Eador Genesis

I've gotten into the campaign now where I have met Oiner, the evil looking guy, and just met this barbarian guy. The first shard I played where I fought him, he promptly destroyed Oiner and then me, with levels that seemed like he was cheating. What do I do against him?

 

Could be a couple of things. Maybe his difficulty level is higher than that of the local lords and masters you've met so far (the increase happens around that time), that gives him more money and faster leveling of units, but that's not cheating, it's how difficulty levels work. If you fight AI who is at master level it's like you playing on competent, so 10% faster leveling for the AI. Could be that he made a quick alliance with a race (centaurs?) or found a harpy nest or something and got quick t2 units and expanded from there. Also Oinor is very passive and often has problems with expanding, he often gets taken out first on small maps, Beleth can be dangerous (and has necromancy spells on everyone, it's a slog in long fights with all the ghouls running around) but plays normally while Dogor is very aggressive and expands very fast, so on a small map it might look like he's coming out of nowhere with a giant army way too early. There isn't really much you can do other than learn to expand a little faster and get a good province guard contract to put in a chokepoint province (if there's one, if he gets to you from multiple angles before you can set up effective province defenses it gets really hard to hold).
And the computer IS cheating btw, just not in the way it gets faster leveling, it doesn't pay for many things you do (like province guard upkeep). I think there might be a bug in the NH mod where AI sometimes levels up faster than it should but the creators deny it's happening, so I'm not 100% about it.

 

Here's an weird thing that happened to me. I level'd a battlemage to 30 and all he got was 2 slots for rank 2 units and 4-5 slots for rank 1 ones. Then i had to delete him and start over cause there was no way to defeat end game encounters. Is that intended? Is the way Heroes get stats (command, magic, hp etc) random?

 

Random within the predefined commander design e.g. a commander will eventually always get full troop slots.
Battlemage as a hybrid (warrior/mage) has limited troop slots like a warrior. Works as designed.

 

how would a low-level (say 5ish) non-summoning Wizard siege fortified provinces, particularly with another leader. I cannot cast spells indefinitely before their units reach our formation, and almost always a siege with a Wizard leader means the other army will have about twice as many units. Good combinations of placement, magic arrow, and magical armour can help but not so far enough to match significantly larger armies. I will be trying Astral Energy and with multiple counter attacks including healing spells but it seems fraught. Granted if a Dwarf turns up that is always a strong opening but is mostly a random possibility and not something to decide long term strategy with

 

Web and slow can control enemies really well. Easy way to defeat high tier units with low tier units, just drain their stamina and kill them little by little.

 

Even that zero-level stamina draining spell can help in a pinch.

 

I'm experimenting with swapping swordsmen for pikemen. They're pretty good. Not quite as tough but still good. First strike is nice, first aid and meditation are very nice (you can safely skip healers), and they do their job as protection for heroes and archers very well. The only problem is when you are forced to attack something (like assassins or enemies with very high ranged defense), then you're fucked because you do very little damage, swordsmen can trade attacks with any melee enemy because they have both good attack and counterattack. But as long as you can sit back and let the enemy come to you, you're golden.

 

that's a really good point about tier 1 units, I cannot seem to find much reason to include other units besides Swordsmen for cost and reliability. The exception is at the very opening where Militiamen are cost-effective for the sake of early ambushes or a group of Goblins or Skeletons and Zombies. But once Swordsmen can be afforded I don't see much reason not to use them almost exclusively. That is until they form a sufficient shield wall and one or more additional range units can be included. With the Wizard casting Magical Armour on a Swordsmen is remarkable for sheer endurance, casting on two units can ensure they will survive and even decide battles against multiple opponents (but not sieges)

 

Well. Casting white magic, or mass suicide removes majority of enemies from the battlefield. Also what do you mean delete level 30 hero? Grab new one and level him up.

 

Mandatory Genesis mods? All I see from googling is New Horizons.

 

Pikemen are my go to units when I'm playing as a Wiz. I can cast my spells and let them form a ring around me.

 

Win original first. Why do you need mods for games.

 

None are mandatory. Vanilla Genesis is great.

New Horizons is very good to add dimension after you've played vanilla to death.

 

Sucks meeting a traveling merchant early into the game.

 

Traveling merchants are like that, you get to look at cool stuff you can't afford most of the time. I think the best I've ever bought from one was a manticore egg, when do you have 13k just lying around? I always invest surplus gold into new capital buildings, windmills, next hero if I can afford it, maybe leaving 200-300 for bad events. Eador has a really tough economy for a TBS, even if you consistently pillage locations for gold a huge portion of that gets eaten by upkeep, corruption, repairs, events, province guards and other things.

 

True enough. I like to study the items and daydream about the stuff i could have had though

Actually, in a way it should be reworked. There's no need for a traveling merchant mechanics if you never ever buy anything from it.

 

It's a balancing mechanism of sorts. They have the best items in the game so you only get once chance to get them, with regular shops found in provinces I often go back for stuff like elven bows or rare scrolls. The problem is that if you're exploring provinces you probably don't have much money and realistically you almost never have THAT much gold to randomly spare, so it really is useless most of the time.
What you could do (if you don't care about the score/revisions) is screenshot the items, go one turn back to the past and give your hero different orders until you have enough money, then go back and explore the province once, I'm pretty sure the order and properties of things discovered by exploration are fixed when the map is created.

 

I've tried that reloading and going back later trick. You still find the traveling merchant at the same % of exploration, but his wares are randomized each time, so there's no way to save up for that one item you want that he had. I guess that's for the best, but it's really sad when he's selling something that's around a thousand gold and I need like 200 more to afford it, but I already sold all my garbage items.

 

Hmm. So the inventory is randomized each time, I thought it would be the same. Maybe it works like loot then.

 

Rule n 1. You don't get these merchants when you have 50000 gold. And if you did, it had much less interesting stuff than when you had 100 gold.

 

Have you ever tried attacking the travelling merchants? I've never tried, so I don't know what happens.

 

It keeps happening

They always have golem guards, so I've never tried it either. If you have an army that can take on 6 golems you're not exploring provinces. It's really like the merchants are there just to tease the player

 

You beat them up, they have some loot.

 

Is the loot any good?