v2 - for experts, this is the version I played. As far as I remember, I freed Jarla in the second month, with a couple of hundred snipers and several golden dragons. Slowing, defending with snipers, and all those hordes of spectral dragons become completely helpless, as do all other enemies in the way. There was absolutely no need to defend the castles, and I didn't do it; I just wandered around the map with a bunch of snipers, looking for castles and portals. You would need to defend them if you were to win in the second way, but that's just a tedious and uninteresting task, in my opinion. By "under pressure," I meant that by the end of the map, as often happens, my hero didn't acquire some kind of furious army of thousands of archangels, and battles with enemies often depended on morale and luck; I called this a good balance. I don't understand how this relates to the large number of unnecessary castles and heroes.