King's Bounty: Mage Strategy Question

[crpgnut]

I've just picked up King's Bounty and started a Mage character. This seems to be the easiest build of the three to play. I quickly found two items that raised my leadership 600 points and I'm only level 5/6. My leadership is 1302 and this poses an interesting problem. Is it better to take a powerful army into combat if you kill most enemies by spell? I've got 7 horsemen, 5 knights, 6 archmages, and 21 priests and archers. This is a good group that can win most battles easily. I even took on a level 10 hero and his army and won. I'm wondering if I should drop these guys in a garrison though and go with 5 groups of 1 peasant. It is rare for an army to live long enough to cross the board to reach my army. I'm sure it will get tougher once I leave the first island. Any ideas or suggestions? I've got rage too and I unlocked the mage-hater and the snake-food guy. I don't have rage very high and I can use these guys about once each per battle.

 

[VPeric]

So why use a weaker army? Do you end up with loses every fight (which I doubt)? That's the only way to justify not using your most powerful troops (because troops can, actually, run out). Also, if you're winning everything easily, that's the perfect time to experiment with different types of troops, anyway (which is a fun aspect of the game).

The general strategy with the game is to try to win fights without any loses, even when that means you run around an area, picking whatever you can that is unguarded, and the heading back to an earlier area to fight the opponents there (for example, once you get to Freedom Isles, you'll want to first sail around and pick everything up, and only then start actually fighting).

 

[magerette]

I found it useful to have some durable troops around to soak damage, as later you will meet with some stacks/heros that can't just be fireballed out of existence with a few castings. Increasing both leadership and mana was probably the biggest focus I had. Spellwise, on my next mage I'm going to be very careful in my choice of which spells to scribe and even more careful on which to raise to the third level, as I blew a lot of crystals on stuff I never used.

 

[crpgnut]

My thought on using a weaker army was this: if I have 5 peasants then everything reads as overpowering and when I win, I'll get lots of xp. Is that not the case? As far as crystals go, I've been upgrading everything! Do you start to run out of crystals? I might get in trouble later, if that's the case. I'm only playing on normal though.

 

[JDR13]

My thought on using a weaker army was this: if I have 5 peasants then everything reads as overpowering and when I win, I'll get lots of xp. Is that not the case? As far as crystals go, I've been upgrading everything! Do you start to run out of crystals? I might get in trouble later, if that's the case. I'm only playing on normal though.

You'll get xp depending on the troops you defeat, I don't think what they are labled as (IE: Strong, Very Strong, etc.) has any effect on the xp you receive.

 

[VPeric]

Yeah, the exp you get is based on what you defeated, not how strong they were compared to your army.

 

[GothicGothicness]

Hmm, but if you keep die with 5 peasants you would respawn in the castle and be rewarded some gold ? and it would cost less than you were rewarded to rebuild your 5 peasants army, but if the army with so many knights and horsemen was defeated your gold would be on - , so if you don't want to ever use the reload function it could be a good plan ?

 

[Benedict]

I didn't find I spent that much money as a mage once I got the sacrifice spell - pick up thousands of cheap, crap high hit points troops to have in reserves and then whenever one of your good expensive units gets some losses top them up by sacrificing your cannon fodder.

 

[GothicGothicness]

I think the sacrifice spell was fixed in the latest patch but I am not sure.

 

[magerette]

My thought on using a weaker army was this: if I have 5 peasants then everything reads as overpowering and when I win, I'll get lots of xp. Is that not the case? As far as crystals go, I've been upgrading everything! Do you start to run out of crystals? I might get in trouble later, if that's the case. I'm only playing on normal though.

Yes, crystals get very sparse later. Also, more powerful spells cost way more crystals to learn and upgrade(investing in alchemy early might help--I didn't pick it up until late in the game) I was scrambling for them, and I played on normal. I also didn't find playing a mage on normal too much easier than playing a paladin on hard, but that could be a learning curve thing.

Bottom line, I would only upgrade my bread and butter spells to third, and any spells like Haste and Bless you use that acquire a mass affect at 3rd level. Not only do 3rd level spells cost crystals to upgrade, but they use more mana in most cases, and running out of mana as a mage is a good way to experience that other strategy Gothicgothicness was talking about.

@Benedict--I never used Sacrifice that much cuz I never had enough cheap low level troops. But Phantom and Teleport were awesome.

 

[Benedict]

I think the sacrifice spell was fixed in the latest patch but I am not sure.

Fixed how? Shame, it was a great spell.

 

[GothicGothicness]

It was too overpowered.

 

[JDR13]

I never found the Sacifice spell during my complete playthrough of KB.

 

[crpgnut]

I think I have it, but I've never used it. I generally use icestorm and fireball. I'll use the slow spell if the enemy has something really fast. My least favorite enemy is those pesky inquisitors. I'm up to level 10 now and have 165,000 gold on me. Too bad you can't buy crystals I finally won enough fights to get the 10 mind runes from an artifact! My mage has a difficult time finding mind runes. I've got a paladin banner though that gave me 10 mind runes and 800 leadership. Fun game. Quite addictive too! Thanks to everyone who talked up this game.

 

[magerette]

I never found the Sacifice spell during my complete playthrough of KB.

Weird. It's usually somewhere in the midgame. I think I picked it up in Demonis. I had a really hard time finding the Resurrection spell in my first playthrough but it finally turned up in the Land of the Dead, I think.

 

[crpgnut]

I don't have resurrection and I can't buy inquisitors anywhere yet either. In an earlier test run with the 3 different builds, I had inquisitors at level 4. Only 5 of them, but they were invaluable. Much better than an Arch-dud-mage.

 

[Benedict]

I picked up some inquisitors from the paladin in the swamp who asks you to clear out the undead, only a few but with sacrifice I kept them going. I think I found sacrifice in the swamp too, from one of the witches.

I'm surprised sacrifice is particularly overpowered, it didn't really have any combat benefits, it was more about being able to go out on long killing sprees without restocking troops. Mind you it probably spoiled my enjoyment a bit and meant I didn't try out different troops as much, I kept the same few going for ages.

 

[wolfing]

problem with sacrifice was that you could have an infinite source of units of everything. One of the balancing factors in the game is the (low) availability of certain troops, but Sacrifice killed that factor. It could also be used on charmed creatures, which was even worse and I would even consider it a bug. In fact, I refused to use the spell in my playthroughs as it destroyed any sense of challenge.
GG said it was fixed in last patch, not sure what they did as I haven't played in a while, but it seriously needed fixing.
EDIT: I just looked and couldn't find any mention of a change to Sacrifice in either 1.6.5 or 1.7 patches, you sure it was fixed?

 

[magerette]

Sounds like that Freeze spell in Divine Divinity. Once you broke that out you could rule completely(except for a very few immune creatures) I liked having it, but I had to make myself ignore it most of the time.

 

[crpgnut]

Question about the patch: I have the dvd version of the game and it wasn't clear whether the patches would work on that version. Has anyone tried them on the dvd version of the game?