The Fall from Grace

I completed this scenario on Heroes, playing the new harder version. I had previously tried to complete the normal version but was unable to play through to victory.

Walkthrough

The scenario consists of 12 battles that the player must win sequentially. All troops, skills, and artifacts are preset by the map's author and cannot be changed. In addition to the replays, I'll describe how I approached each battle.

Godric. The only fight where we play as regular Freyda with Retribution after any Light spell. There's an interesting battle script here: as soon as we kill 4 enemy stacks, the remaining 3 switch to our side, but enemy demon stacks appear. The key is not to touch the strong enemy Zealot stack and quickly kill any other 4 stacks. When the demons appear, the Zealots kill them without issue and we win. All subsequent battles are played as the new Freyda with Helmar's specialization.

Duncan. The main thing here is to cast Deflect Missile on a single Zealot so they shoot at them instead of our shooters. Last time I won this fight immediately and easily. In the new version, it took several retries until everything aligned favorably enough to deal with the enemy Paladins while preserving enough troops to finish off the remaining stacks.

Wulfstan. Single Deflect Missile on the Zealots at the start of the battle, Haste and Slow, then the battle is won thanks to Life Drain on several of our stacks. Overall, I played it the same way from the start; the successful attempt differed in that the computer seemed to play more foolishly than in the unsuccessful ones.

Tolgar. A lot of reloads in this fight. The main idea, in my opinion, is that you can't drag the battle out and need to force the Dwarves to leave the castle and attack us. There were unsuccessful attempts where the enemy had too much luck and too many Stuns. Deflect Missile here seems like a waste of time; I didn't use it at all in the successful attempt. I also encountered a technical issue: the game crashed twice during the Erls' turn, which seems like a bug in the game itself rather than the map.

Arantir. Break the catapult, deal primary damage with shooters, and watch throughout the battle to ensure the cart isn't destroyed. Use Mass Deflect Missile; single doesn't help because the Archliches will still attack the shooters. I lost an attempt where Earthquake knocked down the gate. Then I lost an attempt with two holes in the wall because Arantir charmed the Zealots and they killed the shooters. In the successful attempt, Earthquake left only one hole in the wall, on a more favorable side, and Arantir didn't cast anything dangerous.

Gotai. I didn't really understand the concept here at all. I just played a few times and somehow got lucky enough to win.

Kujin. Now this battle I really liked; I'd describe the idea as: "Think like a demon, not like a knight." We have a real knight army and summoned demon stacks. We imagine we're playing as Inferno and take advantage of the computer ignoring "gates" if it can hit a real stack. There were some retries at first, but as soon as I focused on the correct tactic, I won without any problems.

Ylaya. It's important to choose the right formation, otherwise it's a loss. Single Deflect Missile worked poorly for this fight even in the old version; there's no point in even trying it here. So we cast Mass Deflect Missile; the computer's target selection logic becomes very strange, and we hope it rarely chooses our shooters. The shooters deal enormous damage here, and after several reloads, the battle is won.

Zehir. This is the very fight I couldn't win last time. Here you need to start with Mass Deflect Missile, then force the enemy to attack one stack at a time rather than all at once (I don't know how to explain it better; there's a replay). Also, the random was clearly better this time. Funny enough, this is the only battle in this playthrough that I managed to win on the first try.

Zehir (second battle). An interesting and beautiful fight that required some thought. I eventually came up with this tactic: Mass Deflect Missile, then Mass Dispel to remove the enemies' Deflect Missile. It's important not to break the Hive or Wall of Swords so the enemies can't reach us. We shoot the enemies with our shooters, and once we have a big advantage, we all rush forward and finish them off.

Freyda vs Freyda. The battle consists of three stages: first we fight against humans and undead, then against elves, and finally against humans again. Losses from the previous stage don't affect the next one at all, but everything happens within a single battle, meaning if you lose on the second or third stage, you have to play all three again. I quickly figured out how to win the first stage, then managed the second, but the third was impossible. Then this idea came to me: drag out the first stage of the battle so that the enemy Freyda spends all her mana and can't "retaliate" in the next two stages. That's what I did, and the next two stages were won immediately without any problems. An excellent battle!

Biara. In this battle, I first thought the goal was to kill all real stacks as quickly as possible. I played that way, but it turned out that even when left with only gates, Biara continues to fight. After that, I started playing simply for the complete destruction of all demons. In one of the attempts, I managed to win, generally without coming up with anything original; everything just fell into place more favorably than in other attempts.

The scenario was completed in 1 game day, "Battles won: 12", "Battles lost: 0" :)

I've already said that the scenario is very difficult. This time I want to add that its main difficulty for me is how much it differs from all the maps I've played before. The first time I played the normal version, and almost all my experience playing Heroes 5 was nearly useless there. This time I managed to win the harder version, despite having played Heroes little between the two playthroughs, and never as Knights at all. What changed? First, the fact that I had already played the normal version. Second, knowing that the map was well-tested by the author (meaning all battles are winnable), I was determined to replay each battle as many times as needed until victory.

I didn't understand the situation with the final battle: I planned my tactics based on the assumption that killing only the real troops would be enough. But when I managed to do that, it turned out the battle doesn't end; you have to kill the summoned ones too. Later I won the battle simply by killing all stacks. If this is a bug, it needs to be fixed. If it's intentional, it would be advisable to warn the player with a separate message that different rules apply here. The battles with Zehir also had many summoned creatures, but there was no such problem.

I liked the battles that were initially difficult but where I managed to understand the idea that allows you to win confidently: Godric, Kujin, both battles with Zehir, and "Freyda vs Freyda." In the other battles, there was too much fighting against randomness for me; perhaps I just didn't figure out how to play them more correctly. I've uploaded an archive with replays of all battles in this scenario. An unusual map, interesting battle scripts, beautifully crafted battle arenas for each fight, a storyline, and cutscenes. I'm glad I was finally able to complete this scenario.
Thank you once again for the map!