KBDS Normal/Hard/Impossible No-loss thread

[MattCaspermeyer]

Glad that you did it, but here are some tips with the Evil Book strategy:

You may need to do an easy Catacombs spider stack or two to ensure that you get Level 5 Daert for the final stack whichever is tougher between the Elves and Humans to get more Mana (I actually had to do this in the Ball of Lightning strategy, too). It seems more likely than not that I end up a few exp short of level 5 and so I need to do at least one or two of the easy stacks in the Catacombs to push me over. You should be able to start with 36 Mana for the harder fight and with at least Level 1 Concentration you are no more than 4 rounds from your second Evil Book level 2. Level 2 Meditation is better than Level 2 Concentration and both cost 8 Magic Runes. Level 2 Meditation will get you 40 Mana. I was 2 Magic Runes short, however, in my Ball of Lightning playthrough when I got Daert to Level 5.

You also need to have 2 Evil Books @level 2 versus the Swordsmen / Guardsmen so ensure that your book stays away from them until you get that second Book because one level 2 Book is not good enough against both of them. It can handle a single troop, though, so place your Vamps' starting position to split them up (especially the humans) if you have to fight one to recharge your spell.

Both the Priests and Inquisitor's / Sprite's and Faun's damage is Magic (well half the Faun's anyway) and so try to get them to attack the book or if your book needs to reload its spell attack then attack them to recharge it.

In my test, I actually found the Human stack much easier than the Elven stack, but it just depends on how much they attack your Vamps versus your Books and the spells your Book casts. If it is casting Slow, for example, then use it on a fast troop. If it is casting Lightning then use it to cast on a troop for maximum damage, etc.

You also really need to have it be a damaging spell on its first cast, otherwise it gets way harder. A Poison Skull, Ghost Sword, Magic Axe, or Lightning works wonders on a first cast and this has to be cast on either the Elves or the Inquisitors. Position the starting location of your Vamps, change the time in the round when the spell is cast, etc. to get it to change if it is not good. Sequence of events is everything!

Lastly, remember the goal of your Evil Books for both stack types: 1) for Humans, once you get rid of the ranged troops, the fight is over and 2) for the Elves, once you get rid of the melee troops, the fight is over.

As a variant, you may decide to do 2 Points in Meditation and 1 in Concentration / Chaos so that you can do 3 Level 1 books (but in my experience this is not as good and requires 45 total Mana).

Anyway, glad you were able to do it!



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[MattCaspermeyer]

Okay, I went and downloaded DGDobrev's save and I was able to defeat both the Shelter Elven (easier) and Human (harder) stacks using the double Evil Book @level 2 strategy.

I did defeat the 3 easy Spider / Snake stacks in the Catacombs such that when I defeated the Shelter Dwarven stack I was level 5. I put a point into Order to get me up to 36 Mana and was able to cast my first Level 2 Evil Book and then by splitting the Werewolf stacks it was able to work on the Werewolf and Sprite and then on round 5 as it was close to death I cast my second Level 2 Evil Book. The first one had taken the 8 Elves down to 4 and then only lasted another turn or two, but by that time, the damage had been done and the Sprites and Fauns were gone. My Vamps then helped take down the Werewolves with the second Evil Book as it had gotten the Elves down to 1. Starting placement of your Vamps made a difference between 1 dying and not.

As far as the Human stack, they were much tougher, but once again I split the Guardsmen and Swordsmen (moving towards the latter since they did less damage). I did have a fortuitous Lightning Bolt take out 14 Bowmen, 9 Priests, and 3 Inquisitors when my first Evil Book was about 50% health. This allowed my Vamps to switch to Bat mode and slap the second Evil Book right next to the group of shooters. After that I managed to take out the rest of the shooters and then my second Evil Book was able to take the Swordsmen and Guardsmen down to about 50% when it finally died. As I mentioned above, once the melee troops are the only ones left in the Human stack it is just a matter of time before your Vamps can slowly take them down and finish it. I actually probably could have done better as I forgot to cast Poison Skull when I had gotten 7 Mana and had let my Evil Book absorb 76 damage from an Eviln, which I was trying to get the Swordsmen to hit, but at this point it did not matter since there were only melee troops left.

Compared to Ball of Lightning I'll say that it was a bit easier, but all these strategies (except for maybe the Phoenix which is very easy @level 2) are fairly dependent on finding the right sequence of events.

By the way, I did a little experiment and Runes given during levelups are dependent on the area. I used the "levelup" cheat when I was in Portland to level 5 and I had enough for Meditation Level 2, Concentration Level 1, and Chaos Level 2 when I was level 5; however, since I made level 4 in Dragandor and Level 5 in the Shelter the Runes given were then different and I couldn't get Meditation Level 2 so that's when I went with Order Level 1. Note that I could have also gotten Diversion if I wanted instead of Order Level 1, but I never tried that strategy to see if it was better or not.

If you can get Meditation to Level 2 when Daert is Level 5, then all these strategies are a lot easier when you start with 40 Mana instead of 36. To have a chance, though, you should probably take out the 3 easier Spider / Snake stacks in the Catacombs to give yourself a chance of reaching level 5 after defeating the Dwarven stack.

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[Snow11]

I'm glad you made it Matt.

In my game I even got 1 magic rune from a chest in the fight before the black gate but at the end I was still 1 rune away for lvl 2 Meditation.

Anyway, with 36 mana and your strategy I'm sure it can be done with not too many tries.
Even with 34 mana and enough tries I think it's doable with evil books, however this is a huge problem for me since my pc is so slow that it takes literally 5 min every time I try to load the last save.

[DGDobrev]

Awesome, Matt, congrats

I think you can only hit meditation 40 if you get lucky with the rune/level giveaways. I think there are 3 or 4 combinations, and if you luck out with a good one, you can get twice the max amount of magic runes for the mage, but since the game selects a random line of those 3 or 4 combos, there is no way to be certain.

[MattCaspermeyer]

By the way, since it is possible to get any spell, I'm wondering if Calm Rage would push you over with just Poison Skull. I have not tried this strategy, but if someone gets Calm Rage from the Ore Cart maybe they could try it out and let us know if it will work since they'll be able to convert that early Rage into Mana for more Poison Skull casts.

Hmmm...

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[Snow11]

I think that calm rage won't be a good idea because the biggest problem you have is how to make enough dmg on the rangers before the melee force you to go in bat form. Without book of evil or other summon to slow them down it takes them 3 rounds to reach you and with 36 mana you can cast poison skull r2 the first 5 rounds.

In my game I managed to clear all 3 stacks in the castle's basement which was really hard but at least I didnt have to rely on insane luck.
The first stack against the spiders I used the battlefield to tank them. There was a close spot in the corner where i left my vamps, then I cast r2 Book of Evil next to them so that thay could be attacked only by one stack. Since the spiders dmg is poison the book could tank 3 stacks for fairly long time, enough to get mana for second book.I think it lasted for 8 rounds because at least in 2 rounds I had 2 books on the field.

The second fight against the 3 big stacks of snakes was the hardest. I had to make the book to tank and dmg the royal snakes alone so that it wont die in 2 rounds. I used 1 scroll of magic shackles when thay were close to avoid the snake bite, and 2 slow scrolls on the other snakes. Once the royal snakes were dead I got enough mana for second book to reduce the numbers of the red snakes and after that it was easy.
After the second fight I finally got to lvl 6 and with r2 Concentration and r1 Diversions the third fight was much easier.

Then the real challenge comes in whitehill where you have to kill at least one of the guards and each of them have like double the size compared to the human guard in Shelter, while you are still with your good old 2 Vampires

So I used rage pot for 10 rage before the fight.
The first round the inquisitors skipped their turn thx to diversion which is good becouse thay were the strongest range and the other 2 already wasted one of my vamps. Then I used the jelousy skill from blackie on the 1 big stack of melee and thanks to some bug thay remained red even after the statue disapeared. That way slaughtering all the mean priests and archers for me After that it took me 230 rounds to finish the guardsmen.
Thanks to this bug it all went fairly easy which is good because i didnt want to start all over again with phoenix spell.
Whithout the bug I dont think it was slightly possible to win any of the fights with my setup of 34 mana. May be with 40 mana and 2 rank2 books from start and alot of luck it would be more possible but those rangers were really scary.

[MattCaspermeyer]

You may be right about Calm Rage; however, I was thinking if you got a good Distortion Scroll from Clarissa then you could put 1 point in Bibliography and then there may be a possibility of getting Distortion to Level 3 when you reach level 5. You can at least get it to Level 2, but not sure if there are any level 1 / 2 Distortion spells that would work well with Calm Rage.

Anyway, just another thought to try to vary the starting strategies for Daert.

Great job, by the way, with the Basement and Whitehill stacks!

I didn't have as much trouble as you had with them - the Spider stack was easy as you mentioned, and I did put a point in Diversion which really helped with the Royal Snake stack. The key there was to get the Royal Snake on the Evil Book and the Swamp Snakes and normal Snakes after your Bats. I was then able to cast my 2nd book 4 rounds later and they both ganged up on the Royal Snakes and took them out. In the meantime, the Snakes had moved to attack the two books and then they took him out, too. Lastly, the Swamp Snakes engaged the books and then was able to beat both of them but since I was down to just Bats versus 1 stack I just cycled them down and finished it.

The other snake stack was about the same - I was able to get two Swamp Snake stacks after the Bats and the rest went after the Evil Book. It is very important, by the way, to work on the normal Snakes first because of their Stun ability. So once again, I was able to get my 2nd Evil Book when the 1st was down to about 1/3 health and then the two were able to gang up on the normal Snakes and take them out. The other 2 Swamp Snake stacks had been split where the weaker stack was on my 1st book and the stronger on my 2nd. I did this while whittling 3 of the 4 Swamp Snake stacks down such that when both books were dead I was able to use the Bats to keep attacking all but the strong Swamp Snake stack (while that stack kept being blocked by the other snakes) such that I killed all the other stacks (the Bats' Life Steal kept them close to full health) and just the large Swamp Snake stack was left. At this point, I performed the cycle and slowly whittled them down and finished it.

I actually thought the Whitehill stack was fairly easy - there was 1 stack of 79 Swordsmen and 23 Priests to go with the Inquisitor and Bowmen stacks! The key here was to cast Jealousy such that the 23 Priests became the jealous troop. By the way, I know how that bug you mentioned works: If a stack is controlled by Jealousy and they step outside of the range of the Statue (which happens a lot with ranged units), then they will remain under its control and as long as they are not within the range of the Statue when the spell expires, they'll stay under its control. So I had this work to great effect as the Swordsmen took out the Priests. I was then able to get my Evil Book up to his Inquisitors and Bowmen and by the time the Swordsmen had gotten to my book I cast a second. The two books easily took out the remaining Bowmen and Inquisitors and then the Swordsmen was able to take out both books, but by that time their numbers were in the 20's and then I did the "BatCycle" to finish them off! It took about 50 rounds. I probably could have done better if I had used Orc Strike twice on them instead of the stupid Necromancer ability, which is not very good in my opinion. I also had 1 Vamp killed by the Inquisitors that moved first at the start of the fight, but then the Bats Life Stole their way back up to max health when just the Swordsmen were left.

I also had forgetten to equip the sword for all but the Whitehill battle (not that +1 Attack would have made much of a difference).

Overall, this strategy is quite a bit easier than the Ball of Lightning which really requires you to BatCycle troops in virtually every fight!

I also didn't get level 6 until after I had defeated all the Basement stacks and completed the quest (which shows how variable the experience gain is because I also did the 3 easiest stacks in the Catacombs). I also had 36 Mana and didn't pick any skills when I leveled up to level 6 and so I had 1 Might, 8 Spirit, and 7 Magic Runes that I didn't use. I figured I'd see if I could do it as is and if I couldn't then I'd look to a skill for help.

So far the verified winning no loss strategies are: 1) Ball of Lightning and 2) Evil Book. Both situations require the spell level to be 2.

I know for a fact that Phoenix Level 2 will work because I was able to do it with Phoenix Level 1, but in my experimental game. I also got Demonologist and Avenger to work in my experimental game, but Avenger is pretty tough due to the fact that you have to let units strike you. This is all through the Shelter fights. As far as the Basement is concerned, I don't think Avenger will help you there so you're going to have to kite those stacks and just dig up the artifacts. Avenger has a shot at working on the Whitehill stacks because you just got take out the shooters.

By the way, in all my tries so for with the latest build (V1.5.1047.1747) the middle Whitehill stack is the easiest.

Also, if you go Order you should have enough Might Runes to boost your Rage - this is what I did for Ball of Lightning and it allowed me to use Jealousy twice and use the Rage Abilities more often which is a huge help in this fight.

Lastly, I just invented a new KB term: BatCycle! This means to whittle slower troops down via your Bats as you essentially move about the battlefield in a circuitous manner, thereby guaranteeing no loss!

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