So a friend discovered that you can trade negative quantities, effectively taking resources from other players. In fact, there’s no check against putting them into debt, so you can take a virtually unlimited amount of gold/mana/valor from them and leave them with a negative value. I’m really tempted to use this to create a ridiculously powerful Ent, then give back all the mana as if nothing out of the ordinary ever happened!
I noticed that I can continually apply the Enchantress ability on the same unit, and the effect is not only cumulative, but the timer appears to reset. Since the effect lasts 24 hours, but resets in 12, I could theoretically reduce a huge stack down to zero strength (maybe even into the negative??) within a couple days, and do so easily when combined with a Wizard to keep the stack rooted in place. I don’t know if this is intentional or not, but it seems like maybe the ability either shouldn’t stack or shouldn’t reset the timer on previously applied instances of the ability.
I’ve played through Wildriver Run on nightmare difficulty, and it wasn’t all that difficult. I was expecting to see bosses, like in some of the other maps, but instead it seemed like the only thing that made it at all difficult was that bodies rose quickly. Armed with artillery, gnostic mages, wizards, enchantresses, and a bridge witch, we were able to easily make a stand and suffer very few losses (which was really cool that we were able to form that kind of synergy between hero cards). Something like a Lich King or whatever would have actually posed a challenge.
I see that the gold generation system has been changed to a 24-hour standard. When I first started playing, I was confused by the variable payout period, but now I think that it actually plays better. With variable periods, there’s a counter balance between dwarves and humans, but now the humans are decidedly a better expenditure of valor. When humans paid out ever 48 hours, income was somewhat seldom compared to the dwarves 12 hours. You couldn’t recruit as often with humans because the gold wasn’t coming in so readily. But, grabbing dwarven settlements meant that you had fewer locations from which to recruit, due to the high valor cost. This balanced the two out, and lead me to try to grab a variety of settlements. With the 24-hour standard, I pretty much get the same gold every 24-hours per unit of valor spend if I go with humans or dwarves. Thus, I’m easily better off with humans due to having more locations from which to recruit. Dwarven settlements aren’t worth the extra cost of valor, except to be able to recruit from hero cards.
Having played the game for a bit and having a better understanding of the (former) rules, I think that variable payout periods adds much more gameplay and decision making.
Also, I’ve found the trolls to not be very good, overall. They’re too slow to be useful, and their settlements are too small to get much gold generation from. I’d like to see something which makes them considerably more powerful. Maybe if they always had really high strength, even out of the swamps, to make up for their lack of speed or something. Or, perhaps something that gives them more synergy with other hero units somehow.