How do you win the Great Temple battle?

[GAME GOD FLUENT]

I take it you have to do this right away with the starting party, but how do you win that tough fight? I'm trying both Life and Air and have lost each time. Do I just target the other leader or try and kill all enemies?

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

Like you said, you want to try to liberate the Great Temple right away or almost right away, although it may be worthwhile to clear out the Level 1 buildings right nearby to gain some experience for your party.

Beyond that, it's often a good idea to hire a couple of groups of mercenaries to help you. They're expensive long-term, but you can just dismiss them after the fight to avoid that cost, and they'll make the fight much easier. (For instance, if you're playing as Life, I'd go for a couple of archer companies since Life's archers are much stronger than the barracks units.)

You need to kill all the enemies to liberate the Temple, so if somebody in particular is doing the most damage to you, focus on them, but otherwise try to kill as many enemies as quickly as possible.

[GAME GOD FLUENT]

Originally posted by Eauxps I. Fourgott:

Like you said, you want to try to liberate the Great Temple right away or almost right away, although it may be worthwhile to clear out the Level 1 buildings right nearby to gain some experience for your party.

Beyond that, it's often a good idea to hire a couple of groups of mercenaries to help you. They're expensive long-term, but you can just dismiss them after the fight to avoid that cost, and they'll make the fight much easier. (For instance, if you're playing as Life, I'd go for a couple of archer companies since Life's archers are much stronger than the barracks units.)

You need to kill all the enemies to liberate the Temple, so if somebody in particular is doing the most damage to you, focus on them, but otherwise try to kill as many enemies as quickly as possible.

Can I take the mercenaries into that battle with me? If so, how? I thought one Champion can only have 3 units. Do you wear them down with the mercenaries first and then bring in your Champion next turn? I didn't know you could recruit or hire mercenaries at the start before winning the Temple battle.

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

You can actually have up to 9 regular units and 3 champions in one group - if you make the mercenaries go to the same spot as your other party, they should join up to make one big party. The mercenaries won't have a champion in that spot, but that's fine.

[GreyHuntr]

You can actually only hire mercenaries before you liberate the Great Temple. Training troops costs followers. You get followers every 7 days, based on your fame score. So as long as you liberate the temple by turn 6 you still get the full benefit.

Mercenaries are very cheap to hire, but have expensive maintenance. So you only want to have them for 1 or 2 turns. Just long enough to help with a tough battle or defend against an invasion.

[GAME GOD FLUENT]

Thanks fellas. I will add some mercenaries to my group and see what happens.

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

Originally posted by GreyHuntr:

You can actually only hire mercenaries before you liberate the Great Temple.

This is correct, but potentially confusing; What Grey is saying here is that hiring mercenaries is the only way to get troops before liberating the temple, not that you can't hire mercenaries after liberating it.

[Jimmy Hunter]

Originally posted by Fluent:

Thanks fellas. I will add some mercenaries to my group and see what happens.

You won't need any of them, and you also won't be able to afford the upkeep since they require 4-5 gold a turn per Merc.

Run around to the level 1/2/3 buildings in the area and do some fighting/leveling. Once you get your troops up to level 3/4, and get your lord up to level 5/6, you'll easily be able to roll the Great Temple on Easy and Normal. Doing some fighting will also help you learn the ins and outs of how each unit/lord functions which will make controlling them much easier when it comes time to handle the GT.

Hard has the Great Temple simulating a level 5-6 encounter depending on what Lord/Element you choose. That can be handled by your units being level 4/5, and your lord being level 6/7.

[GAME GOD FLUENT]

Alright, thanks, I'll do that. Appreciate the help!

[Gilmoy]

0. On turn 1, split off your 1 scout unit (every faith has one; it usually has high speed and lousy combat stats). Have it explore separately from your main group, for extra eyes. Your goal is to ping (dummy-attack, promptly cancel) every building you can reach over the first 4-6 turns, and build up a map of their relative strengths. You want to use your dog or equivalent for this, because it's not a fighter.

1. Then for the first ~5 turns, your starting (weak) army should beeline, with maximal efficiency, on a shortest-path tour through exactly those buildings you can reliably capture. That means L1 encounters for the first 2-3 fights, and maybe thereafter an L2 or L3 if nothing else is in reach. Ideally, your dog maps out 5-8 buildings around your town, and you can plan a tour that hits them all in ascending order of difficulty. You need some +income and XP before you go for your Great Temple.

You don't want to use your main group for this, because it's slow, and the least efficient thing it can do early on is to meander blindly, not knowing where the good targets are.

Take zero casualties while you do all this :) The early game is hard enough, and that's one of the ways to lose.

2. You'll need some practice to judge when you're ready, but generally, after you've leveled up to L2 (or higher?) and captured a couple of +income buildings (and healed most of the damage), maybe around turn 15-20, you're as ready as you can get. Calculate when you'll go bankrupt from upkeep (around turn 30?), and that's your time limit. It's less than that, though, because you need to pay for at least 1 turn of mercenary upkeep.

When ready, go hire mercenaries. You'll need the extra HP and firepower. I play as Order, and mercenary Horsemen can't walk all the way up the hill to the Temple in 1 turn, so you're stuck paying for (at least) 1 turn of upkeep. Hire as few as you can get away with. I generally hire 2 Horsemen 1 Crossbowman, but I've won with fewer, or different mixes.

3. You cleverly plan for all of your original troops to survive the Great Temple fight, and for all of your mercenaries to (heroically) die during the fight. That solves your upkeep problem :)

4. The actual fight takes some practice. Generally, throughout LoMSE, you will be fighting "up", where your side is outnumbered and outgunned, so tactics learned here will scale up throughout. You don't have your ideal troop mix this early, so it's back to the basics.

- The canonical force multiplier is to have strong melee units stand in front and Parry, while your ranged concentrate firepower for kills.

- With that in mind, set up carefully. A compact formation helps. You may need to race to seize a defensive position in the hallways.

- Pause as often as needed, so that you can issue orders all over the battlefield.

- Great Temple fights (and others battles later) often have a few heavy hitters (like Trolls) + a lot of chaff (like Goblin archers). Your high-melee units with Parry can stonewall one Troll. (Actually, it can't quite, but not Parrying is worse.) Horsemen are good for blocking hallways because they're long and wide :) You can't ever let a Troll-class threat break through your line and slaughter your weak ranged units.

- Enemy ranged units are annoying, and as dangerous as yours are. Sometimes you can end-run them with one fast melee troop and kill them from the sides. If all else fails, just duel them with your ranged, and (over)allocate enough shots on them to have a high % of killing them outright. Pause and retarget all ranged en masse while your arrows/bolts are still in flight, to save time.

- Mostly, though, you want your ranged to concentrate firepower on the biggest threats first, and wipe them out ASAP.

- If you're a Mage, you have a very limited palette of spells this early. Direct damage sucks (least damage dealt for mana spent). Enchantments that pump up a friendly unit are the most efficient use of mana in the long run. Even a small +1 Melee on a Footman might pay you back 40 times over if he swings 40 times in 1 fight.

- Finally, monster AI is non-deterministic, and monsters can take different walking paths to reach you. If you're lucky, you can drag them around and trick some strong units into walking the long way around. More generally, monsters run at different speed, and they're stupid about it, so over a large enough battlefield, they'll sort themselves by speed. Then you get multiple waves of different subsets of monsters, and you can sometimes grind them down piecemeal.

So, basically, try to set up your formation so that, when the monsters crash into your meat wall, you're ideally prepared, with strong melee Parrying up front, and ranged behind them, so that their frontline are in your range, but their ranged can't shoot your ranged. (Then you both tear apart each others' goons, so you do want to go hunt down their ranged as soon as you can spare anybody.)

5. Finally, after you've crushed the enemy so efficiently that all of your mercs are still alive, leave one Goblin archer or similar as last enemy standing. (N.B. it must be ranged, so that it doesn't die from your counterattacks.) Select one merc at a time, walk it into range, and let it stand there until it dies. Repeat until you've (ahem) maximally dismissed all of your mercs. Then kill that last ranged guy, and you win.

And then ... you have liberated your Great Temple, and your merc upkeep is 0! Nod, walk down the hill, heal (your upkeep clock is no longer a problem). Hire some real followers, get some magical research started. And keep using your dog to ping more buildings.

~~~~~~~~

Much, much later, when you're seriously in the mood to ping those ghastly L11 towers (N.B. the Balkoth fight to win the game is easier than an L11 fight, so you might never actually do an L11), you can even do this completely "fairly", without savescumming. Just hire a new dog (or your scout follower), run it into the L11 tower, pause and peruse the enemy's entire order of battle. Then run for the exit, and try to retreat :) Sometimes they can't one-shot your dog with spells, and he can go ping another tower. If he dies, poor hound, go hire another one. Anyways, now you know exactly what's in that fight, and you can customize a group to maximally nerf it.

If it has two Sorceresses with Firestorm, you could just hire about four Crossbowmen as bait, walk in like you're a threat, they'll nuke their entire side for you, and then you follow up with your real combat group. It's a pity to lose all that XP, tho

[Gilmoy]

On a lark, I launched LoM:SE for the first time in 1.5 years, and freed my Great Temple :)
I had to re-learn many small details.

1. Order Mage, Hard. Wow, on Hard you don't start with your thief creature! Order starts only with the hero, a Footmen, and a Crossbowmen, no Dog. So ... on turn 1, walk directly to(ward) your Thieves' Guild, and buy a dog. Dummy-attack every building along the way, accept the attack if it's Level 1. I bought a dog on turn 3, and thereafter used it as above.

A thief creature has no Mercenary version, so you buy the creature version even before you free your Great Temple. Ironically, it's your thief creature's upkeep that drives your starting gold income negative. In a Hard game without a thief creature, you're actually at 0 upkeep in all 3 resources, so there is no clock: you "could" play forever like that, and slowly hoard resources and XP.

2. By map RNG, I had an L2 Brewery (+2 Ale) and L2 Gold Mine (+2 Gold) near my spawn point, connected by L1 Outposts. Capturing those gave me mild positive income, even with one Dog in play. So I had no clock, and could have played dozens of turns. But there's a secondary clock to consider, namely that the other faiths' heros are walking around and doing things, and so you do want to join them soon. In particular, faiths can dislike each other and kill each others' heroes (where neither side is Death! -- Balkoth just laughs), which leaves foreign Great Temples fallow for the taking. Don't dilly-dally too long.

3. With very little clock pressure, I leisurely rested to heal, as needed. By turn 20, I won 4x L1 Outposts, then my L2 Gold Mine and L2 Brewery, then an L2 Estate, both floors. This leveled me up to L4 Mage Lord with 8 mana (that 8th point is very useful), L3 Footmen, and L2 Crossbowmen. I suppose I could have taken even more time and attacked a couple of L3 Outposts, and maybe earned +1 level, but I thought I was actually behind schedule by now. (On Normal, I think I go for my Great Temple around turn 12-15, because my Dog's upkeep forces me to act.)

4. Tactical combat basics:

- Ctrl-click to single-select exactly 1 guy (out of 3), to give precise orders. You can (and should) send the 3 Footmen in 1 group on 3 separate missions. For example, first guy to walk into range of enemy melee is set to Parry, 2nd guy attacks a preoccupied enemy's turned back, 3rd guy walks past the fray and goes directly for the archers.

- At start of fight, while still paused, set up your {1, 2, ..., 9 } hotkey groups. Select any subset of minions, and press Ctrl-{1,2,3, ..., 9} to assign them to the {1, 2, ..., 9} hotkey. You could have 1 hero, plus this Crossbow, that Knight, and your Dog be group #6, or similar. By default, your entire army is in group #1. You can separate them out by each 3-man group and hero. More subtly, you can regroup them by roles you want them to have, or because you want them to all move together (or stand still together). And you can reassign groups at any time, so if you're deep in a fight and Knight 1b and Footman 2a are side-by-side and momentarily free, you can mini-group them together and send them on the same task.

- Any minion can Defend any 1 other minion. While paused, Ctrl-click minion to select, click Defend (the shield icon), click another friendly minion. The defending minion will (move to and) stay close to the client minion, like a bodyguard, and will move with it.

- As a special case, a minion can Defend itself, which sets it to Parry. When it parries, it no longer attacks, but its Defense goes up by 1/2 of its Attack. So an L3 Footman with Attack 12 Defense 7 becomes Defense 7+6 = 13, which can make it virtually impervious to an L2 Troll with Attack 11: it could block 30 swings and live, as long as nobody else is shooting at it or hitting it from behind.

Note that melee attacks from behind, and ranged attacks, bypass some (or all?) of Defense, so you want to hit enemies in the back, and you don't want them to do it to you.

- If you start with a Mage hero, you actually have four spells at start of game. Some spells are travel-only, on the world map. Within tactical combats, you may have only 2 spell slots, but 3-6 spells to fit into them. At any time, (pause) and right-click on a spell, and it'll show you the menu of all spells for that spell slot. Left-click to load a spell into the spell slot (which closes the menu). Then left-click on that slot to cast the spell.

- AI minions have a bit of target-fixation. Melee units tend to dogpile 1 of your guys, while ignoring 2-4 of your other guys in melee range. Pay close attention to that, and set that 1 targeted guy to Parry, while all of your other guys Attack. Then you get the best-possible result that your ignored guys land hits for free, while your Parry guy(s) greatly extend their own lifespans. Be alert for sudden AI targeting changes, which sometimes happen right after a monster dies.

In particularly, be wary of leaving too many guys on Parry for too long. If no monster is beating on them, they'll just stand there and do nothing, even if there are targets in range, and they won't move to chase new targets.

- Most humanoid followers are a group-of-3 figurines at full health, and each 1 figurine has 1/3 of the total HP. For any multi-unit follower, it suffices to keep any 1 figurine alive (and you either win the fight, or the unit escapes successfully). Then you keep the follower's XP in play, and it can eventually heal back to 3 figurines at full health. A typical trick is to send all 3 figurines into battle, but as soon as any 1 of them is near death (2-4 of 15 HP left, or so), single-select it and order it to walk into your backfield. (You can re-assign it into your Mage hero's hotkey group, and order it to Defend your hero, and it'll take itself out of the fight to do that.) While that injured figurine lives, the follower (of which it's a part) cannot be eliminated, even if the other two figurines die. So let them fight and sell their lives dear. It's a great triumph to end a hard fight with about four of these last-man-standing guys, keeping 4 followers alive, with 6 HP total between them :) As long as you win the fight, of course.

This obviously doesn't apply to single-figurine followers, like most thief/mage creatures.

5. (The Great Temple fight) On turn 23, I exhausted nearly all MP reaching my Warrior camp, hired L1 mercenaries (2 Knights, 1 Footmen), and learned that it takes 2 turns for them to walk to my Great Temple. I probably should have just passed the rest of that turn, hired them at the start of turn 24, and used two full turns' worth of walking to get there. So I (over?)paid for 2 turns of upkeep, when I probably could have done it in 1.

On turn 25, I attack my Great Temple. It had:
- L4 Death Assassin (strong but short 12/6 ranged, 15 hp)
- 3L2 Troll (11/8 attack/defense, 21 hp), 3L3 Zombie (10/5, 22 hp), 3L3 Skeleton (9/4, 10 hp)
- 3L3 Dark Javelins (12/9 ranged, 14 hp), 3L1 Goblin Archers (6/10 ranged, 10 hp)

I had time to set up decently (which means walking into place):
#2 = L1 (merc) Footmen: roughly 2 o'clock position from the top left corner
#1 = L3 (real) Footmen: roughly 1 o'clock
#5 = L2 Crossbowmen: just left of #1, flush against the wall
#6 = L4 Mage Lord, left of #5
#3 = L1 (merc) Knights, just south of #5
#4 = L1 Knights, roughly 11 o'clock

The Assassin, 3 Trolls, and 2 Goblin Archers went NW for #4, while the undead went NE for #1/#5. My Mage Lord cast:
- (2/8 mana) Leadership (+1 Attack to everybody -- it benefits #1, #2, #3, and #4)
- (2/8) Righteous Bolt (3 + 4/3 = 4 damage) on the Assassin -- I fear that guy
- (4/8) After the melee was well underway, Righteous Cause (+4 Attack, +2 Defense) on Footman #1a, which boosted him from 13/8 to a formidable 17/10. He was never targeted, took no damage, and helped kill about six enemies in melee. I like to delay this casting because I never know ahead of time which 1 guy will benefit from it most. Later, when my Mage Lord is around 14 mana, I may cast Righteous Cause 3 times per fight, as I think it's the most bang-per-mana that Order can get, even better than Warrior Spirit.

My crossbows gun down the Assassin before it ever threw a knife -- hah. The trolls + archers kill #4a, but then pivot centrally and attack #3/#1, whom I send to meet them. I launch #2 on a raid toward the Zombies, but all 3 soon die from hefty javelins. #4 pivot SW to kill the 2 Goblin Archers, #3/#1 and the crossbows kill the Trolls and 3rd Goblin Archer, and then the javelins kill #3. I realize that this fight actually is going absolutely perfectly: I'm about to end up with all of my original guys alive, and all mercs dead except for #4bc, with only one Dark Javelin left alive. And so --

I order my real guys (#1/#5) to retreat out of range, and #4bc to step away from the last Dark Javelin. But #4c is stuck in melee range, and ignores my orders Meanwhile, the Dark Javelin AI evidently says: ignore the goon stabbing you, and throw at the other guy -- so he kills #4b, then walks away from #4c, then turns and kills #4c. Success! I order #5 to engage, and I win. Dark Javelins have annoyingly high Defense: an L1 Knight stabbed that guy in the back at least 4 times for -1 hp total, then stabbed him in the chest about 6 times for another -3 or so, and that's it.

I probably took a bit too much damage (losing 2 of 3 Footmen figurines), but overall, I got it right: I had just enough merc-meat to absorb those javelins, and won without much stress. Dark Javelins are very formidable, and were a bit of a nasty surprise in a Great Temple fight, but I figure that's the fun of playing on Hard. (On Normal, it would be six Goblin Archers, or similar.) Later fights get harder than this, even considering that you have more and better real troops.

[Oishii Kudasai]

Basically use mercenary units and rush the temple quickly if you are doing easy or normal. Hard mode will require that you clear some easy areas before to gather xp and resources to make more mercs. Depends on the faction you are playing because order and life are pretty good with units. I tried doing a different approach for earth by altering my game start. I did it by putting a powerful artifact on my warrior and clearing till he cleared the temple and it worked. In terms of champions, warrior in my opinion is easiest then mage second then thief hardest.