merlinme

[quote who="sjaminei" reply="7" id="3400727"]Tidal wave is the most bang for mana spell there is, once you get some water shards going. [/quote] I believe you. How much damage does it do exactly though? I can't find it anywhere online, and I don't have access to the game at the moment. My strategy involves making a Stack of Doom and killing everything in sight as early as possible though. Even 40 mana is quite a lot at the start of the game, and I wouldn't have fou

Incidentally I tried Tidal Wave once, it was an enormous letdown. The damage was tiny. I assume it causes physical damage rather than elemental damage, and physical damage would be reduced by armour, which may be part of the problem.

The AI definitely uses strategic spells. I've had it spam them on my armies in fact. I think I've seen a Falling Star, but I don't really remember. I try not to leave my armies in enemy territory unless I can take a city or outpost in one turn, so that greatly reduces the chances of being hit by a lot of them. Falling Star is quite expensive, Curgens Volcano even more so, so it may be that in most games the AI either doesn't have the mana or decides it's

Is there any particular reason monster difficulty is +4 levels on Ridiculous, *2 on Insane? As noted on another thread, this makes level 1 monsters much, much easier on Insane than Ridiculous. In fact any monster up to starting level 5 is weaker on Insane than Ridiculous, which seems odd. If there's no particular reason for it then could it be made a max of the two values, e.g. max(level +4, level *2)? Or failing that maybe have a multiplier and a level bonus, and for Ins

The behaviour described (monsters kill AI city once, but then don't attack for many turns when the game is reloaded and replayed slightly differently) could fit with the hypothesis that monsters will attack the AI troops and cities, but that this is more or less random. Mobile monsters definitely target my units and cities on Ridiculous and Insane. I don't know about lower difficulty levels, e.g. Challenging.

I believe based on another thread that monsters never target Outposts, human or AI, although they may occasionally move into one at random. I believe not having the AI aggressively clear out lairs was a design decision to leave some for the player to fight later in the game, I don't know if the monster aggression against the AI was toned down to compensate for this. Certainly on higher difficulty levels the mobile monsters actively attack me, and if strong enough will h

The AI gets increasingly enormous boosts on higher difficulty levels, as far as I can tell for all of production, population and research. One of the biggest factors though is building new cities. If the AI is getting to its second city faster than you it will almost certainly be producing more research. After population hits 50 there is no benefit until population hits 150. A lot of city sites can't support a population of 150 without building food boosting buildings, and even if th

+1 to have something other than silence when you visit a quest you're already doing from a different quest location (such as two Inns with the same quest). One more: if you use a spell to immobilize a stack you get told how long the immobilization will last. This doesn't seem to happen if a hero is killed; please could there be some way of seeing how long a recently killed hero will be immobilized for. Thanks, merlin

[quote]I think it was suggested that the player should play a game with each faction so that there would be a "pool" of builds for the AI to have some efficient builds to choose from ? Is this still in FE:LH [/quote] Yes, speaking as someone who was attacked by his own Mounted Lightning Pikes in his last game, I can reassure you this is in!

There's quite a dramatic difference between a monster upgraded to level 2 (Insane) and upgraded to level 5 (Ridiculous). Wolves have 8 hitpoints on Insane, for example, I'm sure it was more than that on Ridiculous. In fact if it's +1 level per difficulty level between Challenging and Insane, then having only one extra level takes you right back to one level above Challenging. On the other hand you really don't want to be fighting a dragon on Insane. Esca

That is interesting, I'm currently trying to win on Insane and I did think that some of the monsters "felt" easier than on Ridiculous. I didn't have a problem taking on Wildings and Bandits, for example, whereas almost any monsters were pretty tough at the start on Ridiculous. Doubling level will clearly have a dramatic effect on the tougher monsters, and it might make the Quest victory tougher if that's affected. But if the intention is that Insane should always be tougher than R

[quote who="Sanati" reply="56" id="3399638"]Only one of the victory conditions requires killing AI units[/quote] Well, not really. You can win more or less any way you like if you've eliminated the AIs as a threat. There are some marginal cases when playing on a high difficulty where you might squeak through a Spell of Making or Quest victory with more powerful AIs still playing, or take a Diplomatic victory because you're allied with someone. But most of the ti

One more: At the moment unused Essence slots are grey, which is quite hard to spot unless you're really looking for it. It's easy to forget you have unused city Essence slots, especially just after you've conquered an enemy city, and 95% of the time it's a mistake if there's an unused slot; some sort of prompt or hint or way to easily find them would be nice. There may be legitimate reasons why

Yes that's correct, Cyndrum demons gain one figure (with full hitpoints) per unit they kill, up to a maximum of five figures. Be aware that this only happens if the unit maximum is less than five figures though; it caught me out once with a unit I'd got to full strength but then it had taken a beating and was down to only one figure (on 1/5 of the unit's maximum hitpoints). In other words, you don't gain a figure because your unit is damaged and current unit size is l

In no particular order: 1: On Diplomacy Screen, mouseover the "Friendly" bar should give a tooltip which says why they are angry/ friendly, so you don't have to exit and go into the Foreign Relations screen to find out. 2: On Diplomacy Screen, have an "Are you sure?" box if you click on Declare War. Or put it somewhere away from the other options with a "Don't touch unless you mean it" colour. At the moment it's ridiculously easy to Declare War by accident

I disagree with GFireflyE on toning down Wisp and Lightbringer. They're powerful summons, but so are Raise Skeleton and Skeleton Horde. I certainly wouldn't only target the "good summons", and I'm not convinced they need toning down at all. I approve of the low experience for fighting AI; killing AIs is its own award, i.e. that&#39

I don't know the exact details but I would agree essence yields of 3 are rarer now. In Legendary Heroes I don't generally expect to find an essence yield of 3 without clearing a lair or doing a wildlands. This makes high essence city sites all the more valuable, and as far as I'm concerned that's a good thing, it makes it all the more meaningful if you do manage to find one and hang onto it.

Re: Balance, is anything going to be done to make the Fire branch of Summoning worth taking? Especially if Earth elementals etc. are being buffed. The big one would be to make Summon the Pyre of Man less ridiculously expensive in terms of mana cost. And last more than two microseconds. Re: AI, I had the AI use its fire staffs on my Burning Wraith last night. I believe this was fixed for spells, is it possible to fix it for staff troops not to attack units which are immune? It

Not top of the list, but I agree the hourglass when you're choosing research is annoying. Although I can see some people complaining that they missed that they had finished research. Actually one of my pet peeves with Research is that if I'm browsing the tree and switch from Warfare to Magic and then exit, I will now be researching in the Magic tree, which wasn't actually my intention. I don't think you should have your previous choice deselected and something else aut

Blizzard is powerful, but it takes an extra turn to cast, and can potentially be countered. At the point where you get -1 casting time you can cast two Fireballs for one Blizzard, and Fireballs will be cast instantly (no chance to be countered; kill enemy units one turn faster, i.e. before they can attack). I do generally prefer Water magic to Fire magic, but to some extent this is a matter of taste. The -40% mana cost for tactical spell (Mantle of Oceans?) from Water is awesome, but&nbs

[quote who="Fezziwig" reply="17" id="3398796"]Really, this usage is, for the most part, just exploiting the AI.[/quote] Well, maybe. Yes, the fact that the AI won't generally move its unit if an enemy unit is next to it is a weakness. And I agree the summons are acting as a distraction. But that distraction would stil be useful against a human, if not quite so much. The Zone of Control and Swarm bonus mean that Skeleton Horde (for example) would be effective against

[quote who="merlinme" reply="16" id="3398787"] Quoting Sanati, reply 15No offense, but that was exactly the sort of misconception I believed the OP had about the system.[/quote] You're misunderstanding the exploit. It's not about building one pioneer. The point is you can queue unlimited numbers of pioneers behind whatever it is you want to actually build, and then cancel the queued pioneers to regain the population without ever a

[quote who="joeball123" reply="36" id="3398519"]I tend to try to avoid building troops in the early portion of the game if possible[/quote] I agree with joeball123 on this, I also tend to adopt a fairly high risk strategy where I only build the minimum of troops I need to at the start. On occasions I've had to rush my sovereign back to defend my capital. On one or two occasions I've had to reload a previous save game to get there in time, which some people may consider ch

The loss of mana is not insignificant, but it seems to be a percentage, which means factions with low mana stores don't have as great a penalty. I quite like the idea of a Fame hit, as it seems logical that heroes would be less likely to join a losing sovereign. Maybe killed heroes and sovereigns could randomly lose one item they own, which would be fairly historical; defeated knights might lose their horse or their armour but not their lives. Temporarily increased unres