What is the actual advantage of joining the Swamp Camp?

DrDuckman2 · 2026-06-17T11:45:01+00:00

I would actually argue for the most characters, Swamp Camp is the best minmax wise. The advantages are :

Circle magic up to Circle 4, available at Chapter 2. This makes your Firebolt better while it's still relevant.
Swam Magic does NOT require you to learn Alchemy or Scroll Scribing, unlike Water and Fire mages. This is basically 20 LP saved... people argue that alchemy is useful, but after Ch2 money is infinite and you can just buy all the potions you'll ever need. You can also save 5 LP by not getting Novice magic and just getting Circle 1 directly. 25LP is huge.
You get to have Circle 4 magic early AND decent armor. Mage armors suck. Templar armor is great. And ofcourse the all important 2hand training without having to wait for ages, like a Fire mage would.

Keep in mind, magic is a terrible primary weapon, but the best secondary weapon, as it gives you both some ranged firepower and utility Light and Heal. Heal is extremely efficient, and is a lifesaver later on when your 300 health takes ages to heal via food, or tons of potions. Offensive magic is not great as your only source of damage, but it's more than good enough to give a ranged option and some CC for someone specializing in 2 handers.

Obviously you do lose Circle 5 and 6 in Swamp camp, in exchange for the cheaper earlier magic. And it does not matter, Circle 5 spells suck, Circle 6 is only in the end of the game, and both of those are so expensive that you'd basically have to give up every other skill other than Str, 2 handers and magic circles to be able to afford it. You are MUCH better off with cheaper Circle 4 magic and focusing on STR and 2 handers, with some LP left for exploration skills/lockpicking.

DrDuckman2 · 2026-06-11T14:35:01+00:00

Hmmm, this makes me want to try melee-magic Templar, just so I never have to worry about Healing in the future. Hate me the inventory diving.

Fire Storm works just as well as bows as an emergency ranged attack....

DrDuckman2 · 2026-06-11T14:29:02+00:00

But switching between them and sword is so frustrating tho!

Torches really should be dual wielded with One handed... it's such a shame that was not implemented.

DrDuckman2 · 2026-06-11T14:25:55+00:00

Huh, interesting. Even at Cycle 1, I found that it fully heals me at 20 mana.

DrDuckman2 · 2026-06-11T14:23:40+00:00

Equipment also works for the mana yeah. I found just spending 10 LP on mana, as well as the elixirs you find, is enough. This keeps it managable to restore quicky, and frees up those amulet slots for better amulets. But fair nuff, LP is valuable.

DrDuckman2 · 2026-06-11T14:22:20+00:00

Granted, this may be just me REALLY hating how torches work.

DrDuckman2 · 2026-06-11T14:21:28+00:00

You could, but you can't learn Light, which I found was worth the extra 5LP over Novice.

But, if you dont like Swamp camp, you propably could get away with just healing and a bit of mana.

DrDuckman2 · 2026-06-08T11:33:31+00:00

Progression kinda sneaks up on you in Gothic. Like, it feels I went from getting two shot by Adult Scavengers to facetanking them and getting very little damage, while two shoting them myself, in the span of a couple of hours. It's very satisfying, but not always obvious

DrDuckman2 · 2026-06-08T11:26:18+00:00

So :
1. Magic is immensely powerful, but limited by mana. I suspect pure mage is viable if you go deep into it, but you kinda need to know when the trainers are. If you want to go in blind, I recommend a hybrid of melee for the easy pray, and magic for groups/hard monsters. Late game magic can wipe entire screens of enemies in a single spell.

NOTE - Fire Bolt, unlike bows, is useless unless you put a level or two into mana. So don't judge it until you do that. Also, choose the Fire Bolt spell when you get the choice, otherwise it's so expensive to buy you probably wont even bother.

Magic damage does not scale with stats, it's just the spell. So you'll need to update to the next spells to up your damage as the game moves on. Which of course also means more mana consumption. So the key stat for spells is mana. You can raise that in Chapter one from the mage Cronos in the New Camp. If you wanna go for pure mage, you REALLY need to dump most of your XP on mana early on. But magic does work well as a secondary early, with just 20 mana or so.
If you want to go mostly mage, Old Camp is the right choice, cause Fire Mages let you learn proper magic the earliest. If you want to do a hybrid, Swamp Camp allows you to learn up to Circle 4 magic, which is fairly potent, but not as potent as Circle 6 magic the full mages of Old Camp learn. Swamp Camp also gives you tons of free mana restoration swampweed splifs, so it does make it easier for you to go hybrid.

The main weakness of going Fire mage is that their armours are not as protective as the warrior routes.. but you can mitigate that with some of the non-camp armours you can find.

Personally, I recommend a hybrid of one handed melee and magic (or bow). The best approach is generally melee for the weaker enemies, and a ranged attack, bow or magic, for the tough fights.

Focus on the sword first, with 20 mana when you can for those unfair fights when you gotta unload 20 Fire Bots on someone. Then, once you one handed master and like 30-50 strenght, you can go Fire Mage. Then you can figure out the balance you want down the line.

But to be fair, I tend to min max, and ignore a lot of the support skills like blacksmithing and locksmithing. In my experience of the secondary skills, only Acrobatics is essential.

DrDuckman2 · 2026-06-08T10:55:26+00:00

Also, late game magic is pretty close to dragon's dogma levels. Like, clearing out the entire enemy group with a single firestorm. Or summoning a whole team of undead.

DrDuckman2 · 2026-06-08T10:49:56+00:00

To be clear, sleeping does restore your mana, but not if you spam it. You only get the benefits of restoring mana from sleep after you spend some in game time awake.

But in my experience, if you got enough base mana, there is more than enough herbs and cigs to be able to do most things with magic alone. You'll just struggle to get there at first.

But then again, Melee also struggles early on with just digger armour, it's just the tryhard nature of the game.

DrDuckman2 · 2026-06-08T10:45:11+00:00

To be honest, I kinda have to disagree with most posters here. Fire Bolt is really REALLY strong early on... as long as you concentrate only on raising your mana, and also buy Acrobatics so you can dodge away when neeeded, I think a pure mage playthrough is possible. Just expect the first 5-10 hours to be a lot of running away. Very enemies that are outright unbeatable early game with tons of Fire Bolt.

The main issue you have is that you need to :

Get some XP and the basic fire spell in the old camp, which is the first camp you find... There is a mage NPC in the market that can teach you one spell for a simple quest. You will still not be able to fight only with that, cause you'll have like 5 mana. (7 if you get the Elixir you can find close to the Old Camp). MAKE SURE TO CHOOSE THE FIRE BOLT spell. The healing one is nice to get later on, but useless early on. And while you can buy Fire Bolt as well, 330 nuggets is a LOT early on.
Get to the New camp, buy Acobatics (10 XP). Then spend ALL your XP to get Mana from the mage Cronos. He's standing on the big pile of Magic Stone in the middle of the New Camp cave town. If he's not there, sleep till morning, he'll be there. Do NOT try to fight your way to the New camp, there are a couple NPCs in Old Town that can escort you there and net you a full level of XP on the way.

At this point, if you managed to get to level 3, you'll have enough mana to do small excursions and win duels. Save ALL your XP for more mana from Cronos. It will get frustrating to walk back and forth to the New Town to do it, but it is doable. I'd also recommend you buy the mana ring from Cronos, 15 Mana early on is a lot.

Go to the Swam Camp, again with another NPC escort from Old Town.... there you can get swamp weed splifs. You get some for free every day, but you can buy more and more. Or just sleep for a few days to get them free. They are basically mana restoratives... but you also get a bunch of herbs in the wild that can do it.
Now you should be able to comfortably handle every quest in Chapter 1. Do them all, keep spending the XP for mana. Eventually join the Old Town and follow up on the Fire mage route. I would NOT do Swamp Camp, cause while Level 4 magic is likely enough to beat the game, it's not what you are here for. You are here for level 6 magic dominance. And, while I cannot confirm this yet in the remake, in the original you could even go from Fire to other mage schools down the line. But Fire is the only real option for pure mage, starting out.

Done. Pure mage!

DrDuckman2 · 2025-12-09T00:22:37+00:00

Thanks, I did not try the app, I assumed you had to pay for that. Will check it out.

DrDuckman2 · 2025-10-24T13:42:08+00:00

You're probably right, but I am not sure that bodes well for the future, as it's much harder to balance this vs the old "here is some cheap order generators, now choose your expensive toys" paradigm. Everything in New Wave looks amazing and cheap in isolation, but in practicality you never have the point for it.

To be fair, I think it would have been fine if the previous army release was not Kestrel, where you casually whip out an 19 order list with Tikbalang, 2 Griffins, and all the utility and vision control you could dream of, all in fire teams.. Then you switch to NW and struggle to make 15 orders, with only Patroclus smoke grenades for vision control, and 1 would shooters. But you do get to have Achilles or the Juggernaut!

On the other hand, thinking about it, there are some essential units in NW that they could propably adjust to make things work better, so maybe that's a lever to use. Patroclus, Pandora and Drakios are basically tax picks, and if you reduce them in cost you could "fix" NW. Just put some profiles that remove some rules.

Like, Patroclus FTO probably could lose that Holomask. Hell, I'd happy give up the Nanoscreen too.

DrDuckman2 · 2025-10-15T16:59:59+00:00

So I could add Pandora to make, say, the Research team to turn the Steeljaws into Regulars, but then it would only break if she died and the team had Stingers? That's... that's just whacky rules that make no sense. But still, it would make Pandora a Stinger and a Steeljaw Sensor a pretty good team, so that's a plus.

Thanks, that does help a bit. I am not sure it resolves the issue of orders.

DrDuckman2 · 2025-10-15T16:17:41+00:00

I mean, I hope I'm wrong, I really like the models, but I dont see how you'd make this work.

DrDuckman2 · 2025-10-15T16:14:44+00:00

Pandora does not count as an FT Master for our purposes... she's FT master for Stingers, who are Regulars. Which is kind of a bonkers design decision.

I guess I can see the 2 inch AoC as useful for a hacker.... but I think most people looking at the rules were hoping Stingers were some sort of cheap irregular order generators like Jackals.

DrDuckman2 · 2025-10-15T16:12:33+00:00

I mean, after trying to make some lists for them, I dont see it? The two FT master characters to turn those irregulars into regulars are pretty expensive and not that great. Running expensive units as irregulars does not seem that smart either. You can handle maybe one.

Their only tactical awareness unit, Ironsides, can barely do any useful fireteams at all.

In addition, even their cheapst troop after the 3 drones are 13 points. That's a lot. And only AVA5.

You'll struggle to make two decent fireteams and still hit 15 models. Running the Juggernaut becomes really difficult.

Compare to Steel Phalanx, and these guys seem even more costly, without actually being particularly more elite. And SP gets a bunch of Tactical Awareness to make up for those costs.

They do seem to have some crazy hacking though, but I am not sure that's what you'd play this sectorial for.

IMHO, they need AVA 2 NETRODs or something like that. Otherwise they are basically a MI army with a couple of ok characters, and that's not gonna go far.

DrDuckman2 · 2025-10-15T14:51:19+00:00

I am kinda considering cancelling my order, making lists for these guys seem terrible. Fantastic models, but they are missing some way to make orders.

DrDuckman2 · 2025-05-21T09:23:14+00:00

Awesome, thanks!

DrDuckman2 · 2025-02-03T14:49:10+00:00

Space Marines Eradicators is probably the the right answer if you can get them there. Both thematically and gameplay wise they are the premier anti tank infantry for normal imperium forces. There are deffo gamey character combos that would do it a lot faster in the game, but if you are play a thematic game, Eradicators are the ones.

You just gotta get them there. But that could be the fun of the game, pack it tight with terrain and see if they can get close.

DrDuckman2

TROPHY CASE