Walkthroughs for custom maps.

However, I (and others) are very interested in another important question: how many in-game days did it take to complete the game?
Regarding the number of creatures in armies, the length, and the tediousness of battles, I can say that this is a common practice among authors to give players a sense of the enemy's power and the satisfaction of victory, although I don't like the mindless repetition of the same actions, especially if you make even a small mistake (for example, miss the moment when the blindness effect wears off on an enemy stack), you have to start the battle over (or put up with unreasonably large losses). There seem to be RPG maps where you can't recruit troops at all, and you have to complete each battle optimally, otherwise it's impossible. I can't name one off the top of my head (I haven't played any like that yet), but I remember that in the description of one map, it says exactly that.

Here, it's more important to think about the amount of real time spent (the battles are terribly long, both with and without ranged attacks)...
And, of course, I forgot to mention that I defeated the last enemy at the end of the 10th month of the game, and the game was completed at the beginning of the 11th month...
It could be done faster, but I decided to prepare more thoroughly for the campaign against the orange faction, and then I also made a few mistakes when the orange Necromancer faction invaded through portals, and I lost a lot of time there (about a month was spent chasing them because of the one-way portals - I didn't save before jumping after the enemy), because at that time, I could only defeat the orange main heroes (Yorogoss, Josephine, Vandroy) with Vael and azure dragons, so I had to chase after the last one... And replaying from earlier saves was just too much of a hassle, so it could have been finished earlier...

Unfortunately, author-made maps often "suffer" from having an uncountable number of creatures.....

But in reality, the true difficulty of a map lies in its openness and dynamics: it is much more difficult to complete a map if it is open to all sides (there are no guardians of passages, strong defenses, etc., i.e., the computer attacks us, and we have to quickly defeat it) and if reinforced enemies attack us from all sides, which requires us to split our attention and play several heroes with troops simultaneously... In my opinion, the idea of a difficult map should be like this, and it should all be combined with good design and some kind of plot....
While I was writing this response, I had an idea-suggestion for the quest with the Sphere of Vulnerability: if you require it to be delivered to the city portal, and then pick up the portal scroll right before the final battle, it might be more interesting: you would be without the sphere for the last battle, but on the other hand, it would be easier because you could bring in additional troops from many cities))

Yes, mistakes are a huge problem, because replaying a 40-minute battle is...

I don't know when and about which map I will write next, and I will always be happy to read about your playthroughs of author-made maps!

Added 15 hours 39 minutes ago

I found a "tasty-looking" map called "Dunkler Horizont," also in German (and there's a lot of text!). I really liked the abundance of everything: monsters, objects, and so on. I tried to play it and translate it on the fly, but I couldn't complete it, I failed. It's a shame. I thought the main difficulty would be with the translation. In general, even after looking at it in the editor, I can't figure out how to do it: either you need a very high level of skill, or you need to set the difficulty to a lower level, or I missed something. Whatever the Secret Author's Intention, I didn't understand it. In any case, by the 3rd month, the enemies start attacking from 3 sides at once, and there is nowhere to run... Maybe someone will figure out how to do it?

I decided to try to figure out this map, but I immediately had a question: which of the 2 maps do I need to play???
There are two maps in the archive....