Mission 3 broken difficulty?

[Oblivious26]

Am I simply bad or is mission 3 impossible in hard difficulty?
The limit of 20 soldiers is, to me, way too low.

Not to mention, there's a bug with monsters able to attack walls behind other walls. (When they aren't placed in a straight line)

[76561199514469134]

Hi there!

You're not alone, but the third mission is meant to be hard (especially in hard difficulty), and therefore, more seasoned players have something fresh and challenging. However, you might be right when it comes to the 20-soldier limitation. We'll keep balancing the difficulty.

And we know about that bug. We'll try to fix it in the next patch.

Thanks for your feedback!

[Jamadman]

It is doable. took me two attempts as I didn't expect the final wave to be what it was.

[Techno_Mage]

It isn't that hard if you are aggressive to expand early, there are some much more effecient way to make walls than others though so that might be what makes it harder

[soggyprata]

Just wondering how you get the 20-soldier limit? Mine seems to be 15 (it shows 15 arrows) and the Lobber uses 2 arrows, so it's actually 5 Lobbers and 5 Bowmen = 10 units. Am I missing something? Any tips on how to defend the 4-direction wave? Do you split the soldiers evenly or concentrate on one side first?

[Strait Raider]

It seems pretty easy once you know the sequence and how the game works. I lost the first time I tried it (cascade of learning failures, losing my starting units, getting the walls breached on the first and second waves and losing my entire military both times), but the second time was quite easy (although I was making use of the pause function when I needed to). I think it will need to be tuned harder or a fourth difficulty added later.

Key things I did:

- Maximize your resource exploitation ASAP. Get three sawmills immediately, then houses and your first two quarries. Work on your barracks and getting a few archers out so you can clear out the bigger groups of enemies, then expand to six sawmills and four quarries. You can place two oxygen generators on top of the citadel for maximum efficiency at minimum cost as you start to run out.
- Building up the walls high enough to get maximum (purple) strength is essential. The hit points more than double(!!!). This is the most important thing right now as it will buy you enough time for just a couple of defenders and a bunch of traps to beat the final wave. Get the wall built up to "High" strength (about 7 levels), then place machicolations on top to bump them up to max level.
- Experimenting with the walls a bit, you can definitely get away with 2-thick walls in this scenario, but you have enough resources to make 3-thick walls everywhere so you might as well do that for the extra security. Place machicolations along the back of the wall as well when you have the resources so that even if the wall front is breached they will be delayed long enough for you to rally the defenders.
- Don't forget to place banners along the walls, you have few units so making them as strong as possible is important and banners are cheap.
- Keep using any excess wood after your buildings are done to flood the area directly in front of your walls with traps.
-[Gamey/Exploit] You can use your excess minerals to build big fields of flags in front of your walls and traps. This slows the enemy down a lot. Enough that if you cover one angle with flags you can ignore it and concentrate on the other three then come back to it later. I wanted to test this out, but it didn't make a difference in the outcome as I kept the same number of units at that wall the whole time.

Things I would do differently next time:

- Place all blocks at the bottom front of the wall end-on. This will effectively double the time required for the enemy to break their first block, since only half as many can attack a single block.
- Don't bother with bomb-throwers. I'm not certain about this one, but their attack states it only does damage to two targets, it's not a straight up AOE like you might expect. This makes their damage when boosted by a flag a maximum of 20 compared to 19 of an archer. They might waste less damage on average since that damage is lower and more spread out, but for taking double the population space it does not seem worth it at all. It is also hard to get them into their 0-4 level difference to deal best damage since your walls will be 7+ levels high, and their lack of range can make them less versatile. More testing is needed but I would say drop them.
- I wound up overbuilding with three barracks and more than 20 houses because I didn't realize there was no way to further increase the military cap... So plan to only build maybe 10 houses for 40+8 population which should be enough to max out.

[Strait Raider]

Originally posted by soggyprata:

Just wondering how you get the 20-soldier limit? Mine seems to be 15 (...)

There is a technology in the citadel.

[soggyprata]

Thank you so much for the tips! I guess my mistake was trying to build low positions for the lobbers. Will try out your strategies when I get the chance.

[moyang]

Build 'towers' for archers. When building a tower, only use stone outside and fill inside with wood arches so you can save resources.
Later you'll get enough stone to reinforce towers with another stone layer.

Use size 2 blocks as they cost 3 wood or 4 stone, while two size 1 blocks cost 4 wood or 6 stone.

[MercenaryGrok]

Managed to do this one first try, i built pretty strong walls on all 4 attacks and made 5 lobbers 10 bowman
3 walls fell, and in a panic, I decided to quickly build 2 layered max hp walls around citadel. It worked! always have a backup

[randomguy]

i think they should add something to allow more units like a building that is like the houses but instead for military

[randomguy]

and also don't really like the part of the map where your mineral and stone harvesters don't get good defense in between them since you would have to stretch out your units into groups of 1 to 2

[Uzsi]

Its totaly doable

You just need to build a big wall around the main castle so your troops are at one place.
Build a balcony at 4m height (so the base still gets the full hp boost) and spend all your troop limit in aoe bombers

[Uzsi]

Originally posted by soggyprata:

Thank you so much for the tips! I guess my mistake was trying to build low positions for the lobbers. Will try out your strategies when I get the chance.

Low position for lobbers is good!

you just need to extend it from a max height wall so you have max hp (and the best defense is to use laying 2x1 (Cos they have more hp) facing the short end out so they can attack only one unit of wall at ones

[Woofthr]

Didn't have any issues. Make a flat face wall up to the max strength height, add like two positions for lobbers in simple 1 tile balconies per wall. Then use wood to make a 2-wide walkway at the top for archers with the damage flags.

Not a single wave ever breached, though single blocks of stone got broken. (Overlap your stone in a way it won't collapse from one or two missing pieces just like real life)