|
| Thread: Nasty or funny artifact/spell/skill combinations | |
|
Osmin
Hired Hero
|
posted November 11, 2010 08:31 PM |
|
|
Nasty or funny artifact/spell/skill combinations
In short, practical or theoretical combinations of skills, spells or artifacts, used for great effect in game.
My first two examples are from the end of A Pirate's Daughter, where Tawni and Cyrca has to split up in order to destroy the mermaids and the sea monsters simultaneously.
Tawni had Grandmaster Melee (of course), the Sword of Swiftness, a Potion of Quickness, and lastly access to the spell Cat Reflexes. She also had the Amulet of Fear. Now, when facing the mermaids, the first turn was used to cast Cat Reflexes, and the second turn to drink the Potion Of Quickness. The next turn, I waited. Now, Tawni hit the mermaids five times, and then four more times because she acted last in the previous turn and first in the next. She would have hit the mermaids once more, had they not been killed by strike number 9.
On the other side of the peninsula, Cyrca fought the sea monsters without an army. How? The Hideous Mask. Her three last levels had all been invested in Melee, so she already had the First Strike ability. If not, she would have cast it on herself. Before the battle, I gave her potions of Strength, Toughness, Speed, Cold and Immortality, but only the Potion of Cold was somewhat important. Then, in the first turn: Fatigue on the sea monsters. Second turn: Slayer on Cyrca. Third turn: Cat Reflexes on Cyrca. Then she waited, and after that, it was easy to just jump-kick the ugly beasts to death. Either they froze, and if they didn't, they just tried to get away from her.
Now, I want to hear other such examples of nasty, funny or simply awesome combos.
____________
Deconstruction is the basis of all study. You must know a thing's parts before you can know the sum of those parts. And thus, dispelling even that which we cannot cast becomes simple.
|
|
Bones_xa
Known Hero
|
|
posted November 13, 2010 04:39 AM |
|
Edited by Bones_xa at 04:40, 13 Nov 2010.
|
Thats pretty creative.
I never knew you could cast cat reflexes AND use a potion of quickness. I thought they were the same thing.
That must have been a pretty large stack of mermaids if they could take up to 9 melee hits from Tawni on the last scenario.
As far as the stuff I've done I don't know I'd half to think about it and maybe get back to this.
|
|
Osmin
Hired Hero
|
|
posted November 13, 2010 05:09 PM |
|
|
First of all, the number of mermaids was 350, and sometimes when I play from my saved game, Tawni downs them in 8 hits.
(On an unrelated side note, the number of sea monsters was 60.)
Now, the next combo: two low-level nature spells, namely Terrain Walk and Quicksand.
When was the last time you used Terrain Walk? Probably quite a while ago. Quicksand, on the other hand, is often used, although mostly by Water Elementals. What many people never realize is that Terrain Walk negates the effects of ALL terrain, including Quicksand. Now, try facing an enormous stack of powerful walking melee creatures (Behemoths, Hydras, Champions, Dragon Golems, just to name a few). Cast Quicksand, or summon some Water Elementals and have them help you in covering the battlefield with quicksand. When the enemy begins to close in on you, cast Terrain Walk on yourself. Then, you can just walk around on the battlefield, unaffected by the Quicksand, while your opponent struggles. Use ranged attacks, summoning spells, direct damage spells, or my personal favourite in this scenario: Poison. If you are lucky enough to have the Amulet of Fear, the Hideous Mask or the Halberd of the Swiftwatch, hit-and-run tactics are also possible.
____________
Deconstruction is the basis of all study. You must know a thing's parts before you can know the sum of those parts. And thus, dispelling even that which we cannot cast becomes simple.
|
|
Bones_xa
Known Hero
|
|
posted November 16, 2010 12:54 AM |
|
|
Ya I've used terrain walk like that before. I find quicksand a very useful spell. Especially when you don't have other spells like slow or confusion/wasp swarm. After the battlefield is full of quicksand, I've used terrain walk at times to get around.
Another interesting combination I use is the pikeman's special ability. Just like the halbeard of the switchcraft, with their long range attack without retaliations I've had some interesting victories. Just need a couple heroes with some spell points to cast things like song of peace.
|
|
evinin
Supreme Hero
Servant of Asha
|
|
posted November 22, 2010 09:55 PM |
|
|
|
My biggest experience with artifacts was in the Gathering Storm. Using the characters' artifacts like they should be, led to nothing. So I did a few switches. The most important one was to give Kozuss the Harmonic Chainmail and the Archimage's Codex. The Ice Scales went to Bohb but that didn't make much difference. Also important was to give Alita the Tome of Life and Dogwoggle the Robe of the Guardian. So in the beginning of the battle Kozuss plays first and casts Berserk on the Gargantuans. Alita casts Sanctuary. So the Gargantuans kill Hexis and later on using Hypnotize and the ability of Dogwoggle to freeze is rather easy.
|
|
Dj0rel
Tavern Dweller
|
|
posted November 30, 2010 02:17 PM |
|
|
|
Here's one interesting and easy combo: Summon Phoenix + Rebirth. I found out about it while playing the last map on Another Bard's Tale campaign. It is a well known fact that Phoenixes can use rebirth only once. Or do they?. Anyway I got careless and got too near some Black Dragons at the end of my turn so they attacked me. I used the most powerful spell I thought would be useful: Summon Phoenix. A stack of Phoenixes appeared and I sent them to fight the blackies. They got killed but using Rebirth some of them got brought back. Now normally once the stack that was previously brought back once is killed, they won't come back again. But I used Summon Phoenix again and more Phoenixes were added to the existing stack. And then I found out that their mana was also restored, they could use Rebirth again. From that moment my tactics was Summon Phoenix, use Rebirth to bring back killed creatures, fight Black Dragons, Summon Phoenix...
|
|
Bones_xa
Known Hero
|
|
posted November 30, 2010 02:43 PM |
|
|
Quote:
And then I found out that their mana was also restored, they could use Rebirth again.
Come to think of it, I've also noticed this. I've done it with leprechauns, and also with water elementals. Summon more just so that I get the spell points restored and you can cast fortune or whatever other spells again. For water elementals I find its more useful to use their quicksand instead of having the hero cast it. Thats if you have summon water elemental though.
|
|
Maciek
Known Hero
|
|
posted December 29, 2010 11:07 PM |
|
|
chaining
Hi!
Chaining is important in all the other heroes games and can be used in h4 as well. However, here not only creatures and artifacts can be subjects to chaining, but also heroes themselves!
1. Chaining artifacts
At first glance it looks similar to chaining artifacts in other heroes games. Artifacts depart from point A and go through a series from armies standing on the way to point B. You still need to dedicate several armies to chaining. If your chain involves heroes, they can still flee to some town and continue their journey from there.
The difference here is that some of your armies may sit in mines or garrisons and hence not count in your 8-army limit. In h1-h3 and h5 you could only do that with heroes staying in town garrisons, or hired from external taverns. In h4 you also don't need a hero to guide your army and you can pass items to creatures hired in external dwellings (dismiss or leave somewhere the creatures that were carrying your artifacts before you visited that dwelling).
Naturally, for chaining purposes, you may want to have as many armies as possible. More on that later.
2. Chaining heroes
This is quite simple:
- get hero killed by neutrals (You can also use colored enemies to do this, but be careful not to get your hero imprisoned!)
- pick your hero from ground, if you need to
- treat your hero like an artifact, just don't visit towns with him/her.
- destination needs to have a town or a sanctuary.
Explanation: Dead heroes don't use up any movement points.
You may want to do this even if you just want to get to your nearest town, because fleeing uses up all but several of your movement points and you man not necessarily have town portal spell at your disposal(it costs some mana anyway). Funny thing is that an army with only dead heroes and some creatures can capture a guarded town(provided it can beat the town garrison), but cannot capture an unguarded town, so it may sometimes be better to have an empty town garrison than to have, say, 1 imp guard your town.
3. Chaining creatures
To chain creatures you need some heroes with resurrection skill(not spell). Creatures with such a hero depart from point A, travel some distance, get into battle, get killed and resurrected. Creatures are then passed to another hero with resurrection and so on until they reach point B.
Now, if a full stack gets killed and resurrected, it gets full movement again. The problem here is that your hero can not always rise all the casualties. This limits chaining effectiveness somewhat, but you can still for example pass an angel or a black dragon this way if your heroes have expert resurrection or higher.
Another problem here is that your heroes should survive the battles they get into, but the chained creature(s) shouldn't.
4. Long chains
You want your chains to be long, but you can only have up to 8 armies. How do you make more armies?
NOTE: The following tricks are likely to be bugs which might get fixed in some future equilibris version or maybe somewhere else, so don't be surprised if at some point what I write below stops working. As I am writing it, the most recent equilibris version that I know of is 3.51.
Okay, onto the tricks:
a)dead heroes and space bar
- get hero(es) killed by neutrals
- split your armies so that you have 8 of them
- approach hero with an army that has all 7 slots full(hero + 6 level 1 creatures work well) AND has a hero capable of casting town portal spell
- in armies exchange screen press space bar and then put something in the row that holds your dead hero
- You now have 9(or more) armies, but 2 of them stand in the same place and cannot move. Cast town portal.
Note: instead of casting town portal your immobilized armies can get attacked and retreat/surrender.
b)caravan to hopeless town
- make a caravan to town A
- town A gets captured by enemy
- caravan must reach town A after enemy captures it
- caravaned creatures and/or heroes form an army in front of town A even if you already have 8 or more armies.
c)captured heroes
- get at least 7*n+1 of your heroes imprisoned in a single town
- capture that town
- you get n new armies
d)ships
- get at least 2 of your ships close to each other an close to the shore
- put some creatures on ship A, empty ship B
- meet ships and split some creatures from ship A to ship B
- land ship B on the shore
- repeat
result: you get a lot of new armies on the shore
I'm looking forward to some more of your tricks! Cheers!
|
|
Dj0rel
Tavern Dweller
|
|
posted December 30, 2010 12:46 PM |
|
Edited by Dj0rel at 12:50, 30 Dec 2010.
|
Quote:
b)caravan to hopeless town
- make a caravan to town A
- town A gets captured by enemy
- caravan must reach town A after enemy captures it
- caravaned creatures and/or heroes form an army in front of town A even if you already have 8 or more armies.
I assume this one would also work if you send a caravan to a town that has all the slots occupied. Right?
Anyway thank you for informing me of the tricks one can use to get more than 8 armies. There's a little trick with town gate spell that until now I thought was limited by 8 army limitation.
This is what says in Town Gate description "Town Gate transports the caster to the nearest town." however that is not completely accurate. The way Town Gate really works is that it transports the caster to the nearest unoccupied town. So if you put a "blockade" in front of your nearest town, Town Gate will transport you to your 2nd nearest town.
In most cases the "blockade" will need to consist out of 4 armies positioned in such way to completely block entrance of your nearest town. Even 4 armies that contain nothing more than 1 dwarf each will do. However in some cases there might be some objects next to your town entrance that can act as a blockade too.
If you have a enough armies you can pretty much choose which town the Town Gate will take you to.
|
|
Maciek
Known Hero
|
|
posted December 30, 2010 01:42 PM |
|
Edited by Maciek at 13:44, 30 Dec 2010.
|
Quote:
I assume this one would also work if you send a caravan to a town that has all the slots occupied. Right?
Wrong. Try it yourself. Caravan will show up as 'arrived' if you click caravan building and you get some message about it. If an enemy then takes this town, all creatures in 'arrived' caravans get automatically beaten up and all heroes in 'arrived' caravans go to this town's prison.
Quote:
This is what says in Town Gate description "Town Gate transports the caster to the nearest town." however that is not completely accurate. The way Town Gate really works is that it transports the caster to the nearest unoccupied town. So if you put a "blockade" in front of your nearest town, Town Gate will transport you to your 2nd nearest town.
In most cases the "blockade" will need to consist out of 4 armies positioned in such way to completely block entrance of your nearest town. Even 4 armies that contain nothing more than 1 dwarf each will do. However in some cases there might be some objects next to your town entrance that can act as a blockade too.
If you have a enough armies you can pretty much choose which town the Town Gate will take you to.
Yes, blockades work great with town portal. They may also work for fleeing/surrendering. The difference here is that town portal can take you to the closest unoccupied town no matter how close to you it is, but by fleeing/surrendering you can't get to any town that is too close. Another difference here is that fleeing costs most of your movement points while town gate and surrender preserve them.
|
|
tttttc
Hired Hero
|
|
posted January 05, 2011 03:52 PM |
|
|
Quote:
Here's one interesting and easy combo: Summon Phoenix + Rebirth. I found out about it while playing the last map on Another Bard's Tale campaign. It is a well known fact that Phoenixes can use rebirth only once. Or do they?. Anyway I got careless and got too near some Black Dragons at the end of my turn so they attacked me. I used the most powerful spell I thought would be useful: Summon Phoenix. A stack of Phoenixes appeared and I sent them to fight the blackies. They got killed but using Rebirth some of them got brought back. Now normally once the stack that was previously brought back once is killed, they won't come back again. But I used Summon Phoenix again and more Phoenixes were added to the existing stack. And then I found out that their mana was also restored, they could use Rebirth again. From that moment my tactics was Summon Phoenix, use Rebirth to bring back killed creatures, fight Black Dragons, Summon Phoenix...
Rebirth seems to be both a spell and an automatic skill. Basically you can manually rebirth the phoenix, and when the stack is killed with 0 mana, they will still rebirth a proportion, which I consider a little buggy.
|
|
pacifist
Famous Hero
|
|
posted February 09, 2011 01:58 PM |
|
|
It was disappointing in the last mission of Tawni to have to beat 60 sea monsters and 350 sirens while in the previous mission you can already beat 100 sea monsters with any of the main characters and +- same with sirens. There are so many ways to beat them in one stack, maybe Equilibris will give more challenge here. I simply shoot with Tawni (GM archery) after having summonned water elementals for slow and the sirens didn't come close to scratch her . Cyrca just slowed the sea monsters, killed one with bow, summonned ghost and with aura of fear spell it was so easy. For fun I also tried with illusion wand and unlimited sea monster illusions if it was necessary . The only real challenge in this map were the minos+ medusas stacks with Cyrca since she didn't have high-level summons like Tawni and splitting medusaes also make split the minos and you can't target the medusas. Tawni could cast magic resistance or summon phoenix (both work well).
____________
http://www.youtube.com/user/alkoriak#g/u
|
| |
|
|
