No Loss thoughts?

[Loopy]

Originally Posted by BB Shockwave

Ahriman? Ohh, he is a piece of cake compared to his boss, the necromancer in the cave. The guy is... LEVEL TEN! And even if I kill all troops on the island and do all quests, I only got to level 5. I lost all my Vikings and a lot of Berserkers and Slingers in that battle... that's when I decided that hey, I am playing a viking, for them, death in battle is the most glorious thing ever. So... I just go with the flow.

See my post two before yours. I found the other two bosses after Ahriman to be a piece of cake. The difficulty is highly random based on what it gives them.

[BB Shockwave]

Originally Posted by Loopy

See my post two before yours. I found the other two bosses after Ahriman to be a piece of cake. The difficulty is highly random based on what it gives them.

I read your posts since then. But what the HECK is this with random troops and leadership for enemy heroes? This wasn't so in the previous games - there was some randomisation about what troops they could get and how many stacks they were divided into, but not such huge Leadership differences. Makes it unfair to those who - like me - got the bad luck to meet these bosses with their increased armies. In my game, the Necromancer had 2 Ancient Vampires and 3 stacks of 5 Vampires, about 5 Cursed Ghosts, and more Zombies and Skeletons then I could throw a bone at. The Bone Gate thing is the worst - it lets those otherwise slow skellies get to you on the first round, very often.

I did find that for some reason - thankfully - Skeleton archers do not use their Poison and Black Arrow skills that often.

[Zechnophobe]

Originally Posted by hotfix666

in this game you can not digg after wander scrolls so thats can be hard on impossibel?

I did no-loss in KB:AP just fine without abusing the dig effect. That said, if you want a minimum time game, yeah... it's going to be a lot rougher.

[Zechnophobe]

Meant to ask, has anyone gotten Jarls or Maidens on the first island? That'd probably make no-loss completely doable right there, especially for a mage. Maidens are freaking amazing at this, and will only get better once you factor in phantom/gift.

As I sorta insinuated, I'm just playing through the game to start to get a feel for things. Looks like you can always get Jotun once you can fly, and they are decently tanky. I'm not quite sure how to go through the first island without losses, but 2nd island onward looks pretty doable.

Maybe get a bunch of 'call of nature' scrolls, and just spam them during the Ahriman fight to make him less likely to target your only units, and cheese the RNG? Sorta extreme, but I think it would work.

[impy]

Well, I restarted the game 50+ times to see what the conditions are on the first island. Here are the observations :

Hunter sells always 2 x basic bears +wolves. Never spells, items, other units.
Runolv sells always wolves + soothsayers only. usually 1-3 potions of both mana & rage. Only twice I've seen him sell extra level 1 item, vampire stake I think. Also always sells 2 x spells, rune magic only.
Castle sells always slingers + vikings only. No spells. items vary, but are very low level. The best I've seen is helm +2 def, boots +2def (unupgraded spike boots), Shield +3def or berserker shield (better)
blacksmith sells always axethrowers and berserkers. No spells, 2 or 3 (rate) very low level items. Mind you, it can be level 1 items which can be upgraded later on nicely, i've seen staff of herbsage there for example.

Since slingers & wolves & snakes are weak, the line-up must be made from berserker, 2 x bears, axethrower, soothsayer, viking.

you cannot dig chests hoping for nice RNG, and there is no rage spell upgrade yet either. You cannot really buy spells apart from Runolv so you have to find them.
warrior char. needs 17 magic runes for either order magic (heal..) or distorsion magic (stone skin, slow..), but acquiring 17 off is nearly impossible.
The only means of healing for warrior char. is therefore soothsayers or heal scrolls.
The gift spell to recharge soothsayer only affects units 1-2 level ( at level 1). I have not played mage char. yet, but i guess you would need to upgrade rune magic to 2-3 (to affect soothsayers), which might be impossible on initial island.

I came close to defeating Ahriman as warrior which I played (att: 8,def:16, leader:775, 2 x nature call scroll) but so far nothing. Remember there is another nasty necromancer in the lair. I guess skald or mage are better suited for this.

That brings a question : what were the developers thinking? No-loss challenge in various forms has always been a part of Kings bounty community. I find it hard to believe it can only be done as result of some extreme RNG if at all. we'll see, game has been out only for 2 days..

[zjazd18]

Skald seems to be the best - song of helheim is pretty sweet against udead, and diversions made some battles extremly easy, when 2 archer stacks dont make a move on first round you know you won the lottery .

But yeah Ahriman seems to be only doable with heavy Call of Nature abuse. I think main problem is that you cannot level your rage spells from the start, which leads to doing dmg only from units who are mostly melee that get retaliated.

[Razorflame]

Originally Posted by impy

Well, I restarted the game 50+ times to see what the conditions are on the first island. Here are the observations :

I came close to defeating Ahriman as warrior which I played (att: 8,def:16, leader:775, 2 x nature call scroll) but so far nothing. Remember there is another nasty necromancer in the lair. I guess skald or mage are better suited for this.

That brings a question : what were the developers thinking? No-loss challenge in various forms has always been a part of Kings bounty community. I find it hard to believe it can only be done as result of some extreme RNG if at all. we'll see, game has been out only for 2 days..

Well my observations are a bit more different

Save for the fixed things ofcourse

What i noticed what that LEADERSHIP doesn't really matter for the first island
U will get to level 4-5 in no time which will give almost any char the 620 leadership for the 3 soothsayers(which is the only semi decent u can get on this crappy island)

the point is on the starting island there are barely any HIGH level creatures to buy or units that have high HP which leaves u to get Ancient bears/soothsayers/beserkers and axethrowers and throw in some extra fodder .

you will only get 2 Ranged units. (slinger which is total crap and the soothsayer)
forcing u to get at least 3 melee stacks which is forcing u to get healing or w/e to get your melee units not dying

and the rage amulet is also quite crap with it's 70-80 damage

Which all leads to getting ORDER magic ASAP (esp for pala and warrior)
and in some games that is near impossible the ways to get to the magic abilities requires ALOT of magic runes t.t

as for beating ahriman there are quite some options i believe


1. scroll of nature and pray his damaging spells go to your summoned shit
2. healing spell (for damage , since u can damage undead with healing spells and it does decent damage for 3 mana)
3. using 2 stacks of bears ancient and normal one for tanks(and use HIBERNATION to the max) the tricky part there is the damaging spells which are a total pain in the ass.

4. U can let 1 UNIT die the soothsayer can revive one of any stack so long the HP isn't in the yellow
5. BE VERY LUCKY with the RNG and get a summon phoenix or death call spell(which i highly doubt is avaible i've only seen level 1-2 spells so far


and as for optional things u can do to max out your spell input
5. FIGHT every battle but only if there a chest in that battle that u can get! so maximing your chest find and item/gold/runes/crystals

and other than that it is quite impossible to kill ahriman xD with the crappy unit selection u have to choose from and the limited space from which u travel from


But i will find a way and post it here when i beated this boss xD

[namad]

on the first island you get enemy heroes that cast poison skull on turn1 and deal 200damage to something before you even get to act!


when people talk about no lossing though do they just mean no lossing all the non-boss non-hero fights? or even those too?

[Bhruic]

No loss means just that, never losing a single unit in your entire playthrough.

There are tricks you can use to avoid the poison skull - or mitigate it. Basically the AI will do the exact same thing every time under the exact same circumstances. So what you need to do is keep trying different things until you find a situation where the AI - as an example - casts Helplessness instead of Poison Skull. This is accomplished by varying your attack order, attacking different units, etc. Pretty much any time you perform an action that requires a random number to be generated, you'll alter what the AI will do.

If the AI has the unit with the best initiative, and casts Poison Skull right away, you have less options, but one thing you can do is alter your unit positions. The AI casts the spell on the position, not the unit, so if you swap in your toughest unit (Soothsayers in this case), you can often survive a Poison Skull without a loss.

[Loopy]

Even then, there is a lot of praying that the spell doesn't get cast on the wrong unit mid-battle. Summons can help, but you'll need to burn scrolls for that.

Gift can give soothsayers extra revives, but you'll need to both heal and gift, which is very expensive if cast from mana. Not sure how many Gift scrolls can show up.