Your goal is the citadel at the top. There's multiple ways to get there, some include bonus encounters like trying to batter down the walls, or making your way over/under the walls.
It wouldn't be boring if you needed more than one army (which was the key to HoMM). Two is nice to cover map more easily and to specialize your armies (three is ideal for that). The problem is that there's little need to do so since it's so faceroll, and it's so faceroll since people who should know better encourage the "hurr, durr, Crusade sux I've played five whole minutes" crew to never even learn the basics.
Kind of need the loselessness to build up critical mass, just needs to be a little more challenging/interesting to achieve it. Speaking of which running Marksmen into the wrong fight is a good way to lose that losslessness. They're glass cannons. Shield Bearers are on the weak side but even they have their uses.
I like to get up on the walls to take out Giants/open gates from above, then climb down over by the Tavern and clear back from there. Gives you an open path back to vendor to do everything else.
No, there isn't. It's the same for all of the game's large dungeons/set pieces - even the deepest, foulest, and most secret demonic lairs mysteriously have extensive collections of sanctified relics so you can rest as much as you like without worrying about corruption.
Iirc if you rest via the crusader supplies then no. The actual keep doesn't have free rest spots, but it also has a relic or two.
I disagree. You should scale into the lategame by having better forces, and more recruitment/month, not by taking 0 losses. It's very silly from a lore perspective that the total casualties in your final crusade against the demons is going to be like 20 people.
They are glass cannons, but they're also really fast, hit ridiculously hard and since they have low hp they're trivial to mass resurrect.
"As much as you want" is an exaggeration. You will always get a decent amount of rests (iirc with good religion you can get like 2-3 before the first penalty, and each relic will give you another 1.5-2.5 or so), but if you rest spam ala BG2 or NWN2 OC you're gonna die.
Most of the larger dungeons have three or four corruption-removing relics scattered around, so if you enter with no corruption that's 10+ rests in locations that can be cleared with none or one on unfair even without abusing the most egregiously overpowered stuff. I actually prefer the provisions mechanic in Kingmaker because it imposes somewhat more of a challenge, especially since the passage of time is an important consideration in that game.
Yeah same.
Not extensive, not really. It is designed for higher rest than P:K, but so is the ruleset with all the classes (like Warpriest) that rely so heavily on rnd/lvl abilities. It's far from trivial to avoid corruption in Labyrinth, for instance, and passing the resting skillchecks on high difficulties isn't either. If you're reloading on every failed skill check you're kind of undermining one of the main sources of challenge in the game, and if you're taking the abilities that allow you to take the RNG out of those checks (and combat) you'll necessarily be toning down some of the c-c-combos that allow you to dominate combat with good RNG.
WIS-based Scout. Could be a good place to try out Forester. That's the spellbooks you're missing. EDIT: Tactician is redundant with Battle Scion. Hunter of some sort might still be good fit, or just a Freebooter.
If you're mass resurrecting, you're not nuking, and it has to be done in combat. There are fights where that matters, just not enough of them.
You can retreat from the Citadel to rest up and sell up back at forward camp. Each rest uses a set of Crusader Supplies so that's anything but limitless but retreating lets you use the supplies scattered around the map to eliminate drained levels and configure spells and abilities for next fight.
Sound Burst also works. Need to stop Vrock too.
What I do is start with standard Inspire Rage and then turn on Battle Prowess in next round.
I like Drezen but I think my main complaint is that it doesn't have any mechanics to force you to plan out what you're doing or sort of punishment for going too far without letting your allies move up and attract more demons away from you. For example, it could be that if you haven't taken down the stone thrower giants and the first gate, the areas past the second gate will have a lot more demons. The rest makes sense though, battles take hours or days, the same people aren't fighting on the front the whole time, they take shifts and rest.
Tell me about it. I tried really hard to never rest more than once per dungeon because spending 5 minutes rebuffing is torture.
Scout is any character with high Stealth, Perception, and ideally Trickery who can see what's ahead without being seen. Aru is the ideal case since she gets scaling bonuses to Stealth and Perception, but Favored Terrain also boosts Perception while adding Initiative (Forester gets super Favored Terrain - additional bonuses plus treats Favored Terrain as Favored Enemy).
Lvl 16 and MR 7 (or 8, it was changed between patches).
