be more of a weak point than a strength, when even stoneskin + 20% physical resistance from items + 30% magic resistance from items wasn't keeping them alive for a whole turn at a time. I switched one final time at around level 45, to an army I *highly* recommend - paladins, knights, archmages, inquisitors, and royal griffins. Royal griffins are, hands down, my favorite new unit of the game - the morale boost was great, the high mobility excellent, they do a *ton* of damage (particularly when they have high morale, and I had voice of the dragon 2), and they almost always went first in combat (with a +1 initiative boost from my pet dragon). They're a tad on the fragile side, but you can also run some nasty combos with their always-retaliates ability followed by timeback. Keep some knights in reserve with that unit mix and you can always switch them in for inquisitors to have an all-level 4 army (which makes fear much more useful in some situations).

I didn't really run into any particularly difficult fights after that until end-game. I was a little nervous about Elenhel given all the dire talk about his geyser spell, but for some reason he just spammed call of nature until he was practically out of mana. As I killed the animals faster than he could summon them, that wasn't a big problem. I think he tossed off one geyser all fight, and it was after the real fight had been decided. There was some hero who spammed armageddon against me who was annoying as heck and took three tries for me to figure out the right strategy (answer: kill most of her units faster than she could kill mine. Then fear an imps and resurrect everyone). Otherwise, everything was pretty much smooth sailing. And there was a lot of sailing, because as I think I've mentioned I just kinda wandered from island to island fighting whatever interested me at the time.

The spider boss never actually attacked me. Not sure what was up with that, but it made the fight easy. The frog boss was a pain in the next, but once he was dead the handful of royal snakes floating around made it real easy to take my time and restore my army. The driller caught me off-guard with his rockfall the first time; the second time I kept stoneskin-ed paladins by his left hand with target and he spent all his time beating a brick wall and never bothered the rest of my units. Gremlion slaughtered me the first half-dozen times I tried, but once I got the Inquisitor's Blade (plus advnaced from level 44 to level 52) the fight was a snap.

I stuck paladins by his left hand, knights by his right, royal griffins to the rear, archmages to the left (next to where he placed towers, so they'd do their melee attack against them instead of ranged and thus do more damage), demonologists to the right, and left a gap in the middle for phantom paladins. I took a handful of casualties and had to stall off some ents at the end to resurrect, but could do so just with mana already sitting in my mana pool.

K'Tahu died first-try. I was, admittedly, level 58 at that point. And I used one of every combat-oriented wanderer's scroll first. I had an army of knights, paladins, horsemen, and guardsmen. Incidentally, I strongly recommend leaving that fifth slot open - a fifth unit isn't needed, and becomes just one more unit to be casting stoneskin on. You could be better using those casts on Phantom. Phantom paladins basically kept ahead of the damage, so when K'tahu was dead my paladins and knights were at full strength, my horsemen down 5% or so, and my guardsmen down about 10%; it didn't take long to restore that.

Baal took 3 tries, as mentioned. I went with my standby army (archmages, inquisitors, paladins, knights, royal griffins). I'm torn on whether the royal griffins were the right unit to include, as they kept dying but they also did a ton of damage to the demons Baal kept summoning, boosted the morale and thus damage of my paladins and knights hacking at Baal, and the angelic guard made excellent blockers for convincing Gilbert's units to go elsewhere and not crowd my nice little circle formation.

I probably could have gotten to level 60 if I'd played this before, as I wasted one fight from one ancient knowledge against a low-xp enemy (the tower fight in the temple of sorrows). But that was about 150 fights ago so I'm not about to go do it all again to correct that. Otherwise, I was actually pretty careful - once I sensed I was running out of fights I toured all the islands and counted how many invincible enemies there were left, and it turned out there were exactly 5x as many as I had ancient knowledge scrolls (including the 3 boss fights I had remaining). So I went used up all but one wanderer's scroll killing invincible enemies and Gremlion, then killed off everything not rated invincible, then turned on my last scroll, fought the last 3 heroes, killed K'Tahu, and killed Baal. I drew a grand total of 9 wanderers scrolls this game for what it's worth. I suspect I must have had lower-xp enemies in sum or fewer xp-giving items on the map than possible or something, as UnicornXP managed to get only 14k xp short of where I was despite finding 4 fewer ancient knowledge scrolls.