In my case, all three of the last options turned out like this:
Day 1 - landing
Day 1 - capturing the main castle and immediately capturing all the others (in the final version, I was 2 squares short of capturing the Barbarian castle)
Day 1 - destroying the messengers
Either you were very lucky, or I was very unlucky. In my case, the Sorceress had 4 heroes, and 2 of them ran to opposite ends of the island.
Because of this, I lost a day, and there was nothing I could do.
