That's interesting - you can definitely get more control over Warriors of Discord, and if you're minimizing total levels then they're a pretty good choice. Since I end up spending most of my money on buildings and not units, it might be better to recruit Warriors of Discord, but I wonder if it's better enough than Barbarians.

I spent some time looking over the code and level 40+ only bumps up a spire level when there are 4-5 spires. So once you're down to 3 spires, only level 70+ will bump a spire level. You might have more wiggle room than you think, though I'm not sure how fast you destroy towers (gradually or all at once).

Still, it might be tricky to win with such a low level cap. 8 level 8 Warriors of Discord would have trouble defending the kingdom from some of the later waves. They can only be in so many places at once! It reminds me of Vigil for a Fallen Hero, where it can get frustrating trying to make your tiny handful of heroes do what you want. Definitely interested to see if you get a successful run.

What are your strategies for Spires of Death? I recently submitted an attempt just so we'd have something on the leaderboard:

The basic strategy is:

1. get Warriors and Krolm x 2 up
2. get 3x level 3 marketplaces
3. build everything: fairgrounds, guilds until they cost 5k+, wizards towers, sorcerer's abode
4. all-out assault starting on ~day 27

The "build" step is the most interesting part - what does the optimal kingdom look like? Should you build a Magic Bazaar before your second Rogues Guild? Is it worth upgrading the Magic Bazaar?

There aren't a lot of quests that really showcase long-term kingdom building. Anyone have tips on how to improve this run or build their own kingdoms?

Thanks for the explanations, those are both pretty useful! While these don't reveal 100% what to do to some robot precision, it is helpful to know the rules. I spent some time reading over the Spires of Death scripting, and it was pretty interesting reading about how the spires step up their attacks.

@Torquesthekron

I feel like basically every level could be improved with use of the gambling hall, but I honestly feel like that should be a separate category. I didn't use it out of principle for any of my runs, but I guess it's within the rules so go for it

That was my first thought - isn't this so broken it should be banned? However the above 8ish quests were all I could come up with that could be improved with Gambling Hall.

Keep in mind to use Gambling Hall you have to:

1. build Rogue's Guild
2. build Marketplace
3. build Inn
4. upgrade Palace
5. build Elven Bungalow
6. wait for up to 1 day for Gambling Hall to appear
7. THEN buy whatever you wanted in the first place

On most quests, it's faster to build what you want immediately rather than build out all those buildings. Gambling Hall isn't useful on quests completed in <6 minutes, which is most of them.

Timer quests aren't helped much either since you have a huge amount of money by the time the final objective appears.

So Gambling Hall is only effective on "grow a barbarian army" quests and not "blitz" or "wait" quests.

I do agree that a leaderboard that's basically "who got luckiest" would be pretty lame. However on most of these quests, you can stop gambling as soon as you reach 20k. This happens about 20% of the time when starting from 5k. So it just becomes part of the strategy, like resetting if you get bad spawn positions.

And as always, if it's considered boring enough it can be banned or spun out into a different category.

with the SDK files we can re-explain the problem of how long teleport vs short teleport works.

I saw you post about this earlier, how are you decoding these SDK files?

I have some disassembly experience so I'm curious. But I've never done it in Windows so I don't know what tools to use or where to look.

I feel like while Ramsrock's 6 day clear prepares a large economy, he doesn't really use it, while in your 6 day clear, while your gambling hall makes you build a far larger kingdom in the same amount of time... due to luck with hero response to the flag you don't get the effective value of your gambling hall gold - only 1 guild's worth of barbarians respond of the 18 that could be there.

I agree - the big kingdom helped, but not 100% as much as it could have with better unit management. I also sat around waiting for the first teleport when I probably could have attacked much earlier with 1-2 Temples to Krolm. Now that I think about it, the optimal strategy might be to rush with Rangers + Krolm immediately and not bother with money at all.

With Tomb of the Dragon King, you're right that it could be improved by better management of the barbarians, getting them to destroy buildings instead of Rogues. I feel Gambling Hall would still help some, as there are plenty of times when your kingdom does not have 100% full guilds and Rage of Krolm, and both of those would definitely help.

Legendary Heroes: definitely would help, since the first half of the quest is getting money to build wizard towers. In theory you would gamble up to 60k+, but the odds of that happening are pretty slim (5%?). Still, we could get a big improvement by gambling up 20k and using that to jump start a big economy - 3x level 3 marketplaces. This would definitely shave off a few days.

Darkness Falls: I just did this one, definitely helped.

Spires of Death: This is the longest, most expensive quest by a long shot. Similar to Legendary Heroes, you theoretically could fund this entirely with Gambling Hall but more realistically you'd want to use it to get a foothold early on. Anyway none of that matters because right now any time is a WR!

In A Deal with the Demon, the winning strategy is to use a Gambling Hall to boost your money from 5k to 100k in 24 seconds.

Wouldn't some other quests go a lot faster if you started with 100k?

Just today I went for Gambling Hall on Clash of Empires and improved my time from 15 minutes to 10 minutes. I also improved the Brashnard's Sphere record from 14 minutes to 13 minutes.

I feel this applies to any quest where you build 2+ marketplaces: instead of waiting for your economy to grow, just gamble it away. 80% of the time you'll lose everything and restart. But 20% of the time you'll magically go from 5k to 20k. This gives you a HUGE head start of several days over the traditional strategy.

So, don't you think the following quests can be improved by using Gambling Hall?

1. Tomb of the Dragon King
2. The Dark Forest
3. The Fortress of Ixmil
4. Legendary Heroes
5. Darkness Falls
6. Spires of Death

Thanks for the response. I do think there is quite a bit of variability, and came up with a scientific test:

1. start recording audio
2. turn off music
3. turn directX on (fast)
4. freestyle game > only outpost > wait 2 days
5. turn directX off (slow)
6. freestyle game > only output > wait 2 days

Every 1 day, the advisor announces "your majesty, if our kingdom is to prosper, it needs more heroes." By looking at the time between announcements, we can see how long a day is, and if it ever varies.

Here's two recordings - the top is with directX on, the bottom is with directX off:

There's quite a difference - 66 seconds vs 73 seconds. If changing this one setting can make a difference on the same computer, it can probably make a difference on different peoples' setups.

Anyway, I guess the takeaway is to try to get your system running as fast as possible and hope for the best.

I kind of believe this can be crushed though --- I built the outpost and built/demoloished temple of krolm to make tons of barbarians for defense (they move to outpost which still holds 6 and I pay the lowest cost for each temple instead of scaling cost) , but probably could have put that money toward getting started

I like the idea - you're getting a high-level barbarian for only 1250. Still, it does cost money in a quest won on money, and also takes a lot of attention to maintain. You can also do the outpost + embassy strategy to get 8 high-level heroes, but random classes.

In my experience by the time I have the resources to build an outpost, my base is secure enough that I should already be exploring with wizard towers. In most quests you want to recruit enough heroes to control the entire map. In this quest, you only need enough heroes to secure your kingdom. As long as no marketplaces are destroyed and few tax collectors are killed, you're good.

Hi all! I started running this game recently as I saw there was some activity recently and I've played on and off for a while.

I was trying to beat the Legendary Heroes WR.

Here's Reality's current WR:

• 21 days in-game time
• 23:07 real time

Here's my attempt:

• 20 days in-game time
• 24:06 real time

Which is faster? How does mine have less in-game time but more real time? In both runs we don't touch the game speed setting, so I don't know how we ended up with different times.

Mostly I'm looking for a way to normalize my setup with everyone else's so I can get consistent times.