Beating the game with no losses (Paladin)

[sector24]

Namel: That's very good to know. Fortunately I did not take leadership at level 12, so we'll see what I get. Overall my level ups have been fantastic, I took mana once, rage once, leadership twice and the rest have been attack and defense (mostly defense). I think I have a natural defense of 10 (from shrines and level ups), I'm at work and can't check right now. I'm going to start taking leadership bonuses now that they are more valuable.

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The fights against my own army will probably be the most interesting. Since I have a ridiculous amount of money I will probably buy 5 full stacks of units specifically for these 2 fights. My goal would be to pick all melee units that are easily nullified by spells and have varying rates of movement. Examples being:

Peasants: Casting weakness on peasants reduces their damage by 50%. They also have move 2 so I don't have to worry about them until late in the fight.

Fire Dragonflies: They have haste and the AI will use it on the first turn, so I should be able to focus all 5 of my stacks towards wiping out the Dragonflies on the first turn.

Ideally I'd have a movement 6 unit (Dragonflies) a movement 4 unit, a movement 3 unit, and three movement 2 units. That gives me the most time to focus fire one stack at a time. Spells like trap or slow can further split the speed of the units. With Phantom I can create a stack to eat the counter attack, and then focus fire with all my stacks. Of course this is all theory, I'll probably run half way around the world recruiting an army and then find out it doesn't work and have to try something different. But I think it will be fun nonetheless.

[Zhuangzi]

I'm pretty impressed by what you have to say about this game, sector24. Sounds like someone knows how to think things through properly.

I haven't actually tried the double image fight, but I would have thought a Mage can win it fairly easy using crappy units like Miners and Hyenas.

[Dorkus]

I beat the double with no losses. If you have a lvl 1-3 heavy army, it's a piece of cake. i had lake fairies, sprites, dryads, inquis, and emerald dragons. I nuked all the dragons with a couple ice snakes, then put everything else to sleep with my dryads. You can perpetually put everyone to sleep again and again using phantom image (ideally, first level, so it doesn't cost too much mana). My "double" enemy hero didn't even get a move because all of his units were constantly asleep....

[sector24]

I got +650 leadership at level 14, so I filled up on Inquisitors and Beholders, cleared out the Eastern Islands including Lucky James and Duke Sov. Surprisingly, the quest related battles are easier than the random armies that you need to clear to get to them.

So it was finally time to go back to the Orc Embassy and prove my manhood. I decided against using Cursed Ghosts this time and went with:

Beholders
Griffins
Royal Thorns
Royal Snakes
Inquisitors

I also used a charge from my mask of rage artifact (+20 rage) for the first time, up until now I haven't had to use any potions or anything. The problem with the above setup is that I don't get to go first so I couldn't lay down a trap. The enemy hero also had an annoying habit of using magic poleaxe on a different stack every turn, so I had a ton of resurrecting to do. However, I came up with devious and exploitative strategy.

I got the enemy down to 1 shaman, and let him keep his healing totem. Using my ample stacks of thorns, I put magic spring on one and attacked the shaman, who countered and I got my mana back. I could repeat this endlessly except sometimes the shaman would attack me back or use the axe dance and I would get an additional 5 mana. He would also heal himself to full every turn so I didn't need to worry about him accidentally dying. Endless mana loop to resurrect all my troops.

So I filled my rage and mana before I finished off the shaman, bought my own stack of shamans and went into the basement for some fun. This is the fight with the stack of 1400 fire dragonflies. Again, I lost a couple units from every stack, so to generate mana in this battle I used my beholders to put the dragonfly stack to sleep turn after turn, put a poison cloud on them, and then put my mana springed (sprung?) thorn stacks inside the cloud. You gain 5 mana every time they take poison damage, so your mana spring is guaranteed to pay off in full. This is another exploitative but very necessary strategy for the hardest battles.

So now that I have Royal Thorns and Shamans, it's time to go sink all the pirate ships and make the oceans safe for mass murdering heroes like myself.