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playing again for the first time in 10 years

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lunajenny

Mar 19, 2013 8:44 am GMT
I remember I played this game like 10 years ago and it gave me a pretty sound thrashing. I was trying to play through a campaign where the protagonist is trying to get an artefact of some kind so she can become a dragon and I couldnt even beat the first level despite trying a lot at it. I recently found a copy of heroes chronicles and beat it and that made me want to retry the dragon campaign from this game.

Just a few questions before I start:
What skills should I aim for on my main characters? I found the various magic schools to be useful for mass-buffs/debuffs, chain lightning, frost ring and implosion, and also pathfinding and intelligence. Are these considered good skills or are there better ones and why?

What is a good build order for my towns? Should I go with different build orders for my towns? I usually got the town hall upgrades first on my main towns, and on the next ones I got I always got the first tier of unit producers so I can be building up their numbers even before I can afford them since I can usually eventually save up the money to buy them all anyway.

What spells are ideal? I usually focused on getting haste, bless, blind, berserk, slow, chain lightning, implosion and frost ring.

Any good strategies to mention? I usually had a hero rush to enemy territory as fast as possible using magic a lot to get there, then ran around tagging enemy mines, taking poorly defended towns and generally doing my best to disrupt them without being cornered while I built up my town and used my other heroes systematically tagged the mines around my area and the middle areas. I typically bought a cheap hero to transport men to my hero rampaging around the enemy territories so he can occasionally take out some of the weaker armies chasing him. Then I would eventually finish off the enemy as soon as it looked like I had the power to do so, which was helped by how I weakened the enemy with my harassing movements and didnt need to worry about enemy attacks on my own territories thanks to them chasing me around.
Pyroxenz

Mar 19, 2013 5:37 pm GMT
The campaign you're talking about where you play as Mutare is an Armageddon Blade's campaign. Do note that AB campaigns are a notch more difficult than the campaigns from Hero Chronicles (wait till you try the dragon slayer one).

You are stuck with Tactics and the worthless Estates skills from the start. You should endeavour to learn Logistics, Wisdom, Offense and Earth Magic. I would recommend the remaining 2 slots to be used on any combination of Air Magic (mass haste), Armorer, Archery or Fire Magic. Intelligence will be overkill here since you get to use mana vortexes throughout the campaign. Pathfinding is not necessary since you will be playing on terrain native to your faction (ie subterranean).

Make sure to fully upgrade all your mage guilds and learn every possible spell before moving on to the next campaign scenario. Useful ones are Town Portal, Resurrection, Slow and Armageddon. Past the second scenario when your knowledge and spell power starts to hit the double digit range, you can run around Armageddoning the AI to oblivion with just a single pack of Black Dragons.

Generally the first scenario in any campaign is the toughest since your hero is completely undeveloped. I find the best approach is to take the fight to the AI. The first map is small so don't bother with a city hall. Instead, build your creature dwellings, recruit all available creatures at the start of week 2, then go attack the AI.
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Burning with anger, the ArchDevil hits the Archangel for 150% damage.
lunajenny

Mar 20, 2013 8:50 am GMT
Doesn't armageddon hit my own units as well?

Also, on the first level I won't have heroes with lots of spells like you said, so won't it be difficult to fight past the random monsters on the way there? Thanks for the info, it seems the game is indeed heroes 3 with armageddons blade, perhaps I should play an easier campaign first?
Pyroxenz

Mar 20, 2013 4:35 pm GMT
lunajenny posted...
Doesn't armageddon hit my own units as well?

Black Dragons are immune to magic. Don't bring along other unit types or they will be toast together with your enemy!

Also, on the first level I won't have heroes with lots of spells like you said, so won't it be difficult to fight past the random monsters on the way there?

2 weeks' worth of units, plus troops transferred from 2 fresh heroes recruited from the tavern, should be sufficient for you to comfortably defeat the neutral stacks guarding the chokepoint between you and the AI. IIRC, the AI starts with more towns than you, so the longer you let the game drag, the more of a disadvantage you will be in.

Once you capture the first AI town, you will secure for yourself a big leg-up over the AI. After that, it is a mere matter of mopping up the remnants of the resistance.

Thanks for the info, it seems the game is indeed heroes 3 with armageddons blade, perhaps I should play an easier campaign first?

AB campaigns are targetted at players with substantial knowledge of the game. But since you have beaten a Heroes Chronicles campaign before, you should be able to tackle this. Past the second scenario, the rest of the campaign just ends up as a Armageddon spamfest anyway. Cross the crucial hurdle of the first scenario and you'll be fine.
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Burning with anger, the ArchDevil hits the Archangel for 150% damage.
lunajenny

Mar 21, 2013 8:47 am GMT
So for Armaggedon, I rush to get black dragons then just rush at the enemy spamming it and take them down before they get anything good enough to kill my dragons? Does this strategy work on any of the other campaigns where black dragons arent available? I would imagine if it was possible to get some kind of fire resistance or units immune to fire it should be possible. Or perhaps if I focused on buying one stack of high hitpoint units then not that many of my own units would be killed. Do I need a lot of magic power and spellpoints to make this strategy work? What if my mages guild doesnt have armageddon in it?
Terotrous

Mar 21, 2013 11:54 am GMT
The Armageddon strategy doesn't work during the campaign at all, its purely for skirmish battles. First of all, if your primary hero retreats, game over. That completely rules out using your main hero for the strategy. You can still do it on a secondary hero, but generally, the Armageddon strat works best when an enemy hero is approaching your castle, you can Armageddon him a few times (flee and rehire your hero, then attack him again) to weaken his army before fighting it with your main hero. However, on a large percentage of the campaign maps, the opponent will never come after you, you have to go to them, and they have stacks that are so large Armageddon will not do any real damage.

The correct way to beat the campaigns is to expand aggressively and capture as many resource dwellings and mines as you can early on. Then, set up a good unit supply chain to grab creatures and resources and transfer troops to your main hero as they continue to clean out the rest of the map. Some maps have annoying portals that force you to split your forces between two heroes, watch out for those.

Also, once you've basically won a map (ie, you control all of the dwellings, only some small target like the enemy's final town or a neutral stack remains), take the time to power up your main hero by grabbing spells and visiting stat boosting locations around the map, this pays massive dividends in later missions.

As for the specific campaign you mentioned, it does get pretty tough towards the end, the final battle is an absolutely huge map where powerful enemies will come from many sides. There's neutral towns around you, you must take them quickly, then focus on shutting down the narrow paths leading to the subterranean gates as you gradually expand outwards. It also really helps to grab a couple strong neutral creatures using diplomacy. Make sure the creatures to the right of your starting point join you, then take the free creatures beyond them and split these among 2-3 heroes to allow you to expand faster.

It also really helps if you powered up Mutare in earlier maps. Many of the towns in the Armageddon's Blade campaign bar towns from getting Fly / Dimension Door / Town Portal, but occasionally they don't, so you should always build your mage guilds up all the way before finishing a mission to see what hidden goodies could be there. If you can land Town Portal this mission will be MUCH easier.

As for other general campaign advice, when you're offered the starting bonus, a stack of high-level creatures is virtually always the best choice, since it allows you to beat neutral stacks more easily and expand faster, which yields by far the most power in the long run. The only exception is artifacts, when the artifact is something absurdly good (like a Tome for example). High-Level Creature Dwellings should be taken only when the offered creatures suck. Extra resources is almost never worth it.
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http://terosclassicgaming.blogspot.com/ - Watch me beat "GBA Summon Night Swordcraft Story"
http://www.backloggery.com/tero - My backloggery
Pyroxenz

Mar 21, 2013 5:46 pm GMT
lunajenny posted...
So for Armaggedon, I rush to get black dragons then just rush at the enemy spamming it and take them down before they get anything good enough to kill my dragons? Does this strategy work on any of the other campaigns where black dragons arent available? I would imagine if it was possible to get some kind of fire resistance or units immune to fire it should be possible. Or perhaps if I focused on buying one stack of high hitpoint units then not that many of my own units would be killed. Do I need a lot of magic power and spellpoints to make this strategy work? What if my mages guild doesnt have armageddon in it?

In the AB campaign (the one where you play as Gelu), you can also do this with Gold Dragons and later on Phoenixes/Energy Elementals/Magic Elementals, all of which are immune to fire. And in the final scenario when you acquire the AB artifact, you can do this with any unit composition.

You would have to be very unlucky if none of your mage guilds have the Armageddon spell within. Make sure to visit all the stat-boosting map locations. You can also buy spell power and knowledge boosting artifacts from the Artifact Merchant.

Terotrous posted...
The Armageddon strategy doesn't work during the campaign at all, its purely for skirmish battles. First of all, if your primary hero retreats, game over.

The AI in this particular campaign doesn't field strong armies. A single Armageddon is generally enough to incinerate their army in 1 cast, or at least severely decimate their numbers where a second one will finish the job. Make sure your stack of Black Dragons is sizeable enough to beat down enemy Black Dragons, which should be easy as you specialize in Dragons, and your atk/def stats will be significantly higher.

As for the specific campaign you mentioned, it does get pretty tough towards the end, the final battle is an absolutely huge map where powerful enemies will come from many sides.

The final scenario was a cakewalk compared to the first one. I took the starting bonus of 6 Black Dragons, gave 1 each to my 2 lieutenants to clear mines with Armageddon, and the remaining 4 with Mutare who headed straight for the AI from day 1 and incinerated everyone, also with Armageddon. AI never knew what hit them.

The key is to be ultra-aggressive, and not let the AI who start with more towns and resources than you build up their troop count.
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Burning with anger, the ArchDevil hits the Archangel for 150% damage.
Terotrous

Mar 21, 2013 9:00 pm GMT
Unless I'm thinking of the wrong scenario, the map is so big it'd take at least 2 months just to reach everyone from your starting point, and I'm pretty sure some of them start with big armies.
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http://terosclassicgaming.blogspot.com/ - Watch me beat "GBA Summon Night Swordcraft Story"
http://www.backloggery.com/tero - My backloggery
lunajenny

Mar 22, 2013 4:48 am GMT
Well, I ended up starting with restoration of erathia since it appears to be the primary campaign and I don't recall ever doing it. I'll move on from there to some of the others I think, and if AB campaigns are harder then I can gain some more experience

I'm making a threat for my restoration of erathia campaign where I'll basically say what I've been doing and would appreciate it if people would offer advice on how to improve my strategy and point out what I'm doing wrong =D

Also, this particular campaign seems to be crashing a lot, though I'm only on the first scenario of it I tried a bit of the first scenario of dragon blood and it didnt crash at all. Does anyone else get this? Seems to crash about once every 2 weeks so I save at the end of every day
Pyroxenz

Mar 22, 2013 4:57 am GMT
I actually have save games of every campaign scenario right before I complete the mission objective. A quick load told me I beat the final scenario of Mutare's campaign in 2 mths 1 week and 3 days.

I then restarted that scenario and rushed the AI. This time I beat it in 3 weeks and 4 days. AI never got beyond manticores.
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Burning with anger, the ArchDevil hits the Archangel for 150% damage.
Terotrous

Mar 22, 2013 6:02 am GMT
Well, the concept of fast expansion and pressure remains, it's apparently just possible to do it even faster than I was going about it.

Probably depends on what spells / skills you were able to pick up through the first parts of the campaign. I don't think my Mutare had Logistics, which obviously hurts how fast you can progress.
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http://terosclassicgaming.blogspot.com/ - Watch me beat "GBA Summon Night Swordcraft Story"
http://www.backloggery.com/tero - My backloggery