Awesome, thanks so much for bailing me out of having to complete those absurdly difficult fights! The Phoenix, as expected, dominates the battlefield and won those 3 Shelter battles very easily indeed. So it seems that no losses is possible as Daert after all! But you will need Matt's save and the Phoenix scroll for sure.

Here's how you do it:

Kill Portland stacks, 3 of them, which are a bit harder than usual because you don't get Frozen Grasp in this save!

Ignore those Catacombs stacks, all of them! They would be very hard with only Poison Skull, so thank God it isn't necessary to do them. But VERY IMPORTANT make sure you pick up ALL 18 crystals. You will have 22 in total.

Go into Dragandor, ignore the Spider, pick up your lovely Phoenix scroll (x4!!) and talk to the king. Level up to 4. Now for the hard part. Like Matt says, you need Bibliophile or you won't have the crystals to Level the Phoenix up to Level 2. So you want go do Meditation, Bibliophile, Order 1 and 2 at level 4. Now you can JUST level up the Phoenix to Level 2.

Phew, that was the hard part. Now for the fun! Go talk to Bagyr and Neoline, fight the guard (don't waste the mana on this fight) and then fight the Captain of the Guard. It's very strategic how you win this fight. I've done this step by step. :-P

1. Make sure you have 25 mana.
2. On turn one, open your spellbook.
3. Press the 'I WIN' button.
4. Win. :cool:

Same deal for the three Shelter stacks. In fact the Human one still managed to get one of my Vamps with their healing, so I had to regenerate the Vamp, but otherwise it was a complete walkover. The Dwarven stack NEARLY killed the Phoenix once (:rolleyes: ) but not quite. So I'm in the Basement and I don't expect it will be very difficult. The hardest thing now is waiting for my VERY slooooooow mana regeneration.

Thanks again, Matt!

EDIT: Okay, so I've finished the Basement (killed 2 out of 3, left the Snakes) and Whitehill (again, killed 2 of 3), so I'm up to Portland and, as we know, this is where the game opens up. I've done 12 fights and you could easily do as little as 9, I think, by this stage of the game. Daert's start is absurdly difficult (not as hard as Bagyr's!) and it's only because of the Phoenix that I was able to get through so easily. I think I've probably lost the motivation to actually continue with this game for now, but I may come back to it later.

tl;dr - use Matt's Phoenix save if you want to do a no-losses Impossible challenge as Daert.

Yay! The Phoenix is breath of fresh air, isn't it! :cool:

By the way, I think even if Bagyr got 4 Phoenix scrolls he might be able to do through the Shelter no loss - hmmm...

Very funny post by the way, @Zhuangzi! :)

I think almost all my fights were Phoenix 100% damage, Vamps 0% (slackers! ;)). I think the only fight where they joined in (after Portland anyway) was the Basement Snake stack.

I didn't even disband any of my troops and just tossed them in the Shelter / my Reserve when I was doing the real fights!

Well, since I've been struggling with doing all these no loss battles, I finally figured I'd go forward with the Phoenix since it is so much easier than the others.

Since I was such a dope and didn't realize I could go back to Atrixus / Tristrem when I played Neoline the first time through the Catacombs (I thought I had to get their maps first before it would allow me to return!) I've been wondering around both places and I'm amazed by how much stuff you can get for free! All this gold lying around and chests to dig here and there, dummy stacks to kite to get the goodies, troops that want to join, I'm like a kid in a candy store! :)

I got 12 Demons (not that big of a deal, I guess) and then in Tristrem there are 70 Shamans! Wow! Since my 2 Vamps have been playing all these no loss games, I figured I'd just have then sit in the Shelter, relax, and shoot the breeze with Neoline and Bagyr while I use all these free guys! I also bought 20 Demonologists while I was in Atrixus so that I have 3 Demons, 3 / 2 Demonologists, and 3 / 3 Shamans.

I basically already have enough Crystals for Phoenix Level 3 and I only fought the Horsemen in Portland so far (although I did use a little Phoenix to whoop up on the Catacombs stacks and that Spider stack outside of Dragandor for a little payback from the other games :evil:). I went with Bibliophile Level 3 since I was so short on Crystals in my Neoline playthrough and so just need to get to Level 7 to get Phoenix Level 3.

I'm wondering if Demon Portal is going to work better with Daert as the Leadership is close to my own right now as I bought that while I was in Atrixus, too.

By the way, I was wondering, does anyone know that if you talk to the two shop keepers in Atrixus does that start a clock on how long you have to rescue Pacca? The say she'll be executed in a couple of days so I was wondering if that is game days or it is just scripted and it doesn't matter. At any rate, I didn't want to chance it, although one of them sells some Executioners so I ended up not talking to either of them just in case since I won't be able to do Atrixus for a good while anyway.

So I'm back in the Shelter about ready to set out back to Portland. This time I'm going to use teleport unless I'm really low on gold instead of sailing all over the place, although I miss my Griffin Sails Ship :( - certainly beats the Checkered Sails one! :-P

/C\/C\

Definitely use Shamans in this game, then. I didn't use them at all in my Neoline game, but I'm up for something different. Demons are great too, of course. I kinda thought it would be cool to keep the Vampire theme as much as possible, but I suppose that will have to wait until Monteville.

The Pacca quest definitely isn't timed. I left it unfinished for most of my Neoline playthrough.

By the way, people on the Steam forum are complaining about Bibliophile being bugged - something, apparently, is 'resetting' the discount somehow? But they don't know what. So I would try to monitor that situation, or you'll end up using more crystals than you intended. It may be that it isn't worth spending more runes on Bibliophile for this reason.

Definitely teleport this time :) DG Dobrev and I both finished on day 23 as Neoline and he beat me by about 40 points, 2080 to 2040 or thereabouts. He did way more fights than I!

Hah, I was the one who had the bugged bibliophile and posted it on steam. :) However, it might have been a one-off thing. Cost me about three hours of time as I had to reload.

It is working 100% now and it is pretty much mandatory for the vampire if you want to use nice spells.

Guys, I'm pretty sure it is only when you pick Bibliophile first as Daert.

I can repeat this (I had to go back to my Portland save because I've actually seen it before, but forgot about it) as if you pick it first, then Meditation, you won't get the rebate, but if you don't pick it first than you'll be fine.

I have Bibliophile @Level 3 and it is only 10 Crystals for Level 3 Phoenix when it should be 20.

/C\/C\

Awesome Matt! Someone was bound to get the Phoenix eventually. Glad it was you, I gave up after scanning over 250 saves total. Congrats, I will have a go at it sometime as well. I still have no internet at home, so I have been amusing myself with scanning saves, but it wasn't to be. Then I remembered I haven't finished Divinity: OS, and ditched KBDS for a bit till I fool around with D:OS. Now I may be back to KBDS sooner than expected. Holy hell, huge congrats on the find.

EDIT: Ok, gave it a go. I expected it to be an easy going, but not this ridiculously easy. I think I lost only a single vamp to the human stack. Oh boy, oh boy... Phoenix sure rocks.

Yeah, that Phoenix sure does own the battlefield early on. I think Matt is continuing to play as Daert and has his Phoenix up to Level 3 early on. :cool:

Me, I don't have the motivation to continue with Daert right now. I will come back to it though. Right now I'm playing Wasteland 2, which is basically a modern sequel to Fallout 2. Having a lot of fun with it.

Yah, so far Phoenix is super easy - I did the ol' kiting to Helvedia trick to pick me up an Arch Demon to take on Oncologon (or however you spell his name), but I want to play different units this time, so no Arch Demons for me the rest of the game (well, unless I get them from Demon Portal)!

In fact, I think I'm going to see what I can do about limiting my use of level 5 troops to maybe just Bone Dragons since I'm Daert and maybe the Orc and Neutral non-dragons (like Trolls and Cyclops).

So far I've been having a ton of fun with Demonologists and Shamans and was able to complete all the Portland quests very easily. The Shamans work really well with troops that can't heal early in the game.

In fact I was amazed at how effective the Shamans are as I was able to defeat the two "weak" and "very weak" (mislabeled) humans stacks for Lucia using them with the Ancient Phoenix (I still had 1 Arch Demon and 1 Red Dragon to go with two stacks of Shamans and 1 Demonologist stack when I did these fights).

I briefly tried Vampires / Ancient Vampires with my Necromancers, Demonologists, and Shamans, but they were mostly sitting there doing nothing and since you can get them from the Necromancer's Raise Dead, I ditched them and got me some Dark Mages (neat!) and went back to Tristrem and got me some Catapults.

So now my army is Demonologists, Shamans, Dark Mages, Necromancers, and Catapults. We'll see how long that lasts, but I actually had fun with the Catapults in my Bagyr experiments so I figured it should be fun.

I actually might go all ranged until the Ancient Phoenix starts to lose its power, but right now, I've actually been casting it at just level 2 sometimes due to level 3 being more than what I need for some of the Monteville fights.

I figure I'll eventually need to replace the Catapults with a level 4 troop, but I don't have any other level 4 ranged troops available right now. I could go with Dark Horsemen for a ground troop as there seems plenty in Portland, but with the demon summons and raised dead with the Phoenix there's no sense in needing a melee troop right now since I can produce them on the battlefield.

I've also been using teleport a lot so far and the only time I think I'll not use it is when I have to sail to a new island like I did with Monteville. I guess if I really wanted, I could kite from Helvedia to Inselburg.

I'm really amazed at the number of places you can go with kiting and teleport.

/C\/C\

It's amazing how the devs addressed some old issues I had, including how mages have way too much downtime between fights due to slow mana regeneration.

Anyways, I hate how long it takes to do some of the battles. Summon storm / shaman totem delays are enough for me with the Neoline build.

I'm just doing the old fashioned solo black dragon + Armageddon. Tried using female vampires + chaos gifts but that's actually way worse and mana intense.

Some battles are a little tricky (black + ice + red dragon fights) but so far having a VERY fast run since the big battles are done much faster now.

I can't wait to do Bagyr's run since the "orc warrior" has some very nice high damage mods that work well with orc units. Although I loathe having to resurrect against stupid geyser spells and insane stacks of doom. Ah wells.

I gotta admit I also pressed on with Matt's save. I also got Phoenix Level 3 very early, which made the whole Portland (including the pure chick) a breeze. I didn't go to Helvedia at all. I did go to Atrixus, however, and picked up some Archdemons, Demons, and Demonologists, and then some Necromancers from Monteville. I did beat the dragon with that setup (Plague rocks vs Blackies) and gave him the Portland princess. I am just a few hundred leadership short and I will start the good old "How far can you go with 1 Black Dragon" challenge just for fun. Impy's post really hit my good old KBAP soft spot.

There are some awesome items in Matt's save: I am well over 100 mana on level 8 because of them. That's just amazing. All I can say is, thanks Matt, for giving me the urge to do another play-through. It will surely be a great one. Just... a few hundred more leadership...

Playing as mage I find Call of Nature to be absolutely overpowered. At 36 lvl with 50 intelect, mage talants and Living Book(+20%), rank 3 Call of Nature have 277% of normal power. That means that the animals I get have my max leadership but with 277% attack/defense, health and damage. So not only their dmg is brutal but because of their hp thay can tank really well. While my normal stacks do 2-3k crits max, the animals do 15-20k crits every single time :shock:

True, and you should check how the phoenix looks. At level 18, I am looking at an Ancient Phoenix with over 2.5k HP and over 700 pure fire damage... Give him a bear buddy with call of nature and you dont need to worry anymore...

Haven't gotten phoenix yet (and I'm level 56), but book of evil has been way better for me since you can cast more than one and if you are lucky they do WAY more damage with their spells.

Honestly, with the retarded strong armies the game throws at you, I think it's "fair". At least I don't want to go through very slow combat. It makes me wonder if the demoness/paladin class is once again the shafted class at the end even if it has the "easier" beginning.

That said, there are a lot of subtle things I like about darkside. They give you enough rope so the RNG doesn't break your game. My last game as demoness/paladin, the phantom spell never showed up at all and that's usually the make or break spell.

It's true that phoenix is very powerfull in the beginning but because it's not affected by your leadership it's power start to fall behind after middle/late game.
At my lvl, ancient phoenix have 500-1k dmg and less then 4k hp which means that it can get killed from 1-2 hits if i'm not carefull with him. In comparison the animals from call of nature not only have more dmg but their total hp is more then 30k no matter what lvl the animal is.
Not that i'm complaining how overpowered call of nature is but it's certainly one of the skills together with the halfing talant that make the game alot easier and faster to play.

I actually am going to try to do the One Black Dragon only challenge without using halving for as long as I can. I wonder how that will work. If I see that I am getting summarily trounced, then I will change stuff around. I will, of course, keep plenty of runes at the ready to do so :D

EDIT: I know for a fact that Impy did it, but he is a much better tactician and much more patient and considerate than I am...

DG, thank you for your kind words. I am just a normal guy who likes sweets:grin:
I personally did not use halving skill in my playthrough - see screenshot at level 75, pretty much end of the game. Whole game I followed my old approach which I believe made me a better player - I only spend runes when there is no other way forward, not when I want to. During game I simply did not feel I needed to spend practically any runes in might tree. Apart from very early access to Atrixus etc. I also defeated properly every scroll guardian before progressing. You can guess why - truth to be told level 3 Nature Call is extremely powerful, and this challenge is actually a bit easier than good old KBAP attempt.

Now interesting thing DG, we played solo Black dragon in KBAP + Gift bag (remember that?) environment, but never actually done in Crossworlds. The problem is astral damage from newly introduced orc race, however there are new interesting spells ( gizmo ...) That is what I am playing at the moment.

I'd speculate that halving is probably a suicidal build or painfully slow one for mages because you simply don't have enough runes to get enough happy rage control.

You sort of need enough rage for decent "jealousy" skills and there aren't enough might runes for you to max your magic tree (which is far more efficient for you anyway thanks to the Archmage skill).

At least, this is from a perspective of a non-targetable core unit+ nuke spells and disposable summons approach.

More troops is more liability especially for the lackluster leadership mage.

[edit] oh wow, noticed impy still has so many might runes. I wonder where all of mine went? I'm guessing still in the mage tree as I have like 90 spirit runes which I don't plan on using. :(

Ok, Impy, I don't even want to ask how many double-calls of nature you can do with those 346 mana... Whew. And sure I remember the gift bag bonus content. It had some really nice items. Then again, I never tried the 1BD challenge in crossworlds, I just played the new stuff. You should have better insight there.

What I am noticing at the moment (level 27), is that you can easily do the fights one after the other with minimal downtime. Calm Rage is awesome, and if you have a spare double cast at the end of the fight, double calm rage will give you full mana easily. If the Demoness play-through can be compared to Daert's, then all I will be using are just a few of Blackie's skills: Jealousy, Orc Strike and Orc Shield. I think Orc Shield will be very useful, as it absorbs a decent amount of damage and this will be a good way to keep the solitary dragon alive awhile longer. We will see. I am still in the early game, where fights are a breeze with Phoenix + Call of Nature.

Be wary of not letting your rage skills grow if you take the calm rage approach too much. I'm only level 57ish but I'm always worried I need stronger rage skills like the orc shield and jealousy.

Well, well, if 346 mana looks impressive, I dug out the save at level 79, just fooling around shelter before hitting the final battle and came up with - 492 mana.. With scroll Magical Flow it comes to 522mana. I think even 346 was too much, because Transmute skill works a bit differently now, you also have winds of Magic. But I did play with summons only, not with direct damaging spells really. This could be an idea for another challenge - something like 100% or close damage by spellbook, I think we actually done this in Crossworlds, right?
One of the reasons I did not spent points in Might tree is absolutely overwhelming amount of Rage boosters in the game, bit unbalanced possibly. I had 75 potions of rage left at the end and i was playing specific challenge rather than standard gameplay.

Yes, we did it on KBCW. I dug up my old screens and I have 80% book damage, cause I abandoned the 1 BD challenge on lvl 43 and switched to 1 stack of Black Knights + Eviln. Well, Call of Nature and Demon Portal weren't working the same way as they do in KBDS now. I don't even recall using them so extensively, cause they did not provide sufficient amount of troops - and the ones you got could only survive a few hits, so you were much better using Gift + Paladins than wasting so much mana on Call of Nature, for example.

Wow, 23 pages. I guess you guys must be really, really "hungry" for TBS games that you play this really flawed subpar expansion for such a long time. Me, I went back to playing Crossworlds, and recently, Etherlords II. So much more enjoyable without unbalanced maps and units.

BB killed the forum :P

Well, the start of the game is clearly not balanced, at least on Impossible, which is doubly a shame since that's where people make first contact with the game, and since the game spent quite some time in Early Access so you'd think the devs would have had some useful feedback.

I gave myself a coupla Necromancers and an Ancient Vampire, and I wouldn't as Sethmage say that it was a "breeze". I found it actually pretty tough at times (aiming at no loss), but doable in the end.
Then I went as soon as I could for the single Black Dragon stack, and there the game was a breeze.
First (until about fight 200) with the Armageddon approach.
Then transitioning to Call of Nature.

Now, that spell is indeed way OP in its current version. It does turn the game into easy mode.
Only the two chained fights presented a challenge (easily solved by making sure only one stack lived through the first fight, and then using a combination of Orc Shield and Last Hero to make sure it lived through the second fight).

I've started an Orc run next.
Now, forget about no loss.
On Impossible, simply making it through the Shelter/Whitehill fights doesn't seem achievable without resorting to the uncontrollable stack trick.

That's... pretty dumb.

On the other hand, I'm now having a blast with a pure Orcish army (Shaman x2, Veterans, Chieftains, Spirit Talkers).
Not playing that one originally as "no loss", but as "minimal losses". I'm roughly half-way through (Tristem and Dragandor done), and now in "no loss" mode.

Not sure if I'll be able to keep it up through the really crazy parts (late demon/elven lands), but we'll see.
Then they'll be the issue of the last fight where the Orc player gets completely shafted obviously.

See the link for a mod that balances starting Bagyr and Daert!
 

Certainly agree with the imbalance of Daert and Bagyr!

By the way, my teeny, tiny mod that balances the starting conditions of Bagyr and Daert is here!

No loss with Deart and Bagyr should now be possible under any start condition!

Enjoy! :)

/C\/C\

Wow, what a useful thread!

I have recently started a normal difficulty (no loss) run with Daert, and I learned a ton reading all of this, thanks a lot guys!

Guess I still need to become a lot better before I can do those initial fights on impossible, but I'll get there eventually 8-)

This save is great.
However no Dark Paladins.
I eddited it using the scanner to add them in the Iselburg,
If you want it I'll post.

Sorry for necro this, and my English as well.

I bought Dark Side last year, but not played it until today.
I choose Demonesses, never played Paladin before, Impossible Difficulty, and aim for a no loss campaign, finish all quests :D

Right now I'm stuck at one of the very first quest, the rescue "Demon Cubs" quest.

I have 2 Demonesses, 1 Blood Priestess, 4 Cerberus, 1 Demon, 5 Scoffer Imps.

I've used all knowledge I collected from TL, AP, CW, WotN, but I still loss troops in this fight TT

Could you guys tell me how to remain no loss after this fight ??? I can't pass the portal now, the quest will be marked as "failed".

THanks, and sorry for my ENglish, again.

Three years later, I've finally come back to Dark Side to finish MattCasperMeyer's 'Phoenix Ore Cart' Vampire save. I knew that the rest of the game would be fairly straightforward to achieve no-losses, and it was, EXCEPT the final battle against the Spirit of Light.

The Vampire (Mage) ends up with very high Intellect in this game due to a skill which gives you an extra point of Intellect for every learned skill in the Mage tree. I had 109 Intellect by the end, including FOUR Rings of the Snake King! Early on I was using Ancient Phoenix a lot to inflict damage, but even that eventually becomes ineffective around level 40-50. Thereafter I used Dragon Riders a fair bit, and when I got bored of the grinding I started cheesing with Dragon Riders + Armageddon, which I did for the last 100 battles or so.

This doesn't work in the final battle, however, as the Spirit of Light will hit you on Turn 1 and you can't Resurrect or Turn Back Time on Dragon Riders. I tried a lot of other combinations without much success. By this stage my Fireball was doing 13k damage on the Spirit but I was still losing troops too fast (especially if I used Armageddon too). Eventually I remembered that Call of Nature is REALLY overpowered in this game. It's a spell I never really used but it is ridiculously strong. I summoned a stack of Royal Griffins on Turn 1 which did about 20k damage per hit to the Spirit. I just used one stack of Dark Paladins meanwhile. By Turn 12 the battle was over and thus at long last I was able to complete a no-losses Impossible run as the Vampire, but only with Matt's save with the Phoenix in the Ore Cart :)

Omg man! Good job! All this talk brings back good memories, but I don't know if I have the power within me to try it again. :)