Strategies

General Strategies

Choosing a good primary (main) hero

• A good main hero should be good in battle, and some heroes are equipped with unnecessary secondary skills like Eagle Eye and Learning. Avoid them. Archery, Offense or Armorer are much better.
• Might heroes are better with big armies than magic heroes. Every point in Attack and Defense is useful for every creature, while too much Spell Power or too much Knowledge can be of limited use. Sometimes you need a simple spell more than very advanced spells, that need much more power and knowledge to be effective.
• On the other hand, powerful mages with high Spell Power and Knowledge can often win battles against neutral creatures without any army whatsoever: Solmyr, Aislinn, Luna and other spell specialists that focus on damage of their spells can go through battles with only a few {usually fast) units in their army.
• Heroes that can be better with each level are generally better than ones that do not benefit much from having a lot of experience. Crag Hack, Mephala or Malekith are better and better with each level, while also combining their specialty with specific primary skills. Obvious exception to this rule include heroes with great specialties that do not scale, such as Lord Haart the Death Knight, Luna or Ciele.
• Good hero can move fast. Someone with Logistics (or Navigation on water maps) is much better than slow heroes. Not only can fast heroes collect more resources, they also gain experience faster. This makes, Gunnar or Kyrre good options, especially when playing without Horn of the Abyss.
• Estates, Scholar, and other similar skills are useful, but normally the main hero does not have enough skill slots to have room for them. There are simply more important skills needed for those slots.
• No magic skills? Not good. Try to obtain at least one or two. Your main hero shouldn't have all four though since there will be not enough slots for other important skills.
  • Earth Magic is usually the best choice, due to spells like Slow, Resurrection, and Town Portal having vastly different effects between Basic and Expert level.
  • Air Magic is often considered a reasonable choice because of Fly, Dimension Door, and Haste. The same applies to Fire Magic, because of Curse, Blind, and Berserk.
  • Water Magic is generally considered to be the weakest of the Schools of magic, especially outside of Island-maps (where Water Walk could be useful) - it does not have any powerful spells that significantly change their results based on the secondary skill proficiency. As an example, Exper Bless is only better than Basic when the hero has multiple units dedicated as their main offensive force and all of these units have low damage (as then the +1 damage bonus becomes more relevant). Clone and Teleport can be utilised to almost their full potential without the Water Magic skill. The only exception is Prayer, which becomes significantly better at the Expert level.
• Some Secondary Skills are great in combination. For example, if you like to use the spell Chain Lightning, the combination of Air Magic and Wisdom is very powerful. (You may also consider using Sorcery, however even at Expert level it only increases spell damage by 15%.) Adding Intelligence or Mysticism can improve it even more.
• Some heroes start with a lot of creatures. Heroes that have unit specializations of creatures between 1st and 3rd level start with a significantly greater amount of the creatures they specialize in. Using these creatures, the player can create a strong attacking force (often dubbed "powerstack") much more easily. This applies to Bron, Illor, and Todd as well, who all start with the level 4 creature they specialize in.
• When choosing heroes with creature specialties, consider the bonus of speed they provide. Heroes like Josephine or Ryland have a much bigger impact on the usefulness of the troops they specialize in than heroes such as Korbac, whose specialized unit is already very fast.
  • Remember that hero specialty bonus to speed of creatures affects the number of movement points they have at the start of their turn.
• There are a lot of good heroes and bad heroes. Use the forums and Wiki to know more about them.
• Find your build. Different towns need different heroes, but some of the heroes are great in any town, while others are usable only in one town. For example, Valeska is only good in Castle towns, while Orrin is good in every town - and even better in towns with more ranged units - or when using archers from multiple towns. Having Marksmen, Magi, Zealots and Titans in one army is preferable for him.
• Choose your hero based on the map. For example, if you are playing a map with a lot of snow or swamp, consider a hero with Pathfinding (such as Corkes).
• Some magic heroes are great in the hands of a skilled player. Some examples include Eovacius , Thant, Luna, Victoria, and Jeddite.
• Overall, Overlords and Barbarians are among the strongest heroes, while Planeswalkers and Alchemists are among the weaker heroes.

Some of the best primary heroes include: Orrin, Mephala, Kyrre, Gunnar, Crag Hack, Dessa, Tazar, Corkes , Dury , Murdoch .

Choosing a good secondary (helper) hero

• Estates, scholar and logistics are some of the preferred secondary skills for heroes, that are not supposed to be fighting.
• Normally, secondary heroes will have much less experience than main heroes. It is possible that they will learn only a small amount of secondary skills.
• Gold and estates specialists are really good, especially on poor maps. They can provide you with gold, so you can build important building faster and hire new heroes more often.
• During 4 months, single gold specialist can provide you with 39 200 gold. Enough for 4 capitols or 1 entire week of all creatures from a single town. Leena with Expert Estates can produce about 150 000 gold in the same time.
• Logistics is good, if you need to move new fresh forces from your town to the main hero, fighting several days from your town.
• In need of gems? Crystals? Mercury? Sulfur? Or simply you have many towns and you can trade surplus? There are heroes like Rissa that can help you out.
• Scholar can help you with three things: Exchanging spells between important heroes, providing other heroes with a spell a different hero starts with (such as Alamar with Resurrection or Loynis with Prayer) and copying spells obtained from a Pandora's Box to other heroes (which is otherwise impossible).
• Ballista costs as much as a hero. Therefore it's better to recruit a hero with Ballista (such as Sir Christian) and swap ballista to your main hero. The same applies to Cannon, provided by Jeremy (which is even more expensive). You can also use Rion, if you need first aid tent in the castle town.

Some of the best secondary heroes: Leena, Lord Haart, Octavia, Aine, Rissa, Alamar, Sephinroth, Jeremy...

It is up to a player, whether his first hero is a good primary or a good secondary hero.

Early Capitol

This strategy is particularly relevant when playing on Hard or lower difficulty on relatively poor, small, closed maps, in which the player is separated from enemies by border guards, long destinations or very powerful monsters. If you then rush for an early capitol, you can have much more gold than other players.

• Pros: You can have more income, allowing you to build new units and buildings with enough gold. You can also have more heroes than usual.
• Cons: With limited amount of creature dwellings, you cannot make a good defense early. You also cannot attack all the wandering monsters and may find yourself unable to conquer any important locations in the first week. As a result, while you will not have a problem with gold, you may miss out on ore, crystals etc. which can be equally important for the city development.

Rushing for capitol is of course hard or even impossible on higher difficulties. Capitol costs 10 000 gold, castle and citadel cost 7 500 gold. Many buildings, like blacksmiths, are not that useful early on (or almost useless for some time), yet they are simply required. However, after two more weeks Capitol pays back for itself fully - 14 x 2000 gold is 28 000 gold.

For early capitol, it is a good idea to pick a good secondary hero (or start with someone) with gold speciality and/or estates. Lord Haart and Leena are two best choices.

Example build order:

1. Town Hall
2. Magic Guild
3. Marketplace
4. Blacksmith
5. City Hall
6. Citadel
7. Castle
8. Capitol
9. unupgraded creature dwellings (so you can have as much units as possible)
10. other buildings

Note, that generally it is advised not to follow this strategy on maps that have gold more readily available on the map itself (either in gold piles, Treasure Chests, Gold Mines or Creature Banks) or a large number of external creature dwellings or Creature Banks that provide units (such as Griffin conservatories, as well as on maps where the enemy can be easily reached. In these cases, the player who decides to focus on building the capitol will be unable to conquer (and therefore recruit) those gold sources and external units, and will also not gain any relevant troops from their town within the first week. As a result, their enemy can simply focus on building an army early on and defeat them within the first three weeks, before the Capitol even pays itself off.

Early Army

A much more common strategy on rich maps is Early Army, where the player aims to build one or two "powerstacks" (main offensive units) within the first 2 days of the game, and then attempts to build the dwellings of level 6 or level 7 creatures of their town.

For example, when playing as Inferno, this would most often involve choosing Calh, a Gog specialist, upgrading the Hall of Sins on the first day, and using the Magogs as the main offensive force; in the subsequent days, the player would try to conquer as much sources of gold or other resources, in order to build a Demon Gate, a Hell Hole, a Fire Lake, and a Forsaken Palace in order to be able to recruit 2 Devils and 4 Efreets by the first day of the second week.

Alternatively, if the map is not as rich (especially in terms of rare resources required for dwellings of level 7 creatures), players often try to build Castle and as many creature dwellings as they can, in order to recruit as many creatures as possible by week 2.

Dragogeddon

A tactical maneuver, wherein the hero aims to cast the Armageddon spell without harming his own troops. In the original Restoration of Erathia, Black Dragons and Gold Dragons were the best creatures to have when using this tactic, hence the name dragogeddon. Important note is that Red and Green Dragons, who are, respectively, basic versions of Black and Gold ones, are immune only to 1-3 level spells, and thus will be normally damaged by Armageddon which is level 4 spell.

In order for dragogeddon tactics to work in the best possible way, the hero requires:

• at least advanced Wisdom to learn Armageddon
• high power skill for Armageddon to cause as much damage as possible
• reasonable knowledge for sufficient spell points to cast the spell at least few times
• creatures with appropriate spell immunity to cause damage only to enemy units.

Possible creatures for the dragogeddon tactics are:

• Black Dragons from Dungeon (but not Red!)
• Gold Dragons from Rampart (but not Green!)
• Efreet Sultans from Inferno
• Fire Elementals, Magma Elementals, Magic Elementals or Phoenixes from Conflux

Additionally, golems may be used for the tactic because of their Spell damage reduction ability. For this purpose, Tower's Stone and Iron Golems are typically the easiest to gather. However, dragogeddon tactics are often used in situations where it is essential to rapidly – preferably in the first round of combat – destroy enemy forces, and therefore golems with a slow speed rating are not a preferable choice. Conflux's Fire Elementals and Magic Elementals are not significantly better. Another option is using Archangels or Arch Devils who are faster than Gold or Black Dragons, casting Anti-magic on them in the first turn and Armageddon afterwards (beware that Anti-magic disallows you to resurrect units).

The combination artifact Power of the Dragon Father, while hard to obtain, makes all of the hero's units immune to Armageddon, allowing dragogeddon usage with any army.

Another situation for dragogeddon is when a player needs to weaken an enemy hero's main force. When used for this purpose, the attacking method is typically hit-and-run, which makes speed essential and Phoenixes the best choice. It is vital for the hero to act first in the combat, cast Armageddon and then surrender (or retreat), and then repeat the process. In an ideal situation, the enemy hero's movement has ended up near the defending player's town, when it is a short distance to attack the enemy hero over and over again with Phoenixes combined with Armageddon.

The biggest threats for dragogeddon are Orb of Inhibition, disallowing the use of all spells in combat and Recanter's Cloak, suppressing spells any higher than level 3.

In general, Dungeon's Black Dragons are more likely to be part of Dragogeddon than Rampart's Gold Dragons, since Armageddon spell appears only in evil alignment towns (Inferno, Necropolis, and Dungeon). If a map has Rampart and/or Conflux but no evil alignment towns, it is almost impossible to use dragogeddon tactics.

Artifact Monopoly

A tactic for the turn's first human player of every month. Since all Artifact Merchants carry the same stock, the human player who is first in the turn order gets the first choice of artifacts to buy every month. This can be a huge advantage during multiplayer games, as the computers always act after the human players.

If playing with Shadow of Death expansion, a solid use of the strategy is to buy every combination artifact piece they can afford at the first round of the month. After a few months, and with some luck in adventuring, the first player - using this tactic - may combine few of the easier combination artifacts like Bow of the Sharpshooter, Cloak of the Undead King or Wizard's Well - all quite powerful.

A mite, but not an enemy, very charming, no enmities

If you don't have the resources to run that one town you need the troops from, let the enemy capture it and spend all their resources building it for you, then when they least expect it, take it back with minimal force. Losses are 500 (basic city) over 1000 (with Town Hall building) over 2000 (City Hall) gold to 4000 gold (Capitol city, losing the Capitol to the enemy destroys the 10k gold Capitol building) each day and the added costs of recapturing the town - but the Resources needed for better buildings might even be harder to come by and you want that high level unit buildings to be built in the long term, why not let the enemy build them.

Stack divide, and conquer

Flanking has its uses, Cyclops, Wraith and Genie units with their casting or castle wall damage feature work without considering the unit amount of the stack , so Cyclops that have damage castle walls as a special will get one castle wall attack per Cyclops stack (or even advanced Ballistics and thus two shots when the stack is a Cyclops King stack), the number of Cyclops in the stack is not relevant and Genies will get their usual allotment of spells without regarding the stack size too - one Genie and his utility spells is as important as 100 considering spells that they can cast - as opposed to Faerie Dragons that use damaging spells that depend on the number of units the stack has. Genies are level 5 creatures, a Cyclops is a level 6 creature, both are a little bit faster than level 1 or 2 units in general - and those tend to die off easily midgame so the open places in the army of the hero are not actually wasted given utility spells on worthwhile creatures or faster sieges and additionally higher level creatures also tend to move faster on the adventure map.

Faction Specific Strategies

• Castle
• Rampart
• Tower
• Inferno
• Necropolis
• Dungeon
• Stronghold
• Fortress
• Conflux
• Cove
• Factory

See also

• Tricks