Quote:
Originally Posted by Loremipsum1
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.) |
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\