Dr. D Teaches: Mage Knight Combat, Part 1

[Music] hey gamers this is Liz Davidson from beyond solitaire today I'm making a more experimental video normally I just you play throughs where you know I play the game see what emerges and then try to talk about what I see as it shows up but I think combat and major night is something that people have a lot of questions about and I want to try to run through what the symbols mean and do a couple of basic demos of combat so you can kind of get a feel for what it's supposed to be like without waiting for it to show up in a playthrough I'm just gonna call this dr/dt cheese because it's different from my normal playthroughs which I call how to solo so we'll just give it a different name I'm a teacher my teacher name is dr. D so we'll roll with it and hopefully this little experiment would be helpful I think for this video what I'm gonna focus on is doing combat by yourself and doing combat against single enemies so what that means is that cities and multi attacks are gonna be safe for another video and then I might do a separate one for combat and using units because I think that that's its own thing sometimes and I'll also do one about wounds and healing so that theoretically I've created some resources for you to go to and see what you were looking for of course I'm just one person and I'm basically just going through what I know about combat and that means that it won't be comprehensive if you have a very specific issue especially when that's emerged in your gameplay I actually recommend that you take a picture of the game state go to mage Knight : board game on a Facebook and join that group and ask the people in there your question because honestly there's someone in that group who can answer anything and it's super impressive and I've got a lot out of that group myself just from having it show up in my feed but if you want an overview of the stages of combat and what does that symbol mean then this is the video for you so I hope you enjoy it so this is an artificial gameplay where I'm not gonna be worried about correct movement or anything I'm actually just going to walk you through some of these enemy tokens and talk to you about their special abilities how battle works and some special cases that you might run into so let's start with a super vanilla enemy piece and that would be these orc prowlers here there's nothing special about they have no special abilities so we're gonna be able to just go over here and talk about how they work and for those of you who are just learning major night just so you know this symbol is going to signify a rampaging at work enemy and it will match this sword on the back of the orc tokens so you never need to worry about what goes where it will match and because these are rampaging enemies you automatically get to see what they are day or night because it mimics the locals kind of telling you what's there so you can do some damage so let's say that Gold X is here magically he flew here in a regular game you have to pay cards to move but I'm not bothered with that right now so now we are gonna challenge this rampaging orc so there are a couple of different ways to get into it with a rampaging enemy you can stand adjacent to them and just be like I want to fight for your action that's fine or since I'm here you can also provoke one by moving from a space that's adjacent to it to another space that's adjacent to it so I can either just be like I'll fight this guy and go for it or I can move here because this was next to him and then this is next to him so hey what are you doing in fight or I can do that in this direction and also provoke a fight so good times let's say that we are going to fight this at work so while i zoom in and we'll walk through the four steps of combat alright so now we're in the great battle between gold X and this orc and there are three numbers in the token that you need to you pay attention to the number at the top is the amount of damage that you need to do to this unit to beat it so in this case three the fist to the left side is the amount of damage that this enemy will do to you if it hits you and the number at the bottom represents the amount of Fame that you'll gain if you win so now let's walk through the four stages of combat in this game and we'll get into more detail as we go but for now I'm just teaching you their four stages I personally feel like if we get into all the details right away everybody will just end up sad alright so let's say that this is gold X's hand we're gonna work with the cards that I have here to talk about what we might do to this enemy stage one of any combat in mage night is the range attack face this is your chance to kill an enemy before it has a chance to hit you so if you can get a lot of Rage attack sometimes that's awesome because it allows you to beat up an enemy before taking a wind here the amount of damage I need to do this unit is three so if I have a red mana I could just in this fight right here with this ranged fire attack three so if I already had a red crystal in my inventory I could pull it out boom fire bolt enemy is defeated so the whole battle could have just ended during the ranged attack phase let's say however that I have not been so wise of my resources and I do not have a red crystal we are gonna skip the ranged phase and we're gonna move on to the block phase one thing I think is worth mentioning is that if I needed more than three to kill this unit this range attack would be completely useless in a game of major Knight you either meet the total that you need to destroy a unit or you just do nothing I can't for example do two range attack and reduce this from three to one for the next round of fighting that's not possible this is an all-or-nothing game so if you don't have enough range attack to take out an enemy don't bother save it for the attack round which we'll talk about in a moment so let's say that I did not manage to defeat this enemy in this stage now the enemy is gonna get a chance to hit us if you don't take something out during the range phase then it gets to hit you before you get to hit it so get ready because we've gone from the rage attack phase to the block phase in the block phase if I want to get hit I need to generate four block in order to block this enemies attack one thing you can do is play rage for block two however this block two is still not for again major night is an all-or-nothing game so I either block the entire amount of the damage or I block none of it to block is not enough another thing that I could do is I can play cards side ways to generate block so I could play tranquilly sideways and I can play threaten sideways to get a total of four block two for Rage 3 for so let's say that I managed to do that in order to block the enemies attack that was the block phase if I had not produced these cards then I would get wounded but I'm actually gonna talk about winning and healing in a separate video because I don't want to get too bogged down so we have successfully blocked the enemy attack if we didn't we would take wins so let's move these off to the side the third phase of attack is something that we'll also discuss what I talked about wounds and healing because that is the assignment damage space so we're gonna skip that for now and I'll talk about wins separately so I don't overload you with information but suffice it to say that you get hit before you get to attack and now worrying just was called the attack phase of combat again we need a total of three attack to take out this enemy and there are a couple of ways that I could do that I think what I'd like to do however is I want to play improvisation it allows me to discard another card from my hand to gain a move three influence three attack three or block three so since attack three is one of the options let's just discard crystal joy in order to get to the attack three of improvisation so that attack three is enough to meet or beat the attack value of this unit so it will be defeated you'll take it off the board and you will collect to fame on your Fame tracker which will help contribute to leveling up and then is a full journey through combat we had a ranged attack phase we had a block phase we would have assigned damage had there been any and then we attacked and that is how standard combat works in this game another thing to note is that if for some reason I had wanted to just play this during the attack phase instead of the range space I could have used this card to kill this unit in both the range attack phase and the regular attack phase range attack counts as just normal attack during the attack phase so it's special and that you could use it early potentially but if you don't have enough range attack to use it during the range attack phase you can fold it into the rest of your attack during the attack phase all right now you've been through one just kind of vanilla attack round but now things are going to get exciting each of these other rampaging orc tokens has a special ability and we're gonna talk through what each of those abilities means so that when you play you know exactly what you're looking at as usual this token has the numbers that I told you to look out for on it the amount of damage you have to do to it the amount of damage that it can do you and the amount of fame you get for beating it up however it also has this special little icon right here that looks like a little hang glider or like a bird with a really skinny tail I'm not sure an umbrella it means that this token has the Swift ability and what the Swift ability means is that if you can't take it out with ranged then to block it you need twice as much block as its attack value so if you recall with those regular old prowlers they had an attack for and we had to just generate four block in order to prevent the attack what the Swift ability is gonna do is it's gonna force us to try to create more block in order to block an attack otherwise we're just gonna have to eat that attack so although they're attacked I use three because they have the Swift ability in order to block that attack of three you're going to have to produce six block instead so let's walk through combat again I'm just gonna keep this same hand of cards and show you how much or a little I'm able to do with it so once again we have our range attack phase I only have one card that could possibly give me any range attack at all it is for three none of the other cards in this hand discuss ranged attack at all and I'm not pretending that I have any skills or extra stuff because we're keeping this pretty bare-bones so I don't have an ax French attack the range attack phase is just gonna pass maybe I could fold this into my overall damage in the next round depending on what else I choose to do now we're in the block phase and again this enemy has the Swift ability so it's going to hit me for three if I cannot block it for six so in order to block it I would need to generate six block let's just assume that I'm committed to doing that so we're gonna go ahead and use rage again for block two and then let's say this I'm gonna play improvisation for three block which means I had to discard a card let's dump crystal joy that puts me at five block and then I have to put another card sideways so that's six block that would block this attack for three if we didn't manage to block it we would just take damage for three which isn't that bad as I'll show you in my wounds video this is blocked so we'll skip the assigned damage face because no damage was assigned and then we have to hit this guy before let's pretend that I do have a read minute crystal because otherwise it would not be possible we're gonna do this range attack 3 and power it with this red crystal to enable me to use this more powerful ability on the card then we're going to play threaten sideways for one more physical attack so range fire tech of three one two three one more attack four meets four and we killed this enemy so using the six cards in that hand I've managed to both block any damage and do just enough damage to this guy to kill him so let's talk about our friends the ironclads who have a few special things about them they have their normal three stat numbers so the amount of damage they need to take to die the amount of damage they can do to you if you don't block them and the amount of Fame you get if you beat them up however they also have this nasty looking red skull on them which means that they have the brutal ability and if you look closely there's another little symbol right here and it looks like a fist that means that they are resistant to physical attack so we're gonna talk about our very first resistance right now so first let's have a quick chat about the brutal ability so what this red skull means is that if you do not block this attack it will go through as double its value when we have an enemy with the Swift ability what that meant was that you had to block six to prevent three damage with an enemy that has brutal you have to block four because if you don't you're going to take eight damage so basically blocking four might not seem so bad but if you fail to do it this thing is going to hit you for double so when you see an enemy that has Bertil do try to block it it's very well worth your time the other thing that it has going on up here is that little symbol with a fist that means that it has physical resistance what physical resistance means in the game is that physical attacks including cards you play sideways are what is called inefficient and what that means is that they do half the damage that they normally would let's just assume that we blocked this guy and then look through our cards for damage so for example I need to hit three attack here here we have rage which is attack or block to this attack to is a physical attack unless it says that it's a fire attack an ice attack or a cold fire attack which are your other options it is physical if it doesn't modify the word attack in any way it is a physical attack so what that means is this attack - is inefficient against this enemy so instead of counting 4 - it's only account for 1 if you power it with a red crystal let's just pretend that we have one this attack 4 is really only good for attack - and you need to get to 3 so what that means is that if you wanted to use this card to kill this enemy you would still need to play two more sideways cards to generate that one more damage that you need to take this guy out because physical attack is not an efficient attack it gives this enemy however that's also where our lovely fire bolt comes in if fire attack is not a physical attack it is a different type of attack so if you have a red crystal to power a fire attack of 3 this normal number of 3 will take out this enemy because I had physical resistance well it was not resistant to fire so I do encounter more enemies you're gonna encounter different combinations of resistances that you have to pay attention to as you play because they can add a lot of challenge and change the way they each use to play your cards in your hand when you fight this lovely enemy right here is an orc summoner and you might notice that his stat numbers are different because you have a number that you need to hit him for to beat him you have amount of Fame that you get for defeating him but this isn't a number this is an image that's on the back of another type of enemy it's on these Brown enemy tokens right here so when you encounter a summoner what happens is that during their phase where they get to attack you so basically during the block phase they summon a little friend to help them and you don't actually know how much you're gonna have to block so what that's ultimately going to mean is that let's say that we have our range attack phase we don't have arranged we don't have enough range attacks to take out an enemy for 4 we only have that range attack 3-part in our hand so we're gonna have to skip the range attack phase now we're gonna move into the block phase where he gets to attack us so he's gonna summon a creature to come and mess with us and that creature is going to be used to pull one of these at random a werewolf so basically what's going to happen is that instead of attacking us with his own innate value this werewolf is going to attack us for 7 in order prevent 7 damage from going through we're gonna need to generate 4 teen block because this werewolf has the Swift ability so the Summoner basically punched us really really hard during the block phase unless we had fourteen block which we distinctly do not in this hand we'd have to take seven damage and it would hurt so in the hand that I've been playing what there's absolutely no way to generate a spot for this you get smacked and then the summoned creature that the orc summoner brought into play disappears after the block phase and then you go back after you take your wounds into the attack phase so now I can just generate for attack and kill this guy but not before he did a bunch of damage to me with the creature that he summoned these lovely ladies here are the orc hags and again they have your usual stat arrangement so you have to hit them for five to kill them they attack you for three so you only have to block three and then it you get three fame for defeating them however they also have this sickly little green icon here in the corner and what that means is that they have the poison ability so if you get hurt by a hag who has a poison ability not only do you take a wound in your hand but then there's an extra one that gets added to your discard pile so basically you get double hurt by a poison icon if you choose to assign damage to your units which is something we're going to talk about when we talk about damage then the unit actually also has to take two wound cards and you have to heal it twice before you can use it again so essentially a poison hit that goes through that you don't block means double damage to you or to the unit that you give that damage to poison is nasty unless not least and I think this is a nice transition because we're gonna be talking shortly about more fortified enemies we have some stickers so once again they have the normal configuration of stats and for three block them for three get to Fame but here right here in this token there's a little castle right next to at three up there at the top and that means that these guys are what is called fortified fortification doesn't really affect most phases the battle but it does affect your ranged attack phase so you might have remembered that we had a fire bolt in our hand that powered with this red mana crystal gave us ranged fire attack 3 however that does not help us against this enemy because he is fortified there is a different kind of range attack called siege attack and that's what you need to hit a fortified enemy during the range attack phase so the way to solve this problem would be so see how we have fire bolt here if instead we had crushing bolt and a green mana we would then be able to do siege attack 3 and that would take out this enemy even though it has a fortification so during the range attack phase pay attention because siege attack can hit a fortified enemy ranged attack can't the other thing that's fun about siege attack and range attack is that if you can't use them during the range attack phase get through the block phase and then these bolts just count is regular old damage during the regular old attack phase so they're not useless if you can't use them right at the beginning of a fight all right so now I want to widen the map both literally as you can see and figuratively in terms of talking about combat to include some new enemy types which are the enemies that mage towers and the enemies it keeps the reason I've chosen to do this is because we need to talk about some more powerful special abilities which we're going to get to but also there are some tactical and movement related issues when it comes to combat the orcs are what are called rampaging enemies and what they do is they rampage across the country you always know what they are and if you move from a space that's adjacent to one to another spaces adjacent you will provoke it to attack so for example that would provoke an attack this would provoke an attack basically you can't just move through them with impunity however there are other enemies that are stationary and those are your mage towers and your keeps so mace towers and keeps always come out onto the board face down you do not just get to know what they are it is a surprise so it's a surprise you can see during the day if you get within one space so now that I've kind of crept up here if it's daytime we get to flip it and see who's home there were nighttime I would have to just make a decision whether to attack or not and hope for the best which is how you get creamed in this game but it's fun this keep would normally stay and then like the mage tower this cape would remain a mystery unless I was within one space of it during the day or decided to just march right up to it at night and have a fight the other thing that is worth noting is that you can't attack a keep or a mage tower from the space adjacent to it so if I'm here somehow I would be permitted to attack this rampaging enemy from the space that I'm in I'd be permitted to attack this rampaging enemy from the space that I'm in and in fact I can choose to attack both of these rampaging enemies from the space sentiment which I will discuss later because I don't want to talk about attacking two things at once just now I want to make sure I've walked through all the basics and then we'll get there so from here I can attack one or both of these guys I cannot attack this mage tower to attack the mage tower I have to actually generate the movement the desert movement to walk in there and have a fight the other thing is very interesting is that remember how I told you that you can't move from one adjacent to an orc space to another adjacent to an orc space without provoking an attack that's right that means to attack this mage tower I'd either have to knock this orc out on the turn before or I'd have to actually walk into the mage tower and then fight both of these enemies at the same time thus leading to another multi enemy attack the other thing worth noting spatially is that not only do you have to go up into one of these spaces for a mage tower or keep to attack but these are considered fortified because they're in a tower so these guys don't have fortifications unless there's a special symbol but these guys mage towers keepsies you can assume to be fortified because they're in fortified buildings that you're attacking from outside but for now I'm just gonna look at some of these tokens and we're gonna get into their special abilities because they are in fact special and worth being afraid of so now this is a great time to talk about a few more special resistances and attack types so all the attacks you've seen so far been physical attacks which is symbolized by this fist right here the only resistance that you've seen has also been a physical resistance again symbolized by fists however there's also three other types of attack in the game there are ice attacks which can be shown by this I see five right here it's definitely not a fist it's a hunk of ice there are fire attacks which show you weren't in a moment and they're also what are called cold fire attacks which somehow managed to be both fire and ice' attacks at the same time I'm still wrapping my head around that so this ice major right here both uses ice attacks and has a resistance to ice attacks and I'm gonna talk about what both of those things mean right now so remember we talked about efficiency efficiency can come into play both when you're attacking and when you aren't blocking here we have ice resistance and what that means is that any ice attacks that you might have in your hand are going to be considered inefficient and they're only going to count for half physical attacks are still normal so what that's gonna mean is that physical attacks are still going to count for their normal value so attack two and fire attacks are also going to count for their normal value those are fine it's just the ice attacks if you have a card that says isit AK and set a fire attack it's only gonna have half of its value against this enemy so if it were ice attack 2 and set regular tattoo this will only go through from one ice resistance also means that this enemy is impervious to the effects of cards that are powered by blue mana so for example if I had a card in my hand like shield blast which you can power with a blue mana it not only counts twice against an attack with swiftness but it says a blocked enemy gets armor minus one for each point of block higher than needed when you block it however in the case of this ice mage its armor would not get reduced because this is a card that's powered by blue mana and it is allowed to ignore the effects of blue cards or unit abilities that are powered by it so if you went in here hoping to strip away some armor oops you got a nice mage instead so well this ice resistance means that this enemy is resistant to ice attacks from you this number over here the fact that it does ice attacks actually means a different set of things that I'm gonna walk you through now so when you are attacked by an ice attack this is a very powerful tech and what that means is that your physical block and your ice block are not considered efficient against the attack so let's say that I decided to try to block two to work on my defense against this ice attack oh this only counts as block one because physical block is not efficient against ice attack it is just too cold for you if you have ice block that also is not efficient and will be worth half without you so what is ultimately going to come down to is that in order to block against this attack unless you manage to put five fire block together all of your physical block is only worth half so you're gonna have to jeremy ten of it or your ice block is only worth half so you'd have to generate ten of that so the basic upshot of an ice attack is that unless you manage to put together five fire block you're gonna end up having to spend a lot of extra block in order to fend off this attack here we have a fire mage this is basically the fire version of the ice mage so what that would mean is that this ranged fire tech is really only worth like one because you would round down the physical text and fire attacks will work just fine on the blocking basically you would need to have ice block in order to block a fire attack fire block and physical block are inefficient it need to have to generate 12 of those to block this attack where's you only need six ice block and then of course things get very crazy when you come across the cold fire attack this is a jerk Rotom so we've talked about rampaging enemies the ones that we've gone over so far together or orcs there's one other type of rampaging enemy and that is a jerk honam this one is particularly nasty because he has both fire and ice resistances and he does a cold fire attack so what this means is this dragon has both fire and ice resistances so your fire Tech's or have your ice attacks are halved and your cold fire attacks are halved so you can physically beat this guy up but if you have a bunch of special attacks then you will be said cold fire attack also does a lot to your block because it means that unless you have cold fire block specifically then you're gonna have to generate a lot of block to block this hit so physical block inefficient then we have fire block and efficient have I Spock also inefficient halved so unless you've got six cold fire block hanging around on your hand this is gonna hit you and he's got brutal which means he's gonna hit you for 12 so any game animation I do not play around was your condom so mage towers are ready to find usually they're really crazy fire ice and cold fire attacks keeps play around with fortification and that's something that they do that is special so as we discussed when you attack a keep or a mage tower you assume that they are fortified just because they're in a keeper a mage tower fortification makes sense and in the case of an enemy being fortified you need to use siege attack not ranged during the range tech phase if you want to make progress against that enemy however it is also possible for an enemy to be double fortified so for example this is a keep enemy with a keep on the back that also has a fortification Castle symbol on it what that means is that this enemy is gonna be what's considered double fortified and that means that you can't do anything to this guy during the range attack phase range attacks definitely don't work and also seed attacks do not work you're just gonna have to get through the block phase and save it for the attack phase if you want to get this guy this one on the other hand see this castle with an X through it that means that this enemy is unfortified which is pretty cool because you could ignore the fortification effects of it being at a keep however in this case this one has another special symbol to make up for it and still be annoying to you this little smoky looking bit of armor with a higher number on it means that this enemy has something called illusive so an elusive enemy generally is gonna have increased armor value so this is base armor value but most the time you don't get to use it you only use this lower value in the attack phase and also only if you successfully blocked all enemy attacks if you meet those conditions then you can use the lower armor value what the odds are higher that you're going to be going up against this guy is if he has six armor instead of three then when you move away from the mage towers and the keeps into these brown adventurer site enemies things get even crazier I'm gonna run through these fairly quickly other than paralysis I don't really think that to me these feature in the base game but we're gonna just talk about it so paralysis first since that's the one that you could run into there are some pretty nasty creatures in all versions of this game base and expansions that can paralyze you so if you fail to block an attack from an enemy that has the paralyzed ability if you assign it to a unit that unit just dies you have no chance to heal it and if you assign that damage to yourself that forces you to throw away every single non wound card in your hand in other words it completely screws up your attempt to attack anything and you will leave in shame with some wounds to show for it so watch out for paralysis here are some other more special ones this rock right here basically means cumbersome it what it allows you to do is during the block phase you can also spend move points and then for each move point that you spend then the enemies attack is reduced by one for the rest of the turn so basically you can use move points to block or reduce the attack of this enemy because it's this one is like very big and rocky and slow so that's what that would represent here we have a vampire so he have the vampiric ability which looks like a gross vampire Fang so basically what the empiric will do is it for every wound it causes its armor value up here goes up because you know it's hurting you it's drinking blood it's getting really excited and empowered by that so it becomes stronger so it's definitely something to watch out for this dude right here has something called arcane immunity so what that's ultimately gonna end up meaning is that you will ignore any effects that would just destroy an enemy you also can't do things like prevent it from attacking or reduce its AMA however your attacks and blocks will work normally and you can do things that let you say reduce an enemy attack because that would directly affect attack also fun is this little knife here it's an assassination ability and basically what it means is you can't assign damage from this enemy to your units you have to assign it to your hero so Gold X would have to eat that even if I had a bunch of recruits as you delve into the expansions you're also gonna run into enemies that do things like attack you twice which we're going to talk about kind of grouped in with group attacks so wait on that that will give you reputation bonuses or reductions when you beat them along with the fame that you get and they have an interesting ability called defense so this is from the shades of Tesla expansion basically if these guys were attacking together you could choose to attack one enemy first and this one would either keep his defense bonus for himself that's effectively having an iron armor of 6 or he would give it to his ally who would then have that +1 point for an effective armor of 5 so basically as you play more expansions the eye Kahn's on these enemies get crazier but you shouldn't start here just start with the base game stuff and you will be just fine and that is my first attempt at a quick and efficient overview of some of the combat symbols and their meanings in mage night I hope that this was helpful to you I am planning to do more videos in this vein as well some places because while I'm on mage and I might as well just stay there and work through it if you appreciate my work please do like and subscribe and happy gaming [Music]

Channel: Beyond Solitaire

Views: 8,015

Keywords: dr. d, how to solo, liz davidson, mage knight, vlaada chvatil, solitaire, solo gaming, beyond solitaire, board games, bgg, tabletop

Id: 4qVcjsPggCw

Length: 31min 44sec (1904 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020