[MattCaspermeyer]

Yah, so far Phoenix is super easy - I did the ol' kiting to Helvedia trick to pick me up an Arch Demon to take on Oncologon (or however you spell his name), but I want to play different units this time, so no Arch Demons for me the rest of the game (well, unless I get them from Demon Portal)!

In fact, I think I'm going to see what I can do about limiting my use of level 5 troops to maybe just Bone Dragons since I'm Daert and maybe the Orc and Neutral non-dragons (like Trolls and Cyclops).

So far I've been having a ton of fun with Demonologists and Shamans and was able to complete all the Portland quests very easily. The Shamans work really well with troops that can't heal early in the game.

In fact I was amazed at how effective the Shamans are as I was able to defeat the two "weak" and "very weak" (mislabeled) humans stacks for Lucia using them with the Ancient Phoenix (I still had 1 Arch Demon and 1 Red Dragon to go with two stacks of Shamans and 1 Demonologist stack when I did these fights).

I briefly tried Vampires / Ancient Vampires with my Necromancers, Demonologists, and Shamans, but they were mostly sitting there doing nothing and since you can get them from the Necromancer's Raise Dead, I ditched them and got me some Dark Mages (neat!) and went back to Tristrem and got me some Catapults.

So now my army is Demonologists, Shamans, Dark Mages, Necromancers, and Catapults. We'll see how long that lasts, but I actually had fun with the Catapults in my Bagyr experiments so I figured it should be fun.

I actually might go all ranged until the Ancient Phoenix starts to lose its power, but right now, I've actually been casting it at just level 2 sometimes due to level 3 being more than what I need for some of the Monteville fights.

I figure I'll eventually need to replace the Catapults with a level 4 troop, but I don't have any other level 4 ranged troops available right now. I could go with Dark Horsemen for a ground troop as there seems plenty in Portland, but with the demon summons and raised dead with the Phoenix there's no sense in needing a melee troop right now since I can produce them on the battlefield.

I've also been using teleport a lot so far and the only time I think I'll not use it is when I have to sail to a new island like I did with Monteville. I guess if I really wanted, I could kite from Helvedia to Inselburg.

I'm really amazed at the number of places you can go with kiting and teleport.

/C\/C\