How to deal with the drill mech?

[oceanskie]

Hi guys,

LVL 31 Mage with approxi 7.5k leadership. This is my last encounter on Montero.

Attempted this fight on two previous occasions using different army compositions with mild success. Both times got owned during phase 3 due to the boss getting repaired for 4k+. Also suffered massive loss around the same time from machine gun fire.

Strategies employed so far include 2-3 dmg dealers consisted of 2 physical resist. units + 1 non-retaliation unit, 1 ranged + 1 LVL1 stack dealing with droids.

Here's hoping one of the master tacticians here can share some wisdom on the fight

[Zechnophobe]

Ah, master tactician once say "Come back later."

If you fight him right, you shouldn't even have to worry about droids. And fighting him right means having about twice the leadership you have now!

[TemjinGold]

1) Get a full stack of trolls. (Don't use ANY other stacks.)
2) Make sure you have Stone Skin, Avenging Angel, and Mana Spring Level 3.
3) Keep Stone Skin and Avenging Angel on trolls. (Slap on whatever physical resist stuff you have too)
4) Use Mana Spring if running low on mana.
5) Just attack with trolls.
6) ???
7) Profit!



As long as you keep attacking him, he won't summon any droids. I did this with 1 troll on impossible (Avenging Angel and the occasional fire arrow did most of the damage), so you should be fine if you have the spells.

[MaroonMaurader]

If you want a real easy, real cheap method for beating him, fable already just about summed it up:
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...76&postcount=4

You don't really need the scale set, but at least *some* items giving a boost to physical resistance is nice (the higher the better, anywhere up to a total boost without stoneskin of 25%).

[oceanskie]

Awesome, I'll give the troll strategy a try first as i remember having half a stack sitting in Debir.

Thanks all.

Edit: just finished the fight with zero loss using TemjinGold's troll strategy. Used Titan Armour (+10 def) and Ancient Knowledge (+50% exp)

[ivra]

The Troll strategy is probably the easiest...

I just made it on impossible warrior with more than one stack. The trick was to use max 4 stacks, so that there never were two of my stacks in the same row - that makes it too tempting for the driller to take out the big gun and shoot everyting on that column. Although my tank with stoneskin will manage, my poor support stack will loose around 1/4th of its size... My setup was Paladins and Knights as tanks (Stoneskin3 on both) + Inquisitors and Shamans as support. I was level 34 and had no Turn Back Time, so I needed the driller to summon some Repair Droids. Luckily it did so in the third position. I kept a small portion of the Repair Droids alive and gave them space so that they could stand in a corner and shoot (they would die immediately if they did a melee attack against any of my troops). Afther the driller was killed I could gather around the Paladins and resurrect my troops. I needed the Phantom spell also since the ressurection power of the Inquisitors and Paladins alone was not enough to recover every loss.

Conclusion:
Do not fight with more than 4 stacks in the driller fight.

[tetleytea]

I beat Driller with no loss by using Berserker. My Berserked pallies were doing 10k a pop. Whenever you knock him into the next phase he won't retaliate, plus the next turn you know he's going to do the tunnel collapsing thing. Just make sure your ranged units aren't in those slots and he basically wastes that turn on nothing. A lvl 2 Dispel on my pallies, and the only thing I had to resurrect was the pallies themselves.

[DGDobrev]

That is a good tactic for normal difficulty, well done The problem is that on impossible difficulty the boss has a total of 98K hp (1+2+3 position) and using 1 tank +4 ranged units will make them prone to a gun shot (which is the highest chance attack for the boss if there are 2 units in the same line), which is highly undesirable...

[Hento]

Originally Posted by oceanskie

Hi guys,

LVL 31 Mage with approxi 7.5k leadership. This is my last encounter on Montero.

Attempted this fight on two previous occasions using different army compositions with mild success. Both times got owned during phase 3 due to the boss getting repaired for 4k+. Also suffered massive loss around the same time from machine gun fire.

Strategies employed so far include 2-3 dmg dealers consisted of 2 physical resist. units + 1 non-retaliation unit, 1 ranged + 1 LVL1 stack dealing with droids.

Here's hoping one of the master tacticians here can share some wisdom on the fight

I was about the same lvl mage as you are and on hard, when I defeated Driller, I specifically remember using only Dragon Army(red, black and green) and using fireball and fire rain, then later fire arrows(about 3k damage).

I had no trouble whatsoever, zero losses of course. Are you sure you developed your mage properly, meaning focusing on skills that increase your intellect, both in mind and magic trees?

[tetleytea]

Actually, I didn't use 1 tank and all ranged units. For the Driller I like Droids the best (you are, after all, on Montero). You can hit him with the guard droids all you want, just as if they were a summoned unit--you are, after all, going to repair them all anyway. And there's no reason the Driller should ever hit the repair droids. Plus with the repair droids' speed they have no problem getting out of the way of the collapsing tunnel.

I was no-loss completely by accident, so I imagine Pallies + Droids would scale to Hard etc. without too much problem. I could have filled the remaining two army slots with anything (well okay, almost anything: speed 1 units would not be too wise).