Red Sands Mod/Add-On Discussion - potential SPOILERS

[ckdamascus]

Hey there, does anyone want to discuss the new units and items they found?

There is a lot more stuff that I heard about, but I am only documenting what I have directly seen.

New Familiar - Asmodeus
You get a new item that seems to only fit in your right hand. While equipping it you will lose 15% leadership and 15% base mana and gain 1 defense, however you get to summon a beholder familiar (summon) called Asmodeus in the beginning of the battle.

He has quite a few abilities, can level up, and if he dies, it does not count against your losses. However, if he dies, he will need about 5 rounds of fighting for him to revive on his own, or you can fork out 3 crystals to instantly revive him. (It is a very good deal to restore him if you lose him).

This definitely makes the early game much smoother since a properly levelled up Asmodeus opens up a lot more strategic opportunities. He is fairly tanky relatively speaking.

He levels up based on "doing" things. So, he can level up his attack, defense, or his three special abilities

- disintegration ray
- teleport lightning aura
- undead healing/restoring

If he levels up 3 different "things", he gains a level (extra HP), and he gets more attributes that you can customize. Some of them include +10% resist to all elements, +7% physical resist, +3 to all beholderes in the army, able to counterattack twice, +1 speed, etc.



New Units So Far
Fire Mage
Looks like an archmage but has a lot of burning skills.

Orc Sabateur
Can hide/invisible, ambush units, walk through traps. Supposedly synergizes with Assassins.

Mystic
One of the new beholder units, can hypnotize on attack, gains benefits from runes, can go into trance mode for better attacks AND for vampiric mode which can revive fallen mystics.

Gorgon
Another new beholder unit, can petrify OR poison on attack (this is wickedly awesome), can summon twice on charges, can hex/curse

Ritualist
Shaman unit, but undead. Has ice prison, shock spell... only saw him as an enemy.

Ice Dragon
Emerald dragon but immune to magic, chance to slow on hit, able to shoot a dream of ice (like red dragon icy equivalent)... any empty cells turn into ice shards. Very good to create quick wall-offs. They actually have very good stats which makes them highly resistant to poison and physical attacks.

New Race Modifications
Humans now have a chance to get a "second attack".

Supposedly, now when demons kill stacks, it leaves behind a "rage" ball that can heal and restore talents.


New Levelling System
Seems pretty good. Now, my split up inquistor stack can level up like mad. The stat boosts seem helpful. It isn't clear to me if this will lead to imbalance, but the developers insist it will not.

One interesting tidbid is that when a stack levels up, it seems to restore/reset their talents.

General Progress
Using a Mage, blind build style. Since I don't know the new units and items that well, this probably makes sense.

Just added Assassins and Paladins into the mix. Of interesting note, since levelling up CAN increase your base critical hit percentage, this makes morale even MORE important. It also makes me wonder if Assassins + Orc Saboteurs will be especially dangerous. Also, levelling up can infer a lot of extra bonuses. My red dragons get about +20 attack and +20 defense. This is the sort of thing that MIGHT make assassins viable especially with the damage bonus. Throw in the morale boost, and Assassins will easily be doing 100% criticals in no time.

My new army is
Asmodeus
Paladin
Assassins
Red Dragons
Rune Mage
Archmage

I usually cast Phoenix early on to start it off. A lot of resurrection options, so I don't feel quite as hampered. I'll see how it plays out. Once I get teleport, I think there will be a LOT of mayhem with those Assassins.


Closing Comments
I think this opens up the chance for a new set of units to do "no-losses". Asmodeus will definitely smoothen out the early game so it requires less luck and more tactics in impossible modes. I wonder if Level 10 Peasants have a shot now... hmmm.

Side Notes
Once I heard humans all have a chance to do 'second attacks', I immediately thought, wow, this will make those Rune Mages even more sick. Once I get enough slots for dual, or triple rune mage stacks, I can only imagine the sheepy mayhem that will occur.

[joasoz]

This sounds really interesting I must say. I will have to try this some time.

[Fatt_Shade]

Ok let me give some contribution here
Some more of new units :
Neutral - monstera stronger royal thorn, interesting to play
Undead - evi genius alchemist in undead garb,
adept of darkness , changed necromancer, evlin spell after killing enemy
medium beholder unit in undead ranks ( havent tried him, since it`s talent translation isnt good)
Bunch of new items, and new slot in hero screen for dragon pet items like lizard boots, antena helm . . .
Also every fraction now have special bonus :
humans have % chance to act again(fighting spirit),
elves elemental bonuses earth +deff/hp, wind +speed, fire +att/+dmg (which is sick some times stack of 200 ents with stone skin 2 lvl and +35% hp!!!),
demons get their talents reset after killing enemy,
undead resurrect their number after couple of atacks( need to fill 100% of their) necroenergy
dwarves have some drunken bonus which i havent figured out so far
All in all humans are sick with 15-20% for second turn every unit (goblin have 15% unstoppable on 3 lvl adrenaline, but this is just ridiculous. With warrior hero and humans you can clear 80% enemy in first round). Fighting spirit is overpowered. Try 4*1 archmage and 5th unit some dragon to kill enenmy and you can get guardian medal on 3 lvl in 13 battles.

[ckdamascus]

Originally Posted by Fatt_Shade

Ok let me give some contribution here
Some more of new units :
Neutral - monstera stronger royal thorn, interesting to play
Undead - evi genius alchemist in undead garb,
adept of darkness , changed necromancer, evlin spell after killing enemy
medium beholder unit in undead ranks ( havent tried him, since it`s talent translation isnt good)
Bunch of new items, and new slot in hero screen for dragon pet items like lizard boots, antena helm . . .
Also every fraction now have special bonus :
humans have % chance to act again(fighting spirit),
elves elemental bonuses earth +deff/hp, wind +speed, fire +att/+dmg (which is sick some times stack of 200 ents with stone skin 2 lvl and +35% hp!!!),
demons get their talents reset after killing enemy,
undead resurrect their number after couple of atacks( need to fill 100% of their) necroenergy
dwarves have some drunken bonus which i havent figured out so far
All in all humans are sick with 15-20% for second turn every unit (goblin have 15% unstoppable on 3 lvl adrenaline, but this is just ridiculous. With warrior hero and humans you can clear 80% enemy in first round). Fighting spirit is overpowered. Try 4*1 archmage and 5th unit some dragon to kill enenmy and you can get guardian medal on 3 lvl in 13 battles.

Regarding the archmage, I think it is a bug that it seems to recharge the talent if they successfully roll another turn. I believe they plan to fix this.

What I do like, but it is probably slightly imbalanced, is that when you "level up" during battle, you get fully healed. It has actually been critical of me to rely on this as a Mage in the early game.

I saw all the new units you saw too, but I did not see the Monstera! I wonder if I can upgrade to them via training school???

I think Medium uses a lot of lightning based attacks. I'm not a big undead fan, but I suppose this helps a lot with Undead since you don't need to wait to get EvilN. Asmodeus should work quite well with undead units thanks to his 3rd skill...

Plus, there are so many new undead units. Unfortunately, I wonder if it just means we will be seeing Asmodeus + Black Knight solo stacks. I think I saw some russians already do that.

[Fatt_Shade]

MOnstera i found on Uzala, it`s 4th lvl thorn basic info can be found in game/sesions/red_sands/atoms/monstera.atom. Normal thorn seed, physical/poison dmg, burrow something like gobots to move around arena, and poison aoe attack something like EGD magic well, and every turn heals near ally thorns 50-150 hp.
I havent collected enough trophies to try new unit upgrades in academy but it should be possible for archmage from inqusitor, and all new beholder units from normal beholders, even monstera from thorns. Who try this report pls.
And yes new undead builds will be interesting with more units. About solo BK+Asmodean why oh why ? Solo BK is so easy why playing all game again if already done it before? New undead will do great for warrior since no need for evlin spell in book, so almost no need to spend runes to learn magic tree skills.

[sdshadow]

Has anyone a plan about all skills of Asmadeo?

How far he could levelup? Level 10 like other units or higher?

Some of the Skills seem pretty useless, the 10% heal in the early rounds but max 20...i have now 440 hp and 20 hp a few rounds is really useless. How high this skill go later? I see that it has 5 ranks, is it 50% and max 100 at the last rank?

Since the skills to choose is random and for future planning a list of all ranks of all skills would be nice.

[Fatt_Shade]

All about Asmadeo you can find in game/sessions/red_sand/localisation/rus/other/eng_fammiliar
Just browse that ifle and you`ll learn his skills and lvls possible to learn. And of some of his skills are weak at start, as it should be but later on he`ll be quite usefull and versatile (exsample hp/round regeneration goes to 500 hp/round at 5th lvl.

[ckdamascus]

I wish I saw that list earlier haha.

Being able to attack more than once is a good way to build up extra experience points too.

Also, being able to attack again when hit helps.

The healing thing seems pretty good though since Asmodeus seems to draw a fair amount of aggro.

I should have picked it up, but I did not.

I heard rumors of guys nearly soloing everything with Asmodeus... I wonder what kind of build orders they used.

As an aside, the Rune Mage's Revive spell can heal Asmodeus before he dies.

Ugh, mystic ritual can kill living beings and use it to revive undead beings or yourself. That's no good for a no-loss build. Blah. I'm still starting over again since I didn't let Asmodeus upgrade up enough.

Yuck.

[Fatt_Shade]

Yea healing Asmodean is great since only other way to keep him alive is rune mages, and on early game you dont have enough leadership for them. Aditional action points is also great skill on hit/attack. Soloing Asmodean is only possible with undead i think because mystic ritual can heal them and not living units (i think Asmodean cant heal him self either with it). There is some skill that boost that ability but gives more charges, not healing self/live units.
Reading new unit abilities i got fealing that developers wanted to strenghten undead units with new fraction undead lizardmen : Asmodean can resurrect them, medium/adept of darkness/evil genius all have some ability to make evlins after killing enemy troops.

[sdshadow]

I self try a Asmadeo solo (Asmodean? Asmodeus? in my game he hears not if i yell him so )
The only big problem is that if you had no unit at the start of the battle you loss befor you can summon him.
But i have a undead Skeleton on my side to start the battle and to lvlup Asmadeo with the heal undead spell.

If the undead is dead befor i can use the spell no problem, but Asmadeo is really a aggro machine, the single Skeleton is not often a target for the computer (but priests and all other good undead killer target the Skeleton in no time)