RTS Majesty

[catfood]

Reserved

 

[Dr Skeleton]

Some stuff. Nothing groundbreaking but people seem to miss these:

- Be careful with rogue's guild extortion if you have trading posts. If the caravan reaches a marketplace the gold it carries gets multiplied by the market's level (so x3 if you're at the point where you build trading posts), if you extort before that, you only get the base amount.
- Outposts are a lot better than they might seem. You get 6 more slots for heroes that will take homeless ones when their guild gets destroyed or you can just have an embassy open until it gets filled, plus you get more peasants and tax collectors that you can't really get otherwise, extremely useful on long missions where you build on a large part of the map, like the Siege. If you have too much money, you can also use them by destroying a guild, having the outpost house the heroes then building the opposite guild/temple of the one you destroyed.
- Guard towers aren't just for protecting markets and town borders, tax collectors can deposit gold there, it's vital for fast gold income if you don't just spam extortion.
- Similarly, if you don't rely on extortion you should have at least one tax collector with very high minimum pickup (like 1000), if you don't, markets will often sit at 3000+ gold until a ratman steals it while your tax collectors are on the other side of the map going for a 251 gold inn.
- Market day isn't just a "free money!" button. Heroes can't buy stuff when you use it, so you will end up with less gold overtime because you don't get the tax from the sales and more importantly the heroes will have less healing potions and die much more often. On the other hand in missions where there are neutral / hostile heroes (like the one where you kill rogues and elves) you can use it to kick them out of your markets and deny them sells.

Legendary Heroes.

Legendary Heroes is just evil, the map is gigantic, the time is short and you get too few heroes to reliably explore or defend, the defense part is especially hard. I've never finished it normally (that is by buying heroes and destroying the burrows with them), you turtle with markets, build wizard towers all over the map and destroy the burrows with them, but that is still easier said than done and not very fun. It's probably possible to beat it normally with a lot of resets and savescumming but it was always weird to me that it got through to the release as it did, it's on a whole different level than the rest of the game. I honestly don't remember Vigil for a Fallen Hero or the other unlocked mission in the expansion being hard compared to Legendary Heroes.

 

[Absinthe]

Which is the main strategy. I usually go for at least 2 marketplaces and 3-4 inns. Ideally, get 3 markets and 5+ inns. Never ignore inns, they're cheap, cost increase is small, they make good money and give you a fountain which means an extra tax collector.

Aye, inns are good income for the cost, especially once you've built a few marketplaces. When it comes to tax collectors, it seems blacksmiths, marketplaces, and inns are all counted together to give you an extra fountain per 5 of these buildings, and the fountains in turn give give you an extra tax collector - if the fountain dies, you permanently lose the extra tax collector once one dies. The downside of going inn heavy is that they aren't necessarily the most time-efficient use of your tax collectors, but you can just raise the minimum pickup to address that. It's also important to place guardhouses nearby so your tax collectors can immediately drop off cash instead of walking all the way back. Also spamming inns means you're going to collect sewers faster.

If you have elves though your marketplaces are double income so I'm not as sure how cost-effective inns are.

I find dwarves and gnomes circumstantially useful. Otherwise, I always go for elves. More gold is more gold. At least that is what elves are supposed to do which is make your marketplaces generate more money.

Forgot to mention this but in the Northern Expansion add-on, Gnomes turn into Gnome Champions at level 8, making them a lot more powerful and aggressive. They gain 20 health, 10 strength, 50 hand-to-hand skill, 25 magic resistance, and better weapons and armor.

never liked elves as their houses distract heroes from doing heroic stuff.

Just blow them up with lightning bolts or stick a bounty on them for your disloyal rogues to raze them to the ground. Problem solved. Otherwise get ready to build Dauros and make Monks and Paladins, but even Paladins can get suckered into wasting time at brothels, although they have a much better chance of resisting temptation (it takes 30 willpower to be fully immune, a vigilance buff on a Paladin would do the trick). Gambling halls are extremely unlikely though, since Paladins have very low greed. Also, units will only consider the closest building when it comes to gambling and whoring, so if there are gambling halls nearby, they are less likely to waste their time (since they have to fail both a greed roll and then a willpower roll to enter a casino). Monks though will never go to brothels or casinos. Neither will healers. It's simply not a part of their AI subroutine to pursue entertainment (which also means they won't ever visit a fairgrounds). Healers still purchase general equipment so they do go to fairgrounds for stat training (but not to compete).

power comes from library which other arcane heroes can visit too. Every hero can be stupidly powerful once reaches high enough lvl.

Other heroes can only get Power Shock and Flame Shield (and train magic resistance up to a training cap of 50), and you underestimate the massive amount of int wizards get. Every 4 points of int gives +1 damage to spells (while every 8 strength gives +1 damage to attacks). Also, Monks aside, it's usually unlikely for heroes to end up learning spells since learning spells is generally near the bottom of a hero's priority list, definitely on the bottom of their spending list, they cost 300 gold each (if they don't have the money left, no spell), and on top of that they typically have a low chance of choosing to learn a spell when the subroutine gets that far, plus then there's an int roll that has to succeed (it rolls from 11-40 and if it's above their int, they still won't go to the library and learn the spell) before they actually learn the spell. One of the big reasons why monks learn magic so fast and elves don't despite having the exact same 55% chance of deciding to learn magic is because elves have more shit to spend all their money on before learning spells while monks don't buy gear, plus they have a higher int than elves. Also elves have more higher priority activities than monks. Paladins and Healers will both never learn spells from a library because it's excluded from their AI subroutine.

 

[Dr Skeleton]

Just blow them up with lightning bolts or stick a bounty on them for your disloyal rogues to raze them to the ground. Problem solved.

Don't they just reappear after a while?

 

[Norfleet]

You could just burn them down again, though.

 

[Absinthe]

Don't they just reappear after a while?

Nope. Not as far as I can tell when I've done it.

EDIT: Yeah, just checked. It only spawns brothels and casinos when you make an elven bungalow. If you make a rogues' guild, it will also spawn a casino as long as you have a bungalow.

 

[Pope Amole II]

build wizard towers all over the map and destroy the burrows with them,

I can also agree that it's the only way to do it outside of massive luck. The earthquake damage to your entire kingdom is just too huge and, if the heroes destroy the burrows in far from ideal order (and they always do), you just get rekt.

Not sure what's so bad about it, though. That's one of my two most favorite things about expansion. The second thing is caravan protection mission. We've replayed through it with my best friend some years ago (ordered pizzaz on a weekend and did 2-3 maps in a row) and our mission was bugged - many caravans died upon reaching the marketplace instead of, well, giving the money. So simple protection would not be enough.

So what we did - we built Lunord's temple. And then every arriving caravan would get accelerated into being so fast that no monster would even lay his dirty fingers on it. Solved the map even through the bug and it was wondrous. It's such "outside the box thinking required" stuff that defines Majesty experience for me, personally.

Lunord should open pizza delivery service, btw.

 

[Dr Skeleton]

Don't they just reappear after a while?

Nope. Not as far as I can tell when I've done it.

EDIT: Yeah, just checked. It only spawns brothels and casinos when you make an elven bungalow. If you make a rogues' guild without having a casino, it will also spawn a casino as long as you have a bungalow.

Hmm. I assumed they respawned but I have not checked this in years. Maybe I was thinking of gnome huts. They don't go away unless you destroy all 3 simultaneously or very quickly one after another.

build wizard towers all over the map and destroy the burrows with them,

The second thing is caravan protection mission. We've replayed through it with my best friend some years ago (ordered pizzaz on a weekend and did 2-3 maps in a row) and our mission was bugged - many caravans died upon reaching the marketplace instead of, well, giving the money. So simple protection would not be enough.

I had a bug with the CD version back in the day with this mission where the caravans would skip the market altogether, go to the castle, crash into it and die. I don't like Legendary Heroes because the gimmick is supposed to be that you have super powerful heroes vs super hostile land and it's best played with very few heroes and very low hero involvement in the mission (I think the monster spawns scale to the number of heroes to some extent, if I used the embassy+outpost approach I saw more enemies than with a minimum team of defenders and markets+towers). It would probably be one of the hardest (if not still the hardest) mission in the game even with a much longer time limit. And it's not just the earthquakes, one burrow destroyed at the wrong time and you have 20 trolls and a dragon spawning next to your markets and all heroes somewhere else, economy gone.

 

[Absinthe]

Some stuff. Nothing groundbreaking but people seem to miss these:

- Be careful with rogue's guild extortion if you have trading posts. If the caravan reaches a marketplace the gold it carries gets multiplied by the market's level (so x3 if you're at the point where you build trading posts), if you extort before that, you only get the base amount.

Good to know, thanks.

- Outposts are a lot better than they might seem. You get 6 more slots for heroes that will take homeless ones when their guild gets destroyed or you can just have an embassy open until it gets filled, plus you get more peasants and tax collectors that you can't really get otherwise, extremely useful on long missions where you build on a large part of the map, like the Siege. If you have too much money, you can also use them by destroying a guild, having the outpost house the heroes then building the opposite guild/temple of the one you destroyed.

Yeah outposts are fun. I've come up with a few stunts for them so far. The first is just adding Healers of Agrela to the Fervus/Krypta combo. Healers can and do heal skeletons and beasts, plus Fervus's heal is twice as expensive as Agrela's, but if you have a healer army it's not a problem. You can also use Animate Bones on Healers to give them skeletons, but I'm unsure if those skeletons actually use the follower AI. You can also use it to collect healers for Temples of Krolm, since it's no heals otherwise. Another stunt is using them to mass up units past the point that building cost multipliers would destroy you, like if you want to spam Dwarves. For some reason, every Dwarven Settlement (and Wizards' Guild) past the first costs 4x the cost of the previous one. But if you build one settlement, train 3 dwarves, blow it up, build it again, train 3 more, blow it up again, you will have 6 Dwarves in your outpost without paying those insane multipliers and now you can build another stronghold or an elven bungalow for the income. Dwarves by the way are probably the most powerful of the racial heroes. They hit harder than warriors (more strength and weapon damage), have a higher vitality score (more health/lvl) than warriors, are poison-immune, and have 70 magic resistance. Their dodge and parry is slightly lower than a warrior's though. They also make much better laborers than your peasants. I'd say they compete pretty well with Paladins, especially at high levels (where the Paladin's int growth is wasted, unlike the Dwarf's str growth) or if you decide to go with 15 libraries so your dwarves might actually learn magic (Flame Shield gives +4 armor and +20 magic resist, so 90 magic resist dwarf with 13 base armor). But if you're building a Temple of Krolm you might want to do the standard Embassy + Outpost combo just to have some unit diversity, except the embassy is slow and ridiculously expensive in its hero recruiting, unless you get Paladins or Warriors of Discord, but if you want those you might be better off building the respective temple and filling two Warriors' Guilds before blowing up the temple in question, no outpost or embassy needed since they just stay in their guild.

On a side note, turns out units will also take refuge in embassies if you blow up their guilds, not just outposts.

The extra peasants are mostly useful if you're going elves. If you have gnomes or dwarves you're usually not hard-pressed for additional laborers. If you fill your outpost with 6 dwarves and then go elves though, you will definitely have some quality construction speed. The extra tax collector is definitely underrated, especially if you're going inn-crazy for the income. Honestly, surrounding the outpost with inns and marketplaces seems like a good call, since the outpost also doubles as a tax collection point.

One weird thing I noticed while I was playing a random freeform mission was that I somehow got two Priestesses of Krypta to join my Wizard's Guild while I had a Temple of Krolm. Still not sure how that happened. What I know for sure is that they wouldn't join a Wizard's Guild if their temple blows up. And I don't think there were enemy players in that game.

- Guard towers aren't just for protecting markets and town borders, tax collectors can deposit gold there, it's vital for fast gold income if you don't just spam extortion.

Agreed. Any time I feel like using towers for real defense I end up either going dwarves for ballistas or spamming wizard towers. If you ask me the primary use of guard towers is to give your tax collectors a drop-off point, like if you build 1 guard tower and surround it with 5-6 inns.

- Similarly, if you don't rely on extortion you should have at least one tax collector with very high minimum pickup (like 1000), if you don't, markets will often sit at 3000+ gold until a ratman steals it while your tax collectors are on the other side of the map going for a 251 gold inn.

I usually set all my tax collectors with a minimum pickup of 50 gold or higher. It keeps them from wasting their time collecting at homes and other miscellaneous buildings until the sum's big enough to be worth their time.

- Market day isn't just a "free money!" button. Heroes can't buy stuff when you use it, so you will end up with less gold overtime because you don't get the tax from the sales and more importantly the heroes will have less healing potions and die much more often. On the other hand in missions where there are neutral / hostile heroes (like the one where you kill rogues and elves) you can use it to kick them out of your markets and deny them sells.

In my experience, it is a free money button as long as you use it while your market isn't having customers anyway. It only closes its doors to customers for a really short time, to be honest. Also, it doesn't generate revenue while closed.

Not sure what's so bad about it, though. That's one of my two most favorite things about expansion. The second thing is caravan protection mission. We've replayed through it with my best friend some years ago (ordered pizzaz on a weekend and did 2-3 maps in a row) and our mission was bugged - many caravans died upon reaching the marketplace instead of, well, giving the money. So simple protection would not be enough.

So what we did - we built Lunord's temple. And then every arriving caravan would get accelerated into being so fast that no monster would even lay his dirty fingers on it. Solved the map even through the bug and it was wondrous. It's such "outside the box thinking required" stuff that defines Majesty experience for me, personally.

Lunord should open pizza delivery service, btw.

That's not a bug. You can always buff and heal non-heroes (or even enemies). I also like to use Lunord to accelerate caravans and tax collectors. It works wonders for your economy. Although now that I've made my tax collectors do less frequent pickups of homes and other low income shit it's not as necessary.

 

[Eisen]

Just beat the southern campaign, Tomb of Dragon King and the last one were the most hard to beat. I heard that "Legendary Heroes" is nasty

 

[Joggerino]

You mean that nasty mission with 4 boss like monsters and getting overrun from every direction?

 

[Eisen]

You mean that nasty mission with 4 boss like monsters and getting overrun from every direction?

Yes, the wizards did the dirty job to me, except for killing the Black Phantoms, recruited Warriors and Barbarians to kill them. Healer's temple got destroyed mid-game and couldn't ressurect the LVL 50 Warrior, i've recruited other heroes from the temples that were already built in the map, not sure if it helped me win.

I heard that "Legendary Heroes" is nasty

It is. Good luck.

Thank you, i'll probably go insane as well

 

[Comte]

Reserved

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Excellent game it was

 

[Axioms]

I remember playing a long time ago a game very similar to Majesty, with the main difference being that you actually have to buy items for your heroes instead of just having the Blacksmith research them. I almost wanna say that even the name is similar but unfortunately can't remember.

Hinterland obviously.

/necro