Wow, just wow. NO Demonesses in my game.

[ckdamascus]

Originally Posted by loreangelicus

The problems with criticals is the base +50% damage from a critical hit. An item that for example guarantees 100% critical essentially translates to +50% damage; on the other hand an item that adds +100% damage obviously does twice the bonus. This is why Crown of Blackthorne is so good for thorns, despite the faulty description (it says it doubles attack, not damage), catapulting thorn warrior as the highest possible DPS units with available items (Whip of Pain, Assassin's Dagger), with thorn-hunter coming second.



The good news is it is guaranteed to show up; the bad news is that you have to do EVERYTHING EXACTLY as you had done before; doing exactly the same island-hopping sequence, eggs item usage (basically any action that could also influence what unit you get from a Call Colossus/Call of Death scroll), sequence of enemies fought, etc. up until the battle that generated chests that gave you the Ghost Armor.

Thankfully, unlike the chests your dragon digs up, if you are able to generate the same starting chests in that particular battle, then you are guaranteed to get the same item.

If you got it from a chest dug up by the dragon (is this possible? I always thought you could only dig up gold/scrolls/wanderer scrolls/runes) then the pain continues: you have to do the EXACT battle that you did before, down to the very last detail (ie. on round 8 you first cast Heal on the rune mage, then you had it move to coordinates [4,6]). Good luck with this, I had a hard time recreating a battle up to just the 3rd round (dug up an AK scroll on the 3rd round, but incurred a loss in later rounds, forcing me to replay the battle).

Oh no doubt it is the highest damaging unit per leadership with those buffs. If I wanted that though, I wouldn't have picked the Demonic Race. Although it seems maybe those little imps should not be ignored. Haha.

I get a feeling that it was one of those chests that was "in the battle" in the beginning. I'm not sure though! I swore I dug it, but who knows.

In my opinion, the demons true strength is tenacity due to infinite retaliation. That's why they are excellent summon units (and awesome candidates for Kamikaze).

KarlosCV: were you playing Impossible No Loss mode? That must have been a pain to restore the imps?

I like Archdemons since they are far more durable. I'm not so sure about other bosses, but it certainly made fighting the Frog and Spider doable. Admittedly they are NOT so good for damage/leadership.

The Frog... I had to use the Archdemon to force him NOT to use a mass attack.

I'm surprised you didn't see the power of orcs. Try using moldok as your hero, get onslaught level 3.

Phantom Orc Veterans eat up the front line like nothing. Once they hit Adrenaline Level 3, even bosses can't counterattack their assault.

Goblins end up doing 18K/damage per hit... throw in a Paladin and second wind. Oooh that pain.

[Zechnophobe]

Originally Posted by loreangelicus

I believe a critical hit adds +50% damage, so statistically a +20% critical translates to only +10% damage; so take the straight-up +20% damage axe.

a Critical hit causes you to do 150% of the max damage for a unit. This means that it depends on the damage spread of a unit how valuable the crit is.

Also, +20% crit multiplies with Morale. So if you have +3 morale (140% crit) this will be +28% critical instead.

So, how does this figure in? Dryads do 1-4 damage (average 2.5) and crit for 6, more than double damage.

+20% damage would cause them to do just that, 20% more damage flat accross. (so .2*2.5 = .5 more damage per strike)

+20% with 3 morale (easy on dryads) so +28% crit causes them to, on average, do 28% of the crit damage they get. So 6 -2.5 = 3.5, * 28% = .98.

This means that yes, the crit boost is actually substantially more worth it(for dryads under these conditions). Also, most items that increase crit, do so for all your troops, whereas I don't think many items increase damage for all of them.

This is why I like to field high morale, high crit units with large damage ranges .

[ckdamascus]

Originally Posted by Zechnophobe

a Critical hit causes you to do 150% of the max damage for a unit. This means that it depends on the damage spread of a unit how valuable the crit is.

I had no idea critical hits do maximum damage on top of 50% additional damage.

I learn something new every day. Haha.

[edit]
This actually makes the spell Doom a little bit more worthwhile. Otherwise, Pygmy utterly annihilates it. (it still sort of does though. Haha).

[onepiece]

@Ckdamascus; I learned that in AP and boosted all my units critical (dagger of judgment + shadow cloak/ Max Prayer skill; critical boosting items for particular races/units, etc.)

The only problem is that by having 95-100% critical chance, Ancient vampire are nearly invincible (since they cannot be hit by critical) so I had to kill them by spells or wait until a negative effect lowered my critical chance.

[KarlosCV]

In my last playthrough I decided to finally try orcs and demons.

Orcs - even with the CW improvements still a bit disappointing (or maybe because of them, I didn't care for the new Adrenaline feat).

But boy, the demons were fun! I dumped executioners after a while (too slow, too expensive, wimpy dmg/lship ratio) and changed them for imps. Best unit ever! With the Whip of Pain, Assassin Dagger and the awesome strike-and-return ability a thousand imps can wreak some serious havoc.

And the demoness was even more awesome. With Avgares nad the Whip of Pain she almost always killed the whole stack with one strike.

Not that it was necessary after she teleported my Cerberi into enemy ranks - with their three-head strike they cleared it all out in two three rounds.

The only possible weakness - Archdemons. In my view they don't have any useful abilities. Teleportation seems nice, but a hasted demon with "run" is with the enemy in one round as well and with my demoness-cerberi combo it was not really necessary anyway. And halving only sounds cool. Later I only took them for the fights with dragons, it was funny to watch those poor black and red bastards not being able to even touch them One stack of 15 black dragons did like 22 damage to my Archdemons


So if anyone is also bored with overpowered strategies like black knights, pure ranged or plants with botany-blackthorne-assasin dagger-whip of pain combo, demons are a great entertainingly different team to go with.