Apparently I read how the overlord can be weak at times in the beginning dungeons

Yet somehow I end up with a dungeon full of monsters most of what he summoned

My party is usually: Steelhorns, Astara, Andira, and Varikas the dead

I'm guessing a lot has to do with line of sight or I'm just not killing quick enough

should I be split up my heroes a lot?

I even tried to get a bunch of stanima potions instead of heatlh since they said they were best

I guess I'm just looking for some general pointers

EddieB said:

Difficult to tell much without more detailed information.
In general,

1. Maximise your attacks, often using fatigue for an extra space or two of movement.

2. Every hit should kill most monsters except the really tough ones. If you hit a monster and don't kill it, then consider getting a better weapon. If you 'almost' killed it, then add extra dice with fatigue so that you can kill it.

3. Splitting up is generally not all that good, although sometimes a quest requires it. Heroes that are in teh same area can cover each other's backs and prevnt close spawns. Heroes that are isolated are easily swamped by monsters.

EddieB said:

"Usually?"

Can I infer from that statement that you are picking your heroes instead of drawing them randomly? Here are a few tips for you:

1. Assuming you are picking heroes instead of drawing them randomly, switch out either Steelhorns or Varikas for a Ranged attacker. Someone like Varyah the Falconer or Grey Ker (I think those guys are both 3-Ranged traits, but I'm too lazy to go look.) Astarra and Andira are both decent mages in my experience. (Grey Ker is a good "training" hero since he can switch his action up, but he'll probably also generate a few questions for you.)

2. The reason fatigue potions are so powerful is because of the extra MP you can milk out of them, so make sure you're actually spending that fatigue regularly, otherwise having the potion is mostly pointless. You can declare a Battle action and use fatigue to shift around a bit to get more attacks out of a single turn. Also remember to use fatigue to boost attack rolls when needed (you can spend the fatigue after rolling the original attack dice if you're a point or two short.)

3. Don't split the party up, ever. That doesn't mean keep them clustered in a little four space ball, though. They can spread out to cover line of sight, but in general they should all be in the same room.

4. On that note, make sure you cover LoS to prevent spawning. (Remember that other monsters do not block LoS for spawning purposes.) Try to keep as much of the area around your current position covered as possible, but don't obsess about covering the whole dungeon (re: don't split up the party.)

5. Don't go off course just to kill something the OL spawned. Every turn you spend in the dungeon makes the OL that much stronger. Keep moving towards the end goal, kill whatever gets in your way, but don't try to kill everything in the dungeon.

6. Don't open new doors with your last hero. Spend a turn sitting around and getting everyone ready, then open it on your next turn with whoever you want to act first. Doing this will limit the amount of space the OL has to spawn in as well as allow you to get the drop on whatever's inside the room. Try to position your ranged/magic attackers where they will have good lines of effect into the next room so they can Battle and shoot the crap out of whatever starts in there.

7. Gear is King. Don't wait until a room is clear to open chests - do it as soon as you can spare the firepower. Money that isn't being spent on training dice or new potions should be getting spent on treasure cards, if you aren't getting lucky draws on the chests themselves (remember you can only draw treasure cards from a given deck after you've found at least one chest of that colour.) Buying new skills can be fancy if your starting skills are underwhelming, but I find it's too expensive to be a mainstay strategy. If you happen to 1000gp lying around, go for it, but don't suffer through poorly geared heroes just to save up for a random skill that may or may nor be of use.

Steve-O said:

I'm a new player to the game as well.

This might be common knowledge to most of you, but for a beginner, this is great information, and has cleared up alot of things for me.

Thanks for posting this.

Ex

Thank you for the thorough response.

Yeah I usually pick my heroes hopefully when I get a bit better at this game I will chose my heroes randomly because using the same heroes I'm sure will get boring.

My main problem was probably going after what the overlord spawned and maybe not using my ranged attackers very well they don't seem to good as my melee when killing a creature do they usually need to have power dice added on from fatigue to be effective or is using double attack better?

So ranged heroes apparently 3 of them is good to have

I usually use fatigue to move so I can get double attacks so I can kill two monsters in one turn

EddieB said:

That's fair. Drawing heroes randomly will also help you get a feel for the game as you are exposed to more abilities and see the way they change the game.

EddieB said:

"Double attacking" (Battle action) is better when you can afford to do it. Realistically you won't be able to do it all the time because, even decked out with fatigue potions, you'd move way too slowly if you always Battled. A Ready action with Guard is a good fallback if a particular hero doesn't have anything to attack when his turn rolls around.

The ideal hero party will have one "tank" character (usually a melee hero the way they're statted out) and three magic/ranged attackers. Being able to attack from a distance makes a huge difference in how often you can Battle, and therefore how quickly you clear out monsters. It's true that melee weapons tend to do the most damage per attack, but the limited range makes more than one melee hero in the party somewhat redundant. It is good to have one for when things get tight, but one is usually all you need.

Magic weapons have the highest concentration of area effect attacks and special abilities from surges, so you generally want two of those to hit multiple targets at once and to slow down the survivors. Ranged attacks are good for range (distance) strikes, damage is average and most of those weapons only hit single targets, so they're good for cleaning up what's left over.

People who are more familiar with the game will know you also want one of your heroes to be a "runner" - someone with a high Speed/Fatigue combination who can move quickly to grab chests and other tokens and activate glyphs (although with Astarra in your party that last bit is largely obviated.) It's not a deal breaker if you don't have a designated runner, so don't worry too much about that right now, but keep it in mind for later.

Generally speaking, any hero who has three trait dice in a single attack type will be very good at killing things using weapons of that kind. It's an unfortunate truth that having trait dice split weakens a hero greatly, and the hero abilities assigned to such heroes do not always compensate for the lack of firepower. There are still some very solid heroes in the 2/1 split categories, although you'll pretty much always want to focus on whichever trait has 2 dice. The 1/1/1 split heroes ("jacks of all trades") are mostly useless. You can train extra trait dice in any category, but you are limited to 4 tokens of each type, which is another reason to favour 3-trait heroes at least for whichever category you have two of (and to avoid going 3 Magic or 3 Ranged heroes) - that way you can fully train all your heroes to 5 dice, money and time permitting. In the basic game there's no reason not to train up to 5 dice in a hero's main trait (in the Advanced Campaign there is a reason to avoid this, but don't worry about that until you get there.)

Ok thanks