Dragon's Lair:
Restart If - The enemy reaches your castle with more than a unit or two.
Overview - This level is a tug-of-war between you and the dragon army. A proper formation of Thor + huge mob of Mages will utterly annihilate this level... until the enemy hero spawns, that is. On Easy, a lone Thor can take down the Firestarter plus assorted reinforcements on his own, assuming no tower involvement. However, since you probably need help playing this level on Hard, that's not exactly an option. Note that, whereas in other levels you could potentially get away with using other heroes with different formations, this time is different thanks to the Firestarter. The thing with him is that he's a Hero Grenadier, meaning any meatshields not called Knight Cavalry get wiped in one attack, and even they can't stand up to him on Hard. Thus, running a ranged hero (Robin Hood and that other ninja guy) and meatshield spam isn't going to work. Spartan King is nice, but his foot soldiers get wiped in one shot and he has to rely on the Mage support to take out enemy reinforcements, whereas all that he has to offer over Thor is his useless foot soldiers and the part where he randomly casts War Cry on himself and anyone in the area. I personally prefer Thor's melee-attack-plus-Chain-Lightning attack because the lightning hits enemy reinforcements in addition to the target, but that's just me. Regardless of how you go about building your forces in this manner, you're going to wind up going back and forth across the map until the enemy runs out of Firestarter summons. On Easy he spawned 5 of them, so I assume that number holds true for the other difficulties as well. After enduring all the Firestarters, the battle is yours to win; at this point any supported hero can tear apart the enemy forces with minimal effort.
Undead Campaign Strategies:
First Boss:
Restart If: The enemy's moving towards your castle and you don't have any units out to defend it.
What's that golem do? - The Nature Golem is a melee hero that casts a healing spell akin to that of the Orc Priests. Because of this, you want to make sure to keep the pressure on him as much as you can. Unlike the Orc General, you can feel free to mob this guy because his melee attacks are just simple attacks and not Echo Slams.
General tips - If you want the no-effort way to win, just play on Easy, spam maxed-out Archers, take your one shield, and move on. Knight Cavalry spam will take care of this level no problem on higher difficulties. The reason behind this is entirely because the hero doesn't require any special attention beyond making sure he doesn't get a chance to heal himself back up to full health. Because of this, I consider the Nature Golem to be rather underpowered as a hero (not that I'm complaining :P).
Second Boss:
Restart If: The enemy takes either tavern.
General tips - Your units will want to go north. Turn Auto Move off and force them to meet the enemy forces on the southern front head-on. Open with 2 Knight Cavalry and 1 Mage, and summon additional KCs and Mages as needed throughout the battle. This battle is literally as simple as taking the southern village, stopping the enemy from taking the southern Tavern, and keeping the pressure up on the enemy castle. Properly mixing KC summons in with your Mage summons will keep the inevitable Orc General away from your Mage horde long enough for them to deal with him and any nearby towers. Once you've broken through and are attacking his castle, just spam KCs.
Final boss:
-OK, hold up for a bit. I haven't even beat this level on Easy yet, and the reasons for that happen to be the same reasons that I gave the gameplay a 1/10 in the initial review. No, I'm not some kid who gets sad when he can't beat a level (I have all but 3 shields in the human campaign [well, 5, but I don't have a Twitter, so...]. You have any idea how long it took me to figure the last few levels out?). I'm not irked because I can't beat it. I'm irked because of WHY I can't beat it.
The overview: Each side starts with 2 castles (one castle and the Portal to Hell for you). There are two Taverns, one north and one south, and there are several villages strewn throughout the map. Every path has a minimum of two towers on it for the enemy, whereas you get half that amount, and to top it off yours are in much less useful places. There are four paths between yours and the enemy's sides. Simple enough, right?
The problems come when actually trying to play the map. My current opening is to run two Knight Cavalry and one Mage and attack the southern Tavern head-on to prevent the enemy's KCs and Knights from overrunning it and ending the map before it's even started. Those forces have no problem. The problem comes when the second wave of forces move in; my KCs and Mage squad are fine assuming they listen to me when I tell them to IGNORE THE FREAKING TOWER.
Big problem #1: Your units flat-out ignore your commands sometimes.
The real problem on this map comes on the northern front, where an equivalent squad of KCs and Knights are bearing down on the northern Tavern, which can't defend itself thanks to a tower parked 5 feet away that wipes anything it tries to summon. The southern Tavern has a similar problem, which is why I go after it ASAP. The thing is, though, that the player simply is not given enough manpower to be able to guard both taverns on a map where losing either tavern equates to an instant loss of the battle.
Speaking of that, Big Problem #2: The enemy has unlimited resources.
Here's where I go into the nitty-gritty mechanics of how the AI works in this game. At its core, the AI units work exactly the same as yours do if you set them to Auto Move and leave them. They attack the closest unallied building to them as well as any units that get in their way. They give no thought to formation or anything of the sort; they merely walk and attack when able. Enemy castles run on a timer whose length varies depending on the map and difficulty. Timer hits 0, random unit is spawned, timer starts over. The reason this is a problem is because the AI doesn't need to worry about food or gold; it'll summon as many units with as much power as it wants as long as the timer allows it. The only exception is hero units; these also kind of run on a timer, but not exactly. They're programmed to spawn when the in-battle clock hits a certain time, and the AI will only get a certain number of them per battle. Considering how you'll often find yourself face-to-face with enemy heroes before you can summon your own to match them, this is a fair tradeoff.
Anyways, back to the castles. The biggest problem I have with this game is that enemy taverns operate the exact same way that enemy castles do. Basically, that means that if you let the enemy take over a tavern, you may as well restart because on certain maps (like undead campaign map 2-5) there's absolutely no middle ground; either you stop them from taking the tavern and the battle's a cakewalk or you let them take the tavern and they overrun you.
My problem with the way this was programmed is simply that taverns don't do that for the player. In a lot of cases, owning a tavern actually becomes a liability, because it turns into a point you HAVE to defend or else it's death by mercenary spam for you, whereas you could just leave the tavern to deal with the enemy on its own and it would actually succeed due to neutral taverns acting in much the same way as enemy castles.
So, suggestions to fix this:
1. Make the enemy have to decide where to summon from. Timer hits 0, they pick one building and that's where they get their one unit from.
Pros: Losing a tavern is something the player can come back from.
Cons: Forgotten Kingdom loses most of its difficulty.
2. Bind the enemy's resources in the same manner as the player's. The AI gets the same food and income restrictions as the player.
Pros: Results in a much more "fair" game and removes the "cheated" feeling you get from losing to an enemy with an unfair advantage. This could also potentially open up the possibility of giving the enemy spells to use in a manner that wouldn't seem cheap to the player.
Cons: Doing this would require Toge (or whatever the guy's name is) to program an AI capable of making advanced decisions in regards to what units to summon and when, and considering how he can't even make a game where your units don't ignore your orders... yeah.
3. Make taverns act this way for the player as well. Tavern units spawn on a timer, don't count against your food/gold, move and attack in the same manner as enemy units, and ignore your orders entirely (which they already do on occasion, so that part shouldn't be TOO hard to program >_>.
Pros: Taverns become a massive guaranteed boon to the player instead of being half-useful sometimes and a massive liability at others.
Cons: Let's use undead map 2-5 as an example here. Take both taverns, POOF! Instant super easy mode assuming you summon something to deal with the hero unit. Any map with more than one conquerable tavern becomes ridiculously easy in this manner.
4. Conquering a tavern gives a food/income multiplier bonus of +1 per tavern. For example, owning both taverns on 2-5 gives the player triple food and income.
Pros: Player-owned taverns become able to defend themselves without seriously eating into the player's main resources.
Cons: Someone please give me a con for this idea...
That's everything. Sorry for taking multiple posts to do this; I had to take two breaks (one for lunch and one to use the little gamer's room) and I didn't want something stupid to happen to what I already had typed out...
...that and I still have no idea if there's a character limit on this forum or not.
Thanks for reading.
