Is knight underpowered?

[Aleksandr 47]

I only completed act 1 with all classes. In the end i noticed that being knight sucks and heres why.

First of all, melee troops, mercenaries are kinda common. When you have guard you can recruit at the beggining and 2 melee priests, then getting more melee seems neccesery. I played on hard, so mercenaries were needed when taking castles. Guess what, most mercenaries are melee, so you have limited amount of space in 1st row.

In case of rows, i think mystic is just hands down the best class just because his row is the rarest of all at the start. You can hire lvl 2 christian caster or lvl 1 peasant caster. This seems so hard for the support row not only because it has 3 slots, but because you need manpower and the supports seem to not help in some cases. Hence why mystic is borderline op for having wide array of abilities to choose makes him super tactical. You can spend combat points for mystic if you want, but just maxing command abilities and getting that extra recruit slot and easier sieges make him overpowered.

Ok so lets get back to knight and why he sucks. Another problem with him i would say is that wide array of tactics like mystic, but those tactics are just weapon and armour choices. Now, dont get me wrong, but it is good and a bad thing. Problem is that heavy armour offers so much protection, but kinda negates it with other penalities. That is not only unrealistic, but unfair for heavy armour users. Id say heavy armour should be an advantage, while in this game it stays in disadvantage compared to other armour classes. That huge initiative penality should be removed except for tournament armour, so heavy armour users as rare as they are should be more viable. I found few rare heavy armours and they seem pretty fine, but all in all i would just take barbute and the best brigandine, so total minus of initiative would be 1 but armour bonus would be huge.
Another silly option is weapons. Swords are the best weapons for knight hands down. You can obtain so much maces throughout the act 1 and give them to your grunts. Swords offer huge amount of initiative and damage, so it would be silly to take anything over them. Id say axes are good (despite unrealistic but super useful 50 percent armour pen), they are second choice over swords. Still, they offer such low initiative too. Then we have useless weapons like warpicks, who destroy the idea of this games combat. You have to move fast, snipe low hp enemies and so on. Instead, they act like debuffers with stacking armour penetration of 20 percent.
Last but not least is knights choice of combat skills. You can either be mounted or 2-handed user. Mounted just seems to offer only bonuses, while 2 handed takes away ability to use shields. Knight has ability to wear large shields, so why one of his skills completelly negate that? Its just stupid. Meanwhile, 2 handed weapons have some cool effects. Actually, im not even mad about balance here, all 2 handed weapon classes seem to have a place. Its just that it takes away shields and large amounts of initiative that it seems it would be easier just to use 1 handed weapons and focus targets with low hp. Becuase of combat system, 2 handers are just overkill and waste of turns sometimes.


In the end, i would say that knight has bad options, so it would be best to make him mediocre frontliner and just put all points into upper skills, maybe even getting discount skill too. Just keep in mind that the first combat skill is worth taking.

[Alexander (Aterdux)]

If you search this forum, we had way more complaints that knight is way over powered :) I actually agree, knight is the easiest hero to play. I'd say I think baroness is balanced the best and it's both challenging and fun to play. Mystic is cool too but only for those who have time to develop him far enough. A lot of players complained he was too weak at the start.

[Aleksandr 47]

I will have to search for those forums and check for solid arguments. Im new to this game, but even i think that mystic is by far easiest to play as he takes the role of commander, not frontliner with slightly better gear at start.

Baroness is quite easy too if you build her around bows and try to shoot down less armoured targets. Using crossbows is only viable with that stun perk.

I do not think that mystic is too weak at start. Maybe in the 1st fight, yes. After that? No. Due to his abilities of armour increasing for light troops (which are all you get at start) seems quite overpowered. And armour debufs? Combined with that multi targeted effect you can simply turn enemy heavy infantry into paper.


Regardless of that, ill have to read why knights are overpowered.

[Aleksandr 47]

Alright, first thread i found about balance.

"been playing with the mystic, but considering restarting the game with knight. However my problem is that it seems like an upgraded nobleman or infantry is just better than the knight hero"

I kinda feel the same about knight. He is just slightly better version of your melee troops. Sure, you get few unique skills, but thats it.


If youre games developper, then please make heavy armour more realistic. It takes away too much initiative so it doesent feel better than other armour types. It doesent feel worse, it just feels different. It should feel better, not different, because heavy armour is a trait that not many troops have.

[Alexander (Aterdux)]

Regardless, we don't have time or resources to make any large scale changes. It makes little sense after over two years since release.

[Aleksandr 47]

Well, there is always some room for improvent though i understand the shortcomings.

[Cole420]

Please Alexander, don't give up on the game and try to improve it anyway you can. It just makes your company look better which results in more people purchasing this game as well as other games you will release in the future.

[Aleksandr 47]

I think legends of eiswald is an unique game. All it needs if a bit of fixing. Forget historically inaccurate armour models, they would take sooo much time to fix.

For historical accuracy you would need to change few names of armour and thats it. For example: there are no leather gambesons. All of them are made from linen or alternative of silk. There is no chainmail armour, it is just mail. You are basically saying chain chain in this case. Mail and riveted mail are the two types of mail construction in history, but europeans only had riveted mail, which was resistant to cuts, thrusts and even arrows. Unriveted mail existed, but not in europe, so name should be changed to low quality mail or something.

There are also lots of achonological things like bascinets existing at early-modern germany or leather lamellar existing at that time at all. Leather armour on itself did not exist too, it is completelly modern armour. But again, this is fantasy, so lets not change it, people say. Id just like to see something more historically accurate next time, so there could be more immersion and suspenssion of disbelief.

[Alexander (Aterdux)]

Originally posted by Cole420:

Please Alexander, don't give up on the game and try to improve it anyway you can. It just makes your company look better which results in more people purchasing this game as well as other games you will release in the future.

We are working on it a bit in our spare time. Doing more unfortunately is not possible. We have to work on something that brings income.

[Asuzu]

Originally posted by Александр 47:

Alright, first thread i found about balance.

"been playing with the mystic, but considering restarting the game with knight. However my problem is that it seems like an upgraded nobleman or infantry is just better than the knight hero"

I kinda feel the same about knight. He is just slightly better version of your melee troops. Sure, you get few unique skills, but thats it.


If youre games developper, then please make heavy armour more realistic. It takes away too much initiative so it doesent feel better than other armour types. It doesent feel worse, it just feels different. It should feel better, not different, because heavy armour is a trait that not many troops have.

Yeah my experience as well - as a fighter, Knight hero is in every way worse than upgraded Knight line of Noble.
After you give him 2-handed weapon, he actually starts seeing LESS combat, simply because with his initiative going down the drain, he is always last to act.
My nobles are getting all the experience, while he is standing around with his cool shiny 2-handed polearm, not doing a thing.

He starts to be bearable with Enchantress around so she can buff him Initiative - so basically, he requires an Enchantress not to suck in the first place.
But hey, as soon as you buff him - 1st thing an AI warlock is doing is casting Madness on him, so back to being useless.

Since mounted combat is limited to map and not working in castle sieges, which matter the most - that is also another aspect of Knight being useless at what he does.

Overall, I believe heavy armor and heavy weapons giving insane penalties to Initiative and even melee attack (why?) are dragging him down ways too much and not giving anything.
You can never compare the loss of 5 melee/ranged defense to the loss of 5 attack power and 15 of you initiative.

[Erpy]

I know this is a massive semi-decade long bump, but having recently replayed the game and completed the main campaign with all three hero types, I can say that none of the three heroes are underpowered.

The Mystic starts the game very underpowered and because his skillset is based around support, he needs his army to carry him instead of the other way around. Unlike the Knight and Baroness, his equipment options are limited. You mostly want to give him an item with the power source perk so he regenerates SP, but other than that ordinary equipment suits him just fine. After you struggle your way through the first few levelups, his Necromancy skill becomes a gamechanger.

The ability to drop a spirit in the enemy's back ranks to delay and weaken them and then move that spirit to the front ranks to weaken them and waste their turns is a tactic that (aside from the rare case of an enemy army having a high-level priest to zap the ghostie) the game has no effective answer to. The later-level abilities to slow down enemies and make them more vulnerable to arrows, heal backliners and deliver AOE damage to enemies around frontliners make the Mystic the most versatile hero with a big toolkit that no hired help can replicate, but one who's still reliant on the rest of his army to do the actual killing.

The Baroness starts out okay, although until you reach Windfeld, she's hampered by the debuff that archers receive at night and she needs a good Acolyte buff to truly hurt stuff early on. The Feline Mirror you can pick up just before Windfeld allows her to fight at night (and obliterate werewolves and vampires), which is a welcome and much needed upgrade and in Threvor you can get Magic Arrows from either the swamp castle or from Daniel if you overtake Weasel's castle without him, which gives you the Magic Weapon trait, massively boosting your damage. Then finally, if the two units you brought from East Rotwald and the army of guard and hunter mercenaries from the local tavern are strong enough you can challenge the vampire fight in the ruins in Waldensee at night and pick up the ultimate bow which gives her the Penetrating Shot perk, which is guaranteed death for any backliner you snipe and pretty much a guaranteed wound for any frontliner.

I picked the Point Blank and Long Range level bonuses for her at first and then focussed on the Commander and Encourage perks afterwards. The Baroness, moreso than any other hero, is well-equipped to take advantage of the Encourage perk, which boosts the initiative of your entire army for each enemy you kill and can very quickly create a snowball effect. Just snipe the strongest backline unit you can one-shot and be adjacent to a priest and fellow archer(s) who can hopefully take out more backline units to keep the boosts going. The Baroness is very powerful at the end of the campaign, but is much more of a latebloomer than the other two heroes.

Then there's the Knight. The complaints about him in this thread are not exactly wrong. He is, aside from two minor perks, pretty much identical to a fully upgraded Nobleman Knight. Thing is: a fully upgraded Nobleman Knight is possibly the strongest unit you can have, so having a main hero that's identical to one is a good thing. Because raising a Young Nobleman unit all the way into a Knight unit takes a very, very long time and the Windfeld chapter is arguably the only chapter that's long enough to do this without excessive grinding, having a Knight at all times is useful. (also, you'll lose the recruited Noble Knight you raise in Windfeld at the end of the Threvor chapter) A Knight hero who focuses on the Horse Riding and Tournament Hero perks, which gives him mounted combat and the ramming attack perk, can already be double-killing enemy units before the Lahnstein chapter is over. While the Knight contributes the least to a 12-man fully upgraded army, the kind you have at the end of the Windfeld chapter, he contributes the most to the small army you'll have at the start of most chapters since he's much more capable of doing the heavy lifting while the other units are still weak.

The Knight gets some very good equipment options too over the course of the main campaign, especially around Windfeld. He might get lucky there and get a workhorse in that chapter already, which lets him use mounted combat in swamps and forests. There's a knight saddle which gives him an additional balance point. There's Gunther's armor, which gives him the Regeneration perk without the big HP debuff that the Black Necklaces has. There's Burkhard's 2-handed sword which has high attack power and the Magic Weapon perk to boost that damage even more. Then, in Threvor, you can feed the merchant to the vampire to get the Horror Helmet with the Terrifying perk, that debuffs the attack of any melee enemy that tries to hit you before they hit you. Since the other heroes cannot equip these items, you'll lose them after the Threvor chapter, only the Knight actually gets to keep them.

The Knight Hero serves two functions eventually. On the road, where most of the battles take place, he's a mounted terror whose low natural initiative stat is offset by his horse equipment and who can bulldoze two enemy units at the start of the fight to let the Encourage perk do its thing and give the rest of your army an opening to end the fight before it gets started. During sieges, he's the slow but extremely durable meatshield whom you place in the frontline spot near the strongest unit of the enemy army to soak up the frontline's hardest hits, whose Terrifying and Regeneration perks and Iron Health and Rage levelup bonuses allow him soak up hits and turn them into strength and deliver massive damage to up to three units when his turn rolls around.

So yeah, the Knight hero has his weaknesses, but also more than enough strengths to offset them.