At the end of Day 126, he was sitting in a swamp village with stats 18-21-14-19, 200 mana, but with a weak army.

Well, chances were slim back then — if you ran through the diamond mine, you'd arrive there later than him, and it would be difficult to develop on that small patch left for you. The only option was to blindly rush into the neighboring respawn.

But I liked the map itself up to ГО — you could play not only through the hydra pond (which I wouldn't touch without my own hydra), but through your own fast hydra and consequently the angel (as I played). If it weren't for the slow roads, you could have easily grabbed the boots; it would have been much more fun with them.

By the way, I also played like an online match without looking at the map, etc. But I had to reload twice :o (once I just forgot my artifacts in the chain, but still)