great job FE:LH team :) i really enjoyed participating in the beta. i hope you get lots of good reviews and sell a few million copies ;) imo, the game deserves a 9/10 rating. not perfect, but certainly among the best 4X games i've played so far.
you have flame dart, lightning bolt, shadow bolt and storm for single targets (also sunder for elementals). if your caster has access to mantle of oceans and maybe one of the robes with mana cost discount, it's also affordable to use fireball while flame dart is on cooldown. or use buff/debuff spells to slow/shrink/haste/blind/wither/curse while your main nuke is on cooldown.
don't think that combo is broken or unbalanced. if you want to play a sov that is a physical damage dealer (warrior/assassin), you'll probably pick might, but you'd be silly to also pick weak, since that's the one weakness you really don't want. if your sov will be a spellcaster, commander or tank, you probably won't pick might, since the small bonus to attack is meaningless and there are better alternatives for trait/item picks that make a lot more sense. i ca
never had issues with save games. as long as the changes are mostly in the XML, the old save games are pretty much "immune" to compatibility issues, since they keep a copy of the original XML files and don't update to the newest build at all.
IIRC, Derek Paxton confirmed some weeks ago that this is working as designed (clerics and their upgrade - shrine/temple of essence still requiring essence). i guess that's another point where the game could be easily(?) improved with better descriptions/tooltips. if i had to name one thing for the next patch that absolutely should be done, it would be better descriptions for buildings/traits/(some) other game concepts (such as swarming for example)
when i go dual heroes from the start, i'll build the tower first, so the first champ is unlocked after 8 turns or something. my favorite champs for dual hero teams are defenders, so if i get a chance to pick hannis or inslow (play mostly kingdoms, don't really know the empire heroes by name) i'll get them and turn them into a tank ASAP. other good choices that i used successfully are iriel (starts with life 2 -> useful as a healer from the moment you pick him up) or badra as as
no i don't think so. it's a personal XP modifier. the way it seems to work is that first, XP is distributed among champions & troops, and then the modifiers kick in, such as XP traits, tutelage and items. in this case, the item reduces the XP for the guy that uses it, but it doesn't affect XP for the other survivors of the fight.
[quote who="moi-meme" reply="34" id="3359888"] Quoting Azunai_, reply 33 i disagree that there is no incentive to use heroes together. in my experience, it's a lot easier to clear all those early game lairs that block expansion when you use all your heroes together. also, you can't really afford several armies early on, so it's the smart thing to do. it takes a lot of tech before trained units outpace even a low level champion. if you don't use all of your he
not sure about the dark wizards, but it would make sense for them to be an upgrade for an undead lair that wasn't cleared early, IMO. i think those lairs upgrade to cindercorpse first, so maybe the dark wizards are now the final stage of an undead lair?
i disagree that there is no incentive to use heroes together. in my experience, it's a lot easier to clear all those early game lairs that block expansion when you use all your heroes together. also, you can't really afford several armies early on, so it's the smart thing to do. it takes a lot of tech before trained units outpace even a low level champion. if you don't use all of your heroes in the early game, you're wasting potential. splitting them up later is a
i think the smart thing to do would be to disable those mesages when the game is set up with faction teams (so you don't get those messages if both factions are on the same team) - this would remove the immersion breaking messages for both the scenario and the sandbox game (afaik, you can also set up permanent teams for factions in the sandox game)
hmm that problem was reported about a week ago and Derek said he fixed it. did you start a new game after the 0.91 or 0.92 patch or did you continue a game that was started under version 0.90 ? the save games contain most/all XMl data, so a game that was started as a .90 game will still contain the bugs/typos that were adressed in the meantime. EDIT: you can check the version of that save game in the Load menu, btw. when you hover over a savegame, the first item in the tooltiptext is
[quote who="Burress" reply="4" id="3359226"] ... unless they had that automatic first-strike, then they may get a one-shot win ... [/quote] the "Impulsive" trait was changed from "automatic first strike" to +2 initiative at some point during the beta.
in my experience, some heroes can still be very viable even that late in the game. their main strength is that they are viable much much earlier, though. with a few decent heroes, you can do pretty impressive stuff a long time before you can even train semi decent troops. i tend to rely heavily on heroes early on. it's not uncommon for me to clear out strong and even dangerous monster lairs with my sovereign, the first 1-2 champions and some 3 man groups of spearmen (or other low-
hmm yeah it should be consistent between sandbox and campaign. i used snaking for a while and stopped using it mostly because i couldn't stand the ugly "tentacle cities". i think the reason why they no longer allow snaking to unlock forest/river buildings is so people who don't want to do it (and also AI which is probably not capable of doing it efficiently) aren't at a big disadvantage. as it is now, it's a small bonus to use it (can save you a few connecting outposts and unl
yeah, probably more of an oversight. when they changed the placement rules to put mages in the back row, they should have flagged the familiar the same way.
yeah i don't think it would hurt the game at all if dragons were set to always drop something good. doesn't really need to be dependent on the relative difficulty. even late in the game when you can kill them casually, the loot may still be useful (after all, if you can kill dragons easily, your champions probably need some good items to keep up with trained units). there aren't that many dragons around in my games. maybe half a dozen on a large map or something. won't break t
there's already a shortcut for leave city (the "V" key). wouldn't hurt to have a button in the interface, though.
yeah it's usually more fun to accept losses and rebuild what you have lost after a disastrous failure. just wanted to point out that in my experience, reloading can also have an effect on the loot/reward for a battle.
the loot distribution code might be a bit buggy i think. i remember a particular instance where i managed to kill a dragon in the first attempt (with no reloads) and it dropped a purple item (a super powered towershield with a built in teleport spell or whatever) i lost all my trained units in that fight and one of my heroes also fell and got a weakness for it. so i tried it again (reload) and beat the same dragon, this time with no dead champ and no losses, and this time it onl
there's an option in the game that allows you to manually place buildings instead of the default auto placement. with this option, you can extend the reach of your city borders considerably by building, for example, towards a resource node or towards other cities. this technique is commonly referred to as "snaking"
don't know if the game has to model the effects of armor accurately - i think it's a fairly common RPG trope to show plate as heavy/bulky and chain as the medium option between leather and plate. though this apparently isn't quite true :) if they stick with the current system, i guess lowering the penalty wouldn't be a bad idea. as it stands now, you're often better off just using def units with leather armor and kite/tower shields- no penalty and still ~50-60 def
don't really care about the victory conditions. i consider my game won when it gets too easy or repetitive. i try all sorts of playstyles until i find something i really like, then stick with it for a while before i try something new. i usually avoid stalling/turtling. i find the game pretty interesting and challenging when i go for challenging encounters with rather limited resources. i'll often play games with rather high world difficulty (expert/ridiculous) and lower AI difficulty
you don't need research for those. they are the demons that spawn on death shards. each shard type has one demon type associated with it. the power of the demon corresponds to the level of the shard improvement (higher tier shrine upgrades spawn higher tier versions of the demons)
hehe yeah "middle of the line" is stuff like education or blacksmithing :) dance with dragons is quite expensive research wise actually. with the amount of research you spend on that single tech, you could probably unlock the first 3 tiers of all three tech trees combined.