I watched Sapher's playthroughs on YouTube and decided to make a few threads about stuff I learned.
One important lesson I learned is when customizing your wizard it is important to not focus excessively on your strength, but to also cover your weaknesses.
For example in the Draconian speedrun the idea was to use adamantite bowmen to clear nodes early. Draconian bowmen are strong, but some weaker players would pick red books for flame blade and white books for more buffs. Sapher instead picked two death, two nature and 3 sorcery. Sorcery would eventually give magic immunity. Nature gives earth lore. Death is for drain life. In early game draconian archers are strong enough to clear many lairs, an option for fully buffed army of 9 bowmen who can clear 6x great drake lair is not too important.
Another Sapher's game that illustrates this principle is troll game. The idea is to use trollish regeneration for early conquest. The game was in Dos version so he only picked two life books for endurance. The rest is to cover for weakness, for example against unrecoverable unit destruction with spells like resist magic.
There are many ways to apply it. For example for hero strategy pick tactician that helps when your heroes are in danger rather than warlord that makes your heroes even stronger when they are safe.
There are some cases where fully maxing advantages can be helpful because it breaks some important threshold (elven cavalry first strike min maxing to one shot phantom beasts for extreme lair farming speed), but more often than not what will have more impact on the overall success of the playthrough is how well you deal with what you are weak against, not how fast you farm what you are good at.
One important lesson I learned is when customizing your wizard it is important to not focus excessively on your strength, but to also cover your weaknesses.
For example in the Draconian speedrun the idea was to use adamantite bowmen to clear nodes early. Draconian bowmen are strong, but some weaker players would pick red books for flame blade and white books for more buffs. Sapher instead picked two death, two nature and 3 sorcery. Sorcery would eventually give magic immunity. Nature gives earth lore. Death is for drain life. In early game draconian archers are strong enough to clear many lairs, an option for fully buffed army of 9 bowmen who can clear 6x great drake lair is not too important.
Another Sapher's game that illustrates this principle is troll game. The idea is to use trollish regeneration for early conquest. The game was in Dos version so he only picked two life books for endurance. The rest is to cover for weakness, for example against unrecoverable unit destruction with spells like resist magic.
There are many ways to apply it. For example for hero strategy pick tactician that helps when your heroes are in danger rather than warlord that makes your heroes even stronger when they are safe.
There are some cases where fully maxing advantages can be helpful because it breaks some important threshold (elven cavalry first strike min maxing to one shot phantom beasts for extreme lair farming speed), but more often than not what will have more impact on the overall success of the playthrough is how well you deal with what you are weak against, not how fast you farm what you are good at.