Basic (RTS) strategy tips

[SyntaxError]

Hi,

let me preface this by saying that I play games to relax and with a very non-competitive mindset. I like to take my time building stuff (so I tend to turtle), I like RPGs, and honestly, I don't really care much for 'testing my limits' or for 'winning against terrible odds'. So that said, I'm playing this on easy.

However I'm getting absolutely STEAMROLLED during one of the early main missions: the one where you get your first dwarf base, have to open a magic barrier, find a secret backdoor and then wipe out a load of enemy centers/towers. My army is getting decimated by freakingly huge armies including 4-5 fire golems, dozens of dwarf archers (that deploy into artillery mode immediately) and a few of those super duper melee tanks. My heroes either stand back chucking spells that could just as well be wet noodles at single targets, or (in the case of my tanky-built melee heroes) get obliterated before they even reach the enemy front line.

I remember in the original SF3, I could pretty much solo the maps with my heroes as long as I didn't start the quests straight away, but this is not an option here, because of the barrier. Plus, heroes feel decidedly weaker this time around.

I think I'm making some massive mistakes here, on 'easy' this game really shouldn't make me want to tear my hair out. So I suppose I shouldn't explore/research/build and just beeline towards the enemy outposts, throwing basic units at them? Do tank heroes even work? Does it get better when heroes make it past the initial levels?

Honestly, at this point any advice would be welcome. Please no 'u suck'/'git gud' posts -- I already know I do, and I try.

Thanks!

[Shodingus]

I mean, I'm playing on normal and it really isn't that difficult. Before you lower the barrier with your earthshapers you won't be attacked at all so you should use that time to build up your economy and army. All the materials you need are in that little valley. Heroes that summon are also very good to have.

[SyntaxError]

Hm, yeah, as I said, I think I'm missing something blindingly obvious. How much time did you take before opening the barrier, and how large was your army when you did? I think I had around 10 axemen, 20 arbalests, 4 fire golems (all upgraded as much as possible), and a few shapers, plus my heroes, and they got wiped out in a matter of seconds. Not straight away, mind, I was able to capture two outposts without any losses, but then the enemy sent a relief army south and... well... 15 seconds, 20 seconds top to kill all my units.

[Burden of Brine]

So far I've found that it is of utmost importance to beeline for 7 or 9 Constitution for characters meant to be your frontline, as it lets them equip armor worth a damn. After that, a healer is of course natural to bring along, and Yria works for that if one raises her Willpower(stronger heals, more Focus capacity) in my experience. Though personally I think I might prefer the Druidism tree for raw healing, as I find their heal spell stronger per target even if it doesn't heal as many.

Personally I run around with two frontliners, (Con 7+, shields optional), and always one or two characters capable of throwing out heals. Beyond that, I don't go with anything in particular, but so far I am quite font of a Combat/Evocation character to both frontline and throw out Fireballs to soften crowds with, and a Druid can both heal and cast chain lightning/earthquakes so that is a fun skill set.

So far I've found myself able to take my time, turtle up, build an army, then just head out and push fairly deep into enemy territory, claim a region, set up some guard towers, and rebuild my army while fending off small enemy groups in the meantime.

Though that is mostly be rambling, and not providing a lot of clearcut advice.

Personally I would suggest turning Yria in a pure healer early on, and trying out making Raith into a either a minion master(raising skeletons and improving his Willpower to boost said skeletons) or a 'Dark Knight'(Potion of Fresh Start, focus Constitution to 7 but preferably 9, raise strength a bit, then rely on Demonology and Necromancy to life leech and debuff enemies).

I prefer Druidism for a healer character, as its heal spell is stronger per target but weaker for group healing, as well as getting some AoE damage in chain lightning and later earthquake. Pair Druidism with Elementalism and you can dish out some hefty area damage on demand, for cheap, as Druid and Elementalist skills reduces Focus costs by a lot together! Make it a Dwarf for a special robe that reduces ability costs and cooldowns by a bunch too.

Okay, rambling again, so I'll stop here for now.

[Durwyn]

ahh i just finished that map with the dwarf town and the sneaky behind the lines tunnel.

I was playing on hard, and basically with my army i rushed the 'Capitol' enemy town that is on the east of the backline tunnel

15 ranged, 15 basic melees and 10 fire golem (in activated mode once objective reached), thats all it take to win the map ;)

[Shodingus]

Honestly that should be enough for early on. The best is getting to the maximum population but you should be fine with that much for the first few camps. Are you sure the difficulty isn't actually set to something much higher? I mean I'm playing on normal and I'm breezing through the game

[SyntaxError]

Hey folks, thank you very much for your replies. I especially appreciate the detailed tips you provided, Burden of Brine. @Durwyn: The fire golems probably made the difference. I'll try again.

Now when I'm more awake and feel more competitive, I'll do this again 'vanilla'.

For now, and if anybody else would like to tweak their game difficulty a little, you can very easily do this via the file balance.txt in the soul harvest folder\bin_exp1_win32\configs. Make a backup copy before changing anything. I found the most interesting settings can be tweaked in the second half of the file which holds separate settings for every difficulty mode. The values can take integer or decimal values. Most values are pretty self-explanatory.

Thanks again folks. And thank you, dear developers, for allowing us to tweak the difficulty according to our personal tastes, and so easily to boot.

[SyntaxError]

@Shodingus: I'm kinda tempted to believe that somehow my game ran into a bug. Honestly, reading what you and others wrote, my army should have had no difficulty, seeing how it was reasonably large and fully upgraded, it should definitely not have been wiped out in a matter of seconds. =/

[Marcos_DS]

Captured 4 enemy bases on the dwarf map and a huge army kinda steamrolls me. I have 3 upgraded towers & 15 archers as defense. Main army (heroes+15 archers + 4 golems, melee got destroyed conquering their food base) needs about 8 sec to arrive but by that time the base is already lost to that huge army of mole riders and enemy heroes - at which time they destroy my reaining troops without breaking a sweat. I kinda asked for it due to difficulty, really wished there was a way to keep max difficulty for the RPG part (which is a bit easy on hard) and normal difficulty on RTS (don't really care about RTS & bad at it). So the idea bout using balance.txt is really a godsend, thanks! will look it up.

[Bijat]

Simplest tip, let your heroes sit back at camp and only bring them to take over outposts. Atleast early game. Becuse if you don´t baby sit them and 3 die in rapid succesion you loose. Late game heroes can become gods and RTS becomes a joke.

But on the RTS part, expand FAST and then bunker the closests sectors to the enemy (build 3-4 towers close to the outpost) 3-5 towers & a max lev outpost can deal with pritty mutch any wave from most races. Then its simply build up eco and start spamming out food units. Food is free so spamming out a few to help with defense is not a bad idea.

When you fully upgraded your units and feel ready max out your army and steamroll the enemy. If the enemy is making catapults or similar you gotta make some ranged units to snipe them (melee units will quickly get killed by ther melee/ranged units)

[Mesond]

Some people complain about how powerful the enemy becomes when you don't attack for a while. Personally I say "give me that fun fight". What's important is making sure you have enough areas to have enough farms to churn out those troops.

Tip 1: Have two heroes with heal. For this I have my main character have light magic for the heal spell. AND you can get resurrection later. I also have the defence tree so this is perfect for holding the line.

Tip 2: Towers. This is simple. Pick a choke point or hot zone and put FOUR towers at the location. The toughest ones you have if possible. Make sure you have the resources for this before you take over a sector and dig in. Your hero's can hold one side but they can't be in two places at once. And for when they're at the towers that's extra help with holding the line.

Tip 3: Play hop scotch with the enemy territory. By this I mean keep quickly taking weaker zones and build a scouting post at each one. If you have the resources for it make border forts when you can. It's more to keep the enemy busy so they're less likely to attack your main base.

Tip 4: As someone stated earlier, beeline for 9 con. You get potions of fresh starts so you can always get int and wisdom for other armor later. It all depends on how often you cast spells. if you only summon a demon with Raith then having 9 con can be handy because you can focus on defence and the demon makes a good meat shield (plus there's a nice int based flame sword I give him. Close combat needs con and armor). I've held that bridge on the later dwarf RTS map for ages wiping out whole armies on normal with my four heroes in heavy armor.

Tip 5: Cleave. I've seen moments where mobs have been on a bridge and just went splat all at once. I'm guessing it's because I had max cleave. Whatever I did it wiped out entire mobs (rarely). I'm talking every single enemy on that bridge which was swarming. Was on that dwarf map at late game.

Tip 6: Whirlwind. Get this for two heroes and it helps to hold the line.

As for what types of units to focus on, getting 5 soldiers and 3 archers is a good repeat order. Early on just stick with that. Later on have a champion or lava golem (or berserker) lead each group. I like to get three groups early on (after all the first tier buildings are placed) then get five groups later. If I'm feeling rich in iron or something then I might start churning out champions instead of soldiers.

After that it's a case of knowing what buildings to get and when. Two woodcutters early on for humans. Follow up with a stone cutter then a hunter. Elves can expand their woodcutter. Dwarfs focus on stone instead of wood, so get two stone huts instead. That leaves food. Early on a hunter in each area works. Later on dedicate an area to nothing but farming. Same goes for towers. If you need to hold a line make sure you got enough workers to fill the towers. It's a good idea to put a woodcutter, stonecutter and hunter/farm in each territory you take over. Unless you're dedicating an area for something else (such as iron or four towers or only farms).

If all else fails, push up to the enemy front line early on and make the front line at their door step as you take the territory in between. If you're pushed back to your own doorstep hold out until you get your army and/or titan going. I actually had to dig in until I got a pargon up and running once. The enemy had a border fort on the high ground in the next sector. After I took that things got easier.

[XartaX]

Honestly I've had no problem with any of the RTS segments. I played every mission where I could choose my race as dwarves.

1. As long as your heroes can clear out neutral camps quickly early on by themselves then it doesn't really matter how strong they are. Although it's nice to have an elementalist to snipe high value targets. And of course a beguiler with auras will be useful in RTS mode.

2. Immediately put down two resource gatherers of your primary resource (as a dwarf that's stonecutter) and a hunter's lodge, once they're built get your third resource (charchoal in my case).

3. While you're doing this, send out your heroes to immediately grab adjecent territory.

4. If possible, choose territory with your primary resource. Immediately build an outpost on it and put down 2 more gatherers of your primary resource and a hunting lodge (if it has wild animals). If you're dwarf get charcoal and use farms in territory without stone.

At this point you have several options open to you depending on your play style. Personally I like to grab all nearby territory with stone (since I play dwarf) and put down two stonecutters on them, and a hunter's lodge in every territory with wild animals in it. Resource gathering buildings are relatively cheap and pay themselves back really fast.

If I have unlocked berserkers: I'll put down two iron miners at any iron resource node I have available to me and a smelter in a territory away from the frontline with free workers (not the capital area if possible). If I have pyromancers I'll do the same with moonsilver.

Lastly, I just put down 2 barracks (a bit later I'll go up to 4) and start flooding the enemy with berserkers/pyromancers (or axemen/sentries if those aren't available). I don't think I lost a single building in any of the RTS segments. Except for level 3 dwarf towers towers kinda suck, and even level 3 dwarf towers can't really fend off anything beyond a scouting force (level 2 towers have less damage than an undeployed sentry, lol. I feel like they'd have to quadruple tower damage or something for them to be remotely useful). I just use them to tank damage so my army can relieve the area before the main structure dies. Early on they're just a waste of resources and should only be built once you're already exploiting all the resources available to you and you've got maxed main buildings everywhere.

Of course you could probably just skip straight to slamming down barrackses after step 4 and just spam basic troops. Just put a hunter in every territory with wild animals and if you need more food get some farms going. Even on the dwarf map with narrow bridges and the NPC's going "YOU SHOULD PROBABLY BUILD SOME AIR UNITS MATE BECAUSE THERE'S NOT A LOT OF SPACE HERE" I just flooded the enemy with berserkers and it worked fine (if you use melee units the random fire golems are going to wreck you unless you interrupt them or got the hammer that instantly obliterates golems/constructs, though).

[SyntaxError]

A lot of excellent tips, thank you, Taramafor and XartaX. Very helpful posts -- much appreciated!

What I definitely learned from your posts is that turtling in the starting area is a no-go as it will just lead the player to losing the resource war. I'll just have to play more aggressively so the enemy doesn't pile up big armies. Apparently he DOES do that, which is a bit of a bummer for builders like me. I finished the level after tweaking difficulty levels and I can say with confidence that it would have been unbeatable with the gazillions of troops he threw at me after hours of fiddling around and trying out stuff more or less unrelated to the campaign >.>

A little tactical tip that I discovered while playing is that feints into ambushes work pretty well; sometimes you can bait parts of a large batallion to break off. Sadly elevation is not handled very well, unlike for example in Divinity Original Sin (2) (you can't really lign up archers on both sides of a ravine, for example -- they won't have a reliable LoS), but on somewhat even terrain having enemies run into a crossfire can help. Until, of course, that gigantic army of doom rolls up your backside while the enormous army of death one-shots your units in front xD

[Mesond]

Originally posted by SyntaxError:

What I definitely learned from your posts is that turtling in the starting area is a no-go as it will just lead the player to losing the resource war.

That actually depends. You just need to make sure you got enough territory on your side to work with. For example, the lava map when you're fighting the dwarfs near the end of the game, you can work with the territory behind that bridge. Just enough space to have what you need. The enemy will come in swarms but it's possible to hold them back. And when you're ready even advance. If you push up and claim the middle ground then you got more territory and another choke point to put towers at. At which point you have half the map. In higher difficulties the enemy is likely to send swarms even if pushed back to their home territory. The idea isn't just to stop the enemy swarming you, it's to prepare for when they do. Think of your heroes as a delaying tactic while you build up your army.

That's a choke point map though. Other maps will have you worrying about two sides at once. Which is harder to micromanage. One orc map comes to mind. I always turtle myself. But it's about WHERE you turtle. You got to draw the line somewhere. Too far back and you strangle yourself. Too far ahead and you overextend yourself. You can't turtle your home base either. Not unless you sacrifice the other workers to get in those towers. Which is why I say dedicate a sector to towers. It's where I draw the line. Making sure a sector is used for farming comes first though.

[SyntaxError]

Thanks again -- yeah, I get what you're saying. This is also one of those games where previous knowledge of a level will reduce the effective difficulty significantly -- if you know where the juiciest resource nodes are or where to build choke points, you'll naturally have an easier time of it than if you bumble about for the first time, oohing and aahing over pretty sights, while posting your guards on the wrong side of the map ;)

It's a bit of a pity from a designer/consumer point of view, they put so much effort into level design and eye candy, it'd be lovely to be able to see it first before getting swamped. Then again I'm one of those weird people who will take twice the time of everybody else going through a level in an RPG, because there's so much to se... ohh! a flower!

Cheers!

[XartaX]

The problem with towers is that they're just... not very good. The only use for them is that the AI will prioritize attacking them, giving you more time before they destroy your main base in the sector. So when you place a tower, basically think about it as giving you a buffer to get there with an actual army to relieve it. Use godstones (and tunnels if you're dwarf) to let you move your entire army around, or have a second group for defense. Dwarf units are RIDICULOUSLY good at defense with deploying sentries and golems. So if you're going to use a defensive force I'd definitely include some sentries in there. Pyromancers are better for attacking, though (mobile, splash damage, etc.).