1. At first I skipped this map because people were saying it's "boring," but I thought, well, the idea of having powerful magic at the start should be interesting, so let's go.
2. My first attempt was as the Phoenixes, playing the green player. 10 map restarts just to get the first artifact lying around for free, then two months of unsuccessful struggles, dozens of autosaves, and brilliant battles where you first attack with a hero and a druid (because he's fast), a couple of dwarves (because they don't get targeted), and by summoning elementals, you take out everything you can, and then finish off with a hero and an army if you had to retreat after all. But then they finally caught up to me and carried me out feet first.
3. I restarted as the blue player, playing the Dragons. And then the miracles began. First, on day 5, the main enemy hero died somewhere, and a record with an insanely high score appeared in my rating table. I made an autosave, and that poor guy managed to survive the night. And then, a week later, I got the full Anduran set from a graveyard! Clearly, after that I just walked around the map and killed everyone, but even so, I only managed to defeat the final boss on my second try.
In short, it's awesome — it's rare for a map to have the difficulty evenly distributed across the entire game. 65 days, score 246.
Two points:
Two logistics boots for the blue player seems fair, because he has swamp. But in the second half of the game, it's a serious imbalance, because he can outrun and catch anyone he wants. Maybe it would be better to build roads through the swamp for him, or make the stable properly accessible.
I don't know if this is intentional, but the same blue player can't approach the stable from the north, only from the side.