Sorcerer King Dev Stream (February 25th) at 3pm EST, Noon Pacific

Just finished listening to the stream.

Woo! Can't wait for Beta 5!

I love the idea of all the extra heroes. Looking forward to trying them out. The new sovereign screens are great too.

The thing with hypnotism is that it scales with difficulty since higher difficulty maps tend to also have higher level mobs, giving you much stronger troops that can keep up with what the game throws at you so it has more consistency than other spells at any particular difficulty level. And at 70%, it's not that big of a gamble, though it is pretty costly if you miss. Other abilities may look better at lower difficulties, but as the difficulty goes up, other abilities tend to fall behind as hypnotism will continue to scale throughout the whole game. Giving the wizard a different signature spell would be nice as long as we can keep hypnotism in as a learnable spell. As you can see, I love hypnotism!

Interesting that the question of capturing all shards came up as I just tried doing that about a week ago. Chant of Vitality + 7 chaos books = super-easy to capture all shards on huge maps. Didn't end up finishing that game as I exited and forgot that I hadn't saved in over an hour and there was no auto-save since I was just playing one really, really long turn. Lost too much progress for me to go back to it. ...this is going to get nerfed isn't it? Save the Ohhh-Peee!!!!!! 

Interesting to see the SK stop cheese spells. One of my fun cheese strategies was to cast summon skeleton, run them into a large army and cast blizzard then die. Rinse and repeat until the army's gone. If the SK could smell the cheese and stop that strategy, it'd be awesome!

Maybe Mudlock for the swamp giant?

Great Job Squiggled . 

What difficulty level were you on?  I have tried the exact strategy a couple of times but i was unable to produce pioneers fast enough to capture and protect them.  Keeping pace with logistics really compounds the problem, as does man availability.  

Updated with replay.

It was on insane.

I just started a new game earlier today to give it a second try. This time remembering to save often

Custom Tinkerer with Varda as hero, Chant of Vitality, 7 chaos, 1 enchant.

Tinkerer because of Master Archivist and more enchanting slots. I beeline for this since it gives me sovereign skills and lore by questing and hitting treasure chests. Super useful with Chant of Vitality.

Varda because she has the best mobility of any hero in the game.

7 chaos for +5 mana, +10 dodge, +15 accuracy, +3 hp. Lots of good enchants in chaos, but has very sucky spells overall, which is fine as the enchantments when all combined together are seriously op.

1 enchant because of city and unit enchants. There's also a city enchant that gives +1 logistics to a city. It doesn't cost any essence and is stackable. Basically gives you infinite logistics. Unfortunately, my current game didn't have the luck of having that spell, so I'm going to have to city spam and hope for the best.

Start of the game, I rush to find enough mats to craft something and start enchanting. I got lucky and got a short sword from an early quest which boosted Varda quite a bit. Got some defense rings. Prioritized getting to 100+ dodge, then 15 mana per kill, then 9hp per kill, then as much accuracy as I can get.

Switch all shards to boost sovereign skills. You'll soon be learning spells faster through questing than shard points and mana from shards is tiny compared to what you get from mana per kill.

Got double-lucky by starting right beside the SK's fortress, so I could take out his troops very early, preventing him from expanding and destroying shards. This will save you shards in the early game more than anything else. Even if I didn't start near the SK's fortress, I would explore on a single turn using chant of vitality until I find the SK's armies and start taking them out. Easier to find them when 

I'm at turn 18 and Varda's already at level 11 because of all the SK troops she's been killing . Watch out for warlocks though...those guys hurt. They can seriously kill you if you don't kill them on your first turn. Other than them, everything else so far has been a cake-walk, if a bit tedious due to all the fights.

Once my mana income started flowing, I just spent mana to build instead of production. Gets logistics up fast allowing for the pioneers to come.

I'm expecting any 100% strategy on insane to get nerfed, so enjoy it while it lasts! 

OMG, i did not know that you could stack +1Logistics and did not notice it was not using up essence

.  Great find ... i bet this will change.

Going to give this a try

Would it be possible to get access to the unit maps during the beta-phase?

And where are all the magical wild beast? So far I have only seen shrills. I do not think I have seen earth elemental or ice elemental in the wild. Did they get dumped due to the focus on fire elementals?

ps. I also want to say that I look forward to the global city enhancement spells. If I understand this correctly this is a city enchancement, which has a global strategic effect. For example you cast Winter Wraith and all your units in your ZOC (ZOC of your cities and outposts) get +1 cold damage. Or do the effects apply all over the map for example also in the SK ZOC?