The hero was Spyder the Rogue, and the gear was so-so.
The answer to the obvious question is “Four Great Wyrms, and five Giant Spiders.” On a one square island I hand to Wind Walk to, meaning it was so late in the game it made no difference. The spell was an insult — after I picked up one green book, I spent half the game trying to get that spell, only the game gave me everything else but it.
Started with 11 blue books
Why is it, if I get one green book, the next retort I find is Nature Mastery, not Sorcery Mastery?
What kind of attack stack did you use to win that fight? 4 great wyrms is no easy battle. (Although archmage makes it a lot easier to cast magic in a node, I just recently discovered.)
That was a weird battle. And archmage didn’t seem to make much difference. I took in six paladins and three wizard/warlocks, all with flight, and they got eaten. I killed three of the spiders, and escaped with a wizard and warlock. Second try, I went in with six wizard/warlocks, one paladin, and two longbowmen (all elite, both times).
The battle was buggy as hell. The wyrms shouldn’t have been able to touch anything, but they closed on one of the archers (webbed), ate it, and then started attacking one of the flying wizards — but they couldn’t do a single point of damage to it despite repeated attacks. They took plenty, though, and that’s what won it for me. The paladins, also webbed, were ignored while they freed themselves, killed the spiders, and then circled back to attack the wyrms. Which I’d forgotten I couldn’t doom bolt them because of the node, and was burning them down, bit by bit, with direct fire from the casters and counterattacks from my invulnerable(!) wizards.
As soon as the paladins got close, the remaining pair of wyrms killed it, then killed the immortal wizards (which I accidentally attacked with — they weren’t immune to counterattacks), and then started chewing their way through the rest of the force — despite flight — except for one wizard unit the last badly-damaged wyrm couldn’t touch. It sat out of reach while I burned mana until I finally summoned a Phantom Beast to do the last few points of damage to the wyrm.
The game is really getting annoying, what with its bugginess; I reinstalled it to fix the worst of them, but the weirdness is aggravating. Giving the enemy multiple turns because I flipped in and out of auto-resolve is a big one. (I do that to speed combats). Another queer one is when a unit shows up with zero hit points and no figures on the battle map. I can heal them back to “life”, but if I don’t, they die on the first hit. Or I’ll have nine units on a tower, and only four show up for battle.
Another thing, that was my third four-great wyrm node of the game. The other two had crappy treasure because I left one or two wyrms after the first battle and had to go back to finish it off.
That thing about towers is because a tower is really two spaces, not one. Sometimes it thinks that some of a stack is on one side and the rest is on the other. Definitely a bug, but the way to solve it is when you add units to a tower, activate them all and move them outside and back in again. The forces the game to think they’re all together — and then they all show up on both sides.
There definitely are bugs in the game. Another is that enemy wizards can summon floating islands into squares where your units are parked. Dunno just how that works, myself.
My preferred force for taking out Wyrms is a whole bunch of shadow demons. The intersting thing is, if you flee from a battle you lose a bunch of your units, but if the battle runs 50 turns and everyone retreats “exhausted”, you don’t lose anything that’s still standing at the end. So since shadow demons are fliers, I move them up to point blank range and let off all 8 rounds of range strikes.
then melee. Hit the wyrm once, get damaged, and then sit a bunch of turns and regenerate. Once the stack is back up to 4 figures, hit the wyrm again.
With six stacks of shadow demons, there’s a chance of taking one Wyrm down, and then retreating exhausted. Keep repeating until they’re all gone.
It doesn’t work really well with wyrms because they’re so damned tough, but that’s my standard way of taking out earth elementals in green nodes, and for them it works great.
Yeah, I’ve used the “retreat exhausted” trick many times, and even saved a few wall-less cities with it. Or walled, if I have fliers and the other side doesn’t.
All blue is definitely weaker in the starting game that all death, but late game, it can impose a lock that the other wizards just can’t escape from. I’ve got Suppress Magic and Detect Magic running, with a large reserve to throw Spell Blast at will. No Spell of Mastery or Disjunction can get past all that. Paladins and sky drakes are immune to spells, but I have Magic Immunity if I need it to protect units from dark elf magic blasts, plus Wind Walking, Enchant Road, and Flight gives me unmatched mobility. Oh, and one thing I learned this game was that Recall ignores Planar Seal. So I parked Baghtru (armsmaster) in a city producing pallies, sent longbowmen and wizards there too, and started shipping elites across to Myrror. Worked like a charm until I was ready to Disjunct the seal and open all the towers to my stacks of prepared troops.
Apparently, Suppress Magic can even stop the Spell of Return, sometimes. Or at least Freya was defeated when she should have been only banished based on the number of cities she had left; then about twenty turns later, I got a message that her Spell of Return was suppressed. I guess it has to make the check immediately, to make the cities neutral if it fails? But Ssra keeps coming back, like a bad penny. I’ve banished him four times now.