How do u beat nightmare AI.

[®Balotelidude®]

i mean the the thing spaws like 3-4 necromancers and 2-3 dragons in the 1st 30 seconds of the game how do u even beat that.

[erick]

The dev is aware of the issue. It will probably be rebalanced.

[flowkrad]

i just did a extra small map on full conquest for that to get the guys

[ZeroDivide]

I beat the nightmare AI by going max map size. Try to grow as best you can before you meet the AI, and when you do find them refuse to engage in a fight. Try to build up a few forces of horse archers+knights+healers and begin to roam the map, striking where the AI's forces are not.

Demian the dragon is very useful here as he will auto spawn workers to harvest in circles with out you needing to take time to buy them yourself. Your goal is to eliminate all the neutral circles and just hold as much of the map as posible.

You 'should' be able to take circles faster then the AI, especially if you get 2 or 3 squads of units roaming the map. Then you just need to save up, buy all the Unit upgrades, and either wittle the AI's army down by tossing wave after wave of units at them, or find a nice water Circle and build a bunch of towers in all of the adjacent circles and bait the AI into a fight there where you can swarm them from all sides as they slog around in the water.

I expect the planned nerf to AoE should make the nightmare AI significantly weaker.

[Ghostangel]

@ZeroDivide
Did you beat the Nightmare Imperial Conflict mode (so, vs AI) after the recent patch?
Because "refusing to engage the fight" isn't really an option, as the AI come after you pretty much from the start. Even on XL map you have only something like two or three minutes to build defenses/army before it finds you.

I think a few patches ago, the AI was much more passive than it is now, so it wouldn't attack you from the beginning and you would have time to expand a bit. But now it's pretty much impossible when they come after you with dragons, necros and mages so quickly after the begining of the game.

And on XS map vs AI, you either die instantly if you're on an adjacent circle of the AI, or in 15 secs, if the AI has to go through a intermediate circle before reaching yours...

[ZeroDivide]

Yes it was with the latest patchd. Perhaps a bit of luck is involved in enough distance to get going.
You need to have expanded a few circles away before the AI reaches your starting location so they they dont just stomp you out. And after they move by you can re-take your circles and try to fight out their swarm of workers before they stripharvest the circle bare.

Fighting the Imperial conflict AI on nightmare is all about running away from their zerg until you build up enough to take them on.

[Sel Und Irae]

The difficulty gap between "Nightmare" and previous is pretty high
I stomped all the early difficulties with ease but that one requires a level of patience i do not possess

[N4mt4r]

From my point of view Nightmare isn't makeable. I tried it a few times with serveral heroes and map sizes but 3 mins after beginning the match the ai is comming with ton of magicians, dragons and necros. I have no idea at the moment.

[Sitek]

I did it like ZeroDivide, not that hard when you have space to run from him, just wait until you will have few dragons and attack his army from many sides at once, even if you will lose most of his army will die from AoE, after that AI will not be able to rebuild because you have most of the map.

[N4mt4r]

In which minute of the game you'll be able to build dragons...?

[Ghostangel]

I finally managed to complete a game in Nightmare, though I was pretty lucky with the map generation as I was not too far from a "safe" spot : in the corner of the map, with a poison circle at L2,C2, and the L1,C2 circle couldn't be accessed from the right side. Since the AI seems to avoid going into poison circles, the left hand corner of the map was almost never attacked by the AI so I had time to farm resources until being able to produce a few dragons & necromancers which allowed me to actually expand on the map.

I was a pretty tedious and long game, and it somehow looked like the AI had infinite ressources as no matter how many of its army I destroyed, it came back with the same amount of dragons/mages/necromancers a few seconds later, even when I controlled the major part of the map. In the end I had to give all the units of my main army multiple extra lifes so that they could withstand multiple fights, while I mass produced golems to attack from all sides, capturing circles that weren't defended by the main army of the AI, and acting as diversion while my main army captured other circles quickly or attacking their army while they were busy killing the golems.

I used the hero that replaces the knight unit with the golem unit (it also creates walls when you capture a circle).
The golem is a good early game unit with 1k hp, and more importantly, does not consume gold to be produced. So you can have many of them pretty early, which helps a lot in capturing the surrounding circles quickly before the AI finds you.
Of course they are extremely slow so you have to produce ranged units to support them, but they'll tank a lot of damages before being taken down so that's okay. Late game they can be mass produced to act as diversion or actually capturing circles not defended by the dragons/mage/necromancers. Also they do not generate zombies upon dying from necromancers, so it's better to used them as fodders than the base guard units.

Even though I managed to win a game, I still think it needs balancing. To me it's pretty much a question of luck with the map generation and the ability to find a spot where you won't be constantly harassed so that you can actually build up an army and buy the armor/damage increases. Sometime you just won't find that spot early enough and the AI will just crush you before you're able to do anything and it's definitely not fun.

[Sixgun]

My usual tactic is to simply spam Dream Warrior units.

[®Balotelidude®]

True that i wonder if frog witch could work against it.

[Remag]

finally i made it
keypoint in my opinion was using of hero "LAURA the lifegiver" - started with 3 healers
build up as fast a min of 10 worker and grow up army (mostly archers), engage enemy as fast you can. build up an army of workers! resources you need mass resources to grow up your army.

This was made on current build 1.1.7 with nightmare at a medium map
have fun

[®Balotelidude®]

Yeah i just beat it aswell, i was w8ing for the update to try it for the 1st time without the chessy way of picking the hero that let u start with an army and 0 builders on a xsmall map.Good thing that u still cant beat it that way after the recent update cause it would be kinda meanigless.But its way mor easy now i just attacked while it was fighting other random mobs and losing on its own for some reason from some 10k hostile empires.I suggest the dragon hero so u dont have to focus so much on your ecconomy since losing circles is very common especially when there are some random hords of 5k power monster cavalary roaming around.Plus everything else and the AI.Btw it bugged for me and i couldnt capture the last circle of the AI even though there was nothing left there just save and load and it will fix itself.Just move a unit in and out that circle or a unith that was outside to begin with.

[Dcethe]

Lol im glad i bought the game before the update, I beat them on NIghtmare hunting monsters. the guy had 25,000 strength with hundreds of mobs. i had to conquer the entire map and wait 20 minutes before mountaining a final attack lol.