Test games played

[injonil]

I've played a game at Expert level and had to cheat to have a chance!

In my opinion, the AI is a bit too good. One wizard had early access to Psionic Blast and could take out a few mid level heroes with mid tier artifacts with but a few noob magicians. Without True Sight it would be nearly impossible to beat him.

Better if magicians had only access to their own spells imo.

Also, it's a bit too hard to level heroes (experience required for the higher levels are too high). I agree that it should be a bit harder than in vanilla, but this is much too hard.

Thanks for a very good game though!

[teelaurila]

Well with this game Expert really means expert. I am nowhere good enough to assessing combat odds yet that I could afford to play expert without some trial and error via save&load. So right there with you.

Magicians are at a very interesting spot right now. They are glass cannons that are generally good at defense (at least cost-effeness -wise) and suck at offense. With just fireball they would be but a pale comparison. As the only generic unit with caster ability they are awesome. With black/red/blue you can use them to disrupt enemies en masse (for example, black prayer yourself and 5 magicians throw black sleeps). While green and white can buff their own magicians to actually survive some return fire.

[Nelphine]

I think it's interesting that you say there's a lack of experience for Heroes when seravy and I are discussing reducing experience because there's too much. Admittedly we're discussing reducing some of the very rares but still.

What kind of battles are you doing with your heroes that you think there's too little experience?

[Seravy]

Well I do think experience needed for the highest hero levels might be excessive but I did reduce the amount for Demigod in the last update which was the main offender (1100 XP for the last level is just crazy).
The main difficulty in getting EXP is that neutrals are not worth as much as units of other wizards, but that's intended.
Higher difficulty levels where the AI produces more (and likely stronger) units the heroes can kill mean they level up faster so I guess on Normal or Advanced, they'd take much longer to level up.

[injonil]

About hero levels and experience. The problem was partly because I couldn't engage in battle with the Wizard with Psionic Blast until I had mid level heroes with mid tier artifacts AND True Sight. So, lack of combat to gain experience and at the same time much higher experience required for the higher levels.

[teelaurila]

AI likes to snipe heroes, and is pretty good at it, so it's not easy to bring them to battle. Defense is mostly about items, though, so you can bring inexperienced heroes to even late game fights.

[Seravy]

Another game with Chaos Dark Elves, this time 10 books.
https://youtu.be/Qtq6cZtXPXw
https://youtu.be/3dEpOF-CoW8

[Nelphine]

I was very impressed. 9 heroism adamantium draconian bowmen killed a 9 chaos spawn tower in one attack without taking any damage. (Sadly only got Supreme light; in 1403, I have no units that Supreme Light can help, nor do I have enough casting skill to cast it even if I wanted to).

Now they're just going to raze all of arcanus. My myrran opponents are draconian and dark elf, so I'm going to see how the second stack of bowmen does against them.

[crusader.mike]

Early stack of bowmen is pretty good in some circumstances. I had a High Men game where they (normal bowmen, not adamantium) made my victory by getting me 1 cave and 3 nodes (2 of them were chaos nodes) very early in the game. Only 4 of them had heroism (it was very early, heroism was expensive). Chaos Spawns have relatively low movement -- it helps tremendously.

[Nelphine]

Sadly, they are too slow. I couldn't conquer all of arcanus with only one stack. By the time I started getting to important cities, the AI had enough summons to cause casualties. Ah well.