Marlo_Stanfield
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Map Name: A Long Way
Author: Grigor Minchev
Downloaded: from the Heroesportal map catalog
I spent the last few days marathoning and completed this scenario. It's been a long time since completing any map was THIS difficult. Probably the hardest map I've played since "Metataxer's Revenge". At the same time, it is entirely in the style of the Bulgarian author, developed over years—absolutely unique and unlike anyone else's. The player is primarily required to have sound planning, patience, endurance, and a high tempo. I suspect that completing this map blindly is impossible.
A superficial look in the editor shows nothing supernatural. The AI start in standard conditions, without a head start in the form of insane troops, but with good preset upgrades for their main heroes and a decent set of spells—specifically with Town Portal, but without Boat Summon or Water Walking. But our start is something else entirely. There are two heroes: Jelu, who is locked behind quests and effectively useless, and the knight Lord Haart (Minchev loves this hero) with negative experience of -1230000 and a couple of curious artifacts (Titan's Gladius, Sphere of Forbidding, shooting artifacts). Our starting respawn stretches in a long strip upward toward a garrison on the border with the Barbarians. There are three Castles located on the respawn besides our starting one, but access to them is blocked to varying degrees by quests and multicolored guards. The towns have no taverns. There is also a set of conservatories. Traditionally, everything is very tight in terms of resources and spells. For example, one sawmill is guarded by 40 angels with an upgraded stack; the second is essentially blocked by visiting a blue tent, for which you must kill 24 orcs and 220 ogres to gain access. There is a crystal and ore mine right next door. You have to run quite a bit to reach the others. The initial stage of completion basically boils down to running one hero up and down the respawn, very gradually gaining access to various objects. Water magic, earth magic, logistics, and pathfinding are banned on the map; you need to build up towns one by one from scratch with an almost total absence of resources and money (some quests require bringing archangels and black dragons), while Pandoras along the way—traditional for this author—completely wipe out our economy, so development proceeds very slowly.
I already mentioned what a difference using SoD_SP made on this map. You can generate a starting save such that Lord Haart wipes out his negative experience on day 1 and then starts leveling up like a normal hero. At first, I thought this was the author's design for an inventive player to figure out, but no. Using standard game features, you cannot wipe a hero's experience in the same way. But the author himself assumed that people could play this map on Hot, and there are prerequisites for playing under WoG, so I think the method is still legitimate. The consequences of wiping Lord Haart's negative experience are as follows: we get various secondary skills upon leveling up and, accordingly, primary skills. But! There will be no possibility to obtain logistics, pathfinding, or earth magic. In other words, the hero becomes a powerful but slow turtle. If the negative experience is not wiped, by the time he reaches Paconi's Stronghold, Haart will get intelligence, logi, and pathfinding, becoming a normal hero in the midgame. To the extent that a hero without earth magic can even be considered "normal" :) At the same time, regardless of whether it's wiped or not, the key moment of the start is obtaining water magic from a box at 15.78.0. Water magic is the only 100% must-have skill on this map. "A Long Way" can be completed even without wisdom on the main hero, but the absence of water magic means immediate гг. Therefore, if you do wipe the experience, you need to calculate it so that water magic appears in the hero's tree after the battle with 900 magma elementals and 10k peasants. Tactics also greatly helped for a fast start. It allowed me to kill packs of 4000 snipers before the green tent without waiting for forgetfulness in Paconi. In general, the town of Paconi is our key to obtaining not only forgetfulness but also slow, blindness, shield, stone skin, dispel, and force field. Only, to get access to it, you have to sweat quite a bit. It requires building up a tower at the top, which can be reached in turn after fully building the Castle and Dungeon, as well as visiting the red tent on the Barbarian respawn by making a foray across the sea. To complete tasks on the respawn, the key object—surprisingly—is the mercenary guild near the Inferno respawn. I did some of the same town construction, as well as upgrading angels and djinns, by selling parts of the army given to us through quests :)
By the way, regarding the Inferno respawn, since I mentioned it. Near the mercenary guild, there is a boat that can be used to sail to the red heroes in the first week, capture their lower castle with its growth, and immediately force a struggle against Xerone. At first glance, this seems like the right option for a tempo player. But no, there is no money for adequate troop purchases, and sooner or later we'll be wiped out—if not by Xerone himself, then by his neighbors—and the surrounding terrain is a swamp; a swamp for a hero without pathfinding, logistics, and swamp units is death. Another important nuance: landing at the red base, we brought them a boat that we cannot adequately remove. There's no way to sink it, and buying a boat in the nearby town to tow it back is beyond our means—and you can't sink the boat because then we wouldn't return to the starting respawn. Regarding Boat Summon, there's a curious point: obtaining it on this map is harder than getting flight/dimension door on other maps, and access to some existing shipyards is blocked by hellish quests :) But I'll talk about Boat Summon in more detail later.
In general, I played as tempo-heavy as possible and crawled out of the respawn toward the end of the 5 (!) month. Without wiping the experience on day 1, there would have been a delay of another couple of months. It goes without saying that during this time the AI gathered an immense amount of troops, considering their number of towns, the presence of level 7 external dwellings, and Town Portal for their main heroes. At the same time, it should be noted that our opponents will be Gunnar with a clairvoyance amulet, Crag, Tazar, and a number of other unpleasant companions, including the witch Khalid. She is the only hero on this map with spell power 50+ (all other heroes, including us, have primary skills around 10+), and that hag mows down troops brutally with explosion or chain lightning. Because of Khalid, I even doubted whether to hand over the Sphere of Forbidding via quest at the beginning (the correct answer is—hand it over). Leaving the respawn is preceded by wiping out an unpleasant Barbarian garrison and then packs of azure dragons (pack size depends on timing). The garrison and dragons could be broken through by our neighbor personally, but I wouldn't be happy about such a turn of events. Another funny point of this map is the ban on resurrection; it exists in the red player's starting Necropolis, which looks like a mockery :) And in all battles, you'll have to rack your brain on how to avoid losses or keep them to a minimum. Add to this a total ban on the possibility of obtaining Town Portal on the map—and earth magic already becomes less useful here than water magic. But one can manage without earth magic and resurrection when you have a clone and a stack of archangels. The problem will be that even a clone scroll and a hundred archs won't give us a carefree life, as casting requires mana, which is in short supply. Lord Haart did not get intelligence for me. After capturing the first green Stronghold, we finally gain access to the tavern, and we can now choose a candidate for the role of new main hero. My first thought was to look for an intelligence specialist or even Daremih, but all those heroes are banned. Game experience suggested that in any unclear situation, you should take the armor specialist. Here, that's Nila. Near the Barbarian town before the white tent, there is a box that grants secondary skills. The list is built in this sequence: pathfinding - logistics - leadership - water magic - earth magic - navigation. This is the first and essentially only adequate chance for us to make ourselves a viable main hero. With some skill, you can build your game so that navigation won't be decisive here, so it can be cut off by taking the box with a hero who already has three selected skills. For Nila, these are literacy and armor, but I thought long about the third skill between wisdom and intelligence. Or I considered the option of taking both wisdom and intelligence, cutting off earth magic in the box. The choice, to put it mildly, is not great, let me tell you. In the end, I gave up on intelligence, and after that, it was hellishly difficult. Knowledge for both Lord Haart and Nila during the key phase of completion with artifacts equipped was around 8-10 :) At the same time, Lord Haart had about 700 mana in reserve, gathered from boxes as a bonus. And Nila had 200+. That's the mana you need to kill the map bosses on the first try (yes, they are regularly rebought by the AI here, just how we like it), and that was Crag with an army of 400 ancient monsters, 1300 thunderbirds, and 400 cyclops, to whom a kind ally—by an unpleasant coincidence—added hundreds of phoenixes and magical elementals. And this is despite the fact that when exiting toward the red tent, I lured Dess with a hundred ancient monsters away from the white gates and killed her, so Crag was missing some army. Then it was Gunnar with hundreds of black dragons and arch-devils plus sultans and pits. With Gunnar, you can't drag your feet, as in the inaccessible orange town, events start piling up an immense amount of troops from a certain stage. The battle with Gunnar was without blindness. All key battles in the midgame were without shackles. Also Khalid with practically a legion of hydras and 50+ sp, although the battle with her went easily since I caught her almost without mana. A case where the devil isn't as scary as he is painted. Moreover, most dangerous heroes have Town Portal, and therefore they behave unpredictably. Our army, if you play the start correctly, consists of 100 archs, a little over 1000 master djinns, and 5-6 thousand witch harpies (I sold a thousand harpies at the mercenary guild because money was very tight). An extravagant combination. Battles are fought by casting everything on single djinns from the main djinn stack, and they in turn destroy the enemy supported by harpies and healing via an archangel clone. The archs must not be killed or heavily damaged, otherwise we won't recover later. In general, mana barely held out with all these folks :)
Parallel to capturing and holding territories, you need to complete quests. There are two key points in this regard: I strongly advise against swapping the boots of levitation for the helmet of divine enlightenment prematurely, no matter how much you want to! Do this only after obtaining the second set of boots, otherwise you'll make the game many times harder for yourself. The second point concerns the dolphins from the admiral's hat set. There are two on the map, but three quests for them; moreover, the quest to obtain the sword of justice is mandatory for completion—without it, the map becomes impassable. The other two are optional: either speed boots and access to the fort on the hill, which is very convenient territorially and situationally, or the only chance to get Boat Summon on this map in a prison with a hero. I had to sacrifice Boat Summon, even though I'd already prepared a plan on how to free that hero without sailing across the entire map to him.
Wiping out the bosses lets us breathe a sigh of relief; then begins a prolonged stage of pushing enemies out of their locations and holding conquered positions. Important points here: target one specific flag, rush all its towns, and either hand them over to some ally or fend off attacks at home and in other places (AI wander across the entire map, usually far from their respawns). This way, the pink, purple, and blue AI die within seven days. At the same time, the races of the pink, orange, and purple players are generated randomly during the creation of the starting save. My great luck was that the pink player spawned as Inferno. And Inferno has Town Portal on a minimal level—City Gates. To make the game easier, you can set the pink player to Inferno when choosing map settings; the generation of purple and orange is not as important. Things are harder with green and brown; you have to rack your brain to figure out how to get to them. Incredibly, they have normal daily income in their respawn towns, not 500 gold like everywhere else on the map. They also have a brown tent, and after wiping these flags, other AI will not enter these zones (stupid AI doesn't TP into ally towns and doesn't visit the brown tent, which works in our favor). It is even harder to completely destroy the red player. The last Necropolis is closed by a black guard. Curiously, Sir Mullich is sticking out of a rock nearby with a large army and stats. I couldn't understand what the point was. It turned out that after the death of the red player, the orange player can immediately buy and start using Sir Mullich. The orange player is not permanently eliminated on this map and keeps us in the game so that we perform specifically the delivery of the grail to the city of Colossus. At the same time, scripts periodically dump resources and army into the orange starting town, and all heroes he rebuy immediately learn Town Portal. But the trick from "First Blood," which consisted of driving your own hero through an AI town, won't work here.
I'll also say that the difference in victory conditions between "A Long Way" and "Abelia" is that the city requiring the grail is not a starting one but is heavily blocked by quests. At the same time, the author places obelisks in such inaccessible places and behind such guards that it all looks a bit strange. If you couldn't dig up the grail without fully opening the puzzle-map, it would make sense, but instead, both in "Arlok" and here, I dug up the grail by trial and error, without visiting half of the obelisks. In "Abelia," however, I visited almost all of them and even saw the cross. Also, a difference between "A Long Way" and other maps completed from Minchev is that here quests must be performed parallel to the war with AI, not after—meaning doing many tasks simultaneously. Another tip regarding holding occupied positions and fending off AI constantly crawling into every crack: daily visits to the veils of darkness. Veils near both Dungeons and in the purple player's Castles are especially important. In general, near the exits of the two one-way paths.
In the finale, taking the blue tent with special terrain for harpies was curious—it came as a surprise to me. I prepared to hit the box guards specifically with harpies and 1 mage for a teleport costing 1 mana, but it turned out even easier. And Nila managed to ram through all the guards on the road to Colossus in 1 day with zero mana. Any other available hero with existing means could not have repeated this :)
Victory on 13.4.5, which is still very fast for this map. Under certain conditions (for example, early surrender of boots of levitation), you can play much longer :)
I put the map in my top-5 maps along with "Xiedu", "The Last Crusade", "Metataxer's Revenge" and "Ira the Mage". Yes, goodbye "6424 Heroes". The only thing that could be added is some sophisticated battles with preset starting troops for the AI, and giving the orange player more means to rebuy an army, as he became impoverished over time, but it'll do.
I posted a couple of conducted battles in the screenshots. For example, in the first battle, using the "remove obstacle" spell is vital; otherwise, you won't be able to place single knights in the correct position to then loop the golems, and there is no slow. I spent three hours on the battle with Gunnar so that he wouldn't flee and cause me losses.
P.S. During completion, there was a funny moment when artillery in secondary skills on Lord Haart saved his life. He was defending against Khalid in a castle in a pretty hopeless situation, and control over the towers gave me the ability to blind 150 arch-devils before their turn. The enemy cast earthquake a couple of times, didn't break a single wall, and then fled without waiting for blindness to wear off from her archs (!). Otherwise, I would have been in trouble. In a similar fashion, a hero with a legion of ogres, against whom I had no chance, also fled :confused:
Author: Grigor Minchev
Downloaded: from the Heroesportal map catalog
I spent the last few days marathoning and completed this scenario. It's been a long time since completing any map was THIS difficult. Probably the hardest map I've played since "Metataxer's Revenge". At the same time, it is entirely in the style of the Bulgarian author, developed over years—absolutely unique and unlike anyone else's. The player is primarily required to have sound planning, patience, endurance, and a high tempo. I suspect that completing this map blindly is impossible.
A superficial look in the editor shows nothing supernatural. The AI start in standard conditions, without a head start in the form of insane troops, but with good preset upgrades for their main heroes and a decent set of spells—specifically with Town Portal, but without Boat Summon or Water Walking. But our start is something else entirely. There are two heroes: Jelu, who is locked behind quests and effectively useless, and the knight Lord Haart (Minchev loves this hero) with negative experience of -1230000 and a couple of curious artifacts (Titan's Gladius, Sphere of Forbidding, shooting artifacts). Our starting respawn stretches in a long strip upward toward a garrison on the border with the Barbarians. There are three Castles located on the respawn besides our starting one, but access to them is blocked to varying degrees by quests and multicolored guards. The towns have no taverns. There is also a set of conservatories. Traditionally, everything is very tight in terms of resources and spells. For example, one sawmill is guarded by 40 angels with an upgraded stack; the second is essentially blocked by visiting a blue tent, for which you must kill 24 orcs and 220 ogres to gain access. There is a crystal and ore mine right next door. You have to run quite a bit to reach the others. The initial stage of completion basically boils down to running one hero up and down the respawn, very gradually gaining access to various objects. Water magic, earth magic, logistics, and pathfinding are banned on the map; you need to build up towns one by one from scratch with an almost total absence of resources and money (some quests require bringing archangels and black dragons), while Pandoras along the way—traditional for this author—completely wipe out our economy, so development proceeds very slowly.
I already mentioned what a difference using SoD_SP made on this map. You can generate a starting save such that Lord Haart wipes out his negative experience on day 1 and then starts leveling up like a normal hero. At first, I thought this was the author's design for an inventive player to figure out, but no. Using standard game features, you cannot wipe a hero's experience in the same way. But the author himself assumed that people could play this map on Hot, and there are prerequisites for playing under WoG, so I think the method is still legitimate. The consequences of wiping Lord Haart's negative experience are as follows: we get various secondary skills upon leveling up and, accordingly, primary skills. But! There will be no possibility to obtain logistics, pathfinding, or earth magic. In other words, the hero becomes a powerful but slow turtle. If the negative experience is not wiped, by the time he reaches Paconi's Stronghold, Haart will get intelligence, logi, and pathfinding, becoming a normal hero in the midgame. To the extent that a hero without earth magic can even be considered "normal" :) At the same time, regardless of whether it's wiped or not, the key moment of the start is obtaining water magic from a box at 15.78.0. Water magic is the only 100% must-have skill on this map. "A Long Way" can be completed even without wisdom on the main hero, but the absence of water magic means immediate гг. Therefore, if you do wipe the experience, you need to calculate it so that water magic appears in the hero's tree after the battle with 900 magma elementals and 10k peasants. Tactics also greatly helped for a fast start. It allowed me to kill packs of 4000 snipers before the green tent without waiting for forgetfulness in Paconi. In general, the town of Paconi is our key to obtaining not only forgetfulness but also slow, blindness, shield, stone skin, dispel, and force field. Only, to get access to it, you have to sweat quite a bit. It requires building up a tower at the top, which can be reached in turn after fully building the Castle and Dungeon, as well as visiting the red tent on the Barbarian respawn by making a foray across the sea. To complete tasks on the respawn, the key object—surprisingly—is the mercenary guild near the Inferno respawn. I did some of the same town construction, as well as upgrading angels and djinns, by selling parts of the army given to us through quests :)
By the way, regarding the Inferno respawn, since I mentioned it. Near the mercenary guild, there is a boat that can be used to sail to the red heroes in the first week, capture their lower castle with its growth, and immediately force a struggle against Xerone. At first glance, this seems like the right option for a tempo player. But no, there is no money for adequate troop purchases, and sooner or later we'll be wiped out—if not by Xerone himself, then by his neighbors—and the surrounding terrain is a swamp; a swamp for a hero without pathfinding, logistics, and swamp units is death. Another important nuance: landing at the red base, we brought them a boat that we cannot adequately remove. There's no way to sink it, and buying a boat in the nearby town to tow it back is beyond our means—and you can't sink the boat because then we wouldn't return to the starting respawn. Regarding Boat Summon, there's a curious point: obtaining it on this map is harder than getting flight/dimension door on other maps, and access to some existing shipyards is blocked by hellish quests :) But I'll talk about Boat Summon in more detail later.
In general, I played as tempo-heavy as possible and crawled out of the respawn toward the end of the 5 (!) month. Without wiping the experience on day 1, there would have been a delay of another couple of months. It goes without saying that during this time the AI gathered an immense amount of troops, considering their number of towns, the presence of level 7 external dwellings, and Town Portal for their main heroes. At the same time, it should be noted that our opponents will be Gunnar with a clairvoyance amulet, Crag, Tazar, and a number of other unpleasant companions, including the witch Khalid. She is the only hero on this map with spell power 50+ (all other heroes, including us, have primary skills around 10+), and that hag mows down troops brutally with explosion or chain lightning. Because of Khalid, I even doubted whether to hand over the Sphere of Forbidding via quest at the beginning (the correct answer is—hand it over). Leaving the respawn is preceded by wiping out an unpleasant Barbarian garrison and then packs of azure dragons (pack size depends on timing). The garrison and dragons could be broken through by our neighbor personally, but I wouldn't be happy about such a turn of events. Another funny point of this map is the ban on resurrection; it exists in the red player's starting Necropolis, which looks like a mockery :) And in all battles, you'll have to rack your brain on how to avoid losses or keep them to a minimum. Add to this a total ban on the possibility of obtaining Town Portal on the map—and earth magic already becomes less useful here than water magic. But one can manage without earth magic and resurrection when you have a clone and a stack of archangels. The problem will be that even a clone scroll and a hundred archs won't give us a carefree life, as casting requires mana, which is in short supply. Lord Haart did not get intelligence for me. After capturing the first green Stronghold, we finally gain access to the tavern, and we can now choose a candidate for the role of new main hero. My first thought was to look for an intelligence specialist or even Daremih, but all those heroes are banned. Game experience suggested that in any unclear situation, you should take the armor specialist. Here, that's Nila. Near the Barbarian town before the white tent, there is a box that grants secondary skills. The list is built in this sequence: pathfinding - logistics - leadership - water magic - earth magic - navigation. This is the first and essentially only adequate chance for us to make ourselves a viable main hero. With some skill, you can build your game so that navigation won't be decisive here, so it can be cut off by taking the box with a hero who already has three selected skills. For Nila, these are literacy and armor, but I thought long about the third skill between wisdom and intelligence. Or I considered the option of taking both wisdom and intelligence, cutting off earth magic in the box. The choice, to put it mildly, is not great, let me tell you. In the end, I gave up on intelligence, and after that, it was hellishly difficult. Knowledge for both Lord Haart and Nila during the key phase of completion with artifacts equipped was around 8-10 :) At the same time, Lord Haart had about 700 mana in reserve, gathered from boxes as a bonus. And Nila had 200+. That's the mana you need to kill the map bosses on the first try (yes, they are regularly rebought by the AI here, just how we like it), and that was Crag with an army of 400 ancient monsters, 1300 thunderbirds, and 400 cyclops, to whom a kind ally—by an unpleasant coincidence—added hundreds of phoenixes and magical elementals. And this is despite the fact that when exiting toward the red tent, I lured Dess with a hundred ancient monsters away from the white gates and killed her, so Crag was missing some army. Then it was Gunnar with hundreds of black dragons and arch-devils plus sultans and pits. With Gunnar, you can't drag your feet, as in the inaccessible orange town, events start piling up an immense amount of troops from a certain stage. The battle with Gunnar was without blindness. All key battles in the midgame were without shackles. Also Khalid with practically a legion of hydras and 50+ sp, although the battle with her went easily since I caught her almost without mana. A case where the devil isn't as scary as he is painted. Moreover, most dangerous heroes have Town Portal, and therefore they behave unpredictably. Our army, if you play the start correctly, consists of 100 archs, a little over 1000 master djinns, and 5-6 thousand witch harpies (I sold a thousand harpies at the mercenary guild because money was very tight). An extravagant combination. Battles are fought by casting everything on single djinns from the main djinn stack, and they in turn destroy the enemy supported by harpies and healing via an archangel clone. The archs must not be killed or heavily damaged, otherwise we won't recover later. In general, mana barely held out with all these folks :)
Parallel to capturing and holding territories, you need to complete quests. There are two key points in this regard: I strongly advise against swapping the boots of levitation for the helmet of divine enlightenment prematurely, no matter how much you want to! Do this only after obtaining the second set of boots, otherwise you'll make the game many times harder for yourself. The second point concerns the dolphins from the admiral's hat set. There are two on the map, but three quests for them; moreover, the quest to obtain the sword of justice is mandatory for completion—without it, the map becomes impassable. The other two are optional: either speed boots and access to the fort on the hill, which is very convenient territorially and situationally, or the only chance to get Boat Summon on this map in a prison with a hero. I had to sacrifice Boat Summon, even though I'd already prepared a plan on how to free that hero without sailing across the entire map to him.
Wiping out the bosses lets us breathe a sigh of relief; then begins a prolonged stage of pushing enemies out of their locations and holding conquered positions. Important points here: target one specific flag, rush all its towns, and either hand them over to some ally or fend off attacks at home and in other places (AI wander across the entire map, usually far from their respawns). This way, the pink, purple, and blue AI die within seven days. At the same time, the races of the pink, orange, and purple players are generated randomly during the creation of the starting save. My great luck was that the pink player spawned as Inferno. And Inferno has Town Portal on a minimal level—City Gates. To make the game easier, you can set the pink player to Inferno when choosing map settings; the generation of purple and orange is not as important. Things are harder with green and brown; you have to rack your brain to figure out how to get to them. Incredibly, they have normal daily income in their respawn towns, not 500 gold like everywhere else on the map. They also have a brown tent, and after wiping these flags, other AI will not enter these zones (stupid AI doesn't TP into ally towns and doesn't visit the brown tent, which works in our favor). It is even harder to completely destroy the red player. The last Necropolis is closed by a black guard. Curiously, Sir Mullich is sticking out of a rock nearby with a large army and stats. I couldn't understand what the point was. It turned out that after the death of the red player, the orange player can immediately buy and start using Sir Mullich. The orange player is not permanently eliminated on this map and keeps us in the game so that we perform specifically the delivery of the grail to the city of Colossus. At the same time, scripts periodically dump resources and army into the orange starting town, and all heroes he rebuy immediately learn Town Portal. But the trick from "First Blood," which consisted of driving your own hero through an AI town, won't work here.
I'll also say that the difference in victory conditions between "A Long Way" and "Abelia" is that the city requiring the grail is not a starting one but is heavily blocked by quests. At the same time, the author places obelisks in such inaccessible places and behind such guards that it all looks a bit strange. If you couldn't dig up the grail without fully opening the puzzle-map, it would make sense, but instead, both in "Arlok" and here, I dug up the grail by trial and error, without visiting half of the obelisks. In "Abelia," however, I visited almost all of them and even saw the cross. Also, a difference between "A Long Way" and other maps completed from Minchev is that here quests must be performed parallel to the war with AI, not after—meaning doing many tasks simultaneously. Another tip regarding holding occupied positions and fending off AI constantly crawling into every crack: daily visits to the veils of darkness. Veils near both Dungeons and in the purple player's Castles are especially important. In general, near the exits of the two one-way paths.
In the finale, taking the blue tent with special terrain for harpies was curious—it came as a surprise to me. I prepared to hit the box guards specifically with harpies and 1 mage for a teleport costing 1 mana, but it turned out even easier. And Nila managed to ram through all the guards on the road to Colossus in 1 day with zero mana. Any other available hero with existing means could not have repeated this :)
Victory on 13.4.5, which is still very fast for this map. Under certain conditions (for example, early surrender of boots of levitation), you can play much longer :)
I put the map in my top-5 maps along with "Xiedu", "The Last Crusade", "Metataxer's Revenge" and "Ira the Mage". Yes, goodbye "6424 Heroes". The only thing that could be added is some sophisticated battles with preset starting troops for the AI, and giving the orange player more means to rebuy an army, as he became impoverished over time, but it'll do.
I posted a couple of conducted battles in the screenshots. For example, in the first battle, using the "remove obstacle" spell is vital; otherwise, you won't be able to place single knights in the correct position to then loop the golems, and there is no slow. I spent three hours on the battle with Gunnar so that he wouldn't flee and cause me losses.
P.S. During completion, there was a funny moment when artillery in secondary skills on Lord Haart saved his life. He was defending against Khalid in a castle in a pretty hopeless situation, and control over the towers gave me the ability to blind 150 arch-devils before their turn. The enemy cast earthquake a couple of times, didn't break a single wall, and then fled without waiting for blindness to wear off from her archs (!). Otherwise, I would have been in trouble. In a similar fashion, a hero with a legion of ogres, against whom I had no chance, also fled :confused: