Create your Hero to be most powerful, or fun?

I name my sovereign Thomas Bayes and sit around my city trying to infer how the AI has been programmed and imagine how much better the maps will look when we shift to 1-tile cities. In other words, I'm waiting for a couple more beta iterations to jump all the way in.

Boy, I tried my best top end tech army, full 8 knight with cold attack, and even put power spell sure as stoneskin on every of them with my best leader (though can't used fire based attack, due they can't be harmed by fire) How do you win this once battle, yikes! 6 dragon fire based, only one of leader is hard to killed.

I find that life and fire second level to be useful and powerful easy in early and late game if you pick up for your hero, I pick a tait that gave you int per level too to help, and warlock to get %50, but downside side is that if there all firebased enemies can't be harm by fire, I'm screwed like those dragon from master end quest that win the game.

wicked army leader ofcourse:

evoker, live 1, fire 2, air 1, attunement, impulsive

reasoning:

* live 1 gives regen, which is way to overpowered. should go into earth imo

* fire 2 gives flame burning blade, burning hands, pillar of flame and flame dart, a must early in game. fire  3 + impulsive give you a 1 turn fireball, way to overpowered

* air 1 for haste at the start, but air 2 + fire 2 give you tireless march, WHICH STACKS AND WORKS IN COMBAT. my 6 here army has a move of 10 on the world and combat maps, which really is a gamekiller. air 3 gives storm and stormstrike for when your flames won't work, and air 4 gives cloudwalk - woohoo

now all you need is a hero who can cast stoneskin and tremor and steal 2 levels of water from someone to get gentle rain (20% extra food). it's really the comination of impulsive which makes you able to cast a first turn fireball or 2 other spells and the fact that haste seems to reset the combat order in some way.

impossible difficulty, large map everyone allied against me and i still win (with a half decent starting location all i train are scouts and pioneers. for the end of game battles, since the dragonslayer spell is still a dud i run around a lot and cast storm a lot. sometimes i have 1 or 2 dead champs, but always win. stormstrike on your champs makes them be able to teleport out of sticky situations. now all i need is a way to counter fear.

Thank you post share your hint..live 1 regen I find that not overpower, it's just gave you one heathpoint per turn where enemies damage you 40 or 30 or even 100 (rare, happan to epic dragon master quest!) and I think it's belong to "life" not earth, earath is like stone and hard, not living, while regen is living belong to life way I see,

fire is powerful, but not alway overpower, I think they are fine, at best early or if you do not had warlock or evoler %50 damage more, not that great, believe me, for common enemies, this is good, but for speical firebased enemie or epic enemiey like master quest or very large "overlord" element like fire, not so great and useless, even for fireball. I think they are fine with way it, it's should be powerful if you keep pick up warlock or luckly gave you evoler, but not everyone had warlock or luckly pick out evoler.

Are you sure it's stack? I recalled, it's said spell can't be used again if they alreadly had that spell, unless that was slow? hmmm.

fireball WITH impulsive just breaks the initiative system ...

while fireballl WITHOUT impulsive is a semi-mediocre spell at best.

Yes, I did pick up impulsive, it's do good for common emeies but useless again epic enemie even my hero is 12 level or something, that's dragon epic quest get first attack, and attack more while my hero rare get turn. impulsive all right and good for common enemies. not epic.

Not just that, but I think dragons are fire immune

-> I've thought about stacking some Blizzard scrolls to use for that battle :p

Yes, I don't pick water or whatever blizzard belong?? but I do had a hero but her level is not so high and reason I didn't level her up because hero got wound that can't be heal so I left her in city! LOL! Is Blizzard belong to water or air?

Blizzard is a level 4 water spell.  Also worth trying for is level 3 air - storm and thunderstrike.

it gives 1hp/turn for each lifeshard you have, which makes recovering from battles (since it also works on worldmap) a breeze. with death you have to make sure you rest long enough between battles, so life races through the game and death stumbles along.

both true, but there just aren't any decent direct damage spells other then fire. storm is random, blizzard is underpowered and has a casting time of 3. i just rolled over the final dragons with friggin stinking mud. master dragon leaps to me and kills one here, the rest all got stuck in the mud and didn't even reach me.

and the initiative system is borked, try casting haste or slow and watch how everything gets rearranged on the second.

summon something lame, add it to your army last. the main dragon will go after that first, then it's your sov's turn. cast stinking mud on the rest of the dragon pack and it gets a whole lot easier. oh, and with the shrink mace the main dragon is just a pushover.

In WOM first verion, they allowed you to summon a bunch of elementals early on.  This gang of elementals allowed you to run around cleaning up monsters as fast as you found them.  They said this ruined game balance and did away with it.  Instead, I make cheap dragon fodder units by making a custom pioneer unit: click on Pioneer, click on Edit, change the weapon to the free 2-handed staff, change the hair to anything else, add a second negative trait and the "Scout" trait; do not change the gender.  This will give you a cheap 3-tile move unit with the capability to make a city.  With a full roster of these units and a sovereign with fire and water spell casting I can take on much tougher monsters.  Researching magic out to Erog's journals will give me 5 high level heroes I can gang with my sovereign by turn 40.  This allows me to run around cleaning up monsters as fast as I can find them.

I find I can successfully take on a dragon with a level-9 sovereign, 2 level-8 heroes, a 50+ point weapon and 3 dragon fodder units.  A 50+ point weapon can be obtained by killing enough Hoarder Spider armies.

Did anyone try sovereign level up as path of Gover? is that useful? do sovereign had to stay in city to be that useful? If so, how would you level up if stay in city? I know there is a hero building that gave you exp but it's so small and lot of turn to build.

I've said it before, but I would prefer if Administrative type buildings give free Exp to "Path of the Governor" types.

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In this way, Economic/Tech progression could be closely tied with a Governor's level progression.

Most powerful, or most fun?

My first character I almost always design for fun and to investigate the gaming world (plus controls).  So I usually go for all the magic power I can, to get a chance to see what spells are around, how they look, what they can do, etc.

Later I go for trying to find synergies, characters whose abilities, background, etc, play into one another to make them more powerful.  But that, too, is part of the fun.  When it only becomes a matter of combining A + B + C to produce the best result, it ceases to be fun for me.

As a long time pen and paper roleplayer, i always create a character to be fun, usually giving them at least one flaw. to me its more about the epic story of a map than "winning or losing", id love to see the ability to label locations on the cloth map so you can really make a believeable play world.

I make a little story about each hero. Each traits adds a piece of the story. Love it when a hero gets amnesia. Adds so much to the story, often sending them on quests to get their memory back.

Create your Hero to be most powerful, or fun?

At first I played to max out bands of badass heroes.

Then I settled in to role-play hero development. "Strongest" trait got trumped by "Best Fit".

I look for deeper specializations in the future. To go beyond "Best Fit" to "That's it!".

Honestly, I like to have more fun heroes, it is quite obvious though, I like to play around with heroes, I think most traits should be balanced so I am not penalized (Too Much) for picking stuff up that sounds fun/fitting to a theme.

Did try to have a mage hero do 200 damage with flame dart, couple of combats later that got really really boring (3 times evoker, mage class track and warlock background (ok head is a little fussy, sorry for wrong names) and a ton of fire shards).

Also have had melee warriors do insane damage in melee, oddly I find it excruciatingly hard to make decently tanky characters.

Cant wait for the next beta release tho, the remevol of str, con and int will be intriguing to try out!.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

One thing I would like to see is a character creation system that's like the one used in MOO2: apply available points, and get a difficulty rating that in turn affects the final numeric rating of a character (if you care about such things; I don't, but some do).  Want to create a super character?  Why not be allowed to do so?  It's your game.  Similarly, you could create a character with few points, and get a much higher rating based on your character's difficulty level--which would be separate from the game's.

Yes, I can see where this system would get a bit complex, but at least it allows players to build whatever they want in a character design, while rewarding those who stay within the given parameters--or use even less points than allotted.