Surviving on Impossible

[Quikpik]

How does that skull work? I just bought it from the dwarven necromancer and didn't really understand the description.

[Sandsai]

My warrior is doing just fine on impossible. The strategy is pretty much slow, isolate and fire away, hitting melee only when there is no retaliation and I have initiative on my side. To this end I maxed the rage inflow early on so I could control the battle a bit more. The wall and ice thorns are very useful for minimizing losses as the AI would much rather walk around the thing, moving at one title per turn (slow) than attack it. I haven't given the mage a try yet but the war is very viable on impossible. The only difficulty I ran into was the turtle; running out of troops in the main castle. This is marginal as I feel the turtle is best confronted with big HP melee units. Archers are kinda weak against high defense targets and their HP pool is also kinda marginal compared to some of the melee units out there. So I mean if this was your first time around you might have had issues but then why are you playing on impossible the first time around....

[Zhuangzi]

That's cool, Sandsai. I had suspected that Warrior was much harder but as I haven't played as one I wasn't sure. This game actually rewards players with the Impossible skill level, as it's Hard but definitely NOT impossible.

Oh and I don't melee the Turtle at all as a Mage. I snipe and use Ghost Blade/Magic Pole Axe on it.

[Zhuangzi]

Okay, I am up to level 8 now and I've just defeated the Turtle using Fire Arrow 2 (can't use Fireball 2 on it which is annoying), as well as Inquisitors, Priests and Thorn Hunters (plus Royal Snakes and Swordsmen which mostly defended until the final round or so).

Things are going quite smoothly. I suppose a Mage on Impossible is going to have the lowest possible leadership in relation to the size of the enemy stacks, which means that most enemies in Darion are listed as Match, Slightly Stronger, Strong or Very Strong. And these are just the normal enemies that you would easily mop up on lower difficulties. Despite this, I have virtually managed to clear out Darion now, except for the usual things like Rezo's Tower, Abandoned Castle and Magic Range. I have a few more things to tidy up but I will certainly be level 9 when I go to Freedom Islands. I am a bit of an OCD player and I don't like loose ends, i.e. enemies wandering around.

I had wanted to have worked on Trophies and Trading by now, but a lack of Mind runes is stopped me from doing this. I don't know why, but Might runes seem much more common than Mind. I'm not sure if this is random or not. I think I will only put one point into Trophies, but I will definitely max Trading. I know some people don't think it's necessary but I hate selling items at less than full value. I tend to hand onto them until I have Trading 3 (not scrolls - you pretty much have to keep selling them or you can't buy anymore).

More importantly than the Mind tree is the Magic, of course. I have Chaos 2 (doesn't need Mind runes) and Distortion and Order 1. I am using Fireball 2 a lot at this early stage. In fact I think I may go straight to Chaos 3 as soon as I get more runes. I've got Kamikaze but I need Phantom in order to use the 'terrorist' trick that has been discussed in another thread.

I have had VERY good luck with Feanora's children. In past games I always seemed to get 'scroll children' from her, but this time I have 3 and they are:

+5 defense
+ 20% defense
+ 20% intellect

This is awesome! So I have 4 Attack, 14 Defense and 13 Intellect already.

I also got the belt which gives increase in morale to Priests and Inquisitors, and even better, something called the Banner of True Faith which was expensive at 60,000 gold but it gives I think +4 mana, +800 leadership and 10 Magic runes after 50 victories (48 to go, heh). So I have 3500 leadership already, which is awesome for a Mage this early. And if I can get to Chaos 3 soon, with about 70 mana I think I am ready to dominate much larger enemies.

Bring it on.

EDIT: the fourth child gave +20% mana, which is unbelievable. Feanora's children are so good this time I may have to keep them for the whole game!

Even better, when I got to Freedom Islands the king dude there had Ice Snake, so now I'm dealing 1430 damage plus 400 or so to adjacent squares. (I have got Chaos 3 now and 15 intellect). This is at level 9, remember. So I am sailing around the Western Islands picking up stuff and smashing about half of what I can see straight away. This is a domination...on Impossible

[Sandsai]

Originally Posted by Zhuangzi

Okay, I am up to level 8 now and I've just defeated the Turtle using Fire Arrow 2 (can't use Fireball 2 on it which is annoying), as well as Inquisitors, Priests and Thorn Hunters (plus Royal Snakes and Swordsmen which mostly defended until the final round or so).

Things are going quite smoothly. I suppose a Mage on Impossible is going to have the lowest possible leadership in relation to the size of the enemy stacks, which means that most enemies in Darion are listed as Match, Slightly Stronger, Strong or Very Strong. And these are just the normal enemies that you would easily mop up on lower difficulties. Despite this, I have virtually managed to clear out Darion now, except for the usual things like Rezo's Tower, Abandoned Castle and Magic Range. I have a few more things to tidy up but I will certainly be level 9 when I go to Freedom Islands. I am a bit of an OCD player and I don't like loose ends, i.e. enemies wandering around.

I had wanted to have worked on Trophies and Trading by now, but a lack of Mind runes is stopped me from doing this. I don't know why, but Might runes seem much more common than Mind. I'm not sure if this is random or not. I think I will only put one point into Trophies, but I will definitely max Trading. I know some people don't think it's necessary but I hate selling items at less than full value. I tend to hand onto them until I have Trading 3 (not scrolls - you pretty much have to keep selling them or you can't buy anymore).

More importantly than the Mind tree is the Magic, of course. I have Chaos 2 (doesn't need Mind runes) and Distortion and Order 1. I am using Fireball 2 a lot at this early stage. In fact I think I may go straight to Chaos 3 as soon as I get more runes. I've got Kamikaze but I need Phantom in order to use the 'terrorist' trick that has been discussed in another thread.

I have had VERY good luck with Feanora's children. In past games I always seemed to get 'scroll children' from her, but this time I have 3 and they are:

+5 defense
+ 20% defense
+ 20% intellect

This is awesome! So I have 4 Attack, 14 Defense and 13 Intellect already.

I also got the belt which gives increase in morale to Priests and Inquisitors, and even better, something called the Banner of True Faith which was expensive at 60,000 gold but it gives I think +4 mana, +800 leadership and 10 Magic runes after 50 victories (48 to go, heh). So I have 3500 leadership already, which is awesome for a Mage this early. And if I can get to Chaos 3 soon, with about 70 mana I think I am ready to dominate much larger enemies.

Bring it on.

EDIT: the fourth child gave +20% mana, which is unbelievable. Feanora's children are so good this time I may have to keep them for the whole game!

Even better, when I got to Freedom Islands the king dude there had Ice Snake, so now I'm dealing 1430 damage plus 400 or so to adjacent squares. (I have got Chaos 3 now and 15 intellect). This is at level 9, remember. So I am sailing around the Western Islands picking up stuff and smashing about half of what I can see straight away. This is a domination...on Impossible

This actually convinced me to get a mage started, so far so good, except I have a sneaky suspicion I am going to get + scroll kids.

On a side note, Firefox now thinks mage is a misspelled word for some odd reason...

[Namel]

Originally Posted by Sandsai

This actually convinced me to get a mage started, so far so good, except I have a sneaky suspicion I am going to get + scroll kids.

Started mage as well and took frog wife. My kids, first +scrolls, second +exp, third plus rage. Finally 4th was +defense so it wasn't that bad. I guess I have to try beating kraken early to get new wife. lol

[Zhuangzi]

I'm up to level 11 now and slogging through Freedom Islands. I have cleared out the West, which is unusual because some of the hardest enemies are on the main continent. But they're gone now.

The Banner of True Faith was even better than I realised. It is 10 MIND runes, not Magic, so that really helped me with my green rune problem. As I'm concerned about money, I took Trophies 2 and Reserve 1. I've already got Trade 3, so hopefully money won't be a problem from now on. I've got about 160,000 gold but I had noticed that my money had plateaued. With 20% more gold after combat it must be a similar amount to what you get on Hard after fights.

Ice Snake 3 is such a wonderful spell at this stage. Not only does it deal over 2000 damage (including splash damage) at 15 Intellect, but it slows the enemies down as well. You just need some good ranged stacks to pick them off...

And I finally had a go at Sacrifice. I found 5 Royal Thorns somewhere and used Thorn Hunters to increase the stack from 5/14 to 14/14. Is this what I'm supposed to do with Sacrifice? I haven't got Hypnosis yet. Royal Thorns seem very nice but I haven't got any modifiers for them (I hear there is a Thorn Crown or something). Question about Sacrifice, if I increase the stack to beyond its cap it will revolt against me right? So what's the point of that?

[Sandsai]

Originally Posted by Namel

Started mage as well and took frog wife. My kids, first +scrolls, second +exp, third plus rage. Finally 4th was +defense so it wasn't that bad. I guess I have to try beating kraken early to get new wife. lol

I had to get Rina because I had two +scroll kids along with +10 mana and rage from the frog wife. So far doing pretty good with kids, +20% attack and +5% leadership so far.