Archer army

[Hento]

Can you finish the game with warrior on hard with zero losses if your army consists of:

-hunters
-repair droids
-guard droids(target spell)
-cannoneers
-elfs

from skills:

-3 in quickdraw
-3 in persuasion
-3 in prayer


from items:
-artifact with 5% critical and initiative to dwarves, humans and elves
-dagger of judgement(20% critical)
-sniper set(20% critical)

dwarf companion who further increases criticals to 100%(you also get criticals from achievements)

Has anyone tried this?

[Urbz]

I think there's been some discussing this before on the forums although now it might be a bit more viable with some of the new items.
Anyhow if you're gonna try, goodluck!

[DGDobrev]

In the boss battles archer die like crazy. This is the biggest problem with them. They are waaaay too frail. It may be possible to do it on normal, since the bosses are generally low on health there, but on the higher difficulties, when a single mass attack kills something like 1/5 to 1/3 of the entire archer stack, things will look very grim.

In normal battles they rock. Hard. They are really, really great. However, if you want to complete the game with archers ONLY, the boss battles will be the biggest challenge.

[Hento]

well, bosses are rare anyway, you can always keep a reserve army in some castle, I was thinking archmages, knights, horsemen, paladins and inquisitors as second army(i will have very high moral and initiative for humans).

[Hento]

I found this-

- Bosses. I felt like the bosses in this game were ridiculously more difficult. I really wish they had let you use your dragon in them, because the damage output on them was just silly. Ironically I thought the only boss that wasn't that hard was the final one. I pretty much left the bosses until the end of the game and even then they were still the only encounter that I thought were hard. The gremlin in the tower was particularly annoying. I had to try a couple different combinations of unit. Mostly though I will say this: USE RANGED UNITS AGAINST BOSSES. Using Melee units is an exercise in futility as they all have unlimited counter attacks and will usually hit more than 1 square. I wasted so many dragons against bosses it was silly. At the end of the game my strategy was basically going into battle and having some really strong units with lots of life, like Trolls/Ogres/T-Rex and just having them defend each turn while I whittled the boss away at 3k a spell.

I don't know why DGDobrev said that, i thought it was strange...

[DGDobrev]

Well, all I can say is - get to the boss battles and see how many of your archers will die in the first mass attack. This is a good way to discover how your army will fare against them.

Know that the Spider webs your ranged units every time they attack for 2 turns. This means that if you shoot with all your archers, they will not be able to attack and will be immobile for 2 turns. Very inconvenient, to say the least

Please keep in mind that I'm always analyzing from impossible difficulty point of view... I assume that on normal, an archer party may do really well against bosses, because they have less attack, less defense, and less health.

[ivra]

It has been mentioned many times in this forum; the importance of Resistance in boss fights. I experienced it first hand in my impossible mage game in the fight against Baal. I had about 29k Leadership (including Flaming Eyes) and used an undead setup with Necromancers, Vampires, Ancient Vampires, Bone Dragons and Death Knights. I attacked with the vampires and the death knight. I had also put Stone Skin on the death knight. In one attack K'Tahu attacked my ancient vampire stack and destroyed it in one blow (Can bosses score a critical hit - this sure felt like one). Later the same attack killed only 5 of my death knights (out of ca 200)...

[DGDobrev]

Well, archer-type units have few or no resistances. This is a major problem even if you get all the necessary resistance items

[MaroonMaurader]

With a high-level, high-leadership army you can take down frog and spider so fast they don't have time to really hurt you.

If you are so stupendously luck you truly get *all* the necessary resistance items, and are using the gift bag, I believe you can get (and equip) a base +52% physical resist: leather dress, crystal ball, twinkling boots, scaly set, guardian angel 3. If it's possible to get multiple crystal balls it rises from there (I've never gotten any, but see it there in the items file). Toss stoneskin on top of that, and Driller, K'Tahu, and Baal are fairly ineffective against any army.

While wearing that equipment, you can also get magical resistance up to 92% easily: add in the gift-bag helmet for 50% and the anti-magic diploma for 25% to the 17% from leather dress, crystal ball, and guardian angel 3. Then Gremlion is also not going to hurt you too much either.

So I think the answer would be... yes, if you are really, really lucky.

[Zechnophobe]

Ktahu's first action is going to be to do thousands of damage to all your archer stacks. You will cast stoneskin on one stack, and do some damage... and he'll either do the same thousands of damage again, or summon a bunch of units that will go to melee range with your guys and prevent them from shooting him.

I really doubt that is going to work out well. Even WITH all the luck listed above.