If you are going for badge, don't aim for 288 crystals hero in sacrifice menu. It gives almost same power rating and you will lose time getting equipment for it. I also got unlucky and my 3 stars hero deals ~half damage of what other 1 star heroes can do.
Two useful things for badge hunters. First, you can sell first dungeon reward at the market. Click scales icon on the left and you will be able to sell each item for ~350 gold. This is better than what you would get for mastering the weapon, which requires the reward as component. It is also instant cash. Second, filter your recipes by type - if you view all recipes, scrolling will be annoying and eventually some of the old recipes will get hidden.
What is wrong with the game balance? Silver refresh hero(assassin woman) from tavern controls the bronze refresh level troop(spear men) and has extremely high attack and hp, while both gold refresh heroes i ever got are only a reskin of knights with slightly better stats. The desert challenge levels give you only bronze refresh after completion. Everyone already told about the blacksmith. Most heroes control the same weak starting troops. Some of the perks are obviously better than the other ones(example: +30 armor vs +35 armor), but both take one slot and unlock same perks later on.
Also, here is working strategy for most of latter levels. Put 3 red enhancement blocks on 2nd, 3rd and 4rth floors in triangle form, add laser gun between all of them, cannon or laser bombs between two of them, machine guns in the remaining 2 slots close to red blocks. Get at least one armor block and fill remaining slots with weapons of your choice. Dustwalker is good at both taking damage and dealing damage(with his kill move). Laser weapons will deal most damage, but game will throw a lot of enemies with shields at you. If the game spawns two worms, try to damage both before killing them, so that next wave of enemies does not start with one worm still alive and having high health.
After completing the campaign and getting most of the achievements, i still has one question. Seriously, whats the point of -3$ cost of cannons upgrade(results in them having price of 107 instead of 110)?
No way to review the evidence before answering questions(without going through long cutscenes), ridiculous plot twists coming out of nowhere and court questioning, not a single enjoyable character, game engine not suited for game. 2/5
Be advised, some of your items may disappear. Happened to me with third ladder step and fourth core in storage area. I think that this happens when you try to use items too fast. Game breaking, had to restart twice.
Enemy ships act bad when their ship is blocking the only path to your ships. Enemy sends one ship to get your ships, path get blocked, other 4 enemy ships are traveling around the map corners instead of waiting for path to unblock. You might want to change the pathfinding function to address this kind of behavior.
Hint: save your trophies for last battles(last chapter and chapter before that). Spend them on double power and get 33+ attacks combined gear by the last chapter. With setup like this, you will be smashing through enemy shields with ease, only combo length will matter.
Even gambler class and the free reroll does not save me from grid full of defense items and no chains while enemies are all shielded by ONE element. Wish there was a way to quickly restart.
It feels like some missions are meant to be completed only with consumable weapons usage help, no matter the upgrade paths. And overall your tanks are much, much weaker than opponent ones. I don't like this.
If you are having troubles with hard badge, try order of the holy cross. Put the points in constituion, maces and spirit. Pick aura skills first, get 2 handed maces skills and horse defence next. Holy tribunal will speed your progress by a lot(250 damage each second for free, and you will get it close to the very start of game), healing aura and armor buffs with best horse units will be enough to complete everything. When you get best units, go straight for enemy capitals and fight the champion after conquering it.
Seems to be a rather good game. However, there also seem to be 2 issues. First is common problem about this kind of games - waiting times for everything growing exponentially. People don't enjoy waiting. Second is not so common - servants. There are a lot of comments in top section, where players complain about spending servants while the game did not warn them that they will do it. Second, researchers stuff. I bet that a lot of players have spent their starting servants on researcher only to get every slot filled the next day(and this way, a lot of servants got wasted). Will anything be done about this?
Thanks for the feedback A3lex. We've been getting a lot of feedback about the accidental servant spending, and we are going to revise that popup to make things clear and intuitive as soon as we have the chance.
On researchers, I'm happy to say we fixed that by making all researchers cost 1 servant each in realms 76 and 77. So they're effectively free. :)
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Thanks for the tips!