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[marko river]

Hi. I'm sorry for not visiting this discussion before. I completely forogt to check it for months. Here we go.

Game is not that hard once you get better and better. I remember i hooked up my first neighboor on it last year. He is lot younger and he loves this new kind of games, with perfect graphics and stuff. Yeah well, like they can match with Balor. Well, he played it a lot. I managed to finish it, but than i saw him playing this game very long. He reached the year 40 in the game. After 70 or 90 years, game will finish itself by radnom motnh as the king you lead has passed away. This means that you may play for years after this "ending" year. I never played single game so long, but i liked this option.

Anyway, after 40 years champions become VERY strong. Fomors are no big deal to beat then. I'm sure you don't have to bother that much. I think i even managed to finish it in the 7th year. My favourite king is Finn of Fianna tribe (according to legend, they were tribe of warriors and were in incredible shape )

Lead your armies to battle and they will get experience. But also, beside giving them job in the provinces, make sure that they play game of hurling (especially warriors). Continously hurling will slowly increase their strength (and experience as everything else does). After playing this for long time, i realized that champions who are already level 15 (maximum) are not that good because they can't progress anymore. Weak champion with good skills will become even stronger than Fomors after years of hurling and fighting battles.

Strongest champion is Lugh (legend says that he is Balor's grandchild) who is level 1 but is the most skillful. You don't need him exactly to beat Balor, not at all, but he is the most likely to become the strongest. Skill of arms influence the duel (and is increased with weapon).

Playing the game I find out that prestige of my tribe is very important to etablish diplomatic relationship with other tribes but I haven't found how to raise the prestige itself... Could someone help me?

Just about anything raises your prestige. Number of provinces, inhabitants, champions, grain and cattle, level of citadel and village in your provinces influence power and culture (which influence prestige), battles, your acts like dealing with your champions or captured ones, building good realtions with other tribes and so on and so on.

When your prestige is very high you may ask for a province to be subordinated to you. That can happen and i even think that their king himself lets them. I remember that the very first time i played Tales, i got one province like this and got the first level 15 champion with it. there is option in citadel to let your province to act individually, although it still belongs to you. Subordinated province will be your but will act individually. Just cancel this in citadel and new province is all yours.

passed the game yesterday....the worst part was fighting balor and his evil eye

Well, after you united all tribes (or defeating them) you play for another month and Balor will attack a province where you are (the king you play with). You don't have to rest your champions because all will be preapared and you will be able to select EVERY champion under your control (i think), not just the ones in the attacked province. Balor is very dangerous and he uses the spell of his evil eye. After defeating them you'll get Fomors weapons (i think that simple swords are better). Balor have a magic weapon, not a usual Fomor weapon, some sort of javelin i guess. It is not that good, but give it to one champion.
Now it is time to rush small Fomor island and get rid of them. Once again, all your champions are ready and available. Only remember to wquip them properly before ending your turn. Balor will still use his eye, but if a champion carring Balor's magic weapon attacks him, his eye will be finished. Now Balor won't be able to use his spell. This is important, because this spell of evil eye will terrorize your champions.

Also, you'll encounter stone runes. Every rune is made of wood and might break during the battle. There is exactly one different stone rune in the Eire. Therefore, there is only one set of stone runes. After collecting them all, carry them to one place and give them to your strongest druid before you are the only tribe in Eire and battle against Balor. Now, take druid into the battle with Fomors and you may cast healing spell as long as you have mana. This is very handy when few Fomors attack single champion. Fomors don't heal.

I also recommend one bard for final battle because of spell Interial Fire. I can't remember how it goes, but i'm sure i have it written down somewhere. No, i don't have entire spell list. As this guy did, you can try and guess spells, at least i did. Only problem is that even if you guees the right combination, you can't cast the battle spell if not in battle and can't cast province spell if in battle.

Cool thing about those two final battles is the fact that Fomor champions beside Balor are not the same. There are many Fomors who come for taxes or for sabotage. You never know who will face you. Only certain thing, at least i think, is that they are all warriors, so they can be called for a duel.

oh yeah, one more thing, in the review, it says u can take 9 champions into battle, not true, u can take only 7

Mmmmmmh, was it 9 or was it 7?

does anyone knoe what exactly Skatha does to ur person when she/he goes off to train with her besides giving u that sword?

Besides level and arms skill, you also get Sword of Skatha, which is really unfair. If playing in single mode, you always get this sword which like 40 points to the champions arms skill. Computer opponent never get this sword. Don't know happens in multiplayer mode. This means that almost any average level Warrior with above average arms skill carrying Skatha's sword will become duel master, terrorizing all other warriors and even poor Fomors who don't even dream this in their worst nightmares.

Really, at first i loved it, but than i realized that game becomes too easy.

Here is stupid and simple strategy. Find warrior with good arms skill, train him with hurling untill he has reasonable level and strength and give him sword of Skatha. Attack a province with equal number of champions. Every warrior with simialr level as your warrior will accept his duel, but he doesn't stand a chance. If enemy tribe has a warrior for a ruler attack all his provinces wih LOT of champions and make them retreat untill they have only one province. Attack it and get your warrior in duel with king. If you beat him (not necesserily in the duel and not necesserily if he is warrior) all other champions are surrendering and in 95% will be willing to join you.

Speaking of joining, don't exile captured champion so easily, especially if he is skilled one. He will join you later, when your tribe is stronger. Realease him to your enemy, or you are afraid maybe?

I hate to be basic here, Marko River, but I have its CDROM catogarized in "STRATEGY." And I recall that it was the lowest rated Strategy game of all KOEI strategy games. RotTK series was my favorite.

No prob. Well, as it's been said few times, KOEI never bothered to put this game through, that's why only few people heard of it and never respected it. Even some of the ones that played it never bothered to get into deep, so they went with a flow thinking that this game is nothing special. Trust me it is great, it is original at least.

Hello! i have a problem! whenever i try to download the manual from the review page, it asks me for a username password of kerner.dtdns.net/content/extras

you probably get it by now, that is old FTP.Why am i replying this one? Because i wanted to say that i wanted to write manual of my own, since official manual still doesn't say some tricks within the game. Still it is good, especially for Celtic legends
I doub that i'll ever do that, since it is too much to type and you can discover some basics yourself. Don't hesitate to ask me here about anything you can't figure out or simply PM me.

Don't know if its been mentioned or not but This game is listed under RPG erroneously. It may at first resemble a sort of role playing but it's definatly a strategy game first. I almost missed it because of the catagory it was under.

Honestly, i was surprised when i saw that Kosta put it in RPG. It is a strategy in my oppinion, with barely RPG elements. Well, maybe Kosta wanted to be offical so he put it in RPG because skills of champions (did you know that every game where you have inventory to select and use items is adventure, no matter how it is played). Still, i think that this game should be unde Strategy but that's up to Kosta. Perhaps one day we will have RPG subcategory called RPG Strategies

i got a problem with my mouse curser, he is doublikation him self if is move him, and that all over the screen and he cusses graphik problems*

Yes, i experienced this in Dosbox. It is actually no prob if you don't stay too long on one screen

To all others having problems, i'm not Dosbox or VDMsound expert. I managed to play it in Dosbox, little slow, but acceptable. Someone said that it runs perfectly in VDMSound.

I also have problems running the game.

PS: I´ve got win 98

Now i'm disarmed. I remember playing it in both win98 and command prompt only without problem. Maybe it is memory, like not enough EMS or something. Check it.

np and thanx for adding it.

i'm sure there are still some spells left.
good luck in finding them to all of us.
please share new spells if u find some.

cya

Exactly. Like i said, i remember Interial Fire, Bard spell, good because it greatly decreases enemy's strength, doesn't hit his soldiers. So, he will be easily beaten and you don't want to cause needless death. I think it was 3,5,9-12, FE but i'm not sure.
Unfortunally, i lost paper with discovered spell years ago. When deciding to upload this game, i found that it was gone. I have some spells in txt file, but only the most common ones.
I strongly recommend interial Fire and Confusion. If you are attacked by stronger enemy and you don't want to withdraw, cast Lighting more than once, it might bring rain. Now enemy will move slowly and won't be able to see you. Get your champions together and get his champions one-by-one. Little unfair since computer guided champions don't know where are their friends, while you generally know place of your champions.

Hmm, i suppose this post is long enough. When did you recently saw this length?

Really, if anyone remembers anything to ask, please do. It just might take somewhile, but i might just surprise you. If you question is "urgent" and is not about how to make the game work, feel free to PM me. Than you'll get answer much more quickly.

Here is..

Internal Fire: 3, 8, 9-12 Bard/Fire - as Marko said, a great spell ;-) very useful for capturing champions without accidentally killing them.

And another one I did not see on the list,

Fireball: 1, 6, 9-12 Bard/Fire - another good attack spell, but don't try this one in rainy weather. It could be just coincidence but it seems to fail a lot when it rains... (makes sense too)


Many thanks for Chaos and Twister! :-)

Hi. Does anyone else find it utterly retarded that the only way to learn some (if not most spells) of the spells in this game is through experimentation (through 256 combinations of ruins no less!) or just reading them off somebody else's list? Whereas, all the CPUs seem to know every spell beforehand. WTF?

I'm trying to play the game where I only use spells I've bought from travelling druids, but this is a pain in the behind as the CPU would utterly pwn me early on with their spells, while my own casters feebly try to attack them hand to hand. Worse still, there are some spells that seemingly cannot be learned without testing out every combination of runes, particularly the Bard ones. If it wasn't for the CPU's completely inability to protect their leaders, it'd be nigh impossible to win any battles this way.

Anyone else tried playing this way, and is it even possible to win the game without so many spells?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Guest @ Dec 27 2005, 11:57 PM) [snapback]192570[/snapback]</div>

Hi. Does anyone else find it utterly retarded that the only way to learn some (if not most spells) of the spells in this game is through experimentation (through 256 combinations of ruins no less!) or just reading them off somebody else's list? Whereas, all the CPUs seem to know every spell beforehand. WTF?

I'm trying to play the game where I only use spells I've bought from travelling druids, but this is a pain in the behind as the CPU would utterly pwn me early on with their spells, while my own casters feebly try to attack them hand to hand. Worse still, there are some spells that seemingly cannot be learned without testing out every combination of runes, particularly the Bard ones. If it wasn't for the CPU's completely inability to protect their leaders, it'd be nigh impossible to win any battles this way.

Anyone else tried playing this way, and is it even possible to win the game without so many spells?
[/b]

Back when I played the game originally I had no list of the spells, but was able to learn most of them through trial and error. There is a certain logic to how the runes work if you know their names (which were given in the manual, if i remember right).

I was able to buy some spells, and tease out enough of the others through trial and error to defeat the game pretty easily.

You can get pretty far exploiting the same weakness every KOEI game has: the AI can't cope with a player using a "scorched earth" policy. Raise a huge army in one province, and move around attacking and plundering to raise a bigger army. Move all the troops and goods out of the old provinces to the recently plundered one, and don't worry if the computer takes your old ones, because it can't do anything with it because it has no resources. When you've suitably weakened the whole map, start building a real kingdom.

[Captain Ackers]

This game PWNZ. But after 3 weeks of playing it in a stuffy room, it's not so great. Gets boring when you have so many counties that it takes half an hour to get through them all (Even if you're continuously clicking end turn)

*sigh* I love Koei games though.

Well, I just got through the game. As it turns out, it's actually quite winnable even without using half the spells in the game. I had to cheat a little at end there, since for some reason no one seem to want to teach me heal, even though I got it in a previous game easily enough. Really, there are only maybe two or three spells that I would consider essential and they're all druid ones.

Overall, I'm not sure I'd consider this game a strategy game, or if it is, then it's not very good one. Most of the strategy bits are in the first 2-3 years of the game when your tribe consists of only a handful of champions, and trying and expand/explore while keeping an eye on neighbouring tribes. What makes it different from the initial phases of other games like Civ or Master of Magic, though, and why it's so difficult for new players, is that the game puts far less emphasis on territorial expansion. The only real reason to ever take and hold territory in this game is Prestige, which you need to convince champions and other tribes to join you. Resources (especially food) are practically limitless in almost every province in this game, and is more a factor of how many champions you have than how much land occupy. In fact, having too many provinces only make it more likely that your neighbours will attack you.

The only things in this game that actually matter in CT are your champions. If you don't have enough of them, it doesn't matter how much resource/culture/power/prestige you have. Once you figure this out, the game doesn't really offer much of a challenge. Incidentally, Rodrudan (3 starting champions, awful positioning) and Falias (4 champs, no warriors!) are probably tied for the hardest playable tribe in the game. How the Rodrudans survived until the very end in my game and even captured one of the neighbouring tribes, I will never know. My guess is they managed to get some high level travelling champions to join them early on, since CPU seem to have much easier time convincing them. I had one tribe where the highest level champion was lvl 14 when everyone else in the tribe was around 9 or 10.

Anyways, once you manage to usurp a couple of neighbouring tribes and absorb their champions into your ranks, your tribe just basically steamroll over everyone else. At this point it's not even worth trying to micromanage your provinces anymore. Unfortunately, in my game I had about half my provinces built up to Lvl 47 Culture and Power by Year 8 and mass produced items and carefully distributed them so that all my champions were armed to the teeth only to realize you were only allowed 7 champions to fight the Fomors! All that time micromanaging every single one of my 100+ champions, only to have them sit at home twiddling their thumbs during the apocalyptic battle. Wonderful.

Oh and another thing: Culture and Power are worthless. Of the two, Power is the only one that even remotely matters and even then, soldiers aren't worth a damn in battle, and chances are, if your champion have a decent Charm, he will get the maximum 100 soldiers that they're allowed anyways. You're better off sending your champions off to play hurling instead of wasting time building up your infrastructure. LOL

And speaking of horribly skewed priorities in CT: you're actually penalized for finishing the game too early. The thing is, the Fomors' forces will always remain the same throughout the game. Whereas, your champions gradually get stronger over time as they get experience and learn new skills (well, okay, just Might). Furthermore, the Fomors will never attack until all the tribes have been unified, so you're actually better off leaving one tribe alive until all your best champions have attained the maximum level before going in to finish them off. At Year 8, it took me 3-5 retries before I could beat either of the final battles, and it would have been much worse if I didn't somehow manage to snag a level 14 druid from one of the tribes.

This game PWNZ. But after 3 weeks of playing it in a stuffy room, it's not so great. Gets boring when you have so many counties that it takes half an hour to get through them all (Even if you're continuously clicking end turn)

If you go to your ruler's Citadel, you can click on Delegate and have the CPU control some of your provinces. Only works if your ruler is in the province though.

Well, after you united all tribes (or defeating them) you play for anothe month and Balor will attack a province where you are (the king you play with). You don't have to rest your champions because all will be preapared and you will be able to select EVERY champion under your control, not just the ones in the attacked province.

Actually, Balor won't attack the province you're in, just some random province in the north. In fact, you can't select the champions in the attacked province, because Balor apparently incinerates them all along with the province. Do NOT keep any of your champions in any of the coastal provinces in the north if you intend to use them during the final assaultz.

Strongest champion is Lugh (legend says that he is Balor's grandchild) who is level 1 but is the most skillful.

Except he doesn't have Heroism, which affects both Melee and Duels (or so the game says). I only ever use him for swordsmithing. Then again, he's only lvl 8 in my game.

[marko river]

Originally posted by Guest@Dec 28 2005, 12:57 AM
Hi. Does anyone else find it utterly retarded that the only way to learn some (if not most spells) of the spells in this game is through experimentation (through 256 combinations of ruins no less!) or just reading them off somebody else's list? Whereas, all the CPUs seem to know every spell beforehand. WTF?

Actually, i liked this. How could a poor druid learn a spell back than, no scholls or anything?
Honestly, i didn't mind this. I remember that once i was desperate in battle, i was still new to the game, so i cast something randomly and got a spell. Can't remember exactly which one it is, it was some sort of firing spell, but i can imagine how wonderful it felt.

As for previous post (i guess it is from the same guest) i didn't know that Balor captures champion in attacked province. Stil, it sounds cool. I guess than Balor Can't attack province where the king is, right?

Other points are right. when you have many champions you can simple move on leaving empty provinces. I did, but only when got so strong to create a line of provinces, so noone can pass to the other part of the island. Also, you can attack province with few champions and make them retreat, then gather food and material and go back at your province. I guess that something like this happened lot of times in the human past.

At the end, game seems difficult at the start, but mostly to get through things. After finishing it once, you'll find it too easy. Still, concept is original. Too bad that no improved and more balanced sequel is unlikely to appear ever.

Can someone help me? I tried right-clicking the KOEI file and playing it with VDMS but every time it starts up it says to click the mouse button and then crashs. Can someone help?

Hi!

I tried to open the game with dosbox- no go. I tried to open t normally under xp with 95 compatibility- it started, there was sound but no graphics and it crashed and i cant install vdmsound because I've got ituens installed and the vdmsound installer can;t find the installation pack for itunes. I tried to find it using search the system command but again, no go.

So what do I do, help, please?

[The Fifth Horseman]

What was the exact result in DosBox?