Speed Mastery strategy working well
Posted: Wed Dec 21, 2022 3:40 am
I've noticed that in this game I get to a point where the AI just has so many cities. I can defend and I can take any city, but at a point its just too many to deal with, even on Small maps it seems. So I pulled out my "Speed Mastery" strategy and it works better in this game than the original, because in the original I typically won by conquest, even with Speed Mastery.
It's basically a variant of Artificer/Runemage. The picks are:
2 Sorcery + 2 Chaos + 2 Nature
Artificer
Runemage
Node Mastery
Sage Master
Conjuration
Picks: Hell Hounds, Phantom Warriors, Water Walking or Web.
This means that you will have very few spells to research and you will have many boosts to research, for Arcane Spells as well as Summons, plus Sage Master, plus you start with 2 additional Arcane spells already known.
The result is that you get to Summon Hero very fast and even Summon Champion quickly. Plus you can make your own artifacts, even though they aren't the uber artifacts of the traditional strategy. Importantly, you get Water Walking for artifacts. So the early part of the game is generating mana and then summoning Hell Hounds and using Phantom Warriors to take nodes and neutral cities.
Take any hero you can get, they can all be made powerful with artifacts. Shoot for Summon Hero ASAP and use that to get 2 or 3 heroes, then fill out later with Champions.
But the key it, you will get to the Spell of Mastery pretty quickly, and the real strategy is to win by Spell of Mastery instead of having to win by conquest. The combination of Runemaster and Sage Master, along with the extra power from Node Mastery means that researching the SoM can often take less than 100 turns once it shows up in your Spellbook.
I'm playing this again now and got Jaer the Wind Mage on my first Summon Hero attempt. He now has 9 movement :p Less than 70 turns to Spell of Mastery to go and I'm on turn 210 of the game. And this hasn't even been a very well played game, plus I researched every spell prior to going for SoM just so I wouldn't pop them in lairs. Could have gone for it much sooner.
It's basically a variant of Artificer/Runemage. The picks are:
2 Sorcery + 2 Chaos + 2 Nature
Artificer
Runemage
Node Mastery
Sage Master
Conjuration
Picks: Hell Hounds, Phantom Warriors, Water Walking or Web.
This means that you will have very few spells to research and you will have many boosts to research, for Arcane Spells as well as Summons, plus Sage Master, plus you start with 2 additional Arcane spells already known.
The result is that you get to Summon Hero very fast and even Summon Champion quickly. Plus you can make your own artifacts, even though they aren't the uber artifacts of the traditional strategy. Importantly, you get Water Walking for artifacts. So the early part of the game is generating mana and then summoning Hell Hounds and using Phantom Warriors to take nodes and neutral cities.
Take any hero you can get, they can all be made powerful with artifacts. Shoot for Summon Hero ASAP and use that to get 2 or 3 heroes, then fill out later with Champions.
But the key it, you will get to the Spell of Mastery pretty quickly, and the real strategy is to win by Spell of Mastery instead of having to win by conquest. The combination of Runemaster and Sage Master, along with the extra power from Node Mastery means that researching the SoM can often take less than 100 turns once it shows up in your Spellbook.
I'm playing this again now and got Jaer the Wind Mage on my first Summon Hero attempt. He now has 9 movement :p Less than 70 turns to Spell of Mastery to go and I'm on turn 210 of the game. And this hasn't even been a very well played game, plus I researched every spell prior to going for SoM just so I wouldn't pop them in lairs. Could have gone for it much sooner.