mage - impossible - necromancer island1 strategies?

[Loopy]

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 . 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.

[namad]

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)

[Loopy]

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

[namad]

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?

[ckdamascus]

Originally Posted by namad

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.

[tiberiu]

Originally Posted by namad

WOW what a moronic game mechanic!

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

I think maybe a person would be better off just pretending they are one-time use only or something for balance sake?

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.

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)

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

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?)

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?

[tiberiu]

Originally Posted by Loopy

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

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.