SomethingWicked
I completed it in 145 days on Veteran difficulty – I could have done it faster, but I didn't rush and explored different upgrade options + the order of quests, without knowing the specifics of the map.
I killed Faydaen without losses in the castle (more for the challenge) by destroying the catapult + phantoms + raising undead with level 50 magic. In an open field, he left me with 30-40% of his troops, but the battle wasn't difficult at that point either.
The fire dragon seemed more challenging than Faydaen (mainly due to the number of losses, which are very difficult to minimize), so I ended up with about 5% army loss. In principle, you don't even need to fight him; +10 magic doesn't make a big difference. Robin posed a threat during his first appearance, but I chased him around and gathered as much of my army as possible – after that, I won without any losses. Mages and humans weren't a serious threat initially.
The battle in the pyramid is cool as a puzzle – I won't spoil the solutions (there are probably several), but I managed to complete it without losses.
The demon seems strong, but if you gather a good army, he becomes just an easy target. You can easily defeat him in one and a half turns while he tries to open the gate. It feels like he needs some kind of buff, but I don't have any specific ideas yet :)
At some point, the mages' and Robin's raids became more annoying than posing a real threat, but by that time, you could also eliminate the mages themselves and the "lower" humans. Subjectively, the underground area is too large; it would be better to cut down on unnecessary things and "compress" points of interest to make everything more accessible.
Overall, it's a very well-designed map with a lot of thought put into it, without being unnecessarily drawn out, but also without creating a high risk of losing (which is actually a plus for me as a casual player).
Everything is fine regarding additional quests, artifacts, and upgrade options; the main quest is also quite decent. I can't say that I got some kind of wow effect; it was simply done at a very good level (no, this isn't simple). There are very few maps that are made well and don't annoy you in any way. It was enjoyable to spend time playing it.
Among the noticed bugs/oddities:
1. The blinding attack from unicorns has a strange effect on the guard vampires – they don't react to the attack; I see the blind effect in the log, but it doesn't apply (and shouldn't, since they are undead).
2. The guardian of the portal to the elves in the underground area disappeared at some point with a strong army (Randall?), and I didn't notice any specific trigger. At the same time, the quests "do not engage Randall in battle" and "capture Coldwell" remained open until the end; I won without completing them. There were no blue heroes/cities on the map, but their objects remained blue. Maybe this is normal behavior overall, but it seemed unintuitive.<
3. An elf hero (I had Ossir) got blocked by caravans between the last city and the garrison (the city has 3-4 caravans, the hero, followed by another 3-4 caravans near the garrison). He stood there for several weeks. Perhaps the passage needs to be widened :)
Thank you very much to the map author for such great work. This map is definitely among my personal favorites :)