Combat Window


General info on combat window
Attacking troops will always be on the left side, defenders on the right. The troops of one hero arrange in a column from top to bottom of the window. The troop that is the first in 5 troops appear at the top. You can see the order of appearance by double click the icon of the hero who is leading those troops at the left side, outside the adventure window.
The small tent behind the line of your troops is where the hero is hiding during the combat. You can move the mouse point over the tent and it will change to a helmet. Then click and you will see all the options a hero can do. Nothing much, cast spells, retreat, surrender, cancel.
Cast spells
If your hero has any spells on the spellbook, it's time to use those COMBAT SPELLS. I will tell you the effect of different spells in 'spells' section. Your hero can cast spell once every combat turn. So make sure you are not helping the enemy before you cast a spell. (Yes, you can actually help your enemy by cast a spell in battle.)
Retreat
Your hero flee, lose all troops but your hero is back to the pool for rehiring right afterwards. The heroes keep the experience points. artifacts. BEWARE, the hero after fleeing can be hired by any lord and disappears the next week. So if you want to rehire that hero do it quickly.
Surrender
it doesn't sound good for a hero but it has its advantages too. When you surrender, generally the other hero will accept (yes only another hero can accept surrender so you can't surrender to enemies without a hero leader.) After the hero accepts your surrender, he/she will ask for ransom before setting you free. The amount depends on the number and kind of troops. What you are actually doing is paying money to buy back your loser troops. If you can't pay or the hero declines your request, then you must continue the fight. After paying, your hero is back to the pool with experience, artifacts, all the troops and ready for ALL the lords to hire. Since you paid the money for his/her freedom, grab that guy OK? Don't be a sucker and let some other lord get your hero and troops.
Cancel
You click here when you say 'OOPS, I click on the wrong icon.'
Attacking party move first. exceptions see 'troops' section. The troops move in order of speed. The fastest troop move first. Most fast troops, and all flying units can move to enemy and attack in one turn, most slow units can't. So don't get part of your units to deep into combat while your others units are still trying to catch up. But again sometimes you want to do that. All depends on your strategy. Shooters are the most precious units you can get in combat so ALWAYS PROTECT THEM. But remember, your shooters have limited ammo so if you fight a long battle, they will run out of the arrows or whatever. After that, shooters units suck. There is another thing you should know in combat called retaliate. Don't think your enemy will just stand there dumb-founded. They will return the favor to the first one or two attacks they receive, generally, see 'troops' section for exceptions. The same apply to your units, if they are attacked. You can only retaliate the enemy in adjacent squares, therefore, you can't retaliate any shooter unless you are standing next to them.
When it's time for one of your units to move, you would see that unit being highlighted. You can skip this unit and go on to the next one by clicking on 'skip' button at the bottom of the screen. But if you do that, the unit you skipped lose that turn.
There are three situations you may get into when you start your combat: combat on normal terrain, attacking a castle, and defending a castle. Attacking and defending a town is the same as fighting on normal terrain. Normal Terrain
When fighting on normal terrain, everyone has the same advantage/disadvantage. You just move your troops around and do your normal fighting.
Castles
When attacking a castle, you have to use catapult to break the castle walls before you can walk up to an enemy unit and attack. You flying troops are not limited to this, they can fly into the castle bofore you break the wall. Your shooters units' damage is reduced when attacking over the castle wall. You can only fire your catapuls once each turn, and it takes two hit tat the same section of the wall to break that section. The catapult aim at a random section every turn. You can't control it. You can fire twice if you have an artifact called ballista of quickness. See 'Artifacts' section. Catapult can not be destroyed.
When defending a castle, you have castle walls to keep enemies away from you. You can't walking out either. You can use shooters to attack them and flying units to fly over castle walls to attack. The same apply to your enemy. You have a guarding tower shooting fire arrows, once each turn. The damage of arrow depends on the number of city improvements you build inside the castle. The guarding tower can not be destroyed. Hell, it can't be seen either.
All the changing mouse pointers during combat.
Running man
When you see this, you know you can move the highlighted unit to the place where you put your pointer.
Flying man
Same as running man, you only see this when the highlighted unit can fly.
Sword
This means you can attack whomever you are pointing at with your highlighted unit.
Arrow
You can shoot there. You see this only when the shooters of yours are highlighted and they have arrows left.
Red X
You can't move/attack there.
?
It changes to ? when the pointer is on one of your units. Click and you see the troops info window come up on the screen. Click on this often during the combat to see if any of the troops are low in hp and need a heal. (Yes, you will have heal spell.)
Helmet
I already told you.

Now that we got the basics out of the way, it's time to fight.

The BIG question, Do I or Do I not choose Auto-combat?
This is a bit tricky, since both auto or manual combat have drawbacks. First let's talk about auto combat. It is a good choice for newbies. For more experienced players I would suggest manual combat. Playing auto-combat is like watch a cartoon, it takes the fun out of game-play. But if you have absolutely no idea what is going on, then forget about the fun part and just keep your men( or some kind of creatures) alive ok?

First let's look into what's happening when you choose different combat options.
Auto Combat
There really isn't much strategy involved on your part. Computer does everything for you. And computer always follow one single strategy in combat.
Normal terrain.
How computer casts spells
Each turn, if you have any combat spells available, the computer will try to use it. Typically, it casts 'protection' on your shooters unit first, then 'bless' either your shooters or one of your currently attacking units. Computer casts other spells generally when it's needed. But computer try its best to cast one spell per turn ( The max allowed ) until you run out of combat spells. Sometimes, and I have no idea how computer calculates that, it will force your hero to cast some destructive spells like storm. It will hurt both enemy and your own units. I highly oppose the usage of this kind of spells unless you are on a suicidal mission. There are only two spells in the game that will hurt all troops, 'storm' and 'Armageddon'. Use these with extreme caution!! You could kill your army with it. But over all, computer does a fairly good job on spell casting. The only problem is you need to go back to your castle to restock your spells at least every two battles, if you let computer do all the spell casting. Oh, also, the 'fireball' may hurt your own troops if they are one square away from where the fireball explodes.
How computer moves the troops around and fight
The computer will always move your slow units before the shooters to form a protection shield. By slow I mean the units that can't move to the enemy and attack within one turn. That will include all the units with 'slow' speed and most 'medium' speed units, unless you cast 'Haste' on them. The units with 'fast' speed and flying units will all go attack enemy shooters units first. Well... That's about it for dumb computers. It just wait until enemy units are within attack range then attack it. Otherwise, only shooters will attack. And computer always attack the enemy shooters first. This is the strategy the computer use when attacked by you. But, of course, if the attacking unit can't get to the enemy shooters, it will attack anyone in its way. This should be obvious. That's all to it for auto combat.
Attacking/Defending Castles
During the attacking and defending of castles, if you choose auto combat, the computer generally use the same tactically planning. Definitely the same as far as spell casting is concerned. However, computer does send more walking units to stand near the castle wall to wait for the breaking down of the walls. Other than that, it's the same.
Draw backs of auto combat.
Doing auto combat is tend to waste your spells. Even if you know you can crush your enemy in one or two turns and you don't really need to cast any spells on your troops, the computer will still do it until you run out of scrolls and have to go back to a castle for a refill. When I was playing, I generally let a hero with some strong army wonder around and fight for a while before I get them back to a castle, so if I use auto combat all the time I will be in trouble. Spells can be extremely helpful in combat. You will see.
Auto combat does not always move and attack according to situations. For example, when you encountered those neutral creatures groups, they are normally all the same type of troops, but they split into 5 groups with around 5 units each. So, when you get into those kind of combat and enemy is all shooters, the strategy computer uses is fatal to your troops, if you use auto combat that is. You see, when you are facing 5 shooting units, they shoot at your shooters at least 5 times in one round. If all your walking units are just standing in front of your shooters trying to protect them like the computer will always do, your shooters suffer unnecessary damage. The troops can't block arrows, arrows always hit the target. For your shooters alone, to kill all the enemy you need at least 5 turns. If you walk the other units toward the enemy, even if they can't attack within one turn, most of them can attack the enemy in the second round and save the shooters. (Shooters can't shoot arrows when an enemy unit is standing next to it, and they do much less damage without shooting). Another example, if you have one of the following 3 units, you'd better not do any auto combats: Dragons, phoenix, and cyclops. The problem with these units is that they are extremely powerful. They are also the only units in the whole game that can attack 2 squares instead of 1 for normal units. During auto combat, computer only see to it that dragon/phoenix/cyclops do hit the enemy. It doesn't care if you have another unit standing in the line of fire and get killed by your own dragon. This happened to me a couple of times and can be very annoying if the units got killed is one of your shooters. After that, I abandoned auto combat totally.
Manual Combat
Normal Terrain.
Now here, you can use some strategy. First you notice that your mouse point changes according to its position. The most important of all, the sword sign changes pointing directions when you move it around the body of the enemy. It shows how you attack, the handle points to where you would stand, and the blade points in the direction of your attack. It doesn't seem much at first, but it's proved to be an important thing to consider when conducting a combat. What you want to do is to keep most enemy away from your shooters and let the rest of your troops attack them with the help of shooters from behind. One way of stop a unit moving is send an unit next to them. Or use a unit to block the way. There are rocks and trees and so on, that have already blocked some of the road. The first thing you need to do is survey the whole battlefield to see how you can use those 'blockers' toward your advantages. Effectively using those road blockers and your units can keep most of enemy at their side of the battlefield and annihilate them. Another thing you need to remember is that no unit can move to an occupied square period. So if you are clever enough, you can use enemy units to block their own troops. Of course, they will attack your blocking units like crazy so use the unit with considerable strength to this job. If you send a unit to stand inside the semicircle made by three enemy units, all of them will attack your unit instead of moving around them even if they can.
One note on blocking, there is no way you can block any flying units. They can fly to wherever they please to.
Another importance of knowing the direction of your attack is when you have the three units I talked about earlier that can attack two spares. You want to make sure that your other units aren't in the line of FIRE. Also check if another enemy unit IS in the line of fire and you can attack both within one turn.
Always leave at least one unit to protect your shooters preferably one of the slow moving units since the enemy flying units will always go after your shooters. Then send the rest to attack and block enemy units. If your flying or fast moving units aren't strong enough to take the first round, then move them slowly with the others and form a steady line to prevent undesired encounters. And again, flying units will just go over your head.
Always use more than one unit to attack one enemy unit unless your are sure that the enemy unit is so weak you can finish it in one or two turns.
Shooters should always try to kill the enemy shooters first. After that, if your shooters are strong(great in number, etc.) you should try to eliminate a whole group of enemy troops alone. If your shooters aren't so strong, then try to help your attacking units to finish their fight quicker so they can go on to the next battle. As the saying goes, 'it's an art, not science.' go with your feelings. Watch for ammo though. The shooters' ammo normally lasts 8 rounds. After that they attack by hands and become almost useless.(Druid and trolls will be still good attackers even after their arrows are gone.) Don't worry, after the battle is done, they got new supplies and will have the full load for the next battle.
Other than these, you just walk/fly to your enemy and attack. Flee if you have to. You flee to prevent you experienced hero to abandon you. If you make a mistake by attacking someone or you got attacked and you are sure that you can't win, you can surrender and buy back your troops.
For spells casting during the battle, I will put them in the spells section using comments to each spell. It will be easier to write this way.
Attacking Castle
Generally you do the same thing. You just need to handle an extra castle wall before you have a clear path to attack. Your flying unit can get in only if there are space left inside. Sometimes you can't find any space inside the wall. Then you have to wait until the catapult to break at least one section of the wall. Line up your attacking units along the wall and wait for the walls to be broken. your troops will be stopped upon entrance between the broken walls, hence block the way of your own troops. So castle attacking is normally a one-on-one even two-on-one, three-on-one situation. Always send in the strongest walking troops. By strongest I don't mean the type. You may have 2 dragons and 500 swordsmen, then the swordsmen is stronger than the dragon. To find out the detailed info on your troops move your mouse over them and click on the troop with that question mark. Also read the section about troops in this guide. Don't forget to let your shooters help opening up pathways into castle, by killing the enemy that's blocking the way, or kill some weak troops inside the castle to open up space for your flying units. You will have to cast protection on your shooters or they will suffer some heavy casualties.( Those damn flaming arrows from the watch tower!) Don't leave any units with shooters to protect them unless enemy has flying units.
After I take over a castle, I don't normally leave it empty like the computer does most the time. I don't leave any of my own army there either. I recruit if I can. If I can't, I let my here stay there a week. This somehow slows down your quest but, you don't lose your castle too easily.
Defending the castle
Your walking units wouldn't do anything until your castle wall break down. Shooters is the most important and you should start shooting the first round. First at their shooters, hopefully, with the help of the watch tower, you can kill enemy shooters. Then enemy flying units if there is any. Then shoot at the strongest enemy units to, at least, cut down its size to minimize the damage they do. At the meantime, line your troops along the wall to fill all the spaces. Also send out your flying units if they are strong enough.
That's about it for combat. Isn't it exciting?