Enemy Units!

[Soliton]

... these are not by any stretch of the imagination "FAIR" odds!

I'm curious, what games did you play where you had "fair odds" against the computer player?

[Darkmage]

No comments, i played this on easy and isn't difficult, i had a marksman a half-leveled druid a hero and i recuited a shaman and an archer, this is not the best way to start, i know, and 113 gold used, i had no problem, if trolls fight on caves, i do on castle, if they do on flat terrain i do on mountains and if i do on flat terrain, they are on water and i have the healer backwards and shifting on villages, not really complex, give yourself time to learn the basics and replay other scenarios most of the times, after a hard battle not only your army is rec¡duced, but your money go low, be careful with the income.

[Joram]

I know it will take some time to learn some of the finer aspects of the game; I appreciate the comments, but I think most of them missed the point entirely! WHY?

Because otherwise, this game would be a cakewalk for people who have even a small bit of experience. I just recently finished the entire campaign, and I didn't lose a single scenario; and I'm no expert either.

would the game mechanics pit my low level guys against ones that are of higher level, I have noticed so far that my units start out at first level, and the enemy units are either second or third, this seems to be an unfair advantage enjoyed by the bad guys,

The reason that the enemies recruit level 2 or 3 units is that by this time in the campaign, you should have some level 2 and 3 units yourself.

If the Computer was only able to recruit level 1 units, then a player who had a couple of level 3s would have such an easy time with the scenario that it would become very boring. That is why the enemy can recruit lvl 2 units.

At the start of the campaign, he was only recruiting level 1 units, just like you. As you get farther and farther along, he starts recruiting tougher and tougher units. Right?

So what do you want? Do you want the bad guy to be forced to recruit level 1 units while you are smugly recalling level 3s? Then you would have an unfair advantage enjoyed by the good guys. The current system is perfectly fair; you get high leveled units, he gets high leveled units. You both get an equal advantage.

plus I see that their units do more damage and hit twice as often as my units, again it seems to be slanted in their favor, it doesn't make for very enjoyable play when your units get hit twice and die because the enemy's units are doing 10, 12, 15 or more damage,

As far as doing more damage: of course they will do more damage because they are level 2.

Also, Trolls get a 25% bonus during the night; meaning that they will get 25% of what they were doing before (most of them get a 25% penalty during the day, so fight them then).

As far as hitting you more often: This is probably not true. If you are luring him out of the hills and mountains, you should be hitting him fairly often. If you are staying in good terrain, he shouldn't be hitting you too much (though even one hit from a troll is a lot).

I don't know about you, but it is very easy for me to notice when I get bad luck, but I don't often notice when I get good luck.

plus they breed like cancer, from what I have seen thus far I would need 700-1000 gold every scenario just to be able to recruit enough units to equal their numbers, again only slightly imbalanced right?

What difficulty are you playing on?

I got through this scenario with 8 units (5 of them level 2). I had less than 200 gold. And I outnumbered him for most of it.

Let us examine an Elvish fighter with a sword they get 4 attacks and do 4 damage, an orc gets 3 attacks and does 11 damage, that is for all intent and purposes 3 times the damage my unit can do, how can anyone justify this rational, not to mention the also have more hit points,

An elvish fighter is level 1, and Orcish Warrior is level 2; did you expect them to be equal? A level 1 Orc gets 2 attacks and does 8 damage with each of them. 2*8 = 16; 4*4 = 16; You aren't supposed to be fighting level 2 units with a single level 1. Either you should have several level 1 units, or you should have some level 2s.

Compare an elvish hero to the orcish warrior. The Elvish hero does 4 attacks and 8 damage, the orc gets 3 attacks and does 11 damage. That is for all intents and purposes equal damage.

How can anyone justify this rationale? Quite simple: Level up your own units and you won't have a problem.

Plus, the elves get bows and can do small amounts of damage without retaliation.

Also, you have betrayed a certain sense of exaggeration in your complaints. In your example, the elf is doing 16 damage vs the orc's 33. 33 is twice 16, not three times.

pardon me but this seems patently unfair and severely imbalanced, and sometimes you just cant manage to attack the enemy from the cover of the woods,

In those cases where you can't attack from good terrain, the enemy should be almost destroyed anyway.

and as far as more gold is concerned, how would you propose I manage that, on a couple of these scenarios I start with a whopping 100 gold thats enough to recall 5 units, or recruit 6, maybe 7; and put those 5-7 units up against 15+ enemy combatants, these are not by any stretch of the imagination "FAIR" odds!

And in what scenario does he get 15+ units? Like I said, I went through the hardest difficult setting, and I don't think he ever got more than 10 units at most.



You keep saying that these aren't "fair" odds. Well, I'm not an expert player, yet I have no problem with them. Here's a replay of my run through this scenario:

AOI-Valley_of_Trolls_replay.gz

(18.27 KiB) Downloaded 140 times

[PhilipN]

I had some trouble on that scenario as well. It turned out that I needed to go back and level some more units, and work up a larger amount of gold. Plus, you might find that your level-2 elvish archers (I'm especially talking about marksmen) won't win you this scenario. They can be very helpful, even delivering crucial killing blows, but they won't win you the game without the help of leveled-up shamans and other unit types, because trolls are resistant to pierce (you should read the help pages to learn more about the various resistances of the units to various attack types, and their defenses in different types of terrain). You'll find that an army of Sorceresses for attack (helped by your commander, who has a magical attack), backed up by healing Druids, can really make a difference, along with tougher units to help with the mop-up job where you actually have to fight in the caves. I found that this scenario is one where you don't have many options concerning tailoring your strategy to the Time of Day; the trolls will be on the attack early on and you'll have to fight them at all hours of the day and night at first. Also, until you begin to develop a strength advantage you will have to stay in the forests as you will not get hit as often. Elves move and fight well in forests, and dwarves move and fight well in mountains (according to one of the main-screen tips, which has proven to be accurate). That being said, I do realize that there aren't enough forests on this map for you to use them for more than a few units at a time (unless it's been changed since I played it on 1.4), which is why you have to take advantage of the fact that your fighters and scouts will have as much defense on mountains as in forests, and your other units will only have 10% lower defense on mountain

p.s. I also clearly remember having some REALLY bad luck on this scenario. And I mean consistently bad luck where I could hardly hit at 60%. My solution was to focus on getting a lot of magical and marksman units. I have no idea how the RNG works in this game, but it makes you wonder if there's something skewing the odds. I have a brother who believes that it's the team color (although he says that he hasn't had enough time playing 1.6 to see whether it's changed since the last stable version). He says that the Elves will never be lucky when they are Red, but that the Dwarves will be very lucky when they are Black, and the Drakes (speaking of drakes, why aren't there any Drake campaigns yet, other than the part of the NR campaign where you have Krash? Just a suggestion!) will be lucky when their team color is Blue. I'm not convinced of this at all, except that in 1.4 (haven't tried this in 1.6 yet, and this effect is much less noticeable in 1.6) the Dwarvish Thunderers did seem to be very lucky when their team color was Black...

[Turuk]

I really do hope that you are not serious about the RNG being influenced by team color...

If so, that would explain the following: Color Influences Combat

[Lucifuge]

I hadn't played this campaign before, but I've just had a go at it to see how hard it was.

This is definitely the hardest scenario of the campaign so far, and I'm finding it difficult to complete without losing some of my level 2 units. What I find tricky is not fighting the troops the enemies recruit, but getting at the leaders who like to hide away in their castles behind a narrow gap in the mountains, where it is quite hard to get enough units in there at one time to kill the leaders without taking heavy casualties in return.

I've tried waiting for them to come out and attack me in the open where it would be easier to surround them but it doesn't always work as there's no guarantee they will come out to fight.

[CountPenguin]

This is definitely the hardest scenario of the campaign so far, and I'm finding it difficult to complete without losing some of my level 2 units.

Sometimes your level 2 units will die. It's not a crisis, just a little disappointing.

[Darkmage]

This is definitely the hardest scenario of the campaign so far, and I'm finding it difficult to complete without losing some of my level 2 units.

Sometimes your level 2 units will die. It's not a crisis, just a little disappointing.

That's a hard lesson it took me time to learn. The other was to be patient especially on campaigns.

[Araja]

I always found the campaigns were a sure-fire way to get crushed by an AI that has a complete combat and strategy guide pre-programmed into it.

My only advice is a possibly obvious thing I picked up off RPG maps, which is that the trolls are slow enough you can outrun them by 1-2 movement points, or 3-4 movement points if you duck through forest, so just running away during the night can be a good solution...until they corner you ...
What I did on that map was to basically play ambush whenever things got ugly, make a little hunting pack and ambush any trolls that I could., shamans + rain of arrows was pretty good even if trying to bring down the massive level 3 regenerating guys with 50 damage attacks was beyond me.
But hey, if I want to be instantly killed by a leader I can go play SX Battle

Also, if they're slowed they can't cross rivers, which does allow for some escapes.
Running through the forest in the dark being chased by trolls also sounds good.

[Joram]

The leader only does 50 damage if he hits with both attacks; which should be about 1/5 of the time. If you slow him (incredibly easy to do), it should be half of that.

[Lucifuge]

Well, I've played the rest of the campaign, and after this scenario the later ones seemed disappointingly easy; I know this campaign is intended for beginners, but it seems a bit odd to have the hardest scenario in the middle rather than at the end.

About the losing levelled-up units thing; yes I realise sometimes experienced units will die, but I'm generally annoyed to start losing them this early in a campaign. Of course I was forgetting that this campaign only has 7 scenarios, so this is actually nearly the end.

[Dave]

I have noticed so far that my units start out at first level, and the enemy units are either second or third

In most campaigns, on the first scenario you can recruit first level units, and the enemies can also recruit first level units.

In later scenarios, the enemies can typically recruit higher level units, while you can still only recruit first level units, but can recall units from previous scenarios. This is typically balanced out, depending on how well you played previous levels, and how difficult the campaign is meant to be.

Generally our campaigns are challenging, but victory without cheating is definitely possible. Nothing about a scenario is meant to be "fair", though. Just fun and challenging.

David

[Radament]

Campaigns are inherently unfair, because you get a lvl x "brain" for 0 gold and 0 upkeep at the beginning. What's a measly lvl3 Troll compared to that?

If you want a fair fight, go to the multiplayer server.

[Joram]

Campaigns are inherently unfair, because you get a lvl x "brain" for 0 gold and 0 upkeep at the beginning. What's a measly lvl3 Troll compared to that?

Good point.

[Turuk]

Topic duplicated. Locked.