Any Warlord difficulty advice?

[Lampros]

I am winding down my Captain difficulty playthrough and will move onto Warlord in a few days. Are there anything I should do differently? Any general advice would be appreciated.

[Ashura_Darkheart]

Don't use cannon or gunner so you can enjoy hell =) and remember to put permadeath

[Master]

Have a good mix of squads. i had more squads focused on melee, some chapters had some squads not doing anything due to terrain bottleneck. Kesh toolkit was very useful for me against enemies on walls.

The early game wasnt that difficult if you invest on defensive techs 1st. At least i never had to really think hard until the mid game.

Give your tank squads unassuming traits so they will be targeted, imposing traits for your highfire power or low defense squads to avoid being attacked.

[The Jason Order]

Tips:

1) Put all story characters in the front row. They can die for free (don't need to rez and they'll always return). The early game is a bit harder than the rest, so if you do have deaths it should be them. You don't need to restart if you lose some random fighter or militia early on either.

2) Pick up any character with any captain ability (-2 cost to unit type). There's a few named mercenaries with this ability. Don't get more than 2-4 of these. You'll get enough high LDR story characters.

3) Give all your capture LDR to these characters. Change their affinity to Light (ideal) or Earth (second best). These units will be able to field 9 character significantly earlier than even the "high" LDR story characters.

4) The most important army organization is getting units Loyal. Save your arena tokens and then every once in a while, put a squad with all your non loyal units, and have them solo the arena and then capture the fort. This will get them to loyal. Remove the loyal units and repeat until your whole army is loyal. The best units are always mercs, since they get free talents and better starting stats. For example, there's a mage called The Outcast that will be 140 magic when regular apprentice mages will be around 80 at the same time.

5) Good squad types are: 3 Melee in front, 2 healers, then add DPS in back row. This keeps your healers save from assassins.

Front Row:
2 Fighter > Solider > Sentinel
1 Militia > Acolyte > Paladin

Middle Row:
2 Medic > Priest > Templar

Back Row:
Any DPS.

If you run mages, put them in the middle with healers in the back.

The best current DPS units are: Champion, Sword Master, Fire Mage. If you ran multiple mages stop at 2 fire and pick up an ice mage for 3rd. Sword Masters should get precision as talent. If they start with that get Assassin's heart. Mages should get arcane barrier helps a LOT with survivability) or arcane speed.

Make 2-3 units of Horsebow > Raider. You can add a healer in the middle, which can be on foot without losing mounted. These units will soften up tough units / bosses without taking damage, and also soak all archer units since their threat will be low, but evasion will be very high. These will carry you in harder missions, and also let you grab chests super easy,

6) Affinity matters a lot for random recruits. All your medics and mages should be Water or Dark. All your archers should be Fire or Lightning. All your squad leaders should be Earth or Light. All your Sentinels (Soldier, Fighter) should be Fire or Earth. Delete all characters that don't match these, unless its a good merc you can swap afinity for.

7) Pick the best pre class for stat growth and base stats. Solider is better than Spearmen if you want Sentinel. You want to get them to promote as fast as possible, and a water affinity spearman for example, will become a sentinel roughly 10 levels slower than a fire soldier.

8) Grab 6 or 9 Dragons to make 2/3 flying units. These can go to low LDR characters like beatrix / Sybil / Abigail and still cap squads. You'll want 2 Templar, 1 Paladin, 3 Dragons (2 silver 1 fire).

After Chapter 12, if you "beat it", the game drops off and becomes a lot easier. It becomes super easy once your main character gets revive / powers.

[Throwaway Name]

Yeah what the last guy said. I would like to emphasize how good raiders are. Stick them with Stephan and you have a fast squad of death that can barrage or ambush really well.

[Throwaway Name]

Originally posted by night4:

It's funny, while I've used Raiders before and I get why people like them, I also didn't use a single one in my last permadeath Warlord run. For me, the horses were better spent on cannons and a single heavy cavalry squad to soak attacks from physical heavy enemy squads.

So Raiders are good, but I don't think they really carry any more than any other strong squads do.

Whaaaat there are so many horses I don’t feel like I could actually use them all. I have two large melee cavalry squads, one raider squad, and a cannon squad at around Ch.20 and didn’t use them all.

[Elusiv3Pastry]

Does the difficulty ever spike back up after the point where you can pick up side quests? I'm playing for the first time on Warlord/permadeath/ironman and I'm honestly having too easy a time of it. I played a lot of the classic games this draws inspiration from but otherwise I'm not doing anything special, and my parties can all blow through anything with ease without taking casualties.

[The Jason Order]

The difficulty honestly spikes at Ch12 and goes down from there. There's another chapter, I think 27, that can be a bit hard if you are going for the achievement but honestly once you hit Tier 3 units around chapter 10-12 you are set.

[Throwaway Name]

Originally posted by The Jason Order:

The difficulty honestly spikes at Ch12 and goes down from there. There's another chapter, I think 27, that can be a bit hard if you are going for the achievement but honestly once you hit Tier 3 units around chapter 10-12 you are set.

The desperation chapter in the imperial sewers stands out to me too. The enemy has pretty big squads meant to take out your units and there is no way to rez. My cavalry was especially under pressure against the units with 5 spearmen and magic users. I sent in non-cavalry units to absorb the hits and lost a silver dragon, zweihander, and crossbowman :-(