You might want to report that as a bug then. Every city starts with a militia (unarmored, not unarmed), you usually get 2 groups of militia and 1 group of archers in a typical city... and way more if it's a fortress.
I pretty much always use spear, Krax or not. I use a front line (3-4) of spear chargers (on wargs) and a backline of bowmens (also on warg - also chargers, but never move). I still haven't seen anything survive this set up. Hell, Vetrar died in one round. Heh.
My assassins are always in the middle of battle... but I never use sweep either. I take Assassin for crit and armor ignore.
I like to rush for Ironworks, so I pretty much can never run out of metal... but crystal costs tend to hurt. I usually have 2 designs of most troops, a "normal" version that minimizes crystal costs that I use in most places to save crystal... and a final "enchanted" version for my SoD, but even these never use champion armor (main crystal costs comes from accessories).
@OP, food simply determines maximum population. It determines what level your city can get, and thus determines the base bonuses of the city and what free improvements you can get. Improvements that + growth is for the city only, however there are improvements (usually wonders) that + prestige that effectively boosts overall faction growth (prestige/total cities). @Xia, I think the only way you'll see lv5 cities now is if you had multiple farms near a city and lots of towns in you
I think I tried this in a previous beta build (so it might no longer be accurate now), but while you definitely CAN get both life and death, you can't upgrade the path that you can't get naturally (due to Kingdom/Empire alignment). At least I wasn't able to get it to show up after some 30+ levels (it was when leveling was a lot easier). I suppose that might be an issue with randomized choices, but I was able to get to V on all the other magic paths and was running out of stuff to
The various warrior "skills" need a slight buff. I seem to never ever use them, so I never ever pick warrior.
The first thing to note is that there is TWO difficulty setting. The first, you encounter is the "world" setting, this basically dictates monster behaviors , lair distribution and strength. The second difficult setting, on the opponent's page, dictates the individual AI (or collectively) difficulty, intelligence, and bonuses/penalties. As to monsters: From my understanding, monsters tend to ignore capitals (first cities) so that players don't get wiped o
They don't "rock" anymore than a group of 7 (or 5) troops with the same equipment though. Basically Iron Golem is just 1 big guy in "free" armor and HP to make up for the lack of a group... and it looks cool. IMO, the only way to make them useful is to give them overpower.
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As I mentioned earlier, I don't find Pariden or Amarian Blood a big problem... even the lowered HP can be countered (using towns for HP bonuses). The problem, I think, is Procipinee herself, her build just doesn't synergize very well, IMO. Summoner, as I mentioned, isn't a great pick (might need a slight buff). Her magic path is also iffy at best, and she's too reliant on buying spell books to make up for it... and even if she does, she can't level them like someon
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Yeah, Procipinee has always been one of the sillier builds. Her strength (summoning) isn't all that great IMO, and not only does she have a pretty bad weakness, the only reason she gets the crown seems to be for story purposes... except for gameplay purposes, she often just ends up giving it to the first hero she comes across... which makes no sense. I usually make a custom sovereign when I play with Pariden. I don't really have a problem with Pariden as a faction or Amarian B
I'm pretty sure this is an issue when the AI pioneer is in an army with a hero. Basically, what's happening is the game thinks it's the same as a Sovereign founding the first city (which starts with 30) and doesn't get destroyed. So the army can just walk around building as many cities as it wants. When the pioneer is NOT in an army with a hero, it works as it should. Or at least that's what I've noticed.
A couple of things to make your life easier: First, Magnar (the faction) isn't really a good choice to start out the game with... they have a mechanic (slavery) that requires a bit of planning and demands a certain play style to make full use. In general, it's better to make elite troops instead of cheap ones (due to army limits and stack of doom effect), Magnar turns this on its head with lots of cheap troops that just aren't very good unless you're using it in combin
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[quote who="Tuidjy" reply="27" id="3261461"] Quoting Kalin, reply 26 Of course that doesn't mean I don't think some of these stuff should be ignored, they should be looked into, but let's not blow it out of proportion, shall we? If anything, the only thing that this really does is put a dent in Brad's claim about the AI playing fairly, and you know Brad isn't going to let that slide. I'm afraid it does one more thing. It really pisses new players o
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I'm seeing some of this stuff as well, and while there are definitely some "quirks" with the game, it's hardly what I would consider "game breaking" because I'm still kicking the AI's butt in anything below Expert without really trying. It's basically like the old days of Moo (or w/e other games you're into) when you're playing on Hard/Impossible, knowing that the AI cheats because it needs to in order to compete. If you're having a hard time on Challenging, si
A lot of good things, but I do have to agree with the few posters who worries about production being tied to city levels instead of population. It severely depreciates the value of food improvements. You'd never want to build them unless you know you can hit the next 'tier', making them meaningless for level 5 cities (which will most likely result in high food tile yield cities not bothering to focus in food improvements - which seems... rather counter intuitive). You'd also o
While the idea sounds nice, the implication of adding food to your capital city (or any city of your choosing) makes city spamming the defacto strategy. This is what happened in EWOM, and was the reason why caravans became what it is today.
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It's not the range (3) that's the problem, you could easily run up and use the knife if you're out of normal attack range. The problem with the knife is that it does 4 piercing damage, making it pretty much useless... if it did the user's attack in piercing damage, it might be semi worthwhile. Unfortunately, the game doesn't know that it is useless, it just knows that it has an attack ability, and tries to use it...
I'm not particularly thrilled with the special abilities for weapons either (as I mentioned at the very beginning of the post), but if that's the way they want to make weapons unique, then I'm willing to put up with it. It may not be the greatest system, but when it works, it gives you choices and the different strength & weaknesses adds to the experience and re-playability of the game. I'm just expanding on it to give flavor to all 8 type of weapons. As for mixing
I've always thought that initiative penalties and bonuses directly on weapons are badly done, that's why I wrote up a comprehensive suggestion regarding weapon balancing a while back ( here ), one part of which would essentially move all the initiative bonus/penalties into the weight of the weapon and have it be handled via the encumbrance system. Although I never expected to get the whole thing implemented, I thought that part of it
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I usually play on hard mainly because that's the level that Brad said he wanted to get feed back from. It's a pretty good difficulty to try out various stuff and still get feedback because the AI doesn't get crazy bonuses. I can beat expert without too much trouble, but it usually means I have to focus on a specific strategy and try specifically to win without messing around, often abusing all sort of cheesy tactics to do so. It feels a bit too limiting sometimes and I get tired o
I'm pretty sure I saw this one as far back as a couple of versions ago. It's definitely not a newly snuck in item.
I hire them, level once, pick PotG, then turn them into city defenders. It doesn't really matter if they have 2 skills or 10.
I used scions a few times, mostly to turn a bunch of them into PotG for a massive prestige, income and research boosts. But yeah, they are pretty much late game units that needs a lot of babying. The biggest problem is that they can't use hero equipments like henchmens, so you tend to wait until you get the best weapon/armors before really deploying them. The cost to train is a bit of a pain as well. Although, after playing around with henchmens, I'm sure I could find more use
They don't die right now... although Derek said somewhere that they should. To be honest, I don't really think they should, because if they die permanently, you'll never see the Altar AI using henchmens because they'll die way too easily if you don't baby them, and the AI doesn't know any method to do so.