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A shame that this hasn't gotten more publicity (and that the thread seems to be dying), because the game really is amazing. One nitpick I have, though, is that it tends to hide information from you quite a bit. I have no clue what determines your alignment, for example; I tried being as benevolent as possible, always aiding the populace (when I had the resources to), keeping them happy etc - and after I conquered the shard I was remembered as "evil". What the hell? I did summon a whole lot of imps with my wizard hero, though - does that lower your alignment? Most of my armies were lawful / good.
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Dec 21, 2012 22:30
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 02:36 |
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Blarrgh, is the third difficulty level after skilled (Competent etc?) really this goddamn hard or am I just bad? Skilled is usually pretty easy if I get the ball rolling (as in, don't get ruined by those "barbarians attack, you lose"-events before I get my mills / mines pumping cash), but competent just wrecks my poo poo immediately. In skilled, I tend to rush for pikemen / crossbowmen with a commander. Seems like those two units are far, -far- better than anything else in the first tier - pikemen have first strike so they can ruin pretty much any other low tier melee unit, while crossbows can pierce armor. I just can't get there in competent since I have less money, conquering anything is damned hard and buildings cost more.
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Dec 23, 2012 17:40
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victrix posted:That might be your problem actually - look at the prices and upkeeps on the units you chose, those are some of the most expensive. The evil units are way, wayyyyyy cheaper. You get a bit less gold from loot if you use them, but the tradeoff is you can re-recruit them for nothing. Hm, I might have to try the cheaper units again. I tried a couple of games with barbarians and slingers / bowmen, but those didn't really get anywhere since the units seemed damned weak by comparison and died constantly (except bowmen, those were alright). Which unit choices have worked for others here on the harder difficulties? Also, I just tried to explore my first dragon's lair. Christ, I had an almost full group (maybe 1 or 2 slots free of the whole board) of crossbowmen and pikemen + some healers and a horseman. All were ridiculously experienced, and my commander was around level 15 as well. Surely it can't beat this all by itself, right? It could. I barely got it to half HP before it ate my last few guys. Good thing the revert time-option is there.. Wonder what kind of a beastly army you need to take these bastards down, since mine could already roll over the rest of the shard with zero trouble whatsoever.
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Dec 23, 2012 21:35
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Mr.48 posted:Ugh I hate not being able to stack units. HoMM did it right so many years ago, why are we regressing? Actually, I like individual units more in Eador. I don't think it's inherently better or worse, just a different design choice. Works when everything is balanced around it. Dropbear fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Dec 23, 2012 |
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Dec 23, 2012 21:50
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:What should I be doing to learn this game correctly? I get the feeling it isn't the campaign. I've been doing 6 player Skilled games just getting my poo poo kicked in constantly, but after reading this thread I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing. My arch-nemesis is upkeep, as it was in every Total War game. For some reason I can never strike that balance, most likely due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the game mechanics. I've been playing the campaign. I can beat campaign shards pretty easily on skilled, but not on competent so take any of my hints with a grain of salt. What I do is: - Stick around exploring the starting province until you have a stack of decent troops (I prefer pikemen and archers / crossbows). Be patient, don't rush with sub-par troops until you're sure you can take whatever you're trying to. Have some kind of ranged troops with a few meat walls - archers, slingers or crossbows, they help a lot in softening stuff up. Crossbows are brutal, but expensive. - Similarly, be patient with letting troops heal after they get beaten down. Having a healer in the group speeds this up a lot. Explore provinces while waiting. Rushing too fast gets you brutalized. - Try to find provinces with either orcs (orcs and goblins are easy), simple militia with no / very few archers or undead first, I think those are the easiest. - Build the first magic building and slap your hero full of either magic spark or fatigue, even if he's not a wizard. They help a lot. Fatigue is surprisignly useful in bringing down tougher troops. - Based on the terrain, try to rush for money-generating buildings after you have your basic troop generators (mills for plains, mines for hills, sawmills for forests) when you have a few provinces. They only provide 5 gold / turn, but in the end having a bunch of them helps a lot with upkeep woes. I usually go for mills first (granary -> farmer's market is the route, I think). - Don't be afraid to rewind time if you mess up! It's a damned excellent mechanic for learning the game, and I wish more games had it. It ruins your score if you use it a lot, but that doesn't seem to really matter, at least in the beginning.
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Dec 24, 2012 17:46
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What does losing a shard in the campaign actually do? I played around a bit and tried the higher difficulties, so I lost a bunch of fights - looks like the shards disappear and you can't try again. Do you lose the bonuses for good, or do they pop back sometime? Should I just restart? Also, if you're playing a goody two-shoes like I am, get allied with the elves. Seriously. Their starting stats might not seem that impressive but by the end of my last shard I had, for example, an elf with 19 archery skill killing most things in a single shot. And my commander had 6 elves, so most of the enemy army was usually dead by the end of round 1. You also get some pretty neat elven buildings into your capital's foreign quarters, the best of which gives ALL your provinces +1 happiness regardless of race or terrain or anything.
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Dec 25, 2012 22:59
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I just ran into a pretty much impossible shard on the campaign. The other wizard going against me (Oinor) was easy-ish, but the other had some ridiculous guards with horsemen on his every province. I still can't build other than tier 1 units (wonder when do you actually unlock tier 2 recruitment buildings), so I couldn't beat those drat horse-guards even with my best troops. And he had them on EVERY damned province. I wonder if losing shards actually leaves you technologically behind like this.. I had lost a few previously, might be the reason. Can't really check the russian wiki either; my Chrome translates the front page but refuses to translate the others, for some reason.
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Dec 26, 2012 02:24
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Okay, this is getting annoying as hell. I've captured a ton of shards and I still don't have access to ANY T2 units. I'm fighting for some master craftsmen now, but no decent units. The only way to win now is to get a warrior and level him to 25 or so and / or find some obscene gear to beat the AI's ludicrous guards and units with - on the last shard I had to beat a guard with 6 level 15 minotaurs, as well as another guard with 2 devils, 2 demons, 2 fiends and a ton of imps. The devils had 30+ attack, for example, so the standard pikemen etc. didn't even scratch them. How do you actually unlock the better units? Is it just up to luck?
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Dec 29, 2012 15:35
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Pierzak posted:Supposedly the Expert level is the one where the AI doesn't get any boni or penalties. Except in the campaign, where some of the masters have vastly better units and especially guards that they can spam on their provinces than you (probably) have, like devils and phoenixes. Turns out it's probably worth it to have a hero built especially so he can wreck dragons if you happen to find a lair. My method was to have a level 10+ scout (so I can use doubleshot) with an armor piercing crossbow + lots of the archery skill for more pierce. Then just fill every slot in his army with healers or something else that the enemies love to attack and surround your scout with them. While the dragon snacks on the units one at a time, keep putting doubleshots into it's face until it keels over. The rewards pretty much seem to win you the shard - for example, I got a ludicrous amount of money / gems / xp and this beauty:  After that I just walked that thing to the enemy forts and let him eat everyone, since pretty much nothing could really hurt it.
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Dec 29, 2012 23:38
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I'm fairly certain the "in expert the AI is equal, below that only you get bonuses"-thing is a myth, since the AI seems to keep pulling huge amounts of money right out of it's rear end even on skilled. Yeah, 3 heroes + mercenaries on every province + instantly replenished losses isn't happening this early without some trickery. But at least the game is challenging. And addicting as all hell, I wonder how many hours I've put into this thing..
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Jan 4, 2013 00:58
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Does actually using evil units decrease your karma, or is it just a single hit when you purchase them? I found a place that I can recruit trolls from and rummaged through half the map with one of them beating everything to death largely by himself, and I'm curious if that hosed with my karma much. On that note, trolls really do get pretty ridiculous fast if you manage to get them early enough so that your enemies don't have many tier 2 / 3 units to counter them with - I just hasted mine and kept casting astral energy on it for double turns of beating everything to a pulp. Also, is the astral plane bugged somehow in MoTBW? I've tried being as good as possible (well, besides the troll-thing) but Oinor is still "indifferent" to me. I also noticed that the statistics screen shows my best title as "Spectre", although I've gotten Eternal Ruler and other grander sounding ones too. Or is spectre really above those?
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Jul 11, 2013 19:53
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Tehan posted:It could be because Oinor is basically powergaming Eador's in-universe karma system. If you read between the lines with his dialogue, he's not good for the sake of good, but because good begets good - your karma level influences how positive or negative random events are. He's not giving you lectures about how you should be kind to fluffy bunnies because he genuinely believes it, but to grind good karma out of you, so he doesn't give much of a poo poo whether or not you follow through on his advice. Huh. In Genesis, Oinor's opinion of me got a lot better when I got better karma - or so I thought, maybe I did something else to appease him, hard to say.
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Jul 12, 2013 00:12
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Okay, now I'm fairly sure the campaign is either bugged somehow or the balance is completely out of whack. I'm playing on Competent, and I can never get even close to defeating the barbarian guy - not on other shards, not when he attacks mine (effectively ending the campaign). He always has a ton of centaurs immediately when he meets me; if I rush straight to level 2 units at the cost of everything else, I might have one horseman. My scout also never died and spent most of his turns fighting, and he was level 7 - Doh-gor's scout was level 12 by then, and he also had a tough secondary hero as well. His armies also seem to magically spawn troops out of nowhere, since I killed all of his scouts units except himself, fought him again almost immediately afterwards and he had tons of centaurs, again, without ever visiting his capital. Any tips? I don't think it's supposed to work like this? EDIT: Yeah, tried it another time, with a warrior instead of a scout this time. No chance, can't be done. Centaurs rampaging all over the map from the start. Dropbear fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Jul 12, 2013 |
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Jul 12, 2013 19:06
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pigdog posted:You can buy troops from forts you build in provinces, as well as the capital. Chances are the guy had built a fort in the province and recruited from there. I finally beat him by lowering the difficulty to skilled for that one map; the initial money bonus let me rush to pegasi, and a commander + a bunch of those managed to charge the centaurs into oblivion. It was still a tough fight, since the rear end in a top hat barbarian had -tons- of centaurs and high-level heroes. The other maps have been easy-ish on competent, but that one was nigh impossible. I'm pretty sure the AI cheats quite a bit, regardless of what the wiki says - at one map I conquered the opponent's every province except his main fort (it had minotaur guards I couldn't kill) and surrounded it with manned forts to keep his heroes bottled in. The opponent still managed to get enough money from the ether to keep resurrecting his heroes (~400 gold a pop at those levels) and pump them full of sizeable armies of swordsmen (~100 gold a guy without iron) -with only one province-. He'd have nowhere near the income for that without bluffing.
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Jul 18, 2013 12:46
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pigdog posted:Home provinces do give a pretty substantial amount of gold on their own, they can explore it and use rituals... It's the upkeep on guards and troops that robs money the most. Yes, but resurrecting his hero + giving him an army of swordsmen after every time he dies costs ~1000 gold, and the labyrinth guards are also costing quite a bit of upkeep for a single province. Let's say the home province gives him 50 gold (I don't think I've ever had mine give that much). It would still take him 20 turns to gather the money to pop a single hero back with troops, let alone many of them.
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Jul 18, 2013 13:41
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Fargo Fukes posted:This might just be bad luck too. At least in the original, being a bastard gave you a lot of "Chunk of money now for a long-term penalty" options rather than just "gently caress you". Which still sounds like a raw deal but they are actually amazing because they let you get thugs around 5 - 10 turns quicker and thugs are boss. Yeah, I've played with good karma so far (the astral screen shows me as <player> the Pure) but I still get the "Inquisitors attack your province!" / "Barbarians attack!" / "Harpies attack!" / "Fire destroys sawmill!" / "Monolith gets cursed!" / "Prince conquers your lands!" / "Dark cult uses your altar to sacrifice babies!" constantly. The only upside seems to be that at times pilgrims bring me free items; sometimes these are rather powerful, sometimes rubbish. EDIT: What I'm curious about is how the different choices in the "Your officials are corrupted"-events affect things. Is arranging a court session for show the best option in reducing corruption? It costs 300 gold, while fining the officials gives me 500. I could also execute them, but I suppose that lowers karma? Dropbear fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Jul 18, 2013 |
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Jul 18, 2013 14:07
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 02:36 |
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Tahirovic posted:Dragons are very easy, just use the spell that transforms one of your units into a dragon too. It's expensive but it works like a charm. Best part of this is, that if there is also an army with the dragon, they'll die trying to kill yours. I haven't even ever seen that spell, not to mention actually getting it, so I wouldn't call that "easy" by any stretch of imagination. I found the easiest way to kill dragons to be using a level ~13 scout with any crossbow (penetrates armor), precise shot (more pen), doubleshot and stamina rings to keep using doubleshot. Get a cheap army of spearmen or something and keep doubleshotting the dragon while it's eating the spearmen until it keels over. Doesn't even need tier 2 units or spells or anything.
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Jul 25, 2013 13:04
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