Contents
Building Combat Parties
Steps:
- Drag minions onto the ‘New team’ option to form a new team.
- Drag more minions onto the team until you have your chosen team ready.
- Select the team by clicking on it.
- Choose a team leader from the minion list and click control.
- To attack with the team leader, move them into an enemy.
- Click on items in inventory to use them, equip them, throw them etc.
- Right click on enemies for various options. eg. Order Capture
- Press t to explore the campaign map with your party.
Choosing Team Members
Making Good Melee Units:
- High damage and defence unit
- Try melee resistance potions
- Hit enemies with melee vulnerability potions
- Get a good melee weapon
- Often played as the team leader
Making Good Mages:
- High spell damage skill
- Mage weapon and armour
- Get the best spells
Making Good Archers:
- High ranged damage unit
- Get the best bows
Night Scouts:
- Give your team the ability to see at night
- Let your archers shoot at night
- Use night scouts in dark caves
- Spot the enemy first to suprise them or avoid them
- Can use night vision mushrooms
Aerial Scouts:
- Give you line-of-sight past trees and some other barriers
- Aim arrows at full range through a forest
- See enemies before they see you
- Shoot enemies before they see you
Trap Disarmers:
- Very useful against enemy dungeons
- Will see traps
- Will disarm traps when you move into them
Healers:
- Train in the healing school
Shaman:
- Heal spirits such as dopplegangers
Spies:
- Work out the dungeon layout you are attacking.
- Try looting the enemy dungeon.
- Sabotage the enemy furniture.
- Try a ring of spying.
Looters:
- Need to have infinite carry capacity
Riders: Must have the riding skill. Match the size of your rider to an appropriate beast. For instance, imps can ride rats, bats, and ravens, while goblins have the option to ride wolves and deer. Humans have a range of options that includes horses, ents, unicorns, minotaurs, and dragons.
Examples of Riders:
archer
child
duke
elf lord
goblin warrior
imp
keeper
knight
peasant
skeleton warrior
squire
thief
vampire warrior
witchman
Steeds: Match the size of your rider to an appropriate beast.
Examples of Steeds:
bat
black dragon
bone dragon
cave bear
deer
flying carpet
green dragon
horse
ki-rin
minotaur
rat
raven
red dragon
skeleton wolf
slasher
tree spirit
unicorn
white dragon
wolf
yellow dragon
yeti
Choosing the Battlefield
- Determine what triggers your enemies and their attack patterns
- Consider luring enemies to your home dungeon to gain the advantages of defence
- Watch out for fire creatures that may burn down your dungeon
- Surround single creatures in the open
- Fight armies in confined spaces to avoid being surrounded
- Protect your keeper and dungeon by taking the fight to tough enemies
- Secure an area promptly after invading to bring prisoners back alive.
- Capture enemies in battle by baiting them to attack your dungeon, making it easier to seize them when they fall.
- Quick torture can make defeated prisoners switch sides in a fight.
- Keep in mind that defeated prisoners die after 300 turns and can be shot, control your team to displace captives behind your front line
Keeping Control of the Party
Mode 1 – Don’t Chase:
- Stop your troops running off all over the place chasing enemies.
- If you don’t have this set, they will break ranks and charge at all enemies.
Mode 2 – Stop:
- Get your troops into a standing formation
- Only the leader moves
- Switch leader and position everything as you want it
- Leave a defensive block at a useful place and attack with the leader.
- Tell a healer or defensive block to stand ground in a safe place while the leader attacks. Then return to the healer to get healed.
- As you come under attack you can switch leader and keep a defensive block.
- The formation of the standing army is broken after they follow their leader again.
Mode 3 – Neither Ignoring Enemies nor Standing Ground:
- Chase enemies
- Good for mopping up fleeing enemies, if you don’t want any to escape
Mode 4 – Full Control Mode:
- Control each unit in turn
- Press ‘w’ to wait until other units have moved
- Right-click on the unit to manually order it to move if it hasn’t moved yet in that cycle.
- Handy for keeping a line moving through a chokepoint and checking inventory and combat experience.
- Be patient
Consider the Line of Sight
- Throwing items, firing ranged weapons and casting ranged spells can only be done properly at creatures visible to the attacker
- Potion throwing enemies and archers: Shoot them or avoid direct lines of sight or hit them with slow, sleep, blindness or poison
- Try and identify the enemies that have large ranged damage or ranged spell damage by resting your cursor on them.
- Make a distinction between monsters capable of 5 ranged damage and monsters that will do deadly ranged damage.
- Night Vision, elf vision and flight will improve visibility and allow you to hit targets that perhaps cannot see you.
- Being shot through the head from behind a tree is a miserable way to end your heroics, so don’t let it happen.
Scout the Enemy Dungeon First
- If you find or make a ring of spying, then use it.
- Find and sabotage the enemy’s means of production. Steal their building resources and break down their training and production centres.
- Kill the enemy’s workforce and ensure they can not easily get new workers.
- Invisible opponents: Sometimes, you have 3 options – Go invisible yourself, run, or die!
- Running is often the best option because invisibility spells normally have a cooldown.
- Get the enemy to use all his potions up during this part of the dungeon battle.
- Try to take out any traps before taking out the army.
- Take loot: Potions, scrolls, mushrooms, artifacts and dungeon resources (if you have infinite carry capacity in your party).
- Find any storage rooms and empty them of all the useful items. Check corpses for these items after killing enemies.
- Deal with traps using a creature that can disarm them. If you are an adventurer who cannot disarm traps then play it carefully.
Web trap: You can still fight from within the web. Teleport if you are webbed and attacked by stronger enemies.
Poison trap: Works in your favor if you have a poison resistance ring Surprise, alarm and panic traps: Trigger the trap and run away again. Come back later.
Undead: Dismember them until they are weak. The first blow is the hardest. Hit and run if you can.
Attacking Large Armies
- A lot of battles are lost because you go into them injured.
- If you are fighting in a dungeon party, take healers and shaman (who heal spirits).
- Enemy healers and shaman: Take them out quickly because they heal other monsters.
- Always consider your enemy before attacking. Rest your cursor on an enemy to judge their stats and level.
- Seperate them and pick them off one at a time, especially if they are in a dungeon.
- Fight armies in corridors in preference to rooms or the open battlefield where you can fight one enemy at a time.
- If you have to fight armies on the open battlefield where numbers have a huge advantage, make sure you also have a large amry.
- Try to fix it so that you get the first hit in every one-on-one confrontation.
- Compare their stats to your own.
- To be reasonably safe you need attack and defense higher than your opponent.
- Blind and sleeping opponents are generally safer, so blind them and put them to sleep.
- If you are alone, realise when you are about to die and retreat. Use a speed potion if you need to.
- Take being wounded VERY seriously if your minion is powerful or you are in Adventurer Mode. Never just keep on fighting.
- Retreat and heal. If you are chased, go for a speedy retreat and heal up.
- When you need to heal, use a first aid kit, or use a healing potion or some sort of spirit heal.
- Be careful of healing yourself in a difficult fight. It takes a turn to heal, first aid kits take more than one and you can be hit again.
- In adventurer mode, you can sleep on beds without returning to a dungeon. This is a great way to heal for free.
- If you have to fight the army eventually, do it well.
Common Traps
- Terror trap: Causes the trespasser to panic.
- Gas trap: Releases a cloud of poisonous gas.
- Alarm trap: Summons all minions.
- Web trap: Immobilises the trespasser for some time.
- Surprise trap: Teleports nearby minions to deal with the trespasser.
- Fire trap: Causes a tower of flame to errupt under the trespasser.
- Boulder trap: Causes a huge boulder to roll towards the enemy.
- Blast trap: Causes an air blast to throw the enemy across a few tiles.
- Gargoyle trap: Comes to life when an enemy comes near.
Boulder/Web Combination Trap
- These traps are difficult in Adventurer Mode without a spying ring or trap-disarming abilities.
- If caught in a web trap in front of a boulder trap, use a teleport spell immediately to avoid being crushed.
- Without a teleport spell, you will not survive.
- Herding wildlife into the trap can be an alternative, or triggering it with deception, flies or summoning spells.
- Some maps require an “Indiana Jones” approach to traps.
- If facing a lone boulder trap, trigger it and step aside, or trigger it without getting too close.
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