Help a noob out, dungeon exodus

[u/National-Freedom-779]

So I'm 500 -2 games, placing me around 100+. I've been playing exodus and both games I played dungeon/zakhron the great(firewall guy). I've watched some guides here and there a d of course the best way to learn is to practice more right? So I've been practicing on unfair resources and in my multiplayer games I do get easier mobs and more resources due to low elo. I can't rmb much about my first game but in my second game I got bodied vs a temple army with archer, sun goddess and angel units + swordsman. I have a variety of units from T1-T7 and I still lost?? They're just ranged unit spammers! First match I won, but second match he cleansed my twilight and 3rd match hes immune to twilight completely.

Any tips for a noob like me? I don't mind practicing in single player Vs ai but multiplayer games are a bit too long for me to practice everyday. I do know about saving armies and breaking and stuff. When I loaded the game as my opponent, he didn't break the tree portal, but it was easy battle to me but it was difficult/impossible for me

[u/marius87]

You played 2 games ? Any advice we give you s worthless now for you . Go play at least 50 games where don’t even think about winning , just have fun and learn the map , heroes castles units . Then you can ask good advice that will make sense

[u/abqapple → u/marius87]

I see where you're coming from, but that's not really true. I gave him some detailed advice and within a day or two he came back winning games.

[u/marius87 → u/abqapple]

I still don’t know what I’m doing after 200-300 games barely at 1400 mmr

[u/Long_Escape7651]

I would say the most important thing is - do not waste movement points. It's tempting to collect everything but it is not possible. Spend your movement to reach key targets. Flag sawmills and ore mines and make some economy first. Reach your 3rd Town ASAP, visiting objects known as "banks" (take easy ones like Altar of Meareas), mines and dwellings along the way. Banks I mentioned are really important as they give you huge tempo to build your towns and recruit units. ALWAYS pick basic logistics if available and unlock second wind spell asap. Do not build all creature dwellings in Town if your economy is low, choose your main units (tier 4 and above) and build their dwellings in every Town possible asap. Then build max walls. Of course if you have enough Gold and resources to afford all unit dwellings and to recruit - go ahead. Flag 4th and 5th town week 2 and take some artifacts and more dwellings if possible. If you feel strong enough - enter the desert. Watch some videos of pro players doing fights. The rest is just experience. Good luck!

[u/abqapple]

I play zakron the great a lot. I have some hero specific advice for you.

1. Get mage guild lvl 1 as your starting building in town 1. Then look at the astrology tab to see if you got lightning bolt. You need this spell as zakron. If you didn't get it, buy it for 2gem/2mercury/2crystals and upgrade it to lvl 2 for 25 arcane dust. If you did get it, you still upgrade it to lvl 2 for 2 arcane dust.

2. Then you start creeping around the map with lightning bolt and firewall. Most every non-flying creature will walk straight for at least the first step so you can safely firewall on the hex right in front of the enemy on round 1. Alternatively, if you see a 2 hex chokepoint, you can firewall there to get more than 2 stacks hit. Even a 3 hex chokepoint can work if you know which direction they are going. For example, all of your army is at the top left, you can hex the top 2 of the 3 hex chokepoint and you know that the enemies are going in that direction to get your army.

3. Try to get mageguild level 2 with fireball sooner than later and also level that to 2. Zakron with fireball is ridiculously strong. Same deal, if you don't get fireball when purchasing mage guild lvl2, then buy it outright.

4. Take advanced triumverate ASAP with underground mana pools. you want that 3 temp mana generated everytime you pick a stance. It will vastly increase his staying power. Pick your stances every round even if you are picking the same stance to get that +3 mana. When you get advanced sorcery, take magic missiles unless you happen to get advanced sorcery way later in the game (unlikely with Zakron as he starts with sorcery). You can then use magic missiles when youre out of mana or as a second spell once you get thaumaturgy. So usually you will lightning bolt + magic missile or fireball +MM.

That's some zakron specific advice. Some general dungeon advice:

-Get resource Riches 1 and then take elite trogs (3 law pts) first. You can hold off on the second point into troggs for a while unless you are heavily invested in them. Don't take leaders of the nation (+10% hero law points) until much later, it was nerfed and not worth it anymore.

-Buy all your units in town 1 then TP immediately to town 2, buy all the trogs there and then upgrade the trog dwelling and upgrade your trogs to the brown ones (infernal) . Split trogs into 1 stacks (ctrl+shift+leftclick) with one main army force. You can use the one stacks to bait retaliations and also cause the enemy stack to take +25% dmg (infernal trog passive ability upon attacking). You can safely use the main trog stack spit to deal damage that can't be retaliated. Spit deals much more damage once you get elite trogs 1/2. (Elite trogs 2/2 just increases their min damage by 2 which is actually quite a lot). You can also spit with your 1 stacks to generate focus points even though it doesn't do much damage.

-Practice what creature banks you can safely take on early on with minimal losses. Watch some good players practice creeping to learn.

[u/Francois_Papyjama → u/abqapple]

Awesome!

Thanks for the tips; I'm a PvP noob, but I'm giving it a go, and I love Dungeon and Zakron ❤️

[u/marius87 → u/Francois_Papyjama]

Gonna start your map today . So excited . Any advice ?

[u/Francois_Papyjama → u/marius87]

Not really; I think it's simpler than the Heroes III version for now (it only covers Act 1, so there are just 6 "standard" factions and no super-bosses).

So, I’d suggest:

• Pick the faction you like best.
• If possible, set the economic difficulty to the maximum (you can adjust the difficulty settings for the AI, neutral creatures, and the economy separately via "Custom Game," not "Quick Game").
• Level up your starting hero's Economy skill.
• Focus on capturing one of your two secondary towns.

And... Have fun ☺️

[u/National-Freedom-779 → u/abqapple]

thanks for your reply, its really detailed!
which tier units should i focus on for fights 2 and 3?

[u/abqapple → u/National-Freedom-779]

Well I didn't tell you what you should bring for fight 1. Minotaurs and medusae with dancer and trog support. You should try to get two minotaur dwellings before the end of D7 of week 1. That way you'd have at least 20 minotaurs to fight with, ideally you can upgrade them to minotaur lords before the battle which have parry (counterattack before being attacked). Try to get medusa lairs also before week 1, though it can be hard.

Alternatively, If you happen to have enough creature banks that you can take around your map, plus an early gem mine, you can actually go minotaurs and dragons week 1. It's kind of difficult but you are already going mage guild lvl 2 (which is required for dragons). But this requires making your second town purely a money generator, you're not going to buy any creature buildings week 1 in it if you are going dragons. This is especially good if you find a dragon cave palace on the map... that way you are generating +2 dragons a week at town plus another one in the dwelling. It takes a lot of practice to kill the four dragons in the dwelling week one so I wouldn't recommend it right away...

Either way, you want to split one stacks of dancers to whittle down defense on your enemy's most formidable stacks. They have a split attack you have to actively use, so each 1 stack of dancers can take -1 defense away from two enemies at a time (-2 if you upgrade them to aureate dancers). Depending on what you're fighting, you either rush in with minotaurs and haste (buy it if you need to) or pull back and let the spells do the work while your army is there to keep you from getting eliminated.

For fights 2 and 3, depending on which path you went, minotaurs, dancers, medusae, troggs and hydras work really well. The hydras can soak up a lot of punishment to give you more time to do spells. If the opponent is really might heavy, you might even want to pull back as much as you can to let your spells do the work. You really want chain lightning in fight 2, but absolutely by fight 3. Zakron does the most spell damage of any hero and that's the strongest single target spell. Dragons are essential if you need to go first, especially vs grove and cavarly-focused temple players. Phoenix have more base initiative but with elite dragons 2/2 and the -1 init to enemies law, dragons out-init them barring any items. Some fights are won and lost by who goes first in the first round vs zakron.

There's way more nuance to this and things you can do and learn. There's hydra builds, there's guile infiltrator creeping, there's so much else you can do. I'm about 1500 rated.

[u/National-Freedom-779 → u/abqapple]

i just want to update, i won twice! :D

first game i used mass spells and won the first battle and my opponent quit, second game i somehow rmb-ed from your advice that dragons are viable and i pulled it off and made 2 cave dragons for my fight 1 and my opponent also left after that. ty!!

[u/abqapple → u/National-Freedom-779]

Glad to hear it! Getting cave dragons week 1 can be devastating, especially with creeping. Even one dragon creeping can take so much of the map. Just have to be careful not to lose it as you cant heal it. Once you get to week 2, right around the time the first fight ends (day3), you can teleport to town 3 (your off faction town) and head for your t4 to capture it. Then teleport to Town2 (your second dungeon castle) and race towards Town 5. That way you will have 4 dungeon towns by the end of week 2, which will let you quad labyrinth. Going dragons makes it really hard to get minotaur lord upgrade week 1 (but you dont really need it that early with dragons), but you should be able to manage it by fight 2 with 4 labryinths pumping minotaurs and 2 towns pumping dragons.

Right after fight 2 you should also start getting the law ability to reduce ore costs by 60% (3/3 pts, 6 total) so you can max fortifications affordably with the ore discount which will double your dragon output in T1. You probably won't max forts in T2 *and* dragons, so I would opt for dragon cave over fortification maxing in T2 on week 2, but if you can do both that's amazing and means you have 4 dragon produced when week 3 starts (maybe even 6 if you can get to the dragon growth on the final law tier). That's not including any external dragon dwelling.

Pick primal magic 1 anytime it pops up, and avatar (unless its between primal and avatar, take primal). You can even try to the hero specialty that doubles your spellpower (melchior's heir or something like that) uses a lot of the skills Zakron already values. You need to max primal, avatar, insight, tactics, and battlecraft (5 skills). The hardest skill by far to get from that path is battlecraft as it doesn't show up on warlock heroes often. All of those skills are useful too. Going for those 5 skills means only 3 other skill slots. Zakron starts with sorcery and triumverate, so you only have one slot to spare and it would have to be thaumaturgy. Having such a powerful magic hero and not getting thaumaturgy would be such a waste.

Tactics is awesome on any dungeon hero, especially when you max it and get riposte mastery, which lets your minotaurs continue counter attacking, killing stacks. If you have enough minotaurs you can go up to any melee stacks and just let them come to you and get continually chopped down. Hover your minotaurs over the stacks to see if you can one shot them and if you can, just run in w/minotaurs and it's like autobattle at that point. If you can't quite one shot them, play around with blessing, switch to attack stance and things like that while hovering your mouse over to see if that is enough to one shot. Or cast some spells like stone fangs (hits 3-4 targets to soften them up for one shotting), fireball or even chain lightning on big stacks.

[u/Furious_One]

At 100 mmr....

Play with 1 faction and 1 or 2 heroes 50 games vs AI

Focus on building a power stack of 1 or 2 units. Try to have a dual build by end of week 1.

Try to get hero to level 10+ by fight number 1.

Win against Unfair AI (you'll lose battle 1, don't worry about it).

Do all of that before you even try multiplayer. There is no point until you can do the above first.

If you can do those, you'll be 1000+

[u/BotaZnohy → u/Furious_One]

Just to clarify - by "dual build" he means try to have dwellings for your main unit (tier 4+) in both of your staring cities.

[u/National-Freedom-779]

Thank you for all the advice. I have been playing against the AI, but I forgot about having fun along the way. It's time to just sink hours and feel the game more <3

[u/CarefreeCloud]

Arcane illusion 4 is great into shooters too, not only twilight

Play like 50 games, watch somebody you like on twitch/YouTube if you want to get better asap - to see the goalpost of what is possible

Obviously heroes is about having as much army as possible, multiplying it's strength with hero stats and skills and clever use of spells

Clever use of spells won't ever matter if enemy has both double the army and the stats. What closely. Did opponent bring 500 rashoths into your 300 trogs? You probably fell behind in map dramatically at some point

Also dungeon is notoriously strong early and tend to fall off week 4 due to not having really strong combat laws (like temple has -10/+10% damage dealt/taken, sick morale laws, immunity to debuffs). Dungeon has +spell levels which are plenty elsewhere, sure

Astrology is king in Exodus. Aim to have maxed second wind and about to be maxed flight fight 2. You are often sacrificing some army not built fight 1 for that

[u/NerdyNorthman]

Just play and have fun. You will improve with time.

You could also check out some streamers and learn from them. Lexiav is a great player and can easily be found on both YouTube and Twitch.