I completed it on hard difficulty in a little over 4 months. It wasn't too challenging; I guess I was just lucky. I leveled up Naste to get one level of the Blood skill, and then I wanted to try leveling up to the second level of the Tears skill, just for the experiment. I was about 200 Tears short of reaching the "thousand" level when the battles ended, and I moved on to Miranda. By that time, my army was slightly larger than hers. Sometimes, I couldn't apply any skills to the vampires; all the units were highlighted, but the vampires weren't. But I only used them to protect the liches from large monsters. Otherwise, it was just ranged attacks, ghouls and wights as melee units, and ghosts as healers. I had to use a specific tactic; I was used to setting up my units at the beginning of the battle in the fifth game, and it helped here too. Towards the end, I was winning without any losses; thousands, regiments, it didn't matter and wasn't scary. Phoenixes are incredibly tough; you shouldn't even try to fight them directly! I defeated them by leaving only the vampires in a corner and sending them to defend; they become invulnerable, their counterattack doesn't deal damage, and only one unit of phoenixes can approach them. The creatures of Darkness and Light are evil, but their evil lies in their speed and lack of counterattack; I still haven't figured out how to defeat them effectively. My spiderlings unexpectedly defeated a large group of ghouls with their "languid gaze," and the ghouls barely had time to attack, only managing to swing for 200 damage. Still, these creatures are not fully understood, they are not familiar. It's interesting to play, not too difficult, but without a battle plan, without a strategy, it won't work. And I also wanted to note that Ludmila and Kaspar, who were bringing me supplies in the Dungeon, were killed by a meteor on their way back (this is an Inferno skill that hits a hero in the Dungeon near the city). Since there were no creatures in the army, the heroes disappeared and didn't appear in the tavern... If I had known, I would have left at least a couple of skeletons behind