Armored Princess Medal Analysis
Medals are a brand-new element to Armored Princess, and boy do I love them.
A big part of what this ties into is a philosophical design difference between The Legend and Armored Princess: in The Legend, 80% of your power comes from exploring, avoiding combat. Another 19% comes from advancing the plot and specifically acquiring titles and their associated Leadership boosts. Only 1% of your power comes from winning fights. This is a very interesting, unique dynamic, and in some ways I love it in The Legend, but it has the unfortunate consequence that it strongly encourages the player to avoid combat as much as possible, at times leading to combat feeling like a chore, when the tactical combat of the King's Bounty games is the central appeal of them! That's a fairly serious flaw, that the focal point of the game can end up feeling like a chore instead of a joy.
Armored Princess tries to make combat more intrinsically rewarding. Leveling automatically gives increasingly large amounts of Leadership, the amount of Runes acquired by leveling has been ramped up from The Legend, and of course Medals provide direct payoff from combat that isn't Experience-based. (Though admittedly Treasure Hunter is actually not very combat-focused of a Medal) No longer is combat a chore to be done only once you've ninja-ed everything of value in an area, but rather an interesting challenge with its own unique rewards!
... though if you're obsessive about completing them from the beginning of the game, you'll probably be done with Medals by less than halfway through the game, which is a bit unfortunate. On the other hand, it'd be obnoxious of the game to screw over more casual players... oh well. There's probably no ideal solution here, and I love that Medals are a creative fix to a tricky problem, regardless of the imperfection of the execution.
Grand Strategy
Level 1
Earn: 10 fights won without casualties.
Benefit: +200 Leadership.
Level 2
Earn: 30 fights won without casualties.
Benefit: +500 Leadership.
Level 3
Earn: 50 fights won without casualties.
Benefit: +1000 Leadership.
Keep in mind that the game only calculates casualties at the end, by comparing against what you started with. If you lose half your army, and then resurrect everyone to full before you win? Grand Strategy credit. This also means it's perfectly fine to use summons as suicide units to absorb punishment for your 'real' units. The Paladin's Resurrection Skill does not function in this manner, and same for recruitment effects: those occur after the game has already decided whether you've gotten the progress or not.
To be clear: this is not 'in a row'. If you've had ten separate fights where you took no casualties in total, you've got Grand Strategy 1. Simple as that.
By far my favorite Medal in Armored Princess, as it encourages you to do something you'd prefer to do anyway (avoid casualties), but to a degree that's legitimately notable (In The Legend I usually try to keep my casualties low, not non-existent), and the reward is significantly worthwhile if you go through the effort of acquiring it as soon as you can. On the flipside, if you're not interested in chasing the challenge the benefit is sufficiently small in the long haul it's fine to ignore it, just so long as you can get through the early game.
About my only complaint with Grand Strategy is that the early game seems to be basically balanced under the assumption you'll go for Grand Strategy obsessively, at least on the higher difficulties. That seems like it's missing the point of Medals being a reward.
Though it also ties into the more general point that Armored Princess 'tightens up' the early game and 'loosens up' the late game. It wouldn't even be an issue if Armored Princess stuck to The Legend's approach, where the beginning of the game has far more fights than you actually need to defeat to get enough levels to be able to compete with the next 'tier' of battlegroups and so on. So it's less a flaw in how the Medal is designed per se and more a couple of sensible decisions ending up working at cross-purposes in the end.
And thankfully the next couple of games smooth that particular issue out, so that Grand Strategy is a genuinely nice boon early on but fights are no longer balanced under the assumption that you got it as high as possible as fast as possible.
Weird mechanics aside: the smart thing to do at the beginning of the game is to accept the tutorial sequence, and when the game gives you Paladins dump all your other units in the castle and only use the Paladins. This has the mildly cheesy effect of giving you some free units in general, as once you're done with the tutorial the game resets your army state to what you started the game with... without bothering to check if you actually brought those units into the tutorial with you. However, the reason I'm mentioning it here is that doing this is a way to get some vital early progress on Grand Strategy. This can be the difference between metaphorically banging your head against a wall on the first island or getting through with a satisfying but not maddening challenge.
Headhunter
Level 1
Earn: Defeat 10 Heroes.
Benefit: 5 Rage granted at the beginning of a fight with Heroes.
Level 2
Earn: Defeat 30 Heroes.
Benefit: 10 Rage granted at the beginning of a fight with Heroes.
Level 3
Earn: Defeat 50 Heroes.
Benefit: 15 Rage granted at the beginning of a fight with Heroes.
Headhunter is sort of neat, but overall it's mildly gimmicky, and the fact that it's something you'll just automatically max out through progressing through the game is a bit out of line with Medal design principles. It does mean you can, for instance, try to arrange the order you fight Heroes in so whichever fight you think is hardest is put off until you gain the next rank of Headhunter, but that particular dynamic is fairly limited; if you're nowhere near the next rank of Headhunter, you'll basically level past a given Hero's threat level long before you actually get the next rank of Headhunter. So basically you need to be, say, 3 Heroes from a rank for any such ploy to be at all viable.
It is mildly nice to get a bit of a booster against Heroes, kind of? One of the issues with Hero fights in The Legend was how the further you got in the game the more they stood apart from regular fights, not only because they have Spell access and may have special effects like passively boosting Initiative or attaching some Fire damage to all their units' attacks but also just because their stats climb with yours where regular fights just keep falling behind in Attack and Defense. It made for a strange dynamic, where early-game Heroes were generally about as challenging as their army composition would suggest, compared to local forces, while later Heroes were generally far more threatening than their composition would normally mean.
On the other hand, this is basically just reinforcing the oddness of Hero fights, so arguably it's counterproductive.
Oh well, it's at least not intrusively bad. That's... something I'll be getting into in Warriors of the North...
Dragonslayer
Level 1
Earn: Kill 1 Dragon.
Benefit: Rage experience generation increased by 10%.
Level 2
Earn: Kill 10 Dragons in total.
Benefit: Rage experience generation increased by 30%.
Level 3
Earn: Kill 100 Dragons in total.
Benefit: Rage experience generation increased by 50%.
Dragonslayer is one of the Medals that has a kind of aesthetic basis I like, but the mechanics are sort of... pointless? You're going to eventually kill enough dragons, and your influence on timing of gaining the benefit is a bit limited, and then the payoff barely affects your play experience anyway. 50% more experience sounds like a lot, but experience demands climb so rapidly that doesn't work out to as much as you might think.
It's okay, but it's one of the more questionably-designed Medals.
Note that this is dragons within a stack: if you kill a stack of Emerald Green Dragons that's 3 individuals, you've made 3 points of progress.
Also note that there's a particular early-game ship fight with a guaranteed Emerald Green Dragon, quite clearly designed to trip the first rank of this Medal. If you're trying to optimize, you should seek out this fight as soon as you can to maximize the Rage experience gain from the Medal.
Treasure Hunter
Level 1
Earn: 40 chests opened. (Field and battlefield chests both count)
Benefit: Combat experience generation increased by 3%.
Level 2
Earn: 80 chests opened.
Benefit: Combat experience generation increased by 5%.
Level 3
Earn: 120 chests opened.
Benefit: Combat experience generation increased by 7%
Remember how I talked about Learning being terrible? Treasure Hunter is that, but as a freebie bonus. That makes it not a newbie trap, at least, but it's still disappointing compared to, say, Grand Strategy.
I suppose technically it's one more incentive to use Treasure Hunter like crazy, but the bonus is so tiny it's not going to matter so... whatever.
Battle Alchemy
Level 1
Earn: Inflict Burn/Poisoning 50 times.
Benefit: Burn and Poisoning do 10% more damage.
Level 2
Earn: Inflict Burn/Poisoning 150 times.
Benefit: Burn and Poisoning do 20% more damage.
Level 3
Earn: Inflict Burn/Poisoning 400 times.
Benefit: Burn and Poisoning do 30% more damage.
Note that Battle Alchemy's percentage increase is, er, a percentage. That is, getting the first rank doesn't bolster your Burn/Poisoning damage from 5-10% of the stack's overall Health to 15-20%. It bolsters it to 5.5-11%. By extension rank 2 is 6-12%, and rank 3 is 6.5%-13%.
Battle Alchemy is a bit of a weird Medal in that it's technically not a guaranteed Medal, but in real terms you're going to get it eventually. By the same token, you can push to try to get it sooner by biasing your forces toward units that can inflict Burn and/or Poisoning and trying to use Spells to inflict them, but since you're going to tend to end up including some of those anyway for completely unrelated reasons -such as how Assassins and Royal Snakes are really good units in general- it's not like it's something you need to pay attention to. Especially since the final impact, while nice, is sufficiently small that it's not necessarily terribly important. Certainly, it's well within the regular randomization range on the effects: you only unambiguously benefited in any given case on a high roll.
I very much like the idea of getting to bolster damage over time effects, but as a Medal it's odd.
It does end up with the implication that these effects are stronger in player hands than AI hands, which is kind of nice on a mechanical level and gives the devs a little bit of wiggle room for messing with the design space. I can imagine that maybe the devs originally made the base values of Burn and Poisoning more powerful, but didn't like how quickly it wore down player forces, yet still found themselves wanting to give the player access to roughly that level of strength. That kind of idea.
Regardless, it's a bit of a boring Medal from a gameplay perspective, though not quite so boring/invisible as eg Treasure Hunter.
Trapper
Level 1
Earn: Finish off 10 stacks with Traps.
Benefit: +25% damage on Traps, and 1 'friendly' Trap is placed at the beginning of most fights.
Level 2
Earn: Finish off 50 stacks in total with Traps.
Benefit: +50% damage on Traps, and 2 'friendly' Traps are placed at the beginning of most fights.
Level 3
Earn: Finish off 100 stacks in total with Traps.
Benefit: +100% damage on Traps, and 3 'friendly' Traps are placed at the beginning of most fights.
Rather frustratingly, Trapper's Traps are set after you've finished the Tactics phase, meaning you can't plan around them. I'm pretty sure I know why that is -Trapper specifically always sets its Traps within 2 tiles of a unit's starting position, and Tactics let's you determine your units' starting positions- but it's still aggravating and unintuitively un-synergistic. This does mean you can manipulate Trap positions a little, such as shuffling all your troops northward to prevent Traps from spawning southward on your side, but it's not any kind of actual control.
Note that Trapper progress doesn't count summons, but it does count friendly units. (This is what 'without regard to kind' is awkwardly trying to explain to the player, I'm pretty sure) It would be rather silly to do so, but if you really wanted to, you could bring in severely under-strength stacks to suicide onto your own Traps to get the Medal faster than you're really supposed to. It's also worth noting that there's no timeout factor: it doesn't matter whether you kill a stack on turn 1 or on turn 100, you get the credit.
Additionally, note that Trapper doesn't set Traps for Keeper fights, Boss fights, and occasionally for certain scripted fights that don't fall under either of those possibilities. This is mostly beneficial in practice (Pre-placed Traps would be more likely to hurt than help in most Keeper fights, and in Boss fights would potentially critically interfere with your troop movements initially), but can be a bit of a nasty shock if you don't already know about it.
The Traps Trapper sets are equivalent to Level 2 Traps you set yourself, except they never time out. This makes them particularly impressive if you get the Medal early in the game before you can set Level 2 Traps yourself. This includes that their damage scales with your Intellect, gets increased by Destruction, etc.
All that said, Trapper is probably my second-favorite Medal in the game. It's one you have to put in effort to earn, with tangible and interesting rewards for making that progress, and while it's a bit class-biased since the Mage is going to consistently have the most lethal Traps, it's still useful to the other classes just for the potential to slow down enemies, with any damage done effectively being a bonus. It's especially effective on battlemaps that are more 'tight corridor' than 'wide open field', which means it tends to give you a noticeable edge in caves, ship-to-ship battles, and the more heavily forested areas. If you're inclined to try to lure enemies to battlegrounds that favor you, Trapper's effect is pretty cool just for that aspect.
There's also a nice meta-layer aspect of subtly rebalancing Traps in an unobtrusive way. Traps in The Legend were impressively lethal for the early-to-mid game, but the further you got the more it became the case that damage was a minor bonus -outside the edge case of the Mage potentially trying to kill Black Dragons with them- and the delaying aspect was the primary usage. This is still broadly true in Armored Princess, but if you're putting in the effort to get Trapper the damage is much more competitive in the endgame. (Admittedly there's other factors here, like how you tend to get more Intellect in Armored Princess than in The Legend) It's a nice, subtle way of specifically boosting Trap's late-game potential, as opposed to making a more general boost that risks making them overpowered in the early game, where they're already really good.
The only two elements of Trapper that are a bit frustrating on a design level are that, firstly, there's shades of a 'the key is in the safe' dynamic to Trapper, in that if you're lucky enough to find an early Trap Scroll and then arrange to get 10 Trap kills suddenly the Medal starts being able to directly fuel itself by killing things with the Traps it generates, and secondly that Trapper is yet another mechanic discouraging using conventional melee forces. The set Traps can easily block you off from being able to roll Horsemen through, or Leap Cerberi, or Ram Brontors, with particularly choked battlefields almost guaranteed to prevent your own forces from successfully closing. I wouldn't mind this part so much if it weren't for how eg it looks to me like Lizardmen are in part an attempt to encourage melee-heavy armies: if Armored Princess were simply embracing the fact that the player is probably going to focus on ranged units with maybe some No Retaliation melee support, that would be one thing, but... I'm pretty sure that's not what's happening here.
Still, I love Trapper almost as much as Grand Strategy.
Guardian Angel
Level 1
Earn: Cast any combination of Stone Skin, Avenging Angel, Divine Armor 50 times in total. Archmage's Magic Shield also advances this count.
Benefit: +3% resistance to all non-Astral (
) damage types on all units.
Level 2
Earn: Cast any combination of Stone Skin, Avenging Angel, or Divine Armor 150 times in total. Archmage's Magic Shield also advances this count.
Benefit: +5% resistance to all non-Astral () damage types on all units.
Level 3
Earn: Cast any combination of Stone Skin, Avenging Angel, Magic Spring, or Divine Armor 400 times in total. Archmage's Magic Shield also advances this count.
Benefit: +7% resistance to all non-Astral () damage types on all units.
Note that only castings that occur within the first ten turns of a battle count, for this and any other 'cast these Spells so and so many times' Medal. No stalling a battle for 200 turns and maxing a Medal out in one battle.
Guardian Angel's effect is most pronounced if you're using troops with extreme resistances in the first place. A Royal Snake, for example, will go from 80% Poison resist to 83% at the first rank, which is actually reducing the incoming damage by more than 10% of what it was before you got the Medal. It's always useful, of course, but it's at its most useful if you're arranging to take advantage of strong matchups. I quite like that!
I'm not so fond of grinding out its ranks via spamming the Spells in question, unfortunately. It's a fairly arbitrary, thematically driven list, and it tends to encourage less in the way of incorporating the casting of those Spells into your strategy and more in the way of going 'oh hey I have nothing better to do with my Mana this turn anyway, let's drop Stone Skin/whatever on a random troop just for Medal progress'. This is especially frustrating since Stone Skin is the cheapest of the options, but has a somewhat lengthy animation and often isn't that great of a Spell to be casting. You can mitigate things some by fielding Archmages to supplement with Magic Shield, but that's annoying in its own way. If, say, the game had made a wider number of units able to contribute, such as having the Totem of Life on Orc Shaman also advance progress and then throw in a half dozen other such cases, that would be pretty cool in terms of allowing the player to advance the Medal with a fairly varied force composition, or if they just wanted it out as fast as possible make their entire army out of units capable of advancing the Medal, but as-is it's... a really weird, minor incentive to use Archmages in particular. I'd honestly rather no unit contributed to the Medal than just one unit.
Unfortunately, while the next couple of games rework the exact list and address some of the particular issues I have with the Medal, in broad terms it never stops being a grindy Medal that has somewhat mild benefits. This is exacerbated by the fact that good play tends to minimize how often your units get hit in the first place, so if you're actually playing reasonably competently you're further minimizing how much benefit you're deriving from it. It does least mostly-consistently help in Boss fights, which tend to toss out unavoidable mass damage attacks...
I broadly like the idea of Guardian Angel, and in particular I do appreciate how it's a Medal you have to actually do something to earn, but it's still... not the best-executed Medal.
Blind Rage
Level 1
Earn: Spend 1000 Rage in total.
Benefit: +1% crit chance on all units.
Level 2
Earn: Spend 7000 Rage in total.
Benefit: +3% crit chance on all units.
Level 3
Earn: Spend 21000 Rage in total.
Benefit: +7% crit chance on all units.
Well. You're going to earn it eventually. It's... a thing. I guess.
Okay, Blind Rage is just disappointing, but that's okay. I'm a lot less bothered by something you'll sort of incidentally earn being a bit lame than I am by, say, a Skill you have to dump Runes into to earn being disappointing. Blind Rage seems a bit pointless, but there's worse possibilities.
Even the fact that it's a tiny crit bonus isn't something I can get particularly worked-up over, because it would be hugely frustrating to eg end up with a +40% bonus and suddenly find Ancient Vampires are practically immortal in humanoid form. To an extent, a crit bonus from a Medal is just plain a bad idea, and a Medal being derived from Rage expenditure is boring. The Warrior will tend to get it a bit faster than the Paladin, and the Mage will tend to get it a bit slower than that, maybe, and... that's about it. The drastic increase in requirements isn't even particularly meaningful, as your Rage costs rise and Rage generation rises so that you just plain burn through more Rage per turn later in the game.
Two medal slots vary based on which class you're playing as. In each case the first of them provides a primary stat bonus for slaughtering a particular species/faction, while the second provides a slightly more variable class-appropriate bonus for spamming a list of class-themed Spells.
We'll be starting with the Warrior's two.
Reptile Hunter
Level 1
Earn: Defeat 5 battlegroups classed as Lizardmen.
Benefit: +1 Attack.
Level 2
Earn: Defeat 10 battlegroups classed as Lizardmen.
Benefit: +2 Attack
Level 3
Earn: Defeat 15 battlegroups classed as Lizardmen.
Benefit: +3 Attack
Battlegroup classification for the purposes of this Medal -as well as its equivalents on other classes- is based on the percentage of Leadership in the group. More specifically, a group needs to have at least 40% of its overall Leadership represented by that group (ie a group that was 38% Lizardmen wouldn't count for Reptile Hunter), and then needs to not have a different species more individually common. (ie a group that was 40% Lizardmen and 60% Dwarves wouldn't count for Reptile Hunter) In the unlikely event of a tie (eg 50% Lizardmen, 50% Dwarves), the game rather curiously decides that the group has no faction at all for Medal purposes. So basically with a typical 5-stack army, if Scouting reports two slots are Lizardmen and the other three slots aren't all one non-Lizardmen species, there's decent odds that group will count, and if 3 slots are Lizardmen it's probably a Lizardmen army, and if it's four slots it's basically guaranteed. (And of course if all 5 slots are Lizardmen, it's Lizardmen) With higher ranks of Scouting, you can accurately determine whether a group counts before initiating battle by counting up units and determining the Leadership totals. This isn't super-important, but can be nice to know.
Regardless, Reptile Hunter is... puzzling. The bonus makes sense to me, more or less, in that it helps separate the Warrior from the other classes by emphasizing the offensive strength of their army still further, but I couldn't begin to guess why the Warrior is being set up with a grudge with Lizardmen. It's also, in Orcs on the March, probably the least convenient of these 'kill X battlegroup' type Medals, as Lizardmen don't show up until the middle-ish of the game, where Undead and Orc battlegroups can be encountered right on the first island. So that's a bit annoying.
It's also a bit boring of a Medal, since what'll basically happen is that you'll get no opportunities for progress (Bar maybe an early upgradeable Lizardmen Item? Keeper fights do count) and then when you get to Montero the forces are basically all Dwarves or Lizardmen, with the surface being slanted toward Lizardmen. So you'll just sort of incidentally get the Medal at a predefined point of broad progress. Being a class-based Medal makes this a bit more tolerable of a design choice, but it's still odd.
Iron Knight
Level 1
Earn: Cast any combination of Berserk, Ghost Blade, Battle Cry, or Dragon Arrows 20 times in total.
Benefit: +5 Rage.
Level 2
Earn: Cast any combination of Berserk, Ghost Blade, Battle Cry, or Dragon Arrows 70 times in total.
Benefit: +10 Rage.
Level 3
Earn: Cast any combination of Berserk, Ghost Blade, Battle Cry, or Dragon Arrows 150 times in total.
Benefit: +15 Rage.
Iron Knight is confusing and counter-intuitive in its mechanics. You get more Rage because you're a Warrior, okay, makes sense, but... you get better at Rage by casting Spells?
The particular list is also frustrating. Dragon Arrows makes sense, inasmuch as it's genuinely one of the better Spells for a Warrior, but it demands you're using one of four specific units, artificially restricting your force composition if you want to grind for Iron Knight using Dragon Arrows. Battle Cry is, in all honesty, much more of a Mage Spell than a Warrior Spell due to how vital Initiative advantage is to the Mage, and anyway it's not a Spell you want to be casting constantly, making it annoying/wasteful as a method of grinding for Medal progress even though it'll work in any situation. Berserk is just plain garbage, and is even more frustrating in Armored Princess since it tends to lead to units taking unnecessary casualties and thus cost you progress on Grand Strategy, even though it's thematically appropriate a choice. Ghost Blade is the only consistently spammable option, and it's terrible in the Warrior's hands and in particular is hampered by its 10 Mana cost being fairly crushing for an early-game Warrior. 2 casts and you're done is going to be typical for a while. Which is frustrating since the Warrior's lacking Intellect isn't anywhere near as important in the early game, so damage-wise Ghost Blade actually is worth considering as a Warrior, and so would be actually be a perfectly acceptable tool for grinding the Medal early in the game if only it weren't for the aforementioned Mana cost.
The overall result is that the smart option is to luck into Dragon Arrows as soon as possible and then religiously grind it on probably-Bowmen until you've finally maxed the Medal and then never think about the situation again.
In theory I like that it's a Medal you have to earn, but this is less important a quality on class-exclusive Medals -or even actively undesirable, if they're meant to highlight class distinctiveness- and it doesn't make up for how infuriating the execution of the actual list is. It's probably my least-favorite Medal in Armored Princess, and I'm honestly a bit puzzled as to how it ended up this way.
Now for the Paladin's equivalents.
Purifier
Level 1
Earn: Defeat 5 battlegroups classed as Undead.
Benefit: +1 Defense.
Level 2
Earn: Defeat 10 battlegroups classed as Undead.
Benefit: +2 Defense.
Level 3
Earn: Defeat 15 battlegroups classed as Undead.
Benefit: +3 Defense.
It's sort of weird to me how the game is placing Defense as a Paladin-centric priority, but I kind of suspect it's more about giving each class a single primary stat than anything else so... I don't like it, just because Defense is directly less valuable than Attack or Intellect, but I understand the thought process involved in the choice.
It's too bad, because Undead battlegroups is actually the best of the three for creating interesting choices. You're going to max out the Medal eventually, but Undead dot the world intermittently in most locations, leading to situations where you've taken out four Undead battlegroups and you can consider maybe trying to go hunt down an Undead battlegroup for that point of Defense or put it off until later because eg you've found such a group but it's a bit too powerful for your tastes, contrasting with how Lizardmen have nothing for ages and then a sudden glut and Orcs in Orcs on the March are widespread enough to be rather easy to grab early on.
Purifier is thus a Medal I want to like but kinda don't.
Holy Warrior
Level 1
Earn: Cast any combination of Healing, Bless, Pacifism, or Resurrection 50 times in total.
Benefit: Priests, Inquisitors, and Paladins have their base damage raised by 20%.
Level 2
Earn: Cast any combination of Healing, Bless, Pacifism, or Resurrection 150 times in total.
Benefit: Priests, Inquisitors, and Paladins have their base damage raised by 30%.
Level 3
Earn: Cast any combination of Healing, Bless, Pacifism, or Resurrection 450 times in total.
Benefit: Priests, Inquisitors, and Paladins have their base damage raised by 40%.
Note that the damage boost occurs at the most basic level, and so these values are fairly misleading. The first rank of the Medal raises your Priests' minimum and maximum damage by 1, for example, because the game isn't applying the boost after having totaled together all the individual Priest damage, it's boosting the damage of each individual Priest by whole values, erring toward ensuring there's any boost at all. One of the overall results is that a Paladin is strongly encouraged to use Priests over Inquisitors if eyeing them for their damage output, as the somewhat odd way the boosting works leads to Priests being overall more damage for the Leadership.
Curiously, the code's framing is of giving a 20% increase in Physical damage to all three and a 20% increase in Magical damage to all three, even though Priests and Inquisitors only do Magic damage. I haven't noticed Priests and Inquisitors suddenly punching partially through heavy Magic resistance, so I don't think this aspect of the code actually matters, but I could well be wrong.
Holy Warrior is another Medal I'm iffy about. The thematics make perfect sense -Paladin does Paladin-y thing and finds her fellow holy warriors battling against the darkness to be more effective- but the details are wonky. Pacifism is difficult to justify casting in most situations, Healing rapidly loses utility as you go deeper into the game, Bless is okay but reliant on using troops with swingy damage to be particularly useful (Or on being Level 3 so it's mass-cast, which takes a while to reach), and Resurrection is expensive and has some limitations that can be a bit inconvenient. And unlike Iron Knight, you really do have to spam these Spells like crazy to earn it.
And then the bonus is that three particular units hit harder with their basic attacks, none of which is a unit defined around its damage-dealing ability.
I find it entirely understandable if you elect to ignore the Medal entirely, or maybe only grind up to the first rank since it has the most dramatic impact anyway.
And to be completely clear, only you personally casting these Spells counts. A Priest using their Healing or Bless Talent does not, nor does an Inquisitor using their Resurrection Talent.
Yeah, the Paladin is a bit screwed when it comes to Medals.
Lastly, the Mage's Medals.
Illiteracy Exterminator
Level 1
Earn: Defeat 5 battlegroups classed as Orcs.
Benefit: +1 Intellect.
Level 2
Earn: Defeat 10 battlegroups classed as Orcs.
Benefit: +2 Intellect.
Level 3
Earn: Defeat 15 battlegroups classed as Orcs.
Benefit: +3 Intellect
In Orcs on the March, Illiteracy Exterminator works similarly to Purifier: Orcs pop up intermittently all over the place, with no great concentrations prior to the point you've probably maxed it anyway. It's nice and can create little mini-strategic moments, especially since Intellect's breakpoints matter so much you might find yourself really wanting just one more point of Intellect and so go scouring the world for Orc battlegroups to get that next point ASAP.
And then unlike Purifier the bonus is actually really good for you!
It's a really well-designed Medal, is what I'm saying.
I've always wondered what's up with its graphic, though.
Fire Mage
Level 1
Earn: Cast Flaming Arrow, Oil Mist, Hell Breath, or Fireball 70 times in total.
Benefit: +5 Mana.
Level 2
Earn: Cast Flaming Arrow, Oil Mist, Hell Breath, or Fireball 210 times in total.
Benefit: +10 Mana.
Level 3
Earn: Cast Flaming Arrow, Oil Mist, Hell Breath, or Fireball 600 times in total.
Benefit: +15 Mana.
Fire Mage actually isn't particularly a pain to grind, unlike its counterparts on the Warrior and Paladin, even though it requires the most casts overall. Flaming Arrow will be your default Spell most of the time for much of the early game just because it's your innate damage Spell, and in the early-to-midgame Fireball pretty neatly displaces it. Even once other Spells start pushing them aside as your preferred damage choices, Flaming Arrow remains an excellent way to inflict Burn on overly-large stacks, and furthermore the Mage gets Higher Magic so they can get in potentially 60% more grinding in a single battle, or if you're tending to not draw out battles long enough for Higher Magic to peter out than outright double the speed.
While Hell Breath is garbage the Mage doesn't want to cast and Oil Mist is a bit overly-situational, it doesn't really matter. In the end, the Mage is actually likely to max out the Medal without specifically trying.
I'm basically happy with that. It's frustrating the Paladin and Warrior struggle so much with their equivalent Medals, but that doesn't mean this Medal is badly-designed, it means those Medals are.
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There's definitely a number of Medals that could be better in design, but overall I really like the Medal system, and even the boring grindy Medals at least give you something to do when you're not sure how to use your Spell per turn. No particular plans? Drop a Stone Skin. Or as the Warrior slap Dragon Arrows on your Bowmen, it'll be useful eventually. Whatever. So the grinding may be frustrating, but it's not all bad.
Next time, we get started on the Might Skills and the Warrior class in Armored Princess.
A big part of what this ties into is a philosophical design difference between The Legend and Armored Princess: in The Legend, 80% of your power comes from exploring, avoiding combat. Another 19% comes from advancing the plot and specifically acquiring titles and their associated Leadership boosts. Only 1% of your power comes from winning fights. This is a very interesting, unique dynamic, and in some ways I love it in The Legend, but it has the unfortunate consequence that it strongly encourages the player to avoid combat as much as possible, at times leading to combat feeling like a chore, when the tactical combat of the King's Bounty games is the central appeal of them! That's a fairly serious flaw, that the focal point of the game can end up feeling like a chore instead of a joy.
Armored Princess tries to make combat more intrinsically rewarding. Leveling automatically gives increasingly large amounts of Leadership, the amount of Runes acquired by leveling has been ramped up from The Legend, and of course Medals provide direct payoff from combat that isn't Experience-based. (Though admittedly Treasure Hunter is actually not very combat-focused of a Medal) No longer is combat a chore to be done only once you've ninja-ed everything of value in an area, but rather an interesting challenge with its own unique rewards!
... though if you're obsessive about completing them from the beginning of the game, you'll probably be done with Medals by less than halfway through the game, which is a bit unfortunate. On the other hand, it'd be obnoxious of the game to screw over more casual players... oh well. There's probably no ideal solution here, and I love that Medals are a creative fix to a tricky problem, regardless of the imperfection of the execution.
Grand Strategy
Level 1
Earn: 10 fights won without casualties.
Benefit: +200 Leadership.
Level 2
Earn: 30 fights won without casualties.
Benefit: +500 Leadership.
Level 3
Earn: 50 fights won without casualties.
Benefit: +1000 Leadership.
Keep in mind that the game only calculates casualties at the end, by comparing against what you started with. If you lose half your army, and then resurrect everyone to full before you win? Grand Strategy credit. This also means it's perfectly fine to use summons as suicide units to absorb punishment for your 'real' units. The Paladin's Resurrection Skill does not function in this manner, and same for recruitment effects: those occur after the game has already decided whether you've gotten the progress or not.
To be clear: this is not 'in a row'. If you've had ten separate fights where you took no casualties in total, you've got Grand Strategy 1. Simple as that.
By far my favorite Medal in Armored Princess, as it encourages you to do something you'd prefer to do anyway (avoid casualties), but to a degree that's legitimately notable (In The Legend I usually try to keep my casualties low, not non-existent), and the reward is significantly worthwhile if you go through the effort of acquiring it as soon as you can. On the flipside, if you're not interested in chasing the challenge the benefit is sufficiently small in the long haul it's fine to ignore it, just so long as you can get through the early game.
About my only complaint with Grand Strategy is that the early game seems to be basically balanced under the assumption you'll go for Grand Strategy obsessively, at least on the higher difficulties. That seems like it's missing the point of Medals being a reward.
Though it also ties into the more general point that Armored Princess 'tightens up' the early game and 'loosens up' the late game. It wouldn't even be an issue if Armored Princess stuck to The Legend's approach, where the beginning of the game has far more fights than you actually need to defeat to get enough levels to be able to compete with the next 'tier' of battlegroups and so on. So it's less a flaw in how the Medal is designed per se and more a couple of sensible decisions ending up working at cross-purposes in the end.
And thankfully the next couple of games smooth that particular issue out, so that Grand Strategy is a genuinely nice boon early on but fights are no longer balanced under the assumption that you got it as high as possible as fast as possible.
Weird mechanics aside: the smart thing to do at the beginning of the game is to accept the tutorial sequence, and when the game gives you Paladins dump all your other units in the castle and only use the Paladins. This has the mildly cheesy effect of giving you some free units in general, as once you're done with the tutorial the game resets your army state to what you started the game with... without bothering to check if you actually brought those units into the tutorial with you. However, the reason I'm mentioning it here is that doing this is a way to get some vital early progress on Grand Strategy. This can be the difference between metaphorically banging your head against a wall on the first island or getting through with a satisfying but not maddening challenge.
Headhunter
Level 1
Earn: Defeat 10 Heroes.
Benefit: 5 Rage granted at the beginning of a fight with Heroes.
Level 2
Earn: Defeat 30 Heroes.
Benefit: 10 Rage granted at the beginning of a fight with Heroes.
Level 3
Earn: Defeat 50 Heroes.
Benefit: 15 Rage granted at the beginning of a fight with Heroes.
Headhunter is sort of neat, but overall it's mildly gimmicky, and the fact that it's something you'll just automatically max out through progressing through the game is a bit out of line with Medal design principles. It does mean you can, for instance, try to arrange the order you fight Heroes in so whichever fight you think is hardest is put off until you gain the next rank of Headhunter, but that particular dynamic is fairly limited; if you're nowhere near the next rank of Headhunter, you'll basically level past a given Hero's threat level long before you actually get the next rank of Headhunter. So basically you need to be, say, 3 Heroes from a rank for any such ploy to be at all viable.
It is mildly nice to get a bit of a booster against Heroes, kind of? One of the issues with Hero fights in The Legend was how the further you got in the game the more they stood apart from regular fights, not only because they have Spell access and may have special effects like passively boosting Initiative or attaching some Fire damage to all their units' attacks but also just because their stats climb with yours where regular fights just keep falling behind in Attack and Defense. It made for a strange dynamic, where early-game Heroes were generally about as challenging as their army composition would suggest, compared to local forces, while later Heroes were generally far more threatening than their composition would normally mean.
On the other hand, this is basically just reinforcing the oddness of Hero fights, so arguably it's counterproductive.
Oh well, it's at least not intrusively bad. That's... something I'll be getting into in Warriors of the North...
Dragonslayer
Level 1
Earn: Kill 1 Dragon.
Benefit: Rage experience generation increased by 10%.
Level 2
Earn: Kill 10 Dragons in total.
Benefit: Rage experience generation increased by 30%.
Level 3
Earn: Kill 100 Dragons in total.
Benefit: Rage experience generation increased by 50%.
Dragonslayer is one of the Medals that has a kind of aesthetic basis I like, but the mechanics are sort of... pointless? You're going to eventually kill enough dragons, and your influence on timing of gaining the benefit is a bit limited, and then the payoff barely affects your play experience anyway. 50% more experience sounds like a lot, but experience demands climb so rapidly that doesn't work out to as much as you might think.
It's okay, but it's one of the more questionably-designed Medals.
Note that this is dragons within a stack: if you kill a stack of Emerald Green Dragons that's 3 individuals, you've made 3 points of progress.
Also note that there's a particular early-game ship fight with a guaranteed Emerald Green Dragon, quite clearly designed to trip the first rank of this Medal. If you're trying to optimize, you should seek out this fight as soon as you can to maximize the Rage experience gain from the Medal.
Treasure Hunter
Level 1
Earn: 40 chests opened. (Field and battlefield chests both count)
Benefit: Combat experience generation increased by 3%.
Level 2
Earn: 80 chests opened.
Benefit: Combat experience generation increased by 5%.
Level 3
Earn: 120 chests opened.
Benefit: Combat experience generation increased by 7%
Remember how I talked about Learning being terrible? Treasure Hunter is that, but as a freebie bonus. That makes it not a newbie trap, at least, but it's still disappointing compared to, say, Grand Strategy.
I suppose technically it's one more incentive to use Treasure Hunter like crazy, but the bonus is so tiny it's not going to matter so... whatever.
Battle Alchemy
Level 1
Earn: Inflict Burn/Poisoning 50 times.
Benefit: Burn and Poisoning do 10% more damage.
Level 2
Earn: Inflict Burn/Poisoning 150 times.
Benefit: Burn and Poisoning do 20% more damage.
Level 3
Earn: Inflict Burn/Poisoning 400 times.
Benefit: Burn and Poisoning do 30% more damage.
Note that Battle Alchemy's percentage increase is, er, a percentage. That is, getting the first rank doesn't bolster your Burn/Poisoning damage from 5-10% of the stack's overall Health to 15-20%. It bolsters it to 5.5-11%. By extension rank 2 is 6-12%, and rank 3 is 6.5%-13%.
Battle Alchemy is a bit of a weird Medal in that it's technically not a guaranteed Medal, but in real terms you're going to get it eventually. By the same token, you can push to try to get it sooner by biasing your forces toward units that can inflict Burn and/or Poisoning and trying to use Spells to inflict them, but since you're going to tend to end up including some of those anyway for completely unrelated reasons -such as how Assassins and Royal Snakes are really good units in general- it's not like it's something you need to pay attention to. Especially since the final impact, while nice, is sufficiently small that it's not necessarily terribly important. Certainly, it's well within the regular randomization range on the effects: you only unambiguously benefited in any given case on a high roll.
I very much like the idea of getting to bolster damage over time effects, but as a Medal it's odd.
It does end up with the implication that these effects are stronger in player hands than AI hands, which is kind of nice on a mechanical level and gives the devs a little bit of wiggle room for messing with the design space. I can imagine that maybe the devs originally made the base values of Burn and Poisoning more powerful, but didn't like how quickly it wore down player forces, yet still found themselves wanting to give the player access to roughly that level of strength. That kind of idea.
Regardless, it's a bit of a boring Medal from a gameplay perspective, though not quite so boring/invisible as eg Treasure Hunter.
Trapper
Level 1
Earn: Finish off 10 stacks with Traps.
Benefit: +25% damage on Traps, and 1 'friendly' Trap is placed at the beginning of most fights.
Level 2
Earn: Finish off 50 stacks in total with Traps.
Benefit: +50% damage on Traps, and 2 'friendly' Traps are placed at the beginning of most fights.
Level 3
Earn: Finish off 100 stacks in total with Traps.
Benefit: +100% damage on Traps, and 3 'friendly' Traps are placed at the beginning of most fights.
Rather frustratingly, Trapper's Traps are set after you've finished the Tactics phase, meaning you can't plan around them. I'm pretty sure I know why that is -Trapper specifically always sets its Traps within 2 tiles of a unit's starting position, and Tactics let's you determine your units' starting positions- but it's still aggravating and unintuitively un-synergistic. This does mean you can manipulate Trap positions a little, such as shuffling all your troops northward to prevent Traps from spawning southward on your side, but it's not any kind of actual control.
Note that Trapper progress doesn't count summons, but it does count friendly units. (This is what 'without regard to kind' is awkwardly trying to explain to the player, I'm pretty sure) It would be rather silly to do so, but if you really wanted to, you could bring in severely under-strength stacks to suicide onto your own Traps to get the Medal faster than you're really supposed to. It's also worth noting that there's no timeout factor: it doesn't matter whether you kill a stack on turn 1 or on turn 100, you get the credit.
Additionally, note that Trapper doesn't set Traps for Keeper fights, Boss fights, and occasionally for certain scripted fights that don't fall under either of those possibilities. This is mostly beneficial in practice (Pre-placed Traps would be more likely to hurt than help in most Keeper fights, and in Boss fights would potentially critically interfere with your troop movements initially), but can be a bit of a nasty shock if you don't already know about it.
The Traps Trapper sets are equivalent to Level 2 Traps you set yourself, except they never time out. This makes them particularly impressive if you get the Medal early in the game before you can set Level 2 Traps yourself. This includes that their damage scales with your Intellect, gets increased by Destruction, etc.
All that said, Trapper is probably my second-favorite Medal in the game. It's one you have to put in effort to earn, with tangible and interesting rewards for making that progress, and while it's a bit class-biased since the Mage is going to consistently have the most lethal Traps, it's still useful to the other classes just for the potential to slow down enemies, with any damage done effectively being a bonus. It's especially effective on battlemaps that are more 'tight corridor' than 'wide open field', which means it tends to give you a noticeable edge in caves, ship-to-ship battles, and the more heavily forested areas. If you're inclined to try to lure enemies to battlegrounds that favor you, Trapper's effect is pretty cool just for that aspect.
There's also a nice meta-layer aspect of subtly rebalancing Traps in an unobtrusive way. Traps in The Legend were impressively lethal for the early-to-mid game, but the further you got the more it became the case that damage was a minor bonus -outside the edge case of the Mage potentially trying to kill Black Dragons with them- and the delaying aspect was the primary usage. This is still broadly true in Armored Princess, but if you're putting in the effort to get Trapper the damage is much more competitive in the endgame. (Admittedly there's other factors here, like how you tend to get more Intellect in Armored Princess than in The Legend) It's a nice, subtle way of specifically boosting Trap's late-game potential, as opposed to making a more general boost that risks making them overpowered in the early game, where they're already really good.
The only two elements of Trapper that are a bit frustrating on a design level are that, firstly, there's shades of a 'the key is in the safe' dynamic to Trapper, in that if you're lucky enough to find an early Trap Scroll and then arrange to get 10 Trap kills suddenly the Medal starts being able to directly fuel itself by killing things with the Traps it generates, and secondly that Trapper is yet another mechanic discouraging using conventional melee forces. The set Traps can easily block you off from being able to roll Horsemen through, or Leap Cerberi, or Ram Brontors, with particularly choked battlefields almost guaranteed to prevent your own forces from successfully closing. I wouldn't mind this part so much if it weren't for how eg it looks to me like Lizardmen are in part an attempt to encourage melee-heavy armies: if Armored Princess were simply embracing the fact that the player is probably going to focus on ranged units with maybe some No Retaliation melee support, that would be one thing, but... I'm pretty sure that's not what's happening here.
Still, I love Trapper almost as much as Grand Strategy.
Guardian Angel
Level 1
Earn: Cast any combination of Stone Skin, Avenging Angel, Divine Armor 50 times in total. Archmage's Magic Shield also advances this count.
Benefit: +3% resistance to all non-Astral (
) damage types on all units.Level 2
Earn: Cast any combination of Stone Skin, Avenging Angel, or Divine Armor 150 times in total. Archmage's Magic Shield also advances this count.
Benefit: +5% resistance to all non-Astral (
) damage types on all units.Level 3
Earn: Cast any combination of Stone Skin, Avenging Angel, Magic Spring, or Divine Armor 400 times in total. Archmage's Magic Shield also advances this count.
Benefit: +7% resistance to all non-Astral (
) damage types on all units.Note that only castings that occur within the first ten turns of a battle count, for this and any other 'cast these Spells so and so many times' Medal. No stalling a battle for 200 turns and maxing a Medal out in one battle.
Guardian Angel's effect is most pronounced if you're using troops with extreme resistances in the first place. A Royal Snake, for example, will go from 80% Poison resist to 83% at the first rank, which is actually reducing the incoming damage by more than 10% of what it was before you got the Medal. It's always useful, of course, but it's at its most useful if you're arranging to take advantage of strong matchups. I quite like that!
I'm not so fond of grinding out its ranks via spamming the Spells in question, unfortunately. It's a fairly arbitrary, thematically driven list, and it tends to encourage less in the way of incorporating the casting of those Spells into your strategy and more in the way of going 'oh hey I have nothing better to do with my Mana this turn anyway, let's drop Stone Skin/whatever on a random troop just for Medal progress'. This is especially frustrating since Stone Skin is the cheapest of the options, but has a somewhat lengthy animation and often isn't that great of a Spell to be casting. You can mitigate things some by fielding Archmages to supplement with Magic Shield, but that's annoying in its own way. If, say, the game had made a wider number of units able to contribute, such as having the Totem of Life on Orc Shaman also advance progress and then throw in a half dozen other such cases, that would be pretty cool in terms of allowing the player to advance the Medal with a fairly varied force composition, or if they just wanted it out as fast as possible make their entire army out of units capable of advancing the Medal, but as-is it's... a really weird, minor incentive to use Archmages in particular. I'd honestly rather no unit contributed to the Medal than just one unit.
Unfortunately, while the next couple of games rework the exact list and address some of the particular issues I have with the Medal, in broad terms it never stops being a grindy Medal that has somewhat mild benefits. This is exacerbated by the fact that good play tends to minimize how often your units get hit in the first place, so if you're actually playing reasonably competently you're further minimizing how much benefit you're deriving from it. It does least mostly-consistently help in Boss fights, which tend to toss out unavoidable mass damage attacks...
I broadly like the idea of Guardian Angel, and in particular I do appreciate how it's a Medal you have to actually do something to earn, but it's still... not the best-executed Medal.
Blind Rage
Level 1
Earn: Spend 1000 Rage in total.
Benefit: +1% crit chance on all units.
Level 2
Earn: Spend 7000 Rage in total.
Benefit: +3% crit chance on all units.
Level 3
Earn: Spend 21000 Rage in total.
Benefit: +7% crit chance on all units.
Well. You're going to earn it eventually. It's... a thing. I guess.
Okay, Blind Rage is just disappointing, but that's okay. I'm a lot less bothered by something you'll sort of incidentally earn being a bit lame than I am by, say, a Skill you have to dump Runes into to earn being disappointing. Blind Rage seems a bit pointless, but there's worse possibilities.
Even the fact that it's a tiny crit bonus isn't something I can get particularly worked-up over, because it would be hugely frustrating to eg end up with a +40% bonus and suddenly find Ancient Vampires are practically immortal in humanoid form. To an extent, a crit bonus from a Medal is just plain a bad idea, and a Medal being derived from Rage expenditure is boring. The Warrior will tend to get it a bit faster than the Paladin, and the Mage will tend to get it a bit slower than that, maybe, and... that's about it. The drastic increase in requirements isn't even particularly meaningful, as your Rage costs rise and Rage generation rises so that you just plain burn through more Rage per turn later in the game.
Two medal slots vary based on which class you're playing as. In each case the first of them provides a primary stat bonus for slaughtering a particular species/faction, while the second provides a slightly more variable class-appropriate bonus for spamming a list of class-themed Spells.
We'll be starting with the Warrior's two.
Reptile Hunter
Level 1
Earn: Defeat 5 battlegroups classed as Lizardmen.
Benefit: +1 Attack.
Level 2
Earn: Defeat 10 battlegroups classed as Lizardmen.
Benefit: +2 Attack
Level 3
Earn: Defeat 15 battlegroups classed as Lizardmen.
Benefit: +3 Attack
Battlegroup classification for the purposes of this Medal -as well as its equivalents on other classes- is based on the percentage of Leadership in the group. More specifically, a group needs to have at least 40% of its overall Leadership represented by that group (ie a group that was 38% Lizardmen wouldn't count for Reptile Hunter), and then needs to not have a different species more individually common. (ie a group that was 40% Lizardmen and 60% Dwarves wouldn't count for Reptile Hunter) In the unlikely event of a tie (eg 50% Lizardmen, 50% Dwarves), the game rather curiously decides that the group has no faction at all for Medal purposes. So basically with a typical 5-stack army, if Scouting reports two slots are Lizardmen and the other three slots aren't all one non-Lizardmen species, there's decent odds that group will count, and if 3 slots are Lizardmen it's probably a Lizardmen army, and if it's four slots it's basically guaranteed. (And of course if all 5 slots are Lizardmen, it's Lizardmen) With higher ranks of Scouting, you can accurately determine whether a group counts before initiating battle by counting up units and determining the Leadership totals. This isn't super-important, but can be nice to know.
Regardless, Reptile Hunter is... puzzling. The bonus makes sense to me, more or less, in that it helps separate the Warrior from the other classes by emphasizing the offensive strength of their army still further, but I couldn't begin to guess why the Warrior is being set up with a grudge with Lizardmen. It's also, in Orcs on the March, probably the least convenient of these 'kill X battlegroup' type Medals, as Lizardmen don't show up until the middle-ish of the game, where Undead and Orc battlegroups can be encountered right on the first island. So that's a bit annoying.
It's also a bit boring of a Medal, since what'll basically happen is that you'll get no opportunities for progress (Bar maybe an early upgradeable Lizardmen Item? Keeper fights do count) and then when you get to Montero the forces are basically all Dwarves or Lizardmen, with the surface being slanted toward Lizardmen. So you'll just sort of incidentally get the Medal at a predefined point of broad progress. Being a class-based Medal makes this a bit more tolerable of a design choice, but it's still odd.
Iron Knight
Level 1
Earn: Cast any combination of Berserk, Ghost Blade, Battle Cry, or Dragon Arrows 20 times in total.
Benefit: +5 Rage.
Level 2
Earn: Cast any combination of Berserk, Ghost Blade, Battle Cry, or Dragon Arrows 70 times in total.
Benefit: +10 Rage.
Level 3
Earn: Cast any combination of Berserk, Ghost Blade, Battle Cry, or Dragon Arrows 150 times in total.
Benefit: +15 Rage.
Iron Knight is confusing and counter-intuitive in its mechanics. You get more Rage because you're a Warrior, okay, makes sense, but... you get better at Rage by casting Spells?
The particular list is also frustrating. Dragon Arrows makes sense, inasmuch as it's genuinely one of the better Spells for a Warrior, but it demands you're using one of four specific units, artificially restricting your force composition if you want to grind for Iron Knight using Dragon Arrows. Battle Cry is, in all honesty, much more of a Mage Spell than a Warrior Spell due to how vital Initiative advantage is to the Mage, and anyway it's not a Spell you want to be casting constantly, making it annoying/wasteful as a method of grinding for Medal progress even though it'll work in any situation. Berserk is just plain garbage, and is even more frustrating in Armored Princess since it tends to lead to units taking unnecessary casualties and thus cost you progress on Grand Strategy, even though it's thematically appropriate a choice. Ghost Blade is the only consistently spammable option, and it's terrible in the Warrior's hands and in particular is hampered by its 10 Mana cost being fairly crushing for an early-game Warrior. 2 casts and you're done is going to be typical for a while. Which is frustrating since the Warrior's lacking Intellect isn't anywhere near as important in the early game, so damage-wise Ghost Blade actually is worth considering as a Warrior, and so would be actually be a perfectly acceptable tool for grinding the Medal early in the game if only it weren't for the aforementioned Mana cost.
The overall result is that the smart option is to luck into Dragon Arrows as soon as possible and then religiously grind it on probably-Bowmen until you've finally maxed the Medal and then never think about the situation again.
In theory I like that it's a Medal you have to earn, but this is less important a quality on class-exclusive Medals -or even actively undesirable, if they're meant to highlight class distinctiveness- and it doesn't make up for how infuriating the execution of the actual list is. It's probably my least-favorite Medal in Armored Princess, and I'm honestly a bit puzzled as to how it ended up this way.
Now for the Paladin's equivalents.
Purifier
Level 1
Earn: Defeat 5 battlegroups classed as Undead.
Benefit: +1 Defense.
Level 2
Earn: Defeat 10 battlegroups classed as Undead.
Benefit: +2 Defense.
Level 3
Earn: Defeat 15 battlegroups classed as Undead.
Benefit: +3 Defense.
It's sort of weird to me how the game is placing Defense as a Paladin-centric priority, but I kind of suspect it's more about giving each class a single primary stat than anything else so... I don't like it, just because Defense is directly less valuable than Attack or Intellect, but I understand the thought process involved in the choice.
It's too bad, because Undead battlegroups is actually the best of the three for creating interesting choices. You're going to max out the Medal eventually, but Undead dot the world intermittently in most locations, leading to situations where you've taken out four Undead battlegroups and you can consider maybe trying to go hunt down an Undead battlegroup for that point of Defense or put it off until later because eg you've found such a group but it's a bit too powerful for your tastes, contrasting with how Lizardmen have nothing for ages and then a sudden glut and Orcs in Orcs on the March are widespread enough to be rather easy to grab early on.
Purifier is thus a Medal I want to like but kinda don't.
Holy Warrior
Level 1
Earn: Cast any combination of Healing, Bless, Pacifism, or Resurrection 50 times in total.
Benefit: Priests, Inquisitors, and Paladins have their base damage raised by 20%.
Level 2
Earn: Cast any combination of Healing, Bless, Pacifism, or Resurrection 150 times in total.
Benefit: Priests, Inquisitors, and Paladins have their base damage raised by 30%.
Level 3
Earn: Cast any combination of Healing, Bless, Pacifism, or Resurrection 450 times in total.
Benefit: Priests, Inquisitors, and Paladins have their base damage raised by 40%.
Note that the damage boost occurs at the most basic level, and so these values are fairly misleading. The first rank of the Medal raises your Priests' minimum and maximum damage by 1, for example, because the game isn't applying the boost after having totaled together all the individual Priest damage, it's boosting the damage of each individual Priest by whole values, erring toward ensuring there's any boost at all. One of the overall results is that a Paladin is strongly encouraged to use Priests over Inquisitors if eyeing them for their damage output, as the somewhat odd way the boosting works leads to Priests being overall more damage for the Leadership.
Curiously, the code's framing is of giving a 20% increase in Physical damage to all three and a 20% increase in Magical damage to all three, even though Priests and Inquisitors only do Magic damage. I haven't noticed Priests and Inquisitors suddenly punching partially through heavy Magic resistance, so I don't think this aspect of the code actually matters, but I could well be wrong.
Holy Warrior is another Medal I'm iffy about. The thematics make perfect sense -Paladin does Paladin-y thing and finds her fellow holy warriors battling against the darkness to be more effective- but the details are wonky. Pacifism is difficult to justify casting in most situations, Healing rapidly loses utility as you go deeper into the game, Bless is okay but reliant on using troops with swingy damage to be particularly useful (Or on being Level 3 so it's mass-cast, which takes a while to reach), and Resurrection is expensive and has some limitations that can be a bit inconvenient. And unlike Iron Knight, you really do have to spam these Spells like crazy to earn it.
And then the bonus is that three particular units hit harder with their basic attacks, none of which is a unit defined around its damage-dealing ability.
I find it entirely understandable if you elect to ignore the Medal entirely, or maybe only grind up to the first rank since it has the most dramatic impact anyway.
And to be completely clear, only you personally casting these Spells counts. A Priest using their Healing or Bless Talent does not, nor does an Inquisitor using their Resurrection Talent.
Yeah, the Paladin is a bit screwed when it comes to Medals.
Lastly, the Mage's Medals.
Illiteracy Exterminator
Level 1
Earn: Defeat 5 battlegroups classed as Orcs.
Benefit: +1 Intellect.
Level 2
Earn: Defeat 10 battlegroups classed as Orcs.
Benefit: +2 Intellect.
Level 3
Earn: Defeat 15 battlegroups classed as Orcs.
Benefit: +3 Intellect
In Orcs on the March, Illiteracy Exterminator works similarly to Purifier: Orcs pop up intermittently all over the place, with no great concentrations prior to the point you've probably maxed it anyway. It's nice and can create little mini-strategic moments, especially since Intellect's breakpoints matter so much you might find yourself really wanting just one more point of Intellect and so go scouring the world for Orc battlegroups to get that next point ASAP.
And then unlike Purifier the bonus is actually really good for you!
It's a really well-designed Medal, is what I'm saying.
I've always wondered what's up with its graphic, though.
Fire Mage
Level 1
Earn: Cast Flaming Arrow, Oil Mist, Hell Breath, or Fireball 70 times in total.
Benefit: +5 Mana.
Level 2
Earn: Cast Flaming Arrow, Oil Mist, Hell Breath, or Fireball 210 times in total.
Benefit: +10 Mana.
Level 3
Earn: Cast Flaming Arrow, Oil Mist, Hell Breath, or Fireball 600 times in total.
Benefit: +15 Mana.
Fire Mage actually isn't particularly a pain to grind, unlike its counterparts on the Warrior and Paladin, even though it requires the most casts overall. Flaming Arrow will be your default Spell most of the time for much of the early game just because it's your innate damage Spell, and in the early-to-midgame Fireball pretty neatly displaces it. Even once other Spells start pushing them aside as your preferred damage choices, Flaming Arrow remains an excellent way to inflict Burn on overly-large stacks, and furthermore the Mage gets Higher Magic so they can get in potentially 60% more grinding in a single battle, or if you're tending to not draw out battles long enough for Higher Magic to peter out than outright double the speed.
While Hell Breath is garbage the Mage doesn't want to cast and Oil Mist is a bit overly-situational, it doesn't really matter. In the end, the Mage is actually likely to max out the Medal without specifically trying.
I'm basically happy with that. It's frustrating the Paladin and Warrior struggle so much with their equivalent Medals, but that doesn't mean this Medal is badly-designed, it means those Medals are.
----------------------------------
There's definitely a number of Medals that could be better in design, but overall I really like the Medal system, and even the boring grindy Medals at least give you something to do when you're not sure how to use your Spell per turn. No particular plans? Drop a Stone Skin. Or as the Warrior slap Dragon Arrows on your Bowmen, it'll be useful eventually. Whatever. So the grinding may be frustrating, but it's not all bad.
Next time, we get started on the Might Skills and the Warrior class in Armored Princess.
It is interesting that you can exploit Backstab skill to know exactly where an Assassin troop will land and trap them there, just notice where is the back of the unit used as bait (opposite the direction it is facing).
ReplyDeleteGrand Strategy is Great Strategist in the original.
ReplyDeleteFunnty note - before I learned the English name, everytime I saw you mentioning 'Grand Strategy' I thought you meant general game strategy, which propably includes minimum casualties and getting all of the Medals. I feel dumb now :) I mean, names not even that diffirent...
Guardian Angel was easily the least liked medal among fandom. A strategy some people used was to leave a few early game armies and return to them later with 5 stacks of Archmages, all spamming Magic Shields on themselves. I used it once (or maybe twice) but didn't like it.
An army counts as being of race X if:
- atleast 40% of combined Leadership are X units
- units of no other race have have combined Leadership higher than one of X units
For example, army, 40% of which are Lizardmen, 30% are neutrals and 30% are Undead is counted as Lizardmen army and will counts for Reptile Hunter medal but not for Purifier.
An army with 40% of it being Lizarmen,15% are neutrals and 45% are Undead is considered a Undead army and thus will count for Purifier but not fot Reptile Slayer.
One may ask - what about theoretical army with Leadership equally (50/50) divided between Lizardmen and Undead? I expected there be some kind of race priority (if two-race army is not possible) but it seems it will be considered an army of no race and will not count for any medal.
Reptile Hunter and Purifier are Reptile Slayer and Undead Slayer respectively in the original. I guess tranlators decided it was too boring.
Holy Warrior is Warrior of Light.
Yeah, Guardian Angel is pretty tedious. I actually enjoyed it in my first run of Armored Princess, but the more I've played through the series the more I've been frustrated by it. A couple of times I went back to The Legend specifically to escape the Medal system, mostly because of Guardian Angel -it's a tremendous psychological relief to just cast what I think makes sense in the moment.
DeleteThat all seems right. I'll be updating the post to include this info.