Might & Magic: Heroes VI - Necropolis - The Spider's Stratag

[Shoaura]

If you would like to take a look at the original page visit this link:
https://www.celestialheavens.com/786

[Shoaura]

Great job, as always, Maltz. Just want to point out that the teleports down to the inferno towns may be random. I did this mission on normal and attacked different towns when compared to the numbers shown on your map.

[maltz]

Thanks for you input. Could you point out which underworld area did you enter first, second, etc? Perhaps it is all random, but I have a feeling that the developers want to assign the last entered area the one in the middle.

[RollingWave]

A few tip:



Skeletons in large numbers actually hits harder than Fate Weavers (assuming that you won't be having 1000 Weavers), the trick is that you cast storm arrows on them to negate their penalties (which means the spell instantly increase their damage by like 200% , since it double the damage AND then add 55% on top of it.) and/or use teleport to put them close up to the enemies.



Weaver's strengh is actually in their special abilties, which would again be best utilized if you have teleport spells. most people just turn weaver into range units and shoot 100% of the time, that's a huge waste of their potential, he best idea is



1. teleport them to a spot where they are ain contact with multiple (3 or more) enemy stacks while they're in range mode



2. cast freezing web (which is basically AOE time statis!!)



3. turn into melee mode and attack, if you can, try to get Lamasus to cast is breath on those units right now.



4. before they enemies recover from the freezing web cast dance of decay. if you have agony or Lamasu breath or similar spells on them now they'll be utterly devastated.



With this, you essentially diaabled at least half their army for two turn AND did massive damage to them. and now they wake up with a bad ass champion standing next to them.



With any high lvl magic Necro heroes, clearing neutral is very simple, here's the trick, just give them some vampires, put them always on guard (which means the first attack on them every turn will NOT hit them.) and then cast Earth / Dark elementals and just whittle them down with your spells / attacks. against might inferno heroes this might work too though against magic onces it's risky that your vampire gets blow away by fireballs.



Also, the Lamasu upgrade is the most worthwhile upgrade amongst the Necro units, since it turns a useless unit into a pretty good one,



Again, at this point you should not be scared of just sending out high level hero with little troops to take out neuturals quickly. espiecally magic onces that can summon elementals. for 3rd heroes I usually suggest getting those that add unit production.

[Shoaura]

Maybe not as random as I first believed / remembered. As you mentioned, Maltz, the central area was last. Here's my list of overworld portals connecting to the inferno ones based upon your numbering scheme. I will put these in the order I entered them:

3 - 5

4 - 4

1 - 1

2 - 2

5 - 3

6 - 6



So, just looking at the above, the only difference was 3 and 5. I also went West and conquered E and F first since that movement pillar was just beyond my starting borders.

[maltz]

Hm maybe I messed up the order of 3 and 5... they all look similar anyway :p Can someone else confirm Shoaura's order? Just one more vote and I will change the numbering on the map.

[maltz]

RollingWave,

I have heard about good things of your strategy. But I had some doubt - the Teleport spell has a cool down of 4 turns. How do you prevent the spiders from being fried when the web effect expires? And they will get hit by other stacks that wasn't affected by the web. Also, the spiders can't hit for that much in melee (as we are a magic hero)... how much damage do you see?



In my game, I spammed Puppet Master whenever possible. Since the enemy's stacks are all so large, they easily deal 5000-10000 damage to each other. To me that seems to be more damage-effective.
Edited on Wed, Nov 16 2011, 08:56 by maltz

[RollingWave]

Yeah, if the enemy stacks are so much bigger than this wouldn't be ideal, this is assuming both side's stacks are at least comparable.

The problem of course, is that if the stacks are so big, you can't even cast puppet master on them anyway. there' s a limit based on your spell power. while your SP would be crazy high right now you'll still hae a lot of trouble controlling those triple digit elite units or 5 hundred Cerebus etc.

Though I do agree that in the case where they are bigger and sitting behind them damn walls you probably need to do this, the problem is generally that puppet master have CD as well and in this situation they'll still devastae you simply from their breedmothers and Lilims.

The Fate Weaver trick is of course used mostly the table flipper when you your units are already entangle with theirs.


Also, Sacrifice in the tear path can be useful in this situation, because IT CAN BE CASTED ON SUMMONS, just summon a earth elemental sit him in the back and sacrifcie him ;p

[maltz]

I remember seeing the restriction of Puppet Master on stack sizes in some other games; is it here in Heroes6? I had no problem to PM 700+ Breed Mother with a spell power of ~70, though. (But I often had problem with the game crashing hard when I actually use them to shoot.)

[RollingWave]

You had higher SP than me (presumablly because you went the blood path, which would also inheriently increase your puppet master power), I only had Annie at 50-60ish and I often couldn't control the largest stacks, and controlling smaller onces is usually fairly pointless.

Still, I managed to get the Uriel fight quite fast by blitzing with Kasper and Annie in two direction, your right that after fort G the fights gets noticablly harder but that basically means I had to combine my army for the final 3 towns. everything before that I managed to do with split armies just fine.

I finished everything by the time I had 500 skeleton or so (losing almost none in between) but I guess it's because of that th Uriel fight seems impossible for me right now since he basically carve up any of my stack with 2 hit. and I could not do anything more than getting him to about 60% health (despite dance of decay already hitting 10% .)

For Tear path Sacrifice can be quite nice in most of those siege fight , what you basically do is to just casti t on your ghost and keep them in spirit form, which would mean thay'll take two full rounds of damage with only about 20-30 Specter lost at most (By then you can easily heal that right back up with just about anything.) and it let you attack without as much worry on retaliation and such. it's not as powerful as wail in the longer run but the damage absorbed in those two round can be really really significant.

Maltz how many units you had by the time you fought Uriel? since right now after a couple try that seems impossible without me having at least twice as many as I have now (I'm roughly at 500 skeleton 200ish Ghoul/ghosts / 60-90 elitle units per stack and 30 Weaver ) Also you ignored all those guard units right? they seem to do meh damage but are pretty hard to take down (while Uriel can ressuect them.)

[RollingWave]

Alright I finished this one. The Uriel fight can be really easy or really hard depending on how many troops you have (using # of skeletons as reference, it's basically impossible at around 500 skeleton but quite easy at around 1000, so the break even point's obviously somewhere in between), if you don't have enough it's basically impossible since Uriel hits A TON and if you can't bring comparable damage down on his he's going to slice through your stacks one by one.

Another trick / exploit, this seems to be a oversight on the developer's part, but Uriel and his troops can't do any structural damage, which means that abyss worms are invunerable against them, but even then the guards will keep trying to hit the worm to free the unit eatten... so this means that with Abyss worm you essentially remove the guards completely from the fight and let you focus on Uriel.

[Bucker]

Woah it seems like gap beetween normal and hard difficulty is devastating. I was getting raided by Inferno heroes all the time, but their army was so tiny(not to mention laughably low stats of heroes) that they were getting erased easily even by Kaspar I inherited from third mission(not to mention Anastasya who ended up with 0 casulaties even while fighting with her starting stack). Took me like 7 in-game months to finish as this mission is horribly long, but by achieving perfect victory against uriel I ended up with hero status. Gotta try hard difficulty to see these interesting sieges you promised, maltz.

[skortzy]

I also played on hard. My choice was magic tears and the mission was piece of cake...

All my battles except the boss fight were perfect due to summoning. My only problem throughout the mission was mana depletion. I used Meditation a lot.



I could not defeat Uriel in my first attempt (had less than 500 skeletons), but I waited two weeks and the final fight became easy too.
Edited on Sat, Dec 31 2011, 06:17 by skortzy

[Queen Hera]

Hi maltz, I got the same result as Shoaura with the portals based on your numbering scheme. i.e.

3 - 5

5 - 3

[gsandro1]

Great job, as always, I follow your walkthroughs since Heroes V. Thank you Maltz.

[sylvanllewelyn]

Uriel was horrible, I had around 650 skeleton spearmen and I was left with 5 dead 2 greatly reduced stacks when the fight ended (who's lame enough to wait for 1000 skeletons?).

[bkknight2602]

There are only three locations for the four pieces of moon fragments. I got my first from one of the towns, don't remember which, but is the fourth piece underground?

[bkknight2602]

I did come see where the Tear was located, thanks.
Edited on Sat, Oct 13 2012, 23:51 by bkknight2602

[Sir_Toejam]

actually, this mission works even better if you treated ludmilla as a decent force in her own right in the previous mission. If you develop her as a serious might hero (do NOT follow the advice to make her a town booster!), and get her to at least level 20, she can take care of things quite nicely, and you can move on BOTH the Eastern and Northern fronts simultaneously. Hopefully by this time you have figured out how to level arachne to 4 easily enough, so give ludmilla that weapon, and make sure she has the "storm arrow" spell. a decent might hero with a couple hundred skellies using storm arrow pretty much will allow you to clear anything in the first eastern area easily. Use your free hero bonus to hire the hero that boosts lich production by 2 per week (Siham), and give HER all the town building bonuses, movement bonuses, and also I would recommend all the scouting bonuses (shows you exactly where all the artifacts are on the map). Give 90% of the skellies to ludmilla, all the might-oriented set artifacts from the previous missions, and most of the ghouls and ghosts. If you're lucky, you will gather enough resources to build every creature dwelling in the first week. Upgrade the vamp and lich building in the first week (priority on liches, since you get 2 more that way), if you can, then upgrade the lamasu in the next week.

Ana should have started moving north with her starting army as soon as she has touched the power boost node, and you have claimed both mines in the area near the start town (no later than day 3). buy all the skellies, ghosts, and ghouls you can, and give them to ludmilla. Have her start moving East. You should be able to take the first eastern fort and first norther fort before the end of the first week. Have ludmilla start moving back towards your first town from the fort, and have Siham run (not portal) over to ludmilla the new batch of skellies, ghouls, ghosts, and vamps (only if you managed to upgrade, otherwise wait until you do) and a few lamasu (you can use reinforcements on them, and it seems to more than double the stack size, and they work great as archer blockers (yours or the enemy's!). Run shila back to town, and build a town portal. portal all the liches and the spinners, and the remaining lamasu up to the norther fort. Have Ana grab those and then keep pushing north towards the first inferno town. Have ludmilla use her army to clear all the resources around the eastern fort.



now you're way ahead. I already had around 300 skellies at the end of the second week, 30 liches, 20 lamasu and vamps, around 120 ghouls, and a partridge in a pear tree.



oh, and i actually do not recommend having a secondary hero follow ana around. Why? because you actually should have found the set pieces giving Ana econonomist 1 and snatch in previous missions, and you should have them equipped.



not really much point in having someone follow.
Edited on Mon, Jul 22 2013, 18:13 by Sir_Toejam

[Sir_Toejam]

oh, also, archliches are broken (not sure about the regular). They take their bonus damage from your MIGHT statistic, NOT your magic stat!



I learned this the hard way, when I put the vast majority of them on my magic hero, only to see the half-sized army on my might hero do twice as much damage!