BUG: just did survival mode. Died, chose to go back to menu ather than retry, and now I'm looking at the title screen with the white grid and green plane and the fade effect is cycling continuously. Fade in black, fade back in, repeat. No buttons, no way to continue. Seems to be stuck in a loop.
Beat the game, ended with 22 bullion. Never once spent any, and never once had enough to buy anything that was better that what I had. Note that when I first started playing there had already been an update to increase the drop rate.
Ok, beat the game. Conquered Rome...and nothing special happens. No video sequence, no story, no nothing. Just "you conquered rome" like when you conquer any city and that's it. Kind of disappointing. Anyway, final levels were 42, 42 and 40, all speed/strength stacked dimachaerus gladiators. Nothing else is needed to beat the game. Though note that the 4x combo skill is disappointing for its cost since each hit does less damage and the miss rate seems kind of high.
@BlakeM14: Yes, speed does "do something." it *IS* possible to get multiple attacks to your opponents one, but it's not very realistic to expect it. For example, my current team has speed ranging from 66-78, and even going back to the very first, lowest level fight in the first city, I have to go two full rounds before I get two attacks to his one. HOWEVER, higher speed does mean you get to go FIRST, and if all your team is fast, and can get all three attacks before anyone on the opposing team moves, you can easily use that time to kill or disable one enemy, making it 3 to 2 in your favor before they get to move. That is VERY useful.
Presently in the final area, Rome, with level 34-37 gladiators, beating teams over level 50. Don't know why you people are downvoting my advice. If you're having problem with the blockers, you're doing it wrong. Stop trying to out-finesse them. You always have the choice of fighting two teams to advance. Pick the one with no more than 2 shield wielders. Spec strength and speed and kill one before he's able to activate his ability. Then kill the other guy, and it's 3 to 1 in your favor and you can wear the last blocker down until he dies.
As for mercy vs kill, I think it's not as important as some people are saying, but yes...loot is a large portion of your gold income. But by halfway through the game you'll have 50k gold you can't spend until much later cities, and MP is probably more important. Also, later on, drops fall off to almost nothing. Sometimes even taking the extra loot option will give no drops at all and the gold is less important. My advice would be, mostly always do whatever the crowd wants for the MP boost. An extra round or two of special attacks is more important than the extra gold, and later on gold is MUCH easier and faster to get than MP gains.
Focus target on glads you can eliminate. If they shield, just attack somebody else. If they have too high health, just take out their weapon so they can't fight back. Self healing and dodge/block builds try to allow you to outlast your opponent, but heal/dodge/block doesn't evade as much damage as simply killing your opponents or removing their weapons. So kill or disable them fast and move on. When you fight those annoying block teams, just kill/disable whomever you can and work the rest down over time. When it's 3 vs 1 in your favor and you do 4 times as much damage, even if you miss 75% of the time, you'll still win.
As for build, I think there are several valid options, but pesonally the best option I've found is ALL 3 glads as dimachaerus, with enough speed to always go first (40-50 by athens, less earlier) and everything else into strength. Get two weapons, and spend skillpoints in the 1st 3 tiers. Skip blood rage. Buy best weapons you can. Worry less about armor. The goal here is to do enough damage FIRST to kill one glad, so that it's 3 of you vs 2 of them before they act. The remaining 2 can't kill one of yours, so next round it becomes 3 vs 1. Then you win. And you win FAST so if you do need to grind, it doesn't take long.
Don't waste your time buying high level slaves. You can only use 3 at a time, and there's no need for more because respecs are only 1000 gold. Get a team of 3 early on, and stick with them. Don't pay stupidly high amounts of gold to buy more and then get stuck dividing up your xp across them. 3 on your team, no more no less.
Now that I'm 7/9 of the way through the game, I'm finding that a lot of complaints and advice people are giving in the posts is invalid. The gold problem is nonexistent. Just keep playing and you'll have more gold than you can spend. The grinding and build advice....not so much. Right now my glads are levels 31-34 and I'm beating teams full of level 47+ glads in Athena consistently. If you need to grind excessively, try changing your build instead.
Tarsus: "win a combat without losing a gladiator." I just won a match in Tarsus without any of my gladiators even being hit once at all...still did not get this achievement.
Pace is too slow, and the player has too little involvement. Even after spending 5-10 minutes grinding, each run basically amounts to pressing thrust or shoot over several seconds, and the remaining 95% of the run is just holding the up arrow key. Would be better if tricks were something you could do more often, and if the pace wasn't so sluggish.
Umm...BUG: I leveled and received no points to spend. Thought maybe I mis-saw it somehow, leveled again, AGAIN received no skill or attribute points to spend.
Yeah, just trained up a level 11 dimacherus and she's more useful than my level 24 muumilo was. The damage mitigation of having your opponent be dead is much better than the damage mitigation provided by sometimes blocking.
@Xelestial: Ok, I had a L23 gladiator with no skill points spent, invested everything into defense/muumilo. It's fairly durable, but my strength/dimacherus glads do 3 times as much damage. The two others sometimes kill a glad before the muumilo even moves, and that 50% block rate doesn't make up the difference. At least at level 20-25, dimacherus totally beats muumilo.
Has anyone found a build other than strength/dimachaeruss that makes sense? Somehow, durability/dodge regen/healing builds seem kind of pointless when I'm taking out gladiators in 2-3 hits.
I can't tell the difference between a speed rate of 10 and a speed of 25 at all. There's no shortage of MP, and misses don't happen often. Looks like "invest everything in strength" is the way to go here.
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