Bay 12 Games Forum

Buy shurikens

Call imp, meph cloud. Don't have those? Why aren't you playing wizard, nitwit I jest, of course, but still...

My melee dudes definitely have a lot harder time getting off the ground. I tend to have a lot better luck picking up melee and defense skills after I've got enough magical firepower to actually keep me alive. Pure melee folks just... they don't have options. From what I understand, it's genuinely not intended to be a viable playstyle by the devs. Support by either god powers, magic, or evocations is supposed to be basically requisite.

As for the impossible situations in the early game... iirc, that's supposed to be at least somewhat intentional, or was at some point. Re: Kobold avec exploding darts opening door to starting vault on turn two. Stuff like that. Sometimes crawl's just going to kill you, and there's literally nothing you can do or could have done about it. It gets less likely as you get better at the game, but there's a reason no one's managed an unending streak yet. Well, beyond the whole logical impossibility of an unending streak in a finite timescale.

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IE's have one of the easier early games Freeze murders everything that's not an ice beast (most things -- I've killed up to Yaks with it, iirc, without much trouble) and th'armor's ruddy good for light armor users (i.e. casters). Icicle or summon ice beast kills ice beasts. Agreed that EEs are a bloody pain to get off the ground, though.

AEs always seem to have trouble, unless spark got buffed recently and I didn't notice. If you can't doubletap with it, it sucks, and even then it doesn't hit terribly hard and seems to miss fairly often. It's also the only thing they really have for damage until lightning bolt (which they only got in their starting book in 0.9!). Static discharge seems like crap, and the olololohitzu aspect isn't something an early game critter can risk using.

Depends on how low-level you're talking about, and how many you have. The drakes are alright, especially with dragon master to improve gem efficiency, ferex. Cave drakes especially can be an early answer to a lot of some low-prot or low health nation's problems, and the fire and ice ones can add a nice lil'bite on the cheap that can still take a lot more of a hit than most recruitable troops. With dragon master, you're just getting a ruddy nice HP to gem ratio, if you just need something to arrow catch.

Just looking at level 3 or below in the schools (this is in CBM 1.6!), lemme' see if I can remember the notables...

In conj: Black servants are apparently alright mini-thug/raiders -- built in life drain and ethereal. Give 'em some armor (5 gem black steel and horror helm, maybe) and they'd do alright against lighter PD and indies. There's the drakes, as above, and sea serpents, which can help out most of the underwater nations in their indie-squishing -- as with the drakes, they're a lot of HP for a fairly low cost. Summon animals can be pretty interesting -- a lot of the units it pulls up is better than most plain human troops, and some (Moose!) are pretty beefy, which makes it a pretty good spell if you need something quick to catch arrows or blunt a cav charge or something. The awaken sleeper spell is a go-to for low-tier thugs, and banes are a 4 gem bane blade that walks around.

In construction, you've got clockwork horrors and corpsemen as summoned units. The clockworks are good for chaff, especially if you're someone without general amphibian access. They're especially notable when going up against large (size 4+ non-tramplers) enemies, as they're fairly small and have two attacks, so they're excellent at stripping defense away. Corpsemen aren't just souless -- they've got more hp and lightning immunity, and they're cheap as all get out. Not much able to summon them natively, but they're alright have some low-level mage you've got puttering around call up in between battles or shuttling troops. Extra chaff, if nothing else. E: Well and manikins and wooden constructs. The manikins might be interesting to throw at high encumbrance enemies, but they're otherwise mostly worthless as anything (and even, to a degree) except chaff. Wooden constructs are, again, mostly worthless. About the only thing I could see using them for is to distract the AI from actually useful large monsters, or if for some strange reason you really needed some extra no-morale HP somewhere in your lineup.

Enchantment has reanimation as about it for mass-summoning, and it's pretty worthless. Even at two gems, 10 longdead are kind a ripoff. But! Ench also has mound kings, which are basically the indie-commander of undead, and can lead things underwater if you need that sort of thing, and revenants, which are 9 gem dark knowledge casters, something your better death mages call up to free them up to do other things. They're also alright for chasing armies around spewing frighten at th'enemy. I also hear good things about watchers, but I've never personally used them. They've done alright when I've ran into them, though -- very tough, incredibly high precision lighting blasts, excellent patrollers if you can spare something to physically patrol a province.

And then there's blood magic, of course. Spine devils are one of the heaviest infantry units in the game, you've got bind devil and frost fiend, both solid for the price, and cross breeding, which can both produce a lot of chaff and some fairly impressive larger critters. Hella'good if you're running a luck 3 nation.

It's usually not a good idea to run a totally summoned army in the early game, though, for most nations. Summons are generally supposed to be force multipliers or used to plug holes in your army's TO&E, like no amph access or heavy inf/arrowcatchers, etc. Later, you've got the mage and gem output to really pull full armies out of the air, and they can be serious additions to your main combat line or raiding potential, especially in support of SCs, either directly in combat or by threatening the surrounding area while the big boys do the real damage. Early, though, they tend to be just garnish for your recruitable armies.

None of the bells are particularly resistant to magic domination, last I bothered paying attention. However a wiki-check says yeah, dominate (the spell) will likely fail. Domination rods apparently work a lot better. Either case, pick up the monster heart before you go dominating.

Also, never, ever give a bell a grenade. They will kill themselves and/or you, and do so very, very, quickly. Shuriken or panties are the way to go.

For the time stop thing, it works just fine on NPCs, iirc.

Nah, that's ogre 'zerkers.

SpBr is more like a really sharp but really brittle, rather small knife. Attached to a mechanical top powered by something volatile and quick burning.

Daos, from Tales of Phantasia. Dude did alright, for all that he lost. Blazes if I know what his epitaph should be, though. Been too long since I've played through the game. Maybe, "Damn Time Travel!"

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No, because everyone  clicks spoiler tags, just to see what's inside. And I won't be party to ruining such an amazing ecksperience for others. And Aquaria is carried by the plot, which means truncating the plot means truncating the game means ruining it.

Anyone who clicks on a spoiler is accepting personal and total responsibility for what lies within. You're not party to it, in any way, shape, or form. Hiding something under a spoiler is basically a disclaimer, in essence. Not your fault if they ruin their own experience.

Anyway, just mentioning the name is being party to spoiling it, heh. Search engines exist

Question for Sif Muna people: is invocation good to train when following this deity? Does increased invocation skill cause you to channel more energy?

To quote the knowledge bot, Sif's channelling is "d(2+inv/4) mp." So yeah, at about 1 extra MP per 4 levels of invocation, added to the maximum a channel can give you. Can still get only 1 mp, but higher inv makes that a lot less likely.

The summoners never really bother me terribly, as uniques go. The ones I hate are the ones that are faster than I am -- the same speed is fine, it's just faster that's the problem -- and those with abilities that pierce. Lightning bolts, smite, etc.

Any of them with ranged attacks can sometimes cause problems, especially those that are faster than my character. I well remember getting shot three times the same turn I came into FoV of that centaur unique, ferex. Lost that character, obviously.