Walkthroughs for custom maps.

Gird was the main player and was handing out Blade of Armageddon to everyone.

On that map, archers + clones were ultimately more effective. The Blade was useful, no doubt, but when the opponent has around 1,000 units of level 7, it doesn't play as big a role anymore.

Added 13 minutes ago

I dug through my archives and found a long-forgotten, but unfinished map by the author Woxin - 生死百年第三版.

On this map, I found further proof of how cheating mods like HD and others are.

The thing is, the chosen strategy involved getting 1000 gold and a hero with a ballista at the start (Gurnisson or Hervulf). It turned out that this is a very rare combination, and I spent about 8 hours generating a save. While I was at it, I started listing all the starting heroes in a table, and it turned out that some of the allowed heroes simply don't appear. They are definitely allowed, and they are not on the map, either with the AI or in prisons. They do come to the tavern, but never together with 1000 gold; thousands of restarts confirm this. Meanwhile, as we know, they can be easily bought with HD. On this map, it's not critical, but in theory, you could create a map where the inability to buy a certain hero at the start is one of the conditions for a normal game. And HD would unfairly break the author's design.

Added 1 minute ago
upd
another condition was getting advanced artillery on the first level, but that's not relevant here