I have Silver beasts and the rest cooper, we shall be moving to silver campain soon, I was wondering how other OL had handled this.

Is it better to upgrade the silver beasts to gold once we get into the silver campain, and then upgrade the cooper to silver as I can afford it. Or is it better to upgrade the cooper monsters to silver, then silver beasts to gold during the silver phase?

Having stronger gold beasts is appealing, but the cooper creatures would be toasted so fast, and a lot of dungeons are not beast orientated. Any thoughts would be welcome.

Depends. How much XP do you have to spend? Can you upgrade all 3 over the next 3 turns? If so, I'd go Gold, Silver, Silver. If not, then I might consider doing one more Silver before the Gold, especially since the heroes doen't have any Silver treasures yet (but once they do, watch out).

-shnar

Mordak said:

I generally find that there are better things to spend CT on than minor monster upgrades.
By which I mean that I would usually upgrade just the Beasts to Gold and leave the others as bronze unless I had more CT than I knew what to do with.

But it largely depends on your plan as OL. Are you specialising in dungeons and trying to trash the heroes there? Or working on a plot victory where Lts are key (or a Tamalir Raze).

Treachery is a much better buy than minor upgrades if you are trying to do anything of significance with Lts. Once you have max, or near max, treachery then you can think of minor upgrades.

OTOH, Silver Eldritch are significanlty boosted and significantly common in dungeons.

Horses for courses. (and it also depends if you are using any hous rules),

If you do not have the 55 to upgrade both then I would upgrade eldritch because they show up in the dungeons more often. Also they increase their damage by pierce and not by dice as gold beast do so your damage output will be more consistant. You will also increase the threat of spawns as more of your cards will spawn silver critters. I would then upgrade beasts as quickly as I can. You really should have saved 55 conquest to do this right away. This is a common mistake for OL to make but it is a mistake none the less. I woud NOT upgrade beastmen as this is generally a waste of conquest.

Do remember this.

The OL almost never wins the final battle. He can't win by trashing the heroes in dungeons.

How are you planning to win?
Eyes on the prize. All else is window dressing.

I will need 30 to upgrade eldrich, I have 1 saved up just now, had to get a new Lt (17xt for best Lt), (alric died) am playing the spider queen so I have bought 2 points of purple treachery, and upgraded beasts to silver so far, I have had 77xt and the heros 70xt. now on forth dungeon, encounters have been terrible for the OL lost my starting LT and killed nothing.

doing obsidian shackles

Corbon said:

How are you getting kills in the dungeon with only beasts being gold? You can't win by killing heroes in the dungeon but you need conquest. How do you get kills without 1 monster catagory at silver and 1 at gold? In my experience once your heroes get 1 or 2 silver armors copper critters just don't do damage.

Managing to kill the 8 and 12 health hero's with monsters, Also dark charm and animate weapons, and other traps are good for the spider queen.

Mordak said:

How many kills does this give you in a dungeon? Are we talking 2 to 3 or more than that? Are you saying the kills from monsters are from the gold beasts only or are you getting kills in with copper critters? I have not played the spider queen so I am not real confident my experience would translate but why did your heroes pick up fatgue upgrades when they should KNOW most damage is going to come from traps?

granor said:

You may want to read his posts more carefully. He's not at silver campaign level yet . He's got one silver category (beasts) and the rest copper, which is the maximum monster upgrades he can have at this stage of the game.

Antistone said:

sorry I assumed he was replying to reply #7. My bad

granor said:

Remember the Spider Queen has 'Into My Parlour', which allows her to have two trap cards set aside at the start of every dungeon. This means she can be hitting the heroes hard, and early. It also slows the heroes down, allowing her more time to gather resources than you might expect. She can hold her end up in dungeons, even if not being quite so powerful as the Sorcerer King.

Meanwhile the Lts should be sieging cities - creating another source of CT gain. Once you have 6-7 treachery the Lts become very scary (and so do dungeons actually). And Slaggoroth then becomes your chief CT source, jumping the heroes at every opportunity.

I rate the spider upgrade higher than minor monster upgrades once you have a treacher-ied up Slaggoroth in play.

Losing Alric is bad though... Don't lose his sister. She can put down a power of hurt on the heroes with all her upgraded beasts (including a Brilliant Commandered Naga giving you total command 3) and nasty traps (not to mention some more incoming Treachery Beasties - Master Manticore anyone?, and a crushing Blow+Danger+Rage set).

It is a very different style of game from a dungeon based one.
However the dungeon based style has the disadvantage that the OL can't win by trashing heroes in dungeons...

Into my Palour is a great ability, having dark charm, and animate weapons available at the start of every dungeon, is nice just waiting for the chance to play, just trying to weaken all the hero's before I hit them with Animate Weapons.

Corbon said:

Thank you for reminding me of into my parlor. I always forget about that card and it changes how the spider queen plays quite a bit.

I am really not understanding your argument here. The set up you describe is truely good. However, you have used almost 120 conquest to get there. (if I am counting correctly) are you saying there is 30 conquest you would say is better spent on treachery or Lts than on upgrading an additional monster type to silver? Of course by better I mean will get me more conquest and replace itself quickly.

I get the sieging cities for overland map advantage but to say they can keep up with killing heroes outright in a dungeon is simply untrue. Even the weakest of heroes gives you 2 weeks on conquest gain. Many heroes give you more. Let alone the time required to destroy a city. If your heroes are spending that much time on the overland map they simply play differently than mine.

I get Slaggoroth is a power house but when do you purchase him? And would you be better off delaying that instead for upgrading a monster type? Are you getting total party kills with Slaggoroth? If you are I can begin to understand passing up other upgrades but I still wonder if it would be better to pass up something else instead of the monster upgrade.

I guess I just don't understand your argument well. Please if you have time give more details about when and how these upgrades are bettter than a monster upgrade from copper to silver at the begining of the silver level.

Not had any kills from encounters yet, been a bit unlucky with the maps.

used animate weapons in the last dungeon, and got 1 kill and damaged another hero enough for a monster to kill him, dark charm and traps did for another one. I managed to get 10xt from the last dungeon. This had been about average so far.

The hero's are 2 tanks (4 xp each) and 2 magic users (2 and 3xp), 1 magic user has a blast weapon and also a weapon which ignores undying. the other one has a breath weapon + standard magic attack weapon, one of the tanks has leadership, so they a running about with dodge and guard up and the magic users a blasting the crap out of multiple monsters per attack. This has a devestating attack value against cooper creatures, which is one of the reaason I upgrade beasts to silver, and got purple treachery as soon as possible. Its not easy getting enough creaturesin the right place to overwhelm the Hero's, the dungeons are small so its easy to stop spawns, and when you can spawn its expensive 15 threat for every extra spawn per level.

I lost my starting Lt in an encounter, early on, now that I have some treachery for Lt encounters I have bought Slaggoroth.

How many curse tokens has the wizard with the Staff of the Grave built up trading back and forth? It's easy to carry a curse doll or two, but if they forget you can get a bunch of XP in one burst from killing him.

It's really hard to kill a hero in an encounter (unless there's a lieutenant involved). The areas are so small that larger monsters are near worthless, reinforcement is very expensive, and they start them all with full fatigue so can move where they want and still battle. I think the encounters are meant to whittle down heroes while giving them a small XP and gold bump.

James McMurray said:

Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy. We had two encounters that went very poorly for the heroes. First they met a pack of silver shades (late copper) in the box canyon. I was able to block their progress long enough to take out the two ranged heroes. The other two heroes only had melee weapons and could not touch the shades. The second one saw the heroes run into the "Sorcerer Circle" which was 5 gold sorcerers (upgraded with blast 1), one a master (early silver). After the sorcerers took out Nanok the tank in one round, the rest ran like the wind. Two escaped and I got another kill.

granor said:

Yes. Your first monster upgrade is important at each level, but a second? Why? It's only real purpose should really be for starting monsters/bosses, and you get some choice in those to slightly tilt things in your favour there. Sure, it won't work in every level, and you'll give up some easy levels sometimes <shrug>. OTOH, much of the time even upgraded monsters still die pretty fast, often without getting an attack, so what value partially upgraded monsters?

Pretty much all your spawns should be your primary monster type, especially once you have some monster treachery. A competent hero group tends top limit spawning opportunities anyway...
Cards being discarded for treachery (or focus) should also usually be 'useless' spawns.

Treachery arguably will do more damage in a dungeon than a minor upgrade anyway (especially with Into My Parlour). It's swapping out bad cards with really good cards.

By the time you have razed a few cities you are earning 3-4 CT per week, not one, but I agree, that's not what is important. It is still killing heroes that gets you CT, its just how and when you kill them.

Killing them in LT encounters (assuming a reasonable amount of treachery is often easier than killing them in dungeons;
1. you start with a picked hand of cards
2. you often have better cover for your minions
3. reinforcements (including treachery spawns) are of your choice every time

Note: It was very different when Telekinesis was still in the game as heroes could ignore the minions and go straight for the Lt, but that is a lot harder now.

And yes, Slaggoroth is more than capable of TPKs.
Heck, people slag off (almost a nice pun there) enconters as a waste for the OL all the time, yet they have the potential to be very dangerous. My most recent RtL OLing experience saw a highly developed gold hero party only escape a TPK on a 'normal' (non-Lt) encounter because the hero with Wings of Regaroth was just able to escape, flying through the final reinforcement. The other three heroes died nastily, which is something a rarely managed by that time in a full scale dungeon (playing Dragon Avatar, so very weak in dungeons, and the heroes could clear nearly all dungeon levels on their first turn almost every time - oh, and that was the end of a long drawn out campaign so the heroes still had Telekinesis and Bear Tattoo and did not have Feats).

My upgrade priority generally goes something like this.
1. Silver primary monster upgrade (25) 2. Merrick Farrow (5) 3. Eliza Farrow (5) 4-6. Treachery (10-15 ea).
Thats about the first 70-80 CT covered, and then saving for Gold Primary Monster upgrade. The Lts at that stage are mostly avoiding the heroes and seiging widely separated cities.
7. Gold primary monster upgrade (25) 8-10. Treachery (10-20 ea)
By now you are up to 150CT or so and can spring Slaggoroth. Then another Treachery or two and he will take on any hero party and be **** scary. He's hassling the heroes leaving the Farrows to Raze cities or even try for a Tamalir Raze. You should have 2-4 razed cities by now too. The last upgrade for Slaggo is the spider special (Pierce 2 and Burn).

There is plenty of flexibility in that of course, and room for the odd other upgrade (seige engines which I missed out for example, and is a good one to buy midway through a seige to break the hero party's seige-raiseing calculations, not to mention the odd extra like Focus, Big Trouble etc).

A lot depends on the quality/style of the heroes though. If you have a lumbering bunch who go through every dungeon methodically you should be butchering them anyway, so you don't need streamlined efficiency and can probably afford (and better use) more monster upgrades. However if you have a sleek, fast, nastily efficient hero paty then a second (or even third) monster boost in dungeons is really rather inefficient and you just can't afford it. RoI (return on investment, how much you actually get to use it) should be much lower than it looks on the face of things if you (and the heroes) are playing well.

The Hero's in our game take the view that speed is life to them and bad for the OL. I have not had a chance to recycle the OL deck in any dungeon yet.

So I dont get a heap of chances to spawn, that why I upgraded to beasts only, and then upgraded treachery. Its also one of the reasons I picked the spider queen, I thought I'd get more kills from traps that monsters, knowing how the hero's thought from playing vanilla quests.

Mordak said:

Our heroes tend to have the same philosophy. Recycling the deck only ever happens in Legenary dungeons or the OLs keep, and not always then.

Slower heroes get hit by monsters quite a lot more (they are less able to kill them all before they get an attack, and less able to mess with spawning so may promote a multi-monster-upgrade strategy. OTO, with heroes like that you should be beating them by so much anyway that your srate is of minor importance!

edroz said:

We always had an easy time with shades, though it helped a lot that our melee guy was carrying both a walking stick and a dual wield combo so he could have reach when needed. It also helped that our OL constantly used shades as if they were melee creatures. (musta been a holdover from D&D)

Mordak said:

Even if they're running fast, you should still get one spawn per dungeon level, right? The reinforcement marker starts face up on every level, so you're just paying the 4-5 threat for the first spawn.

Yeah, always get 1 spawn.

James McMurray said:

Only on some levels.

Spawn prevention is not that difficult if you are fast. And especially if there is no spawn card in the first 5 cards of a dungeon (ie turn 1).