All "no-loss" strategies

[MaroonMaurader]

A strategy that lets you defeat an army with a higher-level hero and five times your leadership without losses is a cheesy strategy. Either you've abusing a game mechanic, or you're abusing AI stupidity. So yes, no-loss on impossible does require cheese.

[Moonheart]

Not even that, but any kind of infinite loop is a kind of cheese.

In this regard, Paladin + Phantom, Black Knight + Eviln or nuking doesn't seems to me less cheesy than anything else above, Dainbramage, simply because in the last boss fights, the amount of units you have to raise or the amount of direct damage you have to pull to end the fight costs above > 1000 mana.

Such a high amount of mana doesn't come without cheese. Never.

Mostly it's done using the insane bugged rage generation + Calm Rage and/or the IA stupidity in front of a single stack enchanted with Magic Spring, but still, it's a kind of cheese: you can win any fight when you go through infinite loop strategy, providing you make your units last long enough to exploit it.

The only non-infinite loop I see pass through Baal is the one I used at the last fight of my no-loss campaign:

Name: Curse of Ghosts
Type: Loss/Ressurection balancing
Works against: Normal troops, heroes, boss
Requierements:
- a army made with only one non-full stack of Cursed Ghosts
- the 25% physical resistance item
- full +defense oriented equipement
- Stoneskin spell
- Teleport spell
Optional enhancements:
- Eviln spell
- Lifeforce spell
Process:
- Before the fight you must balance the size of your stack to avoid the either to have it killed by not having enough regeneration power, or have it become wild by haveing too much. It's a difficult guess, but most often 75% of your leadership is a good mark.
- Keep your ghosts under Stoneskin to hit the 95% physical resistance mark. Teleport them close to units doing non-physical damage to kill them first.
- Use Eviln when the stack is running too low, and Lifeforce to damage it when it's running too high.
Failure conditions:
- Having the stack go out of control. It is a very difficult process in many fights: Of all the strategies I know able to reach a no-loss score, it is the one with the highest reload rate since you can loose by either by being too weak and being too strong, so a good calculation of your own strength versus opponents is requiered at almost every round of every fight to not mess up.

[dainbramage]

Against the bosses:

kraken and spider I used a 5 stack army
frog, driller, ktahu and baal I used knights + paladins
zilgadis I used paladins only


The knights weren't needed except against k'tahu, since the tirex fear will make you lose with one stack if it isn't immune to mind spells. I didn't need to cast calm rage at all in the boss fights. Frog didn't need any phantoms, driller one, k'tahu and baal 2, zilgadis 3 iirc. The kraken and spider didn't kill a single unit.

I had to cheese my way through a level of the tower of eventus since it kept crashing (the clone room, a single stack of peasants and killed his army with fiery phantoms first turn).

Other than that, I finished at level 60, 32att/25def/25 int, a bit over 44k leadership with inquisitor's blade and dragon heart for more paladins and dragons. Most commonly used army was rune mages/paladins/black dragons/red dragons/engineers. Most damaging units were black, red, paladins, rune mages, engineers, royal snakes, knights. No pre scout or save game scan, honestly it's about as cheese free as you could get. Battles were won through smart play and a good army composition. Spells like target and stoneskin are in the game for a reason, it's not cheese to use them.

[Moonheart]

Ok, I understand from your explanation why we have such a different view about the strategies.
From your sole leadership count and stats, I can guess you were playing warrior class, which is significiantly easier than the mage no-loss impossible run I did.

Under the mage class, you end the game near of level 55.
Your defense rating is lower, so your paladin stack takes about 10/15 loss EVERY turn against Baal despite of a high-ranked stonekin (70+ intelligence), meaning you just CAN'T keep it alive without casting Phantom almost every turn. Which requiers LOTS of mana you can't simply have without cheese.

Also, your attack rating is lower and you have 50% less units due to your leadership. Which means a boss like Baal have lots more rounds to live before you can reduce his hp to 0, and since his stacks increase of size at each summon, it leads to a point were archdemons simply starts to reach the leadership mark where the "halve" ability triggers... leading to 50+ losses in one strike.

Those facts put aside makes than your "you don't need cheese" point of view is understandable, but just not valid for everyone.
You can't expect to make a paladin stack survive boss runs when you're a mage without "cheesing". Because the paladins are nor as strong, nor as resilient than if you were a warrior so you have to make up for their "weakness" with spells... lots lots of spells.

As I said, the only way I know to not enter this logic, with a mage, is to use ghosts, which are both resilient to the most common attacks of enemy units and able to regenerate themselves without forcing you to use mana. Which leaves you free to not use infinite loopholes to regenerate it insanely... at least if you are able to keep the ghosts away from running wild.

[1darklord]

This is an excellent thread, thanks for creating it.

Daniel.