Road to Arnika is tough

[lmk012376]

My 5/6lvl party on easy setting cannot get through the road to Arnika in one piece! Does it make sense to get cool items in Arnika and return to the road?

Overlord

[Vaprakgruumsh]

Seriously, I think the road to Arnika was one of the hardest parts of the game so far (well, till ya get to the room with the 6 cultist, 2 death lords, and 1 Sorceress Queen - but heh, that's a bit down the road - er, not on the road, but in the game)! The key to getting through to Arnika is... well, lots of luck. This is seriously a pretty difficult area, with those constant brigands, bugs, and crabs (and if you're lucky enough to run into someone who can summon elementals as I did, yeesh). Something you may wanna do, hug the walls. This does two things. Usually prevents you from being surrounded (so your mage/priest/whoever is in the back) doesn't get picked on; as well as keeps ya off the main road where everything tends to wander.

If you find yourself in constant battles, something you can do is "rest/camp" behind the house. You're usually pretty safe there during camping time, to get your casters back up to having magic resources.

What do you have (race and class) as a party?

[Merkin]

The road to Arinka is tough. The first few tries, I got ahnded my head on a plate. Mobs of bugs and plants and bandits...spitting thingies and stinging thingies and slicing thingies...oh my!

Hugging the walls helps indeed. But what I found even beyond this is to look for a couple of key crevices in the wall just about anytime the road makes a turn, the inside wall will have a crack just deep enough for your party. As long as you have at least two beefy fighter types in front, and have picked up some of the armor goodies in the game, you can hold off the mobs from theses cracks. They can only approach you two or three at a time, can't flank you, and the mob will bunch up nice and tight for magic missles, fireballs, webs, etc. My level 6-7 party took on 18 raiders, 4 acid plants, and 9 wasps with no rest/heal in between.

Oh, and it really helps having a bard with pipes. One of the prettiest sights I've seen is three of those nasty plants exploding simultaneosly! Pretty sweet.

[Virgil]

Another option is to run. It's hard to escape fights in those narrow sandy areas, but once you get to the grassy area, you can run around most bands of enemies. If you see one coming steer around it and just run south to Arnika. I've made it through with relatively few fights. You always get crabs coming out of the monastery, but they're not too tough.

If you do get into a fight, and you want to avoid it, just click on the move button and pick run every turn. Run away from the enemies. Once you get a wall or a corner between you and them, they will usually break off pursuit. This could backfire bigtime if you run into another band of enemies behind you, so be sure to save often.

[chimera99]

Becides the above, the key to those battles is spells that imobilize your enemies like sonic boom, web, freeze body (or whatever the 2nd lvl water spell is) etc. It allows your guys to take on just a couple of the bad guys on both offense and defense. After reading the hints on this board I restarted (for about the 4th or 5th time) and focused more on that type of spell and things got a lot easier.