Redwhait
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We agreed to play the final best-of-1 VT under SoD
05.01 BA/IEHOK (red, Castle, Valeska, Pikeman) def Redwhait_HP (blue, Rampart, Ivor, Kyrre), Diamond, 217
The game truly turned out splendid...
I should have played VT a few times after all, since the last time I played it was on the Russian server.
The pair suited me well enough, the restarts kept giving me junk, I even had to make one on encounter.
I didn't play optimally, the lack of experience showed a bit, and I had nothing to counter my opponent with.
As it turned out later, everything was handed to me on a silver platter :D I just had to capitalize.
On the last restart, I got a bad external dwelling of Elves and a terrible closed road network with one-way portals.
I entered a big treasure zone, there were a couple of external dwellings of Hydras, a Shield +12, a Pandora's Box with 30 Flies, a couple for experience, and 2 for level 4 magic. But Ivor didn't have Fire in his skill progression. From the Control zone, I only scouted the level 5 Cap, but the guard was 20+ Scorpicores, and I essentially had nothing to take it with on the 2nd month.
Then, at the end of week 2, my opponent arrives, takes the Cap, and reveals 50+ upgraded Wyverns, which made me uneasy.
I collected all the Dragon Fly Hives in the treasure zone, I even took the Dragon Utopia, but it gave me junk.
Then, the only joy was taking Wings; the opponent had no Town Portal, which was good and gave me time to build 50 Wyverns and decent combat stats. But again, I lacked literally one day to upgrade them and got hit with a hard final fight, which lasted over 2 hours and was very epic.
I was heavily behind in mana and spell power, but I had a significant advantage in combat stats. The army was also not in my favor.
The outcome was heavily influenced by the speed of my Wyverns being only 10. If the opponent had given me one day to upgrade them, the final fight would have been more or less easy, even though I had 30 fewer Wyverns. As it was, the only option during the final fight was to kamikaze myself and kill him with Armageddon; otherwise, the "poop" would just catch up and kill me sooner or later.
Then, after the final fight, neither of us knew what to do. We didn't want to play a new game, and we didn't want to continue either.
But essentially, the game was for advancing to the main stage of the Champions League, and there was only one spot, so we had to continue.
I quickly specced into Hydras, but the issue was money.
I captured the Conflux with a Capitol and growth from the computer on day 2, month 1, week 1, and thought for a long time: either buy in the Conflux and try to defend the Capitol, since I had almost no towns and money, or buy all the Hydras immediately and go level Kyrre.
I bet on the Conflux and unfortunately guessed wrong; the next turn, the computer recaptured the Conflux almost entirely thanks to Advanced Catapult and Bless on Storms and Psychos.
Then I was in debt with no purchases and didn't know what to do, wasted a couple of days and let my opponent gather everything he needed for happiness. We caught Kyrre with the Book, but without Haste and Slow, I was just short of money to buy back, so we practically killed him on the spot.
And then it was cleanup in the Swamp, against which there was nothing to be done.
Thank you for the incredibly interesting game and congratulations on the tournament victory; it is definitely well-deserved!!!
Added after 2 minutes
Also, thanks to the organizer for a very interesting tournament on an excellent template.