I'm having one troubling question. Just as the title. During my campaing as haven i have noticed enemy is placing liches during tactics in the keep before the actual combat starts. I would like to do the same but i cant, when i place unit(archer for example) the unit disappears from the battlefield indicating that this unit wont take part in the combat.
If anyone know how to do this, please help me.
Placing Shooters in keep during tactical phase
might-and-magic-heroes-6
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Okay, I spent several hours testing this. The answer is...disappointing.
It appears that units are placed according to the order that they entered your army. Their order in the city or hero screens do not matter. The only order that matters is the one you see when you right-click your hero -- for some reason the army there is displayed in insertion order.
The pattern is:
_ 5
_ _
_ 3
_ _
6 1
_ _
_ 2
_ _
_ 4
_ 7
That's it, until you add ranged units. Ranged units will step back one space if possible, swapping with a melee unit if it's there or pushing a ranged unit to the side. Oh and 7 jumps to the middle for no apparent reason.
Also note, reinforcing a unit does not reset it's position. So I could add 1, 2, 3, then put extra units on the first one added and it would still retain it's #1 position.
Okay, now the evidence.
First, I placed my units in order, from 1 to 7 like so:
In battle, I got the following pattern:
Simple enough, I thought. Next, I tried removing a few units, and got one of two expected outcomes:
Apparently it ignored empty spots and treated 1 _ 3 _ 5 _ 7 like it was 1 2 3 4.
I tried this in different fights, to make sure it wasn't enemy-dependent, and it seemed stable.
Then I decided to try multiple unit types, and things got weird:
Wha? That made no sense at all. I stumbled around for a bit, thinking maybe it was doing it based on unit strength or something, then made an important discovery: the right-click hero popup showed units in a seemingly random order (not the order I saw in the city or hero screens).
To confirm that it was the insertion order, I took all the units out and added them at random positions but in order from 1 to 7. The city screen looked random, but the right-click popup was in order:
Battle showed the expected pattern:
Great. I tried reversing the order and counting down from 7 to 1 and got the expected pattern.
I had previously noted that ranged units tended to move to the back, and so excluded them to avoid confusing the issue. Now I added them back in, and saw reasonable move-to-back behavior:
5 and 7 just moved back one step, and apparently 1 and 6 flipped but that seemed reasonable.
Then I tried all crossbowmen:
...I don't know what happened here, maybe someone else can decipher it. It looks like 2, 3, 4, and 5 did what I expected (normal position, but moved to the back). 1 and 6 got shuffled around a little, but they're more or less where they should be. But I can't explain how 7 got to the middle.
I suspect that what's really going on here is a simple algorithm that goes through the units and tries to place them on the board in a pseudo-spiral pattern. Unfortunately, it grabs the units in the order they were inserted, not the order they appear on the screen. As a programmer, that feels like a bug, not something someone did intentionally.
Now I'm going to go actually play the game, and try to forget that I ever learned this, because shuffling units in and out of cities just to get them inserted in the correct order seems like madness. I hope this helps someone.
Here a few ideas
Use your healing skills. Healing and Regeneration are obvious candidates, but I'm a big fan of the Reinforcements skill. You can only use it once per combat, but it allows you to "overheal" your unit by giving them extra units. Not only do losses get taken out of these units first, but the extra units also increase the damage you deal.
Use the tactics skill to start the battle with your ranged units in a protected spot.
Use Guardian Angel. Your faction ability doesn't cost you any mana, and it doesn't even take your hero's turn, but it doesn't carry over from one battle to another, so you should be using it whenever you can.
Use your Sentinels. Each Sentinel unit standing next to an attacked unit will absorb and split some of the damage with it. If you upgrade them, they even get to retaliate when the unit next to them is attacked.
Use your Sisters' healing ability. Twice per battle they can heal, so make use of it effectively. Don't use it early if you haven't sustained the full amount of damage that you can heal. Beware though that the AI will generally target Sisters before ranged units. =)
When they are being attacked by a melee unit, make sure they don't get hit by retaliations. The ranged units are fast, so they will act early in a turn. If there is something next to them when there turn comes up, have them wait. When they come up again, you can either move into position to shoot at the beginning of the next turn, or melee attack something that no longer can retaliate, or possibly even shoot if you've killed the unit next to them in the mean time,.
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As far as I have been able to determine, you can't: you have to burn your unit's first move to enter the tower. I suppose it's another hidden buff the AI gets to offset its general lack of tactical or strategic ability. I would love to be proven wrong though.