Gamers Daily News has teamed up with Neocore Games and Paradox Interactive to help you get the most out of your Lionheart: Kings’ Crusade experience. This series of tips will run every week and give you insight, right from the developers, on how best to approach the game, some tricks on surviving and succeeding and whatever else we can manage to get from them. Since some strategy games can prove to ramp up difficulty quickly, it’s always nice to have that extra edge to take out the competition. Enjoy!

-Christophor Rick, CEO GDN

Tips for army building and the loss management

As many would agree, Lionheart can turn out to be a somewhat difficult game on harder difficulty settings, requiring you to make careful decisions both in battles and during the management phase. This article is meant to provide some useful tips regarding the latter.

The first thing you have to realize about this game is that it’s not enough to simply win the battles; you’ll also have to keep your losses as low as possible. If the replacement costs exceed the mission rewards you may still be able to continue your conquest with a smaller army, but the following battles will prove increasingly difficult and eventually you may have to give up the fight altogether. Only one Pyrrhic victory (a victory with devastating cost to the victor) is usually one too many here.

To keep losses down you’ll have to set up the best possible army assembly that favors your playing style. It’s generally advised to build a core army with a few favored squads and in the meantime to keep a more flexible mix of units you can use in different battle situations. If you like steady advances you should choose heavy infantry, but if you prefer speed, recruit cavalry instead. Thus the core army determines what weaknesses you must compensate for with the auxiliary units. Heavy infantry for example can suffer costly losses from enemy cavalry charges, so they need units to protect them from being trampled. They will also have a hard time catching enemy archers, so heavy infantry can greatly benefit from having light cavalry around as they can fulfill both roles. Accompany them with a few archers that come handy against spearmen, and you have the makings of a solid basic army.

It’s usually worth having a developmental plan for your troops as well. Combining unit skills is a good way to come up with really effective battle strategies that make the game much easier. For example, you can build tactics around Bowmen with the Hide, and Surprise Shot skills, or Crusaders with their Shield wall formation, and the Heroic Defense skill.

In some situations you simply cannot avoid losses, no matter how well you play. It is therefore well worth having a few cheap units in your army, to be used as “cannon fodder”.

If you end up with considerable losses but you want to continue anyway, you have some options which may enable you to recover. On the Christian side, you can take a loan, which is the easiest way to correct mistakes. Sure, you should theoretically repay your debt, but if you choose not to, all you lose is some Fame, which is ultimately a smaller price than having to replay battles. Another option is to let units that would be too expensive to fill up (like knights or heroes) rest (regaining 1/3 of the unit losses per mission rested), then buy a few cheap ones, and go for an easier mission next. Therefore, it is also a good idea to save one or two easier missions for the final phase of the campaign. And finally, some missions – like Damascus in the Saracen campaign – will not allow you to take your entire army into battle. This means of course that only some of your units will gain experience in that mission, but on the other hand you have the chance to rest many units at once, saving huge amounts of replacement cost.

Lionheart Kings’ Crusade is available through GamersGate for $39.95