Tips & Tricks Thread - Conquest of Elysium 3

Post any any random tips or tricks here.

Burning Forests : Ending your turn in a burning forest will damage your troops. When committing arson, always save enough MP to flee the scene of the crime.

Recruitment : If you are already looking at the site and want to make SURE you recruit there, then a long right-click on the site will open the recruit screen already set to that site

Tip : Put at least one unit in every farm, village, town, mine that is within one turn from a castle or other defense. That way someone cant run thru multiple things of yours then disappear into the fog. At that very first spot they have to STOP and fight that one unit. This gives you a chance to jump out with almost everything in the castle to STOMP his butt, then run back in (leaving one lone unit behind again of course)

TIP: never walk out onto a frozen lake or frozen river without hovering on that snowflake in the upper right of your stat screen.
If it says Late Winter then don't move onto the ice because Early Spring is around the corner.

Tip : The game does moves in order of nations. Keep this in mind when setting up team games.

Bakemono :
Uncontrolled summoned creatures remain on the map if they defeat their summoner, this means a Bakemono Sorcerer can use Immortality + No Sacrifice Summoning to dump a wandering monster in hostile territory. Just remember to bring a second commander to lead your troops out of the way before you do the summons.

Necromancer : Carrions make great escorts for your vampires. Both flying, both immortal and having something in the front line will allow your vampire to cast spells instead of being tied up in melee if you are attacked.

Edited by: catquiet

if you have an army on a frozen lake and it becomes spring, does your army drown?

Yes.
TIP: never walk out onto a frozen lake or frozen river without hovering on that snowflake in the upper right of your stat screen.
If it says Late Winter then dont move onto the ice because Early Spring is around the corner.

Random tip: Place a single piece of chaff (a single slave, longdead, or spearman...) in every single square you ever go through. This will greatly hamper any enemy and independent movement, effectively reducing their entire movement rate to 1 until the chaff is cleared. Also, it is recon at the same time: you can watch the battles and see what he has coming.

That sounds like it would bleed your armies to nothing fairly quickly, I usually don't have that many troops to spare.

catquiet wrote: That sounds like it would bleed your armies to nothing fairly quickly, I usually don't have that many troops to spare.

That depends actually. A goblin, a longdead, a slave, a spirit summons, a wounded soldier I usually have an overabdunance of mid-game +. Maybe I should have said: this is rarely for early game, although some races can do that. Also, I find it actually worthwhile: huge strategic advantage at the price of mild loss in striking power seems to pay off for me.

The frozen lake thingy is more RTFM stuff, this time in the movement section.

You don't need a leader to have troops in squares, drop a few over after conquering important locations. A small garrison, in places that are important to you to keep, prevents losing them to a few wandering brigands or even more horrifying... deer.

Placing small garrisons like 2-3 melee / 3-4 ranged troops can deal with a surprising amount of independents, due to the fact they get to deal damage first before the enemy gets to strike.

Also helps with lifting the fog of war and prevent nasty surprises.

Helped me a lot.

Also putting a garrison on an Ancient Forest, even if you can't do anything with it yourself due to the class you play, is a good way to prevent independent generation. Edit:

Edirr wrote: Ancient Forests only stop generating creatures if you can flag them. If you can't, just having troops there will do diddly squat.

Ah there goes that theory then. I only tried it in 1 baron game so far, so might well just have been lucky with generation.

Edited by: CustodianV131

Ancient Forests only stop generating creatures if you can flag them. If you can't, just having troops there will do diddly squat.

If you arent quite into the "drop something in every square" frame of mind..

Put at least one unit in every farm, village, town, mine that is within one turn from a castle or other defense. That way someone cant run thru multiple things of yours then disappear into the fog. At that very first spot they have to STOP and fight that one unit. This gives you a chance to jump out with almost everything in the castle to STOMP his butt, then run back in (leaving one lone unit behind again of course)

Tip: Random heroes and wizards often come with magic items. Magic items are otherwise rare, so this can actually be one of the main ways you'll get to see them. Since the cost of the hero/wizard is generally comparable to the cost of a regular commander, any item you get is a bargain.

As libraries increase your chance to be offered a wizard, this also suggests that they can be worth grabbing even if you're not sure you'll have one of your casters take advantage of the long course of study there.

Oops - should have mentioned that the magic items coming with recruited heros/wizards info is in the manual. Still, it's something folks may have missed/not remember.

Additional tip: Amphibious commanders can scout the coastlines for you with less risk than land-based scouts as there are fewer critters in the water and few to none are stealthy, plus most enemy players won't have many/any stacks that can chase you in the water. The water knights summoned by warlocks are good obvious choices, if a bit expensive, especially if you summon a few water troops for support. Mound Kings (random necromantic summons) are more cost-effective at 40 hands of glory. There is also a magic item that grants the amphibious ability.

Edited by: MorlacRowan

Demons, starting with major summons, bring items (mostly branded weapons) as well. And they can be summoned at no cost even if they do not like it
Summoned dragons can have some nice items too, but dragons are expensive (and will be even more expensive after the summoning cost bug is fixed ).

Tip: Unless you have a serious emergency, *always* make sure you have enough money to purchase 1 of your apprentices: save up, you don't want to miss buying them, since sometimes their arrival is few and far between. Plan at least a little bit ahead. Don't go overboard in recruiting troops and miss on a commander. Save in autumn, since you will have 3 months of winter with very little gold income, and what if your long-sought-after apprentice comes then?

Further to that suggestion, as some races, your Mercenaries are really important parts of what you want. For example, as Senator, I really want Old Wizards, and they get offered few and far between. Therefore I normally try and keep 300 gold at all times, waiting for one to show up. Most races have a similar need to keep some gold and iron in reserve.

How far into the game do you start doing that? Saving money for apprentices or mercs?

It's going to be awhile in most games before you earn 300 gold, even if you don't spend anything.
A little bit easier for races that can rely on summons for replacement troops, but for most you've got to balance saving for the big juicy buys with investing in expansion to earn more money faster.

I like to try keeping a bit over 100 gold for emergencies/opportunities as early in the game as possible. certainly not until I've fleshed out my starting stacks a bit, but not long after that, either.

on that note, if your nation (like Baron) gets the occasional 'bulk-purchase' offers like 10 archers for 70 gold, you really should try to (a) keep enough gold and iron on hand to take advantage if they are offered, and (b) know which units tend to go on sale and which do not, as that may guide your buying decisions when you need to buy non-sale troops.

Edited by: MorlacRowan

Tip 1: Try to get as many commanders as possible. Using a tiny squad as a mobile recon post can be invaluabe.
Tip 2: Using your recon squad, you can often trick the AI into squandering its resources. Example: I had captured a juicy Port and a Silvermine 2 tiles away in a faraway rocky corner of a map, but did not have the resources to defend them sufficiently: the AI captured them back, but also only held them lightly, so that I could recapture them, but again: was unwilling to bring a large defensive garrison there. However, by placing a scouting team nearby, I saw the AI had gathered 2 quite reasonable forces and was underway to take those back. I did not have the forces to beat his stacks. However, I did have about 1/3 of his firepower nearby, consisting mostly of two decent commanders. Just before he arrived, I was able to place my forces in the town and the mine, and these forces (not sufficient to win in my opinion) deterred him from attacking, and he retreated. I moved my forces away, and he promptly began the journey back; I re-garrisoned, and he retreated again. Rinse and repeat, view with scouts. This way, I invested very little (less than one-third of his forces), but was able to tie up and make useless his much larger forces, so I was more than twice as effective, AND I kept both the port and the silvermine this way.

Even simpler way to tie up the AI is to sit in a citadel (offering defense bonus 2 or 3) and recapture nearby farms with a fast commander. Nobody garrisons farms and AI is very timid when it comes to storming citadels... so you can distract huge forces with a lonely cavalryman and a couple of scary-looking summons.
I usually avoid resorting to such cheap trickery, but in some very hard scenarios it becomes necessary

That same tactic can also be with one amphibious leader.
Stand off coast. Rush in to grab a couple of spots then step back onto the coastline. it can be very irritating to an opponent whether its AI or Human.

A human player can counter, say, by putting a strong army in the area and placing a little chaff here and there to bog you down... Still, an amphibian raiding party moving along a coastline can be very annoying.

TIP when playing TEAMs (such as with AIs doing the Trial by Fire campaigns). The game does moves in order of nations. Put enemies first, then team members, and you last. At least I like to go last so I can help my team members with whatever they are doing.

Do you want to move before your enemy? before your team? after everyone?

Edited by: gp1628

A tip for newbie players who are still learning how to handle a game. Creating a snaky/tower map makes it much easier to deal with the roaming indie hordes and the AI opponents. I usually go for a 99/20 square map.

jsv wrote: Even simpler way to tie up the AI is to sit in a citadel (offering defense bonus 2 or 3) and recapture nearby farms with a fast commander. Nobody garrisons farms and AI is very timid when it comes to storming citadels... so you can distract huge forces with a lonely cavalryman and a couple of scary-looking summons.
I usually avoid resorting to such cheap trickery, but in some very hard scenarios it becomes necessary

If you want to kill off all the AI's commanders, you can use a powerful stack to take a valuable resource deep in his territory (silver mine or somesuch) then immediately move off of it. The AI will send over a modest liberation force, usually consisting of 20-30 troops plus a commander. Since you stack is right there, kill them and reflag the resource. Move off the resource, rinse, repeat. This is a good way of bleeding the AI's gold resources as he will then buy up every commander he can to replace the ones he is busy throwing away. I won a game this way vs a barbarian even though he still controlled about half the map.
Pure cheese, of course.

Here is one more tip;

1. Fill out your first rank. As attacks are directed to a random unit of the first rank, you should fill out the first rank of your army (usually the melee) so as to distribute the damage around. This increases the survivability of your army which in turns increases overall damage dealt (dead units do not do damage). Filling in of your ranged units (read as middle ranks) could be done after the first rank is filled (with some surplus for accidental losses).
2. Assassins are great as they could potentially mitigate losses by taking out casters of the opposing army. You should consider getting more than one in a single stack to increases chances of knocking off that caster. Aside from AIs, these would be typically useful during those library raids... As a counter to assassins, you could obtain siege weapons or other type of fillers for those back ranks.
3. Indie generators: Flag them if you can't capitalize on them. Roaming independants could cost you a poorly defended revenue and it is typically a good idea to shut down the generator. However if you can find a way to charm/enslave the spawned creature, you could potentially 'farm' them for troops. People who could do those are usually druids, enchanters et al...

I guess it might be a good idea to mention:

On the first turn, look around and try to get an idea about how big the random was on creating your map. If you see things like 2 wolves and 1 moose then that is very different than seeing 7 deer or 4 moose. Do not form a hard habit of walking out with xx and leaving x behind. Take a look and let it decide your first moves. Even wait a couple of turns for more things to show up and give you an idea of how wild the wilderness is before you walk out.