There is a technique I used for defeating the whole first island no loss - but only on hard diff. last night:grin: Unfortunately have to leave town for business for few days, but if it helps anyone on impossible. diff. then that's great.

idea: use Skald, learn order magic, learn Edda, the rest is your choice. With a bit of luck you'll find 2-3 nature call scrolls and 2 x mana boosting shrines. Ideally 3 scrolls + 2 x mana boosting shrines + mana boosting items (+5 gloves..)

Upon starting a fight,cast song of Helheim then cast nature call using mana. Since it costs 20mana, you'll be left with 10-15mana. Song of Helheim recovers mana - nicely positioned ice storm attack by soothsayers recovers 5mana. Bit of skirmish enables to cast nature call again in second round. Note : Mana 30++ to start with is not strictly necessary. you should be able to get your second Nature call casting during second round somehow. Advantage however is to be able to cast it at the very beginning of round 2 - give enemy units & hero more targets. In third round I did not manage to get 20mana out of it, however if desperate, you can use a stock scroll of nature call. This way, if you had 3 x starting nature call scrolls, you can : - 3 x nature call casting against Ahriman
- 3 x nature call casting against lvl10 Necro below
- 2 x nature call casting against Eric and any other tough stack

Hope it helps.
Someone asked earlier if wanderer scrolls can be found on the first island. I found Gift of stones in the chest during battle. It raises runes of troops to 3..

Just ran into an orc hero that spammed Armageddon 4 turns in a row, wiping out his remaining troops and ending the fight with heavy loss on my side.

No idea how to counter that other than reloading and hoping he'd cast some silly debuffs instead.

Well...there's an achievement to defeat Runorm with no more than 30% troop loss. For an achievement to exist with that high loss expectation, I imagine this version of KB is not meant to be won with a no-loss victory at higher levels of difficulty.

I wonder if it's even possible to advance in the "Grand Strategian" medal at higher difficulties.

Well past first island everything seems super easy, i agreed upon having minimal loses on those 3 hero fights and went ahead with the game. Even if there are some tough fights, the troop selection is gonna make them possible. On 3rd island u get 720 hp tank unit and once u can level amulet rage abilities hurt like hell. The hardest part is 1st island which is pretty silly in terms of game progression.

This first island is just so frustrating. The fun part of King's Bounty was figuring out how to do a no loss; sometimes it meant kiting, sometimes it meant skipping ahead and coming back.

The problem is, there is no skipping ahead because everything is blocked by the first boss. And there's no kiting, because every single spawn you can buy on the first island is prepopulated and not RNG, so you can't even run to a vendor to get better units.

I hope someone releases a mod that either RNGs the units on vendors, or lets you teleport off the first island. This is just silly to restrict all of your strategic options on the first island.

I think no loss 100% is not so popular beacuse you get no achievement for that.

More fun get all achievement ?

Done it. First island with no losses. With Skald is first island so much easier then with Warrior or Mage.

Axe throwers: best unit, they do most of damage just because they can attack every turn once or twice
Slingers: are great because Uladar keep casting fear and other weak spells on them
Berserkers and Ancient Bears: they dont do that much damage because agaist bosses they cant attack every turn
Soothsayers: agaist undead kinda useless but better then nothing

And runes used on +3/+3 and Edda. Also heal spell is more usefull then anything Mage has...

yeah skald is overpowered i already noted that on my last walktrough;)

as for mage and warrior get order asap and then u have a chance

and u need to be lucky with bosses not using damage spells

or at least not using them on anything but the soothsayer

cause the soothsayer will ussualy survive and one simple heal is enough:)

lvl 1 rune magic: Runic word gives 2 runes for 3 mana. Chargers costs 3 mana to convert 3 runes into 3 mana or rage each. Casting RW x3 and Chargers x2 costs 15 mana and will give you 0-18 rage/mana. Assuming 50/50 rage/mana chance thats spending 15 mana to get 9 back

lvl 2 rune magic: Runic word gives 4 runes for 5 mana. Chargers costs 5 mana to convert 6 runes that gives 4 mana each. RW x3 + chargers x2 costs 25 mana for 12 runes. 0-48 mana returned, or an average of 24 mana per 25 mana spent.

lvl 3 rune magic: Runic word gives 6 runes for 7 mana. Chargers costs 7 mana to convert 9 runes that give 5 mana each. RW x3 + chargerx x2 costs 35 mana for 18 runes converted. 0-90 mana returned, average of 45.

So you need lvl 3 rune magic to get past break even on average. Getting that before Ahriman requires lvl 5 and lots of might runes. Even then, getting enough crystal for lvl 3 runic word and chargers might be a problem. And even with lvl 3 rune magic you risk a bad run wiping out your mana battery completely (though you can compensate by using runes that your units bring into battle with them).

polar bears? how?