Warlords Battlecry 2: I don't get it

Games
1

I found a cheapo copy of WBC2 the other day and I’ve been trying the campaign. I started with the Undead, making a Wizard -> Frost Mage.

By the time my guy was level 3 (two battles), I seriously couldn’t win another map. The AI always seemed to have twice as many units as me, and I guess twice as many resources. Their heroes were all blazingly fast, able to escape any sticky situation unless I managed to literally surround them with units and pin them down.

How the hell are you supposed to win in this game? I mean, I’m not an RTS idiot, I know I should be pushing my unit cap as much as possible, but it seems like if your hero dies in a battle or you lose strong components of your retinue, you’re fucked.

Anyone have some strategies to share?

2

Scoping around and acquire as many resources as you can.

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Early in the campaign, your hero doesn’t actually help all that much, because their stats aren’t really that good. In some cases, you might notice a boost in some areas when your hero dies.

What they are good at, though, is conquering nodes. However, you’ll eventually get some other units that can do this too, so losing your hero isn’t a huge deal. Just try not to lose him/her right at the beginning.

And I wouldn’t worry too much about their hero. They’re nice to pick off when you have a chance, but if they’re kiting you all over the map, maybe you’re focusing too much on that and not on building your economy and army. Those should be your highest priority – the enemy leader will die eventually once you have the clear edge.

Beyond that, I’m not really sure why you’d be having that many problems. The campaign is all about taking over juicy territories with meaningful bonuses. I could see you getting beat down eventually if you were taking few or bad territories and fighting a more established nation, but otherwise you should be on equal footing.

And as in most RTS’s, I would recommend playing with the speed setting. Make it slow at the beginning while you get everyone started doing what they should be, and then make it fast to pass the time if you’re just waiting on income, conversions, or travel.

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Any recommendations on a nation? Undead seem to require alot of micromanagement with upgrading individual units, plus they’re really, really slow.

5

Humans are good for starters. Thier cavalry kick ass. Like roving tanks.

Personally, I like the dwarves. They are probobly the slowest of all the races, but can take a pounding. If you can get some dwarven lords (or whatever they are called), Your all set. These guys have so much frigging armor it takes a sizeable army just to kill a few.

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You guys shut up. The last thing I need is to reinstall a game about levelling a character.

Once you can manage their micro, the undead are absolutely badass. They take a while to get going, but they can eventually hit really hard. And as Hiro said, don’t expect too much from your hero early on. There’s a sort of tipping point where the hero almost becomes more important than the army, but that’s not going to happen for another ten levels or so. At that point, you’re playing a whole different game, which is one of the really cool things about Battlecry.

-Tom

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I still play Battlecry 2 and 3 with my friends. You just can’t top these. They’re the pinnacle of the RTS genre. deepruntramp, WBC2 comes with an excellent foldout cheat sheet that details what every hero will be able to do. It lists all the spell schools and abilities and stats. It’s really a brilliant foldout that I used to read constantly while I was playing the game.

Some heroes that I would recommend: Human merchant (make your units really really cheap to build, but keep him away from combat!), undead necromancer (be a walking army generator, just summon undead anywhere on the map and upgrade them), and all the traditional heroes for Elves and Fey and Dwarves.

I just love these games so much. Another tip: You can do infinite queues, so you can be human for example, and build a basic barracks type building and produce pikeman and archers, and put it on infinite queue. If you want twice the amount of pikeman than archers, build two pikemen, one archer, and put on infinite queue. If you want equal amounts, put one of each. It works beautifully.

Another tip: For buildings that produce units, you can set their “attitude” which sets the units attitude when it gets produced. So for example, the building that produces Unicorns that can heal your hero? Just put the building on the attitude “Magical Guardian” and specify your Hero as the target. That way, any unicorns you produce in that building will automatically chase your hero around and help in his battles, and will automatically heal him when he’s injured. You can do this with any unit in the game, or any building.

Another tip: No matter who your hero, try to get a little bit of magic so you can get the spell which allows you to produce some basic workers right away. So if you can summon a grunt worker, you can put him to work in the mines. So right away, you start the game, summon some workers, and put them in the mines. That way your resources start coming in really fast.

That’s it from the top of my head for now, but one of my friends who recently moved to New York called and said he really missed playing games with us, and wants to regularly play Warlords Battlecry 3 again, so I’ll probably be playing the game again regularly soon. I’ll come back and post some advice if I think of any.

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By the way, what difficulty level are you playing on? Most of the time me and my friends were allied together, 3 of us and we still had trouble beating two computer players on the hardest difficulty. So we usually had one computer player on the hardest (I think it was called Emperor?) and one on a lesser difficulty.

By the way, if you don’t have all the latest patches, get them. They made many AI improvements and added AI difficulty levels and such. On their website they also added new AI behaviors you could set, and even an attitude or three. It’s all good stuff.

9

Does the AI cheat really bad? It fucking pisses me off that I’m cranking out skeletons when some big army wheels up full of siege equipment that just wrecks my base in seconds.

GAH! I was just in the middle of a mission, doing really well with a Minotaur Lord who joined my retinue, when the thing crashed. This game hates me.

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In Skirmish, I don’t think the AI cheats. Even on the highest difficulty levels, we’ve been able to take his resources away, which forces his hero to run around and try to get resources back before he can build again.

As for the campaign, I don’t know. I’m sure certain campaign scenarios are designed to give the computer a huge advantage, depending on the map.

The best part about the game is that you don’t have to keep playing the campaign if you don’t like it. You can also take your hero to Skirmish or multiplayer, and level him up there.

By the way, what kind of hero did you make?

Ironman? Bronzeman? Normal? I had a couple of Bronzemen heroes, but most of my heroes were Ironmen, so they all eventually died. (Ironman is the equivalent of Hardcore in Diablo 2, if you die, you’re dead permanently).

In Warlords Battlecry 2 they took away the Bronzeman option, which made things pretty interesting. None of us had the patience to wait for a normal hero to level up, so we always played with Ironmen heroes, and they all died. Sooner or later, no matter how careful you are, the Ironman hero eventually dies. But it’s still one hell of a ride while he’s alive.

11

My hero is an Undead Ice Mage on Normal mode. I get about one level a battle.

The game just crashed again – I’m using the 1.04 beta patch, is that supposed to be unstable or something?

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What Tom said. Man, I sank way too much time into the Battlecry games (primarily II).

All of the sides play very differently, which is part of what makes it such a blast. What I didn’t like is that if you have multiple AI opponents, you will always be the primary target. They will send armies halfway across the map to get to you, ignoring anyone else unless they happen to get in the way. If you have a fast hero or unit, you can lure these opposing armies into each other or into enemy bases, which can be the only way to survive against multiple high-level opponents.

What I liked to do is set up skirmish games with four or five AI opponents and one AI ally. Having an ally seemed to make things a little more interesting, and if you’re new to the game, watching them might give you some tips.

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I didn’t know you could make them fight each other Raife! That’s interesting. We always assumed that the AI teams were teamed together by default, so if we wanted them to fight each other, we purposely had to put them on separate teams, which is an option. So if we had more than one Emperor difficulty AI we were fighting, we’d put them on separate teams. One would be team 3, one team 4, etc.

And sorry buddy, I’ve only played with the 1.04 beta patch, and I never had any problems with the game crashing. But I haven’t tried WBC2 on any machine since WBC3 came out, so maybe it’ll start crashing on my more modern machine too? I hope not. We did always play with the NO CD patch from Gamecopyworld, the one that involved putting the intro movie or something into a specific folder on your harddrive, so that the game would be fooled.

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DEFRAG! That’s always worked for me.
1.04beta is THE patch, just means it never went through UbiSoft’s QA.

The cheap editions tend to skip the foldout. You can also download an updated spell chart.

15

For starting the new game you took a hero that’s a bit hard and a race that takes some time to get rolling.

I had success early on with Minotaur race and a Minotaur hero of the fighter type. The hero and a couple of big guys ran around taking nodes and buildings while the base back home built up basic fighters and ranged units until I could rush the next closest enemy. By the time you convert some of the buildings or mines of the first guy you wipe out it’s pretty much game over for the rest of the enemies on the map (you are doing that right?)

Anything that affects the enemy troops will to fight or gives your own troops a bonus while near your hero is very nice to have. Use your hotkeys for groups often and if you start hearing the heartbeat (hero dying) you’d better have him booking it out of combat already. The loss of your hero on a map can be devastating if not game ending.

EDIT: Almost forgot, the AI will rush towers a high percentage of the time. Use that to your advantage, place them around anything important giving you extra time to defend or bring reinforcements. They also give you visibility. Popping one up at some mines you took mid map is a great idea (your hero can build as well as convert.)

Also, keeping that troop from game to game as an elite unit makes a HUGE difference later on. Try not to let them die. Spending start points on extra builders is also a damn good idea.

16

Crap! Now I’m getting the itch to re-install this. As if I didn’t have enough to do already…

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I had success early on with Minotaur race and a Minotaur hero of the fighter type.

How could I forgotten the Minotaurs? Wow, that was definitely my first love in this game. The Minotaur heroes are awesome. I remember Minotaurs can heal by eating wildlife (sheep, cows, etc), and there’s a building that the minotaur race can build that produces sheep that only cost 1 gold or something, so you can have one building constantly building sheep and have its attitude as “Guardian” and target your hero. That way, all the sheep produced here go directly to your hero, and if he’s hurt, he automatically gobbles them up.

My only problem with that particular strategy is if my hero doesn’t get hurt for a while, it causes huge traffic jams with large number of sheep blocking narrow passages and other congestion problems.

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Not to mention the look of a giant Minotaur tearing the shit of out everything on screen fills you with a childlike glee. You might find yourself yelling, “RAWR” then snacking on mutton.

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WBC2 is my most-played RTS of all time so far (RoN may win that eventually). I picked Humans for my campaign, but eventually kept using the Orcs once I won their lands. I loved the orcs for so many reasons: Cheap infantry that allowed you to focus on iron, the giant general with the fear aura that could also hit flyers, and the goblin chucker. Artillery that produces irritating infantry when they hit or miss? Oh yeah.

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Play as dwarves, or maybe minotaurs (since they don’t have a lot of units) until you get a feel for things. That’s my recommendation. Also, it’s a dynamic campaign, so try restarting if things around you look too tough. Go for the weaker areas first and get the bonuses.