Is there a fun style of expert play *other than* no-loss?

[ckdamascus]

I read about an all shooter army thread on here once. I could not get it to go without some losses.

I then added Paladins, and was able to almost achieve no-loss. I only slipped up against Baal and was too lazy to try again since I considered it a successful enough run.

http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=14286

My mage version of it seemed a bit more tedious so I stopped that. But the mage build allows you to get a little bit more sloppy thanks to Higher Magic (dual cast).

That said, if you don't mind losing a few units, this build is sick. You might want to replace the royal garbage, er griffons with Black Dragons to improve effective initiative even more for the other shooters since you don't care about losses.

The real power of the units was achieving 100% critical rates.

[copcod]

Hi, I am new to the game but my idea is probably good.

The dfferent types of troops available may be well playetested and balanced but abilities that allow resurrection of troops and summoning of additional troops stand out as more powerful than others.

Using a point system to limit the kinds of troops that you can deploy on the battlefield can make the game more challenging and might make players even use some units they haven't chosen before.

If the expert players on the forum could put their heads together and come out with a list of all the units with a point value, It could create alot of fun competition over winning the game with different point caps.

for example, you could have a point cap of 9 points while employing several different squads of 8.75, 8.9, 8,5 point value under rev. 1.0 of the troop rating list.

being able to combine troops only in certain ways would add some depth to the game as well.

It would be nice to have an interface mod to go along with this to speed things up when changing your squad makeup.

[ckdamascus]

Not necessarily true. It depends on how your character is developed and how you use your troops.

Archdemons have no resurrection, yet due to their fast initiative, with a Mage-Amelie you can cast invisibility and spell-nuke everything. But if you were a Warrior-Amelie, you wouldn't have enough mana to do this.

Black Dragons are great to help avoid enemy heroes from nuking you, yet again, more useful with the Mage-Amelie. Again, no resurrection or summon.

Trolls with peacefulness and stoneskin and at night might be one of the most deadly tanks out there. No resurrection or summon here either.

Range Style play requires the most damage output (basically, destroy the enemy so fast, they can't retaliate anyway). Too many summon units would hurt that sort of build. I only used paladins to help restore the ranged units en-mass. Another guy on here relied on skeleton archers (which cannot be resurrected by paladins), and royal griffins (which never work well for me).

So you can't assign a universal weight since I can make bowmen into the most powerful unit for my type of game play, yet they will be total junk in your game. Or someone will make black dragons incredibly strong in their game too.

About the only unit in the game with infinite resurrection is the double droid stack build. While you can set artificial limits on that, taking eons to kill the enemy alone is punishment enough in my book.

That's why I went with the ultra fast damage range team. Took out Ktahu in 12 rounds, impossible-mode, no losses.

But that is part of the allure of this game. Being able to maximize a unit's abilities to suit your particular game style. I think we need to simply introduce more viable gamestyles rather than artificially limit ourselves.

[Zechnophobe]

Actually, archers do about the worst damage in the game. The only advantage they have is of course that opponents have no way to retaliate against them.

Also, Turn back Time is a great ressurrection tool for level 5 units (Still no black dragons though). And you can rezz trolls and archdemons with inquisitors.

[ckdamascus]

Originally Posted by Zechnophobe

Actually, archers do about the worst damage in the game. The only advantage they have is of course that opponents have no way to retaliate against them.

Also, Turn back Time is a great ressurrection tool for level 5 units (Still no black dragons though). And you can rezz trolls and archdemons with inquisitors.

They are a "decent" alternative to skeleton archers, whom I cannot resurrect with paladins.

It is all situational. My most "effective" unit being the hunter, but with raw damage, who wins? Assuming no range penalty (e.g. they are close enough), assuming I will max out the attack / defense gap (helplessness against the tough defenders, plenty of attack buffs), we have

Archer Leadership / Avg Dmg = 3.5/50 dmg = 7% damage per leadership.
Hunter Leadership / Avg Dmg = 9.5/150 dmg = 6.33% damage per leadership.

Throw in astral bow and whip of fire, +2 damage

Archer = 5.5/50 = 11% dmg per leadership
Hunter = 11.5/150 = 7.67% dmg per leadership

Both range units always do critical hits (barring double negative effects) with my setup too.

Also, even if you do more damage (the skeleton archers actually do the most damage per leadership, but I can't do mass resurrect with paladins with them), the hunters are probably better.

But you can't quite say the archers do the worst damage. The lowest damage units benefit the most from the +X damage items. The setup matters the most. The no-retaliation girl power team probably does a ton of damage too with the right items too.

Of course there are so many other factors to consider as well. That's also why I said "with my style of game play" in my previous post to hopefully preemptively dissuade claims of what is normally a piss-poor damage/leadership unit.

Yes, you can also resurrect level 5 units with demonologists too. I think we have proven quite thoroughly that you really can't put a universal weight on the units since one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

[BB Shockwave]

I think it's fun replaying the game with a certain army line-up in mind. For example, I have already played the game with an all-Lizard army, and an all-Undead one, now I'm playing with an all-elven army... Meaning, I won't use other creatures at least, until I can get the desired units.

It might be hard to get all the units you need (for example, even though I played no-loss I soon ran out of Gorguls to recruit), therefore I think "cheating" is allowed in this case - if you cannot find a unit at all on any map (or even on its homeland map), using the console to give one to yourself is allowed.

For example, in KB TL, I was playing an all-undead army (Werewolves allowed, for a while) and I found no Ancient Vampires anywhere - not in Demonis, or Death Land, not even after beating Karador to see whether his castle sells them. So, I used the console to give myself undead army, dismissed all but 1 of the Vamps (so I could say I got this one from a Coffin) and patiently used sacrifice in battles to build them up to my leadership level.

Playing with some rarely used unit types could also be fun, like using only Pirates or Robbers...

[Metathron]

As for the topic of the thread: How about using only creatures of one race, at a time? This sounds like it could be both interesting and challenging, but it's off the top of my head.

[KongMysen]

I did that with both Elves and Demons in KB TL. Elves actually have a decently balanced team although it can get quite tedious, ressurecting late battle, because your fairies fall like flies.
I did no-loss endgame in my warrior impossible game. Paladins and physically resistant allies makes this quite easy as well...

I'm not sure if I'll ever do a 3rd run through on AP, but if I do, I think I'll join Loreangelous' "only lvl 1-3"... Or maybe a "no-spells - no pet - no unit abilty" game.

[Rhygadon]

Originally Posted by KongMysen

I did that with both Elves and Demons in KB TL. Elves actually have a decently balanced team although it can get quite tedious, ressurecting late battle, because your fairies fall like flies.

I just wish the elves were available earlier; all-elven armies have some interesting possibilities, but by the time you have access to enough different types of elven troops, there's almost always something better available.

One of the biggest disappointments in KB:AP was when I realized that the order of unit availability was going to be almost identical to KB:TL (humans and animals and low-level undead, then dwarves, then elves and high-level undead, then demons), and that the new Pangolin units would be unavailable for almost the entire game. I'd really love to experiment with demons or elves as a starting army, but apparently the laws of nature forbid it.

[copcod]

This mod will let you recruit any race units on debir.
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=14769

It does provide a large amount of each unit so you would want to restrict yourself to keep the challenge up.

Maybe you can choose 5 types of units, no substitutes and you have to stick with them for the entire game.

If you suffer too many losses (say you are playing with low level units and no healers.) your forces just dwindle until you cannot win any more battles and lose.

The idea for the point based armies came from this thinking. having to use lower level units. but not all lower level units are as strong as each other. so I figured that you would want to rerate each unit to have a more effective level limit system.




So. this would make warriors very unpopular. That is why 3 versions of this all races mod need to be made with an appropriate variety and quantity of units to choose from. Seems a simple matter of decompiling the loc files with kbedit, changing the numbers of units in each ushop and recompiling it. the 2 mod files are nice and small.