[LazyWizard]

I think that beast fort I mentioned might actually have been on easy – I just tried another beast fort, lost handily. Twenty-two cave bears wasn't enough to take out even the lizardmen's shaman. Or maybe it was just terrible luck this time. Huh.

I have had similar pathfinding issues to the ones Gnarz brought up. The AI also doesn't seem to recognize the danger of fire. I had my Keeper torch a library with a Flame Sphere to ward off a tri-faction invasion. It worked, but the moment I released control of the Keeper he ran back into the burning library to study and died.

[…]

Expanding is worthless past a certain point. You can only have 40 troops total right now, so anything more than the tiles needed to sustain that is unnecessary.

You can obtain a massive amount of mana from killing things, and a smaller (though still significant) amount by torturing whatever prisoners surrender after a failed invasion. Try putting together a small team and raiding a village you've already conquered to kill the civilians for mana (you should be doing these raids anyway to get the final research tier unlock book for that faction).

Regarding pacing: the enemies don't seem to regenerate killed troops, so once you've survived a single invasion by that faction they are almost harmless (unless their faction leader survived). Mid-game is when you should be taking teams into the enemy towns to hunt down any survivors, raid shops and grab skill books. End-game is when you've killed every combatant in the elf, dwarven, lizardmen and one of the human factions. At that point you will be invaded by the Duke's incredibly powerful army (the other human faction).

[LazyWizard]

I'm fairly certain the beast fortress was hardmode. I usually play on hard unless I'm trying something crazy like a keeper-only run (which seems impossible right now, sadly).

I have mixed feelings about Adventurer vs Keeper. I've played a few games and it's fun, but outside of a lucky shot against a wandering Keeper I've never even come close to clearing a fortress.

In Keeper mode your goal is to make your fortress impregnable against an entire high-level army, so playing in Adventure mode where you're level 1 and all alone seems impossible against any half-decent fort design. Even with plenty of scrolls/potions and max handicap I rarely make it past the entrance hallway. There's also no easy way to gain levels if the Keeper didn't focus on beasts since all other enemies stay bunched up in the fortress. Luckily equipment isn't a problem; even with aggressiveness turned off you're likely to have killed off most of the factions in Keeper mode before retiring so there's plenty of corpses for your adventurer to loot.

Maybe levels could be more statistically significant for Adventurers (and Keepers) than for regular creatures? That would smooth out the difficulty curve a bit.

[Author]

Posts