KBDS Normal/Hard/Impossible No-loss thread

[Loremipsum1]

Originally Posted by MattCaspermeyer

Great ideas, Loremipsum1!

I have not tried to see if the Evil Book will help, yet.

The problem with vampire troops is that they regenerate every round. So this makes it tough, I think, to give the player starting (Ancient) Vampires and coupled with the no retaliation, you can do pretty amazing things with just a few of them. I think the developers tried to keep this in mind with respect to impossible no loss when playing Daert.

I've noticed from my experience with Daert is that Vampire troops can get into a corner and limit the damage to just 3 troops if there are no ranged attackers. The enemy stack sizes are just large enough (especially the thorns) to do more than 70 damage, sometimes. You need to whittle them down a bit, but then if there are two or three armies attacking the Vampires then they can kill at least 1 of them. So you end up trying to kite them around, but it is a lot harder with the limited space of the Catacombs fights.

I'm not 100% certain, but I think 1 Ancient Vampire would be able to solo all the fights to at least the shelter and he could easily do the Dwarven Shelter stack (I know that since I as able to do it with the 2 Vampires).

Yeah, that's correct, unfortunately. All the battles through the Black Gate were trivial, barring two giant stacks in the catacombs. Though, as you point out, the same is true with the default troops.

I definitely understand your concerns about ancient vamps being too strong, and before I did the Shelter fights, I had that concern too. After my first few attempts at the Elven Guardian, my concerns were resolved. 140 hit points is still fragile enough that the player will die if he gets hit by most melee stacks; the only difference is that it gives him a chance to survive the initial volleys from the enemy's ranged troops.

If anything, I think my setup is a little too weak; I don't think it's possible to beat the Shelter Guardians with it unless you get a scroll of Magic Spring from Clarissa. I'm not sure how to resolve that. (Other than swapping out your starting plague scroll for a scroll of magic spring, I mean.)

That's why I was thinking the spell route may make no loss possible (and it goes with the fact that he is a mage), while keeping the starting Vampire troops as they are. Also, I don't think we should be going over about 20 to 30 rounds to do no loss, otherwise, it just gets tedious.

I like this idea in the abstract, but based on earlier posts in the thread, even giving Daert something as extravagant as Summon Phoenix still makes that fight pretty tight. (And it comes at the expense of breaking the game a little earlier in the post-Whitehall sections.)