Slingers also tend to get double-shot a lot faster than Bowmen, which is brutal against much of the lower-level stuff you fight early on. Since the AI mercilessly targets missile units, and rightly so, Bowmen don't often live long enough to pick it up. Bowmen are a little better at taking out spellcasters, but they're mostly a waste of money, particularly if you don't have access to wood.
A warrior with a first attack polearm (or whatever the skill is that lets you hit before they do) is pretty badass. However, I find that I quickly run out of stamina. I guess you need some sweet magic items to keep that from happening.
The haste spell helps. I find that even so I need to bring some troops with, though. Stamina is a bitch if you're leaning too heavily on any unit, even a badass hero.
So I did the tutorial fight and I had a quick question. I had two militia and two slingers versus a handful of goblins. The militia did most of the heavy lifting and the slingers were hitting for approximately 1 damage, which didn't seem like a whole lot. The interface seemed almost too simple...am I missing something in making ranged combat effective?
And don't sell yourself short on the guards you hire. I had "Guards" guarding my home city, and they took out an invading army and its hero. However, I still got steamrolled by the second army behind that one. Was able to get a magic user up to using a single Ghost, which is pretty deadly. So close to getting there, then I realize I'm just on "beginner" difficulty.
Also, try to avoid ranged attacks on units in forest terrain, which increases the ranged defense of units there. And keep in mind that as a unit loses health, it's defense stats drop. So you can soften up an enemy with high range defense to the point where ranged attacks will be more effective against it. Not so useful when you're trying to pick of units at a distance, but potentially important when you're trying to maximize unit actions.
Actually, the way it works is that as a unit loses health, its morale drops, and when morale drops to 5 or below, the unit suffers stat penalties. Inflicting wounds lowers morale, and so does killing units. Some spells also affect morale, and the "Cause a Panic" sabotage option in the Scout tree makes all enemies start with a big morale penalty. On the flip side, morale of 15 or more grants stat bonuses, and that's one of the reasons heroes suddenly become much more awesome after a few levels - their base morale increases to 15+, which makes them permabuffed with the high morale effect. You can use militia to feed them to spells in the Chaos school - there are some spells that require you to sacrifice a living allied unit in order to get an effect. I think that spearmen and slingers are the cheapest units you are meant to actually use as combat units. I've found spearmen really helpful for cheaply filling out a Commander hero's retinue. Guards are much more powerful than you probably think - when you hire, say, the "Light Infantry" guard for a province, it doesn't mean that there's just one guy who hangs out in the province marching back and forth, it means that you get an entire army of light infantry for the upkeep cost of 1 normal unit. Elite guards are easily the most powerful force you can field and will crush even high-level hero armies... unless the enemy has enough gold to bribe them. If nothing else, you should always hire the adventurers guard unit. The description of the adventurers might make it sound like they're temporary and will leave at some point, but that's not actually how it works - in your entire empire, you can only hire a certain number of adventurers at one time. The first level of inn you build at your stronghold gives you 1 contract, a later upgrade gives you 2 total, etc. The adventurers are both extremely cheap and devastatingly powerful, and there's never a reason to not hire as many as you can.
No, Adventurers will leave, I've had it happen a few times. It gives you a message that they moved on, but it's not something that happens very often. Adventurers are pretty cheap for their power level, though, so they are still worth using.
Let's talk about morale. So I had two stacks running around wrecking shit with Guardsmen. My warrior stack -- the stronger of the two, and my primary hero -- had Guardsmen one-shotting most unarmored things and doing like 10-12 to hardier units like swords. My scout (a total badass with an Enchanted Crossbow full of lulz) was seeing his Guardsmen do about 2/3 of that damage. Curious, I poked around their stat pages to see if I had leveled them up weirdly or something (level six Guardsmen: total death machines, btw). Turns out that my warrior stack had Guardsmen rocking 30+ morale that was giving them fresh combat bonuses like +3 attack/counter. Because every time they kill an enemy, they get +1 morale and it stacks up way beyond their actual base-level morale. So that stack you're steamrolling with? Yeah, this is a big reason why. Interesting stuff! Also, being good is hard :( I'm trying, really I am, but goddamn my people bitch about every damn thing. EDIT: Typed half of this up before Thasero posted that. Wasn't trying to scoop his morale thunder ;)
Not only that, but slingers have a problem with stamina. Well, it's not that their stamina is weaker or anything, it's just that their infinite missile supply leads me to fire whenever I get a chance. And once they start getting a chance, they usually keep getting a chance, so they keep firing until they don't have any stamina. And if you look at the description of the stamina stat, you'll see that units start getting progressively worse penalties as their stamina drops. So my slingers were often completely ineffective because they were tired. Don't be like me. Don't overuse your slingers.
DAMN YOU, COPYCAT! =) Yeah, apparently morale returns to normal values over time just like health does - so when your units are out of combat, their high morale will slowly fade while wounds heal back to normal. But if you keep crushing it, the positive morale will build faster than it fades. Just like Adam B, I've now realized that one of the reasons my archers in one army were so badass is that they had high morale. My Commander hero lead a stack with a large group of spearmen to hold the front line while horse archers and crossbowmen sniped from the back. The archers got most of the kills, which boosts morale, and so they always had large stat bonuses. Because of the way defense works, going from 6 attack to 9 is way more than a 50% improvement. You go from dealing 2 damage to 5 damage against a target with 4 armor, and that's a huge change in the number of hits it takes to drop an enemy. I saw a a commander-only banner weapon that gave +3 morale to every unit in the army, and thought "Pfft, my guys never get low morale anyway, why bother?" Turns out I should've bothered! That bonus gets you 60% of the way to a morale-based permabuff to every unit you field.
Bleh, I'm more or less off of the slinger train. The only things they're any good at killing are units that *everyone* is good at killing. I'd rather spend the upkeep on another spearman, who can at least dent slightly hardier targets like brigands and orcs. Of course, I love me some spearmen. I love to roll with an all-spear army early on; their skirmishing ability with their single ranged attack helps avoid attrition, and they're reasonably tough for their cost. Then again, barbarians are pretty awesome as well. Just depends on how lawful good I feel like being, which tends to depend on the map. So I like the spearmen neutrality, because it lets me go either direction later on without having a "wasted" troop building.
Oh? How does the map determine your alignment choices? I haven't gotten a good handle on the alignment system yet. I gather that your dialogue choices affect your alignment, which affects subsequent event occurrences. But does your alignment affect how certain subject races react to you? How does your choice of troop type affect it? (i.e. does my love of thieves & brigands make my current "all good" dialogue options kinda pointless?) And I'm not real clear on what the lawful/chaotic axis affects, or how to affect it in turn.
It's impossible to know the actual mechanics at work, but I get the impression your alignment is the result of a combination of dialogue choices, favored troop types, buildings in your stronghold, and performance on the diplomatic front. At this point I'm not even sure if there's a single axis of good <---> evil. Your avatar gets an adjective at the end of the game that described his karmic status, and in one game where I went heavy on the barbarian troops and chaos magic, I got the descriptor "Furious." Which I love, because it makes it seem like the game understood how I was trying to "roleplay." EDIT: The following adjectives are appended to the names on the high score list: Ruthless, Terrible, Clever, Just, Treacherous, Good, Pure, and Evil. There are definitely more, since I got "Furious." You could plot those all on a single line, but Treacherous and Clever seem to imply things can go in more than just two directions.
Since I may not be paying close enough attention, but this doesn't really jibe with my experience, and the tooltips say that decreased morale and stamina only affect attack stats, not defense stats. What I'm seeing is that I'm able to inflict more damage when the target unit's HP drops below an uncertain threshold. The feeling is that once I soften them up, they go down easy. Nothing is increasing my attacking unit's morale, and nothing is decreasing the target unit's morale in these instances. Again, I may be missing something, but in my playing it looks to me like defense stats are somehow getting reduced. EDIT: To clarify, I am seeing the the boost/penalty to attack stats from morale swings, just not to any other stats.
In other news, I found a random page that summarizes difficulty levels, morale, and stamina effects. The difficulty level stuff is interesting: BEGINNER Neutrals HP 55% XP from battle 130% Base gold income/nest egg +15 / 1000 Base gem income/nest egg +5 / 100 Corruption max. 60% Corruption province # 18 Score multiplier 25% SKILLED Neutrals HP 70% XP from battle 120% Base gold income/nest egg +10 / 850 Base gem income/nest egg +3 / 50 Corruption max. 66% Corruption province # 16 Score multiplier 50% COMPETENT Neutrals HP 85% XP from battle 110% Base gold income/nest egg +5 / 600 Base gem income/nest egg +1 / 30 Corruption max. 72% Corruption province max. 14 Score multiplier 75% EXPERT Neutrals HP 100% XP from battle 100% Base gold income/nest egg +0 / 500 Base gem income/nest egg +0 / 20 Corruption max. 78% Corruption province max. 12 Score multiplier 100% It's nice to know there are some concrete reasons why I'm having a @!#$ of a time trying to win at Competent. I don't even know how corruption works. The bigger your kingdom gets, the more gold get siphoned off your income?
^^^^ Just signed up to this forum to say that the above wiki link is very useful. Also, I also play on competent, and it's like day and night compared to skilled. On the beginning maps, I go Wizard+Shamans ASAP so I can start clearing out the easy Tier-1 neutral dungeons. Since most weak enemies have no magic resistance, it's easy to steamroll them without losses if you micro the shamans carefully. The wizard is there for utility and summoning zombies to tank damage for serious battles. Edit: Also, I have a suggestion for competent difficulty players. Go into the file difficulty.var and change the variable "Hero Advice" on competent from "0" to "1". This way, you can get still get the computers estimate of your likelihood of winning a battle. If they ever say the enemy is "doomed", I go ahead and auto-resolve (F10) to save myself some time.
In my experience so far, two things can make Militia worthwhile: one of their level-up perks is to become a Spearman, and when coupled with a Commander's army-wide stat bonuses, they become cheap but sturdy troops. I am finding that combination useful at Competent level when I'm strapped for cash.
So, I'm playing my best game at Competent yet -- large map, 3 opponents. My main Hero is a Commander, I have a Scout secondary, and I'm relying primarily on Pikemen and Bowmen. Every province is guarded by Patrolmen. The Inquisition shows up, I tell them to get lost, and their periodic attacks on my provinces thereafter are successfully (and oh-so-satisfyingly) repelled. I love beating down Executioners because I hate them so much. I manage to get a solid economy going, but I'm strapped for strategic resources. I attack an Elven forest province for its Redwood, and manage to pacify it after several rebellions. I end up with only one AI neighbor to my north, and nowhere to expand except overseas, to a province guarded by 15 Centaurs. Meanwhile, one by one, I get the messages that the other 2 AI opponents have lost. I begin scheming to assault my northern rival, but upon checking his border provinces, I see that they all have some unholy swamp creature guards -- 11 or 12 per province, the usual horrific assortment of Giant Spider, Basilisks, Giant Slugs. I doubt I can put a dent in them. So the plan changes to levelling up, fortifying, and preparing for the inevitable invasion of my lands, in which I hope his armies will break upon or at least be weakened by my Patrolmen. When the invasion comes, my Commander is level 12. His invading Scout is level 20. He sweeps through 3 of my cash-cow provinces and I move to engage. On the first round of the battle, his hero one-shots one of my level 5 Pikemen, which regardless of in-game morale effects is demoralizing to me, the player. And then, among his Thugs, Griffins, and Horsemen, I see this @#$!ing thing: Needless to say, my main army is duly decimated.There's no way I can recover from that, especially since he is flanking me on a second front with his Wizard secondary. So in order to keep as much of my score intact as possible, I surrender. I'm guessing I got the "Clever" sobriquet due to my win/loss ratio. And my one reversion was to recover from the Inquisition invading and capturing my undefended home province. Lesson learned: Hit opponents at the earliest opportunity. Since I was going for a good, or at least lawful alignment, I was worried about the karmic impact of an unprovoked invasion, but in the meantime the other 3 AIs perished and their lands were (presumably, I never saw) taken over by my evil neighbor. Curse him! I shall return.
So for those of you playing at the higher levels: (i.e. not Beginner) Do the other hero types start becoming competitive? Or is the Warrior the best pretty much always? I've been playing around with every hero type *except* the Warrior, since I find them more interesting. But I have to admit... using them thus far is like playing on hard mode compared to the times I allow myself to just use a Warrior.
I've found Commander the most useful so far, though my hardcore Necromancer was doing pretty well in my last game. In my experience magic items crop up a little less often at higher levels, so it's harder to trick out a Warrior Hero.
I'm playing on Competent but probably should drop it down based on the kinda dumb amount of save-scumming (i.e. Into the Past) I'm doing. I've been loving rolling a warrior main and a scout secondary, simply because beating through those first few neutrals/lairs with shitty spears/slings is soooooo much easier with a warrior. And they get so damn much health that they're beasts later in the game as well; it takes an awful lot to chew through the 79 HP Lord Pimpenstein or whatever his name is rocks in my current shard, especially when he's smashing face to the tune of 12-20 attacks and 6-12 counters. Mark M, you'd asked how the map determines my alignment and I forgot to respond. Oops! Anyway, the way I think about it has two elements: One, if I can't get iron in a reasonable timeframe I'm pretty much doomed to rolling barbarians or brigands just to get the necessary beef up front. Two, sometimes random events just don't give me much option to be an evil bastard. Or I'm latching onto any excuse to be a iron-fisted tyrant, either way. P.S. Haste is my bestest friend. That's pretty much every first-turn action for any warrior I'm piloting. P.P.S. The berserker perk (double-warrior at level 10) is kinda shitty. Because warriors have so damn much health at that point the berserking takes for-goddamn-ever to kick in. On the other hand, round attack erryday, which is beyond devastating.
People whining about needing you to explore their province every turn as you fight apocalyptic wars is the most annoying thing in a game since "You must gather your party before venturing forth." Also about halfway through my first game (Beginner and still was at risk of losing at a few points) I stopped trying to rush around the map putting out fires and instead just said stuff like "Send the troll a cart of children so he'll shut up."
I love that about this game. I don't find it annoying so much as yet another aspect of the role-playing fiction. Because if I were a tyrant trying to conquer the world, you can bet my eyes would be a-rollin'.
Yeaaaahhhh I see your point, but there's a better way to do that without being so annoying. Like less frequent but increasingly more demanding messages.
I just had an amazing fight. I appear to be alone on a mini-continent, so after much exploring and leveling and crap, I finally get ready to cross the ocean/river and explore new lands. I send my Ranger with his retinue of 4 Swordsmen, 1 Monk and 1 Guardsman. When we land, we're met by the Inquisition, which tells us to gtfo or else. My hero recommends we don't fight, so I try negotiation. They just get mad and attack. Their forces? 3 Executioners, 3 Crossbowmen, 1 Monk, 1 Super Monk, 3 Swordsmen. Welp. I've got one hope: Sabotage. I have three choices which boil down to poisoning everyone for a short time (possibly a good choice, it'd take out the Crossbowmen, maybe the casters, and dent the Swordsmen). I could hurt everyone's stamina (seemed the worst choice). Or, I could screw up everyone's morale. So I go for Morale. And hoo boy does it start low. The Executioners are at, like, 2 morale. Now knowing how morale works, my Ranger, standing atop a hill, starts picking off units he's able to one-shot that are standing next to the Executioners. Within a couple turns, most of the enemy's army is running panicked or frozen scared. I could have let them run. I chose not to. Every one of those fuckers ate an arrow or halberd that day. My losses? One swordsman. He will be remembered as a hero, the first of ours to give his life on this brave new continent.
For bonus hilarity, there's a ritual in the Necromancy school that causes all of the defenders in the target province to suffer a huge morale penalty. Throw in the scout sabotage option and you can make an entire army rout on the first turn! Also, a subtle detail that I really appreciate - if your sabotage skill is high enough to use poison, but all of the enemy troops are immune to poison, the option doesn't appear, so you can't accidentally waste it. This developer gets a gold star. I turns out I was half-right about wounds and morale - getting wounded drops morale, but having low health ALSO affects stats. Bad morale affects attack, but poor health additionally drops your defense. I think that's one of the reasons I've had a lot of success with a Commander hero and lots of ranged units. If you really make it rain arrows on the enemy, by the time they hit your front lines, they're too weak to inflict casualties. Pathfinding is my new favorite skill. It's in the scout tree and grants terrain knowledge to all of your units. That means ALL of your units in the hero's army, not just the hero! At the 3rd level, every unit can walk in swamps, forests, and hills for 1 AP with no stamina or defense penalties. Even better, the 3rd skill level grants +1 strategic movement, and the terrain knowledge skill also affects the cost of strategic movement - so your scout's army can cross several swamp provinces in one turn.
Just finished my second game (on Beginner) trying a Scout/Warrior start. Like I said earlier, I made my Scout a Ranger. I'm not sure I'd do that again -- it was either use a turn to cast a weak spell or one-shot something with a bow. Any special effects were mostly taken care of by the Scout's sabotage, which is way better than it looks. Dropping 60g to poison everything can really speed up those annoying trash fights, or give you an edge in a real one. I made my Warrior a Dark Knight. Now this was a good idea. He turned into the typical Haste/Stone Skin counterattack bot described in this thread and won the game for me. He didn't even need an army. Haste, run on top of a hill, cast Stone Skin, watch the enemy corpses pile up in a ring around the base of the hill. Other notes: *I feel like Warriors need a First Strike weapon to be viable. *I went almost all melee units and regretted it. I'm going to get a ranged unit on every tier next time. *Swordsmen >>> Pikemen. *Guardsman are disappointing and overpriced. *The big horrible threat for the first 25-50% of the game are Giant Slugs. Fear them. *On that note, get the Burn Ammo spell (level 1 Chaos). It's a good counter to Slugs. *Don't trust your heroes' analysis when it comes to "Dwarves and Halflings" or "Dwarves and Ballistae." Dwarves are incredibly sturdy and have super duper advantages on hills. Taking a line from Master of Magic, halfling slingers are WAY more dangerous than you'd think and come in huge swarms. Ballistae can shoot you from across the map and you usually have to dig through a stack of Dwarves camping on hills to get to them. *Remember to build stuff in your castle! It's easy to forget about it while you're out adventuring.
The AI doesn't seem to use ports. In my last game, there was a one-province bottleneck between what I'd claimed and the two AI players (both set to Competent). I turtled until I'd cleared every single site in my territory, then declared war on the biggest AI player. I used ports to take some of his strategic resources I didn't have (like Iron), and he never even built any ports despite having quite a few coastal provinces. I parked a very powerful guard unit at the bottleneck and he never attacked any of my territory. That left me free to sweep across and take all of his. It's too bad because the AI is pretty good in general. By the way, Monster guards (from the Monstrologist's Guild building) get really old after the 20th fight against them. My Archmage was the only hero that could reliably take them on and not take any losses. Solo superwarriors aren't very good against either Slugs or Spiders, particularly Spiders because they will keep you webbed until you are dead. Basilisks can't get you if you have a high resistance, but there is no defense against webs. Phoenixes can also get a little rough for a solo superwarrior, but not much else. Maybe Devils. I think my favorite support unit is the Fairy, which you can recruit from Fairy Tree locations in the woods via dialogue. They can cast Haste at level 1 so they can Haste your Hero and other melee units, and they can get Heal pretty early in the level-up process. Fairies also naturally have high Ranged Defense and Resistance, so they're pretty survivable if you park them in the corner. They also can fly at speed 3, so if things do get hairy, they can get out of dodge. I like Monks, too, because they can eventually get both Bless and Restoration, but they have lousy Ranged Defense. I tend to use both a Fairy and a Monk in an army because it frees my hero up for other things besides healing.
Do you mean Shipyards, or specifically Ports? I think they're two different things. I've been assaulted by the AI across sea provinces in the majority of my games, and in one case he had built a Shipyard in every coastal province. Maybe the AI in your game chose a different build path, and simply wasn't able to build them yet?
They're three different things: Shipyards, Ports, and Lighthouses. I meant any of them. He was pretty advanced, so he probably could have built them. I think part of the problem was that he'd built Inns everywhere as well as Markets and Breweries or Mines. He may have unlocked Shipyards after those went up so he didn't have room for them.
Been totally wrapped up in the game also, although I haven't quite been able to complete a Single Player game yet. I have a feeling an invasion like this is about to happen to me soon in my game. As for your spoiler enemy, I will include some ideas that came to mind by looking at it below:
I just finished my first full game playing Skilled (one above Beginner). My main hero was a Scout Archer. I played around a bit with the other three heroes as well, and overall I found the Scout Archer to be extremely effective. He has three primary advantages over the other heroes. (1) He strikes at range. Once he's leveled up, he can take out an enemy Wizard Hero in the first round using double-strike and can typically take out an enemy Commander in 2-3 rounds with double-strike armor-piercing. Enemy warrior heroes take 3-4 rounds, which is still quick enough that they really can't close with him. He can also take out enemy non-hero casters one-per-round and can usually take out enemy 2nd and 3rd tier melee units in 1 or 2 rounds. So typically the toughest enemies never reach your lines, and any heavy-duty enemy casters get taken out quickly. (2) Once he gets the various terrain masteries, as Thasero mentioned above, his troops can range across the entire battlefield with no concern for terrain. Swamps turn from minuses to pluses (his troops will get a +1 defensive bonus for a swamp instead of a -1 defensive penalty and can cross swamps, hills, etc. without stamina cost). He himself gets a substantial defensive bonus in any non-clear terrain (IIRC it's +4 or +5). (3) he moves extremely quickly across the strategic map, probably about 3x faster than the other heroes. I've played a fair bit with the Warrior. The main issue I found with the Warrior is he's relatively expensive to run and he's constantly getting his units killed. I think it's because he needs to close the range with enemy casters, and unless you send the Warrior forward by himself (possible, but somewhat of a moderate risk), that means his units also come forward and some will get killed in the initial skirmish before the enemy heavies are killed. With the Scout the initial skirmish with enemy heavies never occurs, because the enemy heavies are dead before they can close in. I tried running a Warrior just by himself for while, but that only went so-so. He really does need cannon fodder to soak damage in the larger fights. I found it hard to level up friendly units with the Warrior, whereas with my Scout I managed to get three friendly units over level 20.
Question about unit experience: Do they get experience per combat they engage in, or do they get experience for every action they do within a certain combat? BTW... thanks again to everyone who has written long-informative posts. Those of us still playing on Beginner greatly appreciate it.
As far as I can tell, Mark, both. Awards (the medals that increase upkeep but give awesome bonuses) definitely seem tied to actions in battle. And yeah, Scouts are super great. I find Scout armies to be a little more vulnerable to certain compositions, though, and I have a much harder time keeping squishies alive with a Scout than I do with a Warrior since the Warrior distracts everybody with his amazing tankiness. With Haste, you're really only not attacking on the first turn since on turn 2 and subsequent you move 4 or 5 hexes. If you're fighting something like super-experienced bowmen in hills where they have initiative, you're almost certainly going to eat some damage and possibly deaths unless you're only bringing armored dudes (swordsmen+) to the battle. I look forward to playing around with a Wizard more, but they just seem so gimpy if you don't have second-tier and higher spells, which I don't have access to in the campaign yet.
Oh also: Blacksmithing is way better on a Warrior main than you think it is. Item durability is a biiiiiitch, and being able to sustain through a long invasion is incredibly helpful. Also also, the more I think about it the more convinced I am that Berserker is the way to go *just* for Round Attack. First Aid is nice and all, and Soul Steal or whatever is all right, but Round Attack is just brutal.
I think they get an amount of experience for participating in the battle and some for a kill. Medals seem to be completely based on what they did in the battle. Healed a ton? Healer's Medal. Got beat to hell and survived? Resilience Medal.
