KBDS Normal/Hard/Impossible No-loss thread

[DGDobrev]

I absolutely agree with that. While Poison skull is a rather good spell, it does little to help the Vampire in the early game, unless you specialize. We sure need some balance there. I can perfectly understand the devs opting to make a game with 3 different heroes with 3 different play-styles. Let's face it, KBAP plays the same with any class, only difference being the early game.

Then again, you must expect that people will want to do no-loss, and at least give a simple option for that. Or at least a chance... With the spells you listed, I see no chance for the Vampire.

[Zhuangzi]

Wow, 200+ hours, Matt? I can well believe it as I am up to about 65 hours on this playthrough and I'm only at level 33. And if you can't beat the Shelter fights as a Vampire Impossible No-loss, then I certainly don't think I will even try!

Hopefully by the time I'm finished with the Demoness, we'll have a patch addressing these balance issues.

[DGDobrev]

I absolutely agree.

Well, my Neoline is level 45 now, 250 fights in. Still feels like I'm in mid-game, lol. Cleared out Atrixus, and having a great time

[impy]

Well, hello everyone,I finally got the game and did some serious playing this weekend. I was hoping for open world right from the start, as in Legends or Armored Princess, which is great for various challenges once you feel saturated with standard gameplay. Here however are those compulsory fights (around 20) plus Portland offers very limited choices, but it is still a lot,lot lot better than Wotn. Game really opens once you defeat first scroll guardians on Portland.
I have done only 60 fights so far but I thought I summarize in detail what is a good approach to do early demoness no-loss impossible. Please, update it for future generations of gamers!

1) start a game and save. Now using old codes, which still work, for example - "doublearmy" or "leadership XXXXX" get some army in order to check what lies ahead. It will save you some frustration believe me. You want to check the following:
1a) check the position of volcano in fight against knight hero on Atrixus. First, everytime I checked this battle volcano was there, but I am cannot be 100% sure if this is permanent or random . Let's just say it is better if it is. You also want volcano preferably on enemy half of battlefield, not in the middle, and definitely not on your half. With volcano close to enemy, it will seriously cripple his units and it will be much easier battle.
1b) do only compulsory fights and get to Whitehill to see the strength of the weakest stack. I am talking hard learned lesson here. When I started this game, I did not want to check the forums and spoil the tactics for me. Once I arrived to Whitehill with more or less struggle no loss, I was taken aback by the strength of even the weakest stack. Honestly, it was brutal. I checked the forums to see if other people had hard time, but hardly any mention of this. And then on page 4 of this thread I see pictures MattCaspermeyer posted with these stacks. And the first picture , the weakest one is almost walk in a park! Compare it to what I had as the weakest stack. It means, there is some variation in starting leadership of those stacks, so in order to save yourself frustration, check this beforehand.
2) start the game properly now and defeat everything on Atrixus. Dismiss fire elementals, they are so weak it's not even funny, blood priestess are not good either.
3) invest in diversion skill asap and start trapping those enemy units. Seriously, if you have not trapped the unit in some easier battle, replay the battle. The idea is to have 10 trapped units by the time you hit Shelter battles, which gives extra trap plus 25% extra damage. By the time you're doing Whitehill, you should have Diversion 3 and 4 traps.
4) proceed to catacombs. Here you have to defeat everything but the strongest stack of spiders. The reason is, there are precisely 21 battles before you hit Whitehill battles, and 20 no loss battles give Grand Strategy medal = extra 200leadership. So big spider battle is optional, all others pretty much compulsory.
5) I cannot give precise tactics on some bigger spider/snake battles or Shelter battles. Some general ideas are:
5a) you don't have to furiously shoot down the biggest/fastest stack that is approaching you. Instead, concetrate on some smaller enemy which maybe got trapped at the back. Once big stack gets close to your units, swap it with weak stack at the back via demoness exchange skill. This can be used repeatedly in battle, and not just for swapping demon with archer/weak unit at the beginning.
5b) sometimes due to strength of enemy stacks you do not want to send demon to enemy ranks right away. In the other words, apart from sturdiness, demoness contribution is low, becasue she is slow. consider dropping her and create two stacks of scoffer imps and fool enemy with sneer skill.
5c) talking about sneer skill. My favourite use, (especially during Shelter battles, where battlefield is divided in half) is to block the passage to scoffer imps by my stacks right where 3hex gaps are on one side. You let enemy approach on the other side for 2-3 turns, and then casting sneer with blocked way will send enemy all the way back to go around.
6) once you arrive at Whitehill, you only need to defeat one stack. You get Blackie and by far the best skill to use (and later in Portland) is Jealousy. Start the battle with maxed rage via potion of rage and cast it close to biggest level2 melee stack. This stack will go around crippling or even destroying its own shooters etc. Go one hex forward with demoness and swap demon with archer unit. Move out of reach of this teleported unit with imps before you shoot. The idea is, so archer stack cannot move away and shoot, or hit weak imps, so it has to go for demoness. If you lucky, it will even miss. If battle is difficult, restart few times in order for Diversion skill to sabotage in the first round 2 stacks and the stacks you want. Ideally, it will incapacitate melee unit on one side and archer on the other side. You then swap demon with unaffected archer unit, and create summon with demon. Since melee unit on this side won't move in the first round, and melee attack of shooters is weak, your summon will survive round one.

Like I said, i only have done about sixty battles, but there is this idea for a challenge - good old - how far you can get with single black dragon (hmm, never heard of that one before). You can get the dragon quite early actually. Once you reach Portland, develop Blackie in terms of Jealousy and Orc Strike only. Orc Strike will do some serious damage and combined with traps, you can defeat the black dragon.

[zjazd18]

Whitehill was brutal for me too, and they were only fights i didn't manage to do no-loss and it was required to do all 3 stacks when i started. Dunno how my stacks looked compared to matt/yours but i didn't see any hope, although i didn't have level 3 diversion/trapper.

Black dragon challenge should be easy for vampire, the summons are really strong in this game, early game phoenix, then call of nature.

As for vampire start, problem are archers, rest you can kite for days with vampires. In Elf Guardian of Light stack, there are elves that basically kill something in 1 shot, if it hits 1 vampire it dies. Trap doesn't help against them, and there are like 100 fairies that can't be trapped. Poison skull isn't reliable enough even on level 2 it can do really low dmg.

[Zhuangzi]

Sounds like you had my luck with random numbers of units in a stack, Impy. First time I tried no loss I got stuck with a huge stack of Fairies in one of those Shelter fights, but when I restarted and got back to the same fight it was much easier. I didn't do that hardest spider stack either, but like you say once you get Blackie it gets much easier.

Having said that, no loss is a challenge in this game for sure. I am up to 196 fights without loss now, about level 34, and I'm not entirely sure where I ought to be concentrating on. For a long time now most of the available stacks on most islands are Very Hard and above. It's hard to know the correct order of islands in terms of difficulty.

Obviously it's Portland, Monteville, Inselburg in that order, but after that I have been all over the place fighting whatever seemed easiest. I finally cleared out Draganador and also Baraz-Gund, and after quite a few easy fights on Tristem I can pick and choose to a large extent.

I really enjoyed those first three islands a lot - I thought the map and quest design was excellent. The other islands are good too but I have to say I prefer the sense of being more or less 'stuck' on one island and having to fight my way through it, rather than being able to teleport all over the world looking for the next easiest fight. Ah well, at least I don't have to use the boat...

[DGDobrev]

So far I have been doing it in this order: Portland, Monteville, Inselburg, Darenbam, Baraz-Gund, Tristem, Dragandor, Sandy/Bear Butte (seemed the same difficulty at this point), Atrixus, and now I am tormenting the amazons.

Sure takes some porting between islands, due to the nature of the quests. I think we got a bit spoiled by KBAP's linear quests. These ones here need you to think a little, and expect you to be a bit more involved in them, especially since, the way it looks, there are 50+ more quests in KBDS than there were in KBAP. I love the porting here and there - while it takes away the "find the fastest route" game option, it makes for much less punishable game experience if you miss something. Keeping in mind the game is 100+ hours a play-through, I can only smile at this addition.

Also make sure you check the map guards. Some are in places that allow you to kite them just enough to steal the map they are guarding. It never hurts to open a new area

EDIT: they really need to make your summoned units a bit smarter. My summons have adopted a hobby: seek out traps and fall in them

[Zhuangzi]

Sandy Island seems a bit easier than Bear Butte to me, not so much in terms of the leadership but just the quality of enemies. In this game the effect of poison, burning and bleeding just seem very, very overpowered, so certain enemies are a royal pain in the ass. I never want to see any of these suckers again:

Alchemists (uh, so tough, and poison bombs?)
Ice Spiders (stacks of 300+???, one shot killing some of my Archdemons?)
And those new things, I forget their name, that cast Empathy? Screw that.

Those Priests of Light are hazardous too with their mass heal, but you can always cast Fear on a stack of them.

Jealousy is far and away the best Rage ability. Like in previous KB games abilities that do a fixed amount of damage are woefully underpowered by mid-game. Black Hole looks nice but barely scratches them.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Great post, Impy!

Without comparing notes it is hard to tell for certain, but for the most part, it sounds like your strategies were similar to mine. I didn't use any of the cheat methods to look ahead, but I did mention that I ended up going back to my Atrixus save when I first got to the shelter as I realized that I should try harder to complete the Demon child quest, focus my skill tree on improving Trap since it was pivotal to dealing damage early for Demoness with the limited troop availability, and I also wanted to defeat that big spider stack in the Catacombs.

I think you could probably do the big Catacombs spider stack if you wanted, but as you said, it is not important at this stage of the game (except for having a little more experience - and maybe bragging rights ).

Originally Posted by impy

1b) do only compulsory fights and get to Whitehill to see the strength of the weakest stack. I am talking hard learned lesson here. When I started this game, I did not want to check the forums and spoil the tactics for me. Once I arrived to Whitehill with more or less struggle no loss, I was taken aback by the strength of even the weakest stack. Honestly, it was brutal. I checked the forums to see if other people had hard time, but hardly any mention of this. And then on page 4 of this thread I see pictures MattCaspermeyer posted with these stacks. And the first picture , the weakest one is almost walk in a park! Compare it to what I had as the weakest stack. It means, there is some variation in starting leadership of those stacks, so in order to save yourself frustration, check this beforehand.

I'd agree with you that the first Whitehill stack I faced was easier (at least it seemed, anyway) to the Shelter fights I had just done; however, those fights (and the big Catacombs spider stack) had "trained" me for the Whitehill fights in what tactics to use, etc. and so I actually think the Whitehill fights are fairly tough, for no loss anyway, but they seem easier because we are just better players by that time.

It is interesting that they changed it from all 3 to just 1 of the Whitehill fights as your stack was weaker than my final stack (although I'm guessing you were level 5 when you fought them and I was level 6 with 3 more Imps / Scoffer Imps for the 2nd and 3rd Whitehill stacks). Using your stack as the baseline, here are the relative strengths of the stacks I faced compared to yours (this is based on stack leadership):

Stack 1: 70.0%
Stack 2: 81.5%
Stack 3: 111%

So I wonder if this is just variability or a change to make them tougher since you only had to defeat 1 of them. Of course, leadership is not the only gauge for how hard a stack is, but you'll note that when comparing all the stacks, they all have 3 shooters and 2 melee troops, and the Inquisitors tend to use their res ability on turn 1 so they are not as big of a problem as Bowmen or the Priests of Light (at least on round 1 anyway).

At any rate, I think between your and my posts people now should see what the difference in variability is and how possible no loss is comparing against these stacks.

I really think that once you get the strategy down that you can handle quite a bit of variability in stack size with these troops because they all have essentially the same structure of troop types. It is just as easy for your Demoness to swap a stack of 40 Swordsmen or 28. As long as these concepts sink in, no lossing these stacks shouldn't be a problem if you're persistent.

/C\/C\

[DGDobrev]

Keep this going guys. I think that we are close to finding a good formula (spells + units) for a no-loss for a Vampire. It mustn't be too overpowered, yet it must still be a challenge. It is quite all right if it is a mod in my opinion, like an edited save. If someone did it, other can do it too. And then we can move on to the Orc.