No Loss thoughts?

[Sapher]

Originally Posted by MattCaspermeyer

I defeated Ahriman no loss on Impossible with Mage.

Yea. I did that too. With that mage

Except for i was level 4 before the fight.
The only spell i used was healing.
First 2 turns healing to deal damage and for the rest of the fight to heal units.
Lost like 1 Axe thrower but then healed him and used Soothsayers ability to resurrect it.
Soothsayers are divided into 2 stacks so that they could resurrect 2 units.

But next hero looks unbeatable without losses at least with that mage. Ahriman coudnt kill a Soothsayers with a magic spell, so i could heal it back. Now that is not an option. Probably there is a turn sequence during fight that causes the enemy to use weak spells, but that requires a lot of time to find it....

May be i messed up a bit, so now i dont have enough runes for lvl3 magic The gift. Can it be a source of infinite resurrections? Recharge Soothsayers ability, then there is a spell, that gives runes and a spell that converts runes to mana. Would it work? Or i would run out of mana?

[impy]

There is a technique I used for defeating the whole first island no loss - but only on hard diff. last night Unfortunately have to leave town for business for few days, but if it helps anyone on impossible. diff. then that's great.

idea: use Skald, learn order magic, learn Edda, the rest is your choice. With a bit of luck you'll find 2-3 nature call scrolls and 2 x mana boosting shrines. Ideally 3 scrolls + 2 x mana boosting shrines + mana boosting items (+5 gloves..)

Upon starting a fight,cast song of Helheim then cast nature call using mana. Since it costs 20mana, you'll be left with 10-15mana. Song of Helheim recovers mana - nicely positioned ice storm attack by soothsayers recovers 5mana. Bit of skirmish enables to cast nature call again in second round. Note : Mana 30++ to start with is not strictly necessary. you should be able to get your second Nature call casting during second round somehow. Advantage however is to be able to cast it at the very beginning of round 2 - give enemy units & hero more targets. In third round I did not manage to get 20mana out of it, however if desperate, you can use a stock scroll of nature call. This way, if you had 3 x starting nature call scrolls, you can : - 3 x nature call casting against Ahriman
- 3 x nature call casting against lvl10 Necro below
- 2 x nature call casting against Eric and any other tough stack

Hope it helps.
Someone asked earlier if wanderer scrolls can be found on the first island. I found Gift of stones in the chest during battle. It raises runes of troops to 3..

[windezz]

Just ran into an orc hero that spammed Armageddon 4 turns in a row, wiping out his remaining troops and ending the fight with heavy loss on my side.

No idea how to counter that other than reloading and hoping he'd cast some silly debuffs instead.

[Colbert30]

Well...there's an achievement to defeat Runorm with no more than 30% troop loss. For an achievement to exist with that high loss expectation, I imagine this version of KB is not meant to be won with a no-loss victory at higher levels of difficulty.

I wonder if it's even possible to advance in the "Grand Strategian" medal at higher difficulties.

[zjazd18]

Well past first island everything seems super easy, i agreed upon having minimal loses on those 3 hero fights and went ahead with the game. Even if there are some tough fights, the troop selection is gonna make them possible. On 3rd island u get 720 hp tank unit and once u can level amulet rage abilities hurt like hell. The hardest part is 1st island which is pretty silly in terms of game progression.

[amyndris]

This first island is just so frustrating. The fun part of King's Bounty was figuring out how to do a no loss; sometimes it meant kiting, sometimes it meant skipping ahead and coming back.

The problem is, there is no skipping ahead because everything is blocked by the first boss. And there's no kiting, because every single spawn you can buy on the first island is prepopulated and not RNG, so you can't even run to a vendor to get better units.

I hope someone releases a mod that either RNGs the units on vendors, or lets you teleport off the first island. This is just silly to restrict all of your strategic options on the first island.

[hotfix666]

I think no loss 100% is not so popular beacuse you get no achievement for that.

More fun get all achievement ?

[Pilnystudent]

Done it. First island with no losses. With Skald is first island so much easier then with Warrior or Mage.

Axe throwers: best unit, they do most of damage just because they can attack every turn once or twice
Slingers: are great because Uladar keep casting fear and other weak spells on them
Berserkers and Ancient Bears: they dont do that much damage because agaist bosses they cant attack every turn
Soothsayers: agaist undead kinda useless but better then nothing

And runes used on +3/+3 and Edda. Also heal spell is more usefull then anything Mage has...

[Loopy]

Originally Posted by Sapher

May be i messed up a bit, so now i dont have enough runes for lvl3 magic The gift. Can it be a source of infinite resurrections? Recharge Soothsayers ability, then there is a spell, that gives runes and a spell that converts runes to mana. Would it work? Or i would run out of mana?

lvl 1 rune magic: Runic word gives 2 runes for 3 mana. Chargers costs 3 mana to convert 3 runes into 3 mana or rage each. Casting RW x3 and Chargers x2 costs 15 mana and will give you 0-18 rage/mana. Assuming 50/50 rage/mana chance thats spending 15 mana to get 9 back

lvl 2 rune magic: Runic word gives 4 runes for 5 mana. Chargers costs 5 mana to convert 6 runes that gives 4 mana each. RW x3 + chargers x2 costs 25 mana for 12 runes. 0-48 mana returned, or an average of 24 mana per 25 mana spent.

lvl 3 rune magic: Runic word gives 6 runes for 7 mana. Chargers costs 7 mana to convert 9 runes that give 5 mana each. RW x3 + chargerx x2 costs 35 mana for 18 runes converted. 0-90 mana returned, average of 45.

So you need lvl 3 rune magic to get past break even on average. Getting that before Ahriman requires lvl 5 and lots of might runes. Even then, getting enough crystal for lvl 3 runic word and chargers might be a problem. And even with lvl 3 rune magic you risk a bad run wiping out your mana battery completely (though you can compensate by using runes that your units bring into battle with them).

[baronm]

Whew, just got off island no-loss impossible with mage.

Was not easy.

I'm definitely not happy with the first island in this game compared to KBAP, they give you way too few options.

It seems like the enemies are actually easier, but you dont have nearly the resources available in KBAP early on.

PS how lame is it that the one decent ability available to you from any unit is the soothsayer take over ability which doesnt work on any of the undead which dominate the first island!?

Anyway...

There are three hard fights you have to beat to get off the island.

First is Ahriman.

Not sure why ppl had so much trouble with Ahriman, it only took me a few tries to beat him w/o any useful found spells and only rune spells lvl 1. I might have just gotten lucky tho. I used ancient bears, slingers, soothsayers, berserkers, and axe throwers. As far as i can remember his units arent really a threat just be careful, try to take out the archers early, and if you get lucky and his archers dont bash the slingers and he doesnt use poison skull it shouldnt be that hard. It will take a few tries tho, might be a good idea to use more bears instead of slingers tho.

Last hero of the three is pretty easy. I used basically the same setup as for Ahriman, except by that time i had lvl 2 rune spells. Ended up just one might rune short of lvl 3. 8-( The only useful spell i found on the entire island was a lifesaver here, i forget the name but it makes ice crystals on the field. Basically this guy has one very large stack and all the others are weak so i used the crystals to block and kite the large stack. Still took a few tries before i got him to cast poison skull on me only once, and on my soothsayers who didnt die from it. The only thing hard about this guy is that he seems to like to cast poison skull more than the others, maybe he has a smaller spell list so its more likely each cast or something.

Middle hero (Necromancer) is the hardest by a huge huge margin. If you manage to beat him no-loss don't worry about the last guy, he will be a breeze in comparison. Just a warning though, you shouldn't even bother trying (with mage at least) unless you're a masochist like me or get lucky on spells you find. Healing or Nature's Call would probably make this much much easier. The only spells i cast the whole battle were lvl 2 version of that circular ice damage spell w/e its called and 2 spare fire scrolls and a magic missile scroll. Used rage talent too every turn ofc. These things did almost all my damage. I tried many different variations of units before i beat him, but as well as strategy you need an absurd amount of luck to beat him so the setup i won with might not necessarily be the absolute best. I had ancient bears, berserkers, axe throwers, and soothsayers split into two stacks, 1 of 2 and 1 of 1. Was lvl 5 and ofc had the 20 no-loss battles leadership boost.

Anyone looking for advice on this fight the one thing that will definetely help is having at least 2 stacks of soothsayers for some tanking, but no matter what you do you'll need to be very lucky b/c the battle takes quite a while, his units are extremely strong, and a single unlucky cast of poison skull or scimitar will ruin your attempt. His units have bonus poison damage, nice hero bonus stats, and underground +50% def boost, so they way outperform their numbers. Suddenly just 10-15 skeletons are still a huge threat.

Was pretty epic when i finally won, after probably 40 attempts, the battle was going pretty badly, and i was sure i was screwed and about to start over, but i went one more turn just to make sure, and miraculously i got his last large stack of units, 12 zombies, to hoplessly chase my bears around to the opposite end of the map. Meanwhile the rest of my units were just barely able to deal with what was left. Heh. When the battle was over every single one of my units was deep in red hp, and a couple of them had like 3 hp each.

Ok, so the advice i would give to anyone attempting this, save yourself a lot of time energy and agony and asap when you make a new mage run around the island and try to see if you can find a healing or natures call scroll, as either of these would probably make this battle much less of an impossible ass-ache. If you cant' find one, you may want to restart, however, i can say after spending quite a few hours on just that one boss that it is possible to win without finding a single useful scroll, just dont expect to do it on the first try.

Or even the first thirty
;P

tl:dr

The necromancer's the hardest. Try splitting your soothsayer stack up for more tanking. You're better off if you can find healing or natures call, but i didnt have either so it's possible without.