KBDS Normal/Hard/Impossible No-loss thread

[MattCaspermeyer]

I gotcha on the Whitehill fight - taking all 3 out would be a lot harder since you'd want to chain fight them like you were setting up to do and attempting to conserve Mana.

The only problem with Demon Portal level 2 is the randomness. When I tested it, I kept getting Imps / Scoffer Imps (I think once I got a Cerberus) and since the total Leadership of two Level 1's exceeded a single Level 2 then it was better to go with two casts @level 1; however, as you mention, if you can get a single Level 4 unit, then the fight will be easy - I just wasn't so lucky. Going with Chaos Level 1 will ensure that you have Meditation Level 2 at Daert Level 5 (4 if you're lucky) for 2 Demon Portal level 1 casts.

I would not pick higher than Level 1 Chaos until you defeat the Dwarven Shelter stack so that you can either pick Meditation Level 2 or Chaos Level 2 as the situation is warranted for the Elven and Human stacks. Give yourself some flexibility so that if you are lucky and can get a Level 4 Demon troop then go that route. If you can't then go with more Mana.

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Finished at last! 133 hours later and I'm finally done with my Impossible Demoness No-loss game. I found it challenging in the early game and then again from about fight 120-180, but after that it was very easy and as others have mentioned the final fight is a walkthrough. You'll need Teleport 3 to do it though (at least the way I did it).

Level 74, 131 quests with about 3-4 I couldn't be bothered finishing including the Demon lords of Helvedia. 451 fights which is at least 20-30 less than I could have done with all the various pointless upgrade fights I had available, but I knew the xp wouldn't add up to much so I didn't bother.

Basically I used Dark Paladins, Demons, Wizards, Demonologists and Dragon Riders for the last 100-200 fights, but I swapped the Dragon Riders for Executioners for the final fight. My Wizards have ended up doing an absurd 41% of my total damage due to insanely overpowered Halving ability. With Fortune's Smile my troops were doing about 90% crit at the end.

In the final fight I just used Teleport 3 every turn to put one of the tanks in a corner, which would do about 10k damage per whack. Then all I had to do was time it so that there were some junk enemy units on the battlefield when I killed the Spirit (dwarves) and then I could Phantom + Resurrect to my heart's content.

I really enjoyed King's Bounty Dark Side but I doubt I'm game for a second run-through anytime soon (famous last words!) Hopefully the devs will patch it so that the other two races have a chance at no-losses, else it'll be Matt's mod. I thought that this was easily the best KB game since Armored Princess. My only complaint is that is so loooooooooooong, but I loved the Shelter concept and a couple of the late islands, especially Aralan, were as much fun as the first three islands which I thought were probably the best. For a game with 450 fights I didn't feel like I was grinding pointlessly very much. Sure there were a few bugs and I did get some CTDs very occasionally and having to reload a frozen battle from time to time, but overall it is very stable.

This is a real return to form for the King's Bounty series after the mediocre Warriors of the North. Well done, devs! That was the best $25 I ever spent.

[DGDobrev]

Good job, mate, good job I am very glad you enjoyed yourself. As you said, that's the best 18€/25$ we ever spent on a King's Bounty game, albeit a huge time sink. The devs really went balls to the wall on content with this one, improving many aspects of the game, adding branching quests, where decisions actually matter. We sure can't complain.

I am also not so keen on a run soon, cause I am moving to another city and I will be quite busy + I may not have internet for a while - we will see how long, depends on how quickly the company that installs it reacts. Could be just a few days, could be a week or two. I still have internet at work, so when I'm doing the night shifts, I will be lurking around, checking on Matt's progress. That guy can think really constructively and there is much sense in his ideas.

[Zhuangzi]

I had a try at Daert and managed to get to the Shelter using the 2 Vampire trick. I also managed to destroy the Dwarven stack (no ranged units) by running the vamps around and hitting the enemies with their last move of a turn. Took 109 rounds. But I can't seem to do anything at all about the Human or Elven stacks, not like this. Ridiculously tough. I only got money out of the Ore Cart so all I have is Poison Skull. I put two points in Concentration but it isn't working.

[DGDobrev]

This is a very hard battle. I think the closest one to finishing it with minimal scanning was Impy, who proposed to restart till you get magic spring and play with diversion for a trap. Then again, you need to kill the elves quickly, and drop the fauns to 1-2 so that they don't damage you much while you're flying around with magic spring on you. Will take many turns, but it is perfectly doable.

However, I don't know if magic spring would be enough to get you through the human stack. They have way too many ranged units...

[ckdamascus]

I can't even brute force it with losses. With 100+ fairies and 24 werewolves, it's only a matter of time before they catch up to my vampires or wipe my sacrificial tanks. Werewolves can also mass fear my shock troops, so it's back to crappy 2 vampires doing little damage. This run through I had level 2 traps which is actually really good for damage but too many units and fairies can hover over the traps.

I don't really like modding the game, nor would I like to start easier than impossible. Even if I kept re-starting, I'm not sure what would win easily since even phoenix might get overwhelmed.

Sad about this. I wonder if the devs plan on releasing a patch soon to address this.

[Zhuangzi]

Good point - I was curious to see whether I could kill that Elven stack at all with my two vampires and the junk units from the Shelter, and guess what? I can't either. I figured I needed to use a lot of poison skull on the fairies initially due to their 5 hex movement, but the Werewolf Elves always ended up killing me. I tried 3 or 4 times.

Has anyone actually gotten further than this at all as Daert on Impossible? I guess with the Diversions 2 it might be possible. I put my runes in Concentration for this playthough and that was clearly a mistake.

[MattCaspermeyer]

The strange thing about all this is that two Vamps can do everything but the Elven and Dwarven stacks (well skipping the two hardest Catacombs and the Dragandor Spider / Snake fights).

If you read back in this thread, you'll see where I posted several different strategies to do this, but all rely on the spell you get with the Ore Cart in Dragandor.

I'll re-summarize them here. I've put two to actual practice through Whitehill no loss (including all the stacks except maybe the big Spider stack in the Catacombs):

• Ball of Lightning (exceedingly hard, but doable).
• Evil Book (kind of hard, but doable).

The Evil Book was from DGDobrev's save, although since I've gotten a save game of my own with Evil Book (note that you must get your book to level 2), but I haven't gotten any of the other spell combinations legitimately that I tested via the "magicbook" cheat to see if they would work; however, they are:

• Phoenix (super easy - I did it with the spell at level 1 (harder, but way easier than the two above), and getting it to level 2 is cake and a level 2 Phoenix will tear everyone up).
• Demonologist (not as easy as the Phoenix, but easier than Evil Book; however, I did do it when I was able to cast one after another (level 1) since I had 40 Mana in my experiment - getting 40 Mana is easy, though, because you only need 1 point in Concentration, 1 in Chaos, and you should have the runes to get two points into Meditation when you are level 5 (maybe level 4 if you're lucky), which hopefully you are when you fight the Elves / Humans - also level 1 is better than level 2 unless you are super lucky and get a level 4 unit (I did it with two stacks of lowly Imps) so save your runes until you have to fight the Elves / Humans and then decide your path as I think you need Bibliophile to get Demonologist to level 2 due to limited Crystals).
• Avenger (about as difficult as Ball of Lightning or even harder, perhaps, but all the ranged troops get decimated as they attack you and you may need to augment this with Time Shift (you sometimes get this from Clarissa or the Hidden Cache) for a low cost extension of the spell) and you also augment this strategy with your Poison Skulls (this time you need 2 points in Order and with Meditation that is only 3 skills so you should have extra runes for other skills, possibly including at least level 1 Diversion). You also probably want to use those Might Runes to bump your Rage up for the Whitehill stack so you can cast Jealousy at least twice.

Of these 3 that I have not tried in a "real" game, this is through just the Shelter. However, all but Avenger seem doable through Whitehill as well, whereas with Avenger it may not work with the Basement stacks because you have to be struck (although you can kite those troops and skip them so it doesn't matter). The Whitehill fight is actually easier than the Shelter Elven / Human fights because of Jealousy.

I was thinking that it may also be possible to use Calm Rage with your Poison Skull if you got that spell, but have not tried it. I have tried many other spell combinations, but nothing else has worked so far.

Note that if you go the Order route (i.e. Ball of Lighting / Avenger then you should try to get at least level 1 Diversion since you should have the runes for it). Also, you don't need anything special to defeat the 3 easiest Catacombs fights, just use your Poison Skull - they are hard, but good training for using your Vamps effectively. If you do this, you should be level 5 after defeating the Dwarven Shelter stack, making the Elven / Human stacks much easier (if you skip those 3 fights, then you may have to do one of both of the remaining stacks @level 4, which is much harder).

Although you need the right strategy to win with these methods, the chance of getting one of the above spells is exceedingly low. So that's why I started the other thread to talk about changing the game since I think any game should have a chance at no loss if you employ the proper strategy and who wants to be starting new games and scanning them with the save game scanner to be successful?

By the way, has anyone tried Bagyr? If you think Daert is hard, try him!

/C\/C\

[Zhuangzi]

Okay, I'll use the save game scanner and get myself a save with Evil Book in the Ore Cart. That's where I'm going to find it if anywhere, right? And other than that I'm just using two vampires running around the map in vampire mode, right?

Yeah, Bagyr. My save with him is no further than Captain of the Guard.

EDIT: sigh, I don't think I know how to use the scanner properly, unless there's a new scanner specific to Dark Side. Whenever I try to run the scanner it says Scanned Files: 0

Can someone either explain what I'm doing wrong or send me a save with the Evil Book? The saves are in My Games and the loc_ses file is in the steam directory, right?

[DGDobrev]

This is the post you need: http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...63&postcount=4

The guy explained it rather well, I have been using his way of scanning for now, and that's how I found the Book of Evil save.