I think Titans should start at level 5 when you first buy them, here's why

[Dragon]

I realized there is a balance problem with the low level Titans start out as.

Usually by the time you can first afford to spend the resources on a Titan, the game is in the mid-game or late-game phase. Thus, the enemy mobs will destroy the Titan very quickly & easily.

Therefore, due to

a) Titans' low starting level

combined with

b) the late stage in the game at which they first appear

...the following is the result: instead of feeling like the Titan is a powerful beast, it instead feels like a gimpy useless creature that was a waste of time & resources to buy.

One could solve this problem by carefully micromanaging the Titan to the back of battles until it levels up a lot, and/or train it in the Arena. But micromanaging them like they are weaklings made of glass (which they are, at first) is a pain, and defeats their intended design purpose which means they should be nearly-unstoppable forces. And training it up in the Arena forces you to halt all your progress of conquest over the map, and therefore destroys the pace of the game.

This problem is also further exacerbated by the fact that in order access the ability to buy Titans, the game first forces you to waste tons resources to buy other things on the tech tree that you may not want or need.

So given the exorbitant cost of buying Titans (the unit cost itself, added to the costs of its many prerequisites which you don't want/need), they should start at level 5 for that reason too.

[Blake Walsh]

Titans are useful as they are, at least I find them useful on Diabolical.

The thing about a Titan is that if you have a good tome to give them they become pretty sick. An Epic Damage/Crit Tome turns the Pit Fiend into an absolute beast. You can usually straight up increase the effectiveness of a Titan by 50-100% by a tome.

Anyway on Diabolical Pit Fiend is good because he's a damage sponge that quickly regenerates and his damage is not too shabby and he's one of the only AoE dealers in the game (along with Lich, Gobbobot, Thayla and Ogre). Even at level 3, even without a tome, he's pretty good at both being a damage sponge and dealing damage. Sometimes even with Blocked Research preventing Relaxation Chamber, I still might get the Pit Fiend as my first Titan, cause he's that good, and Torture Chamber is much less evilness-experience because you can refund the cost by torturing 5 Gilded Heroes to death (which if you're a cheapskate is best done by slapping them to near death before siccing the succubi onto them).

Overall the game balance as it is, is good enough that I can't decide if (on Diabolical) it's better to get a Pit Fiend once I have More Creatures 8, or if I should dump that evilness into additional levels of More Creatures and potent upgrade Scrolls. My leaning is it's worth getting a Pit Fiend fairly promptly, but whether to do it at More Creatures 8 or not I think largely depends on if I have that Epic Damage Tome chilling out on Thayla.

Ogre is good as a unit because his stun still works fine at lvl3, you can always buy a new one if you have to. Grave Golem is invulnerable to harm while using his "Bury head in sand move", even at level3, but he might be best used as a sacrifice victim, since if you dump 8000 gold into chain-sacrificing GG you'll probably get 2 or 3 other Titans and some nice (possibly Epic) tomes, the problem with both of them is the around 1800 evilness to trudge through, and here it wouldn't really matter if the Titan was stronger at the end of it, on Diabolical you've already forked yourself by spending 1800 evilness with nothing to show for it along the way (unlike Pitfiend route which can get you some converted heroes and at least a 300 evilness rebate, along with super useful Master Swordsmen beguiling Succubi). If I get Ogre it's usually fueled by torture after I already have the Pit Fiend, and it's just so I can faceroll the hero parties thanks to Ogre stun rendering them disabled for more than long enough to kill them.


So overall, the Pit Fiend is easy and relatively rewarding to get to, if you micro the Torture Chamber it costs about half the evilness as the other Titans. A buff to Titans in general by making them start at lvl5 would just make the Pit Fiend route even more attractive because a Pit Fiend is really about the damage it deals and the hitpool, both of which are directly improved by levels, but it would do very little to make the other two more attractive which are really about their utility. Once you have a Pit Fiend the other Titans aren't really relevant they're just prestige investments or to make the game more facerolley.

Of course that's from the perspective of diabolical difficulty, where they are deep disruptions to the game balance, mainly to do with armor being irrelevant and the rapid battle cadence making slow healing units unviable and the arena pointless since there's so much experience awarded from battles. That's a lot of things working against Grave Golem and to a lesser degree Ogre. (also on Diabolical a lvl3 Titan will probably be lvl5 after one battle, and if you cheese it you can make it like lvl7 by letting it solo a couple of badly injured lvl9 heroes)

[Dragon]

Originally posted by Blake Walsh:

Anyway on Diabolical Pit Fiend is good because he's a damage sponge

I don't understand that statement. I made this thread with Pit Fiend in mind, after I played through all the DLCs by teching straight into demons and mostly neglecting the other races.

By the time I got Pit Fiend, he was like level 3 while most of my other creatures were level 6-8. When Pit Fiend fights a mob or two of enemy heroes at that level and at that late point in the game, he dies in a few hits.

Maybe stockpiling tomes for the whole game might change that a bit, but I usually use tomes immediately after I receive them rather than saving them for a potential future that may or may not occur

I.e. how do I know if I'm going to survive long enough to research Pit Fiend, and/or how would I know for sure that I'd even need to research Pit Fiend before I beat the mission outright. In either of those situations, saving a tome would have made it effectively useless. Those are two large disincentives to saving them.

Whereas in contrast, I could have instead used that tome now, in the present moment, when it would definitely be useful. That's a large incentives not to save them.

[Blake Walsh]

Originally posted by Dragon:

Originally posted by Blake Walsh:

Anyway on Diabolical Pit Fiend is good because he's a damage sponge

I don't understand that statement. I made this thread with Pit Fiend in mind, after I played through all the DLCs by teching straight into demons and mostly neglecting the other races.

By the time I got Pit Fiend, he was like level 3 while most of my other creatures were level 6-8. When Pit Fiend fights a mob or two of enemy heroes at that level and at that late point in the game, he dies in a few hits.

You pull him out of battle when he's 10% hp and put him somewhere else to regen.

Maybe stockpiling tomes for the whole game might change that a bit, but I usually use tomes immediately after I receive them rather than saving them for a potential future that may or may not occur

I just put the best damage tome on Thalya since even at lvl1 (which I never upgrade her from) she's one of the best places to put a damage tome (Lich and Gobbobot are only other contenders), and I keep on hand a useless production bonus or wage reduction tome. Once I have Pitfiend I give Thalya the useless tome to make her spit out the good tome, and give the good tome to the Pitfiend. By then Thalya's damage output is irrelevant and she dies in 2s anyway.

Putting aside the tome-recycling feature which I guess you didn't know about, you can either plan to get the Pitfiend as a priority... or leave it until you've completely conquered the Overworld and are otherwise dumping evilness into Improved Whatever. That's a strategic choice and both approaches are definitely viable on Diabolical Skirmish.

I really think if you're going to micro the torture chamber and micro the pit fiend (extracting him when he's soaked all the damage he can) or if you have the mana income to afford expediated resurrection it's probably a no-brainer to get the Pit Fiend ASAP. If you're not going to indulge in somewhat tedious micro then probably a stronger army of lesser creatures is a better choice. But another factor is if you otherwise have aoe damage from Gobbobot or Lich (Pit Fiend goes great with mass Arachnid) and also what the boss is, if the Boss is Elric or Yaina there's no need for a Titan because either of those bosses can be easily killed with just Orcs (or less insultingly, Arachnids) and it can be easier to kill them at 20 minutes or so than to let the game progress to stronger attacking heroes.

[Thats How We do action in Uganda]

I disagre, titans dont take army pop, and they are stronger than regular units, 3 lvl is fine.