Don't play the game as a mage - you will get bored quickly!
 

Blast-blast-blast-blast... blast-blast... blast...
Not to mention you actually need only 2-3 spells. I caught myself doing stupid things just for the sake of doing something different.

You are partially right, partially wrong. I am doing my first playthrough with a mage because i want to learn all the spells, units and game mechanics the comfortable way, without biting off my nails to the elbows. Early fireball is 'imba'? Don't use it, use something other if you are confident enough. Once i learn to play, i will restart the game and play it again, with the warrior, this time not on normal, but on hard (impossible is for geeks anyway :D ).

All in all, as the guru said: YMMW, your mileage may vary :)

I cannot agree, playing as a mage is a lot of fun thanks to various spells, but playing as a warrior getting me bored pretty fast.

As I wrote I sometimes did used different spells only to find out this was stupid.
But if the game becomes boring when playing a warrior this simply means the battles are too much. Indeed - many of the battles could be avoided but this means much less XP.
So it appears the game should have much more quests and more opportunities to earn XP without battles.

It depends on the difficulty level that you are playing at... Even at Normal Difficulty, "blast, blast, blast" doesn't really give you a flawless win in some high level areas because stacks are just too big and often have fire resistance.

Maybe YOU get bored quickly. However, I for one greatly enjoyed being a mage. Using a combination of buffs/debuffs and chaos works quite well, and made the game different. As for having less battles in the game and more quests, while i agree that more quests would be nice, i would also like MORE battles. Considering the battles are pretty much the focus of the game, and the whole reason the game is worth playing, reducing the number of them is sheer idiocy, and would only serve to make the game less enjoyable. Without the battles, you are just someone uselessly running around without any challenge, doing menial errands for other people. Coming next fall: FedEx: The legend!

This is major flaw of MANY games Kings Bounty included. In the beginign every hut was giving ayt least 1 quest, some were giving even 2 or more. Once you go to the dwarves the quests are reduced significantly; and once you go past dwarves the quests are just 2-3 and the huts are giving only stuff. As I said it is common flaw of many games - in the beginning the devs put much efforts in the variety of the game, but once they "smell" the end they are quick to rush the game to the shelves.
As for the fire resistance... did I wrote "fire blast"? No. I wrote just "blast". Does it really matters if the blast is fire or water? That's why I wrote 2-3 spells. And why the hell you need buffs and debuffs? Why casting buffs or debufs when you can simply kill half the army instead? As I wrote sometimes I was casting useless spells like buffs/debuffs just for the sake of doing something different... only to find out I am doing stupid things instead of just blasting out the enemy army for 3-4 turns.
And don't explain me about the dragons. All the dragons besides black dragons are easily blasted with poison skull spell. Only the black dragons must be hacked to death which is easily done by stacks of the lowests creatures like swordmen. Just buy 2-3k swordmen and keep then in your reserve to replenish the dead.

OMG tis is so hilarious! :grin:
What is not funny is the fact that, after some time, i start to completely ignore the tons of text used in the quest-giver window. I am just like: 'gimme-gimme' the quest/reward and quit blabbing. Pity.

As for the number of battles, yes, I like fighting many. Having said that, many battles are very repetitive and boring, i.e. fighting an army comprised of the same units for the 10th time in a row (like in the Marshan Swamp cemetery), or fighting 5 armies in a row, all with really small numbers of dragonflies that could easily have been put together into one medium sized army, but the way it is just feels like they wanted to artificially prolong the playing time. This is just a minor gripe, though.

Whaaat?
I love my uber-mage! :D

Being bored is everyones personal subjective feeling.

I am bored by many games that others literaly love.

I personally hate "fedex" (I like this comparission) quests - but when I played KB for first time - each quest was unique and had very interesting background - so I was not bored by it at all.

I first time played Paladin - and even as I mostly used one spell (guess which) I was totally not bored, actually the oposite is true - I was delighted

next time I started Mage (as I hoped, I repeat : I HOPED that all battles will be BLAST BLAST, done!)
1.) I didn't get Ressurection till near end (and I greatly missed it, even if I wond with BLAST spells)
2.) few I did very weak damage with my BLAST spells and I had to rely on various spell combinations
3.) checking the Fan Maunal.pdf I realized I had only 75% spells (when I was on the head of the turtle - at the game end) and all my BLAST spells were more or less useless ... why?:

a) High damage spells can target only very limited number of stacks - but my enemies had 10+ stacks on huge battleground
b) High area spells were weaker + many of the enemy stacks were immune / highly resistant
c) even with max damage spells I was able to kill only 50% and less of ONE stack only (even if I used Fireball direct on Thorns... when there was 12K thorns in one stack... :) )
d) I could use Armageddon - (which is not always so easy to get, and some games I didn't find it at all) still : you damage your own units - soon you have to return back and refill your army -> that was reason enough for me not using it (having only one stack + gloth's armor works fine for armageddon, but may be not good enough to win the battle - unless you want "cheat" with invisibility :) )

All at all (by Gatts):
- I like playing for all three characters.
- I would love to win battles so easy as is stated in this topic [BLAST BLAST] , but on normal, hard and impossible it does not work that way... so I only am hoping in each battle to get more INT and better spells (on impossible you mostly don't have 3rd level of chaos magic so soon ... I have it above 15th level mostly... sometimes even later)
- I like even the quests in KB (even if now - for 100th time replay I do not read the texts... I know them already, but all the quest stories are very well - on level of good book, that is the point - you do "fedex" but get not only XP + GOLD but nice story as well... I love stories... you don't?)

"sob sob" I never had real ubermage (at least not on impossible) - I even had INT 75 once and was able to cast twice in first and second round and had chaos magic on 3rd level - still most battles were quite hard...far away for me to feel uber (even players that win battles with 0-loss policy use many glitches in the AI and game un-balanceness and play each battle in 20+ rounds... )
So where is the "easy - BLAST BLAST" ?

Is here anyone who played mage on impossible and finished each battle with BLAST BLAST in less than 3 rounds? If yes - I take the last paragraph back.

You hit it on the head in the precious paragraph: there is and never will be such a person. there wouldn't be much of a challenge or any fun otherwise. Blast-Blast-Blast only is for those who love using cheats ... ;)

I agree with you, Gatts.
My mage is only lvl 13, and I started to notice a slight wind of change in my battles. So far, the BLAST-BLAST sysyem worked quite OK for me until..I discovered the Cannoneers in Kordor. Great ranged unit! Then, I stumbled upon that telescope thingy!! Grabbed it from the merchant's hands and.. boy, do my cannoneers and archers rock now! I am still a mage in my diapers, but my cannoneers are doing more than 1000 damage each shot, they crit for like 2200!! Gosh, my BLASTS never crit, and I have yet to see my lvl 2 fireball do 2000 damage! So, I tried Precision too, and with all that, stuff started to drop dead in front of my rag-tag army. Went back to the Isles, attacked those until now 'impossible' pirates and...blew off deck anything they were able to bring on the field of battle. It feels SO darn good :)
Spell combos rock. DD spells are ok, but buffs/debuffs will bring you victory :)

Now when you discovered the power of archers - little HINT for ya:

Don't be discouraged by Morale negiveness - and go for Dwarven + Elven archer combinations - (filling your army with archers: hunters, elves, canoneers, ... then I used random 2 units from the pool of: any TANK, inquisitors, catapult, goblin archer (even worse morale) archmages, griffins, giants, green dragons (depends on you usual strategy goals/ tricks)

You can increase your damage in first round by 500%, and lose mas 30%... easy math:
2000~4000 DMG x 500% = 10K ~ 20K x -30% = 7K ~14K (your ATT may raise, you can get better artefacts - your Leadrship will raise for sure ) so with outrage you can put enemy army to shattered noob losers.

Canoneers can do tripple damage, elves double damage, catapult can do fireball damage... once I even took Necromancers (initiative 7, what was more worth than initiative 2 of druids)... than you will see real BLAST BLAST :)

Why archers, when they are so vulnarable to many enemy attacks? (dragons, mind spells etc.) -> delivering HUGE damage first round may raise your RAGE to 80 from 0 right the same turn -> using maxed BLACK HOLE - finishing the rest of the army :)

I don't write about being a lvl 13 mage. I am writing being a real mage. My fireballs are making 4000+ damage in the center and then 6000+ damage if I use the the mist spell before. And I can blast 2 times per turn for 3 turns. Rarely something remains alive after that.
And if the enemies are fire resistant I use the water blast. Which has slightly lower damage but works on every enemy stack. I killed Baal and defeated my demon bride-to-be without ever noticing they were stronger, and simply outblasted Karador without any tricks to stop him from raising the dead troops.
In Haas labirinth I didn't ever tried to have a full stack. Went to all battles with only 2 stacks - swordsmen and royal snakes. Put 300 from those in the reserve and simply replenished the troops which died.
About the quests - sorry, I thought I wrote this in english but obvously I am mistaken. So I will try to write this time on english:
Yes, there are many quests in the begining of the game. Almost every building was giving a quest or even two. But once you get past the dwarves the quests are very few, and you get just 2-3 quests after the elves. Which means simply the devs become lazy and rushed the game to the shelves.

Calculation for Fireball:

Center Damage (3rd spell level):
x = 360 * (1 + 0.1*INT)*(1+0.1*{Int/7})*(1+0.1*{Destroyer + artefact bonuses})

6000 = 360x {INT and other bonsues}
6000/360 = 16.6
Let's say you Have Destroyer on MAX -> so your sinergy bonus is only 11.06
11.06 = your INT sinergy bonus
That means your INT is equal 53

Havin INT 53 is quite over average, right? - but 6000 DMG in centre of Fireball is totally not what would make you win battles on normal or higher difficulties - not without making effort on strategy planning... I normally have most of the game on impossible INT below 30... first with Xeona I start to increase my INT rapidly - still leveling up the staffs so they will give +5 INT is HARD and beating 4 stacks of 180 archmagi and 4 MAD GREMLIN towers with 8000 HPs and 2 stacks of 400+ Inquisitors and few Priest stacks of 800+ ... sometimes there is one stack of 1600 archers... well - how would your 6000 DMG fireball help you?

And sorry for misunderstanding you quest comments - you are totally right - there are less quests as you are near the end - maybe due the fact that devs want that the player will focus more on the MAIN quest ...

Gatts:
There are 2 types of players in this game. Mages and not-mages.
Some of the not-mages don't have a clue about being a mage but this don't stop them from making comments and calculations which they don't understand.
Instead of writing just to show you don't know what are you talking just check in the dictionary what "fire vulnerability" means.
Hint: there is a spell called "...mist" (forgot the name) which makes the enemy stacks vulnerable to fire for several turns. But you must be a mage to know this.

Handel : I don't argue who is the better mage - be my guest and be the better mage...

The spell is called "Greasy Mist" and it increases the vulnerability towards Fire based on you INT - I know -> you make one stack 120% vulnerable to FIRE : so you do to one stack 13200 DMG -> you spend both your first two spells on delivering 13200 DMG to one stack:
1.) there are fire resistant and even fire immune stacks... but still... ok
2.) There is still the problem... let's say... 180 Archmages... 16200 HP (if I calculate correctly 90HP per one archmage) ... there are 4 stacks... so 64800 HP only for Archmages... but you won't kill even one stack.


Sorry for being not mage enough for you... You win

Yeah, it's 'Greasy Mist', a spell i got rigt at the start from the mage tower in Greenwort.. So far, my spell power is still too smal to notice any significant benefit from that fire debuff. As any newbie, i'd rather call another fireball and watch the numbers flying, instead of casting some obscure 'invisible' debuff on only ONE enemy stack. And i am not talking only about G.Mist, but other buffs/debuffs too. As i already stated, i am learning. Thanks for the useful read guys, i'll keep my eyes peeled on the subject. have fun :)

<EDIT>
I realize some of my statements are outdated by Gatt's last reply, but my browser got stuck after i clicked on 'post reply' and KB forum went offline for some time to me. Sorry :)
Also, I'm sorry if some of my 'piss-ant' lowbie mage strategies started some kind of 'who's daddy is stronger' crusade, it was not my intention.
Cheers.

Gatts - I see you like to argue. Bet you are 14, wear glasses and are hated in the school.
As for the game - providing you want just to argue you can put any numbers. You can yeasily put any number hmm... let me see... why not 1800 arcmages? Or 4200 black dragons? or 365,000 sprites?

Go play some and they start to make your senseless calcualtiosn again.

Yenko: You have nothing to do with "Who can pee on longer distance" discussion. As you started to see being mage is very simple - just blast your enemy away and proceed. But some people which are not mages adore to explain how a mage must play.

Handel, I have played a full game as mage. And dude, you are full of crap. 180 archmages in a moderate stack size you might face towards the end of the game on friggin normal. Gatts`calculations are totally valid, far more so than your stupid comments. You cannot win on anything beyond normal, and probably even on normal, just using damage spells, especially fireball, which is a less useful spell the further you go in the game.

Ryastar - maybe you should read what exactly Gatts wrote. It is in english.

Ok, yes, he did the calculations for the damage wrong. He didn`t notice that the 6k damage was for a fireball AFTER a greasy mist. That`s fine. However, his point about the archmagi is still good, though i doubt that 640 archmages is a reasonable amount of archmagi (though maybe on impossible, i don`t know).

Let`s use actual experience, here: from memory i remember several stacks i have encountered. These are on NORMAL difficulty:

250-ish Necromancers, at 140 HP each, that is 35000 hit points. It would take about six of your fireballs to kill that, and that is only one of the stacks (admittedly, i think they were divided into four stacks, but that was the total number of necros, and there were (at least) four other troops there. This was one of the haas battles)

85ish Ogres, another battle against haas. I do not recall exactly what their hp is, but it is between 550-650, i think, so let`s say 600. 85 times 600 is 51000 hit points. That`s nine of your fireballs, so that`s ten spells altogether, assuming that greasy mist lasts the seven rounds it takes to cast that many spells. Again, there were other stacks in this battle.

Need i go on?

I don`t see how BLAST BLAST BLAST can beat those enemies.

I played the game almost to the end (untill after Haas labirinth) before stopping to play because there wasn't anything more then battles (like quests and interesting dialogues) and never ever got 4 stacks from 180 creatures from this level. As for the ogres and such - blast, blast, blast...
I never wrote I won the battles without losses. First I didn't have rez spell and besides I found it is too boring to prolong the games too long.
But As I said I won most of the latest battles with just 2 stacks - from spearmen and royal snakes because I was keepeing those in the reserve and could easily replenish the losses. Sometimes I was buying other creatures too although they weren't really needed and I was too lazy to go back to restock so after few battles they usually were reduced to unsignificant quantity. And yes - the AI goes for ranged troops first and if they are hit early they may take big damage - but who cares. A mage don't need them and they make excelent cheap cannon fodder.
As for the Gatts - basicly he wrote "I didn't play as a mage but nevertheless let me teach you about the mages".
And what I wrote IT IS FROM MY EXPERIENCE as a high level mage you don't really need all those fancy spells besides the few highly offensive spells simply because it is much easier to blast the enemies instead of trying to cast buffs/debuffs and such. It is true - after the 3rd turn and after 6 water/poison (for dragons)/fire spells there are very few enemies left. Usually most of the battles finish at 5th turn at most. So providing there are no more quests and dialogues and choices to make and such the game becomes pretty boring.

Besides - don't forget most of the damaging spells are area spells so untill I kill the ogres the fireballs are killing zillions of smaller critters too so after turn 5 there may be some other critter left but not much.

Well, I`m sorry that that was your experience of the game. Let me just assure you that most people do not have the same experience as you did. What difficulty level did you play as? If easy, then maybe you should try normal or higher. If normal, try hard etc. Personally, i had tons of fun as mage on normal, and even more as warrior (probably because i had a better idea of how to play). For my third (well, forth, see below) game, i am trying mage again, on hard this time. So far, fireball has been my primary spell, because i haven`t taken a single leadership upgrade as yet (i`m focusing on my other stats), but it`s starting to be less useful, as enemy stacks are getting larger, and my INT isn`t really very high yet (i`ve only been offered INT upgrade once, and only one INT-raising item so far, i might need to restart). I`m still having fun, though, and this is my fourth time through the starting area (my second game was lost to a fried hard drive shortly after signing the dwarven peace treaty) and second as a mage. I encourage you to try again before passing such a sweeping judgement on a truly great game.

Once you start to feel the offensive spells are doing little damage you must upgrade them. The difference is huge and is much more then you can get by raising the INT.
At first glance raising the INT seems better choice because it gaves 10% increase. But this increase is calculated on the basic damage and the basic damage in the center of the 1st lvl fireball is only 120 points (I think) at 0 INT. So +1 INTgive just a measle +12 points damage.
At the same time upgrading the fireball doubles and tripples the basic damage which means it doubles and triples all the bonuses from the INT and from the destroyer ability (and from items if any).

Yes, Handel, i know how these things work. As i said, i have played a full game as a mage before. I don`t yet have enough runes for chaos two.

I started to play on impossible as paladin. But with this ressurect spell I am feeling like I am cheating:-)

Who the hell use fireball in late game? Even fire rain is blah, use geyzer and later armaggedon if you go spell damage mage u need to reduce enemy since from 10 stack to 1-2 the biggest then disable rest, sadly there is no some kind of "implosion" spell which could do massive damage to one target.

Good choice - I personally believe that "as devs intended I assume" paladin has the largest variety as in battle so in level ups (skills) - hence it makes him the best character to try and taste all the flavour of the game. [well - all would mean max 70% - to get 100% you should play it at least for 2 times fully - thanks to the great randomness)

Do not worry about "cheating" feeling - there are some tactics [like invisible + green dragon ] that could be considered cheating - I still call cheating only using the cheat codes in console - nothing else.

Some types of games have "farming" - which is "bad" only if you play multiplayer, but using ressurection would not be even farming (you are not getting more units, you just hold up your original numbers)

I even used Sacrifice -> what could be considered "farming" as I increased my original number of units... still I didn't use "doublearmy" - I just found out how usefull is sacrifice + ghosts or vampires...

BTW - I hope paladin on impossible will show you this game in new light and you may start enjoying it much more :)

Do not play computer games!
Playing computer games is boring! "Click-click-click-click... click-click... click..."

Details! I want details! :)
I want to know all the goody cheesy tactics for sacrifice!!

Well... where to start... mabye with some "good to know points"

1.) Sacrifice works on dragons (except black), undead, demons (if the sacrifice level is high enough... I remember sacrifice level 2 could not give me green dragon... but maybe I had too low INT... I am not sure... but after some levels I was able to increase my green and even red dragons by 1)

2.) It does not work on Cyclops - any "golem" like creatures

3.) You can use mind possesed enemies as source of sacrifice (magically fight on your side - this considers your spells as abilities of your units)

4.) you can use units produced by "call of necromancer" as source of sacrifice

5.) and of course you can use units from demon portal as source of sacrifice


On lower levels I use ghosts - they gain much less units from "sould stealing" than vamps from live stealing - but if you sacrifice less than you can get "suck" back - dont' worry - you will uphold them later on...
- make sure your enemies have mostly phy damage - put your ghosts as far away from your units, and cas on them iron skin max level (level 3) - if you also have some artefact that gives you at least 10% phy resistance - ghosts have 95% phy resistance - even if you lose control of them - sometimes you can still use them as sacrifice... if not - well... fireball them

Vamps - here you should calculate a bit - if you end combat with less vamps - you can't catch that up in next combat (only if you buy them)

Feel free to combine blue and red vamps - prepare your strategy each combat - think if you could survive more enemies and if you could corner shooters (they have enough HP but do only 1/2 damage on melee - good blood banks)

stone skin is good option again on vamps + magic spring - so you have actually mana to cast sacrifice multiple times

If you are realy high level - you can even use TIME BACK (but I actually was able pretty often handle battles with buff/debuff spells and leave the rest on my vamps - as I did not care for some loses - as long my vamps did not suffer) - meaning I more used Lina's charges and Sleems Glot's Armor (when I had to hold enemies back but my vamps lost their "power" - few in numbers)

having red and blue - you can have one being tank and the second the "blood spender" - combining this with "hit and run" tactics - the weaker "sacrificed" vamp will be out of reach and only steal some life each second round, till the other will hold the battle line... (in haevy combats, don't sacrifice, but use clone instead - cloned vamps can fight whole 2 turns mostly delivering nice damage)

I could usually cast in MATCH or OVERPOWERED battles sacrifice twice - I invested it in my bone dragons to catch up my Leadership increase (without going back to buy them)... later on I increased my green dragons (as I started to use their magic source skill)

This spell can be very dangerous for strong mage - you may kill more of your own units than the rest of vamps could suck back (remember - less you, less damage they deliver, less they reborn/redie) and they have to hold the enemies tank units back from your (mine) hit'n'run units (bone dragon, green dragon) --- as fifth unit I kept Dark Commander - he gave my vamps +10% morale bonus

For other armies it is usefull at the same extend (elves can Posses mind, demons have demon portal - demons may summon other demons :), dwarves... well... no one has only dwarves in his army, or does he?)

Just like the original King's Bounty (with was trivial even on Impossible when playing a Sorceress with TimeStop and Raise Control), experienced players may want to impose additional restrictions on the game to make things more challenging.

Last night I just started a new game as a Warrior on Impossible with the following restrictions:

1) No recruiting garrisoned creatures (must rely on lair creatures as recruits)

2) No magic tree (must rely on scrolls for magic)

I've nicknamed this the "Barbarian" game -- it's already turning out to be my most enjoyable game (though only my 4th through), simply because the challenge is greater.

Edit: to clarify, this was meant as a reply to the OP. You can probably come up with some interesting restrictions for the mage as well (e.g. Necromancer game -- Can only learn Chaos magic past lvl 1 and may only enter combat after the trial with an army of undead)

Sounds very interesting - I like your way of planning the gameplay based on solid restrictions (I used ad-hoc debuffs - like delete half of my units, or rather delete 2 or 5 unit stacks...)

This brings me a funny though => we could look into the .lua and .txt files of this game and create "debuff" mods (like tak hugely weakening artefacts, level up gains, increase enemy strenghts, increase = tripple or quadripple costs of crystals needed to upgrade / scribe spells, increase costs for skill and run a competition... hoping that there will be enough crazy players to try it)

I personally will just now to work on my personal "Berserker" Mod -> totally reducing INT and DEF gains / bonuses (even from items) but improve Attack gains/ bonuses (but not for items) - add 100 crystals for each spell costs and also increase the prize of all units/artefacts (bersekes are bad merchants - they need to pay the double for buying things) ... I am not sure if also reduce Leadership gaining -> as Bersekers are known for low charisma... well... maybe I will try to figure out how to make sure I could hire only melee units ... beserkers should not use something that strategic as casters or shooters... well -> this make take me few weeks... but will give my my desired "atmosphfere" -> also when I doubt the game would be playeable (but hay- I may try it on easy again)

I hear ALOT of talking but no proof at all or no clear evidence. :grin: A video of your example would be exellent proof and would also help me so when I decide to use a mage, I'll know what to do.

By the way don't mages fall into the category of weakling and pathetic like the person you just described? You know like Harry Potter? That's what Mages usually look like so that would be "YOU" wouldn't it?

Warriors are the complete opposite you dig? :lol:

Alright, seriously someone needs to put all that in a nice little video to give us some pointers and tips. A video tutorial of the different tactics so get to work god dammit.