You deserve a medal in that case, I take it back.

I do want to know how you managed to average 17.5 RP per turn for 38 turns, (starting on turn 1) since I want to use that trick too .
(Unless you did more research than breons letters ofcourse?)

Nice, and hats off

Edit: Clarified a word

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Oh, starting new games doesn't really do much for you, you haven't been in a war with an AI, atleast take over 1 enemy nation or try to, to see what happens
(The AI gets pretty high research bonuses, and have a steady supply of gold, metal and crystal on insane, so judging by turn 39 when they are still "fiddling around" it makes sense they would not go to war yet, they want to wait up, trying to build a few cities and produce stuff like juggernauts en-masse)

Edit: Clarified a word, still imagine its positive, because its ment positively

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Thanks for the screenshots. Yes, this is insane AI all right.

If you want a challenge, you should simply try to play without reloading. By the way, are you sure you could win the current game if you were to stop reloading? You have very little mana, and your heroes are very vulnerable.  Sure, you have access to some great spells, but unless you reload, that Karavox will be taking your guys out with a couple of shots each.

Or just try a large map, with all settings on default/normal/balanced, and 8 AIs. I expect that you would have to reload an awful lot to win in that case.

Kongdej, she is getting her research from heroes... This is also how she is getting her income, city growth, etc... The problem with this is that none of them will grow easily, and if any AI starts to actually field troops, her heroes will quickly become outmatched.

Also, remember that her enemies can have all their present military strength in one stack, while she can at best field 1/8 of hers at once.

But of course, by saving and reloading, you can win even fights that are waaaay one-sided.

Not exactly - there's a spell to kill a hero, which gives your sovereign one of the hero's spell schools. There's also a spell to give your sovereign -5 hit points, and cause one of your hero's to gain a level. You might be getting the two confused

I save collars for great wolves, they can cast a buff that gives your entire army +1 attack per level of the wolf. They start out at level 7 or so, that's +7 attack for the entire army (including every unit of a trained group, so a 5-man group is +35 total attack). I've gotten one as high as level 17 (you can cast tutelage on them), that's +17 attack for my army, +119 on each 7-man group. They're also very fast with decent attack, but mediocre health and little to no armor, so you have to be careful not to get them killed. Cave bears are better individually, thanks to maul and higher health, but heroes and even trained units outshine any beast so easily, I think it's better to pick a wolf for the buff.

There's a spell that kills a hero to get one of his spell levels. It does not give you the level up bonus, though, as far as I remember.

Not unless you give us the save file, it's embedded in there.  You can see the AI's settings if you hover over the file in the "load" menu

There is at least one level 10 beast, but it is rather rare.  You can easily find an umberdroth, a skath, or a great wolf. The umberdroth is a tank, the skaths have deadly bite (damage x3), and the great wolf can give ALL of your INDIVIDUAL soldiers +5 attack.  That is HUGE is mid/late game.

A bear is a joke in comparison.

The Great wolf actually gives you a bonus to attack based on it's level.  I had one that was level 12 last game...so a +12 to everyones attack.  That makes your troops really fucking vicious.  Also, big fucking spiders.  The really big fuckers, hoarders.  

Capture a Cave Bear.  Level that thing up with maul is pretty fun as well

Hi guys,

thx for the hints, great stuff!

Maybe i should really finsih the enemy off. While the hero i posted is as strong as my main hero (though 3 levels below my level 9 ones), i just spotted 5 juggernauts in his capital. So atm i think while i have all these heroes, the enemy could pose still a threat with their x3 production bonus. My tax level is at oppressive atm becuase of my high costs (one hero = 1 gold, damn it =)) so even with oppressive i make -16 gold each turn.

Influence: sadly i couldnt afford the "hero" trait providing +50 influence for each quest, otherwisse i had focused on quests. I also just recently discovered quest provide much more xp than just clearing monster dens. 1 influence is 2 gold, with 500 influence i could convert a city (1000 gold costs, haha, what fool does that ?). 

Of course, each of my cities has the speel where i get 1 mana per essence. so i need more cities. Hmm. I also thought about buying a horse for each of my heroes to move around with 4 move points. After buying 5 horses, you see in the screenshot that my gildars are gone . Hmmm.

Time to attack, you are right. Time to plunder the neighbours and take a city, Lets see if they can withstand my armies. I will mix them up with beasts and normal units once i can build them to increase the xp my individual heroes get.

1) I will start with these Gilden guys who dared to settle next to my capital. I will sustain peace with the rest and invest in trade treaties with them, are those treaties worth the 70 gildar i have to invest in them?

2) what are other good ways to earn money?

3) what other ways are there to get gold? is there a spell to get mana from enemies/beasts?

I just wonder why this game has not already got a 98% score in 4players, pcgames etc. Its much better than HOMM or other turn based strategy games. Even civ 5 is not comparable.

Strange..

Actually i would lvoe to provide the savegame now, Is there a way to rename my Hero and my realms name?

@the beasts:

Hoarder, is that a spider also? i think i can remember one spider i ahvent killed yet bearing this name. So its worth a capture ?

For the wolves: i already caught 1 normal pack (as a scout with 5 moves to spot new heroes, perfect with my sneaky "Scout" trait

@Kongdej: thx for the flowers, i can provide another hint: in most strategy games, speed is everything. I actually hate that fact, i love to take my time (thats also why i dont play multiplayrt strategy games) but it is there.

So you need to explore the map quickly, for that, think of fast beasts like the wolf mentioned above or investing in a horse early, even if it means to sell healing scrolls and all that one-time stuff. Most of the time its better to own permanent items than these helpful stuff. An exception i found is this summon scroll: this really makes a difference when dealing with monsters to tough for your army.

Be careful though, while xp is not shared with ordinary troops or beasts, summons "steal" xp. So be sure to let it die before the end of the battle (you cant keep it anyway after that).

While i am using the hero strategy i mentioned, i am sure with nearly every other trait one can start a new strategy with nearly the same success. Maybe beasts are weak compared to heroes, but they cost 0 Gold to sustain. This gold could be used otherwise.

hmm, is there a way to tame dragons ? Not strong enough to take on these quests where i get one as reward

Fun, it is, endless fun. I will have a look at Gilden now, hähähähä. 

Please, if you can recommend any tough maps (not large ones, those take too long) or some mods, give it to DeadlyJulia (what a stupid name i gave to the mighty XXX ;)) and she will snap her whip because of joy..

Arrrrg!

PS: @ Tuidjy: resign from reloading? Can't -do -that - not - in - any - case. It just hurts physically. I also don't like the Ironmode with Xcom or similiar games, hardcore mode and stuff. i love to optimize and refine my strategy. Besides, bugs can really destroy a game if you do that. If i would lose a precious level 2 hero (hehe) because of a bug, i would deinstall the game on the spot.

But if there is a tough enemy/map/anything that is nearly not possible to beat, give it to me, and DeadlyJulia will bring you his/her/it head on a rusty plate. With a fork.

Lol I find it laughable that he claims to not cheat in the very same sentence where he admits he cheats. Lol

Sorry bud but if you save/reload because you lost a unit you didn't want to or because a hero gets permanently injured THAT IS CHEATING! Lol

No its not, and don't judge people from playing the game in a different way that you want to play the game.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Julia, I do not think you understand what you are facing.  The only way you could possibly take out five juggernauts with nothing but heroes on insane is by reloading, and reloading, and reloading, until you manage to get them to kill each other with splash damage.  They will still cripple your heroes.  Without reloading, you could probably not even take out Karavox with your best level 9 heroes in a stack, not without mana.

And every turn that goes by makes it more likely that the AI is rushing troops with their 150000 gold.

I'm not trying to preach about reloading and cheating.  Reloading and replaying a battle is a great way to learn.  But I do not play anything but ironman, so I wonder whether my advice is even useful to you. For example, I would have given up this game for lost already.

By the way, you are getting more experience from quests than from killing monsters because you are probably running hero heavy stacks, and while combat experience gets split between heroes, quest experience does not.

Unlikely. You posted Karavox, and the guy who has the Juggernauts is Verga.

Also, there is no way that your main hero is as strong as Karavox.  Did you take a look at the hit points?  How many attacks would it take your main hero to go through them?  By the way, when Karavox has ~60hps left, his armor will go to up to at least 15, and his attack will also rise.

I'm actually quite interested to learn whether you will be able to get a win out of this. My guess is no, but my guesses are thrown off a lot in your exact circumstances.

You can't call the game easy if you are save scumming. Period.

I sure could have grabbed more heroes by knowing where they were by save-reloading.....

I must say that 99% of players play with saving and reloading. If a game is not good enough to give a challenge to someone saving and reloading then its not good enough. Civ games and others do provide challenge with saving reloading though, although it is much easier to play those games without resorting to constant reloading.

The battles in this game are NOT CONSISTENT at all - you cannot predict how much damage is done, other than the bare minimum and I have yet to understand why sometimes an enemy will dodge 4 attacks in a row with 0 dodge, yet when I cast that spell that is supposed to dodge arrows it nearly doesnt help - how does dodge even work?!

A balance problem in a game comes from either being able to abuse game mechanics too much or on the other hand when game mechanics abuse the player too much by being punished for bad luck.

If your unit has 60hp, and gets attacked by 3 units the difference can be as much as that unit sustaining 0 damage and dying(and everything in-between  - this is bad game mechanics that introduce way too much chance that is based on nothing - if you take note non of the best strategy games do that.

Having multiple units in one "unit stack" makes this even worse - if you have 2x5 people units battling it out the damage variance is insane!

Playing with no saves then punishes the player too much for taking calculated risks which in turn makes the game less fun.

The battle AI is pathetic - the fact that it is "scared" of attacking a unit that can get a first turn on it and if you bring that unit within one tile of the other units range the AI will only move one tile all the while you have archers that can decimate the enemy? thats just VERY BAD AI.

I do think the AI has a tendency to forget about certain units, though I don't know what triggers it.

First off you and I both know your first sentence is rubbish. If you need to make a case for why you want to save scum then okay that fine. There is nothing wrong with save scumming but just like the people in the xcom forums that say the game is too easy when they reload tactical battles all the time....

HEY froggy if you are reading this I have a thought. Can we get an Ironman type mode? Just a thought.

Because your attacking unit does not have 100 accuracy, and because the RNG decided to mess with you.

If you're attacking with a 75 accuracy unit, and the enemy has 0 dodge, there is a better than one in twenty chance that the enemy will dodge twice in a row.  If you are attacking with a blinded sovereign (happens all the time against darklings) there is a better than one in ten chance you will miss four times in a row.

I've missed 6 65% hit shots in XCom while counting.  Annoying, but that's what randomness is.

This varies amongst players.  My wife HATES X-Com because of the randomness.  I play both X-Com and Fallen Enchantress on Ironman.  Different people enjoy different things. 

Many of your other points, I agree with.  But I have to ask you.  How do you avoid luck having a great deal of weight?

Total War does it by having tons of individual soldiers, so at the end, it averages out.

Alpha Centaurus, Battle of Wesnoth, etc... pretty much removed luck, from what I remember.

I enjoyed them all. I just feel that be restoring, you remove the joy of actually getting things right.  But again, it's completely subjective.  My wife will not touch ironman, let alone perma-death.

Can we move the ironman discussion somewhere else? We are ruining Julia's thread.

You can avoid luck easily - introduce a small amount of variance vs a large amount of variance - I play XCom with minimal to no reloading just because I dont have too much time on my hands and want to finish a game(Havent yet). 

Instead of modifying damage for each soldier in a stack, get the total damage and modify it with some formula so that 10 damage can become 15 with crit hit or 8 with a poor hit and have the unit critically miss for 20% for the damage 10% of the time. If you want a unit with large variance in damage you can adjust damage with critical chance, or other special abilities. You can also have the units preform a virtual skirmish that would balance the variance a bit more. I am not a programmer, but this stuff is relatively easy compared to writing game AI. Game AI is the toughest thing in games today, because games tend to be pretty complex, and a lot of the complexity actually comes from needless eye candy - little things that have a huge impact on game design. 

You can have range penalties for bows, throwing units, etc to mix it up - the best part is that its all been done before, in countless games. So really developing games today is relatively easy at least when it comes to game mechanics. Its the polish thats hard. Unfortunately games such as this are not very popular with today's audience so most game companies do not have much choice in the way of what to pay attention to when making games - if they want to make money that is.

Have most units carry close stats of 1 to 10 damage, and adjust with special abilities - this is how the best games do it, HOMM, CIV, etc, since you brought XCOM to the discussion this is also how XCOM does it - damage does not change very much, the the hard part, called GAME BALANCING that makes it perfect.

I will take some time out to explain it here, If you want to know about it further please post a new thread (and poke me or anyone else who will gladly explain all the mechanics we know of) (I am a bit randomly active these days).

The dodging part I will explain like that:

If I have a hero with 65 accuracy, and attacking an enemy with 0 dodge, then I will have a 65 chance of the attack saying "HIT" (and damage), and a 35% chance the attack will say "Dodge"... there is no "miss" flow-text, that is replaced by the "dodge" (which can be slightly confusing, just consider "dodge" a miss).

If I have a hero with 65 accuracy, and my enemy have 15 dodge, I will have a 50% chance to hit (65 - 15 = 50) and a 50% chance to miss.

Those two last cases were specific to heroes, because there is only 1 unit included in the attack, the same is true with golems, juggernauts and stuff like that. When it comes to trained units, EACH single unit have X amount of chance to hit, so you will see way less "dodge" when a group is attacking, since someone is going to hit, what you WILL see, is that your hero with dodge bonus will take less damage, or more random damage as more or less members of the enemy trained group will hit or miss.

Attack and defense are tricky, Defense will reduce damage by a percentage, and if you have 10 attack, you actually have a chance to deal "5 to 10" damage against an armoured opponent (max damage, and half max damage).

Your base attack is your base max damage, and it goes through a slightly complicated math thing to get reduced  by defense.

If I have a hero with 10 attack hitting a monster with X defense, my max damage will be as follows, and minimum damage be half of that:
10 attack vs 0 defense = 10 max damage, and 5 minimum damage. (0% reduction)
10 attack vs 5 defense = 7 max damage, and 3 minimum damage (25% reduction) (it might actually be 8 max damage, and 4 minimum damage)
10 attack vs 10 defense = 5 max damage, and 2 minimum damage. (50% reduction)
10 attack vs 20 defense = 2 max damage, and 1 minimum damage. (75% reduction)

This all scales with your attack, versus the enemy defense, so if the enemy have the same amount of defense as you have attack, they will reduce the amount of damage by 50% always (of course this is after spears ability to reduce enemy defense for the attack).

When a trained stack of units attacks, each single unit rolls to-hit separately, as you know, but they all also roll damage separately,
so if I have trained a 3-man-militia unit with clubs, they will all have 5 attack power, and when attacking a unit with 0 defense, they will all deal 5 max damage, and 2 minimum damage each (for a total of 15-6 damage if all hit).

But when my earlier 3-man-militia with clubs, that each have 5 attack power attacks another unit with 6 defense, they will all deal 2-1 damage, for a total of 6-3 damage if all 3 militia units hit.

This probably should be explained in the Hierga-nom-nom somewhere, but at least I am here to tell you so hope it helps.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I just look at the little statistics help thing that tells me my to-hit% and damage, and often times its WAY off?!

Its only my first time playing but vs the same enemy you often do 15 damage and then you do 5, same with enemy vs you, this makes it difficult to play.

Also, the fact that the unit of 5 men does 100-20 damage  to a unit does not make the game any better of said game mostly consists of such units and all the 'hardcore' players playing said game play with no saves

So let me get this straight, I am not sure how this works because I am of the school of thought that you are a piss poor strategy gamer if you savescum to win, but you're saying the game is too easy but you're save scumming? Save scumming is cheating. Reloading every battle to dive headlong into and lose doesn't make sense to me. Strategy gaming and FE is exemplary of this is about dealing with your decisions. It would be like going to Vegas and sitting down to a black jack table and you throw down $100K on a hand and when you lose you ask for a re-deal. Now I may have pegged you wrong and I don't mean any offense, but you can't say the game is too easy while cheating. 

Maybe it is my naivety speaking here, but that is my opinion.  

Whoever said playing a strategy where it makes you make critical decisions probably needs to go back to their Call of Duty. 

Exactly and someone is trying to JUSTIFY save scumming as NOT CHEATING! Laughable lol roflmfao.

Just because YOU CHEAT 99% of the time doesn't mean EVERYONE does. I certainly don't save/reload because something bad happened to me in the game. You couldn't do that in a MULTIPLAYER game vs other humans or you'd be tossed out on your head. Quit CHEATING the computer AI and play it like you would a multiplayer game and you won't have these "game is too easy issues". Walk in the park my arse lol You're just a cheater who can't find challenge in his/her cheating. lol too funny for words.