Dark Side Boss Analysis
Dark Side has exactly one Boss:
The Spirit of Light
It's the final fight of the game, too. So if you're wanting to avoid spoilers about the final fight, now might be the time to bail. I'm going to be talking actual plot-spoilers, in fact, down closer to the bottom of the post.
The Spirit of Light is interesting to me on several levels. Its battlefield is massive, possibly the single largest battlefield in the series, which makes its teleporting shenanigans a lot more meaningful than on prior Bosses. Even Archdemons can struggle to get to its new location in one move!
The Spirit of Light has 3 modes, which each have different behavior. Each turn, it teleports -as a free action- to one of the other four locations on the field, changing its form in the process, and then performs an actual action. It can be any form in any position, though it always starts the battle at the opposite end of the battlefield.
Regardless of which form it's in, it always has 25% resistance to every damage type (Including Astral!) except, unexpectedly given the environment it's in, Ice, which it has no resistance to. Also common across forms is that their summons always get to act on the very turn they were summoned, which is fairly notable as the Spirit of Light's base numbers for summoning are fairly high, though also rather random: 15,000 Leadership to 30,000 Leadership at base, increasing by 10% each time it summons. (That's '+10% chained', as in '100%/110%/121%', where it's 10% more than the previous summon's values) But while it varies a lot, these baseline numbers are sufficiently high to make it difficult to kill units in a timely fashion. You're usually best off prioritizing the Spirit of Light over its summons, aside mass damage effects like Geyser.
The Spirit of Light
Attack/Defense: 80 / 80
Initiative: 100
Health: 100,000
Resistances: 25% Physical
, 25% Magical
, 25% Poison
, 25% Fire
, 25% Astral
, 25% Magical, 25% Poison, 25% Fire, 25% AstralIt's the final fight of the game, too. So if you're wanting to avoid spoilers about the final fight, now might be the time to bail. I'm going to be talking actual plot-spoilers, in fact, down closer to the bottom of the post.
The Spirit of Light is interesting to me on several levels. Its battlefield is massive, possibly the single largest battlefield in the series, which makes its teleporting shenanigans a lot more meaningful than on prior Bosses. Even Archdemons can struggle to get to its new location in one move!
The Spirit of Light has 3 modes, which each have different behavior. Each turn, it teleports -as a free action- to one of the other four locations on the field, changing its form in the process, and then performs an actual action. It can be any form in any position, though it always starts the battle at the opposite end of the battlefield.
Regardless of which form it's in, it always has 25% resistance to every damage type (Including Astral!) except, unexpectedly given the environment it's in, Ice, which it has no resistance to. Also common across forms is that their summons always get to act on the very turn they were summoned, which is fairly notable as the Spirit of Light's base numbers for summoning are fairly high, though also rather random: 15,000 Leadership to 30,000 Leadership at base, increasing by 10% each time it summons. (That's '+10% chained', as in '100%/110%/121%', where it's 10% more than the previous summon's values) But while it varies a lot, these baseline numbers are sufficiently high to make it difficult to kill units in a timely fashion. You're usually best off prioritizing the Spirit of Light over its summons, aside mass damage effects like Geyser.
All three forms are also guaranteed to go first (You're not beating 100 Initiative) and have that shocking 80 Attack and Defense.
Also regardless of which form it's in, the flinch animation behaves weirdly when it comes to melee units, often playing while they're still making their way over to the Boss rather than when they hit it. This has no mechanical implications I'm aware of, and you're unlikely to be using melee heavily against the Spirit of Light regardless, but it's quite jarring and is yet another piece of evidence that Dark Side wasn't properly finished before being pushed out into the world.
These forms are...
Human Knight
The Human form is defined by counterattacking against everything, ranged attacks included. Thankfully, unlike the Giant Spider in Armored Princess and Warriors of the North, this is just a straight damage attack, not a multi-turn disable. Regardless, the other forms don't perform counterattacks at all, uniquely in the series for a Boss.
Visually, it's pretty clearly patterned after the Knight unit, covered in armor from head to toe and wielding a sword with the sword held point-down in front of him when idle just like the Knight unit. Hence why I named it the Human Knight form. Mildly interesting is that you can actually see some hair in the back of the model, and it's brown. There's not very many humans in the King's Bounty games that have brown hair; they trend more toward black or blonde when we can see their hair at all, and of course it's surprising that a model so clearly patterned after the Knight model is designed such that the hair is visible at all. Admittedly, this is primarily to accommodate the white mask the Spirit of Light's forms all wear...
Its actual move list is...
1: The aforementioned ranged stab. The animation is interesting; it stabs its sword into the ground, and then a ghost-sword thing extends out toward the target from it. This is aimed at a particular target for 2000-4000 Ice
damage, but it's actually a beam effect that will catch every unit along the way to the target as well, including its own allies. If it hits an Ice Spike, units adjacent to the Ice Spike suffer Bleeding for 3 turns.
2: Summoning a random selection of Light Human units at random locations across the battlefield. The animation involved is literally just the Resurrection-as-played-on-a-corpse effect.
If you're worried about taking casualties, Human Knight is the form you should skip dealing damage to, naturally. It hits hard enough this is seriously worth considering, especially as the Spirit of Light will never pick a form twice in a row. It can alternate, such as going Dwarf-Human-Dwarf, but it won't be Human in one corner and then jump to another corner still Human. As such, you can reliably count on Human mode ending after a turn. Also, on average the Spirit of Light will distribute its time among its forms equally -this isn't a hard rule that the game forces, but it's usually sufficiently consistent that you can generally plan around the idea that it will only spend 33% of its time in Human mode.
The units Human mode can summon include Knights, Swordsmen, Guardsmen, Horsemen, Priests of Light, Inquisitors of Light, Paladins, and Bowmen. No Peasants, Witch Hunters, or Archmages, for whatever reason. Regardless, while this set of summons is somewhat slanted toward units that are prone to being unable to reach your forces for several turns, those same units can soak tremendous amounts of punishment. It's often not worth trying to kill the Knights unless you're Daert, and the Paladins, Swordsmen, and Guardsmen are almost as bad. Of the ranged units, Bowmen are the main thing that can be concerning, thanks to the percentile damage on their arrows letting them chip down even Neoline's hilariously oversized forces irritatingly quickly. Inquisitors in particular usually waste a turn on performing a Resurrection, letting you ignore them for at least one turn.
Elven Huntress
The Elven form is a woman, and much like Blackie's Demoness form, it's inexplicably the only form where we can see actual skin. Because she's mostly naked. Dangit, Dark Side...
She also wields a staff, which is a bit striking as the Druid is the only Elven unit in the series to do so. Most of the Elven humanoids are actually completely unarmed, relying on innate magical murder ability to get by, with the archers and Druid the only exceptions. NPC Elves aren't particularly prone to being depicted with staves either. A staff is a typical fantasy setting indicator of a magic user, but in the case of King's Bounty Elves it feels a bit out of place if it's not being specifically associated with a nature focus. Which... the Spirit of Light's Elven form doesn't have going on.
The Elven Huntress's actual move list is...
1: Creating Ice Spikes in random locations on the battlefield.
2: Summoning a random selection of Light Elf units at random locations across the battlefield. As with the Human form, this animation is derived from Resurrecting a corpse.
3: 'Turmoil', which can randomize a bunch of units' locations, throwing them all over the battlefield. More often than not, it just wastes the Boss' turn -and I don't mean because randomized swapping is a waste of time. I mean that even with beating the game three times, every time the game announced the use of 'Turmoil' nothing happened. It was only when I was doing a test run on the Boss fight to try to get better information on it that it finally did what it's supposed to do. When it does happen properly, it tries to shove player melee to the center of the map, the player's ranged units closer to its own melee units/its own melee units closer to the player's ranged units, and its own ranged units away from the player's units.
The Ice Spike summoning is really supposed to be part of Turmoil, and this does indeed sometimes happen, but the game is sufficiently buggy I'm still listing them separately because by and large they've occurred separately in my own play.
The Huntress seems to be the buggiest of the three forms, and additionally I've never seen it perform an actual attack action. It really seems to be limited to messing around with battlefield conditions and summoning Elves.
Anyway, the Huntress will spawn Lake Fairies, Forest Fairies, Ents, Werewolves in elven form, Elves-the-unit, Rangers, Druids, Fauns, and Dryads. She doesn't summon Fauns, Ancient Ents, or Unicorns -I'm particularly curious why Unicorns are excluded.
Broadly speaking, the Elven form tends to be a breather form in practice, particularly if your army is focused on long-ranged forces like Dark Elves-the-unit or Hunters. Randomizing locations and generating Ice Spikes often isn't a big deal, and the Elven unit selection, while fairly consistently able to attack your forces or harry them with Talents, is also fairly easy to kill. Depending on your force composition you may well be able to largely ignore the summons as well. In conjunction with the lack of retaliations, the Elven form is usually the form that helps you catch up if you were starting to get a bit overwhelmed.
Dwarven Warrior
The Dwarven form is even more armor-clad than the Human form, and has an appropriately Dwarfy impressive beard. And an axe, of course, because dwarf. Interestingly, its hair is bright red, which I don't think is a color we see on any dwarf in the series, whether unit type or NPC portrait/model. The move-list for the Dwarven form is...
1: Generates a shockwave of some sort (The animation is very confusing, honestly, and the behavior is similarly unclear), which does 1000-5000 Physical damage and petrifies all units in its path (Which extends all the way to the edge of the battlefield), friend or foe. Petrification lasts for one turn, causes the unit to miss its turn, and raises its resistances by 15%, unless this would take a given resistance over 15% in which case it stops there.
2: Summons a random selection of Light Dwarf units at random locations across the battlefield. Again, Resurrecting a corpse is the basis of the animation.
On the first turn of the battle, the Dwarven form always summons a bunch of Dwarves and fires off a shockwave -in the reverse order, so no it won't be catching any of its new summons. Outside that first turn, I've never seen the Spirit of Light do two actions in one turn.
Speaking of its summons, it can summon any Dwarven unit except Giants. (Reminder that Guard Droids and Repair Droids are no longer classed as Dwarves) It's probably the least problematic of the summons, with the main concern being that Alchemists and Engineers can inflict percentile damage on your forces. Dwarves-the-unit, Miners, and Foremen can often be ignored for several turns, and while Cannoneers have high range the battlefield is so massive that they'll often be doing reduced damage to your forces regardless.
Surprisingly, the Spirit of Light is actually a really easy fight overall, especially if you're not leaning heavily on melee damage. Even Bagyr, who you'd expect to be crippled by the Rage loss, holds up just fine. Its Health is surprisingly low for being an end-game Boss, it doesn't have any significant resistances, the stacks it summons tend to be pretty small by the standards of endgame, and it just doesn't have the crazy capacity for murdering your units that eg Warriors of the North's Bosses have. It's a really cool, interesting Boss that has fun with paralleling Blackie turning into Orc/Demoness/Vampire forms, and it's not unfettered, unfair, horrible nonsense. I like it, flaws and all.
It's also nice that Dark Side provides an actual justification for lacking Rage in the final fight: Blackie leaves you, because it's... somehow... the Spirit of Light. Honestly, this twist is bizarre and nonsensical, but it's pretty clear Dark Side's ending isn't taking itself very seriously, and I have to admit the prior games' endings weren't great themselves. They weren't bad or anything, but they were... strange, just in a different way from Dark Side's irreverent disregard for the fourth wall and narrative causality. The Legend just sort of arbitrarily ends: the plot honestly didn't lead up to its villain properly, and it's not very clear why this particular threat is the point the game ends at, beyond that this is a video game and there's no more content. Armored Princess has a more natural ending, but if you try to think of the story from an in-universe standpoint, you've basically got that the entire game was Amelie power-training in a Hyperbolic Time Chamber, full-on Dragon Ball Z style, so she can take on Baal: the game makes no effort to suggest that the allies you made were relevant, or that Teana-the-world-turtle provided some assistance to make Baal easier to defeat, or anything else that would make Amelie running around in Teana-the-world narratively connected to the Baal fight. Even Warriors of the North's ending has a few weird, somewhat jarring qualities, like how Gilford being the final boss who can turn into a dragon is never really justified. So Dark Side's ending being strange is primarily notable in that it's pretty jarringly obvious up front, and not something that creeps up on you if you think deeper on it like in the prior games.
And regardless of the strangeness of the twist, it both ties into the nature of the fight and, again, provides a real explanation for not getting to use Rage in a Boss fight. So I'm a fan of the Spirit of Light's fight all-around.
Strategy-wise, you shouldn't need much of one. The only caveat is that ranged units are vastly preferable over melee units, since the Spirit of Light's constant teleportation covers so much ground that, as I mentioned earlier, even Archdemons struggle to keep up. Physical and Ice resistance are also nice, but not essential -while the Spirit of Light actually hits fairly hard and can potentially hit multiple stacks at once with both its attacking forms, it's so fragile it's fairly easy to kill. The only strategy point of note is that you'll ideally have a save dropped before you open the gate needing the three keys -opening that gate is what triggers Blackie to leave, and without Blackie you can't teleport to the Shelter! As such, if you (somehow) have trouble with the Spirit of Light and want to change up your list, not having a save before Blackie leaves you will have you stuck without access to the main sources of your best troops.
That aside, though, feel free to try out stuff. Melee will be slower to win than ranged options, but the fight is easy enough you can probably get through even with seriously sub-optimal forces. Go crazy! Have fun!
-------------------------------------------------
And... aside one last bonus post, we're done with Dark Side, and indeed the entire King's Bounty series!
Assuming no new entries get made, anyway.
And looking back... I'm surprised to realize it's taken not that much more than a year to get to this point. I was sure it had taken at least two full years.
In any event, that's this site's first Really Big Project done. Not sure what, if anything, is next. Maybe X-COM 2, if luck is with me? We'll see, I suppose.
Also regardless of which form it's in, the flinch animation behaves weirdly when it comes to melee units, often playing while they're still making their way over to the Boss rather than when they hit it. This has no mechanical implications I'm aware of, and you're unlikely to be using melee heavily against the Spirit of Light regardless, but it's quite jarring and is yet another piece of evidence that Dark Side wasn't properly finished before being pushed out into the world.
These forms are...
Human Knight
The Human form is defined by counterattacking against everything, ranged attacks included. Thankfully, unlike the Giant Spider in Armored Princess and Warriors of the North, this is just a straight damage attack, not a multi-turn disable. Regardless, the other forms don't perform counterattacks at all, uniquely in the series for a Boss.
Visually, it's pretty clearly patterned after the Knight unit, covered in armor from head to toe and wielding a sword with the sword held point-down in front of him when idle just like the Knight unit. Hence why I named it the Human Knight form. Mildly interesting is that you can actually see some hair in the back of the model, and it's brown. There's not very many humans in the King's Bounty games that have brown hair; they trend more toward black or blonde when we can see their hair at all, and of course it's surprising that a model so clearly patterned after the Knight model is designed such that the hair is visible at all. Admittedly, this is primarily to accommodate the white mask the Spirit of Light's forms all wear...
Its actual move list is...
1: The aforementioned ranged stab. The animation is interesting; it stabs its sword into the ground, and then a ghost-sword thing extends out toward the target from it. This is aimed at a particular target for 2000-4000 Ice
damage, but it's actually a beam effect that will catch every unit along the way to the target as well, including its own allies. If it hits an Ice Spike, units adjacent to the Ice Spike suffer Bleeding for 3 turns.2: Summoning a random selection of Light Human units at random locations across the battlefield. The animation involved is literally just the Resurrection-as-played-on-a-corpse effect.
If you're worried about taking casualties, Human Knight is the form you should skip dealing damage to, naturally. It hits hard enough this is seriously worth considering, especially as the Spirit of Light will never pick a form twice in a row. It can alternate, such as going Dwarf-Human-Dwarf, but it won't be Human in one corner and then jump to another corner still Human. As such, you can reliably count on Human mode ending after a turn. Also, on average the Spirit of Light will distribute its time among its forms equally -this isn't a hard rule that the game forces, but it's usually sufficiently consistent that you can generally plan around the idea that it will only spend 33% of its time in Human mode.
The units Human mode can summon include Knights, Swordsmen, Guardsmen, Horsemen, Priests of Light, Inquisitors of Light, Paladins, and Bowmen. No Peasants, Witch Hunters, or Archmages, for whatever reason. Regardless, while this set of summons is somewhat slanted toward units that are prone to being unable to reach your forces for several turns, those same units can soak tremendous amounts of punishment. It's often not worth trying to kill the Knights unless you're Daert, and the Paladins, Swordsmen, and Guardsmen are almost as bad. Of the ranged units, Bowmen are the main thing that can be concerning, thanks to the percentile damage on their arrows letting them chip down even Neoline's hilariously oversized forces irritatingly quickly. Inquisitors in particular usually waste a turn on performing a Resurrection, letting you ignore them for at least one turn.
Elven Huntress
The Elven form is a woman, and much like Blackie's Demoness form, it's inexplicably the only form where we can see actual skin. Because she's mostly naked. Dangit, Dark Side...
She also wields a staff, which is a bit striking as the Druid is the only Elven unit in the series to do so. Most of the Elven humanoids are actually completely unarmed, relying on innate magical murder ability to get by, with the archers and Druid the only exceptions. NPC Elves aren't particularly prone to being depicted with staves either. A staff is a typical fantasy setting indicator of a magic user, but in the case of King's Bounty Elves it feels a bit out of place if it's not being specifically associated with a nature focus. Which... the Spirit of Light's Elven form doesn't have going on.
The Elven Huntress's actual move list is...
1: Creating Ice Spikes in random locations on the battlefield.
2: Summoning a random selection of Light Elf units at random locations across the battlefield. As with the Human form, this animation is derived from Resurrecting a corpse.
3: 'Turmoil', which can randomize a bunch of units' locations, throwing them all over the battlefield. More often than not, it just wastes the Boss' turn -and I don't mean because randomized swapping is a waste of time. I mean that even with beating the game three times, every time the game announced the use of 'Turmoil' nothing happened. It was only when I was doing a test run on the Boss fight to try to get better information on it that it finally did what it's supposed to do. When it does happen properly, it tries to shove player melee to the center of the map, the player's ranged units closer to its own melee units/its own melee units closer to the player's ranged units, and its own ranged units away from the player's units.
The Ice Spike summoning is really supposed to be part of Turmoil, and this does indeed sometimes happen, but the game is sufficiently buggy I'm still listing them separately because by and large they've occurred separately in my own play.
The Huntress seems to be the buggiest of the three forms, and additionally I've never seen it perform an actual attack action. It really seems to be limited to messing around with battlefield conditions and summoning Elves.
Anyway, the Huntress will spawn Lake Fairies, Forest Fairies, Ents, Werewolves in elven form, Elves-the-unit, Rangers, Druids, Fauns, and Dryads. She doesn't summon Fauns, Ancient Ents, or Unicorns -I'm particularly curious why Unicorns are excluded.
Broadly speaking, the Elven form tends to be a breather form in practice, particularly if your army is focused on long-ranged forces like Dark Elves-the-unit or Hunters. Randomizing locations and generating Ice Spikes often isn't a big deal, and the Elven unit selection, while fairly consistently able to attack your forces or harry them with Talents, is also fairly easy to kill. Depending on your force composition you may well be able to largely ignore the summons as well. In conjunction with the lack of retaliations, the Elven form is usually the form that helps you catch up if you were starting to get a bit overwhelmed.
Dwarven Warrior
The Dwarven form is even more armor-clad than the Human form, and has an appropriately Dwarfy impressive beard. And an axe, of course, because dwarf. Interestingly, its hair is bright red, which I don't think is a color we see on any dwarf in the series, whether unit type or NPC portrait/model. The move-list for the Dwarven form is...
1: Generates a shockwave of some sort (The animation is very confusing, honestly, and the behavior is similarly unclear), which does 1000-5000 Physical
damage and petrifies all units in its path (Which extends all the way to the edge of the battlefield), friend or foe. Petrification lasts for one turn, causes the unit to miss its turn, and raises its resistances by 15%, unless this would take a given resistance over 15% in which case it stops there.2: Summons a random selection of Light Dwarf units at random locations across the battlefield. Again, Resurrecting a corpse is the basis of the animation.
On the first turn of the battle, the Dwarven form always summons a bunch of Dwarves and fires off a shockwave -in the reverse order, so no it won't be catching any of its new summons. Outside that first turn, I've never seen the Spirit of Light do two actions in one turn.
Speaking of its summons, it can summon any Dwarven unit except Giants. (Reminder that Guard Droids and Repair Droids are no longer classed as Dwarves) It's probably the least problematic of the summons, with the main concern being that Alchemists and Engineers can inflict percentile damage on your forces. Dwarves-the-unit, Miners, and Foremen can often be ignored for several turns, and while Cannoneers have high range the battlefield is so massive that they'll often be doing reduced damage to your forces regardless.
Surprisingly, the Spirit of Light is actually a really easy fight overall, especially if you're not leaning heavily on melee damage. Even Bagyr, who you'd expect to be crippled by the Rage loss, holds up just fine. Its Health is surprisingly low for being an end-game Boss, it doesn't have any significant resistances, the stacks it summons tend to be pretty small by the standards of endgame, and it just doesn't have the crazy capacity for murdering your units that eg Warriors of the North's Bosses have. It's a really cool, interesting Boss that has fun with paralleling Blackie turning into Orc/Demoness/Vampire forms, and it's not unfettered, unfair, horrible nonsense. I like it, flaws and all.
It's also nice that Dark Side provides an actual justification for lacking Rage in the final fight: Blackie leaves you, because it's... somehow... the Spirit of Light. Honestly, this twist is bizarre and nonsensical, but it's pretty clear Dark Side's ending isn't taking itself very seriously, and I have to admit the prior games' endings weren't great themselves. They weren't bad or anything, but they were... strange, just in a different way from Dark Side's irreverent disregard for the fourth wall and narrative causality. The Legend just sort of arbitrarily ends: the plot honestly didn't lead up to its villain properly, and it's not very clear why this particular threat is the point the game ends at, beyond that this is a video game and there's no more content. Armored Princess has a more natural ending, but if you try to think of the story from an in-universe standpoint, you've basically got that the entire game was Amelie power-training in a Hyperbolic Time Chamber, full-on Dragon Ball Z style, so she can take on Baal: the game makes no effort to suggest that the allies you made were relevant, or that Teana-the-world-turtle provided some assistance to make Baal easier to defeat, or anything else that would make Amelie running around in Teana-the-world narratively connected to the Baal fight. Even Warriors of the North's ending has a few weird, somewhat jarring qualities, like how Gilford being the final boss who can turn into a dragon is never really justified. So Dark Side's ending being strange is primarily notable in that it's pretty jarringly obvious up front, and not something that creeps up on you if you think deeper on it like in the prior games.
And regardless of the strangeness of the twist, it both ties into the nature of the fight and, again, provides a real explanation for not getting to use Rage in a Boss fight. So I'm a fan of the Spirit of Light's fight all-around.
Strategy-wise, you shouldn't need much of one. The only caveat is that ranged units are vastly preferable over melee units, since the Spirit of Light's constant teleportation covers so much ground that, as I mentioned earlier, even Archdemons struggle to keep up. Physical and Ice resistance are also nice, but not essential -while the Spirit of Light actually hits fairly hard and can potentially hit multiple stacks at once with both its attacking forms, it's so fragile it's fairly easy to kill. The only strategy point of note is that you'll ideally have a save dropped before you open the gate needing the three keys -opening that gate is what triggers Blackie to leave, and without Blackie you can't teleport to the Shelter! As such, if you (somehow) have trouble with the Spirit of Light and want to change up your list, not having a save before Blackie leaves you will have you stuck without access to the main sources of your best troops.
That aside, though, feel free to try out stuff. Melee will be slower to win than ranged options, but the fight is easy enough you can probably get through even with seriously sub-optimal forces. Go crazy! Have fun!
-------------------------------------------------
And... aside one last bonus post, we're done with Dark Side, and indeed the entire King's Bounty series!
Assuming no new entries get made, anyway.
And looking back... I'm surprised to realize it's taken not that much more than a year to get to this point. I was sure it had taken at least two full years.
In any event, that's this site's first Really Big Project done. Not sure what, if anything, is next. Maybe X-COM 2, if luck is with me? We'll see, I suppose.
Spirit of Light can start the battle in any of his forms, not specifically Dwarven.
ReplyDeleteHe has 25% resistance to all damage types except Ice (0% resistance). He lives on frozen island yet ice is his weakness. Sure, make sense.
...Okay, maybe it actually does. Remember me telling you about mythological thing with witches and the like being weakened/powerless when it's really cold? There is also stuff like Christianic freezing the surface of the Abyss and general mythical idea of using cold to trap and weaken evil/undesirable things. We know that Spirit of Darkness' shelter is both his home and his prison - could the same be true for the Spirit of Light as well? Of course, there is nothing in game even hinting that somebody trapped him in an icy prison, but still, I find the idea interesting.
He summons 15000-30000 leadership of allies per stack. Each time he uses summon, leadership is increased by relative 10%, so 16500-33000, 18150-36300 etc.
Oh, and his Attack and Defense are 80 - highest in the series. His initiative is 100.
His forms internally called "knight", "dwarf" and "succubus". The latter was unexpected to me.
About non-Knight forms not counterattacking - Spirit is actually coded to always counterattack, but has a thing that blocks it for other forms. This thing can be a mistake, but can also be a quick way to puposefully limit counterattacks to one form without rewriting parts of the code. I mean, counerattacks of other forms would be really annoying.
Knight's attack ("Sword of Light") deal 2000-4000 of ice damage, not physical. It deal doubled damage to petrified (dwarf form) units, but it won't actually come into play as petrification only last for one turn. If Sword of Light hits an ice spike, units around get bleed for 3 turns.
There is not a sign of Timidity here.
There is no rule forcing the Spirit to use all 3 forms. And I had a fight once (I think it was 9-turn long) where he only ever used Knight/Dwarf forms.
Knight can summon Horsemen too. In fact, when I loaded a test save, he summoned 2 stacks of them (among other units) right away. And here is a screeshot from another test: https://ibb.co/dLL5ZwT
No Peasants, Witch Hunters or Archmages through.
Um, story-wise KB Elves are very much assotiated with magic. Propably more than all other non-Undead races combined. Now, gameplay-wise...
Ice Spikes are part of Turmoil, not a separate attack; it spawns ice spikes and then tries to teleport units. And it's the only attack of this form other than summon. She even retaliates with Turmoil. Well, she would if retaliation would work for this form.
Turmoil tries to move:
- player's ranged units closer to Spirit's melee
- player's melee into the center of arena
- Spirit's ranged units away from any player's units
- Spirit's melee units closer to player's ranged units
It's glitchy indeed.
In this form Spirit can summon Lake Fairies, Forest Fairies, Elves-the-unit, Rangers, Werewolves (Elf form), Dryads, Druids or Ents. It cannot summon Fauns, Unicorns or Ancient Ents. This is true to my experience too.
I tested it: https://ibb.co/p3XYhdc Ents (they do have ressurection animation by the way) and Werewolves are here.
Dwarf form attack ("Petrify") deal 1000-5000 points of physical damage. And petrifies, of course. Petrification actually increase each resistance by flat (15 - unit's inherent value)%. This modifier can not be lower than zero.
DeleteAlso notice that petrification effect name is red-colored (as a debuff) but frame is green (as a buff).
'sigh' I don't even know for sure how this whole thing is 'intended' to work.
Dwarf form can summon Miners, Foremen, Dwarves-the-unit, Canoneers, Alchemists and Engineers. Only Giants are exception from the list. An example: https://ibb.co/pXCTXcw
I think you misunderstood the end dialogues. Or English localization messed up things again. Blackie is actually an extension of Spirit of Darkness, not a separate person. And Spirits of Darkness and Light are actually two aspects of the same creature. He/it/they watch(es) over Netana (paired world to Teana from AP) and fears that triumph of darkness will imbalance things so much that it will turn over (literally) the paired worlds. We (the player) know he is wrong - in post-AP Teana Light clearly overweights Darkness; if anything, it's victory of Light on Netana would cause turning over. Protagonist does not know it through, but he/she propably believes that it is too late to stop now. Or maybe just doesn't care, in case of Daert.
I personally like the ending. Okay, maybe Spirit of Light making a pun about himself and fastfood pastry and specifically pointing it is kinda weird.
I wish Spirit of Light-the-boss had more mystical/eldritch design through.
Double-checked and incorporated and updated everything, pretty sure.
DeleteThe localization is clear that Blackie is an extension of the Spirit of Darkness and by extension the Spirit of Light is just the Spirit of Darkness in a white robe, and I stand by it being pretty bizarre and nonsensical. Like yeah light/darkness dichotomies where they're one and the same/two sides of the same coin/etc are common to mythology and fantasy pop culture, but in this case we've got the narrative being confused/uncertain about positional stuff (Is the Spirit just simultaneously standing at both its Light spot and its Dark spot, two bodies that are the same being?), we've got the narrative informing us that the massive dragon skeleton Dragandor is built around is the corpse of the Spirit of Darkness and no explanation for how the Spirit of Light is supposed to connect to this (Why is it in a castle on a snowy island far from its body, while the Spirit of Darkness aspect is actually right next to its body?), we've got dozens of questions raised about the logic the Spirit is employing in regards to this world that go entirely unanswered (Why does the Spirit of Darkness help you fight the forces of Light at all if it's worried that Darkness winning would be bad? Why does it help you get all the way to that final step, only to then fight you as the Spirit of Light? Why didn't the Spirit try to get the Light forces to be less horrible bigots if it's actually got this dual-aspect thing going on where it's not invested in one side more than the other?), and on and on.
It's really obvious this 'both Spirits are the same entity' twist isn't really thinking about the tropes it's tapping, and probably wasn't really a baseline part of the concept of the narrative but something kludged in later. (Given Dark Side's general rushed/incomplete state, there's no way to meaningfully guess what might've motivated kludging it in...) It's not consistent with Blackie's behavior, it's a stretch to argue the Spirit of Darkness is consistent with it... it doesn't hold up. It only sort-of functions if you metaphorically lean way back and let your metaphorical vision blur to focus on the general notion of 'darkness and light aren't really that different in this story'. And even doing that, it's hard to ignore that this entire campaign should never have gotten off the ground if this idea is true.
Okay, maybe it could be portrayed better here, but I saw "Big Good and Big Bad are actually the same force/creature to some extent" numerous times. With "if it's this way, why everything even happened?!" sometimes being asked in-story, but still unanswered. I mean, there are even some old Christianic apocrypha about Satan being God's literal shadow and thus incapable of really going against His will. Yet is still evil while God is still good. Because.
DeleteI guess DS devs just decided to make such ending as it is both familiar enough trope to fit into KB parody style, is associated with darker fantasy (and we have DARK Side here) and is kinda expected to go without exact explanation. Gods work in mysterious way and all that.
Or devs could use it to just mock said trope, of course, considering how playful Spirit of Light in his dialogue.
That said, if this trope is actually unfamiliar to you personally/is not really known in the West/you just actively dislike it, I can see why that ending may be unsatisfying to you.
I've seen Big Good and Big Bad are the same person and had it work, but it generally has to be an active conspiracy sort of thing where the person playing both roles is somehow benefitting from this conflict they're artificially maintaining. The Spirit, in the English version at least, provides no explanation for what playing both of these roles and shaping these respective societies is supposed to accomplish, why it would do this. Christian theology in which Satan is 'God's shadow' tends to be trying (In my experience, at least) to argue something along the lines of 'it's all to test mortals, where you wouldn't clearly deserve to go to Heaven unless you had an actual opportunity to show you don't deserve it and didn't take that opportunity', where Satan is thus being evil in service to God's will in a way that advances God's agenda.
Delete(I would argue this read of theology makes God an enormous jerk who deserves zero respect, mind, but my point is there's some kind of functional logic underlying this type of argument)
Whereas with Dark Side this 'the Light Spirit is actually the Spirit of Darkness in a white robe with gold filigree' thing just creates dozens of headaches in trying to make sense of the plot. I'd honestly probably have been outright angry with Dark Side if it weren't so obvious the game is an unfinished mess, it's such a problematic twist.
Well, I thought more about things where Big Good and Big Bad being the same specifically NOT about "manipulative jerk uses everyone for own purpose". Sometimes it's go close to split personality.
DeleteSometimes - to "second personality started as a way of manipulation but gone out of control to the point that BigGood/BigBad himself/herself lost the trail of what is the his/her aim and either just allows things to go the way they do and plays along or actually have sympathy for both sides". In worst case - wishes for both sides to win (NOT making peace), and thus may do something for one side only to ruin it later to help the other. Or just came to think that both sides suck and bringing misery to both on purpose; sometimes it can be paired with genuine sympathy to individuals from specific sides.
There can also be situations where things just gone out of control and Big Bad/Good, despite still being the technical leader of bad/good guys (and said guys genuinly believing in their leader) just doesn't have direct power to stop/change things anymore. Or does, but the only way will have such chaotic aftershock effects that Big Good/Bad just decides to let things resolve themselves (but may answer/assist specific petitioners). I remember an example (in a "power of belief" setting) where manipulative deity, despite being being worshipped by both "good" and "bad" guys (they both sucked in practice) in practice was very weak and pathetic - because both sides worshipped their own imagined visage of said god, not direcly him. Said god understood that he essentially overplayed himself but long lost his drive and just looked upon shitstorm, doing exactly nothing. But was very friendly and helpful to people who uncovered the truth and spoke to him. While not regretting anything.
The main problem with such stories is that author often tries to portray the Big Good/Bad not being a complete sociopath and instead being tragic, well-intentioned but failed (either himself or by servants/subjects/worshippers), or "beyond human comprehension" and leave some things unaswered on purpose. And this is pretty hard to do - often it just ends with readers/viewers feeling decieved and/or seeing the Big Good/Bad as creator's pet/pretentious asshole/useless idiot/hypocritcal bastard.
I don't think DS devs really put a lot of thought in this twist (or they would hint at this before at the very least). It could really be twist for the sake of twist. Or them just having no idea of how to end the game and deciding to use a trope-y twist ending for lulz. And game being unfinished defenitely played it's role too; the whole duration of "Light pwns Dark" is very unclear - sometimes it spoken about like it started within a human lifetime and sometimes as if it lasts for centuries.
DeleteMy general understanding is "by the time of AP Teana had Darkness winning. Human kingdom is rules by evil guy. Dwarves are controlled by lizardmen. Elves are overwhelmed by Orcs etc. So to stop the paired worlds from going out of balance Netana need STRONG light dominance. Spirit of Netana goes into his LIght aspect and does everything to make Light forces as fervent and aggressive as possible - with great success. Way too great - and Spirit can't just say "okay, that's enough. Go home everyone". To his luck (if it is indeed so) a few Dark heroes are ready to create united anti-Light front and look up to defeated Spirit of Darkness. So Spirit of Netana go into this role, helps to stop Light and possibly goes to deep into the role. He now fears that he screwed up again and now Netana goes full Dark. Teana is already too Dark so paired worlds are screwed. But hey, he (as Spirit of Light) can just kill the Dark hero at the height of his/her conquest - his/her empire will propably crumble into warring islands and Light will get chance to fight back - but (propably) does not have enough strength to dominate Dark. Spirit of Light fails. But end of the world does not come, because Teana is already mostly Light due to Ameli actions (which is something Spirit on Netana does not know for some reason), so Netana being Dark balances the whole thing. Spirit cannot die (without Netana being destroyed atleast), so he congratulates hero with victory and accepts it's fate.
I think if we play as Bagyr things should go relatively alright afterwards. All of Netana is nw Dark, but most of ordinary people will propably live about the same way as before.
Victory of Daert is surely centuries of ALL HAIL OUR IMMORTAL EMPEROR!!! DEATH TO ALL WHO QUESTION HIS RULE!!! Until some Light heroes finally defeat him. Like Spirit predicts.
I'm not sure what Neolina's vicory will bring.
I'm honestly not sure if all this light/dark balance stuff (world overturning if out of balance and so) is suggested anywhere in the English version. It's possible I just missed it, though, especially given DS's translation is pretty shoddy so it might be referenced in a butchered way.
DeleteNeoline-wise, I personally suspect if this was all real that she'd botch ruling things badly enough that a rebellion would eventually form to overthrow her, but more in a 'let them eat cake' sort of cluelessly bad way rather than Daert's 'yep, I'm very evil' way. She comes across as pretty 'sheltered princess'-y, at least in the English translation, where I can buy her making edicts or laws that seem reasonable and kind in her view but which work badly in reality, that kind of thing.
In case it indeed is not explained in English - Teana and Netana are "парночерепашные" worlds - it should be something like "twinturtle" worlds or "paired-turtle" worlds. They need to have overall combined Light/Dark balance - or they will turn over, lose their orbit and fall into the cosmic void. And this is not some sacred secret or something - Spirit directly says that Mari knows it and expect the hero to know that as well.
DeleteYour idea about Neolina sounds reasonable.
Who is Mari?
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