I absolutely agree with that. While Poison skull is a rather good spell, it does little to help the Vampire in the early game, unless you specialize. We sure need some balance there. I can perfectly understand the devs opting to make a game with 3 different heroes with 3 different play-styles. Let's face it, KBAP plays the same with any class, only difference being the early game.

Then again, you must expect that people will want to do no-loss, and at least give a simple option for that. Or at least a chance... With the spells you listed, I see no chance for the Vampire.

Wow, 200+ hours, Matt? I can well believe it as I am up to about 65 hours on this playthrough and I'm only at level 33. And if you can't beat the Shelter fights as a Vampire Impossible No-loss, then I certainly don't think I will even try!

Hopefully by the time I'm finished with the Demoness, we'll have a patch addressing these balance issues.

I absolutely agree.

Well, my Neoline is level 45 now, 250 fights in. Still feels like I'm in mid-game, lol. Cleared out Atrixus, and having a great time :)

Well, hello everyone,I finally got the game and did some serious playing this weekend. I was hoping for open world right from the start, as in Legends or Armored Princess, which is great for various challenges once you feel saturated with standard gameplay. Here however are those compulsory fights (around 20) plus Portland offers very limited choices, but it is still a lot,lot lot better than Wotn. Game really opens once you defeat first scroll guardians on Portland.
I have done only 60 fights so far but I thought I summarize in detail what is a good approach to do early demoness no-loss impossible. Please, update it for future generations of gamers!;)

1) start a game and save. Now using old codes, which still work, for example - "doublearmy" or "leadership XXXXX" get some army in order to check what lies ahead. It will save you some frustration believe me. You want to check the following:
1a) check the position of volcano in fight against knight hero on Atrixus. First, everytime I checked this battle volcano was there, but I am cannot be 100% sure if this is permanent or random . Let's just say it is better if it is. You also want volcano preferably on enemy half of battlefield, not in the middle, and definitely not on your half. With volcano close to enemy, it will seriously cripple his units and it will be much easier battle.
1b) do only compulsory fights and get to Whitehill to see the strength of the weakest stack. I am talking hard learned lesson here. When I started this game, I did not want to check the forums and spoil the tactics for me. Once I arrived to Whitehill with more or less struggle no loss, I was taken aback by the strength of even the weakest stack. Honestly, it was brutal. I checked the forums to see if other people had hard time, but hardly any mention of this. And then on page 4 of this thread I see pictures MattCaspermeyer posted with these stacks. And the first picture , the weakest one is almost walk in a park! Compare it to what I had as the weakest stack. It means, there is some variation in starting leadership of those stacks, so in order to save yourself frustration, check this beforehand.
2) start the game properly now and defeat everything on Atrixus. Dismiss fire elementals, they are so weak it's not even funny, blood priestess are not good either.
3) invest in diversion skill asap and start trapping those enemy units. Seriously, if you have not trapped the unit in some easier battle, replay the battle. The idea is to have 10 trapped units by the time you hit Shelter battles, which gives extra trap plus 25% extra damage. By the time you're doing Whitehill, you should have Diversion 3 and 4 traps.
4) proceed to catacombs. Here you have to defeat everything but the strongest stack of spiders. The reason is, there are precisely 21 battles before you hit Whitehill battles, and 20 no loss battles give Grand Strategy medal = extra 200leadership. So big spider battle is optional, all others pretty much compulsory.
5) I cannot give precise tactics on some bigger spider/snake battles or Shelter battles. Some general ideas are:
5a) you don't have to furiously shoot down the biggest/fastest stack that is approaching you. Instead, concetrate on some smaller enemy which maybe got trapped at the back. Once big stack gets close to your units, swap it with weak stack at the back via demoness exchange skill. This can be used repeatedly in battle, and not just for swapping demon with archer/weak unit at the beginning.
5b) sometimes due to strength of enemy stacks you do not want to send demon to enemy ranks right away. In the other words, apart from sturdiness, demoness contribution is low, becasue she is slow. consider dropping her and create two stacks of scoffer imps and fool enemy with sneer skill.
5c) talking about sneer skill. My favourite use, (especially during Shelter battles, where battlefield is divided in half) is to block the passage to scoffer imps by my stacks right where 3hex gaps are on one side. You let enemy approach on the other side for 2-3 turns, and then casting sneer with blocked way will send enemy all the way back to go around.
6) once you arrive at Whitehill, you only need to defeat one stack. You get Blackie and by far the best skill to use (and later in Portland) is Jealousy. Start the battle with maxed rage via potion of rage and cast it close to biggest level2 melee stack. This stack will go around crippling or even destroying its own shooters etc. Go one hex forward with demoness and swap demon with archer unit. Move out of reach of this teleported unit with imps before you shoot. The idea is, so archer stack cannot move away and shoot, or hit weak imps, so it has to go for demoness. If you lucky, it will even miss. If battle is difficult, restart few times in order for Diversion skill to sabotage in the first round 2 stacks and the stacks you want. Ideally, it will incapacitate melee unit on one side and archer on the other side. You then swap demon with unaffected archer unit, and create summon with demon. Since melee unit on this side won't move in the first round, and melee attack of shooters is weak, your summon will survive round one.

Like I said, i only have done about sixty battles, but there is this idea for a challenge - good old - how far you can get with single black dragon (hmm, never heard of that one before:grin:). You can get the dragon quite early actually. Once you reach Portland, develop Blackie in terms of Jealousy and Orc Strike only. Orc Strike will do some serious damage and combined with traps, you can defeat the black dragon.

Whitehill was brutal for me too, and they were only fights i didn't manage to do no-loss and it was required to do all 3 stacks when i started. Dunno how my stacks looked compared to matt/yours but i didn't see any hope, although i didn't have level 3 diversion/trapper.

Black dragon challenge should be easy for vampire, the summons are really strong in this game, early game phoenix, then call of nature.

As for vampire start, problem are archers, rest you can kite for days with vampires. In Elf Guardian of Light stack, there are elves that basically kill something in 1 shot, if it hits 1 vampire it dies. Trap doesn't help against them, and there are like 100 fairies that can't be trapped. Poison skull isn't reliable enough even on level 2 it can do really low dmg.

Sounds like you had my luck with random numbers of units in a stack, Impy. First time I tried no loss I got stuck with a huge stack of Fairies in one of those Shelter fights, but when I restarted and got back to the same fight it was much easier. I didn't do that hardest spider stack either, but like you say once you get Blackie it gets much easier.

Having said that, no loss is a challenge in this game for sure. I am up to 196 fights without loss now, about level 34, and I'm not entirely sure where I ought to be concentrating on. For a long time now most of the available stacks on most islands are Very Hard and above. It's hard to know the correct order of islands in terms of difficulty.

Obviously it's Portland, Monteville, Inselburg in that order, but after that I have been all over the place fighting whatever seemed easiest. I finally cleared out Draganador and also Baraz-Gund, and after quite a few easy fights on Tristem I can pick and choose to a large extent.

I really enjoyed those first three islands a lot - I thought the map and quest design was excellent. The other islands are good too but I have to say I prefer the sense of being more or less 'stuck' on one island and having to fight my way through it, rather than being able to teleport all over the world looking for the next easiest fight. Ah well, at least I don't have to use the boat...

So far I have been doing it in this order: Portland, Monteville, Inselburg, Darenbam, Baraz-Gund, Tristem, Dragandor, Sandy/Bear Butte (seemed the same difficulty at this point), Atrixus, and now I am tormenting the amazons.

Sure takes some porting between islands, due to the nature of the quests. I think we got a bit spoiled by KBAP's linear quests. These ones here need you to think a little, and expect you to be a bit more involved in them, especially since, the way it looks, there are 50+ more quests in KBDS than there were in KBAP. I love the porting here and there - while it takes away the "find the fastest route" game option, it makes for much less punishable game experience if you miss something. Keeping in mind the game is 100+ hours a play-through, I can only smile at this addition.

Also make sure you check the map guards. Some are in places that allow you to kite them just enough to steal the map they are guarding. It never hurts to open a new area :)

EDIT: they really need to make your summoned units a bit smarter. My summons have adopted a hobby: seek out traps and fall in them :D

Sandy Island seems a bit easier than Bear Butte to me, not so much in terms of the leadership but just the quality of enemies. In this game the effect of poison, burning and bleeding just seem very, very overpowered, so certain enemies are a royal pain in the ass. I never want to see any of these suckers again:

Alchemists (uh, so tough, and poison bombs?)
Ice Spiders (stacks of 300+???, one shot killing some of my Archdemons?)
And those new things, I forget their name, that cast Empathy? Screw that.

Those Priests of Light are hazardous too with their mass heal, but you can always cast Fear on a stack of them.

Jealousy is far and away the best Rage ability. Like in previous KB games abilities that do a fixed amount of damage are woefully underpowered by mid-game. Black Hole looks nice but barely scratches them.

I don't think Evil Book is sufficient to help the vampire PC. The fight with the elven Guardian of Light is too hard; the elf stack in that fight has higher initiative than any undead units, and it will kill at least one vampire (your tankiest units) on the first move of the first round. You could try picking up some Scoffer Imps from the shelter, which would allow you to cast one spell first, but I don't think that'll allow you to win with no losses.

What I did to make the vampire PC viable for no-loss was to mod the game such that he starts with a single ancient vampire. This seemed fair (Demoness starts with *two* level 4 units) and is still quite a bit less powerful than the vampire's start in Early Access.

The early game's still hard as hell with this, but it can be done. I just finished Whitehill now. :) The elf battle took me 50 rounds and a little luck; the single Whitehill fight I could handle took me 90 rounds. (I got a Magic Spring scroll, so my main tactic is to nuke down the ranged units as quickly as I can, then hit and run with Magic Spring and Poison Skull, changing to bat form when needed to avoid heavy-hitting melee. This is hardest in the elf fight, since they have three 4-speed attackers, one of which can soar across the chasm. Still, it's doable.)

Actually, Amazonia is an easy island, especially if you have Stone Skin and Teleport and Wizards for the 50% damage reduction. Most of the enemies are physical, so you can stick a Dark Paladin with Magic Shield from the wizards right up their throats, have it attack, then Dark Knights give him second wind to attack again, and then you follow up with even more stone skin or teleport on the dark knights as needed.

In my play-through, I managed to obtain Turn Back Time, which is an awesome spell ever since KBAP. Took big losses on a stack? Turn Back Time and laugh you freaking ass off. I love that strategy.

The Amazons look a bit intimidating, but they are relatively easy to deal with, as long as you can cope with the momentary losses. Still, it is not an island I would recommend a level 35 or less person to do. You need to be able to protect your troops adequately. But then again, if you can get a stack of amazons to help you, it is huge. In my game, I have 2 items that improve damage -+1 physical and +1 Fire, and Amazons with their decent range shine with it. I will most likely not bring them to the final battle, but they are a great sub for the Archdemons now, as they can outdamage them easily.

BTW, I am discovering that Turn Back Time crashes my game a lot. While I understand that it is kind of overpowered, I don't like the failsafe against it :D

If you use the right army, meaning exploit a bit the new mechanics, the game gets real easy. I can frack up invincible armies without losses, even if they have 5-6 stacks of archers.
My setup now Archdemons, Dragon Riders, Demonologists, Shamans, Giants.
First 3 are used to summon block the enemy archers.
The shamans spam totems which the mobs seem to love to go after, so with the right placement among some traps you can kill the turn of several mobs.
Giants are great for the hit all skill which works great with half.
For rage use fiery passion skill from demoness to box the enemy if needed, or even jealousy, or just black hole/shield them for damage and maybe half.
For spells poison rain is extremely destructive, especially if you have 5 enemy mobs that you clustered together with black hole. Or use Blizzard for several, giving a nice frozen stats.
Take advantage of bleeding/burning/poisoned/frozen which can take out a lot of mobs, and add half to it and all fights become easy.

Yeah the game is pretty easy in mid/late game, in my play through i thought the halving was the main problem. This skill is so ridiculously overpowered it's not even funny, especially on impossible where stacks are huge. The damage from halving is absurd on big stacks, not to mention it also gives rage for the damage dealt. It's a single player game so i guess balance is not as important, as you can choose not to use overpowered tactics, and you won't feel like you are having disadvantage against other players. I'd shift some difficulty from early game into late game, especially on impossible. The pinnacle of difficulty are few earlygame battles, and i feel it should be other way around.

True that. I keep on using my underpowered Paladins, Knights, Wizards, Demonologists, Amazons lineup. 4 of the troops are lagging hopelessly behind (meaning 30 or less on the total leadership stack), waiting for recruiter to fill them up :)

Neoline DG is 50 now, so I moved on to Galenirim. Fights are still a breeze :)

EDIT: Btw, I think wizards do better with halving than Giants. Giants are a level 5 unit, so you don't get any bonuses to halving (it is still leadership vs leadership), or any option to use the Second Wind skill. You need to wait till the ability recharges, while wizards can do it any second turn. Knights can boost Wizards in a way that they can do Battle trance 3 times in a row, meaning 3x 15% chance based on leadership between stacks. That halves enemy stacks like no tomorrow. Combine it with Jealousy and you have an easy fight to control. Regardless of what the enemy has to offer. maybe I should try Wizards + Giants. That would be wicked, but then again, I don't have the dark heal spell - I only found 1 (!) heal spell, which I have been using on Demonologists, Trolls, etc. So in essence, your mileage will always vary, depending on the game. And I need more to turn it into a darkie heal spell...

I also consider halving to be overpowered... This promotes using AOE units much more often now: Giants, Wizards, Archdemons, etc. :D

Anyone found anything good in that tree stump next to Clarissa`s hut ? I sometimes got Call of nature scrolls or some weak items but im just curious what else can you get from that place.

Great post, Impy!

Without comparing notes it is hard to tell for certain, but for the most part, it sounds like your strategies were similar to mine. I didn't use any of the cheat methods to look ahead, but I did mention that I ended up going back to my Atrixus save when I first got to the shelter as I realized that I should try harder to complete the Demon child quest, focus my skill tree on improving Trap since it was pivotal to dealing damage early for Demoness with the limited troop availability, and I also wanted to defeat that big spider stack in the Catacombs.

I think you could probably do the big Catacombs spider stack if you wanted, but as you said, it is not important at this stage of the game (except for having a little more experience - and maybe bragging rights ;)).

I'd agree with you that the first Whitehill stack I faced was easier (at least it seemed, anyway) to the Shelter fights I had just done; however, those fights (and the big Catacombs spider stack) had "trained" me for the Whitehill fights in what tactics to use, etc. and so I actually think the Whitehill fights are fairly tough, for no loss anyway, but they seem easier because we are just better players by that time.

It is interesting that they changed it from all 3 to just 1 of the Whitehill fights as your stack was weaker than my final stack (although I'm guessing you were level 5 when you fought them and I was level 6 with 3 more Imps / Scoffer Imps for the 2nd and 3rd Whitehill stacks). Using your stack as the baseline, here are the relative strengths of the stacks I faced compared to yours (this is based on stack leadership):

Stack 1: 70.0%
Stack 2: 81.5%
Stack 3: 111%

So I wonder if this is just variability or a change to make them tougher since you only had to defeat 1 of them. Of course, leadership is not the only gauge for how hard a stack is, but you'll note that when comparing all the stacks, they all have 3 shooters and 2 melee troops, and the Inquisitors tend to use their res ability on turn 1 so they are not as big of a problem as Bowmen or the Priests of Light (at least on round 1 anyway).

At any rate, I think between your and my posts people now should see what the difference in variability is and how possible no loss is comparing against these stacks.

I really think that once you get the strategy down that you can handle quite a bit of variability in stack size with these troops because they all have essentially the same structure of troop types. It is just as easy for your Demoness to swap a stack of 40 Swordsmen or 28. As long as these concepts sink in, no lossing these stacks shouldn't be a problem if you're persistent. :)

/C\/C\

Keep this going guys. I think that we are close to finding a good formula (spells + units) for a no-loss for a Vampire. It mustn't be too overpowered, yet it must still be a challenge. It is quite all right if it is a mod in my opinion, like an edited save. If someone did it, other can do it too. And then we can move on to the Orc.

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).

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 certainly, though, like your idea of trying to balance Daert's starting troops with Neoline's. I think in all fairness, with respect to troops, that 1 Demon is equivalent to 1 Ancient Vampire or 1 Black Knight and that 2 Demonesses are equivalent to 2 Necromancers.

/C\/C\

This has been a problem since EA and it has been reported. I'm not certain why it hasn't been fixed, yet.

I just steered clear of it since I didn't want to deal with the crashing issues.

/C\/C\

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.)

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.)

Phoenix in my opinion isn't that outrageous, but it has to be a scroll, so you don't have enough magic crystals to get it to level 2. Demoness gets hypnosis so it sounds fair.

Other option i considered is last hero, only thing i don't know is if troops take damage when the battle ends, if not some nice planing can lead to no loss victory. Haven't tested it as i went with phoenix approach.

Damage spells simply don't cut it, even the most powerful ones.

After some more playing around, the dwarven ore trailer behind the castle will spawn between 2500 and 7500 gold, 6-7 crystals or a high level scroll like Call of Death or even Phoenix! However, a young phoenix will die to 1 good hit from a stack of 14 miners or 2 hits from anything else and it costs 20 mana. So given that it is 'possible' to get a higher magic scroll early game, I thought I'd try giving my Daert 2 x ancient Vamps, 2 x necromancers, and 1 x Fire Rain scroll to start. All you need to do is the first fight and visit Clarissa and the other hut to get to lvl3. Check how many might runes you have and Chaos Lvl 2 is possible by the time you reach the black gate. I left the 2 big fire spider stacks in the catacombs alone and manged no loss all the way to Portland, although i did have to restart several times and one or 2 of the fights in the shelter went to around 40+ rounds. It was still challenging and I didn't feel it was overpowered in any way as 1 misstep would result in losses. With the very low leadership of the Mage, you cannot have more than 1 Ancient Vamp or Necromancer in your army until the second shelter fight when you get lvl5 and in fact as i only used the Necromancer in 1 fight in the catacombs I think so they are not necessary. I basically just cast Fire Rain 1 or 2 times at the start, depending on how the stacks were arranged, then thinned them out further with Poison Skull Lvl 2 and Slow if the kiting was getting too hard. Now that I've made Portland, the game is looking good!
So I would start with 1 x Fire rain instead of Plague and 2x Ancient Vamps as starting troops and I think that should provide enough challenge!

As soon as I am done with this play-through, I will also give a thought about the vampire :)

But for now: THAT MORALE!!!

Thanks to it, I can mow down enemy stacks easily. Just get those knights nice and fully surrounded with teleport, execute the whirling attack, have them eat tons of damage, Turn back time at the end of the next turn, and then lol. :D

Yeah, it's because of that 88k item, isn't it? We are playing similarly, DG, like you said before. I have Dark Paladins, Dark Knights and Wizards, all with insane morale, and I just bought a Turn Back Time scroll for use with the Knights. My fourth and fifth units are currently Archdemons and Executioners. For the Archdemon you need to use level 3 Healing (after doing the relevant quest to make it 'dark') and the others are all there to slaughter big stacks. And then with Phantom if I lose too many for one resurrection, there's the old Paladin + Phantom routine.

You are way ahead of me now - I'm level 39, just having cleared Sandy Island except for the final bosses and Tristem, same deal there.

My problem is that even though I am over 50, I can't use dark healing - apart from the scroll I have in my book, I can find no other. Maybe it wouldn't have been a bad idea to script at least 3 of each in the game... Or if they did, I haven't found the others. So no Archdemons for me.

This is all really interesting information and these are great suggestions!

By the way, I performed a little experiment with the Evil Book. Honestly, it is not much help as level 1, but if you could get it to level 2, then it may be helpful later. The only problem is that you need to get your Chaos skill to level 2 and I'm always 1 Might rune short at Daert level 4. So you'd have to get to level 5 before you could get any of your Chaos spells to level 2, at least from my playthroughs so far.

I did an experiment where I gave Daert all the spells in the spellbook via the "magicbook" cheat. My army was just 2 Vampires and 2 Ghosts and I was attacking the 2nd largest spider stack in the Catacombs. The only spell that was remotely useful was Phoenix.

The only problem with Phoenix is that why would Daert start with it, either as a scroll or spell? Perhaps the reason is that a Phoenix deals with reviving the dead and maybe he had one since he wanted to do some research with it. I think we should try to avoid Order spells unless they are specifically dark.

I've also devised a point system for the starting spells of all the heroes (1 point for each spell level):

• Orc: 5 points (3 level 1 spells and 1 level 2) / 2 points in learned spells, 3 points in scrolls
• Demoness: 8 points (1 level 1 spell, 1 level 2 spell, and 1 level 5 spell) / 3 points in learned spells, 5 points in scrolls
• Vampire: 5 points (2 level 1 spells and 1 level 3 spell) / 2 points in learned spells, 3 points in scrolls

So you can see that as a Mage, Daert doesn't even start with the highest spell points based on the starting level of his spells. I could see us, as a change, giving Daert 11 or 12 spell points to select his starting spells. Of that I could see going with 4 to 5 points in learned spells and 7 to 8 points in scrolls.

Another problem is his starting low Mana. it should be up to 27 by the time you hit the Catacombs.

When I had all the spells, I looked through them to see which ones had really low Mana costs at level 1 so that you'd be able to cast some with your low starting Mana. Here is a list of all spells that are 5 Mana or less (with some analysis towards their utility for an early Mage) the format is Spell Name (Mana/Spell Level) and bold spells are what Daert starts with:

• Order (Sanctuary):
  • Dispel (5/1): not very useful due to inability to dispel most side effects
  • Helplessness (2/1): starts with -30% defense (enemy unit defense is most likely too low for it to make much difference, although it is very cheap!)
  • Healing (3/1): no help, damages your troops
  • Last Hero (5/1): 0 damage until the spell is removed on level 1&2 troops (not sure the utility since a recast removes the spell first (thereby causing damage) before reapplying it and you probably don't need it at the end since enemy damage output should be minimal; the only exception to this is if the spell is coupled with Time Shift then you can hold onto it for a much longer time, but troop level severely limits the spell's utility @level 1)
  • Shelter (4/1): protects your troop from any damage (this could be really useful for soloing a stack)
  • Dragon Arrow (3/2): only useful (possibly) if you have Skeleton Archers
  • Empathy (3/1): deflects damage (starting at 10%) to an enemy (could be very useful for a Vampire and is effectively a 10% resist all damage that increases as your intellect increases)
  • Magic Axe (5/2): direct damage spell starts with 100 damage (the only units through Whitehill with Physical Resistance are Cave Spiders, Swordsmen, and Guardsmen) and gives very reliable damage
  • Battle Cry (5/2): gives +1 initiative to level 1&2 troops (probably not very useful)
  • Peacefulness (5/3): increased health with decreased damage (may be useful for a unit to absorb damage)
  • Titan Slayer (5/3): increases damage to level 5 units, but there are none through Whitehill so useless
  • Warding Healing (5/3): delayed healing, but given as a reward for a quest later (plus I think it only works on troops of the Light early)
  • Power of Night (5/4): increases damage of your troops, starts at +10% (may be useful, plus the only truly dark spell in this tree)
• Distortion:
  • Stone Skin (3/1): +20% Physical Resistance @level 1 (good for protecting against Physical damage)
  • Precision (2/1): starts with +25% damage (works with all Shooters so useful for Skeleton Archers and Necromancers only)
  • Berserker (2/2): +75% damage to level 1&2 troops (damage output is really good, but only to level 1 and 2 troops)
  • Flammable Oil (5/2): -20% ranged damage / Fire Resistance (may be useful against the Bowmen / Elves later)
  • Blur (3/1): starts with -15% Critical Hit on your troop / +5% evasion (I originally thought this was +Critical Hit, but since it is not it probably isn't very useful and +5% evasion is not even worth it as a cast)
  • Haste (3/1): +1 speed (only helpful for getting away from the enemy)
  • Slow (5/1): -1 speed (only helpful for slowing enemies from getting to your troops)
  • Whirlwind (5/1): 50 damage and knockback of level 1-2 troops (knockback may be useful, but damage is too low, although level requirement is probably not much of a hindrance)
  • Mana Spring (5/2): regenerates mana (perhaps very useful if applied to a unit that can absorb damage)
  • Pain Mirror (5/2): reflects 60% damage (not very useful for no loss unless unit being damaged is temporary)
  • Time Shift (5/1): extends spell life randomly by 2 rounds (very useful if only 1 bonus spell on target and that is the spell that you want to extend, otherwise possibly useful, but randomness may detract from utility, although most spells only last 2 or 3 rounds @level 1 so probably hard to use for more than 1 spell anyway)
  • Trap (5/2): 80 to 120 damage, but target must move onto trap (proved very useful for Demoness (as a skill and a way to increase damage via the medal), but probably not useful for Vampire)
  • Target (5/3): AI of level 1-2 focuses on target (useful for temporary units or units that can absorb a lot of damage, may protect lower level troops that need to move away)
  • Teleport (5/3): starts with a teleport range of 4 (this spell could be very useful)
  • Calm Rage (1/3): converts rage into mana (quite a bit more useful than Mana Spring due to immediate increase in mana and incredibly low cost - only 1 Mana!)
  • Pygmy (5/4): -20% to stack health and damage (effectively a temporary 20% kill all to a stack, but small stack size limits its utility early)
• Chaos:
  • Flame Arrow (5/1): 75 Fire Damage (useful at whittling down stack size over many rounds)
  • Poison Skull (5/1): 40 to 140 Poison Damage (useful at whittling down stack size over many rounds)
  • Frost Grasp (5/1): 80 to 100 Freeze Damage (probably the best damage spell early due to 0 Cold Resistance among enemies)
  • Weakness (5/3): causes target to do minimum damage (great against enemies with large damage ranges)
  • Kamikaze( 5/3): causes 130-200 damage from exploding friendly target (could be very useful if able to create temporary units)
  • Chaos Weapon (5/1): 25 x 3 damage of random type to target (could be useful to whittle down enemy stacks over many rounds)
  • Plague (5/3): starts with -15% to health, attack, and defense (similar to Pygmy, except effect is not quite as useful and once again utility limited by stack size)

Of the Order (or I keep forgetting they are called Sanctuary now) spells, Power of Night is the only one that seems well suited for Daert, but it is 4 points out of his 11 or 12. Helplessness is so low in Mana that it seems like it would be good to just throw it in there. Empathy would be an excellent spell to give to Daert, but it doesn't really seem like a dark spell (although it seems like it would go well with casting on a Black Knight if he had one at the start and it could reduce damage to Vampires as well to protect against loss of one of their units).

Of the Distortion spells, I could see Stone Skin being very helpful as well as Calm of Rage (but starting with Calm of Rage would seem a little strange maybe). Pygmy would also be really good, but its similarity to Plague kind of makes it seem strange for Daert to have it instead of Plague at the start of the game. It is also 4 points.

Of the Chaos spells, I really think Daert has to start with Poison Skull since it is essentially an Undead spell. I think Frost Grasp (due to its cold damage) is also well suited as an Undead spell in a way (it's almost like a grasp of death) and no units have immunity to Cold Damage through Whitehill. I think Kamikaze would be very fun coupled with a Necromancer or two in Daert's starting army and seems to go really well with a Necromancer. I still think Plague should be swapped with Evil Book as that is a perfect Undead spell.

So here's my starting spell recommendation based on the point system I devised (let's use 12 points with 5 points of starting spells and 7 for scrolls):

• Spells:
  • Stone Skin: 1
  • Poison Skull: 1
  • Weakness: 3 OR Teleport: 3
  • Total = 5
• Scrolls:
  • Kamikaze: 3
  • Evil Book: 3
  • Frost Grasp: 1
  • Total: 7

Okay, feel free to use this point system if you think it's fair and come up with your own list (if you want to use spells that I didn't list, just look in SPELLS.TXT for the spell's level - it is on the profit= line). It does kind of force you to want to go for the Chaos skill first, but I think that makes sense as an Undead Mage and if you find other spells then maybe you'll want to go to the other spell schools.

Next we have the problem of Daert's starting army. It is very paltry (you can only get max Decaying Zombies and Skeletons through to the Shelter since you can buy extra from the Zombie Miller). Since you can buy either, I don't think it makes sense to start with either Decaying Zombies or Skeletons - go buy them if you think they may be useful.

To synergize with the spells I selected, I think you should start with 1 Black Knight (since you can use Stone Skin on them) and I think 1 Cursed Ghost might be a neat starting troop because of their Ghost Cry (and you can Stone Skin them for 70% Physical Resistance). Both could use Evlins to heal their damage. Lastly, in order for us to be able to get any use out of Kamikaze, we need to have a Necromancer so that we can use their Raise Dead skill and then Kamikaze some troops.

That uses up the 3 starting slots, although we could use more troops, traditionally, you only start with 3 starting troops. Here's what I think we can do with the friendly troops in the castle: change the Skeleton Warriors so that you get 5 Vampires and change the Vampires to Cursed Ghosts. This would give you plenty of Vampires through to the Shelter and allow you to add Cursed Ghosts to your stacks as you level up. This would allow you to use their Ghost Cry and their life steal should be sufficiently high to help them recoup losses.

That would give him some extra level 3 troops hopefully enough for the Shelter and synergize well with spells / scrolls in his starting spellbook. You then get another scroll from Clarissa and possibly more scrolls before the Shelter.

Your starting troop makeup would look like this:

• 1 Black Knight
• 1 Necromancer
• 1 Cursed Ghosts

And then you'd get the following additional troops:

• 5 Vampires
• 2 Cursed Ghosts

I think this starting group would be quite fun and coupled with Evil Book, Kamikaze, and Frost Grasp when Daert Gets to level 3 should make for a really fun start for Deart no loss, while still being challenging, I think.

Not sure if it will work in practice, but it looks good on paper, at least! :)

/C\/C\

By the way, I did try the following with Vampire:

Spells / Scrolls as listed above, and I chose Weakness over Teleport.

Hero's starting army:

• 1 Black Knight
• 1 Ancient Vampire
• 1 Cursed Ghost

And here's who you get in Daert's castle at the beginning as friendly troops:

• 2 Necromancers
• 5 Vampires

I'm now in the Shelter Basement and I have to say this is probably too easy so far.

I had no problems with any of the stacks in the Catacombs except the big one. I was able to go to Dragandor, kill the stack in front of the gate, then get level 4 to get Evil Book to level 2 with level 2 Chaos in the skill tree.

I was then able to take the big Spider stack down. This was actually harder than the Dwarven and Elven stacks in the Shelter. The only Shelter fight that gave me trouble was the Human stack, but it only took a couple of tries to no loss them.

I finally got enough Might Runes to get Chaos Level 2 when I was Level 4. This is key in this setup. If you don't get enough Might Runes then I don't think you'll be able to beat the big Spider stack with two Level 1 Evil Books, but maybe.

I may try to continue, but I think I'm going to restart with what I mentioned in the previous post since this starting setup was a touch too powerful, I think.

I couldn't use the second Necromancer until I get to the Shelter anyway since I didn't have enough Leadership, and so I think it will be better to try the Cursed Ghosts and see what they can do.

This might also allow me to defeat that stack without getting Level 2 Evil Book if the Runes don't fall my way.

I was actually able to use Kamikaze Level 2 with a raised spider stack to great effect on the big Spider stack and it was major fun!

So I really like this spell setup as it allows Daert to be an actual Mage at the beginning of the game. I pretty much used at least each spell once through my current play.

Evil Book was very critical with this build, and Stone Skin was very helpful with my 1 Cursed Ghost / Black Knight stacks. Frost Grasp came in handy against the Fire Spiders, Poison Skull against the Cave Spiders, and as I mentioned above, Kamikaze worked really well! I used Weakness once or twice to minimize damage from Cave Spiders.

In this game I got (for the first time) spells from the Hidden Cache: two Time Shift scrolls and then from the Ore Cart in Dragandor I got two Chaos Gifts scrolls. I don't have enough Crystals, though, to learn Chaos Gifts, but that spell is great to get early.


***EDIT***

Okay, I went ahead and no lossed through the first Whitehill battle. So that setup is too easy for Daert. Will experiment some more...

/C\/C\

Awesome post. We can pick like 3 best options, do 3 edited saves, and the people who like the idea can try them. We can name Daert somehow for each of the 3 saves and everyone can tell where did he feel the most challenge and the most satisfaction out of it - and if they managed to do the shelter fights. I think this will be a good base for comparison :) Besides, I think all the shelter fights must be compared to the difficulty Neoline has with them. If it feels roughly the same, then we have hit the spot.

This combination works great!
 

Here's the winner! :)

This combination gives a lot of different possibilities for Daert. I don't think it is overpowered as it provides a good challenge through the Shelter and onto Whitehill and allows him to be played as an actual Mage! :)

With this group of units, you should be able to no loss through Whitehill.

Honestly, due to the fact that you now have to defeat only one of the Whitehill stacks, the toughest part of the game is now through the Shelter fights. Since you have 1 Rage Potion, all you have to do is drink it and use Jealously and the easiest Whitehill stack is no problem.

Before, with doing all 3, you had to save that potion for at least the second stack meaning you had to do at least one battle with no rage accumulation. Which was a lot harder.

I can post the modded files in the future if people are interested, but I'm going to next look at the Orc and figure out what his issues are and see what we can do there.

/C\/C\

Good stuff, Matt. I'd be interested at having a crack at the Vampire no-loss challenge with this build. :cool:

Gentlemen, hold your horses!
I believe it is possible to kill elven Shelter guardian no loss, with original settings and army that is, but everything has to work like a clock. You will need a) specific strategy for current battlefield , b) flawless running around c) no luck during battle actually, everything makes sense and no lost turns in round1 via Diversion are needed d) unfortunately tons and tons of tests until you get specific conditions before and during battle.
Now I have for you 2 screenshots. One at the round 1 so you can see the stacks, trap etc. and two is at round 9, when battle becomes trivial. More on that later.

- using codes i tried good few times a journey from beginning of the game to just before Shelter battles. You always end up either end of level 4 or early level 5, assuming skipping one big spider stack in catacombes.. It is interesting to note though that there is some variability in total gained experience from early battles ( meaning leadership of stacks in catacombs where most of battles take place). I tried skipping spider stack near dwarven castle and not using Clot of darkness at all, and still got to level 5 without dwarven battle on one occasion. Or I played using the Clot and fighting this stack and ended up level 4 only. It seems to me, and people confirm as well, that dwarven battle is mostly just mouse clicking exercise, you can always make it to level 5, so that is not a concern here.

- I tried all sorts of skill combinations at level 5. The best combination of skills looks to be Concentration 2, Meditation 1, Diversion 1, Distorsion 1. It gives whooping 33 starting mana, so although it is only level1 Poison skull, you will be casting it for quite a few rounds, occasionally squeezing in slow spell if needed. On the side note - I never played any of the starting battles leading to Shelter with Vampire. Although more challenging than with demoness, they can be all done apart from big spider stack. Correct me if I am wrong.

- you play with one stack of 2 vampires only. Other units would die miserably

-it is absolutely imperative to start the battle with vampires standing not in the middle , but only on the left spot in order to attract the werevolves from the right side to chase you through the left side - see screenshot 1.

-the first elven shot, which is critical, does almost 10dmg per elf. So once the starting amount of elves is 8+, one vampire will die. 6-7 is fine.

-battle consists of three phases. Phase 1. Dealing with shooters, which has to be done first. You melee attack is weak, survivability is low as bat, so nuking shooters with spells (and trap) is primary concern. Phase 2. Dealing with Fairies. They have the same speed as werewolves, but can cross the middle "non-hex" part of battlefield and are therefore much more dangerous. Phase 3. Dealing with werewolves at the end. Now Phases 1 +2 are not that difficult, if the werewolves in Phase 3 did not have regeneration ability both in elf and wolf shape. You just cannot do with 2 vampires 55dmg in one round. Hence the necessity of magic spring spell and bringing down werewolves with poison skulls. Now I really did not want to go with Distorsion 1 route, much rather Chaos 2 for bringing down stack down quicker, but it just does not do enough damage by the time you run out of mana. I even considered getting trapper medal for 2 traps before shelter, it is still not strong enough. You must have distorsion 1.

-important note: everything you do on battlefield, affects the damage of poison skull you are about to cast . Keep that in mind, because the spell damage can vary greatly. Sometimes moving 1 hex forward or left makes a massive difference. Believe that I calculated various branches of moves and corresponding spell damages up to round 5.

-now i can only describe what I have done in my battle from screenshot 1 in beginning of battle till round 9, which is screenshot 2. Start with vampire to the left as described, let the elves shoot, you will heal damage anyway. no need for diversion to incapacitate anyone, but observe the location of trap. Poison skull on elves, 1-2 down. vampires stay in its form, 1 step forward, no sidestepping yet. Round 2, elves shoot, you heal, 3 stacks will almost reach you, transform vampires, cast poison on elves again, and move 3-4 hexes to the left. And here it comes - single most important point in this battle = Fauns, you are still far away from them to receive full damage from their ranged attack. They have speed 4, so they move forward 3 squares and are about to shoot, but there is your trap. It does not end here for battle to be easily won. You have to leave standing ideally one, at most two 2 fauns standing. The trap can kill anything between 10-12 of them I think. The reason for leaving one alive is twofold = it will get in other units way, and secondly it will be used for mana spring triggers later on. Also, as you noticed you just saved yourself 2-3 spellcasts of poison skull right there. Do not underestimate the importance of 1 faun. Since you poison skull is weak you will have to run around the battlefield for about 9 rounds before pretty much only werewolves are left. First 4 rounds = 3-4 poison skulls on elves, 5-9 rounds poison skulls on fairies. If you get cornered, use occasional slow. Screenshot 2 shows the beginning of Phase 3. Just move through the middle, use mana spring and bit by bit destroy werewolves. Unfortunately, I do not have final victory screenshot, since I did not have mana spring, was just testing my theory, but i believe it is rather elementary at this point. All you have to avoid is werewolves coming from both sides.
So you are going to need this :
1) mana spring scroll from Clarissa
2) only 6-7 elves in your Shelter Battle
3) position of placed trap close to Fauns as you can see in my screenshots or similar, you know what I mean (this is probably the hardest to achieve)
4) follow the above

I was pretty sure there would be a way, and you found it. I kinda dislike all the ifs: mana spring (can scan the save game for it, so no biggie), fewer elves & trap placement (those are pure luck and there is no way for you to know - you could play for hours just to discover it was for naught) - I wonder if you can cheat yourself into the shelter just to check how it looks, but the trap is still a big if, as you won't have the skill if you go peek at start... but... once you get through this, the game is pretty much won for you, so... Might as well be worth it. I had that trap exactly on the same spot as impy with the Demoness, and in one of the fights the Fauns squarely suicided on it, so I can confirm that a trap in that spot is extremely useful. I can also confirm that level 1 poison skull will do as long as you can force it to inflict over 100 damage by moving now and then.

Impy's analysis is based on the premise that every fight plays the same and the AI does the exact same thing, the only thing that changes the outcome of the battle is you. If you cast Poison Skull immediately at the start, or after moving a hex to any side, you will always get a different outcome and a different damage amount. The battle must also run in a perfect tick-tock rhythm - and if necessary, you need to write down what happens in each occasion, so you can adapt accordingly.

This is really high-grade tactical combat where your actions must not deviate by a hex. I doubt many people can do it, but it is doable. I also know how, but sometimes I get too frustrated to do it properly :P

Great post, Impy!

If you get the Phoenix scroll from the Ore Cart in Dragandor, you can also do no loss.

I went back to my original save and added Phoenix via the "magicbook" cheat and was able to defeat both the Elven (fairly easy) and the Human (much harder) stacks with just my 2 Vampires via the Phoenix spell @level 1. You don't even need level 1 Diversion to do it, although it doesn't hurt if you want to get it.

In both cases, 1 of my Vampires got killed, but I was able to get them back up to 2 before the fight ended.

***BEGIN EDIT***

If you do find the Phoenix scroll in the Ore Cart, then you can get it to Level 2 by putting 1 point in Bibliography so that when Daert is Level 4, he can get Order Level 2 and with the discount, Phoenix Level 1 is 8 Crystals and Level 2 is 13 for a total of 21. You should find 17 to 20 Crystals and Daert starts with 4, giving you enough for Phoenix Level 2.

If you do this, then the Shelter fights are cake for no loss.

***END EDIT***

You next need to see if your strategy will work for the human stack as I think this is the hardest of the Shelter fights if you play Daert. I verified that Phoenix works on both the Elven and Human stacks (the 2 Vampires can do all the required battles through the Dwarven Shelter stack as that is what I had done before I stopped and started to explore alternate starting scenarios).

The problem with both of these strategies is you have to keep restarting until you can either get Magic Spring (much easier) or run ahead and check the Dragandor Ore Cart (takes much longer to check).

I don't think this is right - you should be able to take any game and no loss it if you follow the proper strategy. Currently, if you don't get Mana Spring then you have to get Phoenix. If neither falls into place, then you have to restart the game. Perhaps other strategies will be posted, but right now these are the only two we know about.

So I think there needs to be a change made as so far it seems that Neoline can do no loss with pretty much any starting enemies due to her troop complement. The same cannot be said about Daert.

By the way, these statements are not necessarily true. It is a bit complicated to explain, but the sequence of events is what is important and the locations of all the battlefield troops effect the seed of the random number generator, but not within a troop's turn as long as they only move and don't use any abilities. If you cast a spell and then move your Vampires, there will be no difference between moving your Vampires and casting the same spell so long as the target is the same (and your Vampires do not use a skill or end their turn).

I tested this out and no matter where I moved my Vampires after combat had started (without finishing their turn or using their transform ability), the Poison Skull damage was the same to the same target; however, if you move your Vampires to a different slot in your army and then start, you've changed the starting location of at least one battlefield troop and now conditions are different and events will change. I think this is what you guys mean.

Also there is an issue with the first time you fight a battle and then fight it again when reloading the last save with the Diversion skill such that different armies may lose their turn. It was this way in WotN, too, but the differences are only between the first fight and the second. The behavior when loading from a save will always be the same, but not necessarily when you save a game, immediately fight, and then reload it and immediately repeat that fight.

/C\/C\

I think the save game scanner can fix that as long as we find out which one of the mine carts in Dragandor actually gives the phoenix spell, and how is it called. I have no qualms starting and saving 50 games before scanning them all and checking for stuff. It will be a rather fast check.

Since I don't know if anyone updated it since KBAP, you can get it from here:
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthr...e+game+scanner
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthr...e+game+scanner

Thin is, I think steam saves for KBDS are a bit different for KBAP, so it might take a bit of fooling around to get it working. Or alternatively, if you can use another program to read the steam files used to save the game, I guess it can be used too.

Wow, great job, Matt and Impy!

My own test games both spawned significantly larger stacks (the one I made it in had 9 elves, 2x 13 werewolves, 96 fairies, 10 fauns); I didn't realize it varied quite so low.

Impy, interestingly enough, your strategy was almost exactly the same as mine with the single ancient vamp. Did you play through to Whitehall? I'm wondering how likely it is that the RNG gives you three unwinnable fights there.

It was updated for WotN; I'm not sure what changed between that and AP, but you can get the WotN version here, halfway down the page:

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthr...t=35533&page=2

I thought that thread was difficult to follow; the main thing you have to do make a save game scannable is:
1. Within the save folder, copy "data" to "savedata".
2. Create a zip archive containing savedata, crc, info, and name, all at the top level. (If they're in a directory, it won't work.)
3. Change the .zip file to a .sav file; so, for example, if it was Vamp.zip, it'd be Vamp.sav.

And that works. KB_DB_EDIT could conceivably edit a save game to ensure that the ore treasure is a Phoenix scroll.

Ok, it works. Now we need to know which cart exactly contains the scroll and how is it called. I have a save right now, with a phoenix spell in a chest in dragandor, but I don't know if it's in the explorable area or not. No magic spring though. This will make for fun poking around. I will sure spend some time toying with it.

Search for telega_ore_box or dragondor_embryo_13
 

I was fiddling with this this morning as I also have a save with the Phoenix scroll (it is in one of my modded games), but I'm not at my computer right now, so this is from memory:

In the savedata.txt file, search on telega_ore_box and you should find the first occurrence in savedata.txt is the correct one. This should be dragondor_embyro_13 (note that it is spell as "dragondor" with an "o" instead of the spelling we see in the game "dragandor" and you can also search on this as it should be unique for the file).

Just a few lines lower you will see the entry for "spell_phoenix" - your Phoenix scroll.

By the way, I'm conducting a test right not and have created at least 35 new games and have not seen it pop up again. I have actually seen Power of the Night twice and Flame Arrow once, so Phoenix is not the only spell you can get from the Ore Cart.

I'm going to keep creating batches of 5 savegames and processing them until I see it again and give a statistical breakdown of what you get from the Ore Cart in Dragandor.

I did try changing Power of Night (spell_dark_knight) to Phoenix (spell_phoenix) and using KB_DB_EDIT, but it crashes when trying to compile the file. So it may need to be updated for the new KB games.

/C\/C\

Gotcha. I found it. You should open savedata.rpt with any text editor (I use notepad ++) and look for the following line:

dragondor.embryo_13 Vagon money 2300

So in this case, there's cash in the wagon. No luck there... Matt, have you checked in where the Magic Spring spell is supposed to spawn? I will jump in the savegame testing process as well.

Okay, some thoughts on the endless saga of Demoness Impossible No-loss...

I'm up to level 48, having just roflstomped my way through Okkarland against Very Hard and Deadly stacks.

Wizards are ridiculously powerful. Buffed by the Archmage staff, given ridiculously high morale by the Amulet of the Twilight Order (Heroic), halving stacks like crazy with Beserker level 3 (15% chance of having PER attack, and the Wizard hits three stacks with one attack when he's in the Fighting Trance). I've picked up a couple of items that increase Crit chance - Undead Master Belt +5% and, even better, a Dagger of Judgement, +20%!!!, that I got from a treasure chest in battle :cool: So the Wizard has a Crit chance of 59% and I feel sure that he's halving enemies more than 15% of the time (is this chance affected by whether it's a crit?) I just know that when I finish the game, Wizards are going to be my biggest damage dealer BY FAR.

The rest of my team consists of Dark Paladins, Demons, Executioners and Demonologists. You could use whatever unit you liked in the place of these last three. The only essentials are the Wizards for damage dealing + Magic Shield and the Dark Paladins for resurrecting. At a certain stage of this game, roughly from fights 120-170, I was struggling to win some battles no-loss. I was having to redo fights and look for the easiest fights. But once you get a stack of Dark Paladins, it's game over. Sorry, you also need Phantom in case you've taken too much damage for the initial resurrection, and Calm Rage too. But once you have these spells, we're back to the old Paladin + Phantom + Calm Rage infinite resurrection trick. My main problem here was that there was only about 130 Dark Paladins available in my game, and my current leadership (32k) allows for over 250, so I've had to use Sacrifice to fill out the stack, and this is tedious because I only have Sacrifice at level 1, not wanting to waste the crystals.

Is it just me or are crystals really scarce in this game? I only have about 12 spells learned and I never seem to have enough, so I've taken to buying all the trashy artifacts etc available in the game and destroying them for the crystals.

At level 48 I've cleared all islands except Amazonia (which I'll do next), Galenirim and Aralan, and also Helvedia. I'm up to 269 fights without loss, and I'm guessing that with some failed quests that I couldn't be bothered with (such as when they conflicted with other quests) I must be looking at about 400-450 fights for the whole game.

Crystals are indeed scarce, so breaking items becomes a must at one point. Not that I mind, with so much gold and so much stuff to buy, it is quite all right.

I am nearing the end of the game. Level 71, finishing off stuff here and there. I have only a few quests left that I need to finish - the one about the Ancient Oak and a few assignments for the council in Helvedia. The Oak bugs me though. I have the primordial flame, but I don't see any guardian stacks around it. I think it is because I don't have the stupid Silver Axe. Gotta roam around the maps a bit and see if someone sells it, or look for ways to acquire it.

No need - just start your game and get through the two dialogues and hit "q" to bring up the Quest Dialogue. You'll see which spell you get right there!

Simple as pie! :)

/C\/C\

I'll third this - I always felt like I didn't have enough and like you guys I just bought artifacts for conversion to Crystals. Daert gets a discount with his Bibliography skill so I think it is more of a problem with Neoline and Bagyr.

/C\/C\

Yep, major shortage of crystals here, too! I've only learned the spells I've absolutely needed, and waited until I had Bibliography LVL 3 b4 upgrading.

As far as progress goes; It's Day 6 Monteville is all done, I've just started with Insleburg, and have already convinced Madame Curie to come back to the shelter. As with previous games, the difficulty seams to vary between a few restarts and a walk in the park! I have to say the major challenge thus far has been finishing fights with full mana as I only found the Calm Rage spell in a battlefield chest late last night.

Daert is at LVL19 and has just gotten the Archmage abilty, so he has 32 Intellect and 145 Mana. I'd like to buy the Archmage Staff from the shelter but I've forgotten what affects it's morale, so some help here please someone????? :-P

My army at the moment is 1 x Troll and 2 x Ice Dragons (Call Scroll), 2 x Red Dragon 2 x Black Dragon (from Shelter).

Gotcha. So in essence, we need to scan only the games that give Magic Spring as a reward for the phoenix in the wagon. That will take some doing :D

As for the Archmage staff, I think it drops when you fight Archmages, and rises if you have them in your army.

Ok done.
 

Ok I am done! I did the last fight with my fave squad: Dark Paladins, Dark Knights, Wizards, Demonologists, Amazons. It was great, I never felt a unit go out of place, and everyone usually had an opportunity to hit something.

Now I am all for the Vamp Phoenix/Magic Spring play-through. It's gonna be fun.

I am sad to say that the last fight was underwhelming. I am happy to say, that with a mod, it will be awesome. Just give the spirit more health, let the stacks be bigger, more diverse (like add level 5 units), and up the spirit damage a bit. Even on impossible, I knew I could win the fight right off the bat. I would also recommend banning ranged units on the mod, as they can be exploited to oblivion. Let the spirit summon melee units only.
EDIT 2: Or just let the stacks grow in leadership. Why? First it nullifies your leadership bonus for halves, and second, it is even more challenge.

In any case, I had a blast. I couldn't finish the Harlequin spy quest, but I assumed you need to take those guys in various fights, and I was already too deep into the game, that I barely had any stacks left for the guys to do something. Unless I misinterpreted the quest. If so, big deal :)

In any case, even though I never finished KNWOTN, this game sure feels like KBAp/CW. Give it a few mods, and it will do as well as the last one. I like it. It made me feel involved, especially in the quests. I loved how they revolve and how the quests deviate from the EXCLAMATION MARK games, where you just go to that guy and you done. You finally get to think based on the clues in the quest. This is the game that flies in the face of other games that just slams easy quests in the people's faces and makes them feel good. If you really want to play this game, your best friend is the notepad. Note all you did, how you did it, and what the npc's told you.

Broaden your horizons. Stop being linear. Expect more. This is how you know the game is good. Cause it tells us not to.

EDIT: It has to be said, that traps, while being awesome in the early game, are a huge hindrance in the late game. Your summoned troops adopt the "walk on traps" hobby, and they stick to it big time. I suggest you lol at them and keep going. I had tons of lols at cerberi/executioners faced with like the enemy's last 5 fairies walking into a trap that is absolutely not in their way. Go baby go! Go baby go! Go baby splat! Um, whoopsie!?

Congrats on finishing the game and achieving this challenge, DG. 489 fights? Looks like I am at least 200 fights away, which will take me a couple of weeks, I guess.

Glad you enjoyed the game - I feel like this is the first proper sequel to AP we've had, and the third excellent KB game overall. :cool:

Well, I never used morale items, and I never went for EXP gear. If you do, you will do better than me. While Martin feels like a good companion, based on your mileage, Roin can be heaps better.

In my game I still had only 1 healing spell, and I never managed to finish the Life Light (only 2 in my game, so I didn't even care buying it) and Healing (only 1 in my game) quest for the Magic department. Go level 5 units for me? No, no, no. Huge no :D

Sadly, I think that no-losses eventually precludes you from using level 5 units anyway, as they can't be resurrected. I know people have done Troll or Black Dragon only challenges, but for a game with about 500 fights, I want each fight to be over as quickly as possible. DG - I see from Steam that you have played something like 128 hours for this single campaign - how does that compare to most AAA titles? :-P Methinks we have got our $25 worth already.

Correction. I paid €17.99 :) I like what I got from my game, and I think we can do it with level 5 units too. I am looking forward to such a play-through, nbut I wanna see the Vamp do it now. We know now that the Magic Spring start is the key. I will scan saves on a daily basis. Lets hope one of us gets lucky.

Congrats, DGDobrev!

You crushed my score! :)

I guess next time I shouldn't be so in love with my boat - 96 vs 23 days! ;)

By the way, my playthrough was only level 5's (ArchDemons and Dragon Riders) no res party so it is pretty easy to do with those troops.

You also play really fast as it took you less than a month, whereas it took me 2 months!

Enjoy your victory for a few days! :)

/C\/C\

Thanks :) Well, everyone's mileage will vary - I had absolutely no chance to play level 5's. That healing spell pretty much forced me into using this lineup. If I could at least use stoneskinned Archies, it would have been different, but it wasn't to be.

All I can say is, there will be no victory celebrations. Gotta scan saves for magic spring + phoenix. One will pop up someday, and I will post it, and the we can all have loads of fun.

With Empathy and Warding Healing you can still do Level 5 units, so you don't necessarily need the Healing spell.

/C\/C\

Regarding the scanning... how crucial is the magic spring? I am trying to get both spells to spawn in early game, but so far I'm having no luck. I had all kinds of stuff showing up in that wagon: money, crystals, fireball, invisibility, ghost blade, corrosion, sacrifice... but so far no phoenix.

I think Magic Spring is needed for Impy's strategy, but nothing is needed except Phoenix for the one I posted.

In fact, the Phoenix strategy is much easier since you can get it to level 2 when you reach level 4. Since I defeated both Elves and Humans with Phoenix level 1, level 2 will be no problem.

Clarissa's reward is a level 1 / 2 distortion / chaos spell so it has a lot of variability due to that. I have not found the Ore Cart variability list, yet, but it seems to be limited to:

Money
A Rune
An Item
A Spell (of level 1 up to it seems level 4)
Crystals

So that seems like it would have a lot more possibilities, although, I think it is the same chance for each of the above, and then there is variability within each category.

/C\/C\

I did some scripted save game creation and analysis (don't ask) with over a thousand newly created games; apparently, the ore cart in Dragondor has a phoenix scroll 0.5-1% of the time. So the magic spring is definitely easier to get (showed up maybe 6% of the time), but has the side effect of relying on there being less than 8 elves in the elf stack. (I don't know the probability for spawning <8 elves, but it seems like it's not that great.)

Gotcha, so this means I can scan more saves, and not exclusively the magic spring ones.

I found 2 more spell combinations that will definitely work and 2 others that have a chance of succeeding. I've seen Power of Night, which is a 4th level spell given twice from the Ore Cart and so I think you should be able to get up to 4th level spells from it.

These first two are fairly easy fights:

Evil Book (level 3 spell so should be given by Ore Cart, although I haven't seen it yet) @level 2 cast twice makes both Elven and Human Shelter fights pretty easy. You can also get your Poison Skull to level 2 if you need it to help out your 2 books, although that is a total of 47 Mana. You need 1 point in concentration, 2 points in Chaos and 1 point in Meditation will really help with your Mana. Try to get as close to 40 Mana as you can so that you don't have to wait very long to cast your second book.

Demon Portal (level 4 spell so I think there is a possibility of it showing up in the Ore Cart unless it is excluded in the criteria somehow) @level 1 cast twice (you need 1 point in Concentration, 2 points in Meditation, and 1 point in Chaos so that you have at least 39 Mana and on round 2 you'll get +1 and have exactly 20 Mana so you can perform another cast) and you can fairly easily defeat both Elven and Human Shelter stacks (note that twice @level 1 is better than once at level 2 for this spell).

These next two are pretty dicey, but they have a shot at working:

Ball of Lightning (I have gotten this from the Ore Cart so I'm going to try this game and see if I can do it for real). You need to get this spell to level 2 and so that means 1 point in Meditation and 2 Points in Order. I had two points in Concentration in my test and so I think you're going to need to be level 5 so that you can get Concentration to level 2. The Human stack is very easy with this spell, but the Elven stack is really hard. The trick here is only use level 2 of this spell if you need to (for example, the Fauns are killed with a level 1 Ball of Lightning). You should have just enough and I think you need to be Daert Level 5 do the Elven stack. Mana is very important here, level 1 Ball of Lightning is 8 Mana and level 2 is 14. I had 42 Mana in my experiment, which allowed 3 casts @level 2 and I also had Concentration level 2. This might not be doable in reality and I used every point of Mana on the Elven stack.

Avenger (level 2 spell, but Order so cannot get it from Clarissa so must get it in the Ore Cart). You need to get this spell to Level 2 so that means you should put 1 point in Meditation and 2 points into Order. You should then have 1 point in Concentration so that you'll be at least able to cast it twice over the course of the fight. I also had Time Shift in my experiment, but I don't think you can get Distortion level 1 and Concentration, but it can be used to inexpensively extend Avenger if you need to so this might also work. Note that the Human stack is a lot easier than the Elven stack and so you should take out the Human stack first.

I also tried several other combinations, but nothing else has worked so far on both stacks. I'll try some more attempts if other spell strategies come to me.

Okay, your mileage may vary, but if you see these as options from the Ore Cart, then try them out as well as they may work for you.

/C\/C\

Ah, craaaaaaap!!! I had spell_demonologist show up in the ore cart and I was almost certain it was the demon portal. I knew it, I should have kept the save. Damn...

Otherwise I can confirm that any spell can spawn there. I had even level 5 spells like resurrection, spawning. Now I am making batches of 9 saves and scanning them as necessary. Now that we have more options, I will make sure I keep all those saves.

THERE WE FREAKING GO!!! After deleting one demon portal save, and beating my head a bit over that, I had a HUGE stroke of luck. In just 9 saves I found 2 with Demon Portal and 1 with Book of Evil - whoa, whoa, hold your horses, that is NOT the good news - the good news is that there are actually 2 (!) scrolls of Book of Evil in the ore cart!!! So you got a scapegoat scroll for a free level 1 Book if anything goes bad in any one of the fights!

I am so gonna test this game. I already checked the ore cart (it is right next to the dwarven castle) and both scrolls and happily lying in it. While Clarissa's scroll isn't useful at all, I managed to excavate a chest with 2-3 scrolls of Slow, which is also great news.

I have zipped the file with the book of evil for you, and I can add the other 2 with the Demon Portals if you want, but since Matt says this is the easiest option of them all, I uploaded the Book of Evil one first. Just make sure you don't overwrite any of your important saves, should it happen to have the same number when you unzip in the save games folder - C:\Users\(username)\Documents\my games\Kings Bounty The Dark Side\$save\base\darkside.

Let's see how well will that work.

Yes! This one works! I couldn't get my Concentration to Level 2 because I ended up being 2 Magic Runes short, so I decided to go the Spirit Tree Diversion route and was able to do it.

I had "small" stacks of everybody including Werewolf stacks of 8 and 9 units and so I used Ball of Lightning Level 2 on a stack of 80 Sprites and 9 Werewolves and it easily took them out.

The Fauns ran into the trap that Impy pointed out and with a fortuitous strike I was able to take the stack of 8 Werewolves out with Ball of Lighting Level 1 and my Vamps.

I was down to 1 Vamp at that point due to 7 Elves, but the Sprite death had left an Eviln and I was able to get back up to 2 Vamps and then the Vamps + a Level 1 Poison skull took down the 7 Elves!

I was very fortunate in this battle and had to adapt to the fact that I couldn't get Concentration up to level 2. I'm not sure if Level 2 Concentration would have been better than Diversion, but it would have given me a third Ball of Lightning Level 2 cast on round 5 if I made it that far, but the Diversion Trap took out those Fauns so maybe Diversion is better if you get Ball of Lightning in the Ore Cart than Concentration Level 2.

I posted pictures of the battle, to give you a feel for how it went down and how fortunate I was! You can see by the second to last picture that I've got him!

By the way, Ball of Lightning Level 2 can handle up to 99 Sprites and 12 Werewolves, but I really think you need a third cast of Ball of Lightning @level 2 if your second Werewolf stack is 11 units. Then there's still probably 8 Elves and 11 Fauns to deal with and so that just might be too much for this setup.

Nonetheless, it can work if you have an Elven stack on the smaller side (and the Human stack is way easier and I was level 4 when I did them and 5 when I did the Elven stack).

Note that I did have to kill one of the easy Catacombs stacks because when I skipped all those fights I was 14 exp short of level 5 when facing the Elven stack - ugghhh!

So I went back to my Catacombs save and took out an easy stack that was worth a whopping 23 exp! Just enough to get me to level 5 after I defeated the Human stack in the Shelter!

Whew! Very close battle! :)

/C\/C\

Good job, Matt :) I am doing well too, killed the Dwarven and Elven stacks. The elven stack was a huge bother. In my save, there are freaking 8 elves and it was extremely difficult to keep the 2 vamps alive. I managed, but I was forced to use the scroll Book of Evil, cause best I can get in terms of mana is 36 if I pick Order, and that is nowhere near adequate for a second, so I opted for +1 Atk/Def/Int combo with 34 Mana, which actually managed to save my vamp - the elves hit for 68 rather than 70, which kills the 1 vamp. Lol :D

Now to see if I can manage with the human stack. With one lvl 2 and one lvl 1 Book of Evil it should be doable. Let's see.

Depending on what I got, I usually end up doing the Elven stack last since I try to get level 5 from either the first or second stacks.

You know what the worst thing is?

It seems like you get the least amount of experience for the toughest stack! In my game, I got 50 for the Dwarves, I think 63 for the Humans and then only 47 for the Elves!

Those amounts are so small, I know, but still it is just a bit insulting that you get the least experience from the hardest stack!:rolleyes:

By the way, I way able to take out the 3 basement stacks and the first Whitehill stack with the Ball of Lightning strategy so it is good.

You won't believe how long some of the basement fights went! I had one go over 200 rounds! I get a little bored once I get past about round 30 and really bored after round 50, but I was in a situation with 2 50+ Cave Spider stacks and I was able to get into a repeatable loop as I whittled them down with the 2 Bats before I could go into Vamp mode.

This is crazy to have to do this so early in the game for no loss.

I think I'm going to shift gears a bit and start checking out Bagyr's situation some more...

/C\/C\

Hey DGDobrev, thanks for the save. With it I managed to kill all the guards somehow. The elven stack was easy but the human was so freakin impossible.

The books of evil were so useless that in the end I killed the hordes of priests and archers mostly with poison skulls and incredible luck. At 1 point I was with 1 vampire bat with only 1 hp :grin:
I also used the 1 book of evil scroll(to slow the melee) and 1 slow scroll. I made the mistake not to take Diversions skill and also ended up with only 34 mana.

I dont see how you can win with books of evil since thay die so fast from the melee and their dmg is not that great. Even if rank 2 book manage to cast 2 lighting spells on the range units, it's still not enough to hurt them.

Yeah, I am seeing that myself. Ever since Matt and Impy started giving ideas what spells are best, I just started scanning saves for them, and this one looked best, so I posted it. I seriously thought it will be much easier than it is with the books.

The human stack indeed looks to be the biggest problem for Daert. I am still trying to fool them somehow, but I am kinda running out of ideas. So far 1 level 2 book and lots of poison skulls look the be the best option for me, but sooner or later one of those ranged stacks destroys my vamp.

I guess I need to try other spell combinations, maybe like demon portal. Phoenix looks to be the best option, but is still very hard to find a save that has it. Maybe I should just fall down to impy's strategy and try to do it with Magic spring only, but I really don't know how those 2 vamps can survive all those ranged attacks at once if I am forced to fly about in bat form.

I certainly haven't given up though. The is a way for Daert to do no-loss, it is absolutely clear now.

Glad that you did it, but here are some tips with the Evil Book strategy:

You may need to do an easy Catacombs spider stack or two to ensure that you get Level 5 Daert for the final stack whichever is tougher between the Elves and Humans to get more Mana (I actually had to do this in the Ball of Lightning strategy, too). It seems more likely than not that I end up a few exp short of level 5 and so I need to do at least one or two of the easy stacks in the Catacombs to push me over. You should be able to start with 36 Mana for the harder fight and with at least Level 1 Concentration you are no more than 4 rounds from your second Evil Book level 2. Level 2 Meditation is better than Level 2 Concentration and both cost 8 Magic Runes. Level 2 Meditation will get you 40 Mana. I was 2 Magic Runes short, however, in my Ball of Lightning playthrough when I got Daert to Level 5.

You also need to have 2 Evil Books @level 2 versus the Swordsmen / Guardsmen so ensure that your book stays away from them until you get that second Book because one level 2 Book is not good enough against both of them. It can handle a single troop, though, so place your Vamps' starting position to split them up (especially the humans) if you have to fight one to recharge your spell.

Both the Priests and Inquisitor's / Sprite's and Faun's damage is Magic (well half the Faun's anyway) and so try to get them to attack the book or if your book needs to reload its spell attack then attack them to recharge it.

In my test, I actually found the Human stack much easier than the Elven stack, but it just depends on how much they attack your Vamps versus your Books and the spells your Book casts. If it is casting Slow, for example, then use it on a fast troop. If it is casting Lightning then use it to cast on a troop for maximum damage, etc.

You also really need to have it be a damaging spell on its first cast, otherwise it gets way harder. A Poison Skull, Ghost Sword, Magic Axe, or Lightning works wonders on a first cast and this has to be cast on either the Elves or the Inquisitors. Position the starting location of your Vamps, change the time in the round when the spell is cast, etc. to get it to change if it is not good. Sequence of events is everything!

Lastly, remember the goal of your Evil Books for both stack types: 1) for Humans, once you get rid of the ranged troops, the fight is over and 2) for the Elves, once you get rid of the melee troops, the fight is over.

As a variant, you may decide to do 2 Points in Meditation and 1 in Concentration / Chaos so that you can do 3 Level 1 books (but in my experience this is not as good and requires 45 total Mana).

Anyway, glad you were able to do it!

:)

/C\/C\

Okay, I went and downloaded DGDobrev's save and I was able to defeat both the Shelter Elven (easier) and Human (harder) stacks using the double Evil Book @level 2 strategy.

I did defeat the 3 easy Spider / Snake stacks in the Catacombs such that when I defeated the Shelter Dwarven stack I was level 5. I put a point into Order to get me up to 36 Mana and was able to cast my first Level 2 Evil Book and then by splitting the Werewolf stacks it was able to work on the Werewolf and Sprite and then on round 5 as it was close to death I cast my second Level 2 Evil Book. The first one had taken the 8 Elves down to 4 and then only lasted another turn or two, but by that time, the damage had been done and the Sprites and Fauns were gone. My Vamps then helped take down the Werewolves with the second Evil Book as it had gotten the Elves down to 1. Starting placement of your Vamps made a difference between 1 dying and not.

As far as the Human stack, they were much tougher, but once again I split the Guardsmen and Swordsmen (moving towards the latter since they did less damage). I did have a fortuitous Lightning Bolt take out 14 Bowmen, 9 Priests, and 3 Inquisitors when my first Evil Book was about 50% health. This allowed my Vamps to switch to Bat mode and slap the second Evil Book right next to the group of shooters. After that I managed to take out the rest of the shooters and then my second Evil Book was able to take the Swordsmen and Guardsmen down to about 50% when it finally died. As I mentioned above, once the melee troops are the only ones left in the Human stack it is just a matter of time before your Vamps can slowly take them down and finish it. I actually probably could have done better as I forgot to cast Poison Skull when I had gotten 7 Mana and had let my Evil Book absorb 76 damage from an Eviln, which I was trying to get the Swordsmen to hit, but at this point it did not matter since there were only melee troops left.

Compared to Ball of Lightning I'll say that it was a bit easier, but all these strategies (except for maybe the Phoenix which is very easy @level 2) are fairly dependent on finding the right sequence of events.

By the way, I did a little experiment and Runes given during levelups are dependent on the area. I used the "levelup" cheat when I was in Portland to level 5 and I had enough for Meditation Level 2, Concentration Level 1, and Chaos Level 2 when I was level 5; however, since I made level 4 in Dragandor and Level 5 in the Shelter the Runes given were then different and I couldn't get Meditation Level 2 so that's when I went with Order Level 1. Note that I could have also gotten Diversion if I wanted instead of Order Level 1, but I never tried that strategy to see if it was better or not.

If you can get Meditation to Level 2 when Daert is Level 5, then all these strategies are a lot easier when you start with 40 Mana instead of 36. To have a chance, though, you should probably take out the 3 easier Spider / Snake stacks in the Catacombs to give yourself a chance of reaching level 5 after defeating the Dwarven stack.

/C\/C\

I'm glad you made it Matt.

In my game I even got 1 magic rune from a chest in the fight before the black gate but at the end I was still 1 rune away for lvl 2 Meditation.

Anyway, with 36 mana and your strategy I'm sure it can be done with not too many tries.
Even with 34 mana and enough tries I think it's doable with evil books, however this is a huge problem for me since my pc is so slow that it takes literally 5 min every time I try to load the last save.

Awesome, Matt, congrats :)

I think you can only hit meditation 40 if you get lucky with the rune/level giveaways. I think there are 3 or 4 combinations, and if you luck out with a good one, you can get twice the max amount of magic runes for the mage, but since the game selects a random line of those 3 or 4 combos, there is no way to be certain.

By the way, since it is possible to get any spell, I'm wondering if Calm Rage would push you over with just Poison Skull. I have not tried this strategy, but if someone gets Calm Rage from the Ore Cart maybe they could try it out and let us know if it will work since they'll be able to convert that early Rage into Mana for more Poison Skull casts.

Hmmm...

/C\/C\

I think that calm rage won't be a good idea because the biggest problem you have is how to make enough dmg on the rangers before the melee force you to go in bat form. Without book of evil or other summon to slow them down it takes them 3 rounds to reach you and with 36 mana you can cast poison skull r2 the first 5 rounds.

In my game I managed to clear all 3 stacks in the castle's basement which was really hard but at least I didnt have to rely on insane luck.
The first stack against the spiders I used the battlefield to tank them. There was a close spot in the corner where i left my vamps, then I cast r2 Book of Evil next to them so that thay could be attacked only by one stack. Since the spiders dmg is poison the book could tank 3 stacks for fairly long time, enough to get mana for second book.I think it lasted for 8 rounds because at least in 2 rounds I had 2 books on the field.

The second fight against the 3 big stacks of snakes was the hardest. I had to make the book to tank and dmg the royal snakes alone so that it wont die in 2 rounds. I used 1 scroll of magic shackles when thay were close to avoid the snake bite, and 2 slow scrolls on the other snakes. Once the royal snakes were dead I got enough mana for second book to reduce the numbers of the red snakes and after that it was easy.
After the second fight I finally got to lvl 6 and with r2 Concentration and r1 Diversions the third fight was much easier.

Then the real challenge comes in whitehill where you have to kill at least one of the guards and each of them have like double the size compared to the human guard in Shelter, while you are still with your good old 2 Vampires :grin:

So I used rage pot for 10 rage before the fight.
The first round the inquisitors skipped their turn thx to diversion which is good becouse thay were the strongest range and the other 2 already wasted one of my vamps. Then I used the jelousy skill from blackie on the 1 big stack of melee and thanks to some bug thay remained red even after the statue disapeared. That way slaughtering all the mean priests and archers for me :grin: After that it took me 230 rounds to finish the guardsmen.
Thanks to this bug it all went fairly easy which is good because i didnt want to start all over again with phoenix spell.
Whithout the bug I dont think it was slightly possible to win any of the fights with my setup of 34 mana. May be with 40 mana and 2 rank2 books from start and alot of luck it would be more possible but those rangers were really scary.

You may be right about Calm Rage; however, I was thinking if you got a good Distortion Scroll from Clarissa then you could put 1 point in Bibliography and then there may be a possibility of getting Distortion to Level 3 when you reach level 5. You can at least get it to Level 2, but not sure if there are any level 1 / 2 Distortion spells that would work well with Calm Rage.

Anyway, just another thought to try to vary the starting strategies for Daert.

Great job, by the way, with the Basement and Whitehill stacks!

I didn't have as much trouble as you had with them - the Spider stack was easy as you mentioned, and I did put a point in Diversion which really helped with the Royal Snake stack. The key there was to get the Royal Snake on the Evil Book and the Swamp Snakes and normal Snakes after your Bats. I was then able to cast my 2nd book 4 rounds later and they both ganged up on the Royal Snakes and took them out. In the meantime, the Snakes had moved to attack the two books and then they took him out, too. Lastly, the Swamp Snakes engaged the books and then was able to beat both of them but since I was down to just Bats versus 1 stack I just cycled them down and finished it.

The other snake stack was about the same - I was able to get two Swamp Snake stacks after the Bats and the rest went after the Evil Book. It is very important, by the way, to work on the normal Snakes first because of their Stun ability. So once again, I was able to get my 2nd Evil Book when the 1st was down to about 1/3 health and then the two were able to gang up on the normal Snakes and take them out. The other 2 Swamp Snake stacks had been split where the weaker stack was on my 1st book and the stronger on my 2nd. I did this while whittling 3 of the 4 Swamp Snake stacks down such that when both books were dead I was able to use the Bats to keep attacking all but the strong Swamp Snake stack (while that stack kept being blocked by the other snakes) such that I killed all the other stacks (the Bats' Life Steal kept them close to full health) and just the large Swamp Snake stack was left. At this point, I performed the cycle and slowly whittled them down and finished it.

I actually thought the Whitehill stack was fairly easy - there was 1 stack of 79 Swordsmen and 23 Priests to go with the Inquisitor and Bowmen stacks! The key here was to cast Jealousy such that the 23 Priests became the jealous troop. By the way, I know how that bug you mentioned works: If a stack is controlled by Jealousy and they step outside of the range of the Statue (which happens a lot with ranged units), then they will remain under its control and as long as they are not within the range of the Statue when the spell expires, they'll stay under its control. So I had this work to great effect as the Swordsmen took out the Priests. I was then able to get my Evil Book up to his Inquisitors and Bowmen and by the time the Swordsmen had gotten to my book I cast a second. The two books easily took out the remaining Bowmen and Inquisitors and then the Swordsmen was able to take out both books, but by that time their numbers were in the 20's and then I did the "BatCycle" to finish them off! It took about 50 rounds. I probably could have done better if I had used Orc Strike twice on them instead of the stupid Necromancer ability, which is not very good in my opinion. I also had 1 Vamp killed by the Inquisitors that moved first at the start of the fight, but then the Bats Life Stole their way back up to max health when just the Swordsmen were left.

I also had forgetten to equip the sword for all but the Whitehill battle (not that +1 Attack would have made much of a difference).

Overall, this strategy is quite a bit easier than the Ball of Lightning which really requires you to BatCycle troops in virtually every fight!

I also didn't get level 6 until after I had defeated all the Basement stacks and completed the quest (which shows how variable the experience gain is because I also did the 3 easiest stacks in the Catacombs). I also had 36 Mana and didn't pick any skills when I leveled up to level 6 and so I had 1 Might, 8 Spirit, and 7 Magic Runes that I didn't use. I figured I'd see if I could do it as is and if I couldn't then I'd look to a skill for help.

So far the verified winning no loss strategies are: 1) Ball of Lightning and 2) Evil Book. Both situations require the spell level to be 2.

I know for a fact that Phoenix Level 2 will work because I was able to do it with Phoenix Level 1, but in my experimental game. I also got Demonologist and Avenger to work in my experimental game, but Avenger is pretty tough due to the fact that you have to let units strike you. This is all through the Shelter fights. As far as the Basement is concerned, I don't think Avenger will help you there so you're going to have to kite those stacks and just dig up the artifacts. Avenger has a shot at working on the Whitehill stacks because you just got take out the shooters.

By the way, in all my tries so for with the latest build (V1.5.1047.1747) the middle Whitehill stack is the easiest.

Also, if you go Order you should have enough Might Runes to boost your Rage - this is what I did for Ball of Lightning and it allowed me to use Jealousy twice and use the Rage Abilities more often which is a huge help in this fight.

Lastly, I just invented a new KB term: BatCycle! This means to whittle slower troops down via your Bats as you essentially move about the battlefield in a circuitous manner, thereby guaranteeing no loss! :)

/C\/C\

BatCycle! I like that and I use it alot even after the whitehill. Right now with 26 bats and few spells it's alot of fun :) I didnt even pick up the Demonologists or any other units, I wanna see how far I can go only with vampires and hopefully with ancient vampires if I get some.

As for the whitehill fight, when I did it I didnt know that you can do only 1 fight. So I gathered all 3 close to each other and was planning to keep 10 rage and most of my mana for the second fight, and do the same for the third fight.
However without saving rage or mana it could indeed be much easier even without the bug.

About other spells that will work for no loss strategy I think that Demon Portal r2 will be beast. With r2 the spawned demons should have more then 1400 leadership and if you get executioners thay will eat everything like it's a piece of cake :twisted:

I gotcha on the Whitehill fight - taking all 3 out would be a lot harder since you'd want to chain fight them like you were setting up to do and attempting to conserve Mana.

The only problem with Demon Portal level 2 is the randomness. When I tested it, I kept getting Imps / Scoffer Imps (I think once I got a Cerberus) and since the total Leadership of two Level 1's exceeded a single Level 2 then it was better to go with two casts @level 1; however, as you mention, if you can get a single Level 4 unit, then the fight will be easy - I just wasn't so lucky. Going with Chaos Level 1 will ensure that you have Meditation Level 2 at Daert Level 5 (4 if you're lucky) for 2 Demon Portal level 1 casts.

I would not pick higher than Level 1 Chaos until you defeat the Dwarven Shelter stack so that you can either pick Meditation Level 2 or Chaos Level 2 as the situation is warranted for the Elven and Human stacks. Give yourself some flexibility so that if you are lucky and can get a Level 4 Demon troop then go that route. If you can't then go with more Mana.

/C\/C\

Finished at last! 133 hours later and I'm finally done with my Impossible Demoness No-loss game. I found it challenging in the early game and then again from about fight 120-180, but after that it was very easy and as others have mentioned the final fight is a walkthrough. You'll need Teleport 3 to do it though (at least the way I did it).

Level 74, 131 quests with about 3-4 I couldn't be bothered finishing including the Demon lords of Helvedia. 451 fights which is at least 20-30 less than I could have done with all the various pointless upgrade fights I had available, but I knew the xp wouldn't add up to much so I didn't bother.

Basically I used Dark Paladins, Demons, Wizards, Demonologists and Dragon Riders for the last 100-200 fights, but I swapped the Dragon Riders for Executioners for the final fight. My Wizards have ended up doing an absurd 41% of my total damage due to insanely overpowered Halving ability. With Fortune's Smile my troops were doing about 90% crit at the end.

In the final fight I just used Teleport 3 every turn to put one of the tanks in a corner, which would do about 10k damage per whack. Then all I had to do was time it so that there were some junk enemy units on the battlefield when I killed the Spirit (dwarves) and then I could Phantom + Resurrect to my heart's content.

I really enjoyed King's Bounty Dark Side but I doubt I'm game for a second run-through anytime soon (famous last words!) Hopefully the devs will patch it so that the other two races have a chance at no-losses, else it'll be Matt's mod. I thought that this was easily the best KB game since Armored Princess. My only complaint is that is so loooooooooooong, but I loved the Shelter concept and a couple of the late islands, especially Aralan, were as much fun as the first three islands which I thought were probably the best. For a game with 450 fights I didn't feel like I was grinding pointlessly very much. Sure there were a few bugs and I did get some CTDs very occasionally and having to reload a frozen battle from time to time, but overall it is very stable.

This is a real return to form for the King's Bounty series after the mediocre Warriors of the North. Well done, devs! That was the best $25 I ever spent. :cool: :lol:

Good job, mate, good job :) I am very glad you enjoyed yourself. As you said, that's the best 18€/25$ we ever spent on a King's Bounty game, albeit a huge time sink. The devs really went balls to the wall on content with this one, improving many aspects of the game, adding branching quests, where decisions actually matter. We sure can't complain.

I am also not so keen on a run soon, cause I am moving to another city and I will be quite busy + I may not have internet for a while - we will see how long, depends on how quickly the company that installs it reacts. Could be just a few days, could be a week or two. I still have internet at work, so when I'm doing the night shifts, I will be lurking around, checking on Matt's progress. That guy can think really constructively and there is much sense in his ideas.

I had a try at Daert and managed to get to the Shelter using the 2 Vampire trick. I also managed to destroy the Dwarven stack (no ranged units) by running the vamps around and hitting the enemies with their last move of a turn. Took 109 rounds. :-P But I can't seem to do anything at all about the Human or Elven stacks, not like this. Ridiculously tough. I only got money out of the Ore Cart so all I have is Poison Skull. I put two points in Concentration but it isn't working. :confused:

This is a very hard battle. I think the closest one to finishing it with minimal scanning was Impy, who proposed to restart till you get magic spring and play with diversion for a trap. Then again, you need to kill the elves quickly, and drop the fauns to 1-2 so that they don't damage you much while you're flying around with magic spring on you. Will take many turns, but it is perfectly doable.

However, I don't know if magic spring would be enough to get you through the human stack. They have way too many ranged units...

I can't even brute force it with losses. With 100+ fairies and 24 werewolves, it's only a matter of time before they catch up to my vampires or wipe my sacrificial tanks. Werewolves can also mass fear my shock troops, so it's back to crappy 2 vampires doing little damage. This run through I had level 2 traps which is actually really good for damage but too many units and fairies can hover over the traps.

I don't really like modding the game, nor would I like to start easier than impossible. Even if I kept re-starting, I'm not sure what would win easily since even phoenix might get overwhelmed.

Sad about this. I wonder if the devs plan on releasing a patch soon to address this.

Good point - I was curious to see whether I could kill that Elven stack at all with my two vampires and the junk units from the Shelter, and guess what? I can't either. I figured I needed to use a lot of poison skull on the fairies initially due to their 5 hex movement, but the Werewolf Elves always ended up killing me. I tried 3 or 4 times.

Has anyone actually gotten further than this at all as Daert on Impossible? I guess with the Diversions 2 it might be possible. I put my runes in Concentration for this playthough and that was clearly a mistake.

The strange thing about all this is that two Vamps can do everything but the Elven and Dwarven stacks (well skipping the two hardest Catacombs and the Dragandor Spider / Snake fights).

If you read back in this thread, you'll see where I posted several different strategies to do this, but all rely on the spell you get with the Ore Cart in Dragandor.

I'll re-summarize them here. I've put two to actual practice through Whitehill no loss (including all the stacks except maybe the big Spider stack in the Catacombs):

• Ball of Lightning (exceedingly hard, but doable).
• Evil Book (kind of hard, but doable).

The Evil Book was from DGDobrev's save, although since I've gotten a save game of my own with Evil Book (note that you must get your book to level 2), but I haven't gotten any of the other spell combinations legitimately that I tested via the "magicbook" cheat to see if they would work; however, they are:

• Phoenix (super easy - I did it with the spell at level 1 (harder, but way easier than the two above), and getting it to level 2 is cake and a level 2 Phoenix will tear everyone up).
• Demonologist (not as easy as the Phoenix, but easier than Evil Book; however, I did do it when I was able to cast one after another (level 1) since I had 40 Mana in my experiment - getting 40 Mana is easy, though, because you only need 1 point in Concentration, 1 in Chaos, and you should have the runes to get two points into Meditation when you are level 5 (maybe level 4 if you're lucky), which hopefully you are when you fight the Elves / Humans - also level 1 is better than level 2 unless you are super lucky and get a level 4 unit (I did it with two stacks of lowly Imps) so save your runes until you have to fight the Elves / Humans and then decide your path as I think you need Bibliophile to get Demonologist to level 2 due to limited Crystals).
• Avenger (about as difficult as Ball of Lightning or even harder, perhaps, but all the ranged troops get decimated as they attack you and you may need to augment this with Time Shift (you sometimes get this from Clarissa or the Hidden Cache) for a low cost extension of the spell) and you also augment this strategy with your Poison Skulls (this time you need 2 points in Order and with Meditation that is only 3 skills so you should have extra runes for other skills, possibly including at least level 1 Diversion). You also probably want to use those Might Runes to bump your Rage up for the Whitehill stack so you can cast Jealousy at least twice.

Of these 3 that I have not tried in a "real" game, this is through just the Shelter. However, all but Avenger seem doable through Whitehill as well, whereas with Avenger it may not work with the Basement stacks because you have to be struck (although you can kite those troops and skip them so it doesn't matter). The Whitehill fight is actually easier than the Shelter Elven / Human fights because of Jealousy.

I was thinking that it may also be possible to use Calm Rage with your Poison Skull if you got that spell, but have not tried it. I have tried many other spell combinations, but nothing else has worked so far.

Note that if you go the Order route (i.e. Ball of Lighting / Avenger then you should try to get at least level 1 Diversion since you should have the runes for it). Also, you don't need anything special to defeat the 3 easiest Catacombs fights, just use your Poison Skull - they are hard, but good training for using your Vamps effectively. If you do this, you should be level 5 after defeating the Dwarven Shelter stack, making the Elven / Human stacks much easier (if you skip those 3 fights, then you may have to do one of both of the remaining stacks @level 4, which is much harder).

Although you need the right strategy to win with these methods, the chance of getting one of the above spells is exceedingly low. So that's why I started the other thread to talk about changing the game since I think any game should have a chance at no loss if you employ the proper strategy and who wants to be starting new games and scanning them with the save game scanner to be successful?

By the way, has anyone tried Bagyr? If you think Daert is hard, try him! :-P

/C\/C\

Okay, I'll use the save game scanner and get myself a save with Evil Book in the Ore Cart. That's where I'm going to find it if anywhere, right? And other than that I'm just using two vampires running around the map in vampire mode, right?

Yeah, Bagyr. My save with him is no further than Captain of the Guard. :o

EDIT: sigh, I don't think I know how to use the scanner properly, unless there's a new scanner specific to Dark Side. Whenever I try to run the scanner it says Scanned Files: 0

Can someone either explain what I'm doing wrong or send me a save with the Evil Book? The saves are in My Games and the loc_ses file is in the steam directory, right?

This is the post you need: http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...63&postcount=4

The guy explained it rather well, I have been using his way of scanning for now, and that's how I found the Book of Evil save.

Right, and see this post for what to search on and note that is DGDobrev pointed out here it is "dragondor.embyro_13" with a "." instead of an "_" as I had originally remembered.

That is also right about the 2 Vamps, although you can pop your Ghosts and Zombies in your reserve if you'd like instead of disbanding them.

I have a save with Ball of Lightning if anyone is interested in trying that out...

/C\/C\

Kamikaze Level 2 Works Great!
 

I found another spell combination that will work - Kamikaze level 2. Coupled with Poison Skull level 2, this spell combination could actually possibly be the second easiest that will work (behind Phoenix).

When I did my original pass through the spells, I had neglected to notice that Kamikaze now works on enemy troops. So I did the "magicbook" cheat and it can work wonders on the Sprites and Werewolves. You may lose a Vampire as you run around the battlefield awaiting the 3-turn delay, but once it goes off - BOOM! It took out half of the 77 Sprites and halved a Werewolf stack - ouch! Then the next round the next bomb finished off the Sprites, Werewolves, and Satyrs. The third round (with the other damage) took the last Werewolf stack down to 4. That was very good use of 30 Mana.

On the Humans, it took out 11 Priests and half the Bowmen! And then the other bomb finished off the Bowmen. Two Level 2 Poison Skulls took out the Inquisitors and then I just had the Swordsmen and Guardsmen left.

This is fairly easy to do.

I didn't even get Diversion Level 1, but it may be possible when you reach level 5 to be able to get Diversion to Level 1, which will make it even easier or go with skills to give you more Mana.

I just got a savegame with Kamikaze, so if anyone wants me to post it let me know (I haven't even started playing it, yet).

So if you get a savegame with this spell, then give it a try! :)

/C\/C\

Thanks to both of you for the help. After MUCH stuffing around I finally have the scanner working on the five save files I created. Sadly, 3 seem to give gold, 1 Cold Grasp, and 1 spell_reaction, whatever that is? No Evil Book or Kamikaze. So if either of you wants to PM me a savefile with either or both of those spells in the Ore Cart, that would be much appreciated! :cool:

EDIT: did another 10 - 6 gave gold, 1 Fire Arrow, 1 Fireball, 1 Hunter Armor, 1 other spell which I've forgotten :(

I gave up and just modified the starting troops to give me two ancient vampires and two necromancers.

Praying for the perfect saved game AND enemy spawning with less than normal troops (I always had 8 elves which would one shot my vampires before I could react) is not my idea of KB fun.

It also means you are completely forced to a single or tedious path.

Just go to the original ses.kfs file, back it up, rename ses.kfs to ses.kfs.zip, extract to ses.kfs folder.

Edit hero.txt

Refer to
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...4&postcount=84

My save games so far...
 

Okay, here are all the ones I've been able to generate so far:

• Ball of Lightning (really, really hard!)
• Evil Book (hard, DGDobrev also has one here)
• 2 Kamikaze's (not as hard, the first gives 2 scrolls, the second gives 4) - I haven't played either of these, yet so give them a shot!

Good luck and enjoy! :)

See DGDobrev's instructions here.

/C\/C\

Thanks ck and Matt. ck - I can see why you got frustrated. We are forced to do something 'outside the box' just to make a start in 2 out of 3 races on Impossible. I love this game but I really hope we get a patch to address this severe balance issue (we probably won't).

Matt - thanks for the saves. I will have a try at Kamikaze 2 first. Cheers. :cool:

Wowie! Matt, that sounds really awesome. Could be well, well, really well worth a try. I will give it a go sometime.

I've made a bit of a start on the Kamikaze save, haven't got far year, but I was delighted to find that I had a Frost Grasp scroll in my spellbook. I never used Frost Grasp at all on my first playthrough but I'm finding it to be superior to Poison Skull and it costs the same 5 mana.

Ugh, I'm stuck on this game at the same spot, having killed the Dwarven stack but not being able to get the Elven or Human. I am a few point short of Level 5 and I don't have even one point in Diversions, but I have Chaos 2 with Frost Grasp, Poison Skull and Kamikaze all at level 2.

The problem is that Kamikaze, while devastating, takes 3 turns to explode. Against the Elven stack, the Hunters (9!) one shot my Vampires, like ck said, and the Human stack isn't much better.

So I think Kamikaze is a bad spell for this fight. Back to the drawing board. I'll try Evil Book next.

Human stack was pretty evil even with the demoness army since they could "heal" you for bonus damage.

In my game, I just beat the elven army which had 8 elves but only 75 fairies vs the 110+.

You need some sort of tank or a lot of continuous crowd control. Even though I have ancient vampires and necromancers, it's still somewhat tricky to get a no loss. However, I didn't get any extra useful spells. Time Shift and Hex. :)

Keep trying and don't forget these ideas!
 

Did you do the Catacombs stacks? You've got to at least do the 3 easiest ones (I know, they can sometimes be really hard, but you've got Frost Grasp so that makes them easier) to guarantee that you get level 5 after taking the Dwarven Shelter stack out or at the very most the Dwarven and Human stacks. The Human stack is very easy with Kamikaze, I'm telling you. See if fighting them will push you over.

For the Elves, you've got to do your best to position your Vamps so they are not one shotted, but if they are it is okay, because in Bat form you can regrow your numbers - don't forget that!

Also, positioning of your Vamps with both the Human and Elven stacks at the start of the fight is everything so experiment with positioning to maximize their regeneration in Vamp form and giving you the opportunity to transform to Bat to then escape. Don't forget, also, that once you transform you automatically heal to full health, so waiting for everyone to move and then transforming is often the difference between living and dying.

Losing 1 Vamp is no biggie in any of the fights, as you can regrow them towards the end of the fight back to their original numbers so don't worry if you lose 1. Transform back to Vamp if that last Bat looks like it is going to die, to get the full heal, and to heal for easy addition of Bat #2 when regrowing!

I'll be trying this game later and we'll see if I can do it - I know you can, just keep trying! :)

***EDIT***

Okay, I see what you're up against - 108 Fairies and 9 Elves, oof! You only got 4 Werewolves in one stack, but I'd rather have 11 and 1 less Elf, but this is what we got to deal with. I say you have to be level 5 to do this one, but there is a wrinkle since the Fairies can dispel your Kamikaze! I just went ahead to see what you had to deal with, but I can see needing to get as much exp as possible to be level 5. I didn't check the Human stack out, but I don't think it'll be a problem compared to the Elves, so do the Elves last. You will lose 1 Vamp because the min damage is 9x8 = 72 (you might get very lucky and not lose one, but I wouldn't count on it). So you'll have to make it up at the end of the fight.

Feel free to switch to the other Kamikaze save because I can see that this one is probably going to be exceedingly hard. I'll still give this one an honest effort, though later...

/C\/C\

Matt, in that game I left the two hardest Catacombs stacks, which meant I was just a few points short of Level 5 by the time I hit the Shelter and defeated the Dwarves. I am trying the other Kamikaze save instead in the hope that it will prove easier. I don't know how you or anyone else manages to whittle down those huge stacks of spiders in such a small arena. I can manage all but two of them. I guess I will try again! I am wondering whether I ought to prioritise Diversions 2 somehow. I don't know if it's possible to get Diversions 2 and Chaos 2 by level 5...

This was incredibly difficult, but I finished all the Shelter fights no loss!
 

I'm not gonna lie: this battle with the Elves pushed me to my limits, in fact I had essentially given up and was going to post here in the forum that I didn't think it was possible.

However, I went back at it again and I was able to do it!

First and foremost thanks to Frost Grasp, I was able to do the 3 easiest Catacombs stacks and the Spider stack in front of the Dragandor gate. These fights will give you enough exp to get to Level 5 after defeating the Dwarven Shelter stack.

Everything had to fall into place right with the Elven stack fight - one misstep and you'd die.

I also had to resort to a tactic that I don't like to use, but the Diversion skill's effects change if you save the game, start the fight, reload, immediately save again, start the fight, reload the newer save, save again, and start the fight - if the troops that you want get Diverted, then you reload the older save when trying it again. If not, then you load the newer save and repeat the above steps until the troops that you want to be Diverted are affected and then proceed to use this save game as your basis for trying to defeat the Elves.

This was actually the first time I used this strategy to do a fight no loss.

So with this strategy, I was able to get the Elves and Lake Fairies Diverted on round 1 and the 4 Werewolves stack killed themselves on the trap. You can't get any better than that! After this, finding the right sequence was exceedingly difficult, but I took the Elves from 9 -> 6 with Poison Skull Level 2 on round 1 (so that the Elves could no longer kill one of my Vampires at the start of round 2), and the Fauns from 13 -> 2 with Poison Skull on round 2 (and then the Poison took them down to 1). On round 3, this is the key, I used the Kamikaze scroll since the Lake Fairies have the Dispel ability. By this time, on round 3 the 12 Werewolves and 108 Lake Fairies were a hex away from my Vamps and so I had to transform to Bats, but you have to wait until everyone does their turn so that you can take advantage of your Bats getting full health on the transformation. On round 4, the Lake Fairies dispelled the Kamikaze on them, ending their turn and allowing my Bats to escape. So then I cast Kamikaze Level 2 on the Werewolves before they began their turn and then ran away as far as I could. The Elves were down to 5 at this point due to the Poison and the Fauns at just 1 were pretty much irrelevant at this point. I then had to position my Bats to get the Lake Fairies to position themselves so that they'd take a route that would allow my Bats to keep escaping. I then took the Elves from 5 down to 1 with a Poison Skull. On the next round I had to use Frost Grasp to damage the Lake Fairies so that they were small enough after the bomb went off not to hurt me too much. I then positioned my Bats so that I could get the Lake Fairies and Werewolves to be adjacent and 1 hex away when the bomb went off. It took out 8 Werewolves and the Lake Fairies were down to about 44. I was also able to transform back to Vampires and I still (luckily) had 2 left (they were probably down to 5 hp when they regenerated). They were able to regenerate and stay at 2 as I then used another Kamikaze scroll on the Lake Fairies and then another on the Werewolves, which were still at 4 units. Unfortunately, the Werewolves transformed on me canceling the spell, but I was able to take them down by regenerating Mana and using a Level 2 Frost Grasp on them leaving 1 left. I then had enough Mana to cast a Level 1 Frost Grasp later to finish them off and the rest was history!

I probably tried this fight 50+ times to get the sequence right!

The key to this fight was to Divert the Elves and Lake Fairies on round 1 because without this, there is simply no way to do it. The next key was using the Kamikaze scroll saving me 5 Mana (I had been casting it @Level 1 since I knew the Fairies would dispel it, but I really needed that 5 Mana to cast Frost Grasp @Level 2 on the Fairies later) so that I could take the Elves from 5 down to 1 and use Frost Grasp to kill about 20 Fairies (using the scroll left me with me exactly 7 Mana for me to cast it @Level 2 on the exact round that I needed it).

As you can see, everything had to fall into place, with most damage being at least above average and sometimes even close to maximum (especially to take that pesky Faun stack from 13 down to eventually 1 unit).

I then did the Human stack, which was actually pretty easy since you just cast Kamikaze Level 2 on the Priests (13 of them) and then the Bowmen (18 of them) on the next turn. Two casts of either Poison Skull or Frost Grasp took the Inquisitors down to 1 or 2 and then I finished them off with another spell (@Level 1). At the end of round 3 the first bomb went off, and then the second on round 4 killed the remaining Priests and Bowmen. Lastly the Guardsmen and Swordsmen are severely damaged with another Kamikaze at Level 2 and then I whittled them down the rest of the way as they were the only troops left.

By the way, it is better to get Concentration Level 2 rather than Meditation Level 1 for the Kamikaze strategy, because you only get +6 Mana with Meditation, but over a 20+ round fight you'll actually regenerate enough Mana for at least 2 extra spell casts (you'll essentially regenerate 27 Mana compared to just 12 or 13)! With this I only had 28 Mana at the start of the fight.

If you don't get Lake Fairies, but rather Sprites, then the Elven stack is significantly easier (I had Sprites in my test) as they only move 4 and can't dispel your Kamikaze's. You simply cast Kamikaze once each on the Sprites and 2 Werewolves and they should almost all be dead after all the bombs go off and then just work on the Elves with a Poison Skull / Frost Grasp or two and you're good to go!

I sure hope the other save game has Sprites instead of Lake Fairies because this was even harder than the Ball of Lighting!

I haven't done the Basement or Whitehill, yet, but the Elven Shelter stack is so much harder than those, I'm not worried.

By the way, I repeated the fight to take some screenshots - I probably don't need to use the remaining 2 Kamikaze scrolls as they can't hurt me any more towards the end.

/C\/C\

Crap, well done. I have tried and tried but I can't seem to do either of those fights currently. I am playing the other Kamikaze save so my stacks are different. I may have to restart AGAIN with your game. :mad:

Okay, finished up the fights through Whitehill no loss with the 4 Kamikaze scrolls in the Dragandor Ore Cart save game.

Some of the Basement stacks were a little tricky, but once you figure out which unit is going to be in the middle when that Level 2 Kamikaze goes off, you can really optimize the damage output of that spell.

By the way, Level 2 Diversion is possible @Daert Level 6. In this game, the exp was lousy as I needed to kill all 3 Basement stacks and complete the digging quest to get to level 6.

Whitehill was a little tricky because the easiest stack ended up not being the easiest and so I switched to a harder stack. With the harder one, I used the Jealousy feature where a ranged stack that runs away from the Statue stays Jealous after the Statue disappears. That made it really easy.

Overall, this was easier than the Ball of Lightning strategy except for the Elven Shelter stack, which has been by far the toughest no loss fight I've done so far with Daert and these save games.

I sure hope the other Kamikaze save game has Sprites because then it would be a lot easier.

By the way, I think we need some more options about what Daert says back to the Spirit of Darkness for when we defeat the Shelter Guardians:

I'd really like to hear what you would say to the Spirit of Darkness after completing Daert no loss through the Shelter! :-P

/C\/C\

A couple of things for anyone else crazy enough to try this (I haven't finished the final two fights yet)...

1. You MUST be level 5 by the time you defeat the Dwarven stack, the first of the Shelter stacks.

2. By level 5, you've spent your runes on Diversions 1, Concentration 2 and Chaos Magic 2. You'll have about 4 Mind and 4 Magic runes to spare. This is so that you can have a pool of about 50 mana for each fight, you can cast Level 2 Kamikaze and Frost Grasp, and you have one trap on the field (and a chance for troops to lose their turn, which as Matt explained, you'll have to abuse to get through these last two fights).

3. You need to do 10 fights to get up to Level 5 by this stage. These are 3 on Portland (easy), 3 in the Catacombs (quite hard - all but the two biggest spider stacks), 1 Spider in Dragandor (very hard), 1 when you get Bagyr/Neoline (very easy), 1 Captain of the Guard (quite easy now that you are level 4) and the Dwarven stack in the Shelter (easy but time consuming).

4. All of these fights are using just 2 Vampires. You could use the Ghosts as well to draw enemies away on certain fights. You will have to learn how to use Vampires optimally, which means learning exactly when to move and transform them. The great strength of Vampires is that they regain ALL hp when they transform, so it's very important to learn to use the Wait command strategically.

5. Having said all of the above, I've been banging my head against the wall with this over the past couple of days. :-o

Good job guys, good job :) You are lining up the stars and planets for poor Daert like expert tacticians. I don't know if I feel masochistic enough to try this myself, but I do know I will have a go at it sometime in the future.

I can't do this! I am up to these two fights on BOTH Kamikaze games and I can't manage either stack in either game. Very sad.

The amount of reloading and resaving you need to do to get those particular troops diverted, geez. I guess if I got the EXACT two troops diverted (Elves and Lake Fairies) I might be able to do it, or not.

The other Kamikaze save is easier in some ways and harder in others.

9 Elves -------------------- 9 Elves
12 Werewolves----------- 13 Werewolves
108 Lake Fairies --------- 83 Forest Fairies (okay, that's better!)
4 Werewolves ------------ 13 Werewolves (ouch!)
13 Fauns ----------------- 10 Fauns

So yes, I can see that the Forest Fairies are easier (and slower) BUT you can't force them to skip their move by dispelling, and with the extra stack of Werewolves, christ.

And the other fight...

10 Guardsmen ----------- 12 Guardsmen
13 Priest of Light--------- 15 Priest of Light
18 Bowmen -------------- 21 Bowmen
7 Inquisitors of Light ----- 8 Inquisitors of Light
19 Swordsmen ----------- 12 Witch Hunters (and they dispel the bombs!)

I have tried various tactics on all four fights. I have tried to get two troops diverted through laborious save scumming. I have tried splitting the vamps or keeping them in a pair. I've even tried loading up with ranged units and hoping to get lucky with what their ranged units shoot at.

Nup, not working, not ever. :-x

Okay, I think you need to practice on the Human fights in both of your saves first.

Believe me, you won't believe how much easier they are to do than the Elven stacks.

You may find that with both Elves and Humans placing both Vamps in your leftmost slot will work the best for you.

Doing this ensures that the Werewolves by the Fauns move to the their right (your left). For the Humans, it won't matter as the Guardsmen will go down one path and the Swordsmen the other.

You actually can stay in Vampire form for both Human fights until the melee troops are basically right on you. It is very important that the Priests do not Heal and kill both of your Vamps. Losing one is okay - don't sweat it, it's easy to regenerate on the Guardsmen / Swordsmen later.

For the Humans, cast the first Level 2 Kamikaze on the Priests and then the second on the Bowmen. Then use Poison Skull / Frost Grasp Level 2 on the Inquisitors.

By the time the melee troops are upon you, careful waiting, moving to escape, and then being second (after the Inquisitors) will allow to escape in Vampire form and then the Priests and Bowmen should be dead by the time you need to transform to Bats with just the melee troops and maybe an Inquisitor or two left. Finish them off with a Level 1 damaging spell and then BatCycle the melee troops saving up to cast a Level 2 Kamikaze on them to make the BatCycle go faster.

Practice on that Human squad until it is easy (do both in both games so you get good practice).

For the other game with the Sprites, believe me, this is easier than the Lake Fairies as the extra Werewolves are mostly irrelevant (so long as you don't forget that you can't use your Vamps to kill them). You do have 9 Elves, so only worry about getting them Diverted (I guess if you Divert both the Elves and the Fauns, that is a bonus).

Position your Vamps in the leftmost spot so that the Sprites and Werewolves go the right (your left) path. You need to cast at least 2 Kamikazes on the Sprites and Werewolves (that are closest). You'll eventually work your way away from them on the right side, switching to Bats to escape. On round 3 you'll have to work on the Elves with Poison Skull Level 2, but be sure to save enough Mana to cast another Kamikaze on the last stack of Werewolves (if you can cast a third Kamikaze on them on round 3 instead of Poison Skulling the Elves do it, but you'll just have to see how it goes).

What makes both of these fights difficult is that the 9 Elves can Double Shot kill (barely) one of your Vamps on round one. If the above does not work, you'll have to Poison Skull the 9 Elves on round one so that they do not kill a Vamp on round two. But, this delays your Kamikaze's, although this worked for me with the Lake Fairies.

Sequence is everything for these fights as well as subtle positioning of your Vamps to get units to use more action points, you may have to experiment with who you put the Kamikaze on first. As a note, there are situations where Kamikaze will make troops skip their turn. Something to do with casting it on a higher initiative troop, so you may find that you need to do this thereby causing lower initiative troops (maybe just one) to skip their turn, but be careful because more likely than not, it causes troops to separate when you want them bunched up for that kaboom! I've seen this happen a lot, especially in the Basement when I'm trying to defeat those guys.

Good luck, maybe I'll try the other Kamikaze game later...

/C\/C\

Rejoice! Phoenix is Here!
 

Rejoice, my friends!

The Phoenix has arrived!

You can skip all the Catacombs fights (but be sure to get all those Crystals, though), skip the stack in front of the gate in Dragandor and just run to the Ore Cart. Get Level 4 Daert and let the fun ensue!

I finally got another elusive Phoenix scroll (4 of them!!!!) and am posting the save here. I actually got one with one of my Daert modded games, but never used it since I went Chaos in that game.

There is one note to be careful about with Phoenix, and that is the fact that the Bibliophile skill is bugged. If you pick it first, it will not give you the Crystal rebate. So make sure you pick it second at least, or last if you're really worried. I had forgotten about this and was short on Crystals when I was in front of the Inn and was like - doh! So I had to go back to my Portland save and pick Meditation first.

You should only need 8 and 13 Crystals for Phoenix Level 1 and 2 so if you see 10 and 15, then that means Bibliophile is not working if you picked it. You should find 18 Crystals (the max!) in the Catacombs, plus the 4 you start with gives you 22 with one left after you get Phoenix up to Level 2.

You'll be amazed how easy all the fights are, and you might only have to think a little bit in the Basement with the Snake stack. Otherwise, even the Whitehill fight will be super easy and you can actually relax and honestly reply to the Spirit of Darkness and say:

"Yes, it was not difficult." :grin:

/C\/C\