SX RPG Expert Strategies?

[roidanton]

Hey guys,

I recently started to enjoy the SX RPG games on higher difficulties (using the correct SX RPG Era) and am wondering whether there are some strategy guides. At the moment, I am having some huge problems beating Castle of Cantar on Expert difficulty. Since it's working fine on the easier difficulty settings, there must be some leaks in my strategy

Choice of Unit:

So far, I've tried to play this with both a single and two units.

The first choice is simple: Dwarf Lord because of its high resistances. Warrior class to get max armor and I play this as a bersek-it-all unit, so I get 70% blade,piece,impact resistance or higher.

First question here: should I put everything into blade/pierce/impact or get 20-30% on arcane and/or cold and steadfast? Whenever I go full blade/pierce/impact, I can 'zerk almost everything, but then get burned pretty badly by spectres and ghosts.

Going chaotic / intelligent / fearless and I purchase terrain training instead of agility to save the ability point.

I initially purchase Regeneration, Skirmisher and Fearless that leaves me with 1050 gold and 2 more abilities. Later in the game, I'll get Hit&Run asap it's available and then - much later - Stunning Shield Use and Steadfast - one using the ability point purchase, which of these is more important?

After terrain training, I have 950 gold left.

I could then go into Armory and bump Blade/Impact/Pierce to the max (can purchase 5), but that would get me as low as 800 gold.

Weapons: I need the Net, the Zerker Sword and the Arcane Sword. 540 Gold left after that.

Enhancements: bumping HP to 101 for 180 gold, leaves me with 350. The +4 dmg/+1 stk is needed to get me strong enough. Then, I only have 45 gold left to purchase movement, that'd get me to 6.

To summarize: After initial purchase, I have Dwarf Fighter, chaotic, warrior, fearless, regen, skirmisher, 6 moves, 101 hp, 50% terrain def. everywhere except snow, 14-4 axe, 15-3 hammer, 7-3 net, 11-4 zerker, 17-4 enchanted.

That's far from the damage that I would have liked to get for this unit, are there any better option or major mistakes in this setup?

Second Unit:

I've been experiencing with both Ghost and Hurricane Drake here. The Ghost has the advantage that it comes with some very high resistances - the Drake is more flexible in this regard, for instance I could choose to focus on arcane.

Going Mage with the Drake. I then choose neutral because I want to save the ability point that I'd otherwise need for Fearless.

Initial Abilities: Regen, Skirmisher, Lightfoot. 1100 gold left after purchasing that.

Negativing all negative resistances leaves me with 960. Terrain training brings it down to 885.

Weapons: Shield, Faerie Fire, Ice Spell. Leaves 650 gold. Does it make sense to purchase the Crossbow and the Firespell (higher attack than the built-in weapon)? Would leave 515 gold.

If I don't get these, I'd bump hp up to 110, get ranged strikes, increase movement to 10, then put the rest (185 gold) into ranged damage.

End result: Drake Glider, neutral, mage, lightfoot, regen, skirmisher, 10 moves, 113 hp, 50% terrain def. everywhere, 7-2 slam, 8-4 fire breath, 8-3 shield, 15-4 faerie fire, 15-4 ice wave.

Again, that's far from the damage that I'd want to get for this unit.

Basic strategy:

With this build, it takes about 8-10 turns to clear out the first two caves (in Castle of Cantar), the small ones that have two chests each. 15 turns if I attempt to quickly get the Sword of the Crusader.

Which path is best to kill the orc leaders?

I tried both the direct rush and the southern path. Running directly towards the orc boss gets a lot of kills and thus a lot of gold quickly, but I need to either run back to shop a few times to heal or take some red potions. And there is no shop at that keep. Taking the southern path would take longer.

So far, I've always succeeded killing the orc leaders, but it took about 30 turns.

The Problems:

After that, the problems start ...

When I go to the mountain shop north of the dead orc leader, I can upgrade there, but I quickly get surrounded by strong sub-bosses that I can't kill yet. The main entrance usually gets blocked very quickly, leaving only the bridge to the western cave for my non-flying unit. Once I get there, strong drake bosses already arrived at the other entrance, so I'm trapped.

My drake can easily escape the mountain cave, but it then gets chased around the map by a bunch of drake bosses which are too strong to face them.

I finally came to the conclusion that I must have been doing something wrong ...

Should I concentrate more on damage instead of getting resistances and abilities early, maybe? Any help would be appreciated.

[iceiceice]

So there were some recent changes in SXRPG, I would be very surprised if anyone really has any idea what the best strategies are right now.

You can look at Mabuse's old posts if you want to get tips for builds though, I think he describes his builds and even gives replays in 5 character and 1 character versions on any map. Cantar is the easiest of the maps, I would say, because every enemy on it is weak to arcane, they don't have a great variety of damage types, and they are so slow in those caves, among other reasons.

Off hand I would say maybe you can improve your build by not getting the zerk sword, getting hammer of rage instead? I don't know if this was nerfed or something in the new version. Since you might ultimately put berserk on the arcane sword it would be better if you could find some way to avoid buying the zerk sword.

I always favored to get the units that do not start with good resistances, because the way that Mabuse's resistance system works, this usually results in you having less potential. Many newer players favored the ghost but I really don't think the ghost is that good a unit in the long run, on any SXRPG map there is going to be a significant amount of fire damage and you can never get acceptable fire resistances as the ghost. On cantar especially you are asking to be murdered by fire dragons.

I never tried to play this one / two hero expert mode cantar you are discussing, but I think choices of dwarf fighter and hurricane drake are probably quite good. When I played in the past I also liked the Drake Burner and the Dwarf Thunderer, both of which I would build as rangers (the burner can work as a mage also) -- the Drake you will want to purchase a cold attack on; he has the advantage that when leveled to max he will have 80% fire resist for free. The dwarf thunderer is one of the most powerful units in sxrpg, if you go for a powerbuild with a huge number of strikes and *delay* getting precision focus until you calculate that it is cost effective, he will become such an incredible killing machine around turn 30-40, it is unbelievable (edit: this in a 5p game, around this time he will begin solo killing bosses in 1-3 turns, because of how rapidly he curves up). I also personally enjoyed playing with those wose -- if you build him properly and put berserk on the crush attack around like turn 40 he can also become quite strong and have good resistances late game. But I think the wose is more crucial, at least as I play, on the temple of bones map.

I seem to recall also that there was a player who beat Cantar with one ghost rogue unit of some kind in a ridiculously short time, like 30-40 turns or something. But I don't know if that was on expert. I do remember that Mabuse said something like, he was shocked that it was possible to beat Cantar so quickly. So maybe you could adapt elements from his strategy.

Another thing I remember from this game is that it is very important to pursue appropriate goals on the map quickly and skip things if they aren't important. Most likely you should move directly to kill the orc leader and aim to kill him around turn 10-15 or so. If you only have one or two units its probably not worth it to clear out the caves. A big part of the strategy in these maps is how exactly you plan to move around the maps, and how you shepard the creeps into the places you want to fight them.

Edit: Another unit you could try playing with is the Paladin, that unit would be extremely good on Cantar.

[iceiceice]

Here's an expert difficulty paladin playthrough on cantar, 87 turns. This was first attempt, so there's a few tight spots, places where I attacked things that had a 10% chance to kill me. But I never get swamped and I'm never forced to fight anything that I really can't. I think with planning and massaging some of the details this strat could be made much more convincing. I did reload once when I noobishly died to wose . I ran in a more conservative direction the second time. Also I didn't always spend my money optimally. Anyways this is pretty much just to convey the idea.

Spoiler:

Unit: Horseman -> Paladin
Class: Warrior
Traits: Neutral Cave Explorer

Initial purchases:
Terrain Training: All except sand, mushroom grove, swamp. (You definitely want to train flat ground for the 50% def.)
Armor: Pierce Resist -20 -> 0
Abilities: Regen, Soul stealer.
Weapons: Net, Torch
No potions at start if you pick regen.
Enhancements: Pick the strikes + damage combo 3 times. I like to get up to 9 mp total on any character I play. Rest into health / damage.

General game plan: Spend all you can on damage and strikes with ~130 hp or so at start, health in turns after until you kill orc boss. Raid the 1st small cave to the north of your start, then kill orc boss asap, ideally turn 15, (you should bring a red and cyan potion with you). Go to the cave shop north of there and grab the chest, that will be your base where you slay the mini-bosses and enjoy 60% def in caves. Get hit & run now, pump your damage up a lot so you have the right damage/strikes ratio (I went to 30-8 on arcane sword at this point, from 22-8). Put berzerk on arcane sword (but not slow) around turn 25-30; you need to be able to zerk mages. At this point you will struggle because the 500 gp you spent on berzerk did not improve your damage or health, but with care you will be able to clear out massive waves of enemies when they are weak and run away when they are strong. You will have to pump blade and impact res very high (60%,50%) in order to zerk the fire dragons, and you will have to stall them for as long as you can. They will show up in your cave house around turn 33-34 or so. You will end up running east to undead cavern and opening shop, you are extremely strong vs liches and ghosts. You just have to keep clearing waves of enemies and healing at the shop, getting resistances nice and high. When you are able to break the bank room down you will have enough gold to afford stunning shield and put slow on the arcane sword; for me this was turn 60. Once this happens you will be basically unstoppable, you can zerk all undead and drakes, take the scepter, the game is a cake walk after this. During whole time from fire dragons until you get slow, you will need to carry red and cyan potions and use them fairly frequently. This will be somewhat costly but it won't sink you, just use them when you need them. Need = I need to kill these 4 guys and then attack fire dragon so I'm not forced to fight him at night. Try to heal at shop instead of using red pots whenever you can.

In my game the torch I bought turned out not to be useful after turn 10 or so, I may have been better off with fire sword (may have helped me kill orcs quicker and maybe could have attacked the black mage leader earlier). I think you kind of need some fire melee to kill woses / ghosts at start. I would say you definitely don't need skirmisher or lightfoot or any of that, those are luxuries that don't really pay on Cantar. I only used 4 ability slots in this game -- several times considered adding Dauntless, but finally opted not to. It might have been a good idea though. I also never really got any fire resist, which seems odd. Probably this plan would have worked just as well with a ghost, although I still prefer the paladin.

~iceiceice~

[iceiceice]

First one was so much fun I decided to play this one yesterday

Solo Drake Burner, Expert Difficulty, Evil Dead. 99 turns.

Spoiler:

build and initial purchases:

Class: Ranger
Traits: Neutral, Resilient
Abilities: Soul Stealer, Hit and Run
Weapons: Ice wave, shield
Armory: Pierce -10 -> 0
Cold -50 -> -10
Arcane -30 -> -20
Enhancements: Strikes + Damage combo * 3 + some damage / hp,
Initial Stats: hp = 125
fire breath 22-7
ice wave 26-6
mp = 9

No Mega-regen until turn 17 (this following a tip from Mabuse)

Starts with lots of action, toasting evil woses and zombies. By levelling up frequently and grabbing yellow potions I am able to fight constantly without mega regen. I go to the north east cave where the drake burner can rule.

I put focus and slow on the fire attack fairly quickly, around turns 25 or so, and I start to improve my resistances. However I have a Big Problem to kill turn 30 fire dragon, forced to stall until turn 52... it seems my build did not produce enough cold damage quickly enough, because of dreadful sight I could not even hope to kill the fire dragon with 3 attacks . So you will get to see me scramble ^^. Fortunately Ranger class, with cheap cyan pots, +1 backpack and +1 mp after kill, is very forgiving when the need to scramble arises.

I decide to ditch my shop, chug cyan pots and go to assassinate the white necromancer leader. He falls easily and I raid his chests. When I come back the fire dragon is approaching through the caves, so I exit to south, which causes him to double back. Later I will wrap around to the north and draw him north, planning to escape through caves again. When I do so I encounter the slower skeletal dragon which is to the east of the cave mouth, but I kill him easily with fire and proceed to the original shop I abandoned at the north east cavern. Now with all the kills and gold of the chests my damage is looking much better on the ice attack. I slay more enemies until the fire dragon comes for me again, and this time I run south and employ hit and run with cyan pots to kill him. It is fortunate that I did so then because his brother arrives at this time . I am able to mop up more mini-bosses and shop at south west one more time before killing the next fire dragon the same way.

Now I fear nothing, slay the orcs raid the chests, max out fire attack near turn 80. Slay human leader with one attack, slay witch in one turn with a large number of blue pots

I think this build is sound and that drake burner is a great unit for the Evil Dead map. But clearly the build could be improved to deal with the fire dragon earlier and easier, with this method I nearly died.

Thoughts: Put slow on the ice attack before the fire attack? This would make it very to easy to hit and run the fire dragon to death, and I might not have had to abandon that shop.
Different weapon instead of ice attack? The arcane focus weapon might also be a good choice, since I have the 80% fire resist, cheaper focus might be worth it, and can upgrade cheaply with precision and blessing?
Could consider precision crossbow? Even a net?
It might also just be that I put specials on the fire breath weapon too eagerly. If that money had gone into damage the fire dragon would have been much less threatening.

Edit: This is not to say that a little scrambling is bad -- clearly the replay shows that because of the two shops and the positioning of the caves, it is possible to kite the fire dragon indefinitely. So perhaps the strongest build does take advantage of this, focuses on fire damage which kills all but the fire dragons, and then kites both fire dragons together for even longer. The thing that worries me is that you should try to kill the orc leader by turn 70 or you stop getting gold, which is very bad. And I think it might be hard to assassinate the orc leader with the fire dragons still alive, I think you would have to run east deep into the enemy base to escape.

On the other hand there's nothing extremely threatening in those caves, so maybe that's actually a good idea if you were going for a speed run on evil dead.

A different approach would be to train up as a mage instead of a ranger, with otherwise the same build, but save up for a big iceball on turn 30.

[roidanton]

Thanks a lot for your feedback! I finally got to the point where I killed the undead leader and picked up the Cornucopia of Fortune. Speed is really the key factor here, if you stall for too long, then the enemies get too strong. As soon as you start spending more gold to heal than what you earn from killing them, you can organize your funeral.

Ok, I've loaded up turn 95 on the MP server if anyone wants to watch - I'll get some coffee and then start ...

/Edit: I'm now standing at a shop and when I check damage calculations, I only have a ~60% chance to kill Dark Adepts and only ~10% to kill trolls. But there are a lot of other enemies that I can easily kill with >90%. So my strategy is now to use that shop as a base for a few turns, kill as much of them as possible while running back to shop and bump damage. Let's see whether that works ....

[roidanton]

Well, so I basically got surrounded by enemies and trapped. And I've reloaded this game enough, so I think I'm stuck here.

However, I learned a lot from this, so I think I'll just start over, correcting some of the mistakes that I did this.

[iceiceice]

I watched your replay, I think you are doing pretty well and just need more practice / experience. You use skirmisher ability to great effect in this replay which was nice to see, I almost never try to play this way. It would be interesting if you were able to use earlier access to shops / powerups from playing this way to mitigate the drawbacks of leaving large numbers of enemies alive; I don't know if its possible.

The other thing I noticed was that sometimes it looked like you bought strikes when you should have bought damage and resistances when you should have bought hp, but you can work that out for yourself with practice.

[roidanton]

Here's another attempt. This time, I concentrated far more on damage and was doing much better before I got trapped again in that same eastern cave as before - surrounded by enemies which are all too strong for me to easily kill them. And giant lvl 7 spiders are my biggest problem.

I have these weapons:

40-13 ranged-fire precision blessed
42-10 ranged-arcane magical
42-10 ranged-cold magical
8-3 melee-impact slows
39-10 ranged-impact slows

Looks like that's still too weak around turn 70. I'm fighting against spiders with 250 hp and drakes with 350-400. Funny thing is, I can easily kill all the bosses, I'm super strong against Fire Dragons and Liches, for instance.

Putting precision onto the built-in fire weapon significantly helped against spiders around turn 19 or so, up in the mountain cave shortly after I killed the orc bosses. I actually did the math before spending the money. Without precision, it only has as 50% chance to hit against spiders.

I'm still unsure about proper resistances. You really need some decent cold resistance as a ranged unit or you're taking too much damage when killing liches and adepts. In one of my builds, I bumped blade, impact and arcane really high. But then, the best way of killing a lich was just standing next to it and letting it hit me; it dealt a lot less damage to me than I could regenerate, but when I hit it myself I got burned terribly. This got much better with 30% cold resistance.

I was even considering putting 20% into blade and impact, buy steadfast then push arcane and cold to the max, what do you think? The unit comes with 10% blade, 20% impact and 80% fire and if I remember correctly, I have 13 armor slots as a mage. So I could get 60% cold and arcane. And I may not even need steadfast because there's usually only one strong enemy attacking me at a time, so having enough hp should be enough.

These spiders have been a huge problem in all my previous attempts to play this. I can easily build my unit strong enough to stand next to a lich boss and kill it in two turns without healing - I have even survived getting attacked by two lich bosses and a dark wizard boss at the same time and survived - but still only have like 30-50% chance to kill against a spider. And whenever I do something to bump that up to like 75-80%, it only takes a few turns until the AI recruited new, more powerful spiders.

As a melee warrior, these are probably no big deal and you easily kill them, but when I attack them with a ranged weapon, they hit me really hard with their "slows" defense. Is there any good counter-measure against a unit that has "slows" against the weapon that you're using? I was already thinking about adjusting my damage/strike ratio, getting a lot more damage - at least early on.

Or how about running up north as quickly as possible and kill the undead leader, making this a top priority? After reading your post about not getting megaregen early on, I got an idea! How about this:

Only get skirmisher, but crazy high moves - like 12 or 13. Kill the orc leader as quickly as possible - around turn 15 or so - go to the mountain cave to upgrade. Get magic healing, moves and arcane, a backpack with 4 cyan potions, bump arcane and cold resistances to at least 40% and one of the 80 gold mage items (the one which increases mana regen). Only did a quick estimate and these items should cost about 700 gold, that's a lot of dead orcs! Not sure whether that's actually possible until turn 15. Maybe it's good to get lightfoot for that - if you don't need dauntless or steadfast, then you can get it and still have enough "mage abilities" left?

Get out of the cave, do some "cleanups" around the orc camp, killing flying and swimming units first. Then, when you're getting low on hp, you should be able to find a spot in the water where no enemy can reach you. Next turn, fly west through the woods using your 12-13 moves. There is always a wose next to the southern cave entrance. If you can find it, then you can even arrive with just 1hp in that area. Then burn your 3 cyan potions to grab the sword of the crusader and the blue and yellow potions in that cave and immediately get out again without engaging with any of the spiders. If you're lucky, then there's that plant which doesn't have any ranged counter-attack, you can then kill to get another 4-5 moves. Get out of that cave as quickly as possible, it's a death trap! Run up north, ignore all the chests and navigate around spiders with magic movement where necessary. The guard is an easy kill for a ranged unit.

Then pickup the blue (both if necessary?) and yellow potions, make sure you have maximum mana and assassinate the lich using the magic energy attack and the two blue potions. You need high cold resistance in addition to arcane or you're take too much damage attacking it with ranged.

Just an idea, not sure whether it would actually work ...

Another idea is this:

That huge spider boss north of the mountain camp does not regenerate ...

The inferno drake already comes with 20% impact res - bump to 30, get dauntless, magic moves and iceball. The mage quickly regenerates > 20 mana per turn and 80 mana (iceball + hit&run one hex away from it) deals 120 damage it it and you should have a weapon that also deals some ~300 damage by then. It should reach the 150 max mana mark around turn 45 or so, that'd deal 360 magic damage plus some 400 from your weapon, so you should be able to kill it with a blue potion. Problem is, I don't know how crowded with drakes the area north of it is, whether you could actually fly over these chasms.

[roidanton]

Just watched your reply again until turn 50, this time setting point of view to full map, looking at enemy stats - and then I did the same with mine.

You never got into this mess of being surrounded and needing 3 or more turns to kill a single enemy.

I think my biggest mistake was on turn 28 where I put precision on my main weapon - I should have gotten focus first and a few turns later, I would have gotten enough gold for that.

On turn 35, the AI recruits lvl 3 Drake Enforcers with 233hp and the liches that you easily zerked have 375hp. Black Wizards are at 170hp and a newly recruited spider at 137. My weapons at this point are 33-10 ranged-fire precision blessed and 35-7 ranged-cold magical. That's way too weak to kill those.

Even against drakes with their -50% weakness against cold, my weapon only deals 35x7 *70% * 1.5 = ~250 damage. That's just barely enough to kill them, I mean I deal more damage to them than they have hp, but the statistical chance to kill is way too low to kill multiple enemies in a row. So I need to add a lot more damage.

[roidanton]

I finally did it

Watching your Paladin replay and looking at the enemy stats at various turns helped me figure it out! Finished it in 119 turns, clearing the entire map.

It is absolutely amazing how strong the Mage gets in the end! On the final turn, I have 452 Maximum Mana and regenerate 76 per turn. 150 Mana does 363 damage, 250 does 742 and - I never actually used this - 350 would do 1237. That would instantly kill a boss - but you don't get any gold from killing an enemy with magic.

Getting Precision Focus on my weapon was really key to success. My final stats were:

mage neutral cave explorer, 541 hp, 15 moves, skirmisher, steadfast, regen
Magic Abilities: healing, moves, iceball, energyball
65-20 ranged-fire focus precision
67-17 ranged-cold focus precision slows blessed
67-17 ranged-arcane magical - I only used this weapon very rarely

Resistances: 85% fire, 65% cold and arcane, 25% blade and impact (50% on defense with steadfast), 5% pierce.
Items: Sword of the Crusader, Ring of Resistance, 2x Ring of Defense

Detailed Strategy:

My main objective was to always keep my damage high enough to quickly kill enemies.

Initial Purchases: skirmisher, melee shield, ice wave, 2 cyan potions, 12 moves and 105hp. No megaregen, ranged net or arcane weapon. Get the dmg/strk combo three times, put rest into damage. So the unit has 20-7 fire and 24-7 ice.

Skip the cave north-west of the camp, you're not strong enough to kill the spider yet. Instead, run up north around those mountains in the middle and try to trigger wose ambushes. Go into that cave, turn right first to pickup the two cyan potions and the chest, then run left and get the chest there and the red potion. Use your speed and the cyan potions to avoid the spiders - you're not strong enough to kill them yet, so this would only delay you. Once you get out, there should already be some orcs in the area, kill those and some woses, then run back to base with about 200-250 gold and fully leveled up.

The unit is now fully leveled and has 24-9 fire / 26-6 ice and 145hp. Get magic healing, moves, ice ball and a full set of potions, then go to the cave right north of your starting camp. Take the two chests, then - instead of going back to base - run up north. Kill as many enemies as possible until you're getting low on health, then burn your cyan potions to fly to the southern entrance of the undead cave.

You should be there around turn 10, it takes 5 turns to grab the sword and the area is quickly getting crowded with enemies.

Kill the few spiders near the entrance, then grab the Sword of the Crusader and the blue and yellow potions. You should be back at the junction point about 5 turns later and the area will be packed with enemies, so you'll have one hell of a fight to get out! Proceed east towards the mountain cave, using magic healing and moves when necessary. It should not take longer than about 1-2 turns and you'll arrive there with about 400 gold.

Now I bought the arcane weapon - the one which I actually did not use very often - and got 159 hp and 32-10 on the fire weapon.

Turn 18. Here comes the biggest deviation from all my previous attempts: instead of using the camp as a base, constantly running in and out and using cyan and red potions, I used magic healing, level ups and that yellow potion in the middle to my advantage. Stayed out there, killing the orc chief and a bunch of creeps, then ran back to base on turn 22 with 450 gold. Got megaregen, the two mage items and bumped hp up to 218. Getting so much hp was something that I learned from watching the Paladin replay, I previously only had about 150. It's kinda expensive to upgrade, but you save significantly on healing costs because the mega-regen will heal most of the damage that you take. And I already have enough attack damage to kill Dark Sorcerers at this point.

Stayed in the mountain cave until turn 35 (when the Fire Drakes appeared), flying around and killing enemies for some decent gold.

Took off running south on turn 36 with 227 hp, 39-10 fire, 20% arcane/blade/impact, 0% cold, -10% pierce, 80% fire - and a bunch of gold in my pocket. Killed the southern orcs on turn 39 and put focus precision onto my fire weapon. Cleared out the cave, grabbing potions and the ring of resistance. Arrived at the shop on turn 46 with over 300 gold.

Now, the first Black Wizard appeared and I had to experience a bit with my stats. Best thing to do here was - instead of increasing damage - was getting high cold and arcane resistance. I ended up getting my final 65% arcane/cold, 25% blade/impact, 85% fire, 5% pierce, but did not have steadfast at this point yet. The high resistances allowed me to hit that boss without taking too much damage, then kill it a turn later.

Arrived at the back entrance of the fortress on turn 49 - and an entire army already awaited me. Pushed my way straight west through a wall of enemies. Finally got through and picked up the Cornucopia of Fortune on turn 58 - with 600 gold already in my pocket.

Ran south through the lava to reach the shop on turn 60. 679 gold, upgrade time! Got steadfast (needed to purchase the ability point for it), 250 hp and 1 ranged strike, making it 39-11 on the fire weapon. A lot of fire dragons at the shop entrance and was quickly surrounded.

Was busy doing boss fights until turn 69, then grabbed the 4 chests south of that shop, they have 50 gold each. Bumped it up to 268 hp and 45-13 fire. Grabbed the yellow potion, then pushed my way east to the shop near the entrance. 500 gold, bumped it up to 287 hp and 49-13 fire, got some cyan potions then ran up north. Killed the guard and picked up the three potions.

It was already turn 72 now and I was a bit worried about not being able to kill the undead leader in time, so I decided not to get the two rings of defense and instead quickly kill the dark wizard king, then deal with the undead. Had a bit over 500 gold when I arrived at the entrance shop - surrounded by fire dragons - so I put precision focus on the ice wave and bumped it up to 326 hp and 50-13 fire / 52-10 ice. My hp was now high enough to stand next to a fire dragon and regenerate enough health.

Back in the mountain cave on turn 78, got two more moves to make it 14, then dealt with the drakes outside the cave while waiting to build up maximum mana. Eventually killed that huge spider north of the shop - I wanted to eventually use this path as an escape route.

Took off to kill the undead leader on turn 84, taking the "normal path" through the caves - 350 hp and 50-14 fire / 52-11 cold+arcane. The undead leader was a piece of cake, then took the time to fully clear out that cave, killing all the spiders and plants and taking the chests. A bunch of drakes and fire dragons chased me that I eventually had to kill.

Arrived back at the mountain cave on turn 100 - with about 1350 gold in the pocket! This is where I truly became unstoppable. I could have simply proceeded up north to finish it, but decided to clear off the entire map, so I ran back to the dark wizard fortress to clean everything up there and grab the two rings.

Now at 417 hp and I put slows on the the ice wave, making it 64-13 focus precision slows.

Luckily, there were a ton of drakes in that dark wizard castle, so I could max it out on strikes, making it 62-20 fire (which I didn't use anymore from this point on) and 65-17 ice.

Had a lot of fun playing this - and it was also cool to watch my own replay while writing this report!

[iceiceice]

Nice job, it is interesting that you got the sword of the crusader rush to work at expert level. That definitely gives you an enormous advantage.

I think it is much more difficult to solo cantar with a ranged unit. I tried several times today, mainly it is hard because of how much tougher the spiders are to kill. I decided to try using an undead unit. The undead trait prevents poisoning so I imagine that it would also help with your sword rush idea, since you can grab the yellow potion safely without killing the spiders first. I tried a few times with the skeleton archer but this is a bad unit for Cantar. I had much better success with the ghoul. The ghoul's resistances are just want you want for a ranged unit on cantar. For fun I also tried with the "swimmer" trait which helped with vision when on the lake. Also swimmer was useful against the fire dragons since they have 2 mp in deep water.

With a lot of trial and error I was able to get the ghoul mage strat to work, but I save-loaded like 3 or 4 times, so I'd rather not post it. The build was straightforward, choosing lawful alignment, getting arcane and cold ranged attacks ~ 110 hp at start and 10 mp. I moved roughly as you did at the very beginning, although I decided to kill the orc leader before getting the sword, and I didn't go into the cave with the white ring. In retrospect I think I maybe should have tried to get demons earlier -- I feel like if I had summoned an arcane demon at turn 50-60 he might have solo killed the lich cave leader and saved me a lot of trouble.

[roidanton]

Hmm, I don't remember having too many problems with poison when I played this. Have you tried increasing your blade resistances a bit? I already had 25% and steadfast when the spiders became super strong and I also tried not to let them hit me. As a Mage, you can hit them with an ice ball, then kill if you have enough Mana.

Regarding the summons spell, I was really looking forward to use this when playing the Mage class, but then never actually got it. In hindsight, I don't even think it's all that useful in Cantar. Once you have enough Max Mana to purchase the ability, you're already super strong and you can effectively use your attack magic to significantly weaken, then kill high-level bosses. So even if I had the ability, I'm not sure whether I'd actually have used it. In addition to using magic for different things, you don't get enough Max Mana until very late in the game and you'd have to reserve an ability slot for it the entire time.

I really wanted to get both the ice ball and the energy wave to effectively target both drakes and undead. Then, the Inferno Drake needs Cave Explorer, so you can't get the extra slot from "Intelligent". Magic healing doesn't cost ability, magic moves is almost a must-have as it saves a ton on cyan potion waste for short 1-2 hex distances. So that's already 5 abilities together with mega-regen and skirmisher. So there's only the one left that you need to purchase.

Here, I had to choose between reserving it for summon demon or getting steadfast. Bumping those resistances high that I attack strong enemies with - 65% for cold and arcane - significantly reduced the amount of damage I took both when attacking and getting attacked. But that left me quite vulnerable against blade and impact with only 25% on each.

[iceiceice]

I decided to try to solo Temple of Bones at expert difficulty -- I have played this map previously with a 5 man team and beaten it on experienced difficulty, but this was 6 months ago and it took me a very long time.

In the past I would have said soloing this map is not possible, but I think the new changes Mabuse has introduced have potentially made it possible for a Rogue Mage. Making rage addable has made rogue mages almost as good at zerking as warriors. Consider: Rage + Charge intensifies combat by a factor of 6, and also there is second strike, for a factor of 12. Berzerk only gives you 15 rounds anyways. Additionally, one might have the first strike be slow-rage-charge, and the second strike be magical-rage-charge. So in melee combat against 60% def a rogue mage is probably as good or better than a zerker. Also you now have access to all magic. And I never realized that rogue mages get cheap potions as well. So the rogue mage is potentially versatile enough to solo ToB in my opinion.

Making Rage addable also makes the shield incredibly good for a rogue mage -- normally the shield is a subpar weapon you take for early defense, but now you can add rage + charge on top of it for 425 gp, giving you very cheap access to fully upgraded melee impact damage in the late game.

Here's my first try -- I'm a bit rusty on this map so I did save load three times, once when I went into a hallway and realized I was going to get trapped and killed, and twice when I misclicked and attacked from the wrong hexes which would prevent me from escaping and get me killed.

Turn 107 now. Progress is slow and steady since entering the temple at turn ~ 70. The fight against the demons has been extremely difficult, almost 40 turns now and have not killed main demons or undead leaders. I have killed the demon warlock, opened the second shop and got arcane armor. Next on the agenda is to get the remaining armors.

The main problem is that I have not been able to max out damage and strikes yet, I am close but not there, and the creeps, while still manageable, may soon become unmanageable. The cheap potions are good, but it seems I need a blue potion for each boss that comes my way. The good news is that I am still profiting from combat. I think I could still beat these leaders by turn 130 and perhaps the whole map by turn 150, but it will really depend on exactly how much stronger the next level of creeps are.

[roidanton]

Cool, I've never made it that far with a ranged unit. It's a lot easier with a warrior.

However, the big problem with Temple of Bones is that the game becomes unplayably slow after about turn 100 - No Luck Mode doesn't help at all. On my computer, I takes about 5 seconds before the attack selection dialog appears and that is the all animation etc. turned off. So it takes like 15 seconds or more to kill a simple unit. And between turns, if there are a lot of berserk units that you kill defensively, then you can go to the kitchen and make yourself a sandwich while it's running.

I've finished it a few times with Ageless and War of the Gods, where you can speed rush through and finish the entire map in maybe 75 turns. Same for Wizard of War.

Is it normal that it takes that long or is this just a problem with my computer?

[iceiceice]

Is it normal that it takes that long or is this just a problem with my computer?

Yeah it does that for me too. I'm not entirely sure why, I think its because of the way wesnoth does damage calculations. I think it works by listing all possible combat outcomes exhaustively and adding them up to get exact probabilities, and that this just scales up badly when you have units with high stats. But why it still is slow even with no luck mode on is a bit of a mystery. I think that somehow SXRPG is set up so that during a berzerk combat, the defender has the option to change weapons sometimes. I have noticed that when a ranged unit attacks me, if I have normal defense on usually my unit might start with net or some slowing weapon and then switch to high damage at the next opportunity, then depending on exact hp values it might switch to a different high damage weapon, and then switch back depending on hits or misses... etc. So it might be that if it gets a large number of opportunities to change weapon it will like exhaustively consider all possible strategies to determine what is the best decision. If that's really the case it would be nice if Mabuse would make it so we could disable this as well as the luck.

Anyways yeah if you go too late you basically have to just attack a unit, then take a shower, then attack a unit, then leave for work, etc. XD. Like I said it takes a long time but the end is epic so its worth it . And you get an awesome replay too assuming you don't corrupt it accidentally (just never save and never turn your computer off XD).

Cool, I've never made it that far with a ranged unit. It's a lot easier with a warrior.

Yeah I guess this is the only time I've tried to solo it. I chose gunner mainly because the ranged pierce is so good vs all the demons. Also, before like turn 90, the enemy dark adept units had low enough hp that I could oneshot them with the gun before they could do any retal, or two shot them hopefully. But once they start to get 400-500 hp you really need to have a good zerk 'em option. So probably it would be better to start over this guy and build to make sure that happens in time.

I'm surprised to hear that warrior is easier to solo this, many of the demons seem a bit too big / too many crazy damage types? The eyedemons are really nasty, I don't think I've ever gotten this far without baiting them out from their hiding spots with demons. But I guess its true that most of the creeps are ranged or not that strong. I still think rogue mage is the way to go but I might try to make more melee emphasis.