Stuck on SotBE:Barag Gor (beta)

[mattsc]

What am I missing? One difference is that Velensk seemed to tolerate the continued presence of the units initially around the castle, whereas I try to exterminate all of them before the assault waves arrive. I guess if you're surrounded by overwhelming forces, then unit kills basically make no difference, except, of course, for leveling.

Well, the kills do make a difference as you have to win eventually, but making a lot of kills early on is not necessarily an advantage here. While yo're vastly outnumbered around the castle, overall for the map the situation is actually not all that bad. For example, in my game at the beginning of turn 4 (when everybody has spent their initial gold), I control a total of 42 units, and the AIs 54. That's actually pretty good odds (assuming everything else is even).

The problem is that at the castle, it looks very differently. So what I need to do is make those units last long enough for Kapou'e's troops to arrive. If I attack, I (most of the time) take damage. And even though I might do much more damage to the enemy than I take, it still weakens my units and they might get killed earlier than they would be if they just sit there. (A side effect is that units can generally only be attacked from 2 +/- 1 hexes, meaning that the enemy units might block each other if there are too many of them, additionally reducing the amount of damage they can do as a group.)

So that's why I often just sit there and let the enemy attack during the early turns, even if it means passing up chances for almost certain kills (that actually takes a lot of self control for me and the couple times I reloaded and went back a couple turns were exactly when I did not follow that strategy). I know that eventually, when side 1 arrives, I'll be able to turn the table, as long as I still have enough units left by then.

Well, that's what I have found to work for me, at least. Take it for what it's worth...

The pillagers I leveled are probably more important (slowing enemy leaders before attacking). So taking the other advancement path is a mistake IMHO. Pillagers are also pretty useful in the undead scenario.

I also always go for pillagers first, and only once I have a couple I might level a wolf to a knight. Having said that, on my own play-through I didn't have a single leveled wolf in this scenario and got through it just fine -- but that was on medium difficulty, of course. Anonymissimus' two pillagers certainly came in very handy here on the nightmare play-through!

As on what you say about grunts, Anonymissimus, I agree with all those disadvantages, but there are also clear advantages of having some leveled grunts around in a lot of the following scenarios (esp. once you get warlords). So I usually try to level grunts and archers (and whelps) in roughly equal numbers and just recall/recruit whatever is more useful in a given scenario.

So... I'm not going to do anything to the balance of the scenario right now, as we have collectively shown that it can be won on nightmare and it is supposed to be very hard (well, technically I'd have to show that I can get through the next scenario in good standing too, but ...). I will continue to listen to the discussion here and in the feedback thread though and we can decide later. However:

Currently, there's also the cruel twist that if you take the easy way out in the previous scenario (i.e., running Kapou'e rather than defeating the leaders for the early finish bonus), then Barag Gor will be quite impossible to beat. I prefer when taking the easy way out means the next scenario will have high casualties and be very difficult to win, but still possible.

That is a very valid point! Personally, my preference would be to take the "just run" option away from the previous scenario though. I don't know, we'll see. In any case, thanks for testing and the discussion, it's much appreciated!

[Maiklas3000]

I gave it a try on on medium and beat that without much trouble, as posted in the feedback thread. I may give up on beating Nightmare.

Suiciding your allied green leader will not benefit you. You're going to go way negative on gold, because there are so few villages. Having your ally not steal villages from you will not change that fact.

I tend to promote strong Wolf Riders to Knights, but yes, it's wise to make your first two promotions be to Pillagers. A Direwolf Rider works pretty well in this scenario too, though. Leaders can be poisoned. The northeast leader won't even try to make for a village to cure himself. And poisoning attackers at the castle helps with leveling your Archers (though you can't wait too long or they'll run away.) Of course, it was a nuisance to have a L3 Rider auto-recalled at the start, due to the upkeep. If I were to replay the campaign, I'd try to have three ready-to-level Wolf Riders by the start of this scenario, with no L2 or L3's.

Thanks for the assistance!

[mattsc]

And thanks to you for playing and the feedback! It's great to read (in the other thread) that you like the scenario in spite of its nightmarishness. Just one quick comment:

Suiciding your allied green leader will not benefit you. You're going to go way negative on gold, because there are so few villages. Having your ally not steal villages from you will not change that fact.

On the replay posted earlier in this thread (the nightmare playthrough) I got 40 bonus gold for scenario 5, and on my medium-level playthrough from a couple months ago 60, with neither of them being maxed out for carry-over (even ignoring the green leader suicide possibility). So you don't have to go negative on gold and having a unit or two more in the next scenario is definitely worth it since you have to fight on two fronts there.

[Maiklas3000]

Phew, I beat it on Nightmare. The replay is in the scenario feedback thread. However, I did 1 save-reload, and I explain the reason in that thread. It's not a clean victory, but it will have to suffice.

I did finish with positive gold, 30, no early finish bonus, so I stand corrected on that.

On the issue of whether to recall experienced Grunts, I did recall one, reluctantly: a L1 Grunt two kills away from leveling. He made L3 Warlord with enough time to spare to make good use of that big ass sword of his, although he was always running back to villages to heal himself, so I don't know if it was worth it. One of the new recruit Grunts had the same name as that one, which confused me. ("Wait, I thought Prish made Warlord? Prish is still a Grunt!")

[mattsc]

Phew, I beat it on Nightmare.

Well done.

Concerning something I said earlier:

technically I'd have to show that I can get through the next scenario in good standing too, but ...

So I decided that I needed to do this after all starting from the end of my previous playthrough. Well, actually, I replayed the very last turn of Barag Gor (for an unrelated technical reason) resulting in Kapou'e getting the last kill and leveling up, for those of you paying attention to that sort of thing.

Coming out of Barag Gor like that the Harbor of Tirigaz was a bit tricky at the beginning with unit and gold management, but I certainly managed to get through it. I'm almost a little embarrassed to post this as some parts of it are quite badly played (I rushed through it during lunch break), but as before, this is all I have time for right now.