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\