Man rezaf you be a spring of joy and light! Fwiw both ap and wotn play more smoothly then the original. If you are constantly running back to refresh your stacks you are doing it wrong. The only time you should lose units is against bosses and ocassionally other heroes.
The only time you should loose units is against bosses or heroes? Then I am totally doing it wrong. I frequently lose just a few units, occasionally none or a fair amount. I am playing the viking though. Are you doing this via the viking? Perhaps I should re-roll as a mage?
The kb series is more a puzzle than anything else. Pick your battles killing weak enemies then circle back around and take on stronger stacks. I would recommend not using any melee units below level 3 or have a way to Rez them before battle ends. It might be helpful to read a FAQ on ap to understand combat. I had the level 3 no loss badge before I fought the spider. A thousand bonus leadership is no joke.
Having a way to rez them after battle… Yeah that would be nice. I can kind of do that with paladins, but that rez isn’t quite strong enough. I have not seen a rez spell. What class are you playing? I think I may put my warrior on ice and try a mage. I am not sure how far I am into the game, after exploring the world a bit after the first boss. I am guessing, not very far into the game at all.
Just as a side note to this generally good strategy: in the first game, I used a couple of stacks of peasants (who were unlimited at the original castle, and incredibly cheap to match my mountain of gold) to help clear out the nearby wizard’s tower. I had kept losing a unit or two that I cared about up until then and reloading, but then I realized the joy that a horde of thousands can bring to the battle when you don’t care how many of them get clobbered along the way.
Warrior Maidens (on the second island) can rez pretty decently, as long as you do it right away. The key is really to switch away from using anything low level as soon as you have the option. Not using any units with under 100 hp makes it much easier to get wins without any losses, which then snowballs as you get more leadership from that medal. You also get the flying mount ridiculously early, which makes it even easier to cherry pick what you’re fighting. Also, to grab all the goodies off the map before you have to fight anything at all.
That said, I am about 8 hours in - not even at the spider yet! - and this feels a bit lacking compared to AP, to me. A lot of it is the aforementioned lack of variety. Some of it is that I liked the mini dragon Rage abilities better than the Valkyrie powers. And some of it just might be that I grabbed HoMM3 in the last GoG sale and I miss the extra level of depth that that game has.
I’m not sure what triggered you to write such a pretentious reply …
I obviously haven’t played WotN yet, but in the original, maybe I have played it wrong, but I definately lost units constantly until/unless I basically only took top-tier troops, and even then it happened every now and then.
How do you reliably prevent losses? If I attacked someone with archers and whatnot, it usually meant any flyer and/or fast unit would try to get next to my own archers (or equivalent) immediately and every ranged attacker I faced would pick archers off as soon as possible. So, while not neccessarily overbearing, losses would occur.
And for a big part of the game, the enemy stacks I faced were equal in power to my own or better.
As a warrior, I really didn’t know what to do.
rezaf
I do have a mechanics questions. In previous KB games (I am fairly certain) when you leveled up, you would get stats mostly based upon the class you played. For example a warrior would tend to get attack or defense, and occasionally rage. A mage would more often than not get int or mana.
In this game, none of that happens right? The only stats you get from leveling are leadership.
If that is the case then there is no inherent advantage to playing a warrior as far as troop defense / attack other than a lack of red ruins to buy skills with.
Warriors also start out with more rage.
The rune difference is huge though and it fixes the problem KB had with the random stat distribution. Even if you buy all the attack/ defense boosts as a Mage you will end up with half of the attack of a warrior by end game.
There are also 2 class related skills that’s not available to other classes.
Regarding difficulty, in AP/CW the Mage have the hardest start but are decent by game end. The warrior is the best class in AP/CW. The Paladin is the worst. This is mainly on hard/ impossible difficulty though.
In WOTN, from the look of it the Skald is the easiest class to start with mainly due to the lock in nature of the first island and the strength of the undead song. Looking at the skills and adding in past experiences it looks like the Skald will be the weakest class again.
WOTN may have lots of bugs and localization issues but the game is way more balanced than the pass games. The spirit tree isn’t 90% useless anymore!
Mind tree useless? Amazing how different people play. Regardless of class I generally get tier 3 of at least one magic school.
Regarding min maxing I am eyeing skald the ability to rush learning has huge snowball potential especially if you are using rage to finish off stacks.
In the past games the spirit tree was not as strong as the the other 2. It was not a coincidence that the mind tree got buffs from KB to AP and from AP to WOTN. Useless might be too strong of a word but on impossible difficulty there was usually a better choice on the other tree. Especially if you want a no loss game.
The buffs the spirit tree received in WOTN makes it much more worthwhile though.
Edit: changed mind to spirit
One of the things that makes my current Mage fairly powerful is that so far it seems there isn’t a decent supply of level four and five creatures. I am buying out black dragons…what would a warrior do?
Guess its time to re-roll a mage. I’ll keep my warrior as it is for a 2nd play through, if I feel like it.
Idk now that I know the lay of the land I maybe moving away from the Mage. Combat just takes a long time and waiting for mana to regen is just dumb. I enjoyed the warrior in ap the most so deciding between pally and warrior for hard playthrough.
You are going to be taking a lot of losses then. Hmm now I am being indecisive. Now I am thinking of sticking with the warrior unless people who have gotten much farther than me are running into problems.
Basically the line about taking on impossible challenges without losses or very small losses is making me want to try a mage. For me, a deadly group is just that. It will trounce me unless it is barely above stronger (isn’t that before deadly?).
I could always park my warrior and play as a mage for a while and get a taste of both.
If you are a new player, do not take on impossible challenges at all.
Stronger, strong, very strong, deadly, impossible, I believe. I miss fighting a zounds, though.
That greatly depends on which difficulty you’re playing it. On Normal, Mage was the most powerful class in KB, AP and AP: Crossworlds. On Impossible, however, the Warrior was the most powerful in all three.
In WotN I can’t tell yet, having only played a bit with the warrior equivalent (on Hard).
The level up mechanic was changed in AP from the original KB. You no longer choose whether to get attack, defense, rage, leadership, etc. You always get leadership.
The inherent advantage of playing a warrior still exists, however. You get more leadership per level up. You get to equip two weapons at a time (three with a companion), which gives you more attack/other perks. You also get faster rage generation and higher max rage. Finally you have access to unique Warrior skills.
Rage abilities are still turned off for boss fights, though, which makes them a total screw job. Still, warrior so far seems really good for the rest of the game (playing on Hard). Great suggestion on the trolls for the spider fight, incidentally; I only had 3 of them available (when I could have had 5 or 6 with my leadership), but they were still my most valuable stack in that fight by far.
I am not totally thrilled that just as I had an army of stuff I liked and I was really getting into it, the game pressed the reset button and I am stuck with very limited choices again.
I’m an idiot. I meant spirit tree not the mind tree. The green one. The mind tree is insanely powerful.
I should stop making posts in meetings.