Eador: Genesis

That's directly a function of the difficulty level that you set for them. At anything below expert, they get penalties, anything above they get boni. So if you play at the first difficulty level for everyone they effectively play at the Overlord level (with superstrong independents etc). So increase their level a bit if you find them not challenging, but are otherwise happy with the strength of independents on your difficulty level.

One other interesting detail about non-human alliances:

It appears that once you ally with a non-human race, all their neutral settlements will join you for free. (They did for me, at any rate.) However, they will only offer to join you if you talk to them with the same hero that completed the alliance quest. If you talk to them with your other heroes, they act like their normal surly selves.

Ah, good to know.

Also boni is not the plural of bonuses. Nor is it a word. It's enough of a pet peeve of mine to act like a jackass and point it out.

Holy Crap!! I'm on my 4th Shard in the Campaign, and I just realized there are hidden buildings which you can access and build in the building info screen, which don't turn up in the City screen. I think the one I found was the Watchtower.

Now I just need to figure out how to get the buildings for 2nd level units and spells, especially annoying because the shard description said I would get the 2nd level spell building....

All second level spell buildings require the Sage's Guild (upgrade to Library) which itself requires you to have built 4 1st level spell buildings, one of which has to be the school of magic you are going to upgrade to 2nd level.

Is there a quick and easy fix for the fact that this gives me about 1fps? I can barely use the menu let alone start a game.

Edit: OK, a new power plan for 50% CPU speed fixed it. Makes my mouse speed wonky when I quit the game though for some reason. I wasn't expecting this game to be quite so... old-school.

Baaaaaaaaaahahahaha, Commander/barbarian/(shaman) spam is just crazy awesome. Just throwing that out there.

Expanding on this a bit:

I decided to try a game with exploration turned off, mainly so I could see the lay of the land & try to ally with an appropriate race. (I wanted to try out the info that I had posted earlier.) A side effect of the no exploration option was that I was able to to watch the AI & see how they were doing. And... well... they weren't doing much. I had almost double the number of provinces, and 2 of them regularly had zero heroes. (I'm guessing they kept getting them killed & couldn't afford a resurrection.) When I finally broke through the wall of independents to directly meet one of them, he crumpled like a week-old banana. However, the independents continue to scale such that unconquered provinces are absurdly powerful. Independents seem to be the real challenge in this game at the lower levels. I wonder if the balance tilts more in their favor at higher levels.

Once I get my economy up and running (so usually by turn 25 or so) I tend to sit at 100-150 income for the first three tiers, which is as far as I've gotten before restarting the game. I've found that that income level gives me enough cash to do what I need to while at the same time giving me decent defenses & troops on the ground. I imagine that once I start trying to get to the fourth tier, I'm going to need much more income. That shit is expensive.

To be honest, pure shaman spam is absurdly powerful with any hero type for quite a while. Obviously, there does reach a point where those primitive casters stop cutting it, but I've had a lot of success with their pew-pew.

In German it is. Jackass.

Seriously though thanks for the correction. Always trying to improve my English.

Diplomacy - http://www.gog.com/forum/eador_genesis/diplomacylooting/post3

Oooh! Handy. Thanks! Looks like I might consider leveling my diplomacy past 1, now that I see some concrete benefits for it.

BTW... does anyone know if there's some way to check your current karma? I'm currently playing a game where I thought I've done everything possible to be good: good-sounding event choices, using all good troops (with an occasional neutral here & there), and all my buildings are good or neutral. But when I went to a dwarven settlement with my scout (diplomacy = 1) he didn't offer me the option to bribe him into becoming my ally. And an elvish settlement didn't offer me an alliance quest either. (That doesn't surprise me, though. It seems to be damn near impossible to be good enough to convince the elves to ally.)

Also: what affects if you can bribe enemy AI provincial guards or not? I seem to get the option completely randomly. Diplomacy doesn't seem to cause to make the offers more frequent, although I imagine the skill does reduce the cost of the offer, as advertised.

Now I understand why those Adventurer provincial guards are so incredibly powerful despite their low cost. I just invaded an AI province that was using them and even though the guards were a grab-bag of various low level units, they were all level 13!!!! His faerie was kicking my swordsman's ass in 1v1 melee combat. And the swordsman had full staming & life, too! He needed help from 2 horse archers to finally bring her down. All of those wee bastards were like that.

Also, I just figured out a really cool feature which y'all prolly figured out a long time ago: you can effectively build roads through difficult terrain in your realm by building a series of stables. I guess I found a use for that third building slot for some of my provinces.

Yep, independents and guards have their own experience levels - and some of them start with lots and lots of levels, too. Generally speaking, the bonuses for higher levels are better, and level 10 often grants a special ability or upgrade. That means a level 12 unit won't just have 6 extra stamina and 6 extra hit points. For example, swordsmen will get bonuses to their Parry skill, meaning that high-level swordsmen are nearly immune to the first melee attack they receive in one turn unless it's delivered by a tier-3 or tier-4 crusher.

I think the chance of bribery depends on how strong your army is compared to the defenders. If you have an extremely strong army and the defending guards are weaksauce, sometimes they'll just turn tail and run without even asking for a bribe. I imagine you get the bribery option most often when the guards are just weak enough that they're feeling nervous about getting trounced. Also, I don't think you get the bribery option unless you actually have enough gold to afford it.

New question: Tier 3 healers, the Eagle Cleric dudes in the fabulous robes. Is it just me, or are they incredibly, unfathomably useless? You can get basically the same healing by slotting a tier-2 monk. Clerics can heal from further away than monks, but it's not worth paying several times the upkeep cost. The Dispel spell is nice, but quite situational. I expected to get a lot more punch out of the unit given its higher spot on the tech tree. Do they learn better magic spells on leveling up, or something? I know that other magic units sometimes get additional enchantments and powers available if you let them gain experience a bit.

Ah. That all makes sense. It certainly explains why my Scout with high diplomacy but leading my shitty secondhand army wasn't getting the option to do any bribing.

Heh... I kinda feel the same way about monks vs. the first tier healers. My second tier slots are almost always super valuable to me, whereas I don't mind losing a first tier slot to a healer.

BTW... once slots become thoroughly outdated, do you still keep filling them up with units? I'm not sure if I'm just wasting gold buying Swordsmen when tier 3 units are running around. However, the extra bodies sometimes come in *very* handy.

I've found monks useful to go with a wall of swordsmen or pikemen. Monks can heal units from a distance during combat and survive a few arrow attacks, so you can park them just behind the main line and support units anywhere on the field. If you only want to make sure there's a minimum of 1 healer in the army to make units recover faster outside of combat, then the tier 1 guy is all you need.

Unless you find a healer's staff and give it to your hero! The Healing skill it grants works both inside and outside of battle, just like normal healers. Wizards and commanders usually won't care about their weapon slot anyway.

I always fill all the unit slots. Tier 1 units are much cheaper to hire and upkeep, and they can still inflict damage and exhaustion on higher-tier units. That's especially true if you're using a Commander hero that buffs everything on the field, or if you cast a debuff on the intended victim first. You will need to block and tackle carefully when trying to take down a high-tier opponent without taking nasty losses, but it's possible with a good unit mix. When I'm running a commander hero, if anything I'll often fill both the tier 1 and tier 2 slots with tier 1 units and end up using the tier 3 and 4 slots to hold tier 2 units, just because the commander's growth in unit slots will outpace your tech and income anyway.

Well then. I tried my hand at the Competent skill level. Turns out I'm not.

BTW... just for the hell of it, I started a game on Expert. I... I don't see how it's possible to progress at that level. It's not a matter of skill; it's simple math. You can't take any independent provinces at all thanks to the independents' high stats. Which means you're stuck at 1 province forever, near as I can tell. I wuz confused.

Then I went back to an appropriate skill level, and I became unconfused.

I found a sorta manual here:

http://translate.google.com/transla...&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://eador.com/en/page3.html

Has some details about what promotions units can get at which levels, unit stats, and a whole bunch of other possibly useful details that I'm still reading through.

I'm with Thasero. The ability of the Monk to heal at range is very useful. Sometimes the unit is too far away to get to and other times it's too dangerous to get to -- a first-tier Healer is very fragile. It's also a pain shuffling units around to make space for the Healer to get alongside the wounded unit. In fact, I thought they were completely useless until I hired a mercenary one for my general's army and discovered that the Healer actually worked quite well, ended up getting three healing awards and did a very impressive amount of healing. I ended up disbanding it after I got Monks though, as my Healer's wage got over 40gp/turn!

I think first-tier Healer really only make sense in a large army like the general's. You need enough troops to hold the line, otherwise the Healer gets killed very quickly.

This part though is huge. Just reducing army downtime saves gobs of money.

Yes, because it never hurts to have cannon fodder around. IMO when going against those large 15 enemy armies you need something holding back even the enemy lighter-weight troops otherwise goblins or rogues or some other fast mover is going to get around to your backside and take out your mages/monks/archers.

True. Then again... that's pretty much the only time I want a healer of any kind. With smaller armies, I just have my hero handle his own healing with his own spells.

Actually, I take that back. I've found one other army type where a healer is super helpful: if you're running a chaos mage. Pretty much all his spells do damage to himself, so having a tier 1 healer sit next to my mage all the time is pretty handy.

About Eagle Clerics - after some levelups they are getting Exorcism spell, which turns easy-mode on any undead opposition. Also i BELIEVE (not quite sure though), what i saw some of really high leveled eagle clerics in neutral province guards casting resurrection.

Actually, if you fully understood basics of combat mechanics and terrain effects, expert is not what hard . Just one starting strategy for example: 1st turn - Scout/Inn/Hero exploring. 2nd - Robbers guild(dont know how it was translated)/Hero+3 robbers attacking province. Free settlement and goblins are easiest, lizardsmen and 4-men barbarians are toughest. 3rd - return to capital, 4- replenish troops, attack next province. Repeat until you capture all province from 1st ring. In meantime save money for 2nd hero, buy warrior,start exploring capital and transferring from robbers to swordsman+healer setup. This will get you going.
Hope it helps!

Going off the manual Mark M linked to earlier, starting at level 3 they have a chance of getting Exorcism (very good damage against undead), starting at Level 5 they get Magic Blow (which from what the translated manual says appears to mean it ignores all resistances -- the manual seems to imply that this includes magic resistance). Starting at level 7 they have a chance of getting Smite Evil and at level 8 they have a chance of getting Resurrection. It lists it as possibly getting it up to four times. Not quite sure if that refers to being able to resurrect someone with higher hit points left, or if this literally means being able to resurrect four dead units, which would be incredibly powerful (assuming you manage to get lucky and get this promotion four times).

BTW, I've done some poking around online about what affects your alignment, and I think I've figured out why it's so hard to get it high enough to appease the elves.

As far as I know, there are four main ways to affect your alignment:

1) Decisions made during random events.
2) How you deal with independent provinces.
3) The units you use.
4) The spells you cast.

There's not much you can do about #1, and it will only slowly affect your alignment. Similarly, you can't really do much about #2. It appears that taking over Free Settlements and Barbarian tribes gives you a 1 point karma hit, but you simply have to expand in order to win. Similarly, you get 2 or 3 point karma hits when you take over an Enchanted Forest, Dwarvish settlement, or halfling town. But again, you gotta do what you gotta do. (Conversely, you gain some karma if you take over goblin & orc settlements, but they kinda suck, so sticking to those settlement types is a losing proposition.)

#3, on the other hand, is a different matter. You gain or lose karma every time you recruit a good (or evil) troop type. Using them is irrelevant... it's the recruitment that matters. So evil, with it's super cheap & disposable units like robbers, can rapidly affect your alignment downwards, so impressing the orcs isn't hard. Good players, on the other hand, tend to buy solid units with healers, and just keep them alive. So they don't get much positive karma from units. One tactic is to intentionally buy & disband the cheapest good unit, which is swordsman if you have iron. But even that "cheap" method will cost you 40-50 gold for each point. It still seems kinda pricy to me. Faeries might be a better option if you want to buy your way to positive karma, provided you have access to a faerie tree & have crystals to burn.

#4) Here is another area where evil has it easy. Pretty much every time you cast a necromancy or summoning spell, you get -1 alignment. Good doesn't have it so easy. Every cast of exorcism gives you +1. I'm not sure if the other healing sphere spells affect your alignment, but I suspect they don't.

So there you have it. You can either buy your way into heaven by buying swordsmen, or you make a mage & get him the exorcism spell. Being good is hard. And the elves are snotty assholes.

When I first started playing, I always bought out the nearby villages. But I've concluded that's completely a losing proposition. No matter how much you want to play nice, it completely cripples you if you don't conquer the nearest six tiles almost immediately (sometimes I'll wait until my hero has gone up a level or two, although the province defenses seems to range from super easy to just easy.).

I'm not positive, but it doesn't appear that the costs of getting settlements further from your castle really goes up that much, whereas their defenses go up substantially, so that might be worth it. I'll have to experiment with that more.

I'm just in the middle of the campaign right now, but I like how easy it is to be evil and how hard it is to be good. The plot reinforces this, with you being a chaos lord and all.

I've completely given up on trying to be good. It's just not compatible with any reasonable strategy, because if you have the resources to be good you probably have the resources to end the game.

No, instead I just genocide the elves/halflings/dwarves when I encounter them then post a guard unit to liquefy their pathetic rebellion when they do manage to come back from me cursing the land. I also send the harpies and trolls carts of children because kids are free and being good is 300g. I abuse Necromancy and Demonology because they're the only schools that make Wizards viable and ignore the good guy magic because anything it can cast is a waste of a turn for a hero.

I'm starting to think this game is secretly a Milgram experiment.

I'm stuck in a stalemate in Genesis, in the first shard of the campaign. I can hold my original territory and the three neighboring regions, but I can't push forward further. I'm trying to strengthen my two heroes by visiting every location in my four provinces -- I've already "explored" 100% of them -- but while my heroes are slowly gaining levels, my footsoldiers constantly have to be replaced.

What worries me is that I may have gimped myself with silly construction choices at my stronghold. I built recruiting centers for militia (sigh), spearmen, pikemen, and crossbowmen. Now it seems I can't raze, say, the militia facility to make room for something better. Am I doomed?

The Tier Two troops aren't based on the Tier One slots. You are missing out on some Tier One possibilities such as Swordsmen (better at attacking than Pikeman, but no First Strike); Healers (see discussion above on whether or not they are useful for anything), Barbarians (which I find pretty decent, mostly because they are dirt cheap, they are also faster than Swordsman, but die a lot quicker); Thieves (nice ability to knife people without getting hit, but steal loot from you -- thus reducing your earnings -- and are generally very light weight and run if they see people around them die); Brigands which I haven't tried, slightly tougher than Thieves, but also steal from you and can't throw knives; Shaman, which I haven't tried, mostly they seem to curse people a lot; Archers, which are nicer than Crossbowmen on attack, since they can move and shoot, and have longer range, but less armor, and the Crossbowmen actually have armor piercing, which ignores 50% of armor rating.

So I wouldn't say you're doomed, in general there aren't really any great Tier One troops. Militia do seem to be pretty useless. I usually go for Swordsman, possibly Pikeman, and then either Crossbowmen or Archers -- I'm leaning towards Archers after a few playthroughs. Fourth one is a tougher choice. Sometimes I start out with Barbarians -- they are very cheap and you can get a lot of them very early -- and then switch over to mostly Swordsman or Pikeman when my economy picks up. Healers can be useful but only in a very large low-tier army (mostly for the General). I did run into one game where the price of Iron shot through the roof and I didn't have any. I really regretted not having any "front-line" type troops which didn't require Iron. Swordsmen were going for 170 gp each and Pikeman were 140 gp. I think one of my other choices was Crossbowmen (which also require Iron and are even more expensive than Swordsmen). Basically I was screwed and I lost.

Anyway, I haven't played the campaign, so I don't know what restrictions you're playing under, but the path to better troops is to built a Fort (unless that's blocked because of some campaign restriction). The Fort is in the upper-left corner of the build "tree" it requires Carpentry Guild (which requires just the initial Workshop) and having all four of your Tier One troop type selected, which you've already done. Once you get that Fort built, you'll get a whole nother set of Tier Two troop selections.

In general, I find Pikeman very useful, and I think a Pikeman, Crossbowman army possibly with one or two Spearmen to give you some troops with 2 moves, could actually work pretty well. My Scout and Wizard heroes always bring Pikeman with them. They're First Strike ability is extremely useful on the defense. Put your Crossbowmen on the hills if you can, which will increase their range by one. This is particularly important with the Crossbows, since they have a shorter range than some of the other Archers do. Stick your Wizard or Scout right behind the Pikeman and then let the enemy come to you while you blast them coming in.

For Warriors, honestly, the troops always end up just taking a secondary role, usually either doing absolutely nothing while the Warrior romps, or getting pulverized if you go against a particularly tough enemy and the Warrior ends up destroying everything by himself and ends up being the last man standing.

god seriously just recruit some brigands and murder everyone already

You should give brigands more of a shot; they're quite a bit tougher than thieves. They can almost go toe to toe with barbarians, but they come at a fraction of the cost. They're truly disposable units, yet they make *great* front line fodder. They don't get the barbarians' rage thing when injured, but that's OK. They're there to soak up damage & distract the enemy. Although they put out pretty decent damage, they're not super heavy hitters. But hey... what do you expect? They only cost 10 gold apiece, and don't require any resources at all.

Okay, that's pretty hilarious given that I already view Barbarians as cheap and completely disposable at 30 gold each! :-)

I think the big problem with cheap Tier One troops is you'll have to constantly be going back to the Castle to replenish them. That will happen with any Tier One troops, but at least the Swordsmen have some staying power.

Snark aside, in Eador you need to abandon any attachments you have to your troops. Troop XP means basically nothing until you have a big-ass stack that rolls through everything on its way to victory (or smashing those big ol' XP and morale bonuses against something that would otherwise be unconquerable, like a rival stronghold or a particularly juicy neutral). The way the combat math works, you're just not going to be able to avoid attrition like you can in MoM/HoMM/etc while expanding at the rate you should be.

Barbarians are amazing fortresses of invincibility compared to the other tier-1 cannon fodder (read: brigands) I blow through. Seriously. 10g/brigand means that as long as my hero doesn't die, it's all good. I can recruit an entirely new stack for 50g! And every level my commander gets (yeah, I'm a total convert to commander-town because goddamn they are so amazingly much better than the other heroes because ALL THE UNITS) means I have 1-2 more troop slots to throw at the next tier of shit. Meaning my attrition goes down, my right leg goes up, and I tilt my head back and finish the cup.

Ahem.

Anyway, the stack of doom goes (3 brigands) + (1 shaman) + (1 brigand) + (1 shaman) + (who gives a fuck, everything else is fucked because your commander is like three levels above everyone else and you have double their provinces). Early on I like to build a sanctuary and mostly slot cure wounds, because attrition gets annoying and shortly after the (who gives a fuck) part I like to switch my brigands to barbarians or (ugh) spears or swords or something because I have all the monies anyways so fuckit.

Have I mentioned I love this game? Because I love this game so very, very much.

[aside to tylertoo -- I may not even do a review of Eador, and just enthuse about it in non-review contexts until Masters of the Broken World comes out. If you want way too much information, I'm currently waythefuck too burnt out on doing any writing that isn't full of curses and unsupported certainties and really need to play something just for me and not for work for a while. But if I were to give Eador a score on the ol' 7-9 scale right this second, I'd be somewheres around an 8.25.]

If you go the good route, (i.e. healers + whatever powerful but expensive troop type of that tier that good fields) then you can kinda get attached to your troops. They tend to last a lot longer, although you'll still occasionally have a death in the family.

But man.. I've been attempting to play the past couple games in such a manner that I can finally ally with the elves,* and it's a helluva lot harder than the evil (or even benignly neutral) method of play.

Eador: making its not-so-subtle case for being a psychopath.

*Why? Just because. That's why.

It sounds like people are still getting into the beta for the new Eador game for those that are interested. I don't have the link handy, but it is at the snowbirdgames.com site. You just have to email them with your forum name and post in the beta sign-up thread.

Link to the forum thread with instructions in the first post.

http://www.snowbirdgames.com/forum/index.php?threads/beta-sign-up.64/

Yep, I signed up on Christmas Eve and just got in today. Pretty game - plays the same as Genesis - definitely still a beta though as they're going to need to do another pass through the interface and animations and clean up a few areas.

Thanks for the helpful replies. I'll look for the Fort.

At this point I prefer Genesis! It's actually easier to use, plays faster, and has more visual clarity -- the 3D graphics in MotBW are too busy and indistinct. I will buy the game at release to support Snowbird, but if they don't make a lot of improvements I will probably just keep playing Genesis.

That's almost exactly my feelings right now as well, but I'm desperately hoping they'll make the necessary changes to let the excellent gameplay shine.

I've really been getting frustrated with the 3D tactical map because I'm having a hard time distinguishing between Plains and Hill tiles when there's a Forest tile nearby, because the trees partially block your view and the terrain isn't blatantly obviously one or the other on some of the tilesets. You can mouse-over and hover for a second and it'll tell you for sure, but that feels like a waste of time and shouldn't be necessary. And this is coming off of me having spent the better part of the past week playing so many hours on the Genesis map that I know exactly how all the terrain, movement, and units work together. I can't imagine what the new battle-map must seem like to brand-new eyes.

I have to imagine the new construction interface will drive people batty. While I appreciate the ascetics behind making it a tabbed view, it's bizarre to me that they have 80% of the screen real estate devoted to showing you a 3D model of your city and only 20% to the actual interface where you select buildings and plan things out - which limits them to only showing a dozen available buildings at a time with no way to clearly visualize dependencies. I'm not going to say that Genesis's 50-button Stronghold screen is winning any UI awards, but it pains me that with the much higher resolutions they're working with the decision was to halve the dimensions of the interface window even while leaving the complexity and number of buildings the same.

Orcs will look at your army strength and will not join if their guard stronger than hero army. After completing alliance quest you can join ally provinces with any hero.

Your title in statistic window.

They are mandatory in PVP for dispell, and at level 8 they can get Resurrect for 4 shots. So, you can cast magic weapon, resurrect - practically you can play without losses.

You can try to recruit Non-castle units. T2 demon can be obtained from Ritual (you can find it reliably often), sometimes you can find mercenary in tavern, and find lairs during exploring. Shops sometimes provide gargoyles, you can recruit trolls, harpies, fairies and dryads. Rarely you can find Unicorn.


Some tips for expert difficulty:
Strongest starts:
1)Warrior + brigands. After getting some levels warrior can go solo. Build carpenter shop for First strike weapon, T2 necromancy for vampiric spell. This is, basically, whole campaign (due to artificially weakened neutrals) and most of small shards.
2)swordsmen + healer.(You need to pillage 2-3 turns or clear 1-2 sites for money). First hero - Scout (preferable) Generally, can clear stronger sites at first level than any hero with same army.
Swordsmen with medals+parry can get around 20 melee defence against first strike.


3)Any hero + barbarians + healers. Usual amount 3-5:2. Astral energy + webs. Tier 2 units asap.
4)Warrior + swordsmen - get some levels, hire second hero, give swordsmen to second hero, warrior goes solo.