Warlords Battlecry 2: I don't get it

I’ve given up on the Undead since, after delving into the manual, I found out their achilles’ heel: crushing damage. It suddenly made sense why the Dark Dwarves and Barbarian towers were kicking the crap out of me.

So I guess I’m off to try a more well-rounded race. The Minotaurs look promising, as do the Humans and (regular) Dwarves.

Dwarves can be a lot of fun, but apart from Runners, their units are very slow. They can take a beating, though, and a brewery can put some pep in their step. Nothing takes down structures faster than Dwarven Lords.

Runemasters are key to base defense. Stick them in a tower, and when a horde comes knocking, pop them out and use their rock spell. Not much can stand up to a few Runemasters in a tower backed up by Runners or Infantry.

For Humans, the main problem can be air defense. Knights are fast and tough, but unlike High Elves, they can’t hit air targets. Make sure you’ve got Squires (and later Mages) around to make up for that. Pegasi can help there, too.

Speaking of Mages, White Mages have a very handy healing spell, and Red Mages can both give your units fire immunity (which is huge), and blast anything nearby with their fire ring spell. Black Mages can drain mana, which can be great against both enemy heroes and other mana-using units.

I’m sort of interested in giving my hero some kind of magic, but I’m not sure if I should just stay with the racial perks to unlock magic (like, say, Minotaur’s +5 Pyromancy) or if I should have a dedicated Priest/Mage (for Mastery/Grand Mastery of a specific magic type). Which circles of magic are worth it, anyhow?

You can go pretty far just taking the racial magic, but yeah, only dedicated spellcasters can get Mastery and Grandmastery, which make your spells much (much) more powerful for the same mana cost.

It depends if you want to support your armies or be an army.

I’ve created many many heroes, and tried to specialize at least once in every magical field, and I can honestly say that I liked every magic tree except for Chaos. One of my friends liked Chaos, because its basic spell and highest spells are good, but I personally didn’t think that whole tree was worth it. But YMMV.

My personal favorites are any magic trees that let you summon basic workers. That’s really awesome. You can get a huge head start if you can summon enough workers to fill in a mine or two at the beginning of the scenario/skirmish. But even magic trees that don’t have worker summons are good.

Even alchemy was a good tree because it lets you summon a lot of cool items for your hero. I remember one hero who built that all the way up, and then in every map, before we wiped out the AI, we’d meet in the middle and I’d make my friends some cool items.

The Undead are still one of my favorite races: I’d say come back to them once you’ve had more experience with the game. If you’re fighting a race that’s doing a lot of crushing damage, then Wraiths are the way to go.

I’d also be kind of leary of the dwarves. They’re the only racial type in WBC2 and 3 that I just couldn’t learn. I was always so frustrated with their lack of speed. They’re just so sloooooow. You can upgrade and make them faster by drinking a mug, but its one of the rare things in this game that you have to do manually. And I hate special abilities that you have to specifically use.

One of the greatest things about WBC2 and 3 for me, is that you don’t have to click on special abilities to use them. If you have a magical unit’s attitude set to Magical attacker or Magical Guardian, he will use special abilities and spells automatically.

So for example, White mages and Red Mages were mentioned earlier. White Mages can heal, and Red Mages can make your units immune to fire. Now in any other RTS (like Warcraft 3), you’re thinking “ugh, Micromanagement!”, but in Battlecry, just make them magical guardians, and they’ll automatically heal and cast fire immunity when they can, and if they can’t, they’ll still do their regular attacks.

And if for some reason, you’re a masochist and you LIKE micromanagement in your RTS games, then you can take them off Magical Guardians and Magic attackers, and they won’t do those things automatically, you’ll activate them by clicking or through a hotkey.

I tried Orcs tonite, making a Bronzeman Orc Shaman for the hell of it, and I think the race is pretty cool. You get a siege weapon right out the gate, and a super-fast with upgrades, disease-spreading cavalry the very next tier. Goblin Shaman are also very nice – their call lightning can obliterate armies.

I went with an Orc Shaman because I was doing Bronzeman, and wanted a character I could keep at the edges of combat, instead of wading into it with a Fighter or Assassin type. Chaos Magic is sort of ho-hum in the first tier, but Drain Mana, Morph Resources, Wildfire, and Chaos Plauge are all nice spells. Plus Shaman can get a +5 to Nature Magic, unlocking that tree for use (trees are locked unless you have a racial or class ability that gives you starting points, right?)

I’m also liking the bigger command radius and such that my hero got for gaining +CHA when I chose the Priest archetype. I love rushing into an enemy base early on and stealing their first barracks or even their capitol building right out from under them. It sort of makes me want to try a Paladin, lol.

Well, for anyone that cares, I’m doing pretty well with the Orcs, outside of a few stacked missions against the Humans which I just can’t seem to win (like, three allied Humans with ~20+ towers across the map versus me as the Orcs with no bonus… yikes). I currently control somewhere in the realm of 15-20 provinces, and everywhere I can invade is marked as “Determined Resistance,” which basically means “there’s a chance that you might run into a hero group five minutes in with two archons and two demons and have your hero killed in seconds.”

Despite my hero buying it a couple more times than I would have liked, (he’s Bronzeman, so I get reset to the beginning of my level if he dies), I’ve managed to get him to level 12, and by next level he’ll be able to cast Chaos Plauge, which should even the odds against some of these healer-type heroes which are kicking my ass.

I still haven’t gone for any other races’ capitols yet, based on the fact that the Dark Dwarves handed me my ass when I attacked them as the Undead – which made me figure my Hero needed to be a one-man army before taking on the capitol missions which are (appropriately) stacked against you.

So far the two races I’ve had the most trouble defeating are the Humans and the Daemons – Humans because they get cheapo pikemen, which means no cavalry for me, and Daemons because they can slam you with a flyer-filled mana-draining retinue early on. The rest of the races seem pretty easy straightfoward – though I haven’t tried picking a fight with the Minotaur yet.

Aaaaaaaand I’m stuck again. Now wherever I go to attack, it’s 3 AI versus me – even though the AI will attack eachother when they’re gathering outside my gates, they only launch attacks against me (and always know exactly where my base is too). Also, there’s always at least one Pyromancer or Ice Mage, invariably level 14, who just walks into my base and casts Ice Stones or Armageddon, completely destroying 2/3 of my base and inevitably causing economic loss I can’t recover from. If I’m lucky I can get a Drain Mana off before that happens, preventing the Armageddon/Ice Stone rush, but most of the time my hero just gets caught in the Armageddon/Ice Stone spell and either dies or just barely survives, forcing me to make haste to the “Forfeit” button.

Grom, the perpetually level 12 Shaman, I hardly knew ye. We had some good times together, and for awhile there it looked like you and I might have ruled Etheria. It’s not you, baby, it’s me – I’m just not a guy who thinks Chaos is a viable tree to specialize in anymore. I’ve seen those Daemonic Pyromancers in their frilly flower-sequined skirts and, well, I was weak. I’m sorry.

Yeah, unfortunately, I’ve had the same experience with Chaos Magic. It’s the only spell tree that I just can’t work with. It sounds good in theory, but it just doesn’t pan out in practice for me. At least not compared to all the other spell trees, where for the same mana, you can do a lot more useful things. I just don’t like Chaos Magic, even in WBC3.

Well, you got me to install this again. And I even created an Orc Bard. And then I remembered why I dislike Orcs so much: They can’t repair their buildings!!! Arrrrgh! So frustrating. I wonder why they put this into the game? Are Orcs really that strong in other areas that they need to have such a huge handicap? I personally don’t think so, but maybe I’m missing something about the Orcs?

Chaos magic didn’t even sound good in theory to me. The other trees have spells that give you some obvious benefit. Chaos just seems to reroll some dice, and the result may or may not be beneficial. Or am I missing something?

No, Chaos is easily the weakest magic tree. Some of the spells look interesting, but overall, it’s just not comparable to the other schools. This becomes very clear, as deep is finding, as enemy heroes get access to higher level spells.

As stated earlier, I don’t like Chaos Magic, but I do have defend it somewhat. The reason it looks good on paper is that it has two of the most powerful direct damage spells in the game. Especially when used in combination. Both Chaos Plague and Wildfire do a lot of damage. Chaos Plague cuts down everything’s hit points down by half and gives them disease (which cuts all their stats in half I believe), and Wildfire hurts everyone in your command radius a lot. I think it does 40 points of fire damage to everyone.

There aren’t many magic trees that have good direct damage from the hero. Ice Magic has a couple of powerful spells, as does Pyromancy, but I don’t think either of those are as good versus crowds as Chaos magic’s two hit combo of Chaos Plague and Wildfire.

The reason it doesn’t work as well in practice versus theory is that Chaos Magic doesn’t have anything to help you against individual heroes and other strong units. Plus most of its other “morph” spells require too much effort and time to be really effective.

A friend of mine likes Chaos Magic because he actually takes the time to build a lot of piddly little level 1 units, gathers them all up around him, and casts Morph spells to get their stats up. If the Morph spells have a negative effect, it doesn’t matter because the level 1 units were near zero to begin with, and cast the Morph spell a few times means you’ve suddenly got Level 1 units that fight more like Level 3 units or better. It can be effective if you’ve got micromanagement patience, which I don’t.

If I had that kind of patience, I would have enjoyed games like Warcraft 3 and other RTS games where you have to activate special abilities for units individually. No thanks.

Well Im not sure if any of you guys still play the game but I can share my experience with you.

Undead is one of the top races,ice mage is wrong choice for the allmighty Undead you should definitely go for Necromancer first conquer lands which will give you mana regen +max mana and armor ratings to your units Doom Knights are strongest champion unit in this game having 6+2 armor ratings which is %80 damage reduction only crushing is %70 for them plus double damage saw a doom knight one shotted a barbarian reaver,daemon trust me use dark portal create 320xp super elite Doom Knights give them vampirism sit back and watch them to slaughter everything even 4 or 5 of them are capable of killing a large group of daemon, salamander easily without losing hit points due to vampirism I was able to conquer all lands in hard difficulty just dont forget to fill mines with quasits and put ur every skill points in intelligence and magery coz as a necromancer you need lots of mana.

Humans are average and dwarves are worst because their units are very slow and their economy suffers from huge gold requirement just like humans a merchant hero can fix but beware an experienced sensible player will never let you expand your base especially in ‘‘multiplayer’’ most players agree that dwarves are just bad.

Dark dwarves are powerful and very dangerous for particularly undead because of their Golems with crushing damage are strong with good resistances their siege units are second to none with devastating damage and they have very long ranges with a merchant hero they are deadly.

High Elves are top tier, Moonguards are fast with multishot ability and flaming arrows are devastating plus you can mass them through trees which is a bonus(not latest version of wbc 3) I think and they have multishot siege weapon called manticore,dragon knights are amongst top quality you can get access to them early only need level 2 keep
a cavalry with good combat are able to attack air,income building and elcors healing ability my strategy is usually massing ancient wisps if you have 4-5 in your retinue it really helps with economy at early game and that way I can transmute crystal to gold and metal it helps me to produce lots of dragon knights early game.

Fey,according to what people say they are powerful but I didn’t use them if someone can tell me why it will be appreciated

Wow, thanks for reviving this thread. It was fun reading it again from beginning to end. 33 posts, so it didn’t take forever either.

Well thank you actually because after reading this thread it made me play again this awesome game wbc2 is one of the greatest rts/rpg game out there thanks mate :)

I did like the heroes of WBC 2, but WBC 3 is still my preferred cup of tie.

Well wb3 is very nice too I just dont like one thing about wbc2 and that is some specialities are restricted based on your hero’s race just like you cant be a pyromancer as a high elven hero unlike wbc3 but wbc2 is pretty good too.

Ah one last thing I hate two spells in entire game wildfire and ice storm while they are very powerful sadly they have a hit prerequisite sometimes they wont hit any enemy and sometimes they kill everyone.

BEWARE, A TITAN WALKS THE EARTH!

I love all these threads where people don’t understand why great games are great. Discussion is fun.

It’s true the races aren’t restricted in class, but since only a handful of factions get access to Mana regeneration trchs, it really is tough to play a dwarf mage. That being said, Warlords Battlecry the protectors does some interesting things with the game.