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Extreme and Impossible 1.5 11 Books

High Elf Sorcery with Invisibility, Phantom Beast and Flight is working pretty good. I was indeed able to get to Elven Lords quickly enough and then put Flight and Invisibility on a single unit and use it to take out a wizard capital. From there, gold and mana was a bit thin for a while, but I took some node from the wizard and that got my mana stable, and from there I was able to get 2 or 3 Flying Invis units, including Theria. I got High Men and now have Paladins, so I'm making a "stack" of Theria, an Elven Lord and a Paladin, all flying with Invis to go take out Freya. Often simply Flying Paladins don't need Invis, but with Web adn Crack's Call... Also, it helps to reduce dispelling.

So yeah, I think this seems like a viable strategy. Indeed Freya is trying to use Crack's Call on me a lot, but since I have Counter Magic its not much of a problem. This is on Extreme, not Impossible. With Word of Recall it makes for fairly quick ability to conquer towns and move on. I've got a lone Flying Invis Elven Lord going around taking towns and moving on, while my other "stack" is now moving to take out Freya.
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Ok, I've played with this a bit and think I've pretty much got it figured out. For tackling 1.5x Impossible these are the options I've found work best for me, in no particular order:

Death Halfling:

Shadow Demons
Black Prayer
Wraiths

Summon Wraiths ASAP and conquer towns and lairs at will. The Wraiths provide offensive power and the undead units they generate provide your early defensive capability. Halflings provide the benefit of low unrest and are defensively capable with Wall of Darkness. Life and Sorcery wizards are the biggest threat, and also Chaos if they are allowed to get Flame Strike. Shadow Demons can be used to plane shift to Myrror and start taking neutral towns there ASAP. They can also be effective defensively if a town is under significant threat.

Life Barbarians:
Prayer
Raise Dead (or Plane Shift)
Invulnerability

If you find cities or encounters you can take with a Guardian Spirit with Invulnerability then go for that ASAP. Also cast Just Cause ASAP as usual. Prepare for an offense using 1 or 2 Cavalry. Once you get a Single Cavalry unit, use it to take nodes/lairs and banish enemy wizards. They will need to be buffed with Invulnerability, Endurance, Heroism and Holy Weapon. Bring a hero along if possible. Defensively, you'll need to rely on building garrisons in towns you conquer and relying on Invulnerability to defend them. Biggest threats are Nature and Sorcery wizards, which should be taken out as fast as possible. Wizards with Alchemy, and thus magical weapons, are also difficult to deal with. Prosperity is important so you can do a lot of buying to develop towns and buy units in newly conquered towns, so make acquiring Prosperity a priority. 

Sorcery High Elves:
Phantom Beast
Flight
Invisibility

This is perhaps the most powerful setup, though it is a little harder to get started with. Build straight to Elven Lords ASAP. Don't stop to build any units along the way. If you have opportunities, use Nagas or just Magic Spirits to take neutral towns and nodes, along with Phantom Warriors and Phantom Beasts. Early offense relies on Invisible Flying Elven Lords, which should be able to handle just about any wizard capital, unless they also have 11 books and are using high level summons. Death wizards can be a challenge since they will have units with Illusions Immunity, which allows the enemy wizard to target you with spells. However, Elven Lords are capable of one-shotting many units, especially once they are Elite and even more so with magical or Mithril weapons. For most encounters the Lords are able to pick and choose targets at will using their First-Strike ability. They are extremely effective with Invisibility because they can almost always one-shot their targets, meaning they very rarely take any damage. Add in Flying Invisible heroes as they come to start getting them leveled up and you'll have a potent offensive force quite quickly.

Defensively you have to make use of Word of Recall to quickly garrison newly conquered towns, which means its good to have your other towns pumping out units to have on the ready to support your expansion. This also means Summoning Circle is the first spell you should research.

Nature and Chaos just really can't hang on Impossible IMO, as they don't have anything quite powerful enough (and cheap enough) to really help hold on to towns in the early game.
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Actually, I've come up with a way to do Chaos. You take Doom Bat and Chimeras for the uncommon spells and Warp Reality for the Rare. You do have to pump casting skill a little so that you can cast Warp reality, but once you get to where you can cast Warp reality, then you basically stick Hell Hounds in every city. You want to keep pumping casting skill as you can until you can cost both Warp reality and a Fire Elemental, which provides even better defense, so you'll have a Hell Hound and Fire Elemental on defense everywhere. The Doom Bat is a great early scout and can also even take out some enemy capitals really early. If you need more power, once you've scouted you can either dismiss the Doom Bat to have more mana to work with, or keep it if you can afford it, then bring in a Chimera for some heavy work. You need to get nodes though, as you'll be relying almost entirely on summoned units. High Elves of course.
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So, yeah the Chaos setup I mentioned above "can work" on Impossible, BUT, having played a few Impossible games now, Death and Chaos both struggle. Yeah, everyone talks about how 11 Book Death is supposed to just faceroll everything, but it really doesn't on Impossible. Several times with Death and Chaos I've gotten shut down in the late game, especially if the wizard on Myrror has a lot of Sorcery books. Between Spell Blast, the Spell Wards, Invisibility, Counter Magic, and Banish it becomes almost impossible to fight against a high level Sorcery wizard, and Life is pretty hard too, with all of its direct counters to Death and Chaos. They end up doing things that I've never seen them do, except on Impossible, and they also tend to do stuff like have 1 or 2 books of a school and then get really high level spells from those schools. Liek right now I'm fighting Oberic, who is mostly Sorcery with a little Green, White and Red, and with just 1 Green book he has Colossus and is summoning tons of them. At the same time, there is NO towers of Wizardry that connect any land on Arcanus to his large island, so I have no direct route to his lands. Teh only flying units I have are summoned units, but he Spells Blasts everything I try to cast, so I can't summon up an army. There is also only a single neutral town on Myrror that is not on his island, quite oddly. That town is Dark Elf and I am High Elf, but I may have to take it. Its the only way I would be able to make boats on his land, but the best I can do is try to make Paladins, get them to Elite, Chaos Channel them get them onto boats, and ferry them to his land and I have no idea what I'll even face in his capital. I'm trying to get a Doom Bat down there to scout it, but man this is really a tough nut to crack.

I also had an Impossible game with Chaos where I got a Doom Bat really fast, like before I finished making a Farmer's Market and I got him to Horus' capital, but guess what?! He was High Men Life/Sorcery with Warlord and had managed to get a hero with Armsmaster that he put Heroism on, so he was sitting there with a full garrison of Ultra Elite units, mostly Swordsmen, but even 2 Pikemen! I was expecting to be able to take him out with just the Doom Bat, but it wasn't even close. And of course I tried the battle just for fun and he cast Counter Magic turn 1, so yeah I just quit that game right away.

So I'd say on Impossible, Life and Sorcery are the best bets. Death certainly has its advantages, but you just can't take out all the wizards fast enough. The only way I guess is if you bust a tower quickly with the Wraiths and are able to just hit each capital quickly in turn, but what I've found is that if you let the wizard on Myrror go for a bit, and if that wizard has Sorcery or Life, then you're in for a world of hurt. And with Chaos, if they have Sorcery, Life or Nature you're in for a pain, or even Chaos, because it seems like every time I go against Chaos on Impossible they end us casting Meteor Storm really early somehow, Its happened in 3 games, even when they have like just 2 or 3 Chaos books. They do so many encounters they get tons of rewards and they get high level spells too fast.

Yeah, you pretty much have to Life or Sorcery to be able to shut stuff down and also so you don't have to rely on Fantastic Units. Like with Chaos, you are pretty much forced to rely on Fantastic Units, including Chaos Channeled. Once they put a Chaos Ward up, you can't even fight them. The only thing to do at that point is try to disenchant it while you have a stack sitting at their gate to move in upon the disenchant, but without reloading trying to get a successful disenchant may be quite tedious indeed. So yeah, Death and Chaos both really struggle in the long game on Impossible.
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Yep, just tried again with Death. So far I've beaten Impossible with Life Barbarians and Sorcery High Elves and that's it. I tried Death Nomads this time, for the Griffins. Again I cleared Arcanus, but Oberic on Myrran got way too powerful. By the time I could confront him, which really wasn't that long, he already had every possible answer to me. And not only that, he also had Call the Void, which he used regularly. When he nuked my capital I just gave up. He had like 6 or 7 retorts , like 2 Life books, 2 Nature, 3 Sorcery and 3 Chaos or something like that. With that he had Invulnerability, Righteousness, Counter Magic, Dispel Magic True, Resist Magic, Heroism, Call the Void, Doom Bolt, Disintegrate, and Flame Strike. At least that's what I saw him use. And his casting skill must have been over 100 when mine was around 45, after having taken all of Arcanus and gotten lots of nodes and had quite a bit of power, putting it into a mix of casting skill and research with minimal to mana.

So even moving very quickly, having flying first striking normal units on backup, and basically doing everything right, in most cases for me at least, you just can't get there fast enough to be able to take out the wizard on Myrror before they get too powerful when using Death or Chaos. At least with Life or Sorcery I would have had some protection.
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Maybe someone will figure out a weak point in the Impossible AI and exploit it hard to win, even with suboptimal realms.
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