No Loss thoughts?

[Loopy]

Originally Posted by baronm

Not sure why ppl had so much trouble with Ahriman, it only took me a few tries to beat him w/o any useful found spells and only rune spells lvl 1. I might have just gotten lucky tho. I used ancient bears, slingers, soothsayers, berserkers, and axe throwers. As far as i can remember his units arent really a threat just be careful, try to take out the archers early, and if you get lucky and his archers dont bash the slingers and he doesnt use poison skull it shouldnt be that hard. It will take a few tries tho, might be a good idea to use more bears instead of slingers tho.

Units aren't really a threat? 3 stacks of skeletons with 40 in each, able to bone gate and easily take out anything that isn't soothsayer? 2 large stacks of decaying zombies, vampires, ancient vampires, and a necromancer? He easily had double the army strength of the other two bosses, which practically melted after my first two spells, while Ahriman's army still has 2/3rds of its strength left.

Did I just get a really bad spawn on him or something? Because he has 7 stacks of units who are all able to kill any unit that isn't a Soothsayer the first time they attack, and Soothsayers will lose about half their health. I can't see how people who talk about just using heal are doing this. Pretty sure Warriors/Paladins aren't able to stack THAT much defense more than a Mage.

EDIT:

Heh, loaded up a second game to check his variance. Here's what I'm seeing:

Original game:
113 skeletons
55 skeleton archers
29 decaying zombies
6 vampires
2 ancient vampires
1 necromancer

1356+770+1160+480+360+200 leadership = 4326 leadership total

New game:
46 skeletons
28 skeleton archers
15 zombies
11 decaying zombies
3 vampiers
2 ancient vampiers
1 necromancer
552+392+450+440+240+360+200 leadership = 2634 leadership total.

This is a HUGE difference. This is a 65% increase in the strength of units. Since difficulty isn't a linear increase (In the new game I could kill half their force with my first spell), this is at least a 3x disparity in difficulty due to the random spawns. Which when no-lossing is then more like a 5-10x increase in difficulty due to how much more difficult it is to avoid deaths.

Bottom line: It may be best to scan savegames for enemy size rather than items. I don't have any Call of Nature scrolls in my original mage game, but if I did I would trade every one of them for reducing their stack sizes by nearly 50%. Seems a bit odd that with the first island clamping down and offering no randomization at all in units available and very little in items that enemy stack sizes should display such variance.