In general terms, the starting area was dirt — I'm on dirt, the computer is on dirt, and the stables along the road are also on dirt.
At the beginning, though, not everything was smooth: there were no stone piles anywhere, and I had forgotten that Lich requires 10 sulfur, not the Horde's four. On top of that, I had to slot in some zombies as well.
Fortunately, I didn't have to suffer for long: I broke through a couple of 3k stacks, entered an adjacent zone and found good roads, and most importantly and dearly: 3 resource silos next to each other :smile23:
The native Dungeon turned out to be quite close, rattled my nerves a bit (killed 16 zombies in the Citadel), but the boost from its spawn can hardly be overstated: first of all, here I found stone and sulfur, as well as a mini Dwarf Cottage. Besides that, on day 6 with double mana I managed to break the maximum Naga Bank and spread out almost to the maximum! and the best part: a tier 3 Griffin Conservatory the next turn.
After that, things went very pleasantly with slow power-stacking, squeezing out the computer, breaking through into 6k stacks. Got Town Portal on the third try, but Fly on the first.
But,
at the same time, which was a big surprise to me, the opponent was keeping pace with me in army strength and showing decent stats. But I watched the replays and didn't pay much attention to it. As it turned out, that was a mistake!
On 132, Gunnar on 3600 movement breaks the maximum Dragon Utopia, gets Wings, a Shield, a Helm, and 4/4 from it. At the same time, he manages to jump into a one-way portal and take Conflux from me, visiting a well along the way.
The main point is that with Wings and stats, he easily took a couple of Dragon Fly Hives from the nearby portal with pit fiends, which I had kindly left "for later."
At that moment, I hadn't rebuilt Dimension Door yet, and intended to fly to take the Dragon Utopias in Super-Treasure, and that's exactly what I did. Tante took a couple of Dragon Utopias, Town Portaled back, and Vidoma, though not very successfully, flew with Advanced Air through the mountains (didn't have enough mana left for Town Portal after) to take a third one.
I gathered stats, got the key item, but, of course, there was no longer the same confidence in domination. On top of that, I left a couple of good, stabled heroes at my main base to break the defenses. The opponent took the Castle without issue the next day and killed them. But he stayed in the castle, even though Town Portal had already been rebuilt there.
So, the Bone upgrade is going, businesslike Aislin is leveling up properly from two Pandora's Boxes, takes a 4th Dragon Utopia, and gets +4 All Stats from it among other things. Here, I must say, I played validol-style: to move the army out, I had to dig up a 2000-stabled hero — it cost over 30k. But I dug him up, transferred the power, and Tante with 600 mana successfully pinned down Gunnar.
In the end, the deciding factor was that Gunnar only had Basic Earth, and therefore couldn't fly away.
Thanks for the game!
Even if he had Earth and Gunnar had flown away, he would hardly have out-powered a stack of Necropolis units with full buffs. So, in short, my chocolate found a better chocolate. Thanks for the game.