merlinme

If the question is whether I would prefer to tactically cast summon grave elememental (with bonus 1 radius reincarnation) with cast time of 1 turn for 60 mana or summon delin with cast time of 2 turns and 500 mana then yes, summon grave elemental wins every time. I'd agree Delin is too expensive. The only real question is what would make him more useful. I've suggested halving the mana, you've suggested dividing it by 8. I've suggested making him last longer, you've sugges

I'd agree air elemental is more useful than earth elemental, by the way. Air elementals can get taken down pretty easily by more powerful units later in the game because of the zero defence, but the higher move and initiative mean they get involved in battles more, and in practice I don't mind casting the summon again because I'll often get a higher level unit because of more shards or other bonuses. I've not played with Delin but 500 mana to (at best) win one bat

The real advantage of summon grave elemental is that you can cast it tactically to give all units within one radius death ward for five turns, which allowed me to win a dragon battle I couldn't have done otherwise. This definitely makes summon grave elemental more useful than summon earth elemental in my view. It could be made clearer to the player though.

I've previously noted that mauling a prone unit is a 100% kill, which seems over the top to me. Is this what you're seeing? It can happen quite easily if you have air elementals or an air mage, or troops that can get Bash results. Regardless of how little damage the attacker is doing and how many hitpoints the defender has, you will keep mauling until they die, because the chance to hit prone troops is always 100%. 100% chance for the first hit + half the norml maul&nb

Ok, well moving my army into their territory until they declared war worked, although it does seem a bit of a round about way of doing things. I still think it should be made clearer that paying tribute is an automatic "cannot declare war for 30 turns", I don't remember seeing anything about that in the screen when it came up. It's entirely possible it was just the icon for Wither, I was losing quite badly so I didn't spend ages checking everything in that game. Even

I've completed a game on Expert where I had one city early, and if I remember correctly I was able to build one more after a few dozen turns, but then I ran into an AI who was way more advanced than I was, and there was no way to go past him. My capital city was quite a good one, and I was just about able to hang in there. I was in a barren peninsula, but I could only be attacked from one direction, and I did at least have access to wargs, crystal and gold mines. I'd agree that w

The summoned troops are not really game changing, but I don't think they're supposed to be, for balance reasons. The troops can be quite handy early on in the game; I don't think you pay upkeep for them, do you? Probably not for your stack of doom in the middle game, and definitely not in the late game, but even after the start they can be quite handy as garrison troops, or reinforcements if your stack takes a bit of a beating and you haven't h

In order of priority: 1) Bug fixes 2) A better AI; better at building its stacks, better at targeting goodies and outposts, better at shifting to all-out defence when it's losing. 3) An AI that uses resource limits. Give it resource bonuses, extra resources at the start, etc., but ignoring limits entirely is too much. 4) The User Interface could be improved. E.g. heroes screen, make technology easier to trade, add a tooltip to show the Swarm bonus, etc. etc

I agree that giving the AI resources bonuses on higher difficulties, e.g. two/ three/ four times what the player gets from the same resource, and maybe giving it a few hundred of each resource at the start of the game, seems a better solution than just having it ignore limits. It rather breaks the resource gathering side of the game if the AI can ignore limits and build what it wants. It also sounds like it causes balance problems, with nations who concentrate on troops d

1) The AI actually cast a strategic spell on my stack, which was awesome. However it didn't seem to expire; the spell was Wither, which I believe should last three turns. It lasted until the end of the game. Which was only a dozen turns or so, I was losing badly, but it was certainly a lot more than 3 turns. The icon was definitely still on my stack, although I didn't double-check that it was affecting the stats. If it;s relevant to anything I had lost both my cities at the time!

It's not that big a deal but it's annoying and I would have thought it's quite easy to fix. When trading technology, on my screen when I select the technology I want from the AI, the box to adjust the amount covers the trade details. In other words I can't see how much the AI values that trade. Worse, it doesn't seem to be possible to remove or adjust the amount of technology which you've added to the trade list; you have to exit the trade screen and go

It's been reported by other people that the AI doesn't need resources to build units. Which is not great, but I guess that might have been the only way they could get it to give an effective challenge. It does seem to give a pretty massive advantage to AI nations which rely more on troops. It would be nice if they could fix this so the AI is playing by the same rules as the player (or closer, anyway). Even if they gave the AI a few thousand of each resource at the start of the game on

Wildlands are still there, pretty much the same. Actually more fun in some ways, as you get cooler stuff if you kill one of the big bad dudes. Magic is different. It depends what you mean by nerfed. They've spread the spells out between the elemental experience picks and the Mage experience picks. If choose to be a Mage you get to choose from some pretty cool extra choices. You basically choose between summoning and causing damage. If you specialise in one or the other then you wi

To the OP: I think it's a much better game. More immersive (better graphics), better AI, I think the heroes mechanics work better, some of the additions (e.g. summoning, special abilities for weapons) make the tactical possibilities more interesting. Quests are better (you get more worthwhile items from doing them). It's not perfect, but if you liked Fallen Enchantress I think you'll like Legendary Heroes a lot more. It's basically Fallen Enchantress, only mo

I'd never heard of "AI War", it sounds interesting, I may have a look. However I enjoy the atmosphere and gameplay of games as much as I enjoy hard games. There comes a point where no, I don't want to beat the game on Deity (or whatever), because that's such hard work (and will take up so much of my limited free time) that even if I put the hours in to get good enough, I can't see the point. I note that according to Wikipedia, AI War gives "reinforcements of units they

The AI doesn't cheat as such that I'm aware of, although at higher difficulty levels it gets significant buffs. It performs reasonably well in general, I've seen a lot worse AI, especially at the time of release, although I am personally hoping that the developers spend some time improving the AI in future patches. If you've played a reasonable amount of strategy games then you won't want to play the game on any less than Challenging, and once you're used to the m

Really interesting post. I agree with pretty much all of it. I merely play on Expert, but I should probably raise the level; with anything other than a rubbish starting position I'm pretty confident of taking any AI opponent out with one decent stack. The game is fun without more of an AI challenge, but it would be even better with a better AI. 1) +1 to the AI only building units in fortresses. The AI should have a target it wants to spend on wages compared to income (e.

I'd agree with most of this; the champions which need the most work are assassins and commanders, the others work reasonably well although might benefit from tweaking to make them more fun. I have to comment on the suggestion that Summon Grave Elemental needs to be replaced with something better though; you do realise that if you cast it tactically all units within one square get Death Ward for five turns, yes? That made my dragon battle a helluva lot easier. I turned up with a fu

1) After playing for a long time movement in the tactical map became broken. No green squares showed, and most of the time I wasn't allowed to move a unit. I could still attack, although I had to let the computer choose the route. Reloading fixed this. 2) After taking the dragon eyes to the statue, I tried the battle and got annihilated. So I reloaded and declined the battle. I then got prompted to take the battle just about any time anything significant happened, e.g. start of tu

Hi, it's 100% chance to hit prone troops. What I assume is a bug is that the maul penalty for later strikes is not applied. So in other words if you maul a prone troop you will kill them every time.