Disciples 3: Renaissance - Tips and Tricks

[Chronoja]

I'm making this topic since it was suggested to me in another thread that it might be useful and since there is a relative lack of information out there regarding this game. I am not a master of the game by any means, I haven't even completed it yet with the Elven campaign still to go, but there's no harm in putting this up for people to share advice and tactics in what can be a rather unintuitive and unforgiving game

First things first, I will link to a great collection of info on the Kalypso official forums Here [web.archive.org] . On this site you will find links to other useful information such as descriptions of combat abilities or explanations of cover and crit.

edit: 04/10/2021 - original Kalypso forum link was dead, replaced it with link to Wayback Machine cached version which retained the old information.

[Chronoja]

1) The hero of the campaign is the most important unit you have. So Lambert, Harhuus and Arion for the Empire, Legions and Elves respectively. You will game over instantly if the party this unit is in is completely wiped out, but the unit themselves can die so long as at least 1 other unit survives the battle, through victory or retreat, and from there you can set about resurrecting them using potions or at a town/capital provided you have built your temple.

The unit is the most important for 2 reasons. 1: as mentioned before, if their party dies you game over. 2: They are the only unit, not party, but individual unit, that will progress to the next Act in the campaign with all the benefits they earned in the previous Act. So all the experience, runes, equipment in their inventory get transferred to the next mission. (I don't think potions get carried across)

2) Hero units have a level cap that increases by 5 on each subsequent Act. So on Act 1 of a campaign your hero can reach level 5 before they cease to level. On Act 2, they can reach level 10 before they stop gaining experience, all the way up to the level cap of 30 at Act 6 in the campaign. What this means is that you want to have your hero unit battle, or otherwise gain as much experience as you can before ending the current act you are on, otherwise you are going into the next act unprepared.

If you go into Act 2 at level 4 for example, you can still level up to 10, it will just take a bit more time/effort. This is rather important though, consider the Act 6 of the Legions campaign will start you with just your Hero party with a single unit to aid you, so you really do want to keep your hero maxed out on levels.

Ways to achieve this are as follows. Battle when you can. Your hero party needs to be the strongest party sweeping the map of all enemies while it can.

It will usually come to the point in an Act where you've basically explored everything and nothing remains except ruins etc. I do not recommend doing dungeons since the experience gain from them tends to be horrendous given that they only respawn every 10 turns. If there is a training camp on the map this is your best bet since they will train any unit with a direct conversion of 1 gold: 1 experience point, but they will only accept the gold when you have the amount to level up. So for example, if my hero is level 4, and needed 1000 experience to level up, I would need 1000+ gold before the trainer fulfilled my demand. If you are at the point you've cleared most of the map you will likely by this point have control of most resource nodes so there is no harm in literally wasting turn after turn to accrue gold just to hit the level cap before you proceed.

On any map where there is no trainer what I have found useful is this. Once you have explored most of the map and control it, head towards the enemy capital. Typically there is a resource node nearby. When the enemy is no longer under the fog of war they tend to behave in very idiotic ways and every turn they will send out a single, weak party which will head directly to the resource node and attempt to capture it. Do not capture the node yourself since it means the enemy will waste it's turn battling your node guardian. What you want to happen is this. The enemy will head out of its base, run towards the free node, they will capture it then immediately attack you after doing so. You should have a party capable of handling the weak party by this stage, so at this point the enemy is simply free experience. Once the enemy is dead, on your turn, defeat the node guardian, which is just more free experience, but do not recapture the node. Heal up using a spell, or better, every party you defeat drops a 400 hp potion and a 5% resurrection potion so you can simply stock up on items by doing this. Ending your turn and the A.I. will simply repeat this pattern ad infinitum. The experience gain is slower than a trainer but much more reliable than using ruins.

[Chronoja]

3) When your hero or leader units level up do not forget to assign their attributes and tiles. When your hero/leaders level up they gain 3 attribute points which can be assigned to their primary stats, so endurance, strength etc. They also gain 2 skill points for their talent trees. Both of these are immensely important.

I can only speak from my own experience but in order of importance for a hero you want to prioritise Endurance first, then dexterity, then strength or agility. The reason behind it is this. All the heros are melee units so they will always be up close and personal in combat, by the latter acts of a campaign your hero will effectively be the tank, drawing aggro and getting surrounded by enemy units, so it is imperitive that at all levels you invest some points into your endurance to raise your maximum health. Dexterity comes in useful since it actively protects against you getting critted. Crits in this game are absolutely devastating due to the fact that they completely negate the defensive bonus and deal upwards of 2.5x normal damage. If you get crit a lot you will die fast. After that strength and agility will allow you do both do more damage and crit more often which helps end battles faster. I personally have not found any real reason to invest points into intellect unless we are specifically dealing with the mage leader units. All this said, don't forget to account for the stats given to you buy armour and upgrades to said armour, so you may get new armour that gives you +10 to dexterity meaning you might want to distribute some points elsewhere instead.

When it comes to the talent trees, 2 per level is not a lot to work with. You can gain extra skill points by finding shrines through act exploration and I highly recommend that you do this since skill points are invaluable to miss. Each leaders and heroes talent tree is unique and you should spend some time looking over them and planning out how you will reach the tiles you desire ahead of time. The layouts are unique but the tile types are not except for unique skills which are often found at the furthest reaches of the trees, for example, Harhuus can access skills like "Deathblow" and "Create Wall" whereas Lambert can "Revive ally".

On these trees the leadership tiles are your highest priority at all times. Leadership tiles increase your party capacity by 1 allowing you add an additional unit to your party. Each board has 4 leadership tiles meaning you can reach a maximum party size of 7, and it goes without saying how important it is to have an additional 4 units dealing damage, healing or fixing any weakness your party might have. After that however the priority is a matter of preference but armour, resistances to common elements such as fire and extra attributes like +2 Endurance are all pretty good.

4) Party Levelling. Normal units do not level like heroes/leaders, so when they level up they simply gain a set increase in stats without any input. The difference of course is that, provided you have built the upgrades in your capital, when a unit levels up they will evolve to the next stage in their tree, becoming a much stronger unit altogether, possibly with very different abilities and statistics.. It's always good practice to keep an eye on your units experience levels and have the relavent upgrade building built so that they evolve the moment they level up. If you don't have the upgrade building built by the time they level up it's not a big problem, the unit will simply evolve at the end of the first combat after the upgrade is built. Since you can only build 1 upgrade per turn it's all a matter of balancing your money and chosing when and what to upgrade at the right time.

Some of the unit evolutions can be very drastic and very important so it is worth analysing what unit evolutions do what since alternate branches of the tech trees are blocked off upon purchase of anothers. Anyone who's played Disciples before is well accustom to this but it can be fairly unforgiving if you select an upgrade path for a unit that doesn't support your party correctly.

5) Dealing with off map attacks. Off map attacks are something that never really gets explained in the game and something that was never really a part of the series so most people never expect them. What they are is an unannounced enemy party will appear from an area of the map beyond where the player can go themselves, and often from a direction where enemies are not expected to come from, so for example, on Empire Act 1, elven parties will attack from the northern roads near the capital whereas the elven capital is in the south.
The first defense against these attacks is simply in knowing that they can and will occur since the biggest advantage they have is the element of surprise. If you over exert yourself in a battle and wind up with relatively low health, there is nothing as frustrating as seeing an off map attack come in and kill you outright while you are weak. As I've mentioned before the balancing in this game seems backwards since the early Acts in a campaign are often the hardest due to a combination of a low party size, low stats, lack of good equipment / runes and access to only lower level magics (through a lack of mana types) and the off map attack add to this difficulty.

A few things you can do though.

Firstly, node guardians. Most enemies, off map or not, if they do not seek out one of your roaming parties, will beeline towards a guardian and attempt to capture it. This gives you multiple advantages.

1) Information. You now know where an enemy party is, and with them attacking a guardian they are likely to have spent all their move points for the day.
2) Node guardians level up over time by themselves, gaining a set about of experience per turn. Higher level node guardians are often quite capable of defeating these parties by themselves rendering the attack completely moot. If the node is capable of defeating the party it simply levels faster by gaining the experience and thus ends up defending itself better over time. If a node guardian cannot defend itself adequately, consider adding units to it's party. A node guardian + 3 Legion fiends form quite possibly once of the most defensive lines in the legion campaign. Since off map attacks often happen along the same paths repeatedly, you don't have to waste that many units once you figure out which routes and nodes are "hotspots" for off map attacks.

Secondly, This is where secondary parties are the most useful. Since your main heroes party will often be exploring the fringe areas of the maps, it is going to be very difficult to police everywhere against these aggressors. If you have captured a city nearby or even from the capital, create a new party and station them somewhere that might be useful. Note that new leaders will have a leadership of 3 and all new units will be low level so they are always going to be significantly weak against some high level parties so this is where you need to apply the strategy of letting them attack a node guardian first to soften them up before heading in later to clean up and recapture the node. Otherwise you may want to consider casting an overworld spell on them to soften them up before hand, buff yourself or whatever to tip the balance in your favour. This can be a bit repetative but it's a predictable and reliabe method.

[Chronoja]

6) Spells. Unlike previous disciples games you can only cast 1 spell per turn, unless you are using the Mage Lord leadership who can cast 2 spells per turn. This is extremely limited so you need to put the utmost thought into when to cast and what to cast. I personally suggest researching any of the healing spells as soon as possible simply because you never know when you might get ambushed by an off map attack after a tough battle. After that, damage spells are useful to soften enemy parties up before you engage them, and if the damage is high enough you might just outright kill them without resorting to combat. The one thing to take note of though before casting an overworld spell is the enemies magical resistance against the spell damage type. For example, many of the Legions spells are Fire elemental damage and casting on a Green Dragon will effectively do nothing since their Fire Resistance is stupidly high. In situations like that it makes more sense to research buffs to yourself, such as the +30/40 Endurance or +20% Magic resistance spells so that you can survive longer in combat against them.

You may find yourself at times in a sticky situation where you need to research a skill before casting it. In situations like this make sure you have enough mana to both research and cast in the same turn. THe problem is not really ever knowing exactly how much the casting mana cost is, but you will learn this as you research spells through gameplay. If you don't have enough to research a level 2 healing spell and cast it, you might have enough for a level 1 healing spell to cast and then suppliment with a healing potion or something if you know for sure you are going to get attacked next turn for example. As a rule though always try to keep a mana reserve and research important spells ahead of time. All this requires you build your Mage Tower of course so it should be a high priority once you start taking mana nodes.

7) Combat. The hex grid in D3 is pretty typical of a lot of modern day turn based rpgs but there's things that make it a bit annoying, such as the way crits work on agility and dexterity meaning some units will just get crit all the time regardless of what you do. This aside though a few typical practices, like.....running your hero or tanky melee units up front to draw attention for a start. Never be afraid to withdraw a unit if it starts losing too much health, since most enemy units will just attack whatever unit they are closest to meaning you can get your wounded unit out of danger. If you can, funnel enemies into places where only 1 or 2 of them can attack at a time, this reduces the your unit has to take per turn or even simply makes enemies take the long way around the battlefield. Have your ranged focus down any mages/ranged units if they pose a direct threat to your own healers or mages. Do not underestimate the power of skills, skills such as the succubus's polymorph or the incubus's petrify. Even harhuus gains the ability to paralyse an enemy and it can be used at range, this alone may stop a ranged unit killing a mage in the first volley.

The limitations of the A.I. for whatever reason they will nearly always attack a summoned creature above everything else. For mid level node guardians this makes them nearly invulnerable since you can spend a couple of turns summoning units to the corners of the battlefield and the enemy will spend it's time running around trying to kill them while you leisurely tear them up. It's not a foolproof plan but it is fairly reliable. You can do the same thing with runes, if you manage to gain a summoning rune, if you summon a creature the enemy will often target allowing you to heal up. withdraw or retreat any particularly important units.

Do not underestimate the power of runes either. I consider most of the damage over time ones to be pretty useless, but healing runes, revive runes, summon runes and high damage runes can give you the boost you need to finish a battle faster and with less problems you might otherwise have faced and without the overworld mana cost.

8) Things to do

If you've explored most of the map and have found a bunch of items, don't sell them. Keep them. Items like Sky Topaz or Dragon skin, even rings, necklaces etc. They all sell highly to a vendor, but what good is the money at the end of a map where you control practically everything. If you keep the items, sell them on the next map and boost your early game economy so you can buy more units / upgrades faster. I tend keep 1 of every type of equipment so 1 Air resistance ring, 1 Death resistance ring etc and sell the duplicates at the start of any map where I need an injection of cash.

Explore tombs in the mid game to stock up on items like runes.

Plan your route on the overworld. Examine all the carts etc for items. If you battle near a fountain you can aim to heal up before or afterwards if possible saving you money or a spell. Many routes are designed iwth multiple wells and milestones that give you +5, 7 or 10 movement points back. If you use these right a journey that might have taken multiple days can be done in 1 or 2. Getting half way across the map in a fraction of the turns can be huge.

If you have a free space in your party and another basic unit is a bit superfluous, consider finding a mercenary camp if one exists on the map. Hiring an "exotic" unit might just provide some benefits that the units in your race do not account for. In my Empire campaign I found it interesting to purchase a Night Dancer Elf to round out my ranged offensive capabilites. It's not necessary but it can be fun to have something like a Troll lead your melee charge etc.

9) Things to generally not do.

Don't buy a guild. The only thing a guild lets you do is purchase a thief leader and unlikely Disciples 1 and 2, thieves have none of the useful abilties they once did. The guild is effectively a useless building upgrade.

Don't waste your only spell at the start of the turn unless you absolutely need it.


This post has been long enough and maybe the advice isn't even that good to those who are more experienced, but to that end I suggest that others share their own advice and if this helps anyone, all the better.

[[VN] Michael Doan]

tricks from my own empires campaign hard difficulties:

1. You should have 1 more healer because Ionel will ALWAYS be overshadowed by tier 2 healer or higher I personally prefered cleric branch, she may has more healing power in statistic but she has lower health and low agility, the important stats for healer

2. at campaign 2 3 or so you will have access to wide range of permanent stat increase potions, armor for Lambert, agi for Ionel

3. Mage: if you want an easy way to beat AI even on hard difficulties, go with summoning mage, and summon air elements near their ranks, enemies melee units will always come after them and you can do whatever you want

4. DON"T waste your time level up a different hero, this campaign isn't that hard, but if you want, put a hero with your choice and fill him up with all titans and camp near enemies citadel, they attack from their citadel every turn but with only level 1 creatures, your titans should make a short work of them

Tricks for legion campaign on hard:

1. Melee: you want cost efficient, go for fiend, you lack money, sell all your unused artifacts the first time you controled a town (this is a global trick, keep your unused artifact and sell them in later campaigns to get a better financial start) and poured money into fiends. You want really easy-to-die-but-very-powerful units then go for bezecker upgrade. My personal favorite tactics are eagle eye these guys and send them into the killing, they crit a lot when buffed with eagle eye, or you can enrage them and send them to the fray, but they will miss alot when in rage mode, that's your preference

2. Mage: If you want to breeze through this campaign, go for witch parts. They can transform enemies into little imp, at succubus level, that spell become AOE. It meaned you're afraid to fight a full stack of elven night dancer with stupid high dex and agi ? IMPIFY them :)). Incubus is nice too because their spell can't be resist, that mean you can petrify enemy capital guardian too. But when you go for this unit, you should consider rely on crit build for harhuus, because enemies armor and their earth resistance will become higher when petrified. if you want your army will crit a lot, go for eagle eye branch, this is my personal favorite branch, eagle eye an infernal knight and you get yourself a Terminator ^^

3. Spells: if you think a battle is too hard for you to fight, use the + endurance spell on your unit, now you should see the difference, this spell last really long (2 turns I think). A 2000 health infernal knight are far more different than a 700 health infernal knights, you can tank AND mow down enemy at a same time

4. Garoyle: when you're at low level, you should consider, bring garoyle higher, unlike many range units from other races, this legion unit is suitable for tanking too

5. Hero: you should consider put another hero in motion from campaign 1, mainly because later, you will be attacked alot and from different off maps locations, your harhuus can't be everywhere at once, for easy level up practice for your new hero, fill him up with fiends and bring them near enemies capital, this new hero WILL need at least 4 leaderships for him to be effective at later campaigns missions, always fill him with fiend, use endurance spell on them, and then you have it, I killed a off map unit with 5 tier 4 units and a hero with this strategy. The main reason for this hero is just to hold the line and protect your territory for harhuus to freely move everywhere he wants

Tricks for alliance campaign on hard :

1. only 4 words: LOWER THE FREAKING DIFFICULTIES

2. another 4 words: DON'T PLAY GULD MASTER

[jktz122]

thank you for youe advice

[Chronoja]

I've noticed a rather crippling A.I bug which makes defeating node guardians and destroying the enemy capitals ludicrously easy. I've done this 3 times now, not intentionally so I don't know the specifics of it just yet but what happens is this

I have attacked one of these targets and the upon realising that some units aren't going to survive much longer I started retreating retreating them. When a few of my units have left the battlefield the enemy just stops attacking leaving you free and completely unopposed to destroy them at your leisure. WHen the enemy's attack turn comes around they simply do nothing and get put back to the end of the queue.

So the short of it, retreat units leaving only 1 or 2 on the field and the guardian just stops attacking. If you want to try this make sure you save just incase.

[Nax_o]

Have not tried the trick above but regarding capitals...

1) Just 'siege' them if you can't kill the guardian. Unless objectives specificaly demand that you take the capital then just leave it be. Put extra units on a nearby guardian to bolster it or keep it untapped to lure enemies into going there and kill them. . I think i used 2 groups of weakling heroes to 'besiege' a capitol somewhere in the mid of the empire campaign. Put them on a nearby choke point. I used 2 more weakling heroes to hold of a choke point in the middle of the map elsewhere just in case some roving parties materialized. Meanwhile Lambert roamed the map elsewhere leveling up and gonig for the end-objective.

2) Offensive spell of armor spell before a tought fight? if unsure or you think there is a risk of getting whacked next turn by a surprise roving enemy party then go for the armor spell. +40% armor just before a tought fight + having armor when you end the turn really helps against off screen attacks. Offensive spells only help the original target but doesn't help at all when outsiders interfere afterwards. Also just before going into objectives i tend to put on a +40% armor spell just incase there are multiple story line fights coming up. It's better to be a bit paranoid than dead. Also dont frown on those +xx% magical resistance spells. They have also been of great help against hordes of fire wielding Legion spellcasters or servants of Mortis in late Empire missions.

3) Dont forget the reveal map spell. This is an end game spell but i always cast it when i dominate the map. shows me what i have missed. And usualy i do miss something important. Better armor for Lambers really helps or some exotic ward/talisman.

[Nax_o]

4) Runes. Not that usefull mid to late game but some stick out: Summons, good early to mid game or if you cant summon at all with your current units. AI attacks summons so summoning air elementals and putting them on defense was a corner tactic for my Empire campaign.
Healing runes and constant damage runes are pretty good. Use them by a character that can't influence much atm. i.e. if party is healed, dont waste turn by healing with inoel/healer. instead use a item/rune.

Also remember to sell weaker versions of runes when you start to have a big collection of them.

Keep atleast one enemy armor degrading rune. very useful when you encounter dragons or similar heavily armored 'no weaknesses' type of enemies.

[Chronoja]

A few tips I have after completing the elven campaign

1: The Life Water spells (level 1: 200 earth mana to research and 100 earth to cast) and (level 4: 800 earth mana to research and 400 to cast) are absolutely essential. They last multiple turns and are so powerful they almost completely negate the need to use a healing unit. If you feel more comfortable with a healer you can still use one but regardless, attempt to have at the Level 1 version of Life Water on your main party at all times, Level 4 if possible

2: When you get to act IV, V and VII there are mercenary camps that sell a variety of units. Hire a Black Naga as soon as possible simply because they are one of the most OP units in the game and will make your life so much easier. A black naga, if you haven't faced them yet, are mage units that have an area attack which deals damage twice per attack. The fact that this attack is water based and many typical enemies lack a high water resistance means that a single attack in a group of enemies can cripple them.

2 other things make the black naga very powerful, a high inititive meaning that they will nearly always be the first unit to attack, and their skill "Petrify which is an area effect paralyse skill. This is brutal to most enemies, a unit able to attack first in almost every encounter and able to neutralise up to 7 units directly from the start of battle. Petrify lasts for 3 turns, is NOT counted as a mind based attack so is not resisted like many other skills meaning you can use it on bosses etc and it does not seem to have a usage limit, not that you really need one. The only drawback of this skill is that it gives the enemy higher defenses making it harder to kill them, but your units by act IV, V and VII should be more than capable of punching through this.

These mercenary camps also sell Holy Warriors (I can't remember their name). It may just be a personal thing but I preferred having one of these instead of a standard elven melee unit, or completely forgoing melee units altogether and filling the party with archers and mages + 1 naga and letting Arion do all the tanking.

3: Arion's summoning skill, "Summon Unicorn" can be very, very useful. If you decide to go the route I have suggested where you stack mainly archers and mages and use the naga to paralyse the enemy at the start of battle then you shouldn't have a problem. The unicorn skill comes in when you can't paralyse everyone and need that extra melee unit to guard whatever side of the field is undefended. Otherwise you can just summon a ton of Unicorns to maximize your damage output since their attack power (200) is just really good.

Can't think of much else at the moment but I will add to this if I think of anything.

[Lampros]

Amazing thread - thanks!

[Lampros]

Originally posted by Chronoja:

First things first, I will link to a great collection of info on the Kalypso official forums Here [forum.kalypsomedia.com] . On this site you will find links to other useful information such as descriptions of combat abilities or explanations of cover and crit.

By the way, this link takes me to the general Kalypso site and not much else. I recall there used to be quite an active Kalypso-hosted D3 forum. Is that no longer around?

[Chronoja]

Originally posted by Lampros:

Originally posted by Chronoja:

First things first, I will link to a great collection of info on the Kalypso official forums Here [forum.kalypsomedia.com] . On this site you will find links to other useful information such as descriptions of combat abilities or explanations of cover and crit.

By the way, this link takes me to the general Kalypso site and not much else. I recall there used to be quite an active Kalypso-hosted D3 forum. Is that no longer around?

Yeah the old forums were taken down it seems. Here it is via the Wayback Machine[web.archive.org] seems like it retained most of the info it had.

I'll update the link in the original post. Thanks for pointing out that it no longer worked.

[Lampros]

Originally posted by Chronoja:

Originally posted by Lampros:

By the way, this link takes me to the general Kalypso site and not much else. I recall there used to be quite an active Kalypso-hosted D3 forum. Is that no longer around?

Yeah the old forums were taken down it seems. Here it is via the Wayback Machine[web.archive.org] seems like it retained most of the info it had.

I'll update the link in the original post. Thanks for pointing out that it no longer worked.

Awesome - thank you so much!

[Lampros]

Originally posted by VN Michael Doan:

2. at campaign 2 3 or so you will have access to wide range of permanent stat increase potions, armor for Lambert, agi for Ionel

Yet to find this shop, and I am middle of the 3rd map. So if this shop is on the 2nd map, I am screwed.