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

[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.

[copcod]

If you establish universal unit weights, they woudlnt need to be perfect.

You have to start somewhere, playtest and revise.

This is the way to create a new artificial limitation forcing you to adapt in a new way.

You suggested that artificial limitations arent helpful but "no loss" and the various difficulty levels of the game are in themselves artificial limitations.

[Zechnophobe]

I was talking about archer style units, not "Bowmen" specifically. Ranged units simply don't do the damage that melee units do. Low level units tend to do more damage per leadership, but also die a whole lot faster per leadership.

I'm currently playing a 'level 3 or lower, no droids' game on Hard, to try it out, my lineup is:

Fire Spiders
Royal Snakes
Lake Fairies
Dryads
Gorguanas
Scoffer Imps (reserves)
Bowmen (reserves)

This game had Two snake boots (+1 move, +1 init for snakes) and the Skraash (+9 atk and Def for spiders, +1 morale and speed for spiders, spiders always crit). Even with the Fire Spiders always critting, the lake fairies (with demonesses whip) still out damage them.

[KongMysen]

Originally Posted by ckdamascus

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.

Even thougt Zech meant ranged units and not particulary Bowmen, you should still consider the attack and defence bonuses when estimating dmg output

The hunters have 11 more attack than the archers. That means if both units attack a unit with 16 i defence, the dmg output will be 11% pr leadership for the archer and 10.47% per leadership for the Hunter. And that is with both the bow and the whip. Close call I'd say and without the items the Hunter would win with 8,65% vs 7%.

However if you didn't focus so much on crits the two skills on the archer unit can come in handy lots of times. I bet the you've used both the cold and flame arrow alot even though skills can't make critical strikes.

EDIT: Comparing the Hunter with the Black unicorn proves Zechnophobes' point. They are both elves and both have 27 in attack. But the hunter only does 9.5 dmg on average where as the black Unicorn does 16,5 on Average. Adding to this that melee units are better defensive, you only need 5.13 Black Unicorns to kill a single Hunter with one average strike. Vice Versa you'll need 13,40 Hunters to kill a single Black Unicorn with one single average arrow. I didn't consider crit chances though...

"Ranged" is such a strong ability that both offence and defence has been nerfed to balance the units.

[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...