Combat Strategies

Combat Strategies to Maximize Damage or Survival Odds

Enemies will only "activate" when they see you, not when you see them or they see their friends get hit.



Enemies are often clumped together in groups, so try and get to the edge of the clumps and snipe them.



Don't travel too far forward too fast, you risk activating too many enemies and losing control of the fight.



As a general rule, take out the ranged enemies first, the strong melee fighters second, and ignore the weak melee fighters until last.

Until the issues with game balance are resolved, for this section I'm going to assume you're running an almost full Hunter set of heroes.As of the Beta, the reason why the Hunter is so strong is because the enemy behavior all demands quite similar behavior from the player. There are three ranged enemies, and three of the four melee enemies cause so much havoc that you have to kill them before they get close enough. The Alchemist would be good if it weren't for the fact that she runs out of potions so quickly despite the typical battle lasting about 15 or more minutes after the mid game.The enemies never patrol or move very far either. They scoot around in their little area until they see your heroes. This means that they remain in their groups and are always clumped together. It's very rare to find a solo enemy after the early game.The level designs are setup so that that the enemies are never very far apart from each other making exploration a pain in the ass - travel too far forward in the middle of a fight and you suddenly activate five new enemies and the battle becomes uncontrollable. This is why veil armor and ghosting are so great - you can finally explore without risk of activating a whole new set of enemies.These are issues of game balance that make the Caberjack and Alchemist too weak for the current game, but with a bit of tweaking they could be much stronger. For instance, if the Caberjack could always get a free move after a successful hit, or the Alchemist could be allowed to carry more potions with additional research, the game would open up.Every so often your heroes get a bad landing and you start off surrounded by enemies. You have two options based on your situation and terrain.You can run away. This gives you the opportunity to ghost and get control of the situation on your terms. Yes, you lose a combat turn where you could do damage, but you also save yourself from receiving any damage, and that's critical.You can fight. If you do fight, then you have to think things through three turns ahead. It's unlikely that you'll take all your enemies out, so you have to be prepared in advance for who which enemy is likely to survive and how much damage they could possibly do. This is where repositioning matters. I'll usually take out all the enemies "to the left" and reposition my Hunters their before firing a flare into zone on "the right" where the other enemies are, which effectively blinds them and makes them useless for the next turn. (Of course by "left" and "right" I was picking concepts to help.)Which brings me to my next point - don't ever pick "Hobble;" it's really useless against the enemies you need it to work on - the Twitches can literally teleport so why do they even care if they get hobbled? And the Wrinkler(?) is so incredibly fast moving that a hobble attack is a wasted turn to slow it down. The Ruptures, even in their advanced form, will likely never do enough damage to you to justify the wasted skill, you're better off just moving out of the way if you can.Use the land to your advantage. The hardest levels are the Keep defense levels and the gray depressing ones with the skeleton eggs and the wooden bridges.The temptation in the Keeps is to overextend yourself in order to find your enemy, and to unite the extra two heroes you are given.Be extremely careful about how you use those two extra heroes. I tend to keep them ghosted almost the entire battle until I'm certain they're safe. I'm also likely to give them kill shots only - this way they gain XP, which is great for the future of the Keep, if the Regent gains a level then fantastic!The other one I mentioned is difficult because you can become exposed to ranged attacks from enemies and not be able to reach them from your current position. This is particularly true if there are Seeds and Twitches on the map, which can just ruin your day. So stay ghosted and take things slow, remember that unless you have veil armour, you can't ghost while crossing a bridge so don't sprint across them, inch across them.The others have their own qualities. The easiest is probably the woods - which is great for hunters without veil armour because of the trees and the rocks. The wasteland terrain is obnoxious - it's usually big and there's always a straggler that you have to travel all the way around the map again to find. It's also difficult because after midgame they tend to clump Bulwarks and Wrinkler's together.