Strategies

From Heroes 3 wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

General Strategies

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.

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:

Additionally, golems may be used for the tactic because of their damage resistance ability. For this purpose, Tower's Stone and Iron Golems are typically the easiest to gather. However, dragogeddon tactics are often used in a 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 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 short distance to attack the enemy hero over and over again with Phoenixes combined with Armageddon.

The biggest threat for dragogeddon is Orb of Vulnerability, which suppresses natural magic immunities of creatures, thus making it possible for Armageddon to harm also the attackers own troops.


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 turn 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 built them.


Stack division and conquer

Flanking has its uses, Cyclops 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 amount 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 worthwile creatures or faster sieges and additionally higher level creatures also tend to move faster on the adventure map.


Faction Specific Strategies

See also