Tips, tricks, or useful things not in the tutorial info

[Throwaway Name]

I would like to collect some useful info to spice up my strategies on my current playthrough. I will start with some things I tried:

Heavy infantry with the guardian trait is actually great in the back row because they easily absorb rogue and assassin stealth attacks. So if you need a unit that can advance without fearing stealth attacks, give it a try. Heavy infantry still attacks from the back row, and if there is a penalty it doesn’t seem too bad.

Use stealth attackers in a squad with majority light cavalry instead of light infantry. You get cavalry move speed to help initiate attacks more often and can still ambush. And best of all you can withdraw behind tougher units after attacking.

Also don’t forget to apply gold status to Barnabas early using a proof of merit item. He starts as a tier 3 unit (knight) and will therefore usually be first to reach max class points.

[seiko769]

Being in late game now my number one lesson is PUT ARCHERS IN EVERY SQUAD. ONE ROW OF EM. INVEST IN THEM!!!! It is SO annoying and time wasting in late game when 8-10 squads just attack *every unit in your army* or one specific weak unit with arrows cause they always prioritize no exchange.

[Throwaway Name]

İlk olarak seiko769 tarafından gönderildi:

Being in late game now my number one lesson is PUT ARCHERS IN EVERY SQUAD. ONE ROW OF EM. INVEST IN THEM!!!! It is SO annoying and time wasting in late game when 8-10 squads just attack *every unit in your army* or one specific weak unit with arrows cause they always prioritize no exchange.

Thanks I wouldn’t have thought that’s important.

[Airyl]

While I won't say that you need archers in every squad, you may find yourself wanting to have more archers, or a few hybrid squads. Invest in some samurai! they are very convenient.

More on topic, you can use the captain leadership trait to over-max squad capacity by squeezing in every last preferred class you can and then changing their class afterwards.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2821495617

[heh]

Archers are crap, don't put them in anything except a dedicated archer squad.

[springy]

order of battle is:
magic
range
melee

so a squad with all 3 will have 3 waves of damage minimizing melee overkill

[Levantine1978]

İlk olarak 76561198022369703 tarafından gönderildi:

Archers are crap, don't put them in anything except a dedicated archer squad.

I don't agree that they are crap, but they definitely operate a lot better in large groups of them rather than one or two in a squad. Samurai are a good compromise if you want some ranged ability in a squad.

Having beaten it on Warlord, I had two dedicated squads of Bowmen (with a single healer) that I did my best to protect and had them either soften up/cripple enemies or go in for the surrender. That worked really well for the entire game.

Most of my very powerful squads had a mixture of Melee/Magic (or Dragons). I would have liked to use Cannon squads more but I never did find a use for them given how slow they are and unable to counterattack. Maybe next playthrough.

[heh]

İlk olarak Levantine1978 tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak 76561198022369703 tarafından gönderildi:

Archers are crap, don't put them in anything except a dedicated archer squad.

I don't agree that they are crap, but they definitely operate a lot better in large groups of them rather than one or two in a squad. Samurai are a good compromise if you want some ranged ability in a squad.

Having beaten it on Warlord, I had two dedicated squads of Bowmen (with a single healer) that I did my best to protect and had them either soften up/cripple enemies or go in for the surrender. That worked really well for the entire game.

Most of my very powerful squads had a mixture of Melee/Magic (or Dragons). I would have liked to use Cannon squads more but I never did find a use for them given how slow they are and unable to counterattack. Maybe next playthrough.

Archers do low damage and can't take a beating. They are good because they attack from range. To make them good you have to capitalize on this by only using them to attack from range, or maybe to defend from range. If you're not attacking/defending from range then archers are a stupid inclusion. And you should never seek to attack/defend from range with any squad except dedicated archer squads, so archers are a stupid inclusion in every other squad.

A dedicated archer squad can be extremely strong because you can design it around assuming that it will never take any damage. Give them all your damage items and your health/armor reducing items and whatever utility you want them to have (I like the "attacks first when defending" item, which lets them oneshot most if not all attackers before they get a chance to do anything, negating the lack of defensive stats) and they do great with it. Do the same in a non-archer squad and that's real stupid. Another reason why including them in non-archer squads is stupid.
You also happen to get two immortal/named archers, Jules and his girl friend, which means you can place both of them in front and even if they die it doesn't matter because they resurrect. But you can't do this with any other archers.
Actually, when you get the armor/taunt power, this archer squad can be one of the best targets, in situations with lots of ranged enemy squads, who otherwise would just be wasting your time by shooting (and doing 0 damage) to some other squad, and then you have to 'manually' kill it during some later turn, and of course it's smarter to get them to suicide into the archer squad. But including archers in all squads to somehow mitigate this is just dumb. Defensive archers aren't going to be killing attacking archers on their own, you're gonna have to run up and melee them to death anyway, so it doesn't save you any time. And in the case where the attacking archers are actually dangerous then the defensive archers don't do anything to protect from that. And you almost never wanna use a squad with a few archers in it to be attacking from range into an enemy squad, since they usually bring so many healers that this helps them more than it harms them, like it does during every battle where you have allies and your stupid allies with their 2 horse archers in their cavalry squad keep shooting at enemy squads and just healing the enemies in the process.
It's much better to be adding an equivalent number of healers instead.

I haven't sat down and thought about any of this min/maxing deeply, or min/max my squads at all beyond obvious things like heavy infantry in front (and probably the back too, to protect from assassins) and then squishies in the middle,, but archers=stupid is just so obvious it's not necessary to think about it. It's *as* obvious to me as putting heavy infantry in front of your mages rather than the other way around.
There are a lot of good reasons to make one (1) squad, but beyond that I dunno if I'd even want a second one. If there was a lot of fighting in narrow hallways where having archers behind your frontline squads to attack from range then archer squads would be good (though probably worse than siege squads in that scenario), but that scenario is extremely rare. I think archers are only good when you can go all-in on capitalizing on their strengths, and that otherwise they are... they're better than having no other unit in the squad, but they are worse than having almost any other unit.

Also, I think samurai are bad as well.

I think they're really cool.

But I think they're really bad. Every time I put them in a squad, where they were getting meleed I noticed that I'd rather haver had another unit, and where they weren't getting meleed I noticed that I'd rather have had another unit. I tried putting them in a medium-range crossbows squad but it was just mediocre. Worse at range than warbows and worse in melee than anything else. So is there ever a situation where you want the same squad to be able to do both, interchangeably? Pff... I didn't find any situation where that was the case. I would sometimes place my warbow squad in positions to get meleed, but they handled that better than the hybrid squad would've anyway just because their damage allowed them to kill enemies so well that they didn't end up doing much, if any, damage to them.

Anyway. I don't know why I wrote such a long post on this, but now I've written it so I guess I may as well just post it.

[Kaserdan]

I'm still early in the game but I tend to use a priestess in all my teams.

My problem was : not enough gems to change their class from medic to priestess.

So I actually bought a few mercenaries and demote them just to get their resources.

EDIT : Oh, and I ended up forming a squad with the 'surplus' medics. I put them in Sybil's squad, with 1 heavy troop up front. It ended up to be an excellent defending squad cause they heal everything on the first attack they get. Plus, If you have 3 healers in 1 squad, you can actually use the heal on another squad 3 times in a single round. So you can actually heal 3 different unit in an adjacent squad on the same turn. Quite useful. I ended up buffing their magic stat for better healing.

[Throwaway Name]

İlk olarak Kaserdan tarafından gönderildi:

I'm still early in the game but I tend to use a priestess in all my teams.

My problem was : not enough gems to change their class from medic to priestess.

So I actually bought a few mercenaries and demote them just to get their resources.

EDIT : Oh, and I ended up forming a squad with the 'surplus' medics. I put them in Sybil's squad, with 1 heavy troop up front. It ended up to be an excellent defending squad cause they heal everything on the first attack they get. Plus, If you have 3 healers in 1 squad, you can actually use the heal on another squad 3 times in a single round. So you can actually heal 3 different unit in an adjacent squad on the same turn. Quite useful. I ended up buffing their magic stat for better healing.

That’s actually a nice use of Sybil. Her squad struggles to be relevant in my campaign. I’ll try that next time.

I have also learned that squads with two healers, a Paladin (to give the healers 50% damage reduction) and some other heavy units are really strong. The only counter seems to be lots of firearms, I guess that’s why the game has them. The 50% damage reduction is probably too good, maybe should be 30% or 25%.

[Gray Riders]

Putting a heavy infantry in the back row to guard against stealth attacks sounds like an excellent idea (they're the enemy I find most difficult to deal with other than dragons and lots of cannons), but does that mean putting the casters in the middle, or will the heavy be able to protect other back row characters?

[Stu -1]

leadership levels up like a hidden xp bar. found this out from the devs/game testers. from making 'winning' attacks or defence, capturing points and making surrenders all contribute to growth to the next level. if you have a squad thats struggling try and cripple enemy squads morale so this squad can surrender them.

i'd suggest letting them seize capture points, but i personally find that (seeing as battles last only around 10 turns, maybe less) you actually lose a lot of efficiency running weak squads around capping points when they could be trying to engage in combat.

one of the devs did say they would look into ways in future patches that allow teams that are lagging behind the curve to catch up.

[Markus Kruber]

İlk olarak Levantine1978 tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak 76561198022369703 tarafından gönderildi:

Archers are crap, don't put them in anything except a dedicated archer squad.

I don't agree that they are crap, but they definitely operate a lot better in large groups of them rather than one or two in a squad. Samurai are a good compromise if you want some ranged ability in a squad.

Having beaten it on Warlord, I had two dedicated squads of Bowmen (with a single healer) that I did my best to protect and had them either soften up/cripple enemies or go in for the surrender. That worked really well for the entire game.

Most of my very powerful squads had a mixture of Melee/Magic (or Dragons). I would have liked to use Cannon squads more but I never did find a use for them given how slow they are and unable to counterattack. Maybe next playthrough.

I ended up with one cannon squad under Lysander. Lysander + 4 cannons + Priestess + 4 sentinels

Was able to one shot basically any squad and not get hit very hard when attacked. The cannons are very strong. just not nearly as good as Beatrix with the item that makes her attack twice. Send her forwards and do a defensive attack, then use the taunt power on her. Kills everything

[EatExcreteRepeat]

Wow, this kind of became an archer thread.

Here's my tips, though I'm only in midgame.

1. When you plan your army composition, you should think about how many rare resources you'd expect your units to take up. I once thought Acolytes and Paladins were the coolest heavy infantry because they're hard to kill with magic and they have a damage bonus to beat up other heavy infantry, so I started to hire a lot of militia. Then, I realized all the Sunstones I would need to promote my Acolytes into Paladins meant for every Paladin I fielded, there would be a Priestess who doesn't get to become a Templar or an Apprentice who doesn't get to become a Mage.

2. When you receive new units or when you hire units, be aware that units have a wide variance of starting stats and affinities. Conscription is so cheap that it's worth it to roll the dice on a few conscripts before you put one into your squad. Always be on the lookout for good starting traits, high magic bowmen who you can groom into mages, and high leadership units that you can groom into squad leaders. A unit's affinities are also important, but they can be changed later (with a retroactive effect!) with items, so you can stomach getting a few units that have good starting stats but poor affinities. When you receive new squads as part of the game's plot (like when Barnabas joins up in Mission 2), you should also go through their units and see who you should fire and replace. Be aware also that Mercenaries don't have a capacity penalty if they are the squad's leader because the squad's leader always fills 10 capacity, so high leadership mercenaries are very good investments.

3. Most squads don't need too many melee units. Melee units can only target the opponent's frontline and all attack at once, so if the enemy is covering their mid and backlines with a single fighter with 1hp, all of your melee units in a phase will jump on them and attack them, wasting all your damage potential on overkill. Mix archers and mages, who can randomly attack any enemy into your squads when you're overkilling too much with melee.

4. Even if an enemy doesn't immediately surrender when you used Forced Surrender on him, they can surrender after your single attack phase if you manage to reduce them to zero hp. If you see a guy with like 5hp and inexplicably excellent morale, go ahead and use the Forced Surrender on him anyways. If your enemy has something like half a squad left and doesn't want to surrender, but they're all lined up and sitting next to Diana's squad...

5. Speaking of surrenders, you know the trait that reduces enemy morale based on the strength of the unit attacking? You know the giant lady you have whose strength is like double the strength of the most hardcore heavy infantry you can find? Put that trait on that giant lady for easy surrenders.

[Markus Kruber]

Beatrice is broke as hell, dont be afraid to abuse her.

You can get an item that Allows the leader to attack twice (reduce follower damage by 25%)
Even with low leadership it is easy to have her with just a priestess and two Heavy infantry

You can do this with any strong squad (except cannons), but run them towards a group of enemies, perform a defensive attack and then use the power that forces the enemy to attack the squad. can clear every melee squad in like 15 tiles.

[Throwaway Name]

İlk olarak Gray Riders tarafından gönderildi:

Putting a heavy infantry in the back row to guard against stealth attacks sounds like an excellent idea (they're the enemy I find most difficult to deal with other than dragons and lots of cannons), but does that mean putting the casters in the middle, or will the heavy be able to protect other back row characters?

Yeah casters go in the middle if you have a rear guard