Artificier strategy

[Seravy]

Now that we changed artifact costs, I wanted to play using an Artificier hero strategy again....but I don't know if it even still works. Maybe we overnerfed it?
(to put it simply, this is the strategy that relies mainly on heroes to clear nodes and conquer - nonhero troops are primarily self-defense, garrison, and filler in the hero armies.)

First of all, the wizard.
1 Artificier - This is obviously needed for an Artificier strategy.
1 Famous - Not really optional anymore - with the first 30 turns having no heroes, this is essential to make sure you get a hero in a reasonable amount of time. You could afford waiting 40 turns for the first hero originally, but now that the clock starts to tick on turn 30, that would make it turn 70 - by then you already lost the game if you weren't doing anything.

5 Life - Not optional - 5 books are now required for the good enchantments (Invulnerability, Lionheart)
5 Sorcery - Not optional - You need it for Phantasmal and Invisibility.

This still leaves you without Teleportation, but that's acceptable.
The problem here? First of all, zero flexibility. Not even a single pick you can use on something different. So you can't play this as a Myrran, you can't have Alchemy, or an additional Nature or Death or Chaos book, or anything. That's boring.
The second, zero flexibility means the strategy isn't scaleable to the difficulty. You can't pick more, and stronger retorts to play on higher levels. If this beats, for example, Expert in the current version, that's all you can play. You can't add Alchemy or Archmage or your preferred "powerhouse" retort to try Master or Lunatic difficulty (though I doubt the strategy is viable for the latter and probably shouldn't be). You also can't "drop" something and pick a weaker choice to play lower difficulty.

Other realms - Death for wraithform or Nature for regeneration or merging are entirely impossible unless you completely drop Life or Sorcery - what really matters in those needs 5 books.

So that's it for the wizard.
this could probably be fixed by reconsidering the book costs - maybe raising the good stuff to 5 was a bit too harsh.

Now for the actual gameplay.

In the first 30 turns you don't get heroes. Which means you have to enter the time period when the AI starts attacking you without any sort of plan. Sorcery/Life has no good summoning, so that's mostly your race and its units - but you don't get enough Life picks to do "super-buffed normal unit" either - you must pick Just Cause and Healing and Heroism (ok, maybe not heroism, Famous might level up your heroes...but I wouldn't bet on that) so you can only pick one buff and even that means no Heavenly Light - which is absolutely critical, too.
I suppose, Nagas are an option but...idk, feels a waste of mana crystals and sorcery picks.
Overall, you must go "military first" instead of the usual 1-2 settlers. Even if you see a spot with gold ores next to you or something. Of course it also means any race without a strong early military option is out. No halflings (even though they are great with Life) or Orcs or High Men or...I guess the others are fine.
Again, feels a bit overly limited.

Once you survive these turns, you need to...get a hero. Which means, passing turns without spending your gold. While everyone else is busy rush-producing the sawmills in their new outposts, you can't even buy a settler - if a hero shows up, you have to have the 200-600 gold needed to pay for it. This wouldn't be so bad but after already being forced to not build settlers, not being able to buy them for gold either hurts. Let's hope the "military first" strategy finds some gold in treasure.

Of course, once you have your hero, and possibly an item to equip - you had nothing better to do in the first 30 turns anyway - you can take advantage of that and conquer some neutrals or AI using the hero so it's not like it's a bad strategy or unplayable - but considering the sheer number of AI units, I don't thing the hero can keep up with all that and actually hold anything.

If you get past that obstacle too, then there is spell blast from the AI, and having to research create artifact, but once you manage to deal with both somehow, you finally have some really powerful heroes. Except, you need to still find a wraithform item for all your heroes and they are so rare now, you probably won't, so you can forget about fighting anyone with Nature books using heroes as you have no Crack's Call protection.

...so, does anyone else play an Artificier hero strategy? Is it still playable? Is it still FUN?

[Nelphine]

.. Why is sorcery mandatory? How is invisibility and phantasmal mandatory?

If anything magic immunity and wraithform are the only things I would remotely consider mandatory. After that, just max defense, endurance and holy armor and iron skin.

[zitro1987]

It would be a bit funner if other realms have more hero-related benefits, not limiting hero strategies to life (and to a lesser extent, sorcery?)

*Nature - could allow +2attack/defense from land link to also apply to heroes. Later enchantments are rather good however.
*Chaos - Pretty bad, though mystic surge can be powerful with heroes.
*Death - the combo of wraithform and cloak of fear is quite powerful early on, but not much later that is hero-centric in game.
*Sorcery - 2nd best as focus magic, resist magic, guardian wind, flight, invisibility, and later magic immunity are very powerful if combined.

[Settemio]

this could probably be fixed by reconsidering the book costs - maybe raising the good stuff to 5 was a bit too harsh.

Sorry, I missed it, which book costs were raised? Is there a table somewhere of the new book costs?

[Nibiru]

I think that permenantly losing your hero upon death is what forces picking many books of certain realms.

[Seravy]

.. Why is sorcery mandatory? How is invisibility and phantasmal mandatory?

If anything magic immunity and wraithform are the only things I would remotely consider mandatory. After that, just max defense, endurance and holy armor and iron skin.

Without invisibility, you can't use ranged heroes to clear out nodes and lairs. (You can with teleportation but that also costs 6 books and is inferior - ranged enemies can still hurt you.)
Without Phantasmal the hero won't do enough damage to very rare and other heavily armored targets. I guess it's the less important of the two.

Sorry, I missed it, which book costs were raised? Is there a table somewhere of the new book costs?

They were changed many times already, but the first modded version I believe had 1-4 books required for every item enchantment. Nothing needed 5 or more.

I think that permenantly losing your hero upon death is what forces picking many books of certain realms.

Agreed, this is why Life (Healing, Raise Dead, Resurrection, etc) is pretty much mandatory - even if not making items. Nature's Regeneration can work but it is very rare so...that's not something you can plan around having for most of the game.

[Arnuz]

Some random thoughts, make of this what you would.

The second, zero flexibility means the strategy isn't scaleable to the difficulty. You can't pick more, and stronger retorts to play on higher levels. If this beats, for example, Expert in the current version, that's all you can play. You can't add Alchemy or Archmage or your preferred "powerhouse" retort to try Master or Lunatic difficulty (though I doubt the strategy is viable for the latter and probably shouldn't be). You also can't "drop" something and pick a weaker choice to play lower difficulty.

Other realms - Death for wraithform or Nature for regeneration or merging are entirely impossible unless you completely drop Life or Sorcery - what really matters in those needs 5 books.
[...]
...so, does anyone else play an Artificier hero strategy? Is it still playable? Is it still FUN?

Why shouldn't it be viable at lunatic? As far as I understand, the objective is to balance the various possibilities so that, at a certain point, the amount of AI "cheating" can be dropped as well. I thought that one objective was to avoid having to play at different levels of difficulty based on the strategy that one chooses to use. Am I alone in this?

Rather than boosting the hero strat though, I believe that we should nerf the super powered ones. If we nerf the OP ones so that none can actually beat lunatic without great luck then the AI bonus can be reduced, and this can be repeated cyclically until many strategies are available and equal. I'm not saying to make lunatic easy mind you - if this level of lunatic is what you aim for, then dropping the power of certain strategies that beat it consistently so that expert is the "honest" level is an equal objective to this. The end result is that many strategies would be available at the same level of difficulty, and none would be clearly better than the others.

Anyhow -  my proposal. Why is it necessary to wait to get a hero? Why couldn't a retort give it from day 1? Maybe famous, instead of the fame bonus which makes little sense at the beginning (there's no maintenance to speak of). The fame can then be accumulated by the hero, clearing lairs/nodes. Otherwise, if there's a good reason not to have the hero on day 1, then famous could ensure the hero (no dice roll) at turn n. To make the strategy viable there should perhaps be a greater number of easy lairs, with common summons, with of course very small treasure, to speed up the painful experience build-up phase.

Spells that I find useful on heroes:
- resist magic (with some lesser resistance granting item, it makes them impervious to confusion, black sleep, and the like)
- resist elements (with bless and some lesser defence granting item, it makes them impervious to most ranged magic)
- bless (with resist elements it allows to withstand a lot of fire bolts and fortress lightnings)
- healing, holy armor
- focus magic

More powerful spells are also more expensive and contend with summons for overland skill, so I tend not to cast them. I'll make an exception for heroism and endurance when needed, but not at the cost of a focus magic'd ghoul less. Note how many spells can make the hero work greatly if paired with some items! I believe that the trick should be creating items with spell synergies, and that we should concentrate the balancing effort towards this. A vampiric blade can let you beat a very strong node by restoring health, and is great together with holy or eldritch weapon for example, and so on. Finding combos like this that are available in the early game is what makes a strategy possible at higher difficulty levels!

Another input I'd like to give is this. It's quite annoying to get a champion at 0 experience mid game, and be forced to lose a high level thief who's been growing for the whole game and managed to survive countless battles because there's no further development, to free up the slot. Ideally all heroes should start from a comparable level of power and be allowed to reach the same level of usefulness and power. Summon champion might then summon an already experienced hero, rather than a "better kind" one, and summon torin could mean summoning a demi-god. I understand that this is a major change, as it'd mean re-balancing all the abilities... But another way to approach this could be to have the abilities come based on the level rather than at the beginning, and increase the starting attack and defence values to balance the reduced up-front usefulness. A level 1 wind mage with 10 spellcasting skill that carries around a stack of wyrms is rather funny...

[MrBiscuits]

A good strategy could be to start as normal with sprites or whatever to clear nodes and then transition to using heroes when you get a couple of good ones. By then you will probably have a armour piercing weapon and some other nice items from nodes.

I'd say heroism is definitely mandatory though, heroes are just too fragile without it at first.

[Nibiru]

I think fame in general is not reliable enough to build a strategy upon, famous doesn't really help as it cant gaurantee a hero within the first 50 turns.

Below are some ideas on how to remedy this (not inteded to be implemented together):

- Famous lets you start with a hero or gaurantee one within xx turns.

- Ressurect becomes an arcane spell (could replace heroes shout)

Alternatively :

If possible, a hero that is killed in combat is automatically ressurected in the fortess after xx turns.

[Seravy]

Why is it necessary to wait to get a hero? Why couldn't a retort give it from day 1?

Because it wins the game effortlessly. If you hire a good hero on turn 5, you can use it to take out any wizard you encounter - they do not yet have enough casting skill or powerful troops to do anything about it. Unless the AI can at least cast 2-3 times a battle, it won't be able to hurt a hero using spells, and nothing you can produce that early hurts a 10+ shield hero.

Even on Lunatic it takes the AI at least 50-80 turns to be able to deal with a hero - either by researching an uncommon direct damage spell, or hiring their own or producing high end troops like stag beetles that can potentially deal damage to it.
In that much time, your hero can conquer half the world, not to mention find enough equipment that it remains invincible even if the AI does get something.

Why shouldn't it be viable at lunatic?

Numbers. You can at most have 6 heroes and each can at most take out one enemy stack a turn. On that high difficulty, there are too many enemies to take out for heroes to be able to do it.
ofc heroes combined with something else (summons, normal units etc) might work but the "heroes do most of the job" approach, probably shouldn't. If it does that means movement bonuses are still too overpowered - it simply isn't meant to be possible for your hero stack to be everywhere at once.

and be forced to lose a high level thief who's been growing for the whole game and managed to survive countless battles because there's no further development,

A high level thief is powerful enough to keep around - but this might not apply to every hero. I wouldn't hesitate to replace my druid for example. But this is a choice the player has to make and I think it keeps the game more interesting.