Armored Princess Boss Analysis

The general mechanics of Bosses haven't really changed in Armored Princess. Every Boss summons minions, but in The Legend only Baby's First Boss didn't, so this isn't some massive shift in concept. So no using Rage moves, Bosses have infinite retaliations, etc.

That said, one tweak is that the Impossible difficulty's impact on Attack has been reduced from +100% to +70%, making the gap between a Hard-mode Boss and the same Boss on Impossible less drastic.


White Kraken
Attack/Defense (Central tentacle): 8 / 12
Attack/Defense (Side tentacles): 10 / 10
Initiative: 100 
Health: 1000 (Central tentacle), 700 (Each side tentacle, for a total of 1400)
Resistances: 20% Physical, 30% Poison, -20% Fire

A boss new to Orcs on the March, somewhat counterintuitively the White Kraken is actually going to be the earliest Boss you fight in pretty much any run. It's very much the blue Kraken from The Legend, with only three substantive changes. As such, I'm not going to rattle off the whole shebang of its moveset, because it's just what I described in The Legend's Boss Analysis post.

The first of these changes is that, in deference to how much earlier in Armored Princess the White Kraken is than the blue Kraken was in The Legend, its stats are far lower and so too are its summon quantities initially lower. The second of these changes is that it no longer resists everything, and in fact is now weak to Fire like the Kraken always claimed to be; bring Fire attackers if you can! Throw Fireballs! Burn it! Or Magic damage is an okay alternative. The third of these changes is that when it spawns Devilfish, it can actually also spawn Pirate Ghosts, in any combination of 2 of one or the other or 1 of each.

The introduction of Pirate Ghosts is a huge shift in the dynamic of the fight, making it much harder, as Pirate Ghosts and Devilfish are surprisingly complimentary enemies. Paladins are one of the only units with decent Physical and Magical resistance, and their Physical damage is strongly resisted by Pirate Ghosts. (Admittedly partially offset by their damage bonus against Demons and Undead) Your few Fire damage units will fare well against Pirate Ghosts, but poorly against Devilfish. Psychological effects like Fear and Sleep work fine on Devilfish, but are worthless against Pirate Ghosts. Etc. It also adds a new element of luck to the fight: if you're leaning heavy on Magic damage units (Since they do extra damage to Pirate Ghosts and aren't resisted by Devilfish or the White Kraken), having the White Kraken stubbornly spawning Devilfish instead will be hurting your effectiveness compared to if it was summoning Pirate Ghosts reasonably often.

This all can make the fight interesting, and yet also can make it very frustrating. Thankfully, the fact that it's placed much earlier in the game makes it a far more manageable fight in and of itself, as you only need a few level-ups/gear improvements/etc to pull substantially ahead of it in power. If you get tired of messing around with the White Kraken, hoping for the stars to align and let you win when you're a little underpowered, it's not so hard to go wandering elsewhere and come back when you're much more powerful.

This requires the caveat that Armored Princess' early game can actually be fairly difficult to get through without constantly running out of Gold and so on, and the White Kraken is early enough you'll very possibly still be in what I tend to call 'Bolo Hell'. It's not until Montero or so that the game opens up enough for you to be reasonably consistently able to ignore hard fights until they're easy fights, like you could very consistently do in The Legend up until quite late in the game.


Giant Toad
Attack/Defense: 35 / 30
Initiative: 8
Health: 40,000
Resistances: 20% Magical, 50% Poison, -20% Fire

The Giant Toad's resistance suite once again reward Fire damage, punishes Poison damage, and somewhat unusually slightly more mildly punishes Magical damage.

On the plus side, the Giant Toad already summons lots of Poison-resistant enemies, so you're unlikely to think it's a good idea to rely on Poison damage in the fight, minimizing the harm caused by Boss resistances not being readily checkable.

The Giant Toad has four-ish actions.

1: Poison spit, hitting all your units for decent damage. No friendly fire risk. It will almost always open the battle with this, so if your army is too weak to cope with it shaving off a chunk all at once, you should basically write off this fight until later.

2: Spawn three snake stacks in random open tiles. This can be any mixture of Snakes, Swamp Snakes, or Royal Snakes, with Royal Snakes occurring 20% of the time vs 40% each for the other two. As with prior Boss summons, these snakes don't get a turn until next round and fully count as summons in every respect.

3: Hop to a new location, accomplishing nothing else with its turn. It decides to do this at Health checkpoints, specifically at 80%, 60%, and 40%. Note that it can't hop two turns in a row.

4: Physical attack. This can be a bite with its head against one target, or it can slap its foot down onto two tiles at once. This set of attacks is its retaliations, and as with The Legend's Giant Turtle and Giant Spider, it will retaliate with a bite if you target its head and with the foot attack if you target a given foot. No friendly fire risk.

The Giant Toad is surprisingly brutal, in part due to its tiny, unusually-shaped battlefield making it very difficult to really make safe use of ranged units. You're usually better off leaning heavily on melee units (Preferably No Retaliation) or pseudo-ranged units that can lob ranged/no Retaliation Talents even with an enemy adjacent to them. Royal Snakes are, perhaps ironically, one of the better options available due to their extreme Poison resistance, ability to strike without provoking the Giant Toad, and mild Physical resistance, but Orc Veterans also perform well (Savage Attack and Cunning both allow them to dish out tons of damage without provoking retaliations), Royal Thorns can be surprisingly useful if you're willing to Teleport them into a corner or something, Black Knights have a useful set of resistances and benefit from rapidly building their Damage and crit chance as they chop down summoned snakes, Assassins can use Murder to help clear out summons one time in the early stages of the fight -or potentially multiple times if you're careful with Turn Back Time- and Goblin Shaman are good just as in any Boss fight simply for their ability to wear away the Giant Toad's resistances with each ranged attack.

Overall though the Giant Toad is surprisingly difficult to produce a good lineup against, making it one of the more challenging Bosses of the game if you're not going to try to simply level on past it. Which, incidentally, is moderately difficult since it is placed late enough in the game there's not a ton of room to level past it with. Fortunately it's not actually mandatory to fight, defeating it is just an option for getting a Stone of Teana.

It's also obviously one Boss you shouldn't be summoning a Dragon of Chaos against, as it will kill it entirely incidentally with the poison spit attack. This is unusual, as the Dragon of Chaos is normally a pretty decent tool for grabbing Boss attention at relatively low cost to yourself, especially if you've gotten to Infernal Dragons to thus have the Talent for a no-retaliation hit.


The Driller
Attack/Defense: 50 / 40
Initiative: 2
Health: 7000/14,000/28,000 (First/second/third phases)
Resistances: 20% Physical, 80% Poison, 10% Fire

The Driller is a very unusual fight, though unfortunately it's not actually that interesting of one.

You're fighting it on a long bridge, and initially it has surprisingly low Health for such a late-placed Boss -but when you knock its Health down to 1 (It won't go below 1, and in fact the game has the strange feature of capping the reported damage-on-hit to whatever would leave it with 1 Health, even though the game is normally fine with reporting damage in vast excess of whatever the target's Health was before you reduced it to a smear) it will promptly back up several tiles and switch to a new, much larger Health meter. This happens twice, and then the third time you kill it is when it dies 'for real'.

Note that strangely low Initiative. I'll be coming back to that in a minute.


It can do 4-ish things, not counting the retreat behavior, which is not actually an action it chooses to take, but rather autonomously occurs out-of-turn-order when it's reduced to 1 Health.

1: Spawn a single stack of Guard Droids or Repair Droids. They exit from the 'mouth' on the belly of the machine and fly to an unoccupied nearby tile. They prefer to land adjacent to the Driller itself, but if you've blocked all those tiles they'll just fly a little bit away to land. (Even the Guard Droids do this, even though they don't fly in normal play) Notably, the Repair Droids can actually repair the Driller with their Talent.

2: Fire a machine gun down an entire lane for massive Physical damage. When I say 'massive' I mean 'you can probably assume the stacks are gone'. Naturally, this absurd gun has no friendly fire.

3: Melee attack with either its drill arm (Its left) or its spinny claw thing. (Its right) Either way, this does Physical damage in an area: the drill arm will hit two tiles in front of the Driller on its left side, while the spinny claw thing will strike a triangle of three tiles, two of which are adjacent to it and one of which is one out. As is usual with Bosses, these two attacks are its melee retaliation options, and it will use whichever one is appropriate to its attacker's location, but it will also use them of its own volition if one of your troops is in reach. Curiously, as far as I can tell it doesn't actually 'see' the full strike zone of the spinny claw thing; I've only ever seen it use it on units directly adjacent to it, and in fact I spent a while unaware this attack actually struck a third tile because of this behavioral oddity. As usual, these attacks have no friendly-fire risk.

4: After a retreat, the Driller can slam its arms on the ground (In spite of the way it's animated, this can't hurt units in front of it), causing a cave-in that renders permanently impassible the two rows of tiles in your back. Any stacks in these tiles are instantly killed without even a damage announcement, and it's impossible to Resurrect them or the like. It can do this once for each retreat, and they don't consolidate. (ie if you force it to retreat twice, it can cause a cave-in twice, rather than blocking the last four rows in one move)

Now, on the face of it the Driller sounds pretty scary, but... if you trigger a retreat before it actually did anything, it doesn't take its turn at all and has to wait until next round. I'm pretty sure that in mechanical terms you're actually killing three separate Driller units, with the later ones spawned in, hence the lack of turns. Regardless, though, this severely hampers the Driller, especially in conjunction with the fact that usually its first choice after a retreat is to cause a cave-in. If your force is actually adequate to take on the Driller at all, the usual outcome is

retreats->cave-in->retreats->cave-in->makes an attack->dies

If you're making sure to keep your forces ahead of the cave-in (Which isn't hard: so long as you're not using base-Speed Royal Thorns or something, just have ranged attackers move a tile forward and attack each turn, if not faster), the overall result is that the battle will probably take 6-ish turns, and the Driller will spend 4 of those turns not doing anything actually threatening. Worse, once you're aware of this behavior, you can deliberately take even more advantage of it: say your forces are actually lethal enough to force it to retreat twice on the first turn, but instead you bring it close to its second retreat and then force the retreat on the second turn, giving it even less opportunity to do anything threatening.

The Driller arguably makes up for it by being obnoxiously lethal when it does get a chance to attack (In particular, it seems to far prefer the machine gun attack to its weaker melee attacks), but it's still not really a difficult Boss. Indeed, I've personally never seen it summon droids in a 'real' fight in Armored Princess (I've let it summon Droids, just to confirm it's a real thing), and so the only reason I'm mentioning that Repair Droids can heal it is because it's explicitly listed in the in-game description. I've never actually seen it happen myself, because the opportunity never arrives.

I do like how it gets animated, at least. Even its death animation is enjoyable. The trio of mischievous Gremlins half-cooperating-half-competing for control have a lot of personality for being vague furry humanoids with nasty grins. In some sense the Driller is what I'd like every Boss to be: memorable and interesting opponents.

It's just hampered by how lackluster its actual gameplay is.

The annoying thing is that its tremendous lethality means the issue I brought up in The Legend -that generally either a Boss is a joke or it kills you- is actually even more exaggerated. I mean, it's at least nice to not spend seventeen turns thinking I'm gonna win and having it dawn on me around turn twenty that I can't actually win, but it's still just bizarre how you'll either be utterly slaughtered by it or it won't get to do much of anything before it goes down. Neither of these is an actually engaging scenario to play.

By extension, there's not a lot to say about unit recommendations. You should bias your forces toward ranged combat, but the details aren't that important. (Aside that Poison damage is obviously terrible to utilize) It really is just that easy to kill.


Giant Spider
Attack/Defense: 22 / 24
Initiative: 100
Health: 30,000
Resistances: 30% Physical, 30% Magical, 80% Poison

As with the White Kraken, I'm not going to do a full writeup on the Giant Spider, as its core behavior is still identical to The Legend. What's different is:

-When it summons spiders, this is a randomized mixture of most spider types. (Venomous Spiders, Cave Spiders, and Fire Spiders) Fire Spiders are spawned 20% of the time vs the 40% apiece for Cave Spiders and Venomous Spiders.

-Now the summons immediately get a turn, instead of having to wait a round.

-The Giant Spider has gained a new retaliation it uses when struck by ranged attacks: no matter where the unit is, it becomes encased with webbing for two turns. If the webbing is not Dispelled, the unit will completely miss its next two turns. Note that many ranged Talents will be retaliated against in this way, too. Also note this retaliation is also unlimited per turn.

Where The Legend's Giant Spider was a bad joke, Armored Princess' Giant Spider is actually tremendously frustrating. Since ranged units are nearly worthless (Only able to fire one turn out of three if you're not Dispelling them? When you can only sustainably cast one Dispel a turn? Yikes), you have to rely on melee units, preferably No Retaliation melee so it doesn't chew through your forces with its melee retaliations. This basically demands a specialized anti-Giant Spider army just for it, and there's not that many good options. Any melee attack that strikes multiple targets is a way around its retaliations (eg Cerberi that target an adjacent spider, Orc Chieftains hitting with their shockwave by targeting an adjacent spider, etc) as well, but other than that and standard No Retaliation, there's not a ton of options here.

Thankfully, it's entirely optional. There's a sidequest that requires beating it, but the rewards aren't huge, so you can ignore it or at least put it off until you're really powerful. If you were forced to fight it, that would be awful, unfun, unfair nonsense.

...

That's next game.


Gremlion
Attack/Defense: 50 / 60
Initiative: 15
Health: 77,000
Resistances: 50% Magical

Much like the Giant Toad, Gremlion's Magic resistance isn't really a big deal because he summons things that are also hugely resistant to the same and so you wouldn't want to try to rely on Magic damage anyway. Unlike the Giant Toad, Gremlion doesn't even have any other resistances to potentially influence exactly what you choose to use beyond 'not Magic damage'. So that's straightforward.

Gremlion has three actions.

1: Spawn a Gremlin Tower. It can be Friendly or Evil, slightly biased toward Evil. (60% of placements will be Evil) Gremlion defaults to trying to place it in the center of the battlefield, but if the center is occupied already he'll place it semi-randomly in a different location. He can only place up to 5 on the battlefield, and in fact may skip his turn entirely if there's nowhere for him to place a new Gremlin Tower. (This includes that blocking the tiles he targets can prevent him from placing a Tower at all) The Gremlin Tower won't get a turn until the next round. Note that the scaling-over-time effect with Boss summons actually does apply to Gremlion's Gremlin Towers; the Towers he sets at the beginning of the fight will have less max Health than the ones he sets ten turns into the fight, which will have less max Health than the ones he sets twenty turns into the fight, etc. In the case of Friendly Gremlins, this in turn means the ones placed later will spawn more units at a time, themselves. I haven't noticed any other scaling factor, though. (ie I haven't noticed Evil Gremlins doing more damage if placed later)

2: Hit all your units for high Magic damage. No friendly fire.

3: Punch three tiles for Physical damage. No friendly fire. Gremlion can use either fist, each one hitting one side but also catching the tile at his front. As usual, this is his retaliation when struck in melee, and he'll use whichever fist is appropriate to the side he was attacked on. If you attack him from in front, he defaults to using his left fist, though he'll use his right fist if you've got another unit on his right and not on his left. So basically, don't put anything right in front of him.

Unusually, Gremlion seems to strongly prefer placing Gremlin Towers, with the occasional use of the Magic mass attack. Even when you have units in front of him, he'll almost never throw a punch other than as a retaliation. As such, Gremlion is unusually passive for a Boss, relying almost exclusively on his summoned Gremlin Towers to hurt you... other than the periodic Magic burst, of course.

Since Gremlion's summons are also placed in an unusually predictable manner, a ranged-heavy strategy is especially effective relative to most Bosses, as you don't have to worry about summons dropping into positions that pin your ranged units. Obviously, Catapults and Cannoneers are some of your better choices since they'll rip apart Gremlin Towers so readily, but basically any ranged attacker that doesn't do Magic damage is a good choice for fighting Gremlion with. Magic resistance is also valuable to minimize the consequences of his ranged attack, but you shouldn't really try to prioritize it; with the exception of Black Dragons (Who are okay-ish for helping suppress the Gremlin Towers, but will die fairly quickly if you try to have them melee Gremlion himself), units generally only have mild Magic resistance or they do Magic damage themselves. On the flipside, Droids are a poor choice for this fight, since Gremlion will get free bonus damage on them, compounded by Evil Gremlins having their retaliation do Magic damage.

Overall though Gremlion is a relatively easy fight. A fun easy, unlike the Driller's boring easy, but still easy enough you can largely do what you want and probably win anyway, so long as you're not bringing in Magic damage units. Which is good, because he's placed very late in the game, giving you little ability to try to level past him if you're struggling, and he's absolutely mandatory to defeat.


K'tahu
Attack/Defense: 60 / 60
Initiative: 12
Health: 86,000
Resistances: 20% Poison

Yeah, K'tahu only has the one light resistance. It's a little odd.

Anyway, K'tahu has 4-ish actions.

1: A Physical spit attack that hits all your units and knocks them to 1 action point. You might expect it to do Poison damage given the visuals, but no, it's Physical.

2: Spawning around a half-dozen Lizardmen stacks in random open tiles. This can't spawn Gobots, Adult Gobots, or Chosha, but all other Lizardmen are fair game, with Gorguls and Tirexes being more common than the other possibilities. Notably, whatever Lizardmen are spawned immediately get their turn, and since Lizardmen include some fairly high Initiative units (Gorguls, in particular) you may well find your force being jumped before they get a chance to do anything. Also unusual is that the highest two difficulties specifically boost the effectiveness of this summon -on the highest difficulty he'll summon twice as much Leadership as on the lowest difficulties, while on the second-highest it's only 40% more. Otherwise the mechanics are typical of Boss summons. (Scaling over time, treated as summons, etc)

3: Moving to a different location. The only interesting thing about this is that the initial portion of the animation resembles the Lizardmen-spawning move's animation, and so you may spend a second misunderstanding what is happening. This is a turn-based game, though, so it doesn't really matter.

4: Slamming a fist down for Physical damage. No friendly fire risk. This works much like Gremlion's punches, in that he has a left and a right that both hit the tile directly in front of him in addition to their respective sides, but with a twist: the right-front tile (From K'tahu's perspective) is completely safe. If a unit attacks from that position, it will still provoke a retaliation (Which matters because it can hit your other units), but it cannot be hit by K'tahu's slams. It also can't be caught in retaliations caused by other units, nor by K'tahu choosing to make a melee attack on his own turn -and he will sometimes stupidly try to slam his fist down if you have a unit in that position.

K'tahu's battlefield is much larger and more open than the Giant Toad's, but in general terms similar units are useful. Focusing on ranged units is usually better than with the Giant Toad, though, as melee units will struggle to keep up with K'tahu when he chooses to swim elsewhere whereas ranged units can not only easily keep slamming him with damage but also unlike with the Giant Toad they'll almost always be able to step out of the reach of summons to keep performing ranged attacks. Unlike the Giant Toad, K'tahu strongly prefers to open the fight with summoning, and only occasionally will he open the fight with the poison spit attack.

Amusingly (Maybe even appropriately?), Lizardmen are actually some of your better units for fighting K'tahu. Gorguls and Gorguanas can clean up his initially-weak summons via Bloodlust and Gorguls in particular can occasionally arrange to spear K'tahu through a summon, Tirexes can actually take advantage of their roaring Talent to instantly clear out the summons toward the beginning of the fight, Brontors shrug off his spit attack and can consistently contribute effectively even before you consider Teleport support... Chosha are more debatable, as you're risking the Gobot stacks being incidentally wiped out by the spit attack and the Chosha can't attack K'tahu directly unless you're providing Teleport support, Hayterants are dubious to use since their egg is at high risk of being destroyed before it hatches (And certainly somewhere in the chain of summons the egg will be smashed), and bringing Gobots directly into the fight is just going to get them killed, but it's still nice to have a fight Lizardmen are fairly strong in.

Black Knights are another very good option, able to shrug off a shocking number of spit attacks while actually scaling up their damage as they clean up summons, and once Rising Anger gets going they're shockingly lethal. It can be a little bit of a pain to keep them in reach of K'tahu, but he doesn't move about too often so feeling obliged to use Teleport support isn't necessarily overly burdensome. Ents are surprisingly effective at contributing damage at range with their Talent, and can pass the alternating turns by smacking the summons, Cyclops are a nice choice due to the large battlefield making their infinite range particularly relevant plus they're Physically resistant plus they're perfectly capable of fending for themselves in melee with the summons, and unusually this is one fight Giants are perhaps justifiable to use in as K'tahu summons an unusually large number of stacks, making Earthquake disproportionately effective.

K'tahu is broadly comparable to Gremlion, except more challenging; he's placed about as late in the game, killing him is mandatory to beating the game, and ranged-heavy forces tend to be the go-to option. The gap in his melee coverage makes it easier to justify using a melee unit, and in fact if you feel like using one that lacks No Retaliation that's not much of a flaw against K'tahu, you just need to account for him moving about as an issue. (Though obviously more than one melee unit is questionable)

Only the final Boss is more likely to stonewall you such that you need to overhaul your force composition, rejigger your equipped Items, etc, as it's quite likely you'll have killed nearly everything in the entire world by the time you've unlocked K'tahu, especially if you're on your first run and don't know where to find him/are being thorough about clearing stuff out for levels and other goodies. That said, K'tahu isn't that hard, he's mostly just weirdly punishing to certain unit types. An example of the huge variability of his spit's damage was that one time I fought him with an all-Undead army that included Black Knights and Skeleton Archers; the Skeleton Archers were taking about 40% casualties, while the Black Knights were losing maybe 1 member at a time in a stack that began the fight with over 130 members. Don't be afraid to swap out a unit type if it's suffering tremendous casualties from his spit.

On a more narrative note, it's worth pointing out that K'tahu's name is, in the original Russian, pretty clearly riffing on Cthulhu. This isn't as obvious with how the English version rendered his name, but if you know about it so many elements about him make a lot more sense...


Baal
Attack/Defense: 66 / 66
Initiative: 15
Health: 126,666
Resistances: 20% Magic, 80% Fire

Irritatingly, even though Baal is clearly meant to be a Demon, he's not actually susceptible to Exorcism, and indeed as far as I'm aware anti-Demon effects of any kind don't apply to him. (eg Priests, Inquisitors, and Paladins don't do bonus damage) The most significant/obnoxious manifestation of this is that Demonoligists hit him with Fire damage instead of Magic damage and thus do garbage damage when they really ought to do much better damage to him (Albeit it would still be resisted even if he was treated as a Demon), making them a surprisingly terrible choice for a fight you'd intuitively expect them to excel in.

And yeah, silly Number of the Beast references invisibly in his statline. Too bad players can't see the Attack and Defense part and all and won't see the Health part unless they player on the lower difficulties. I kind of suspect there's a very low rate of players who both played on one of the bottom two difficulties and made it all the way to Baal, so...

He has 3 'proper' turn-using actions.

1: A Fire shockwave that hits all your units, shoves them one tile back, and attempts to spawn Demons-the-species in every tile adjacent to Baal. No friendly fire risk. If a unit was occupying the tile when this attack started, no Demon will spawn in that tile even if the unit in the way was shoved out of the way. Any Demon type can be spawned by this attack. (Including Executioners if you're playing Orcs on the March) The resulting Demons won't actually get a turn until next round. Like K'tahu's summons, these summons are directly affected by difficulty, including the same numbers: 40% more Leadership on the second-highest difficulty, 100% more on the highest difficulty. They play by standard Boss summon rules otherwise. (Scales over time, is genuinely a summon, etc)

2: Baal hurls his sword out, and it hits three different random targets for massive Physical damage. No friendly fire risk. A curious quirk of this move is that it can attempt to target a Gizmo, wasting one of its swings (The Gizmo is unaffected), though I've never seen it do this more than once per launch no matter how many Gizmos were on the field. On the other hand, it seems to strongly prioritize targeting a Gizmo if there's one on the field. As such, Gizmo can be (ab)used to make this attack 33% less effective on a consistent basis. Which is good, as this is his default attack.

3: Baal strikes with his sword in a tile directly adjacent to him, and also hits the tile directly behind that tile (From his perspective), for Physical damage. This is Baal's retaliation move, naturally.

Additionally, Baal has a special fourth action he'll do on top of his normal turn as his Health drops. I've only ever seen him do this after throwing his sword out to hit three targets, but it's possible that's not an actual limitation. In any event, three tiles are sectioned off by a brief flare of fire, with nothing happening immediately: on the following turn, before anything else happens, the three tiles in question will rise into the air, taking away anything on them. (ie killing them instantly) Even Gizmos can be lost to this effect. It has a predetermined order: Baal will always remove three tiles from the middle-back, then three from the left-back (From the player's perspective), and then three from the right-back. As such, there's a strong element of predictability.

There's normally one other wrinkle to the fight: you have an ally! (If you're playing Champion of the Arena, you fight alone, hence my 'normally' comment) This ally has a full five unit slots whose Leadership is scaled to yours, casts a Spell each turn the instant one of his units gets a turn with no Mana limitations on his part (He's particularly fond of using Fit of Energy on one of your units, as well as mass-Blessing, simultaneously benefiting both your units and his units), and in general is pretty cool, his units being represented as Team Green. As you might infer from my reference to their mass-Blessing, these green units are in many ways treated as your units: you can target them with any affect that targets allies, and if you cast a mass-cast boosting effect, it will apply to all of his units in addition to yours. (Unfortunately, this isn't very useful on your end, as the big one worth considering is the one he'll be casting for free) They even benefit from your gear boosts!

On the other hand, his AI is atrocious. His ranged units seem to try to stand in the spaces Baal will remove from the battlefield, with Teleport being your only way to rescue them from their own stupidity, and his melee units seem equally dedicated to ensuring that Baal's melee retaliations will strike two units. I'm not exaggerating for comedic effect or something here, I really do mean that every single time one of his melee units had the option of attacking from a position that would catch one of his or one of my units in a retaliation, or choosing to attack from a position that didn't unnecessarily net Baal more damage, they always picked the option that made the battle harder. No exceptions. The ranged units at least seem to be functioning more on general ranged AI trying to stay away from hostiles, with it just being the case that Baal happens to target the furthest-away sections of the battlefield for removal, and also happens to go after your ally's corner before your corner, but the melee AI I can't explain the consistency in their behavior without assuming the AI is actively seeking this bad result.

It's incredibly frustrating, because it means your ally borders into being more hindrance than help, and even if that weren't true the difficulty is obviously tuned under the idea that you've got their help, which is a problem since their 'help' is so incompetent/harmful. I found Baal fairly easy in Champion of the Arena no matter my class, and nightmarishly difficult in Orcs on the March, which is crazy because Champion of the Arena uses the base unit/Spell/etc list, meaning that eg my Orcs on the March Mage had Black Hole to make the fight way more manageable, while the Champion of the Arena Mage had no tools for trivially doing away with the summons while adding massive damage to the Boss to boot.

Anyway.

This is one fight Gorguls tend to shine in. When Baal summons a bunch of Demons, 3 of the stacks will always be placed where your Gorguls can stab right through them to get free damage on him, and they start out tiny enough that the Gorguls will usually be able to one-shot the stack up until the later stages of the fight, giving the Gorguls a chance for Bloodlust to trigger. This is obviously a bit luck-based, but if you don't mind that it's pretty cool. It's probably not worth bringing along Gorguanas for Whisper of K'tahu, though, as their damage contribution will be poor and it's not like you can Mark of Blood Baal.

Generally speaking though you should be prioritizing using ranged units, and any melee units you bring should ideally have capabilities like how Orc Chieftains can strike Baal for damage by targeting and thus wiping out one of his summons. Red Dragons and Black Dragons technically fall under this list, but their Fire damage makes them nearly worthless, and their Fire Immunity doesn't help that much either.

Goblin Shaman are unusually helpful in this fight since them stripping Baal's resistances will also benefit your ally's troops, though it's not as dramatic as you might hope.

This is also one of the few times Knights might be able to shine over Paladins, since they decently resist Baal's entire kit and can use Circle Attack to get free damage in on Baal where Prayer on Paladins doesn't do anything to Baal.


In spite of what you might expect, the Dragon of Chaos isn't very useful against Baal. He's extremely consistent about trying to sword it to death with his Physical attack, he significantly partially resists its own attacks as do all his summons, and it can't really contribute without being in his melee strike range. Other summons aren't much better off; he seems to have a strong preference for targeting them with his sword-tossing attack, and even with Orcs on the March Intellect scaling from an end-game Mage he's prone to one-shotting eg your Ancient Phoenix. 

It's arguably appropriate that Baal is such a pain to find a good strategy against, as he is the final fight of the entire game. It would be pretty disappointing if he was a joke. (ie if he was The Legend's final fight) On the other hand, it can be fairly frustrating to have gotten all the way to the end of the game and find yourself struggling so much you end up wondering if you botched your Skill choices or otherwise made mistakes that could only be corrected by starting the entire game over.

I'm not terribly fond of Baal as a Boss fight, overall, is what I'm saying. He's mostly 'difficult' through sheer brute force you can't really play around, meaning that there's little in the way of rewards for playing well.

This is the low point of the series for final fights, as it happens, and I'm glad what came after is better.

--------------------------------------------------

Next time, we wrap things up with the Companions of Armored Princess, aside one bonus update.

Comments

  1. For the Baal fight, there's a helmet and an armor that grant you 50% and 20% resistance to astral damage, respectively, and with a couple other minor resist bonuses you can easily get 85% resist to astral. Then you can use melee units with high physical resist and expert stone skin to hug the boss to block his demon spawning and minimize the physical counterattack damage.

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    1. Hm. I don't remember if that helmet is a guaranteed one or not. If it isn't, that would still require you get lucky. If it is guaranteed, that would make the fight a bit more reasonable than I'd thought.

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    2. Yeah it's the Crown of Chaos, part of the Glove of Destroyer composite artifact, so it's probably not guaranteed every run.

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    3. Ah, yeah, that one. Yeah, pretty sure that's not guaranteed. Still, something to keep in mind for future runs.

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  2. Is Dersu-Kumatu really just 'Giant Toad' in English? Lame.
    Her fire weakness is 20%, not 25.
    Royal Snakes are indeed have less chance to appear - 20%. Both other variants have 40%.
    Dersu-Kumatu moves on 80%/60%/40% hp. I think she can't move 2 turns in row, so if you deal a lot of damage in short time it may look like hp thresholds are lower.
    You forgot to mention one more attack - her looks. She so cute, I always fell horrible killing her :(

    Driller's ini is 2.
    It was originally planned as a boss for the Legend but was cut early. Well, atleast it got second chance, unlike King Thorn.

    Are you sure about Giant Spider summoning Undead Spiders? It was years since my last playthrough but from what I see his summon had 40% for both Venomous and Cave Spiders and 20% for Fire Spiders.
    Also, unlike the Spider Queen form the Legend, this is a guy. As someone who thinks that spider-queens are waaaay overused (and dumb, as social spiders don't have specific leaders, except, I think, for one species, where a 'male' leads), I massively approve.

    Zilgadis have 50% resistance to magic and 15 ini. He cannot have more than 5 Gremlin Towers at once and he has only 5 hexes where he can place them. He summons Evil Gremlins more often (60%) than Good ones (40%). If all Tower hexes are blocked (doesn't matter if it's Towers or their/yours units), Zilgadis have a chance to completely skip his turn. He is not scripted to use magic mass attack on specific turns or anything like that.
    Also, while his in-game name is shown as just "[the] Gremlion", atleast in Russian fandom people usually called him by name.
    Actually, the way you use 'Gremlion' makes me wonder - does English version even makes it clear that it's just a word/title for an uber-Gremlin (supposedly not unique) and not a personal name or anything like that?

    K'tahu does not have apostrophe in Russian and his name is clearly styled after Cthulhu - compare Ктаху and Ктулху. His poison resistance is merely 20%. His ini is 12. His mass attack actualy have physical damage and reduces current action points of affected stacks to 1. I always hated it and find it strange that you didn't even mention it.
    Yeah, he can only summon actual reptiles. Gorguls and Tirexes have about 28% to appear, others - about 14%. This summon is also very unusual in that it's power scales up with difficulty levels; summoned stacks get +40% to Leadership on Hard and +100% on Impossible.

    Baal's fire resistance is 80%. He also have 20% resistance to magic. His ini is 15. Even through lore-wise he is a demon, mechanically he has no race. He cannot summon ordinary Imps. Like Ktahu, he gets bonus to summon's leadership at Hard/Impossible (numbers the same).
    Shockwave's damage IS normal fire. I even tested it with my end game save - and it's reduced by natural fire resistance or one from artefacts. His flying sword attacks are physical. Again, tested in-game - phys resistance helps, Astral (form the crown) doesn't. Unless your version is somehow different than mine...
    Yes, there are only 3 clusters that Baal can destroy. He should only start doing it after his hp goes below 60%. He won't do it 2 turn in row.

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    1. Dersu-Kumatu gets used to refer to the frog by the Orcs of Dersu, but it's never properly explained and isn't used outside their dialogue. I honestly wasn't sure if it was meant to be a name or just Orc for 'god of Dersu' or some such.

      Yeah, it can't jump twice in a row. (I've literally taken it from 75~% to 40~% in one turn without it jumping twice in a row) 80/60/40% is close enough to my guess I buy it; I'll update the post appropriately shortly.

      I probably conflated this spider Boss with WotN's Giant Undead Spider -these Boss posts are some of the most poorly-researched posts, as I didn't do anything smart like drop saves in front of them for testing purposes. I just recently fought it again and it didn't summon Undead Spiders that time, certainly.

      I get the sociohistorical context on 'spiders are women', but yeah, I wish it wasn't so overused. Especially since people don't actually acknowledge the part where spiders normally have the *female* as the massive brute...

      I really should've updated Gremlion's section ages ago... I'll try to get to it soon. In any event, in English 'Gremlion' is never explained and only used in the Quest description and Boss fight; I was pretty confused when I got to his fight and this Gremlion thing confronted me.

      Ooooh, K'tahu being Lizardmen Cthulhu perfectly explains a ton of things about his handling I'd always been mildly puzzled by. Definitely including this bit in the post itself.

      The action point thing didn't get included because at the time this post went up I'd only managed to fight him with one file and overlooked it. And then forgot to edit it in when I got other files that far... I'll be including that, and double-checking the other stuff, shortly.

      I'll double-check the Baal stuff, too.

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    2. On spiders - it's not even just "spider=female". For some reason, almost every time fantasy have some sort of spider related or themed race, they are always oppressively matriarchal. It make no sense because, again, there are social spider species but none of them have queen or anything like that.

      Um, in my experience female spiders being bigger and more aggressive ones (and liking to eat males) is very commonly acknowledged. To the point that a lot of people seem to believe that it's true for all spider species in general (just in case - it's not).

      Btw I wondered for a long time - why are Gnolls never portrayed as matriarchal despite being based on hyena, who are very oppressively matriarchal (even lowest-rank female still higher in hierarchy than highest ranked male)?

      Also, you have propably noticed that youself but Zilgadis is a shout out to the same anime (Slayers) that Lina's and Gaudi's names came from.

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    3. My experience is Oppressively Matriarchal Fantasy Societies tend to go hand-in-hand with 'this animal is always a girl, right?' It's... long read to me as really blatant propaganda, honestly...

      What I'm getting at about female spiders is that pop culture is really, really prone to taking as a given that a bunch of gender role stuff is essentially completely universal, a notable subsection of which is The Males Are Bigger And Stronger And Probably Are The Warriors. (When talking societies to thus have warmaking as a meaningful concept) So on the one hand you'll often get stuff like a boss fight against an explicitly female spider who's huge and deadly and all, but the second someone is trying to imagine some sort of Fantasy Spider Society suddenly the males are bigger and stronger and are the warriors, never mind that this runs contrary to actual spiders. And people do this kind of nonsense with literally every animal, up to and including that you'll get fiction explicitly presenting ants and/or bees as having all the workers male, even though it's not exactly an obscure fact that ants and bees don't remotely work that way.

      I'm not familiar with the full tortured story of gnoll development, but broadly they're based on mythology that absolutely was not based on hyenas, which in grand mythological tradition was vague and variable in its details. Then D&D made them ambiguous dog-men. (And most fantasy ignored them, what with 'evil dog-man' just being a werewolf minus everything interesting) Then Warcraft III in specific made them hyena-men, and now yeah it's kind of a default. (I assume precisely and specifically due to World of Warcraft given its absurd success) And Blizzard doesn't exactly have a great track record when it comes to biological accuracy or non-misogynistic writing, so... that's your answer.

      And no, I had zero idea Zilgadis is a shoutout to Slayers. I've never gotten around to directly experiencing it, so there's only a handful of bits I know that would have the potential to have me wondering if something is a Slayers reference. I'm utterly unsurprised to hear this, but... did not know.

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  3. Again, Ktahu mass attack is physical, not poison. There is no unclear/hidden stuff here - it's just [deal 3000-4000 physical damage] + [if current AP > 1, reduce to 1] on everone.

    And like I said earlier, Baal's summon attack is fire, all others are physical. No Astral here.
    Btw couple of his attacks actually have pretty cool internal names - one when he destroys part of the battlefield is called 'Fallout'. Dancing sword is 'Might and Madness'.

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    1. Been working a file to recheck K'tahu, and been intermittently slogging through testing Baal -I want all his stuff confirmed before I start rewriting, given how much of his portion of the post is predicated on the 'everything is Astral' part. (I've already confirmed that yeah, the fire wave is Fire. Testing the other two has been a nuisance with Baal being uncooperative)

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    2. FINALLY got a file back to K'Tahu and confirmed his spit attack is Physical rather than Poison. Now I just need to finish wrangling Baal into giving me useful test data and then rewrite his section of the post substantially.

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    3. Finally done with updating this post!

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  4. Do those bosses have attack and defense modifiers? The game says "attack" can x3 damage and "defense" can /3 damage. Does skill "resistance" mean anything if boss attack is much more than my defense (ex. 1000 attack vs 15 defense)

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    1. Bosses have Attack and Defense stats, but as far as I'm aware no one cares enough to document it. (Including myself, honestly) They pretty obviously never get outrageously high, though; you're more likely to see no benefits from further stats by using units with high base stats and so getting maximum benefits than you are to be so behind a couple more Defense fails to help.

      60 points of difference is the cap on Attack/Defense modification; if an enemy has 70 more Defense than your unit has Attack, it'll take 11 more Attack to gain any damage. It's a linear progression aside that cap; 60 Attack advantage is +200% damage, 30 Attack advantage is +100% damage, etc.

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    2. I guess I can list those stats (AP bosses specifically?) but they are indeed never go into any kind of pointlessly crazy numbers.

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    3. If I add stats to any Bosses, I'd rather them to all of them personally.

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    4. I actually replied to Newbie :) But sure, just getting Attack/Defence for all the bosses is easy.
      Maybe add resistances for all of them too? Or initiative. You have both for some bosses already.

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    5. All of those would be ideal -resistance in particular is something important to planning I did make an effort to cover and was just sloppy/lazy/inconsistent about precisely determining.

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    6. Alright, attack, defence, health (for fuller picture), initiative and resistances.

      Ah, and Boss Attack and HP are changed on higher difficulties - Hard gives +40% to Attack and HP.
      Impossible gives +100% HP. Attack bonus is also +100% in the Legend but only +70% in later games.

      Gaia the Giant Turtle: Attack 15. Defense 20. Health 2000. INI 3. Resistances: physical 30/magic 20.

      Kraken: Attack 20. Defense 20. Health 18000 (8000 + 5000x2). INI 100. Resistances: poison 30/magic 30/fire 30. Physical resistace is 25 for the central tentacle but only 20 for the other two.

      Spider Queen: Attack 30. Defense 30. Health 25000. INI 100. Resistances: physical 30/poison 80/magic 30.


      White Kraken: central tentacle - Attack 8. Defense 12. Other two - Attack 10. Defense 10.
      Health 2400 (1000 + 700x2). INI 100. Resistances: physical 20/ posion 30/ fire -20.

      Giant Spider: Attack 22. Defense 24. Health 30000. INI 100. Resistances: physical 30/poison 80/magic 30.

      Dersu-Kumatu: Attack 35. Defense 30. Health 40000. INI 8. Resistances: poison 50/magic 20% fire -20.

      Driller: Attack 50. Defense 40. Health 49000 (7000 + 14000 + 28000). INI 2. Resistances: physical 20/poison 80/fire 10.
      Btw phase 2 and 3 health is not some set numbers but [previous phase HP] x 2.

      Zilgasis: Attack 50. Defense 60. Health 77000. INI 15. Resistances: magic 50.

      Ktahu: Attack 60. Defense 60. INI 12. Health 86000. Resistances: poison 20.

      Archdemon Baal: Attack 66. Defense 66. Health 126666. INI 15. Resistances: magic 20/fire 80.


      Dead Spider: Attack 12. Defense 13. Health 16000. INI 100. Resistances: physical 10/poison 50/magic 10.
      Yes, undead mega-spider takes more poison damage than living ones. Sure, makes sense.
      Also, notice how it's attack/defense and health numbers look rather mismatched. And considering what an infamous difficulty jump this boss is....

      Astaroth: Attack 40. Defense 40. Health 40666. INI 150. Resistances: magic 20/fire 80/ice -10.

      Earthdigger (can also be translated as "shrew"): Attack 50. Defense 40. Health 49000 (7000 + 14000 + 28000). INI 100. Resistances: physical 20/poison 80/fire 10.
      Phase hp change works the same way as for the Driller.
      Um, I think I only now noticed this - does this version and AP Driller have the same name in English?

      Giant Necrolizard: Attack 50. Defense 50. Health 55000. INI 120. Resistances: poison 20/fire -10/ice 30.
      One could think that being undead would make him more resistant to poison...

      Loki: Attack 60. Defense 60. Health 78000. INI 100. Resistances: physical 20/magic 20/fire 10.

      Gilford: Attack 60. Defence 60. Health 75000 (15000 + 60000). INI 100. Resistances: physical 30/magic 50. Dragon form change is intended to change resistances to physical 10/magic 70 but is bugged and changes to physical 30/magic 30.


      Spirit of Light: Attack 80. Defense 80. Health 100000. INI 100. Resistances: all but ice 25.

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    7. Edited all these in and modified commentary appropriately.

      And yes, both Drillers are named the same in English.

      Also, just to be clear: are you including Astral when talking the Spirit of Light's resistances? I've been assuming not, but it occurred to me I might be misinterpreting, and I'm not in a position to check in-game right now.

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    8. Let me check your updates, ok?
      Dersu-Kumatu has 20% magical resistance, not physical. No res against physical.
      Driller has 10% fire res, not 20%.

      Spirit of Light is indeed resistant to Astral damage. Ice and only ice does full damage.

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    9. Corrected everything, thank you.

      The Spirit of Light has such a strange resistance setup...

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    10. On the Spirit of Light page you have just "Astral" where "25% Astral" should be.
      You're welcome.

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