Life 1

This guide was submitted by waterfly. Thanks!

The two zips Life1_Day1to5.zip and Life1_Day6-14.zip should be helpful to learn from the choices and movements I made each day.

A few important things verbally too:
- Strategically I want a "capitol" - meaning a wizard city that can be defended if things go worse and you have to retreat to built up again. That means good defense and wizard tower of course. You start the game with a pioneer - theres a reason for it. On Day 2 you can rebuilt a town and that town has a wizard tower already. So if you have pioneers you are looking for razed cities or towns to rebuild with. The bigger the better as they rebuild all structures that have been there - which you dont know before but can guess from size!

Look at that capitol: around Day 10 or a little later I have perfected the defense:
- stone wall
- 6 ranged units, some with enchanted weapon and medals, 1 blocker (to be sacrificed) and the wizard.
I will further send a monk or priest and finally will produce fairy Dragons there. The city of course can be reinforced if necessary from the smaller towns but should be able to handle most armies that can come at the beginning. For Elves the best unit to block a broken down gate is the Druid, as he can entangle his opponent, blocking the gate even longer than if he had to kill him.
- if archers have earned medals on the battle field, send them home as garrison of important cities. Use newbies out in the field as usually you have losses. But veterans can make the difference if you have to handle strong opposition with lower numbers. Archers can make even more damage with enchanted weapon - so thats the most important spell and should be researched first!

- Mana and research are important
- make intelligent stacks (for Tactical combat)
On Day 2 I attacked the node with an 8 stack of archers and another stacks of melee units, since you will need Mana both for better research and to sustain spells on your heroes and some chosen units. You start the game loosing money anyway so look for important targets and take them and try to loose the unimportant units = melee/scouts and keep as many archers as possible alive. You do that by "stacking". Put units of same kind in one stack and of same speed. For 7 ranged units you can add one melee unit to "block" incoming attackers. Against cavallery you usually loose 1 or 2 archers, but then they can get the full volley of your 6 other archers and die. If you put a few archers here and there they cant help themselves against frontal attacks. "'Blockers" dont attack, but move adjacent to the attacker and either serve as a target or get a free strike, if the attacker wants to go for the archers.

I usually also build some cheap structures that produce mana, so I can go on 100 % research while still sustaining some spells. As I get more mana I can sustain even more spells on units. Units spells are more important than most global spells or summoning spells against the AI - the later are more important against other humans.

Diversify the use of your city and according to your goals:
- I used Higlim the southern city to produce archers as I need to build other things in the capitol.
- In the human city I sold the wall, since I decided to NOT defend it. If it would be taken I can take it back without having a walled city to conquer. I use the city to produce money and mana mostly but in the end decided I can produce some monks there for the other cities.
- In the capitol I dont intend to produce many units for a long time but to improve the structures and only later will produce fairy Dragons. But all other cities serve to make the capitol safe, so investment in those structures will never be "wasted".

- Explorer is the most important ability to begin with, since you can move faster on the map and you are much more efficient in battles- esp. against ranged units. You have more movement points and can close in on archers with less damage taken. After the most important spells (enchant weapon and healing) I did go for spellcast 1 since with 30 casting points you can cast healing twice in battle. On Day 14 I finished Necron in a somewhat dangerous attack if I wouldn't have the speed and the healing. I had a healing spell already saved from a previous turn, so could "heal" 3 times with my wizard, making the damage taken by archer and tower guard and spells much less dangerous to my heroes.

- I used the hasteberry tree on Day 2 for all my fast units with 48 movem. point (3 scouts and 2 heroes). So I quickly captured watchtowers and structures in the north and got a clear picture how strong Necron was. He was quite strong but not stronger and he didnt have a walled city yet. So I gathered all archers and available troops and attacked him on Day 5, defeating him with some losses and taking another valuable city with structures. To eliminate another wizard that is so close to you early usually is the best thing to do, since it will be much more difficult later as you have more than one foe.

- Since so many troops moved in one direction, I didn't really know if danger of opportunity was in the opposite direction, so I used 2 swordsmen - that are on my expendable unit list - to explore. Sometimes they find something or they get killed, but if resources are low, I want to have archers anyway rather than swordsmen...

I made you several saves so you are able to analyze the moves or even try repeating the battles. You will need some skills in tactical combat = TC if you want to be good at the game. See if you win the same battles as I did, and repeat, practise if you dont win them. You will have more losses probably, but then you can practise some more ....;)

Have fun...
waterfly