Overpowered 'Hero and Artifact Combo' for a New Game.

[Kantz]

The best starting choice seem to be:

1) Choose a 'Warrior'
2) Choose the 'Life Faction'
2) Go under custom and pick the 'Greater Staff of Light'
3) Level the Warrior to level 3 with the remaining points.

You should be able to liberate the Life Temple by Day 1.
By the end of day 6 it is possible to have liberated both the Water and Order temples as well.
Profit by having 3x Lords, 3x Towns and 3x Temples before the end of week 1.

A high level Light Warrior Lord can solo most content and he will always be at full hit points after a battle (Greater Staff of Light). If a battle is going badly.. just run around and let the staff heal him.

Life Warriors also level up extremely fast. Your barracks will be spitting out Max. Level 5 units very early in the game, since your Lord will have gained so much xp from all enemies he annihilated. (He is the true Lord of Death)

[GreyHuntr]

I have done a similar thing with an order paladin wielding the order legendary sword. I find that even though you can solo a dungeon, maurading parties soon ravage all your buildings since you are spread thin.

[PyroZack]

Water mage with Staff of Drowning. You can devastate just about everything with it. It's......yeah. Beautiful.

[Red Bat]

Water Warrior with Tidalblade is arguably more overpowered. But I think you can only pull it off on easy or medium. Makes your Warrior into a better mage early on than your actual mages, while also giving good stats. Since Water is pretty easy to play to begin with, it's a bit silly.

[Sir Loin Of Beef]

Have to agree with the staff of drowning. You kick that games butt so fast you wont believe it.

[DarkenedI]

Fire Warrior -> Dragonscale Mail Set him in Parry and wait.

[Ruinous Bear]

I don't think you can get the greater staff unless you break the custom points a little bit though I suppose that would work with most of them. What Sir Loin suggested with drowning you can do with the points you are given and after trying it once, was far to fun to not do again.

[Red Bat]

I hate playing as Fire, but I recall they had a pretty broken start on Hard as a mage where you start with 2 fire elementals, and whatever the fire circle spell is. March right over to the temple right at the start, get the enemies to bunch up by the elementals, then cast the spell, taking advantage of the elementals immunity, you should be able to win the battle without hiring any mercenaries or leveling up at all. So you effectively start with a decent spell, your temple, your stronghold, everything you get from liberating your temple, and 0-2 elementals, all by turn 2.

On hard, it's not unusual to take 15+ turns before you can liberate your temple and start working on getting some decent income. Considering you can rarely start with decent items or a decent army on hard, this gives you so much of a head start that you might as well have turned the difficulty level down a notch. I can't really think of an easier way to start that doesn't involve turning the difficulty down.

[JPLRocket]

Fire mage can also start with the staff of incineration, fire storm and heat metal, and solo all the 1-3 dungeons, then roll their temple.

Once done, power level to 12, sit in the library to research inferno and solo balkoth's army. One cast will kill all but Balkoth and fireballs from the staff (or the mage) handle the rest.

Fireball scales 1:1 with level so it does 16 damage at level 12. That makes the aoe fireball really devastating.

[Ruinous Bear]

May not really be 'broken' per say but I did try earth warrior with the axe that allows you to use tremor (I can't recall off the top of my head) but at least on medium it is pretty easy to take down a lot of the level 1-2 dungeons if you also got an army to help.

Funny enough I haven't seen anything on thief yet.

[bloodymonarch]

Originally posted by DarkenedI:

Fire Warrior -> Dragonscale Mail Set him in Parry and wait.

If you're shrewd enough, you can do a hard difficulty fire mage lord, start with dragonscale, the first fire attack spell and a generic fire warrior pumped up to level 2. I just 100% a campaign with that combo pretty fast.

[Ruinous Bear]

Keep in mind I haven't tried hard difficulty so all this is on medium.

Just did a bit with Death warrior using souleater/ring of leeches. You can solo most 1-3 dungeons and I even soloed a level 10 dungeon (at higher level) with use of ring of leeches to give my warrior a bit of a boost to stay alive.

[Red Bat]

Originally posted by Ruinous Bear:

May not really be 'broken' per say but I did try earth warrior with the axe that allows you to use tremor (I can't recall off the top of my head) but at least on medium it is pretty easy to take down a lot of the level 1-2 dungeons if you also got an army to help.

Funny enough I haven't seen anything on thief yet.

That's because thief as a whole is probably a bit overpowered. Air thief especially.

Well that, and most of the obviously broken thief setups aren't usable on hard.

[bloodymonarch]

The hardest start I've tried so far is Earth Mage Lord on Hard difficulty. I can't find a way to be OP even using Custom. You only get about 1000 pts to play with on custom with an earth mage for some reason. It's just shy of enough pts to get OP starts even if you take your mage down to level 1.

Anyone else able to think of something?

[bloodymonarch]

I was finally able to liberate the great temple on turn 5 with an earth mage on hard difficulty. I started with an order paladin and my mage at level 3 each and the stone skin spell. The trick is to go into battle manually, cast the buff spell on the paladin, then autocalculate. If you're lucky like I was, you can hire 6 dwarf infantry on turn 4 and grab the temple using the same strategy I used to get the money. Manual battle, armor as many people up as possible, then autocalc. Worked for me. Now it's on to beat death like a drum. :)

[Kantz]

Awesome to read all these strategies!

Seems like I will have to soon dust of the game and try some new tactics :-)