mage - impossible - necromancer island1 strategies?
 

tips for beating the necromancer on island 1?

I've got 741 leadership, I'm not very likely to get more given what's left to do before this fight, I'm using berzerkers, soothsayers, axe throwers, bears, and ancient bears...


would there be a better combination of units to use? (warriors maiden's aren't an option the only other options are wolves, snake eggs, spider eggs, slingers, vikings..yep that's right so few options!)

I haven't found the spell healing, the only useful spells I've found are slow/avenging angel/call of nature/magic missle/bless I've got other spell options but I can't see as any of them being useful, rune wise I don't really have any options either, and so far I've spent to unlock order magic, alchemy 3, scouting 1, jarls 1, and I have the runes available: might 9/mind2/magic3

anyways any advice would be great.... my army just evaporates the necromancer has like 60zombies and 10ghosts and 50skeleton archers and a few vampires/ancient vampires (casts powerful poison skulls with int 10)

if you not go for no-loss l(ike me) just spam call of nature to help (in my save i have lv3 call of nature it's help me alot)

NO. Your setup is the best. Probably Vikings instead of Bears might work because they have a form of no retaliation attack. I used your setup.

Alchemy is a HUGE NO-NO. Why waste precious blue runes on a useless skill? You have access to infinite crystals in this game, man. Put your runes into some magic skill to cast the spells at lvl 3. Magic Missile does just fine for that. Jarl 1 is useless at this point. Another wasted skill.

You need to put points in stuff that really helps you where you are, on the first island. Depending on what spells you find, you need to get the magic to lvl 3, though Chaos Magic is the hardest to upgrade I think. But Rune Magic is not.

HIt where you deal the most damage. Don't attack the ghosts they have low damage. Kill the Vampires because they regenerate and steal life. Kill them quickly especially the ancient ones - with spells, never attack them when they are in human form and you have chance to Crit >0, because of risk of Critical Hit - No damage for them in this case.

Zombies are the least of threats, kill them last.

Go Berzerk with your Berzerkers. Extremely strong ability to let them loose.

When Bears and Ancient Bears are injured you can also try to let them sleep in order to recover some health. But this only if they can't attack somewhere useful.

Use Runes! For Ranged, use Luck first. It's very nice to attack again. With melee, use defense when you attack strong units, or Attack if they are low-medium.

Take note that there is also an element of chance in this fight, especially with Mage on Impossible. If the necromancer rolls High Leadership, and rolls good spells on your units, the fight quite probably can be lost, without any mistakes from the player. But this should be rare.

I strongly advise you to restart the game and never waste a rune on Alchemy.

I got lucky and I was able to do it by using a few Calls of Nature scrolls that I found and I am a Viking. Although I do have the leadership and rage advantage.

I think here are some really specialized mage builds that can do this too hmmm.

I had to rejigger my army a few times so he wouldn't cast heavy poison skulls on me, but on my summons instead. Also, they sometime start casting crowdcontrol like spells (doom, sheep) instead of damaging spells when you have red snakes.

So I cracked open some eggs to get some red snakes. Then used call of nature scroll (I didn't have order magic yet) to get more red snakes.

Also, don't be afraid to lose some units. I originally only did no-loss because of lack of unit availability and money, but now that both aren't AS big of a problem, you don't have to break your back over it.

depends on what u want

u could go for rune magic level 3 for winter circle

or go for order level 3 which is cheaper

and cast alot fo healing (it damages undead)

you have 3 options to do this battle

(one will be splitting soothsayers and get beserkers/vikings(for beserk ability)/slinger/axethrowers(you can replace slinger for ancient bear but sometimes if u get lucky he will cast doom/sheep on your slingers) which cost alot of mana
and then spam call of nature and GET very lucky he aim with offensive spells on those


option 2
Try to kill at least one medium/big stack really fast and pray that he will USE call of necro instead of an offensive spell


option 3

mass offensive spells(mainly winter circle

try to kill as many with your spells and wait and then rush in with beserkers vikings and hope they slaughter the minor stacks (and keep in note to kill the FAST INI units first (cursed ghost, ancient vampire,vampire(vampires in bat form, necromancers


rest is total bullshit;)


if he gets alot of skeli archers
like 70+ restart game there is no way u can beat that

so most of you seem to be suggesting i start over again from scratch (one of you literally did and the others suggested things that wouldn't be possible otherwise)


going for alchemy is a bit of a holdover from legends where getting infinite crystals was harder... speaking of infinite crystals how do you get them exactly? just buy every item you find and then destroy those items? what with the valkyrie's to feed I figured alchemy would end up being worth it in the long run if you took it early and could end up saving you 100s of crystals? but if crystals can be obtained infinitely then... this reasoning is wrong? anyways how to obtain infinitely?

I having the same issue. I cant seem to win with my soothsayer. I just did my best and lost, came back once more and his army was doable now because of his losses.

There are some item recipies that you are sure to find quite quickly into the game. You can make items from them with Artifactor skill. They cost you mana and a little gold, maybe some crystals BUT you can destroy them after you make them and get MORE crystals then it cost you. Also, some of these items can be upgraded which means you will get infinite extra XP if you want, from the moment you are able to defeat those keepers. (i assume from something like lvl 20 upwards). So basically from that point onwards you have infinite money and crystals and even more runes then you should have. (runes from chest battles.)

If this is not clear, take note that those recipies are not One-use. You can use them indefinetly. So you can make as many items from a single recipy as you want. :) Very bad game mechanic. Will probably be fixed in the future. "Enjoy" while it lasts.

Well go back to an earlier save before you started investing runes in Alchemy......if you have one.

It's not really necessary to take Alchemy since the Artificer skill was added to the Mage tree. As has been said above, the new crafting aspect of the skill allows you to create items from special scrolls (You'll know which scrolls because they will be stored in your inventory, not your spell book.). Using the scroll doesn't destroy it either! But it does cost some gold and a few crystals each time.

hmmm
 

WOW what a moronic game mechanic!


I just assumed those recipes were one time use only because they made such powerful items for such a low cost... honestly ... I think they should be one time use only, I mean infinite gold/experience/crystals defeats the whole purpose of this game! I think maybe a person would be better off just pretending they are one-time use only or something for balance sake?


the big problem really is that even if I had the alchemy runes I don't know what good it would do, as one thing being missed out on here is that all the spells everyone recommends to upgrade I haven't found scrolls for in this playthrough, although i did in my normal playthrough (was too easy restarted on impossible)


P.S. I just gave up, let myself lose, went back, he had only 1or2 units left and i won easily... is there any penalty to dying in a battle really? i've never allowed myself to lose a battle without loading before? (I actually killed like all but 1 of his units but he just kept summoning more and more and more and I lost but the summoned units don't count for the rematch so he had like 20zombies total left and 0non-zombies) (hmmm I got like almost no experience for the win? I guess that's the penalty? no experience for the deaths of all the units that die the first time around?)

Mages start with the Winter Dance scroll. If you invested in magic spells you should easily have level 2 rune magic by that point, which would let you completely demolish his army. But you are a mage who isn't using magic spells, and you are playing impossible. The game should be hard :rolleyes:. Honestly you should be playing a lower difficulty level if you are going for builds like that.

Even if you don't use infinite crystal exploits you should have more than enough to get every important spell. Simply don't upgrade the spells you don't need. You don't need most spells. And you'll get Artifactor quick, which means every crappy item you run across is free crystals.

ah that's true
 

winter dance would've been good, see, that's USEFUL advice, it's advice that isn't based on chance, and advice I could entirely follow..


although you didn't really need to be rude about it, I realize that alchemy is useless on island 1, but then again something like learning would be useless on island 1 as well, I've only ever played normal before, so my ability to optimize and evaluate skills is not especially high.


to be honest though even with my moronic build I came within like 5mana or so of winning the fight, 1 useful scroll way or so... yeah if I hadn't taken alchemy I'd have managed to win that particular attempt through. maybe I should just keep playing normal, I'm not a super optimal player. my level 30 normal mage is a bit boring, but my level 4 impossible mage is a bit nerve-wracking


P.S. I'm awful at this game, in the fight I almost won, I wasn't even fully recruited (was a berzerker and ancient bear short somehow by accident, lol would've won if I had them, I'll load and retry)

Impossible demands fairly optimal builds. At least, early on it does. Getting decent high level spells is incredibly important.

maybe i should try hard, i like playing how I feel like, I like sometimes have non-optimal armies, trying out new units... but normal is just too easy... impossible is a bit of a "puzzle" wherein you have to find like quite narrow solutions? eh?

You can sort of say that. A lot of "Impossible No-Loss" players have a lot of experience with a lot of tricks and optimizations.

I also usually save a LOT of games including before I spend ANY runes at all since your early choices there can make or break you. Since the save game pregenerates all the items, it pays to have at least your original starting game in case you want to replay it for optimal speed/fun.

Anyway, I'm more pragmatic about the No-Loss thing. Originally, no-loss in Impossible was necessary to have the moneys to buy all the items (to destroy into crystals to get a good set of spells or for certain Hireling/Companions), and because units were limited and gold was sparse.

You were extremely limited.

Now, there is a bit more flexibility since gold is much easier to find and some recruits are more readily available.

Totally agree, but the majority of the people just love these kinds of things so that's why they do them.

To have fun in this game you have to do a LOT of pretending. Pretend units X,Y,Z,Q,etc, (that are overpowered and ruin any challange) don't exist. Pretend spells x,y,z,q, etc, don't exist, etcetera.
You shouldn't resort to this sort of willful pretending to enjoy a game. KB has it all wrong in this aspect.


You start with Magic Missile as a Soothsayer. It costs only 5 mana and if you upgrade it to lvl 3 it will deal serious damage. You don't need to find any scroll, nor learn Winter Dance which costs you too much mana and deals low damage :)

There is no penalty to dying except that it lowers your score (which is unimportant unless you're trying to do a high one, which you shouldn't), and that dying in a super-easy game like KB feels Noobish and makes you feel worthless. And yes, you will lose the XP but who cares about losing some XP when you can make infinite xp in this game?

Wrong. I can play the game Skald on Impossible with totally random army and cast no spells at all. The AI of the units is just too low for "optimal builds" to be necessary.