Archdevil

Something seems off about the final battle in the first mission. The first time, I failed it. But with 0 units, my brave hero continued to fight as if nothing had happened! At the same time, the cheesy one-shotting of the remaining 200 zombies by a single hero didn't change anything, even though the enemy still had a dozen stacks of plague zombies. I didn't want to deal with them either, so I reloaded and started thinking.

I decided to check if it's even possible to win this battle due to a script issue. I summoned 999 demons of all kinds from Shio, and... as soon as the human troops fell, the battle ended with my victory. The necromancers appeared, but immediately after that, the end of the battle popped up.

Then I found the script itself and didn't understand why it happened, but I came to the conclusion that to win, you need to kill all the stacks of 80 plague zombies. And then I had a question: how exactly? Given that our brave necromancer raises plague zombies even from summoned demons, and considering his decent defense and, most importantly, the Heavenly Shield, dealing with these zombies is an extremely difficult task. I was planning to get a ballista for myself during the map, but I didn't get Fire Arrows, so the ballista wasn't very useful. I also didn't develop Chaos, because a great mage with a lot of spells and demons don't really go together. Instead, I developed some Darkness, with the intention of using it in future missions, along with Machines, Logistics, Attack, and Gates, including Hellfire. And overall, everything was going quite smoothly, except for the beginning, where I practically didn't find or get anything, because kiting 15 Cerberuses against 50+ earth elementals and other fun creatures for +1 to stats, and various lion collars and clovers, isn't very appealing. Moreover, I dropped a horseshoe from a chest, which overshadowed almost all the artifacts in the starting area. And when I reached the underground, skipping most of the neutrals, I finally got a powerful army. I freed the demon, defeated its enemies. And then I started clearing the map. Overall, I ended up with a hero with potential for the future. There were few spells, and even those were Chaos. Darkness appeared in the final zone. And also a scroll for Blindness from a quest. And I thought that was it, but in the end, the opponent turned out to be a necromancer, and Darkness is mostly not very effective against the undead. So Blindness, Dispel, and other spells happily went down the drain. The only real value was the half-set of the necromancer and some other artifacts. Nevertheless, the opponent was still ahead in stats, but that's not so significant, and with stats of 60, enemies were being killed. The armored zombies made of pure steel under the Heavenly Shield were significant. Because in the end, the army started to run out, and if it ran out, plague zombies appeared and put an end to the idea, for example, of kiting zombies with dogs (alt-grade at that time). And abusing the script with demon summons greatly complicates the battle. So, honestly, I didn't win there. Maybe Chaos and a full ballista would have helped, but what can you do if the author himself tempts you with Darkness? Here's a quest for a Blindness scroll, here's a lot of Darkness in the final zone... Chaos was there too, of course, but as I said, it's not an effective school of magic when playing as demons. And you can't farm many skills on the map, and you need a lot of mana to deal with hordes of zombies on Hero difficulty.

In general, that's how it was. The mission is easy, but the first zone has too strong guards for the loot that's there. Moreover, you can't go back there. The final boss clearly works somehow strangely. I also noticed that somewhere the number of neutrals is increasing (14k goblins!), and somewhere it's not. Let's see what happens next. To be fair, I rarely play as Inferno.

Added 6 minutes ago
P.S. Maybe I would add a mentor to the map, after all, there's a bag on the map, and there are no dwellings in the main zone, except for the elven ones, but they are not used for hiring. Therefore, you can level up as much as you want.

In the quest with the prisoners, I released them for a +2 to defense.