Walkthrough: Campaign Every Dog has its Day

[cjlee]

This walks through the Lost Tales 2 Three-map Dogwoggle campaign, Every Dog Has Its Day. version 1.18

I did not really like this character Dogwoggle from Heroes IV, the Gathering Storm. He was dumb, but not funny-dumb, just plain dumb.

The campaign is not dumb, however. I suspect it was not produced by Limbic. It is significantly harder than the other campaigns on Heroic. This doesn't make it so hard that a gamer would have severe difficulty completing it, just that you have to make some judgement about each battle, as opposed to being able to just fight all neutral stacks you see. Very much like the battles in H4, you have to pick and choose your fights. At most you can defeat 1/4 of all stacks in the first week, 1/4 in the second week, and may have to wait a month for troops and a stronger hero before you can kill the strongest neutrals.

You start with Dogwoggle in a dying world. Its time to flee, because of the Reckoning! The first part of the campaign is a non brainer - you spend 3 days walking through a clearly defined path.

The second part has some challenge. You find yourself alone in a land where all the stacks are deadly. Head NE and you will see a settlement with some troops willing to join you. With that small starting army, your next task is to level up. You do have to pick your battles wisely; there is a gold mine to the SE guarded by a Landsknech. You can take it, but you'll sustain substantial losses which slow down your leveling up. I recommend you do it anyway, for early income even though you don't need this income right away.

I fought the battle three times, did not like having many casualties (lost half my Brutes/ Crushers, so I reloaded and picked other neutral stacks to bully for experience. I later regretted it, because the Landsknetch stack grows by 1 each week, and each 1 Landsknetch is far more powerful than the fresh batch of Core troops that you can recruit each week, so the power difference between you and them just grows. Due to the lack of spells, every battle has to be conducted with troops, so you can't afford too many losses.

There is an Inn to the SW called the Man with the Flaming Hair. It is guarded by a fairly strong stack of medusas and other dungeon creatures. Try to kill this stack as soon as possible which liberates your next objective: to find a castle.

There are a number of battles to fight before you can reach the only Stronghold on the map, at the SE corner. Fight them. Make a beeline for that Stronghold, and you can finally start building up and recruiting troops and assistant heroes. I got Drakon, that ratlike creature who is supposed to be a gnoll hero from Heroes III. Drakon increases the number of your gnolls being produced, so make him governor. Not as if Dogwoggle is capable of governing anything.

For the next two or three weeks, just keep building your stronghold and leveling up. Every stat booster on this map is guarded by something strong, so you have enough challenge to keep going. The enemy is behind a garrison and a barrier and won't attack you. I also recommend that you grab all artifacts that you can see, even the Dark/ Necromantic ones and the ones in the Crusader Commandery and other structures. Artifacts carry over to the next map, and you will have a Necromancer join you.

The harmonic chainmail is in the southern region by the side of the main road to the castle. It is poorly guarded.
In this scenario, Harmonic Chainmail adds 15 to defense and carries over. I personally think it is a great sin to give someone such a powerful artifact so early, especially if this is a barbarian hero with almost no defense stats. If you want more challenge, just don’t equip Dogwoggle with the artifact.

I could have played the campaign without the Harmonic Chainmail. I like to play ranged units, and I always invest heavily in Centaurs and Gnolls. Centaur Chieftains have no range penalty, and Gnoll Hunters have this opportunistic attack ability, where they get a free attack on whichever enemy is the first that you hit in melee combat. So you can always use your Furies to strike an enemy. Furies get no retaliation, and the Gnoll Hunters will follow up with a free ranged attack.

The only units I really am at risk of losing are the Brutes/ Crushers. But since the Basilisk Riders have lowest initiative, they are the last to move in normal battle and first to move after everyone has waited. So they will move before the Brutes, absorbing the first retaliation. Basilisk Riders don’t do much damage compared to Centaurs, but they are great tanks. Once they have taken the first blow your Crushers can move in and inflict more damage.

It’s up to you whether you want to equip the Harmonic Chainmail. I guess if you are much more melee inclined than me, not equipping the HC may lead to a substantial increase in difficulty level.

When you have run out of things to do, hire everyone you can and smash that barrier. The enemy is to the West, and he isn't strong. You have to be careful to take all stat boosters without killing the boss enemy, General/Lord A- who is angry at you for having failed to stop Killgor from destroying Erathia. You win by killing Lord A and taking his town, so I recommend that you take the town without killing Lord A. That way you can increase Dogwoggle's modest complement of spells. Since Dogwoggle can at most get 3 Arcane knowledge (my Dogwoggle had none), he is very limited in spell power. A broad complement of spells might help.

Once you kill Lord/General A, map is done!


Map 2

You start out with Dogwoggle and Sandro in the SW underground. both should be level 20s (unless you failed to max out Dogwoggle in Map 1, which is very unlikely). You have a fort near your starting location, as well as a few creature generators.

You start with 5 castles, one on each corner of the aboveground map, and one Necropolis in the NE corner of the underground.

DO NOT BUILD ANYTHING! All 5 castles will be taken from you by enemy heroes within 3 days, and you can't defend them. Instead, straight away hire everyone you can in the creature generators near you, and start expanding to the East. You will soon find a staircase in the far east. Take it, and you emerge on the surface near a Stronghold that was once yours. Kill the enemy hero guarding this Stronghold, and finally you have a town of your own again!

I believe this Stronghold can be taken in a week, but I took 3 weeks. Partly because I didn't know where I was going, and partly because I took several days to track down and kill an enemy hero in the underground so that he could not backstab me when Dogwoggle and Sandro were on the surface.

A better player would certainly send Sandro to take the Necropolis in the NE underground, and Dogwoggle to take the Stronghold on the surface SE. I prefer to keep my heroes near each other, so that they can do complementary things. You can't hire anyone else in this scenario, so you are very shorthanded. I also like to explore and visit all structures. Don't like to play that kind of game where you just charge into enemy territory and take all castles, and half the map is still covered by fog of war by the time you are done.

There is no real danger from the enemy heroes who have taken away your other castles, although right now they are still too strong for you.

Your objectives for winning are:

1) Not to lose Koyle’s keep until the Shatterstaff is found.

The shatterstaff is supposedly a powerful artifact like Armageddon’s blade, with the ability to destroy everything.
Koyle’s Keep is the fort that you start out in. To ensure that you don’t lose it, the best solution is to kill the enemy hero in the underground who has taken your NE necropolis, Mortis. Once you kill that hero, Koyle’s Keep is safe.

After that it is merely a question of wandering around and visiting structures and killing the enemy. I found the Shatterstaff quasi-randomly, when I was just moving through the western part of the surface area after having taken the SE stronghold Garloch followed by the SW haven Goodsprings castle. I suspect it is an event that triggers after you have taken two castles, because there were no clues.

I don’t know if it was intentional on the mapmakers’ part, but I could pick up a Dwarven Crossbow practically right away. That is very important to me, because I like ranged units and this crossbow has no ranged penalty for your troops. Alternatively I could have invested skill points in Air Magic and the Storm Arrows perk. Since Dogwoggle is not a magic hero, he has no other use for mana.

2) Throw the shatterstaff into some lava pool.
That requires you to pass through some lands controlled by the red knight faction on the NE surface. Obviously for dogwoggle it is just a question of killing everything that moves and visiting everything that doesn’t!

There is a cartographer just ¼ of a day’s journey to the north of the garrison separating the SE surface area from the mid-East surface area. Cost of maps is only $1000. Once you take it, you can see the entire surface. And that will also allow you to see how bad Limbic is at fixing things. I was treated to the spectacle of enemy heroes marching on the same spot, galloping sideways, totally not exploring or clearing their own home area, etc. These problems were widely reported in the first version of H7 released 8 months ago, and still haven’t been fixed.

For Sandro fighting battles are very simple. Just keep defending in one corner, and casting Agony every battle. You should be able to cast Mass Agony after the first level up by choosing the Dark Knowledge Level III perk, and from then on there is no way you can lose any battle. Agony applies to all units I have seen so far, living and non living, elementals, undead, etc. The only creatures that won’t suffer from Agony, are those immune to dark magic or immune to all spells. Necromancy in H7 is calculated from the hit points of the enemy, unlike in previous versions of Heroes where Necromancy can’t be applied to Elementals or Golems or exceed the total number of your living opponents. So all fights are good fights for the high level, Mass Agony-equipped necromancer in Heroes 7. Even a fight against a bunch of powerful constructs or elementals will yield tons of skeletons. Whatever casualties you sustain, will always be less than the skeletons or ghosts you can harvest after the fight.

I strongly urge Limbic to nerf this overpowered spell. No one should be able to cast a ‘mass death’ spell that applies to all enemy units, without hurting your own. This is much worse than Armageddon in previous versions of Heroes.

HOWEVER, after playing this mission and getting conned, I would recommend that you finish it as quickly as possible. You should only need to defeat the red knight faction, which you can do very quickly by making a beeline for them once the shatterstaff is found and the ‘throw shatterstaff in some lava pool’ objective is unlocked.

Don’t bother to visit any level up structure. Don’t bother to get any spells for Dogwoggle. Don’t level up Sandro. Just throw everything you’ve got at the NE red knight faction, because they are guarding a barrier that leads to a boat. Once the knights are gone, the boat is yours. Get into it, sail a day east, and map is won!


Map 3

You start out… as Level 1 with no spells and artifacts. Everything you did in the last map is useless here. Absolutely nothing carries over! It turns out Sandro has betrayed you. (So have the mapmakers, because I spent over a month leveling Dogwoggle and making him really powerful only to find that my hard work never carried over!)

Your objective remains to throw the shatterstaff into a lava pool. But before you do that, you have to defeat all the lords in the region. Sandro has manipulated them into fighting against you, so it is a one vs all map. Don’t worry that you don’t see the shatterstaff in your inventory. The AI considers it in your possession already.

First thing you should do? Hire another hero, preferably someone with governor powers that help you. This map is huge, there are lots of resources, and it is also undeveloped (poor infrastructure) so your movement is going to be slow. You start at the very bottom of the map, roughly in the middle. There are four opponents you have to beat. The resources and stat boosters are modest in number, but fortunately the mapmakers have already assigned Dogwoggle with a number of bloodrage, warfare and offense skills as well as Expert Exploration (with Snatch already selected), so he is significantly better than your standard level 1 hero. You can just spend the first few skill points attained by level up, on more Exploration, Pathfinding and Air Magic.

Dogwoggle is a barbarian but not only can he not learn top level Offense skills, he can’t even learn the level of Master. (His max is Expert Offense.) Similarly, although he is defined as a ‘lucky’ hero, he can’t max out luck/ destiny either. He can only get to Master level destiny at most. Instead like all barbarians he gets to level up Warfare all the way. What are the use of Warfare units? Can you accumulate a stack of 20 and do 10000 damage? No. I’ll rather keep leveling up skills that are actually applicable to my army.

I don’t understand why it is with H7, but although you get a choice of 4 heroes to hire every week, you often get 1 or even no heroes from your own faction. This was again the case for this scenario. Dogwoggle is a barbarian who started in a barbarian town and I was hoping to get a barbarian hero to make governor (hopefully with creature generating bonuses) or at least combine armies with Dogwoggle. But no such luck – during the first 2 weeks on both my attempts of this map, all 4 heroes offered for hire were non barbarian. This really hurt my ability to supply a secondary hero with troops and expand. But sometimes you can make the best of a bad situation. On my second play through, I got the chance to hire Draezerak, a Necropolis hero with 2 Lilim, on the first day. Lilim have 3x higher hp than centaurs and are magnets for enemy attacks, so it is better to sacrifice them if the enemy wants to hit your ranged attackers.

My first structure built was the upgraded Harpy roost. That allowed me to hire more harpies and upgrade them to furies on the first day.

When you march west for 3 days from Anuck there is a little green or grassy area guarded by a garrison with a green two way portal. Ignore this for now because you aren’t strong enough to smash your way through. It is the portal to one of your enemies in the middle of the map, the yellow Kerm Te Bog faction.

In the Western region, 1.5 days NE of the dangerous cave, and 1.5 days NW of the Tribal Totem there is a stack of 25 Crushers waiting to join you. That is a very welcome boost in the first 2 weeks. Talking to them unlocks a quest to visit the Fire Lake and team up with an unexpected ally, so once you take the Ore mine next to your starting castle Anuck and the Stronghold Core dwelling to the south of Anuck, you might as well head due West and make a beeline for these orcs asap. (Oh, and remember to grab the sawmill on the way there!)

Once you grab these Crushers, bringing the Western region under your grasp within the second week should be easy. Because I delayed on my first try of this map, my fights in the third week (when enemy stacks were bigger) proved totally impossible against the single stack of 25 vampires guarding the Stronghold elite dwelling. That was why I decided to restart. If the vampires had been divided into 3 stacks I might have prevailed with acceptable casualties.

On my second pass through the vampires had changed into 3 smaller stacks of elite units Rakshasas, Air Elementals and Sun Deer. I find this randomizing of guarding stacks somewhat problematic. There is a very big difference to fighting a big stack of vampires, and 3 average sized numbers of mixed troops from 3 factions. For one, the mixed army of melee units does not complement each other in combat and they will reduce each other’s morale. Some of the neutral stacks around have as many as 5 factions in the same army, so defeating these demoralized troops is pretty easy – they will stand around for you to shoot!

Thanks to the many obstacles on the battlefield I was able to discover that if firing ranged shots at certain angles between obstacles, it doesn’t count as ‘covered’. (If you are firing head on at a Big creature partly blocked by an obstacle, that is considered ‘covered’ and range attack reduced.)

I would rather the mapmaker either customize all neutral stacks personally to give a controlled level of challenge, or have some other form of control over the challenge level. After fighting a number of battles here I have found the same battle terrain is used over and over again. That’s not good. It makes players anticipate the battle. For example the battlefield has several rock obstacles on the top, so I arranged my range units at the bottom to have un-covered attacks on the enemy. Also in many battles the AI was stupid and their melee units were stuck at the battlefield obstacles thereby giving me free shots. I get the impression the mapmaker did not play through his work.

In the western region is a Stronghold Elite creature, along with a fort (whose faction is random), a mercenary tower where you can buy Rakshasas and a school of war. Your castle is already partly built when you start, but due to the modest resources available you will be quite short of cash. I did not have money to rebuild the fort or visit the school of war. So I decided not to take the fort to the west. It would have cost more casualties than I could afford so early. Just grab the mines and the ‘Dangerous’ cave. Dangerous my foot; I always attack this cave because it is one of the least well defended money-giving structures in Heroes 7!

As for whether you should hire Rakshasa mercenaries, I was reluctant at first because my army already had Necropolis troops. A third faction would be fatal for my morale. But half a day’s ride NW of the mercenary tower, is a garrison that guards the entrance to your Green neighbour’s lands. (Barony of Morpheus.) It was too tempting to invade the enemy, and I needed troops.

Thanks to the Dangerous Cave I was able to build my capitol on the 10th day. I know many good players don’t do this, but I tend to assume a long fight and go for a strong economic foundation early on. This is a big map with no clear way to win it and everyone is against you.

I am not fond of launching half-prepared invasions normally, but this is H7 which is easier than all other versions of Heroes. I took the garrison with loss of 10 Furies (most people should be able to lose less or none; just watch for the walls falling because it means your Strike and Return ability over the wall is negated.)

Green Morpheus was a level 25 Wizard Ufretin in my playthrough. I attacked him during the third week and suffered the week of storm, when no ranged attacks work. I have written against the Week of Storm in the past, but that was back when your ranged units could not even fight. Now v1.18 seems to have patched that, and I was treated to the comical spectacle of ranged units hammering at each other in a very ugly melee.

Ufretin is an alchemist, and had higher attack than me! Luckily I had hired that 8 extra Rakshasa. During this battle I sacrificed my two Lilim to take retaliation, so that my other units could fight melee without retaliation. I also noticed that even during the week of storm, the warcry Engage only applies to the melee units.

First enemy (Green faction Barony of Morpheus) went down on W3D3. His entire home area was uncleared, not even the sawmill or ore pit. In retrospect, it wasn’t profitable to attack this guy. His entire area was undeveloped, and the neutral stacks are powerful enough to make it costly to clear them. His area is a dead end and leads nowhere else. So I had to make the lengthy trek back home to Anuck, without the benefit of portals (I’d entirely forgotten that Dogwoggle forgot all his previous spells thanks to being demoted to level 1.)

Since killing all your opponents is part of the mission, you have to kill Green eventually. The anti-Green campaign took a month, most of which was spent trekking/ crawling on the rough terrain. This map is really short on hero battles, and long on dreary trudging. Mapmaker probably does not know how to use the map editor to make roads.

As for your assistant hero, what is he doing in the meantime?

There is a magenta two way spirit gate barely 2 days NE of my starting castle. That magenta gate leads to a region in the NW rich in resources and boasting an archeological dig where you can hire Shantri golems and titans. Taking this region would be awesome, but I can’t do it in the first 2 weeks. There are some resources lying around in this region, so I suggest using your assistant hero to pick these up instead. Also note that in this region that the magenta gate leads to, is a red two way spirit gate. The red gate leads to the lava region where you are supposed to throw the Shatterstaff.

In the east of the lava region there is a one way, yellow spirit gate where you can take to return to just a couple days West of Anuck.

To the southwest of the magenta gate is a garrison that leads to Gray Necromancer’s territory, aka the Barony of Blister. This was the second of my 4 AI opponents that I invaded. By this point I had a very strong army and Dogwoggle was level 25, so we steamrolled our opponents. The enemy hero in this region was Castrata (remember her from H4?). Crushing her was way too easy. I think problem is that all the enemy heroes are set at the same levels and probably with identically strong armies, so as the game progresses and Dogwoggle levels up and hires more troops, battles get easier.

I know it is considered poor playing to accumulate troops and crush neutral stacks using force of numbers. In my defense I would like to point out that even if I hadn’t wanted to accumulate troops and steamroll the enemy, I could not have done so because it took so long to travel. The only way to play this faster would have been to build the town portal early in Anuck so that Dogwoggle would learn the town portal spell and return quickly. But it would be illogical and self defeating to start building the town portal too early, when resources should be spent on hiring troops, upgrading the harpy roost, etc.

Once I took the town of Blister in the NW during Month 2 Week 3, I immediately built a town portal and teleported my assistant hero in after putting Dogwoggle in the garrison. Then I put the assistant in the town entrance and made Dogwoggle walk a step out. When he cast town portal, he was portalled back to Anuck!

After reinforcing at Anuck, Dogwoggle went out again through the magenta gate. About 1 day to the SE of the magenta gate is a garrison that guards the Purple Barony of Rocky Springs. You know what to do. Steamroll the AI with your 2 month strong army. The Purple Sylvans are led by Blackdog, a might hero. He inflicted infinitely more casualties on my side than his entire army – killed 24 of my Gnoll Hunters with one hero attack, whereas the rest of his army killed nothing. I got less experience defeating this hero, than experience gotten on average from killing any of the neutral stacks guarding a mine on this map.

For most of the first 2 months my secondary hero Drazerak had only a small stack of skeletons, because I simply did not have the cash to outfit him with an army. He only managed to visit 3 learning stones during this entire time, so he was level 3 as of Month2 Week4 Day1. Then with 3 towns in my grasp and having supplied Dogwoggle with enough troops, I started hiring for Drazerak too. Thanks to the big, juicy stacks hanging around the city of Blister, which the AI had the goodness not to clear for me, I was able to get Drazerak to level 16… in just 4 battles during one week!

I am still very ambivalent about this leveling up thing. I have noticed that necromancers still have it easy in H7, much like they did in H6. Somehow they seem to have most spell power, their army keeps renewing and growing after every battle. I am not sure how this can be nerfed, or whether it should be nerfed to begin with.

After taking down the Barony of Rocky Springs, I was left with one of the original four enemies to defeat. I spent a few days traversing the lava region, but no event triggered. The meeting with the guy I was supposed to meet did not occur. So I decided to finish off the yellow Dark Elf faction, also known as the Barony of Kerm Te Bog. This was another laughably weak faction. I took them down on Month 3, and they still had no city hall built. My opponent was a Level 26 guy called Kardd. He had 1 strider and 1 medusa in his army (and only a few dozen of each core unit.) This is truly the least challenging version of Heroes ever. Ubic Limbsoft’s Heroes VII AI can’t beat the AI of flat 2D low resolution cartoons in Heroes I.

Timeoff here for an aside: I really did not like to see that they were pumping out the Dwarven Trial By Fire expansion. The original game is still far from being complete. It is dull. Every map I have played was only tough at the beginning when your hero was weak and his army small. Once you survive long enough, the challenge evaporates because the AI simply can’t keep up with you. They don’t even know to hire troops, to seek refuge in their castle, to level up and clear their own area. Pumping out new factions will only increase the number of weak units waiting to be cannon fodder for your hero. Those Dwarven Werehamsters (aka Kobolds) are going to die so easy. Who cares if Ubic Limbsoft now lets us level heroes up to 999? Do you really want to play so many mediocre battles where the AI stands around for you to shoot because they don’t know how to go around an obstacle?

Killing the fourth opponent finishes the Dog Eat Dog quest, and unlocks a quest to kill Boss Enemy Sandro who is now waiting for you in the eastern side of the lava region. Sandro is supposed to be strong, but hey, I now have a freshly leveled Drazerak who is level 20 by now and has a substantial army of his own. AI is too dumb, so you don’t need Dogwoggle to take down that boss hero.

Sandro’s army had 50-99 Lilim and 50-99 vampires, 500+ skeletons, etc. No matter how dumb the AI is, so many Lilim will put a big hole in your army thanks to their nova ranged attack. And if you cannot take down the vampires before they engage you at close quarters, they will be invincible. Since Drazerak’s range attackers at this point were only a few Shantri titans and some archliches, I TP-ed Drazerak back to Blister to gather troops while letting Dogwoggle clean up the yellow Kerm Te Bog region and visit a few stat boosters.

I went to my climactic battle on M3 W2 D5. Dogwoggle had a huge army that showed Sandro as ‘Average Threat’, and he was several days away still. Drazerak had a fairly large army but Sandro was ‘High threat’ to him. Since this game had been dull so far, I let Drazerak do the honours. He killed Sandro without too much difficulty. Same old tricks that everyone knows: teleport skeletons and clone them; dispel magic on any stack (usually skeletons) affected by Time Stasis, cast inner fire on skeletons. I don’t even understand why Limbic programmed AI to ignore a Shadow Image/ cloned stack. In H5 Nival always targeted Phantom Imaged/ cloned stacks, for damn good reason. In H7, AI never pays attention to the cloned stack unless retaliating. Sandro was level 29 and had a bigger army than Drazerak, but I still won with lots of troops remaining. I do not think I have ever fought easier battles with Necromancers in any previous Heroes campaign mission.

After that, just bring Dogwoggle to the east of where you saw Sandro standing. It is a balcony overlooking the lava pool. That triggers the end of the mission!

I never got to meet the guy who was supposed to help me. He was probably associated with the faction at the center of the map, which I never opened in the course of my adventures because I didn’t figure out how to. So I completed the map with the center still shrouded by fog of war. But do you need these guys? Doubt it. Based on the geography, taking the center of the map won’t help your movements any.

OK, that concludes the three-map campaign Lost Tales 2! First order of business is to totally delete Heroes 7 from my computer. My craving/fix has been satisfied. That trial by fire expansion probably won’t be playable for 6 months, and I doubt that Limbic is going to overhaul the H7 AI before the end of the year. Without a better AI this game is simply not going to be interesting, and mapmakers are going to take a very long time to figure out the editor and start making good maps.

[cjlee]

just a bump up to inform everyone that walkthrough is done!

[joerginger]

Just in case anyone is interested:
The mysterious stronghold guy you're supposed to meet is level 50 Tarnum. He comes with three stacks of good creatures and is decorated like a Christmas tree. That is if anyone decorates their Christmas tree with artefacts.

[maltz]

Map 3
When I played this map, I started as level 25, and all of my stats, skills and artefacts carried over. This of course made the scenario quite a bit easier compared to (re)starting at level 1! I have seen a similar situation before - if I, within a particular campaign, restart an earlier map, let's say Map 1, the game will think that I have not finished Map 1, even if I have finished it before. Then, when I restart map 2 before finishing map 1 again, my heroes will start map 2 at the default level - level 10, level 20, or even level 1!

The Level 50 chief Tarnum (who will join us) can be accessed by keep going north on the Green two-way portal (don't pass that green portal). Pass three garrisons - the last one has 10 upgraded jumping behemoth. Don't worry about suffering from losses you will get a much better reward. The Tear of Asha in my map is also located in that region.