Dandy
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With persistence worthy of a better cause, I finally tested the gloves and quick battle bug variant on the live servers.
Interesting timings: the Barbarian village is cleared on day 132, and the right garrison on day 143 – this allows you to capture both swamp castles and the Serpent and Hive dwellings by day 147, and then calmly generate Serpent units from 3 castles. In my opinion, this is the only option that allows you to accumulate 5k+ Serpents by the 5th month, although it's not certain that this will be enough, but it's not that interesting to watch further.
I got tired of randomizing the necessary setups, but at least I was in the mood to experiment – although, of course, it's not the most enjoyable thing.
I learned a few new things – I'll describe them below.
During the random weeks, I found some tricks, like how to break cycles, but some of them didn't stick in my memory because I was also listening to and absorbing an audiobook.
Of what I remembered: within the same cyclic save, restarting the scenario helps – and the first few loads usually give a new result. Also, saves of the type "autosave" in the root, "daily autosave" in a folder, and a specific save – these are different saves and may have different behavior regarding cycling. Again, you need to try different options with the executables – both HD+ with SoD SP, and a clean SoD and HD with the "HD+" checkbox disabled – also have different behavior, and a save from one version, loaded into another, sometimes does what is needed. But sometimes even this doesn't help, and the only way to replay the last 1-2 days is almost the only way – by the way, it seems that at least one battle should be fought so that a different chain begins.
From a walkthrough perspective, some moments turned out to be unexpected.
1) It seemed that 200% and the Wood/Stone bonus were the biggest problems. But the most effective start is for the gold bonus. I doubt the author did this intentionally, but with the resource bonus, there is not enough space to capture the castle on day 116, and losing a day prevents you from including a Silo resource in the build order. As a result, even the Wood/Stone bonus loses out on resources by the 3rd week compared to the gold bonus. But this is a minor issue; much more critical is the fact that it is simply impossible to buy a 2nd hero on the 1st week. There is simply not enough of that extra 500 gold from the village.
2) With the quick battle bug, it is sometimes possible to save Serpents. For example, 4 Serpents + a Bull + a Ballista are enough for Hydras – the Hydra, for some reason, doesn't always hit the Ballista at close range, and only 1 Serpent died when clearing Behemoths. And yes, this helped a lot.
3) Archers are not needed at all. The main stack is Wyverns, then Serpents and Gorgons in the future. There are few Lizards, and they serve more as meat shields than damage dealers. Potentially, you could build Cyclops, but there are clearly problems with gold in the future. Therefore, I would take, unexpectedly, Ballistics – just for the final battle to break through with Bulls.
4) Some difficult battles turn out not to require morale. From the second week, there were many difficult battles, and all of them involved Gnolls – and the first losses of these Gnolls were only on day 132 – when taking the Barbarian village (-8 Gnolls and 3 Lizards). And before that, either clever closing or the fear of retaliation can solve the problem well.
5) Each defense of a Tazar is incredibly valuable. Usually, defense is not highly valued. But specifically here, the key timing is clearing the right garrison, where all the stacks are dangerous, but 500 upgraded Lizards are especially so. And the difference between a 20th-level Tazar defense and a 17th-level defense is the difference between -25 attack/defense or -28, that is, +25% damage! This is very significant, and to upgrade Tazar, I scraped together +3 level-up bonuses on the Monks and even built +1 defense in the swamp. If Cypsela had come to give us a shield with +2 additional defense, it would have been much easier, but she arrives a couple of days later.
6) The entire army with heroes from the tavern turned out to be necessary – not only from the swamp heroes but also from the Barbarian ones. And the availability of Barbarian meat turned out to be very useful. At the same time, I did not dismiss the heroes, and even so, there were not enough chains.
7) The fixed random events from HD+ are broken by SoD_SP, and this is not news, but we are talking about something else – if you bind a spell to a button and use it with a hotkey or use it with the mouse from the spellbook, there will be two different chains of events (morale/resistance, etc.), although, from the point of view of actions in battle, it is all the same. It was also noticed that if you use an intermediate move when placing units on the tactics screen, the chain of fixed random events will also change – I don't know if this is related to SoD_SP.
And yes, the fixed random events for choosing the right events are a cheat – but this is not news.
8) Upgraded Wyverns are awesome! I was thinking about building and generating 5 Hydras, but in these conditions, the Wyvern's poison on thick stacks of the garrison is much more effective. In a situation where there is little damage from your own units due to the small number of troops, poison is simply overpowered.
Interesting timings: the Barbarian village is cleared on day 132, and the right garrison on day 143 – this allows you to capture both swamp castles and the Serpent and Hive dwellings by day 147, and then calmly generate Serpent units from 3 castles. In my opinion, this is the only option that allows you to accumulate 5k+ Serpents by the 5th month, although it's not certain that this will be enough, but it's not that interesting to watch further.
I got tired of randomizing the necessary setups, but at least I was in the mood to experiment – although, of course, it's not the most enjoyable thing.
I learned a few new things – I'll describe them below.
During the random weeks, I found some tricks, like how to break cycles, but some of them didn't stick in my memory because I was also listening to and absorbing an audiobook.
Of what I remembered: within the same cyclic save, restarting the scenario helps – and the first few loads usually give a new result. Also, saves of the type "autosave" in the root, "daily autosave" in a folder, and a specific save – these are different saves and may have different behavior regarding cycling. Again, you need to try different options with the executables – both HD+ with SoD SP, and a clean SoD and HD with the "HD+" checkbox disabled – also have different behavior, and a save from one version, loaded into another, sometimes does what is needed. But sometimes even this doesn't help, and the only way to replay the last 1-2 days is almost the only way – by the way, it seems that at least one battle should be fought so that a different chain begins.
From a walkthrough perspective, some moments turned out to be unexpected.
1) It seemed that 200% and the Wood/Stone bonus were the biggest problems. But the most effective start is for the gold bonus. I doubt the author did this intentionally, but with the resource bonus, there is not enough space to capture the castle on day 116, and losing a day prevents you from including a Silo resource in the build order. As a result, even the Wood/Stone bonus loses out on resources by the 3rd week compared to the gold bonus. But this is a minor issue; much more critical is the fact that it is simply impossible to buy a 2nd hero on the 1st week. There is simply not enough of that extra 500 gold from the village.
2) With the quick battle bug, it is sometimes possible to save Serpents. For example, 4 Serpents + a Bull + a Ballista are enough for Hydras – the Hydra, for some reason, doesn't always hit the Ballista at close range, and only 1 Serpent died when clearing Behemoths. And yes, this helped a lot.
3) Archers are not needed at all. The main stack is Wyverns, then Serpents and Gorgons in the future. There are few Lizards, and they serve more as meat shields than damage dealers. Potentially, you could build Cyclops, but there are clearly problems with gold in the future. Therefore, I would take, unexpectedly, Ballistics – just for the final battle to break through with Bulls.
4) Some difficult battles turn out not to require morale. From the second week, there were many difficult battles, and all of them involved Gnolls – and the first losses of these Gnolls were only on day 132 – when taking the Barbarian village (-8 Gnolls and 3 Lizards). And before that, either clever closing or the fear of retaliation can solve the problem well.
5) Each defense of a Tazar is incredibly valuable. Usually, defense is not highly valued. But specifically here, the key timing is clearing the right garrison, where all the stacks are dangerous, but 500 upgraded Lizards are especially so. And the difference between a 20th-level Tazar defense and a 17th-level defense is the difference between -25 attack/defense or -28, that is, +25% damage! This is very significant, and to upgrade Tazar, I scraped together +3 level-up bonuses on the Monks and even built +1 defense in the swamp. If Cypsela had come to give us a shield with +2 additional defense, it would have been much easier, but she arrives a couple of days later.
6) The entire army with heroes from the tavern turned out to be necessary – not only from the swamp heroes but also from the Barbarian ones. And the availability of Barbarian meat turned out to be very useful. At the same time, I did not dismiss the heroes, and even so, there were not enough chains.
7) The fixed random events from HD+ are broken by SoD_SP, and this is not news, but we are talking about something else – if you bind a spell to a button and use it with a hotkey or use it with the mouse from the spellbook, there will be two different chains of events (morale/resistance, etc.), although, from the point of view of actions in battle, it is all the same. It was also noticed that if you use an intermediate move when placing units on the tactics screen, the chain of fixed random events will also change – I don't know if this is related to SoD_SP.
And yes, the fixed random events for choosing the right events are a cheat – but this is not news.
8) Upgraded Wyverns are awesome! I was thinking about building and generating 5 Hydras, but in these conditions, the Wyvern's poison on thick stacks of the garrison is much more effective. In a situation where there is little damage from your own units due to the small number of troops, poison is simply overpowered.