Talk:Unholy Alliance

Hero Secondary Skills

The user commentary notes that Yog cannot start with both Wisdom and Earth Magic. This is false. I started playing the campaign today and received both secondary skills together while rerolling Yog. I am unsure of how one would check to see if there are any special rules for hero generation in the campaigns, but extracting and then opening the scenario in the map editor it appears just as any other scenario. The secondary skills Diplomacy, Eagle Eye, Learning, Navigation, and Scholar are all disabled as level up picks, but can still be received at random from witch huts. Barbarians at level up have a probability of 3 for Air and Earth Magic, 2 for Fire Magic and Wisdom, and are restricted from learning Water Magic. Less the banned skills and the four Yog always starts with, these probabilities are out of 68 on his first level up. From what I have briefly tested, at map generation, the game will simulate Yog (and any hero, for that matter) leveling up from 1 to 25. Since his four starting skills are already at expert, at level 2 the computer will roll two new secondaries based on the standing available probability, and then presumably have a 50/50 chance of picking either. Level 3 and subsequent will then have the choice of improving this new basic skill or another brand new skill with updated probability, and this will repeat until all 24 secondary skill points (8 skills at 3 points for expert) have been received at level 13. Combined with the rules laid out on the hero class page for might heroes regarding guaranteed magic skills, this gives Yog, or any Barbarian class hero in this context, a very, very low chance of having three or four magic secondaries.

Now, there is some caveat to this understanding of Yog or other heroes' randomly generated skills. In my one to two hundred or so restarts, I definitely noticed that some combinations seemed to appear with increased frequency. For example, if I got both Air Magic and Wisdom, the two other skills would be all over the place. However, Logistics and First Aid were almost exclusively together as the following two. So the combination of Air Magic, Wisdom, Logistics, and First Aid seemed to appear with unusual frequency compared to any other combination of Air Magic, Wisdom, and two other random skills. If I got Earth Magic, the vast majority of times two of the three remaining skills would be Archery and Artillery. These combinations seem to make sense, as hasted creatures will enter melee combat rapidly and benefit from healing retaliation damage, and slowed enemies will be especially vulnerable to ranged attacks. If I got both Air and Earth Magics together, one of the two remaining skills was almost always Armorer. Now, the probability of skill rolls is most likely memoryless and thus getting one skill would have no bearing on what subsequent martial/adventure skills appear next, but it certainly feels in the moment like intentional weighting towards particular combos. A limited sample size may show a bias that does not exist if allowed to continue beyond a thousand or more attempts. I only restarted so many times, after all.

With all this said, I would say this was just me suggesting with extra steps that instead the commentary be that, if desired, one can reroll any of the heroes' secondary skills, but one should be mindful of each hero class's probability table when deciding how much they should try to get a certain skill or combination of skills. Hopefully, understanding how the random skills are generated every time at restart will allow someone to be better informed of how much time they would like to waste for this or any other scenario. Of course, it is always possible to just edit the scenarios to have the heroes start with skills of player choice and then repack the campaign file instead.--174.74.209.45 11:23, 15 April 2023 (UTC)