Is combat tactical in this game or a mere matter of overwhelming the opposing force? Also, is sheer military might the easiest way to reach the overall win condition


Thanks for the input, I found the manual a tad lacking in this respect :).

Tactical. Unit bonuses (experience and upgrades) and your own spellcasting play a big role in combat. It's turn-based and you're choosing the actions of each unit each turn. so it isn't just some big melee that you sit back and watch. You can try throwing numbers at the enemy but quality of unit plays a bigger role than quantity of unit. You end up with the balance of spending resources to upgrade your towns in order to create better troops eventually - or - spending resources to get some weaker troops out there so you don't get rolled too easily in the early game.

Edit: "balance" isn't the right word there. It's more like an adjustable scale: spend more on your initial units and you'll have less to spend on upgrading your towns to make better units, which slows access to those better units. On the other hand, if you neglect your military, wandering monsters and your opponents can easily roll over your territory and put the hurt on you.

Been a while since I played but I think you can also win by being the first one to finish casting some uber-spell (kinda like building the rocket in the Civ games). Victory this way favors spell research, mana generation, etc.

The game offers a big variety of units, upgrades (unit and settlement), spells, and your own player capabilities so there isn't one particular way to achieve victory. Pretty cool if you like investigating completely different styles of play.

Combat is definitely not a numbers game- you could throw 9 pikemen against a Sky Drake, and the lone Sky Drake would wipe the floor with you. Throw several buffed up Slingers against the Sky Drake and the dragon would be dead in no time. Send an air elemental against the Slingers and they won't stand a chance. Send those original 9 pikemen against the air elemental and the pikemen might take a few casualties but they'll kill it without much trouble.

Basically different units have their own advantages and disadvantages. Throwing waves of low-level units against a powerful enemy won't do much, but some of those low-level units can still be useful if you use them wisely. Various other units and summoned creatures each have their own advantages and disadvantages, allowing them to be highly effective against some enemies, yet highly ineffective against others. And then there's the various ways to increase the power of units- increased experience, magic or other special weapons, various spell buffs, and then there's your ability to cast spells during battle which opens up a massive number of tactics.

As for overall victory, you'll need some sort of army, although whether this takes the form of lots of hired units, heroes, or summoned creatures is up to you. Victory is always achieved by getting rid of all of your rivals, although this can be accomplished either by individually defeating all of them, or by researching and casting the Spell of Mastery (in which case you only need enough of an army to protect yourself when everyone goes to war with you after you start casting the spell).

Your explanation sounds better than mine. ; )

:D You guys were right. At the beginning I was underwhelmed due to more numbers just kicking the latkes out of me... But then I started diddling with the spell book, summoning monsters, upgrades, creating artifacts, finding artifacts.... I love this game.


I beat it on intro :), I know that doesn't count for anything, but I'm proud!

Latkes? Northern Midwesterner, per chance? : )

Had this game for a while now and just cant get to grips with it at all.

Wish I had a manual to hand while playing.....no printer atm.

Thanks for the tip, much appreciated

Right-clicking almost anything in the game will also pop up more info about it.

I love to choose Myran + Warlord so that I can get whatever starting Race I choose with an Adamantium deposit in my home town for early low level monsters.

Imagine those early Spearmen with an extra 2 Atk&Def each. Since they each have 8 units in them that is some massive damage being dealt not to mention the Adamantium gives you a +10% bonus to hit and with WarLord letting them level fast they are deadly. My favorite early unit to do this with are the High Elf LongBowmen. With those upgraded weapons they start with like 5 Ranged atk each and just get deadly. I have taken on ArcAngels and kicked serious but as well as Sky Drakes.

I never really tried it with Halfling Slingers but that ought to be pretty damn super too.

Does not work with the following races since they cannot build Alchemist Guilds. Gnolls, Klackons, Lizardmen and Trolls (although Trolls make up for it in other ways but you should always get Alchemy as one of your picks with them to at least get them Magic Weapons to hit weapon immunes).

Also it doesn't really work with Dark Elves sadly because of their Ranged Magical attacks don't get beefed, but their regular attacks and defense are but thats not really the best part of DElves.

Great question and great answers! Thanks for the info. Glad I stumbled across this

Disclaimer: I am not an experienced player and have only just started

Wait wait! I think it still is a numbers game. Consider damage and hit points. Somebody mentioned that you can't throw nine groups of pikemen at a sky drake and win. Doesn't the reason for that lie in the numbers, such as damage and hit points, and not tactical maneuvers such as flanking and ambushing? And what about experience, doesn't that all simply come down to numbers again?

It's not simply a matter of numbers in terms of attack, defense, and hit points. For instance, a big part of why the Sky Drake would do so well against pikemen is because it has a powerful breath attack, which is executed before melee combat is resolved. What this means in practical terms is that the sky drake can do some major damage to the pikemen before they even get a chance to retaliate (retaliation is part of what's resolved in melee combat), and since pikemen are composed of multiple units if several of those units are killed by the breath attack then the ability of the overall unit to damage the skydrake on retaliation is significantly reduced. Additionally, breath attacks are only executed when the unit with the breath attack is the one to initiate combat; however, since a sky drake is a flying creature and pikemen are not, the pikemen can't initiate combat against the sky drake. This means that the sky drake will always get to use the breath attack. Take nine units with the same stats as pikemen, but make them flying creatures, then the sky drake will likely lose because it will have to engage in multiple combat instances without the advantage of the breath attack.

Ultimately it's nuances like this that have a major impact on how combat plays out, and it makes choosing the proper units quite important, even if on the surface the base stats of units may look similar.

The issue is that there are a lot of unit specials and spells that can completely change combat. For example, the sky drake is flying. This means that the pilemen are going to have a lot of trouble ganging up on it, which is one of the main reasons they lose despite outnumbering it -- it can engage units of pikemen one at a time. If you cast a spell on the drake to remove its flying ability, the pikemen could probably swarm it and beat it.

If the pikemen fought someone with weapon immunity or an illusionary attack, they would also tend to be screwed, because their weapons can't do much damage against weapon immunity, and illusionary attack will negate their armor. On the other hand, if they had magic weapons or true seeing (which they can get from appropriate spells) they could fight back with no problem.

Or someone could just cast confusion or sleep on them (or their enemy), which would make the whole point moot unless they had magic immunity!

The game is heavily influenced by Magic: The Gathering, and part of what it takes from that is the idea that victory often comes from using your spells and unit special abilities, rather than by just swarming the enemy. Finding a good combination of powers (or figuring out how to use your powers to hurt an otherwise-difficult enemy) is really the core of the game; hordes of pikemen are going to have a lot of trouble against air elementals or illusionary warriors if you don't plan ahead and think up ways to negate their weaknesses.