Best Class for Race-Based Games via Editor

[Helios]

I think a no-loss Mage on Impossible would make me cry, (as will 5 melees--I'll likely ditch that game and the archers, but I'd like to give the rest a shot). As I mentioned previously, I don't feel like I have that good of a strategy to playing the Mage period. I think I ended up with like 14,000 losses my last time with him, but I was sacrificing thousands of miners to make my initial Sprites into a huge unit and not bothering with Resurrection back then, saving my mana for nuking the enemy. I thought nuking would be fun, but it was brainless and boring when I went all out for it. I think I'd rather have a dual-casting Distortion Mage now with some equips to make his troops not fall apart. Fighting one of Haas' incarnations that had Demons and something like 20+ defense was a horror story for me. I could barely scratch them!

And I've been thinking about the archer game--I had decent success with an all ranged army with a Mage and redirecting traffic with stone walls and 2x Demon Portal spells, but that wouldn't work later on, would it? Bats can fly over the portals, can't they? I know I've seen ghosts go by them. And of course nothing would stop the dragons from getting to them, but 2x Traps would at least make things a bit easier. If they just had one decent unit they could Phantom and throw into the fray to distract some of the melees coming their way they might have a chance. Maybe I should develop an MVP approach to the archers and the all-melee army where I instead choose four of each of those, and one of the awesome regular units to supplement them and in effect be the most valuable player of the team. Four archers with one demon stack might be able enough to keep the heat off of them to plink away. Or not. Phantoming every turn probably wouldn't be mana-viable without green dragons restoring the mana. How many ways can you poop-shoot that idea? :p

[Vulture]

Not at all ^^ I will just let you see how far you get without having the freedom to chose what to do your spells per turn when you already know what you have to cast in order to keep Dragons from fire breathing through your defenseless archers :> Because if you're a mage that can pull off so many Phantoms and Traps, where do you get the atk and ldr to cause severe damage with your archers if you can't cast Dragon Arrows, Dragon Slayer, Helplessness or Precision :>

Just do it and report in. I am very curious as to how far you get with that. I'm sure you'll have fun until at some point. Like... Karador :> I can already see you nuke and fire from range, chopping down the stacks and then having nothing to stand on the corpses with except two fragile Phantoms :>

Please take screenshots of the big battles. Because if you prove me wrong I wanna play with 5 archers, too !

[Helios]

I'll let you know when/if I get to the Archers. I'm not sure which order I'm going to play in, but I might make it my game after the Undead, as I have an itch to get back to a Mage. I can imagine my horror as I send a Phantom of 30 cannoneers in to take hits and perish in the first exchange. Maybe if Higher Magic let you cast 3 spells per turn ... Nah. There are just so many holes to plug in the sinking ship that there isn't enough to patch it with! Maybe a Paladin with a buffed version of Higher Magic, able to equip 4 weapons, and with the leadership of a Warrior could pull it off, but I'm not willing to break the game that much. ;p To be able to win the boss fights, I can't even begin to imagine how to beat Karador, Baal, or Haas. Those units just aren't strong enough to deal the kind of damage necessary or take the hits boss-boosted units can dish out. I bet I end up dead in five turns or less against each of those bosses. I'd hate to invest upwards of 40 hours and then have it go totally kaput.

[Helios]

LOL, just had to post that I think the Undead are overpowered. :p What a fool I was for not using them before! Cursed Ghosts don't care about getting mobbed with Target, and as long as I keep my eye on their leadership to know what to nuke them back down to, I just munch on the rest with the bats, and the skeleton archers deal out massive damage. I haven't gotten two good weapons but got a Bow in Marshan Swamp and it boosted the archers to 3-4 damage. It's nice to be on the opposite end of those arrows.

[Vulture]

This forum needs a "like" button ;>

That's how I felt, too, when I got undeads the first time. And yes, as soon as you know how to manage their losses and their morale problem, and don't feel like it's annoying to do so, they are overpowered. Their strength was designed to counter their harder management and for them to pose a real threat to the player facing them. Guess which kind of player has the most fun with them ? Right, the one who knows wtf he's doing :>

Big thanks to people like Bucasaurus, Nike-it, loreangelicus and others I am forgetting that convinced me to use them and forced me to get Tolerance which I have done ever since :> It's just nice to bring whatever the **** you want along with your Demons and Undeads.

[Helios]

Yes, it needs the dislike button that FB won't add, too. Well, thanks for the advice on the Undeads. I'll be using them in the future when I'm not playing some strange constrained race/units game. Maybe when I finally go for no losses.

[Helios]

I've been thinking about these playthroughs, and since this game is *so* easy to edit, I've been wondering about minor edits to balance out different play-styles:

Like opening up each wife's equipment slots so they can equip four of anything, and thereby making them a consideration instead of focusing on Xeona for weapons. (I'd use the honor-system and not equip more than two weapons on each wife, to not break the game.) And maybe some edits with the babies, so they are actually part of the game. The mod that exists still isn't enough imo to make the gamble of having a child worth it.

And perhaps adding a second bonus to the sets in the game, so they are actually worth taking up to five of your slots (!). Maybe adding a bonus or two to the wives, like something not too overpowered, like a 100% Defense bonus on Mirabella to Robbers, Pirates, and Barbarians. I'm also thinking of something like -10% Leadership requirements to the race/group of units the wife benefits. Wouldn't more elves trust to follow you if you married one?

I'm not too sure on the skill trees, but there are a couple of things I'd like to rearrange in the hierarchy of the trees, like having Higher Magic buried at the bottom of Magic, and ditto with Inquisition and Tolerance in Mind. The Might tree is better, but it still sucks you have to invest in Combat Readiness and Tactics to get to Onslaught. And doesn't Glory just scream for a boost given the number of runes you invest for the return? How about +300/600/1000 Leadership?

Hero changes? I'm not sure, but it seems silly that a Paladin and a Mage couldn't drop whatever and hold a second weapon like the Warrior.

The only other change I would consider is in the realm of Spells. Perhaps boosting the Phoenix spell so that is actually useful outside of Darion on Normal difficulty? That spell could use a huge boost. The only other ones I can think of, but have real potential to break the game, are to have level 3 Slow be a Mass spell, and have level 3 Dragon Arrows give one arrow to all allied archers. The spells seem pretty balanced already.

This all should probably go under modding, but these are some of the ideas I'm tossing around for my subsequent racial/unit games.

All opinions are welcome. Would any of these break the game? Too much?

[Vulture]

The Glory thing is definitely too much. A smart move would be to change the benefit of the first level of it to 200 since 100 really is wrong. But 300/600/1000 ? That goes way too far. Especially since you can get the first one at level 2 if you want where you have like 500 ldr. That would be an increase of more than half if your ldr ! Idk, I'm not really for modding and I don't want to doctor around at all ^^ If you have fun doing that, however, go ahead, knock yourself out

[Helios]

Thanks for the input. That would be too much for Glory. And I've definitely changed my mind about moving Higher Magic up in the skill trees. What do you think of the mass Slow and Dragon Arrows? Too broken? I was trying to think of a way to make the all-Archers more viable.

[dainbramage]

Both of those would be broken I think. Dragon arrows is absolutely amazing for what it does, a mass version would be way too much. And mass slow, especially with boots of the mystic, is going to mean that anything other than dragons and archdemons will never reach you.

I think it could work if you put a lot of emphasis on skills like ice ball, stone wall and glot's armour. Maybe throw out phantoms to also tank. But this strategy is going to go out the window once you hit mass dragon stacks... hopefully dragon arrows will be enough to handle them.


Also, how are you planning on dealing with bone dragons (and skeletons/skeleton archers). They only take 30% damage from arrows, they'll be an absolute pain to kill.