You must ask him nicely. Try sending him a fruit basket. Perhaps a pair of socks and a nice fur cape. Maybe a pay raise? Do you have casual Fridays for your staff? He'll be more inclined to do better work for you then.











It's a random roll to succeed for most spells. Make sure you are choosing something you can afford (enough points with the winds of magic) and that you are choosing a valid target. After that you cross your fingers and wait. These things can work in your favour sometimes too as the enemy will fail their rolls sometimes.

He may be out of range, the little info box on the ui will mention if he's out of range after you've clicked and wasted your magic points (stink I know).

Other than that depending on the stage other wizards can dispel your spells before they take effect.

He will also fail spells if he picked up a magical item which nullifies all magic! So check his magic items if you have picked on up!

I feel for anyone who does that by accident as you are totally screwed. There's no way to swap items normally in game. You've got to do save game editing to swap magic items between units.

They are completely screwed had it happen to me many years ago,poor poor alor! made the campaign much more interesting not relying on him to flock of doom everything!

Major problem with items showing up by a flash in the ground you never know what your going to get! Or the snowman :D But it did keep me replaying the game for ages searching all the maps for the items.

I remember the first few times playing I carefully scoured each map after playing to find these items! I even had the hunch to search the unwinnable maps like the troll valley one. I think I found almost every item, barring a few potions of strength. I guess there were benefits to pre-internet spoiler age.

Flock of Doom was almost too good. It's probably a plus to play the game without relying on him totally. Especially as we get two other mages who are mostly ignored by players, it seems. I know some people who played the game and never even realised the branching nature of it, so they never got the mortars and the border prince's guards or they did it the other way and never got Vannheim's 75th and the associated maps.

I have the same problem. My wizard fails to cast a spell 80% of time. Incredibly annoying...

This game could have been so good but instead proves to be very frustrating (with other bugs like units not attacking when commanding them to attack, difficulty in selecting units and so on...). And this is coming from a huge fan of Dark Omen.

The units tend to attack far more consistently on the PC version if you make the selections using the map to the right instead of the 3D battle scene. Mages do fail spells but a lot of the time people are forgetting the different ranges of the spells. You can often tell if that is a factor from the poses the mages strike when casting. If they don't even try (raise their arms to do the casting animation) then likely there is something blocking them such as too long a range.

Thanks for the hints. I figured the wizard out after testing him extensively in game but it cost me a couple of hours... And yeah, I noticed that the small map in the corner is your best friend.

After spending 15+ hours playing and learning how to overcome these in-game issues I started to enjoy the game again. But seriously, good part of the games' difficulty is the goddamn interface.

I think Allor has a grudge against me. Failing two spells in a row is distressingly common (I'm checking the log and it's not a range issue--just him messing up). I don't remember this from when I originally played, but that was the Playstation version so maybe spell failure was removed or made less common (or my memory is failing--this was over a decade ago).

Does anyone have any tips on getting experience for the poor guy? His hunting spear doesn't usually get many kills even when it works, and even if he doesn't get Flock of Doom I'm hoping he'll at least fail less if he levels up.
Edit: Had 4 spell failures in a row while going through "Against The Grain". Incredible.

I know your pain. I think I had a stretch of a couple of missions were Allor failed to cast a spell every single time. Insane...

So I tested what could be going wrong. The solution for me was to select the target for the spell using the minimap in the right hand corner (and not the main 3d map). After I started using the minimap I think Allor failed only one or twice to cast a spell over the span of 10+ missions. Too bad it took me half of the game to figure this out. Now I am towards the end and the guy is under-experienced causing a major pain...

Seriously, I can see how the game is fun once you figure out things. But because its interface is so broken it is so frustrating to play... I don't know if this was also the case in the original release, but basically the 3d map is worthless piece of ****. I don't use it for anything because I have issues even selecting or deploying units using it. Don't know if it is only my experience, but drove me near crazy.

This could be really helpful, thanks! I eventually realized at one point that the Grudgebringer fireball kept failing because your unit is too lazy to turn towards a target it's not already facing, but it still uses up the casting. It wouldn't surprise me if something similar is happening here; the game thinks I clicked on the ground so Allor duly wastes his magic on nothing and gives a less than helpful failure log.

Also, I don't know if anyone is willing to try this, but I did find a video of someone using Orc Pursuit to level Allor up; I belive they stashed the cavalry and Ceridan away in the southeast corner then had Allor slaughter all advancing orc units with hunting spears and lots of running--in theory the huge manueverability bonus one man has over a unit should make this possible, and the Exp would be huge. But I imagine it would take an absurd amount of time.

Edit: Just went through a stage, and making sure to click only on banners gave Allor a 100% success rate! Thanks a ton!

Glad it worked for you too. Hope that this will make the game more pleasurable for you. Remember to level up Allor, it is extremely useful once you leave Zhufbar. Otherwise you'll be suffering like I am now.

The best way to level alor up in memory is to use him to clean up fleeing units, when a unit is routed hunting spear will kills lots quickly due to their decreased toughness,

But be careful that none of your units are running down the people your trying to hunting spear as accidents can happen!


Great vs cavalry chuck the curse on them and then a few hunting spear's when they turn tail and run.

Also

Fezred yep got to agree the multiple different ways to play the campaign! Straight to zhufbar and the 75th cavalry I did not discover until my 7/8 play through of the game :D

As for straight to the elvish homelands now they were some fun missions to try and figure out (failed so far) I nearly managed the orc mission using the mortars and alor, group both mortars and alor tightly in the far back corner and cast the spell which stops movement just in front of them making it impossible for units to engage them directly.... but when ever I got down to the last few units both mortars have usually miss fired and exploded, alor cant use hunting spear since his first spell blocks any path it could take and if he removes the first spell they will instantly get slaughtered :(

The other way I have tried for that level is blind firing the orc boar boys that retreat from the tent on the far right hand side with the mortars, out of 20 odd attempts i only managed to hit them once and that killed 3/5 of them, I always wondered if you managed to kill them would it stop the reinforcements from arriving..... still sorry for the wrongly named spells and places but this is going on a very old memory of the game :D