Any way to get stone quick?

[Fanta Morgana]

I'm playing the campaign right now and am at mission 5 of Empire. Since a couple of maps I have the problem, that my troops would be ready to upgrade and I have the required gold to build the building but not the stone. So I either have to wait a lot of turns doing nothing until I have enough stone or just go on and level in an inferior unit type, gaining xp that is basicly wasted once I finally upgrade the troop.
right now I just upgraded my fighters to tier 3 units using 800 stone and still need around 1500 stone to upgrade my healer and mage buildings but I only get 50 stone per turn. I captured a lot of terrain nodes and two neutral towns but it will probably take like another 30-40 turns until my land reaches a stone mine.
My stone shortage is hugely slowing my unit progression down. With gold I could sell artifacts or so but with stone, I get the mines, collect whats lying on the map and if I'm lucky I get stone from completing a dungeon. Am I missing something? Is there a way to get more stone quicker?

[Karol13]

When it is stone only, what you miss, try use trading to get it. Not sufe if all versions of Disciples 3 allow it, but I am able to buy stone in exchange of gold.

[Fanta Morgana]

Yeah, that would help me. How can I trade gold for stone?
I have Disciples 3 Reincarnation, as it is sold on Steam, no mods (yet)

[Karol13]

I have visited most merchants, but could not find it. Not sure if it is race restricted or scenario restricted... or I just had a halucination.

Race specific -> for example Undead have a spell that generates stone:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1314116537

[Fanta Morgana]

thanks. That will come in handy once I play the undead.
I have to say, that in mission 5 of the empire I went the wrong way about.
Don't know if it was just RNG but the ruined town in the southeast next to the Demon capital held a few Dungeons that gave me Stone each by completing them and there was multiple piles of Stone laying around. I just went there rather late. If I got there earlier, I would've had a smoother progression curve. Overall mission 4 was worse, as it yielded very low amounts of stone.
Having a level, where you need say 9000+/- stone depending who you take with you to upgrade your troops and only giving you small piles and 50-100 stone a day in mines is bad level design.

[harleyquinrazer]

No trading for resources in Reincarnation.

Want more stone/mana you don't have a node of/gold/runes? Grind dungeons. Even the easiest "Fearsome Tower" drops all four types of mana, potions, random runes as well as gold and stone as a reward for clearing the enemies. In this game the indoor dungeons are repeatable unlike Disciples 2 so use them.

As mentioned elsewhere by others, if it's just stone you need then press end turn when the position is rock solid to accumulate the resources you need.

[Gondo]

The missing stones for unit upgrades are an issue throughout the game. It is recommended to gather as much points of power as possible first, to get hands on stone mills.
Sadly I learned that some monster places that are hard to fight have bigger stone rewards too, which are just not accessible in the early game.

I really wished trading would be an option, but it is not.

[harleyquinrazer]

Originally posted by Gondo:

The missing stones for unit upgrades are an issue throughout the game. It is recommended to gather as much points of power as possible first, to get hands on stone mills.
Sadly I learned that some monster places that are hard to fight have bigger stone rewards too, which are just not accessible in the early game.

I really wished trading would be an option, but it is not.

You get 150 stone as a random reward from the fearsome tower which is the easiest dungeon in the game.

There are maps with no quarries until much later, so the developers compensate by having lots of easy dungeons in close proxmity to each other.

[Gondo]

Originally posted by harleyquinrazer:

You get 150 stone as a random reward from the fearsome tower which is the easiest dungeon in the game.
There are maps with no quarries until much later, so the developers compensate by having lots of easy dungeons in close proxmity to each other.

Well that does not really help a lot when you need over 2000 stones for the highest upgrade, that was this thread about. And well in my experience most of the easy dungeons give just potions and runes. mybe just bad luck?

[harleyquinrazer]

You don't run them enough.

Undead chapter 6 is a case in point. There are TONS of dungeons lying around and I've seen the mid-to-high levelled ones drop up to 400 stone as a reward. Obviously it's random and players are more likely to get mana, gold, artifacts or a rune instead.

Worst case scenario: skip turn until enough stone is acquired. No time limit so it's only if players are desperate/bored.

[Fanta Morgana]

Originally posted by harleyquinrazer:

You don't run them enough.

Undead chapter 6 is a case in point. There are TONS of dungeons lying around and I've seen the mid-to-high levelled ones drop up to 400 stone as a reward. Obviously it's random and players are more likely to get mana, gold, artifacts or a rune instead.

Worst case scenario: skip turn until enough stone is acquired. No time limit so it's only if players are desperate/bored.

When I made this thread, I already knew and stated, that you can skip however many turns you'd like, with no consequences. That however is the case due to there being no AI. I can only imagine the gameplay would be intended to be in such a way, that an AI enemy would grow and increase his power over the turns, so one couldn't just skip turns because the AI would outpower the player. Play against a human and skip 50 turns and see what happens.
So obviously just skipping turns isn't the intended way of playing the game. So if you are playing the intended way, you will be short on stone by a huge margin, thats why I thought there would be another way to get stone. Because it would be good game design if when you're not making any mayor mistakes the economic progression would be somewhat in sync with the xp progression.

[harleyquinrazer]

So run more dungeons with a secondary hero, the earlier the better. With a secure backyard the dungeons are just there to be harvested since your main hero is busy doing other things like trying to win you the game. Perfectly valid strategy which isn't cheesy and is exactly how the game can be played.

Does stone drop often as a dungeon reward? Not in my experience. But 100-150 potentially every 3 turns isn't something to laugh at when your stone income is a mere 50 a turn.

Final buildings being a pain? Can't see how you'd get your tier 4 units past the cap without help from a trainer, random scenario XP boost and a plentiful number of easy-to-run high level dungeons.

[Talis Cat]

Just edit a save and change playside_res_num 1 for your player side. Technically cheating but if you end up just hitting end of turn to get your stone ... might as well cheat.

[Fanta Morgana]

Originally posted by harleyquinrazer:

So run more dungeons with a secondary hero, the earlier the better. With a secure backyard the dungeons are just there to be harvested since your main hero is busy doing other things like trying to win you the game. Perfectly valid strategy which isn't cheesy and is exactly how the game can be played.

Does stone drop often as a dungeon reward? Not in my experience. But 100-150 potentially every 3 turns isn't something to laugh at when your stone income is a mere 50 a turn.

Final buildings being a pain? Can't see how you'd get your tier 4 units past the cap without help from a trainer, random scenario XP boost and a plentiful number of easy-to-run high level dungeons.

It happens to me in pretty much every campaign map, that I hit the max tier units, often even maxing out their full level progress. I mean all these scenarios send you back and forth all over the map. You somewhat have to go out of your way, to not hit the highest tier.
Not upgrading to the highest tier is just leaving power on the table.
Sure, in some instances you may get a lucky RNG draw and get stone everytime you complete a dungeon. However I still stand by my statement, that there is a serious flaw in leveldesign or upgrade cost, depending on how you look at it, when it comes to stone economy.

[harleyquinrazer]

Only had it happen on two maps (I've finished all the campaign maps) because there weren't enough quarries to begin with but a ton of dungeons. Fairly big hint to players they're meant to be farmed, especially when they're so close to each other and are easy to do by this point.

XP "wasted" isn't that big an issue as it's made out to be. End result is the final capped-out unit has maybe half a level's worth of XP less than it otherwise would have. For the Empire missions, they're all beatable without maxing out the capped unit's tier and there's zero point in grinding for five hours non-stop just to extract every last point available because it isn't necessary.

Couple of Elven maps actually discourage players from going the Marauder route because there simply isn't enough map XP to go round. Not to mention the Marauder route in these cases is actually a bad idea. Taking into account how much stone THAT building needs, I think it's not a bad design choice.

[Fanta Morgana]

I know how to circumvent the issue of not enough stone, which is by just skipping turns.
So effectively I don't have a problem. Also I'm aware that you don't need all the power you can get for the most part.
My point is:
The game is fundamentally broken, because the AI doesn't do anything.
I can understand why this is, as the company went broke and just shipped what they had.

However there has to have been a vision on how the game was supposed to be played.
In a game where the AI was functional, there would be a problem with the stone economy and you wouldn't be in the position to just leave power on the table.
Not only that, but initially you don't know what lies ahead, so you would want to max out your power. Also you wouldn't know how much map XP there is before you complete the map, so you can't say the map discourages you from going Marauder, because by the point, where you have Marauder buildings, you may not even have uncovered the whole map, much less guestimated the total XP available. If a game is giving you tools (as in mechanics and items) to beat it, it is reasonable to expect the game to require you making use of it. What you engage in is ex-post- rationalisation. Yes in hindsight one knows that the Marauder wasn't needed for a certain map, but if want to discourage people using Marauders you have to give them clues beforehand.
Anyway with the mindset of a functional AI, the stone progression is designed wrong and it only turns out to not be a big issue, because the AI doesn't work.