Favorites, to battle! - 6 - The Battle of Favorites! - 6

18.02.2014 bRitvo4kA (blue, Rampart, Ivor, Ivor) def Wowa (red, Necropolis, Thant, Sandro), 2sm4d(2), 223

Thanks for the game!

the most interesting match I’ve played in recent times and out of all the ones I’ve played on SM in general!))))

Necropolis without Gosh has become a pretty sketchy town, except on those templates where it has enough time to ramp up)) but it’s precisely those templates that the opponent cleverly cut off :) we settled on an SM template, where anything can happen.... but it generated the worst possible layout -- 1 day from the opponent’s main to his secondary and less than a day from the secondary to my respawn! :D
I knew this, and even deviated slightly from the path myself and broke through one of the guards on the opponent’s secondary! the thought of doing a meeting rest kept bothering me, but taking an external dwelling of liches and a Pandora’s box with 10K gold, which allowed me to build cavalry in the castle, weakened that thought, and in the end it was simply time that decided it, I didn’t want to replay a week’s worth of game :)
even though I saw the taken external dwelling of monks and that they would surely be built up))
when the 2nd Ivor finally targeted me, I tried to set up a trap on my home turf -- I had a cloak +2 speed and the liches would move before the grand elves -- but the pointy-eared leader ran right past.... I think and decide to run to the blue home, breaking their chain and cutting off their supply line, and in my own main, behind castle walls, try to hold out with Thant
I failed to do either -- the wolves there were sped up by stables, and at home there was no gold left for buying troops, so 15 elves, 20 monks, 6 pegasi, and a hard-hitting sharpshooter, supported by an energy-devouring creature that included marksmen, dealt with the half-purchased garrison faster than the castle towers could shoot them all :(
and it also seemed that Sandro ran into a dead end, since the enemy wolves were sneaking through another passage -- so I returned to him, having killed a couple of blue units along the way
but my units were also killed (especially poorly, I wasted Gurni, it seemed that units were running at him with 1 health)
and when Sandro finally reached the secondary, he was the only active hero left! then, while the opponent explored my former holdings, I barely managed to build up, with the help of animate dead and energy drain from the former blue towns I took a level-3 Dragon Utopia -- it gave total junk: a bag of gold, red boots, and a water spell book :smile51:
I take a shield to round out the 4 stats for phoenixes and break into the castle for mana
well then I wanted to cut the blue chain, broke through a guard object, but was just a bit too late -- Ivor breaks through to the treasure zone where a Dragon Utopia was revealed, and the supply wagon managed to leave with him :( I rushed after him, but when I realized I wouldn’t catch up, I went to finish off my own treasure zone, where a triple Dragon Fly Hive was revealed
before that, I tried to take back my main with a wolf carrying artifacts and part of the army bought from the blues, but the wolf had too little mana :( as a result, the surviving single units with 4-5-6 HP held the castle -- I desperately lacked the ballista that I could have passed, but simply forgot :mad:
but what decided it wasn’t that, but the treasure zones: mine, huge, covering half the map, had nothing besides the Dragon Fly Hives (there were 2 Dragon Utopias in the very bottom corner, and I’d have to go around mountains too, but by then I had no castles, and if I had gone for them, I would have died in that treasure zone)
while the one Ivor escaped to was conveniently compact, and it had EVERYTHING!!! both a KV and a Pandora’s box with the entire 4th level on the way to it, and a couple of Dragon Utopias, including a maximum-level one with a universal gentleman’s set: KZ, a teapot, a red orb, plus +10SP as a bonus
with artifacts like that, it doesn’t even matter that almost no army remains, gathering one on the map is a piece of cake, and by that time Sandro was sitting deep in the treasure zone
so the FF was a formality thanks to the red sphere, without magic Ivor’s stats couldn’t be countered by anything :cool:

GG, thanks to the opponent for a very interesting game :smile20: