Strategies
General Strategies
Choosing a good primary (main) hero
- Good main hero is good in battle. Some heroes are simply equipped with unnecessary secondary skills like Eagly Eye and Learning. Avoid them. Archery, Offense or Armorer is 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.
- Heroes that can be better with each level are 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 combinating their speciality with specific primary skills.
- Good hero can move fast. Someone with logistics (od navigation on water maps) is much better than slow heroes. Not only fast heroes can better attack or collect resources, they also gain experience faster. So, Gunnar or Kyrre are good options.
- Estates, Scholar and similar skills are useful, but normally main hero do not have enough skills slots to have them. There are simply more important skills.
- No magic skill? Not good. Get one. Or two. Main hero should not have all four of them, because there will be not enough slots for other, might or magic related skills.
- Some secondary skills are great in combination. For example, if you like spell Chain lightning, combination of Air Magic, Sorcery and Wisdom is a way to go. It can be also even more improved with Intelligence.
- Some heroes start with a lot of creatures. With specialist for level 1, 2 or 3 units, you can clear the mine defenders easier. However, choose units, that you will use in the final phases of the game as well.
- There is a lot of good heroes and bad heroes. Use forums and Wiki to know more about them.
- Find your build. Different towns needs different heroes, but some of the heroes are great in any town, while others are usable only in one town. For example, Valeska is good in castle town, 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 great for this hero.
- Choose based on map. Are you playing a map with lots of snow or swamp? Take someone with pathfinding.
Choosing a good secondary (helper) hero
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Early Capitol
This tactics is great on closed maps, when all enemies are far and not doing any problems in the first turns. If you rush for early capitol, you can have more gold than other players. Pros: You can have more income, so you can build new units and buildings with enough gold. You can also have more heroes than usual. Cons: With limited amount of creature buildings, you cannot make a good defense early. You also cannot attack all the mine protectors. So while you will not have a problem with gold, you may miss enought ore, crystals etc in the city development.
Rushing for capitol is of course hard on higher difficulty. Capitol costs 10 000 gold, castle and citadel costs 7 500 gold. Many buildings, like blacksmiths, are not that useful early on (or almost useless for some time), yet you simply need them. However, difference in two weeks, with capitol and without capitol, is 14 x 2000 gold, 28 000 gold in total.
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.
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 resistance 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 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.