bolotnik
Auto-translated
Scars of the old wars
If anyone completes the map with other races — let us know. It will be especially interesting to find out who, when, and how can beat Nameless.
After this map, I simply must try to complete another masterpiece by Michael: "Seven Dark Souls." As the author writes, this map is harder, and it is currently only available in Polish (but he promised to translate it soon).
The map is very easy and, I must say, terribly tedious...
I looked at the start for all factions; overall, you can start with any race, as they are all roughly equal. However, in my opinion, Stronghold, Tower, and Rampart have a significant advantage, as they allow you to develop much faster and reach the necessary artifacts, Pandoras, dragon caches, and towns. But regardless of the race, leaving the respawn will be faster than the AI...
About the map: it's a cruel, necessary mockery of the players. If you don't study the map in the editor, the walkthrough can take a very long time simply because of running around in the underground labyrinth.
Therefore, of course, the map was opened in the editor and the route was peeked at; otherwise, the completion would have dragged on for more than 12 months (purely due to the stupidity and tediousness of labyrinthine paths)....
I started with Rampart, the starting hero was Gelu with Slow and Meteor Shower, and next to the starting castle, there were two streams for double mana, so from then on it was very simple and fast — I cleared everything via Mass Slow and sniper shots.
I used 4 heroes (Gelu, Kyrre, Tazar, and Alamar).
After leaving the respawn, I rushed to the center for the Azure caches (only 1 is needed for speed), then took the utopias after the archdevils, the most essential Sphere of Vulnerability, a TP scroll, and other artifacts. After that, I struggled a bit but eventually took a Pandora that gave TP (via Alamar, I successfully retrained other heroes with it). With those, it's easy to squeeze the computer.
So, after capturing all 4 home castles and clearing the respawn, I encountered the orange player and held him with two cities, pushed the blue one from the center back to his respawn, and then Gelu went underground. The other three heroes held the cities and the center of the map, although I must say the AI here doesn't pose any problems at all; it's harder to reach it than to defeat it...
I went into the underground following the route strictly marked in the editor, straight to the portal by the tents. Breaking through the guards was effortless with a full set of spells, heaps of mana, and the Sphere of Vulnerability. After that, through the green portal, I visited the respawn of each AI and took all their cities, dealing with the heroes (who were just puppets with crowds of monsters).
After defeating all the AI, the Necromancers, Nameless, and Grail arrived, and I captured all neutral castles.
Taking the main army (snipers, unicorns, gold dragons, a few Azure, pegasi, and that's all — I used nothing else), I again followed the route checked in the editor to the portal (otherwise you could wander indefinitely).
Another hero (Alamar) with Azure and Crystal dragons (a few of each) went for the Grail, while Kyrre and Tazar started chasing the Necromancers, or rather, running through the labyrinths.
In the end, Nameless (only black dragons, Power of the Dragon Father, Book of Fire, and Sphere of Flame in artifacts) was defeated in the 5th month. To be fair, he never used Armageddon, although he was given the Book of Fire and Sphere of Fire. I think if he had used Armageddon, the losses would have been greater and more critical for the further game. As it was, I beat him very easily, very simply, not without losses, but losses weren't important there and weren't critical, since by the 5th month Gelu's stats were already higher than his and the army didn't lag much in quantity considering the Legion Statue. Castles built from the start + external dwellings and the Grail allowed resources to accumulate quickly and be spent easily.
(Though it would have been entirely possible to defeat him even earlier using speed artifacts and snipers behind a Force Field: attack with dragons and we have the first speed, place a Force Field in front of the snipers; snipers have 9 speed + 2 cloak + 1 necklace + 1 ring, totaling 13; under Haste, the speed would be greater than black dragons, and then add Prayer and Anti-Magic so they wouldn't be wiped out by strike spells, followed by a calm execution of the black dragons. But I didn't do that and lost about 200-300 gold dragons, a bit over 1k pegasi, 700 unicorns, and some snipers (I don't recall exactly). Then from the middle of the 5th month until 6.3.2, there was a game of catch-up, guessing, and bumping into the Necromancer to take all the cities and kill all the heroes.)
Result with the installed Grail, captured cities (all), and defeated AI: 6.3.2.
Overall, I didn't like the map; there were no interesting battles (except Nameless, but he is locked away and poses no threat; it's not even mandatory to take him down).
The entire difficulty of the map is its murderous labyrinthine logistics. We have several colored one-way teleports, and there are simply countless entrances and exits. The entire underground consists of dissected corridors with one-ways, meaning you can only enter via a one-way, but these one-ways are identical (there are several types and they all repeat in incredible quantities, except for one that leads to Nameless).
As a result, the Necromancer AI himself couldn't even reach all the areas and didn't take all the cities in 6 months. Because of such confusion, the AI cannot do anything. Instead of Necromancers with hundreds of thousands of Liches and millions of skeletons (now that would be something, if for example by the 3rd month the Necros carved paths to everyone via the green two-way portal and started terrorizing everything on the surface: 8 heroes with TP, magic, stats, AoTD and other artifacts, someone even with Shackles and an army with thousands of bones and liches — in the spirit of Chinese maps, Fall of Atlantis, Astral Venis, etc.), we get a few stray and lost AI heroes, which is exactly what kills the difficulty and interest in completing such a map....
Though it should be noted that everything on the map is drawn quite well and logically (but the labyrinth in the underground is just killing).
Result: 156 days and 494 points