KBDS Normal/Hard/Impossible No-loss thread

[Zhuangzi]

Yeah, that Phoenix sure does own the battlefield early on. I think Matt is continuing to play as Daert and has his Phoenix up to Level 3 early on.

Me, I don't have the motivation to continue with Daert right now. I will come back to it though. Right now I'm playing Wasteland 2, which is basically a modern sequel to Fallout 2. Having a lot of fun with it.

[MattCaspermeyer]

Yah, so far Phoenix is super easy - I did the ol' kiting to Helvedia trick to pick me up an Arch Demon to take on Oncologon (or however you spell his name), but I want to play different units this time, so no Arch Demons for me the rest of the game (well, unless I get them from Demon Portal)!

In fact, I think I'm going to see what I can do about limiting my use of level 5 troops to maybe just Bone Dragons since I'm Daert and maybe the Orc and Neutral non-dragons (like Trolls and Cyclops).

So far I've been having a ton of fun with Demonologists and Shamans and was able to complete all the Portland quests very easily. The Shamans work really well with troops that can't heal early in the game.

In fact I was amazed at how effective the Shamans are as I was able to defeat the two "weak" and "very weak" (mislabeled) humans stacks for Lucia using them with the Ancient Phoenix (I still had 1 Arch Demon and 1 Red Dragon to go with two stacks of Shamans and 1 Demonologist stack when I did these fights).

I briefly tried Vampires / Ancient Vampires with my Necromancers, Demonologists, and Shamans, but they were mostly sitting there doing nothing and since you can get them from the Necromancer's Raise Dead, I ditched them and got me some Dark Mages (neat!) and went back to Tristrem and got me some Catapults.

So now my army is Demonologists, Shamans, Dark Mages, Necromancers, and Catapults. We'll see how long that lasts, but I actually had fun with the Catapults in my Bagyr experiments so I figured it should be fun.

I actually might go all ranged until the Ancient Phoenix starts to lose its power, but right now, I've actually been casting it at just level 2 sometimes due to level 3 being more than what I need for some of the Monteville fights.

I figure I'll eventually need to replace the Catapults with a level 4 troop, but I don't have any other level 4 ranged troops available right now. I could go with Dark Horsemen for a ground troop as there seems plenty in Portland, but with the demon summons and raised dead with the Phoenix there's no sense in needing a melee troop right now since I can produce them on the battlefield.

I've also been using teleport a lot so far and the only time I think I'll not use it is when I have to sail to a new island like I did with Monteville. I guess if I really wanted, I could kite from Helvedia to Inselburg.

I'm really amazed at the number of places you can go with kiting and teleport.

/C\/C\

[ckdamascus]

It's amazing how the devs addressed some old issues I had, including how mages have way too much downtime between fights due to slow mana regeneration.

Anyways, I hate how long it takes to do some of the battles. Summon storm / shaman totem delays are enough for me with the Neoline build.

I'm just doing the old fashioned solo black dragon + Armageddon. Tried using female vampires + chaos gifts but that's actually way worse and mana intense.

Some battles are a little tricky (black + ice + red dragon fights) but so far having a VERY fast run since the big battles are done much faster now.

I can't wait to do Bagyr's run since the "orc warrior" has some very nice high damage mods that work well with orc units. Although I loathe having to resurrect against stupid geyser spells and insane stacks of doom. Ah wells.

[DGDobrev]

I gotta admit I also pressed on with Matt's save. I also got Phoenix Level 3 very early, which made the whole Portland (including the pure chick) a breeze. I didn't go to Helvedia at all. I did go to Atrixus, however, and picked up some Archdemons, Demons, and Demonologists, and then some Necromancers from Monteville. I did beat the dragon with that setup (Plague rocks vs Blackies) and gave him the Portland princess. I am just a few hundred leadership short and I will start the good old "How far can you go with 1 Black Dragon" challenge just for fun. Impy's post really hit my good old KBAP soft spot.

There are some awesome items in Matt's save: I am well over 100 mana on level 8 because of them. That's just amazing. All I can say is, thanks Matt, for giving me the urge to do another play-through. It will surely be a great one. Just... a few hundred more leadership...

[Snow11]

Playing as mage I find Call of Nature to be absolutely overpowered. At 36 lvl with 50 intelect, mage talants and Living Book(+20%), rank 3 Call of Nature have 277% of normal power. That means that the animals I get have my max leadership but with 277% attack/defense, health and damage. So not only their dmg is brutal but because of their hp thay can tank really well. While my normal stacks do 2-3k crits max, the animals do 15-20k crits every single time

[DGDobrev]

True, and you should check how the phoenix looks. At level 18, I am looking at an Ancient Phoenix with over 2.5k HP and over 700 pure fire damage... Give him a bear buddy with call of nature and you dont need to worry anymore...

[ckdamascus]

Originally Posted by DGDobrev

True, and you should check how the phoenix looks. At level 18, I am looking at an Ancient Phoenix with over 2.5k HP and over 700 pure fire damage... Give him a bear buddy with call of nature and you dont need to worry anymore...

Haven't gotten phoenix yet (and I'm level 56), but book of evil has been way better for me since you can cast more than one and if you are lucky they do WAY more damage with their spells.

Honestly, with the retarded strong armies the game throws at you, I think it's "fair". At least I don't want to go through very slow combat. It makes me wonder if the demoness/paladin class is once again the shafted class at the end even if it has the "easier" beginning.

That said, there are a lot of subtle things I like about darkside. They give you enough rope so the RNG doesn't break your game. My last game as demoness/paladin, the phantom spell never showed up at all and that's usually the make or break spell.

[Snow11]

It's true that phoenix is very powerfull in the beginning but because it's not affected by your leadership it's power start to fall behind after middle/late game.
At my lvl, ancient phoenix have 500-1k dmg and less then 4k hp which means that it can get killed from 1-2 hits if i'm not carefull with him. In comparison the animals from call of nature not only have more dmg but their total hp is more then 30k no matter what lvl the animal is.
Not that i'm complaining how overpowered call of nature is but it's certainly one of the skills together with the halfing talant that make the game alot easier and faster to play.