So, in my first Genesis campaign, I'd conquered 12 shards over the course of about 50 hours of play, and I felt myself pretty far up the learning curve. I'm not sure I've mastered all the optimal build/hero development paths, but I've got a good number of Level 2 creature dwellings in my plans and I'd definitely been rocking the Glory points on my last few Shards.

I was 12-0 in battles against opponents, I'd whupped Beleth and Oiinor every time they'd taken a run at me (typically on "Skilled" difficulty), and I was feeling cocky. I even dialed up the difficulty to "Expert" and rolled through my next 2 Shards in record time.

Then that 3rd Astral Master (the Barbarian with a hyphenated name, I forget it) announced that he was attacking my home shard. We both started out on Swamp provinces near the edge of the map, and with one lake besides us. But, with the massive resource bonuses that the AI gets, he spread like wildfire. He had 9 other provinces (including 2 with resources) before I'd conquered the 4 adjacent to my demesne.

By the time he reached my provinces (Turn 60 on a Small map), he had Level 2 creatures in his armies and I didn't even have enough Gold to buy Swordsmen. By turn 65, I was done.

A few random thoughts:

1) I guess turning things up to Expert so quickly was a bit premature. :-)

2) Having 50+ hours of Campaign game play washed away in a single 2-hour battle for my own Shard would have been upsetting in most games. I enjoyed the journey enough that I'm okay with it here, but that is the kind of setback that would turn away many TBS gamers that I know. (I know, many other "campaign games on rails" only offer 50-60 hours of total campaign play.)

3) Seems like the AI player starting resource bonuses are most pronounced when starting on Swamp terrain, where the rate of new resource accrual is slowest.

4) Next time I'm planning which shards to conquer, I might want to weight the "starting bonuses you can purchase" a bit more importantly than in my first few games. (it seemed silly squandering more than a quarter of my total Astral Energy resources from all Campaign play just to get a Cudgel for my hero, but the fact that you get all those bonuses for free when defending your Home shard matters a bit more)

5) I wish I had a better idea exactly why this happened. I love games like Genesis that feature a "slow reveal", but when the reveal is so slow that I don't even have much of an idea what happened or why, it leaves me wondering...


6) I sure hope this doesn't happen in my next campaign. I'm sticking to "Skilled" level for a while. :-)

I also lost my first campaign, but for it it was after 30 shards and 200 hours or so, pretty unusual experience, other games dont do that. Took a few days break and then started a new campaign, been a breeze so far on expert now at shard 45 or so.
With some strategies and good tactical play its possible to get very far until turn 60. Im sure a forum poster here called Gremlion could tell you how to have won that defense.

You can backup your save folder in the Eador directory. Might be prudent for shard defense, if you dont want to risk starting over.

Your mistake was probably that you didn't play the safest strategy on your shard defense, which is a warrior + brigands start, followed by soloing the warrior as soon as he has enough defense (search the forum on how to solo best). At level 10, either go pure warrior (for round attack + vampirism) or go slayer. If you can't get vampirism yet, slayer is probably the better choice. Both can be powerleveled quickly, 60 turns is plenty to make them so strong that they could have stopped Doh-Gor all by themselves.

Yeah, I'm sure that was part of the problem. I'd wanted to go the Warrior route, but the combination of a Swamp province in my home territory (plus only 4 discovered locations, only one of which was conquerable at < Lvl 3) and no Iron resources in my 2/3 of the map left me hesitant to go the Warrior route. I only have Lvl 1 magic guilds at this point in time and am not sure how to access the Vampire Warrior route, but I'm sure that's due to my own inexperience.

As I say, I'm sure that there were one or more Hero Development paths I could have pursued that would have won that one. I don't know them all. But I'm also not sure it's a sign of good game design when the only way to win above "Beginner" level is to find specifically scripted approaches in forums that will deliver an optimal build path.

Genesis seems to do a better job than most games of defying optimal paths. But the fact that failng to follow one is grounds for losing a 50+ hour campaign in the span of about 3 hours of game play does suggest that there might be room for fine-tuning the game.

Or just that I'm a whimp. I'll let you know how far I get into my next campaign! :-)

Well, there are universal strategies for tactic games.
1. Summoning additional unit
King's bounty: armored princess - dragon's egg, which can summon even max tier units, plenty of unit abilities...
HoMM - illusion spell, elementals,...
...
Eador - undead and demons, unit abilities
2. Buffing your units
3. debuffing enemy units

Swamps mean crystals, crystals mean spells.
1. You could take archer, some meatshield and summon zombie spells. Shoot, zombie, shoot, zombie... and you get virtual 8 units in your army - enough to take on any early campaign province guard.
2. Probably best T1 spell - astral energy, second turn for your units + restore stamina. Free doubleshot. Magic weapon - restore ammo. Combine them - doubleshot, astral, doubleshot, magic weapon (+4 ammo), doubleshot, astral, doubleshot. Isn't that hard to figure out. If you use this on commander->strategist with ranged tactic, you can deal very good damage even for expert difficulty. Like killing minotaur with slinger.
3. Fear can "kill" strongest units in the game in 1-2 turns. http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/6041/screen8fb.jpg
http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/9171/screen1cq.jpg
1 Fear spell from any hero on executor in inquisition site will decrease his damage to 8 - comparable with T1 unit. Fatigue - very useful spell. 2 casts will shut down any barbarian. 1 cast will calm down archers with doubleshot. Web is amazing, even if its duration will be for one turn - "knightly order" site - take barbs, attack knight, get counterattack, activate berserk, cast web, finish knight.

Well I am not Grem but I know that Astral Energy cast on your Hero unit does NOT give it an extra turn. However it does still give that resistance boost along with the Stamina that is sorely needed so is still worth it usually.

It's definitely more noticeable. It's a flat bonus, but when the AI has next to no province income it can make up a huge proportion of their total income. It can mean the difference between waiting 3 turns to afford something or waiting 10.

@Dt3r What "flat bonus" to the starting ressources does the AI get?

It depends on the difficulty level. The bonuses they get can go as high as 15 gold and 5 crystal per turn. They can also start with an extra 500 gold and 80 crystal. That extra gold is enough for a second hero, allowing for very rapid expansion.

AI also does not have to pay for Guard upkeep (and probably garrison too) apparently so it can field monster guards and better in all of it's provinces with upkeep in the thousands of gc and hundred+ crystal per turn. I'm unsure if they need to pay to hire them thought. Probably not.

We were talking about the starting bonus, but anyway ... would you like it better if the AI had no guards, or only weak ones? They do have to pay to place them. We found that out in the trainer thread. Thats probably why they mostly turn up at late turns.

Where did you get those values from, Dt3r, is that in some .var file? I only found difficulty.var, which lists those values for beginner level, but those seem to be for players.

Their starting gold can be seen in gamelog.txt in Eador root folder

Ah excellent, and its indeed 650 gold on expert. I was looking for that because taking control over the ai with tuxutats script showed some unround starting gold like 659, but it turns out that that is 650+the income from turn 1.
But I can see no bonus to income, they seem to just get what the demesne yields. So I am wondering where those +15 gold are from.

I would like to see them field varied guard like they did before(well, only contracts really but now they only use monster guard. well the death worshipper anyway) and what they can actually affort wihtout cheating. AI should definately be lot better. It does not even know how to pull back endangered units or guard their archers/magic users. They also don't seem to know how to optimise their economy (at least as far as I can see comparing their provinces to mine). I just want AI that provides challange without cheating.

defender.var - monster guard costs 45 gc + 2 crystal per turn to upkeep. My last opponent fielded 40-50+ of those which would mean they cost 1800 gc + 80 crystal to 2250 gc + 100 crystal or more per turn just for guard upkeep. I would not have been able to upkeep those even when I was knocking his citadels doors with 90% map in my control. And my own provinces had lot higher income than any of theirs.