Need Hard mode mage tips, Never played other KB's.
 

I'm playing as a mage now on hard mode, but still can't get it right, how do I pick what armies to fight and leave alone? Should I be looking for int. booster for my equipment over attack and defense? And what about skill tree, should I focus only on magic and not might and mind, or mix it up some?

The "Difficulty" of a non-hero army is based on its leadership total. So ones with 'strong' have more troops than you do, and 'weak' have less. Since you are a mage, your leadership is the lowest of the three classes, so you will often see troops as a little bit harder than the others.

I would focus equipment on intelligence, mana, and rage. Definitely invest in all three skill trees, but try to find a good mix of spell effects to use. Some control spells from distortion, some damage spells from chaos, defense from order. Do not try to upgrade ALL your spells. Even a mage will run out of crystals that way.

In Mind tree, pick up some leadership boosts, and diversions.

In Might Tree, grab the basic Rage bumps on the right side. +24 rage is very important. You gain rage at a rate based on your total rage, so 24 more rage means generating that much more per hit! ALl three of the rage skills on the right side of that area are totally worth it, even for a mage.

Thanks that's great, and what about my paladin?
 

I have a Paladin too, what tips can you give me with him? Same question's as my other post. Should I focus him on some attack spells or just some debuffs and buffs, stuff like that?

playing hard/mage, lvl 27 in greenwort area. i would say focus on CC and buffs. damage spells dont seem to scale enough to justify investing heavily into them. or maybe i just have not found any good AoE damage spells yet.

just use rage for your AoE damage and use magic mostly for disabling/debuffing the enemy and buffing your troops. definitely try to pick up the rage increasing skills in the might tree when you can otherwise as you level your rage abilities you will find that you cant cast them at all because your max rage is too low.

focus on leveling up the distortion line first, then chaos, then order. distortion and chaos have really good debuff/buff spells. rune magic is really gimmicky.

I found that damage spell scale just as well as in the previous games. For example, at lvl 27, a single blizzard spell will hit practically every enemy unit for around 6500 dmg. That's assuming you have around 45-50 int, which would be normal for a mage of that level. Two blizzards will destroy stacks of 1500 skellie archers.

If you didn't find geyser or blizzard, then you'll have to make do with Rain of Fire. Greasy Mist lvl 3 + Rain of Fire lvl 3 is an excellent opener if you don't have the other spells. It'll easily do in the 6000s, but won't hit as many as the other spells. It has the advantage of crippling their ranged though, and the mist will stay, allowing you do to a double rain whammy on the next turn if anything's still alive. If you only found ice snake / fireball, then you might want to concentrate on control spells such as Phantom / Trap to do damage until you find something better.

Traps aren't something to neglect either. They'll hit just about anything's that no hovering, will do damage scaling to your int, and more importantly, they'll make whatever steps on them lose their turn. In the late game, a single trap and one-shot a stack of 15 black dragons. Pure joy when that happens!

Having the same problem. Damage spells aren't scaling enough. They'll destroy the level 4 and 5 stacks, but they don't do enough versus swarms of Imps. Also, despite the fact that I have the items for it, I don't have good Summon spells. Damn randomness sometimes.

A few things:
* Ancient Phoenix is an amazing summon and is probably worth getting Order Magic 3 if you already have Summon Phoenix.
* High initiative is a must. You want those big spells out before the opponent can do something nasty.
* Bring units with crowd control abilities: Dryad lullaby, Engineer Flashbomb, Soothsayer Loki's Touch (although maybe not all together as elves are racist in this game).
* Because your army is smaller, your rage skills will level up more quickly.
* Never use Call of Nature. That spell is probably the worst summon in the game right now (since Book of Evil, which is normally THE worst summon, is bugged and overpowered right now)
* Always try to get your intellect to at least be a multiple of 7 (i.e. 14, 21, 49, 63) as this gives an extra 10% to your spells.
* Last piece of advice: Try to make your equips specialize in doing something. If you have different items that do similar things (like boosting intelligence, boosting the power of certain spells, or increasing physical resistance), then wear those together and build a strategy around that.

Attack anything that is AT MOST slightly stronger. You should be able to win the fight.

Choose attack and defense over intelect only if you do not cast damage spells. If you use damage spells, you need to have high intelect.

In the Might tree put nothing until lvl 15 or so, a mage doesn't really need what's there.

In the Mind tree take Learning if you can to maximize you XP intake and level up faster.

In the Magic tree focus on 1 Magic School. Distortion is the best one overall but you should pick what school to specialize in depending on what scrolls you find. If you find Healing and/or Ressurection it is worthwhile to maximize Order Magic. Rune Magic is good if you want to have access to infinite money later on, but costs you more runes then Distortion.

Actually, Call of Nature spell is great on first 4 islands. After that it is uselles.

Phoenix is overpowered until level 50, probably.

Healing on a Mage (Soothsayer) is great because you can damage undeads with it, 300 + damage for 1 mana.

Stone Skin is a must have for a mage.

For units, best on 4 islands are those that you cannot lose, so you can get 100 victories without losses before fighting with giant Spider.

- Trolls
- Jarls
- Warrior Maidens
- Engineers
- Jotuns
- Soothsayers

For giant Spider:
- Trolls (if you get Sacrifice spell you can create some Trolls up to max leadership)
- Polar Bears
- Jarls
- Warrior Maidens
- Royal Snakes

- Use higher magic, stone skin, heals, hell breath on Polar Bears, ... and win.

@DeRex: I would actually say Call of Nature 1 is good on Island 1, but not anymore on 2,3, and 4 simply because it costs too much mana for what it does. Sure, a mage can have 40 mana by Island 2 or 3 for Level 3 CoN, but why would you blow all that mana on a possible level 1 creature?

Now, if we were guaranteed a Royal Griff or other Level 4 animal, it might have some use.

Can someone please tell me a bit about rune magic? I only play as a Mage in KB games. Haven't got WotN yet, but planning to get it this week. How does rune magic work? How is it different from other types of magic?

Well rune magic is not very different from the others. There are damage spells in it, there are spells that give you rage and mana, spells that decrease duration of negative effects from your units. It's an interesting magic school, it can even provide you lots of extra gold. You have to test it yourself to see exactly how it is though.

Wait... what ? I'm a lvl29 Soothsayer and my int is 24... am I missing something ? How the hell did you get it this high ? I want this much int too...

- Permanent boosts from altars.
- Equipment (Almost all of my equipment slots have an intellect-boosting item)
- Spirit and Magic Talents
- medals

My Soothsayer has 44 Intellect.

I believe only 16 of my Intellect is from learning talents. I have about 13 from my equipment (which is pretty low). The other 15 are apparently from altars, shrines, and medals.

My Skald has 28 Int at Level 28. It's not that hard if you explore.

Dont forget to put points into Scouting and Learning from Mind Tree, you get +6 int from there too. Besides that they are useful skills to have anyways. I see Nevar already mentioned Spirit Talents but I wanted to be more specific. :)

I fully explore everything, I even try to dig in every single pixel of the map, I do have both scouting and learning at max, and I do have most medals maxed. Is it possible I had horrible luck with shrines ? Because I remember only a few granting me int. My def and attack is almost the same as my int (18 and 19 respectively) so... maybe ? I don't know, but if so this is pretty frustrating.

It's possible, why not? Some games have more goodies than others. You might have rolled a "lower-intelect" game. But don't be discouraged, I'm pretty sure the game can be won even in the worst bad luck possible situation :)

Odd. Do you have a lot of attack and defense items? My attack and defense are both at 9, WITH equipment on. With mages, I find that INT is just way better, especially if you start summoning Ancient Phoenixes/Books of Evil.

I have only 2 items on me that increase defense or attack. So that proves that I'm really unlucky in my run, dammit! Now I'm considering a reset. While it's certainly doable I'd love to have that extra 20 int instead...

should be able to get like 60 int or higher

at least in KB:Ap that was pretty much easy doable:D

I am almost done with game 0 losses so far. Trick is to install the mod for different units on starting zone :] Paladins and rune mages(think they are called just woke up).

You can say its cheating to use other units other then Vikings but I disagree totally. I play video games for choice's not fixed boring character at start.

All you have to do is make sure you fight stuff that is deadly and it makes the game really fun and sometimes a challenge. But no matter the units this game needs a super impossible mode even if you just use vikings at start.

It's not 'cheating' anymore than anything else is in single player. But you aren't going to impress anyone by using an infinite resurrection combo starting from the first island :P. The point though, is that you don't have to impress anyone. If you enjoy it, that's fine.

I'd only reset if you really want to play a mage focused on damage spells. Int is not that important for buffs and other stuff (maybe some of the summoning spells). I would be surprised if the difference in altars was that huge, and you can always get the medals and talents. The biggest difference may be in items, and I think you get at least one +5int ring fixed (the snake ring). With that, my lvl27 (or so) soothsayer has 29 intellect iirc, and I do not have great incentives to raise it right now (no powerful damage spells except blizzard, no powerful summon spells except ice ball). I can get 10 more intellect from talents, I believe.

Your ipse dixit means nothing. Manipulating a game's rules from outside of the game world is cheating. It is irrelevant if a game is single player or multiplayer. Cheating doesn't apply only to multiplayer games.

REAL summoned creatures (Book of Evil, Ancient Phoenix, and Ice Ball) benefit tremendously from Intellect. I'm talking units capable of fighting stacks with double your leadership. For the rest, it just adds leadership to the summons, which is meh.

The problem with not having high intellect with a mage is that you will be forced to rely on buffs/debuffs to help your weaker-than-average army. You'd basically be playing like a Skald with half the army size. I.E. you'd be handicapping yourself.

Still, like I mentioned, my own Skald has 28 Intellect, with a lot of that from altars. I can't imagine the difference in altars is huge, either.

I just tried lvl3 ancient Phoenix..wow..just wow
roughly 400-700 dmg, 2.3k life, close to 200 atk and def, this is what I got with 37 intell, and I don't even have point in creation yet.


I got to Greenwort with my mage a bit early, at level 14. This summon gonna make my mage's life at Greenwort so much easier.

Your final Ancient Phoenix will have starts that are off the charts. No literally, the attack is so high, that you can't see the minimum damage.

I think mine was ~700-1400 damage? ~300 attack/defense, ~4100 HP.

If you start with Greasy Mist, you can do ~6K dmg per hit (high crit chance) to 3 stacks, and chance to retaliate (if it survives the counter attacks) all for 35 mana.

Very good tank + damage combo until you have super nuke spells.

Nevermind it can interrupt most enemies due to high initiative (you can summon him after your interdictor unit has moved half way through the map or 1/3 in).

Some spells consume runes on the units you cast them on, either one specific (Gift, Negation etc) or several out of all the runes available (Chargers, Rune Chain). But there is also a bunch of spells (especially damage spells) which aren't anything special but are ice-themed such as Blizzard and Frost Snake (which was a Destruction spell previously).

Out of curiosity I used code to max out my skill trees and compared the lvl 3 Ancient Phoenix with lvl 3 Book of Evil at 53 intell. BoE has some insane number of attack and defense, like 800ish, and over 9k life. But AF comes out on top with far better initiative, speed, AOE attack and rebirth. Not to mention the amazing synergy with other spells.

@goldenpath
Real problem here is that if enemy have defense 1 , and you have attack 61 you make 300% dmg to it. But if enemy have 1 defense and you have as mentioned 800 attack you still do 300% dmg to it when hit. So att over 150 is pure waste.
Better look for dmg of summon, hp, initiative and so on.

Damage spells doesn't scale enough? Personally I find they are among the few spells that are actually useful except maybe stoneskin and trap. I have Rune Magic lvl 3 and maxed Sonic Boom. It does tons of damage to the whole army, around 3000 with an int of 42. Also, try to get Trapper III as soon as possible. I start with three traps at 3000-4000 damage every fight and it also stops the enemy from advancing. I didn't bother leveling up Chaos magic because you don't need to since Fear works at lvl 1 and Fireball isn't that good. In AP there was a godly spell called Geyser but I don't know which school it belongs to. You could kill half the opponents army with it. If it's Chaos Magic then I suppose it would be worth investing in after you get that spell. For me it's this order: Rune > Distortion > Order > Chaos.

My tips is to get Higher Magic as soon as possible, cast a small spell first and then a big nuke. General tips are always keep your distance to strong units until you have weakened them enough. CC archers or attack them first with ranged attacks, since you can't control what they will attack. You can also use a spell called Target on a tank if the enemy isn't undead. Get some dragons, paladins and a unit that can summon a tanking troop. Ice Dragons are exceptional but Dryads or Engineers are good too.

I am a mage lvl 28 on hard btw.

I beat it on Hard as a chaos magic user without too much difficulty. Mostly using the grease mist + fire rain combo for some decent damage. Later when I got a scroll of blizzard I maxed rune magic and started using that as an opener since you can usually hit every enemy if you get the first move.

Geyser would've been nice for dragons but I didn't get a scroll of that until very late in the game.

You can easily max every talent in the magic tree so do whatever you want, really.