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I played this map (u/s - hero) in 115 days.
My impression of the map is mixed – the plot is gripping and the design is magnificent :smile20: :smile20: , but unfortunately, there is practically no extreme challenge :( – almost all enemies are passive.
Let me explain in more detail:
During the first month, I visited the underground library, seized the city, and completed all city quests. Except, as it later turned out, for the simplest and most necessary one for the first stage of the game – "the showdown between traders." If I replay it, I won't complete it fully at the start – I pocketed 100 pieces and kept them until the very last stage of the game, because there is a catastrophic lack of money at the beginning, and the cornucopia is completely useless. I maxed out my main hero's logistics, "scholarship," and all types of magic except Light (basically, exactly what turned out to be needed for the walkthrough in the void).
In the first days of the second month, I wiped out the drug-den outpost and entered their lands. Thanks to high mobility, I slipped past the generals and captured their southern Castle, killing one of the auxiliary heroes inside. Both generals rushed to pursue me. My hero bypassed them to the east through the wastes, returned to the crossroads, and turned toward the northern Castle. While the female general was retaking the southern Castle—where a messy surprise of 7 ghosts awaited her—the male general rushed after me, but out of stupidity and immaturity, he handed over his main army to the female general and jumped at me with whatever he had left (an army about twice the size of mine). Meanwhile, my hero captured the drug-den northern Castle (finishing off the second auxiliary hero) and converted all creatures except the titan into undead. Then a battle with the general occurred; since I had mana to spare and my hero's "resurrection" worked better—in the end, the general was retired from service. I had to run around a bit with the female general and one titan, taking turns capturing one Castle then the other at the end of the week, harvesting creatures from them and sending them by caravan to my own city, which in turn sent caravans to the drug-den cities. My hero had to intercept these caravans and convert them into undead. As a result, by the end of the second month, my hero's undead army was comparable to the female general's army. When the danger level became "medium," I blocked her in a pit between the Castles and began accumulating troops to guarantee a total wipeout, while she showed little activity—contenting herself with guarding her iron mine and creature generators (without actually recruiting creatures from them).
The adventure essentially ended there, as the rest of the game consisted of running around the map and "beating up infants."
In the middle of the third month, my hero successfully took down the female general. I decided not to do the quest to convert the cities—on the contrary, I developed both drug-den cities to the limit. I kept waiting for aggression from the demons or orcs, but none followed. Since no one bothered me, I spent the next month capturing creature generators and mines in the drug-den lands and accumulating undead troops—which, as I later found out, was just a waste of game time. I thought that fierce resistance awaited me in the enemy lands (naive).
At the beginning of the 4th month, I realized with deep regret that the 7th dragon artifact had still not appeared in any of the controlled artifact shops (I got the first 5 and looted others in the first month), and I set out on a campaign to the demon lands. For the campaign, I gathered all the drug-den troops into one pile, and shoved the poor lonely titan into his home Castle, because he was like a suitcase without a handle—too pity to throw away (convert to undead), but inconvenient to carry. In a couple of weeks, I strangled everyone there without problems (including the boss); the only loss was 7 skeleton black dragons, and that only because the nasty demon near the underground Castle escaped before I could resurrect them. Then I headed to the orc lands and went straight to the Phoenix; I strangled him quickly and with almost no losses (5 ghosts). I had to struggle a bit more with the orc Castle, but there were no losses there either.
By the end of the third week of the 4th month, I returned to the drug-dens and took down their boss (losing almost one hundred and fifty ghosts—I couldn't resurrect them because the "resurrection" broke). After the victory over death, I foolishly began assembling a large army for the fight with the super-boss, which wasted another week, because the fight with the super-boss turned out to be quite simple (no rivers of blood or seas of suffering; rather, if they existed, they were only for the super-boss, who looked frankly pathetic)—I ruined his mood to "-8" with two rings and a spell, slowed him down, confiscated his mana with ghosts, and then locked him in a steel cage and hammered him with lightning. For fun, I brought along another hundred and fifty banshees so that their scream could help finish him off, and at the end, for complete humiliation, I resurrected everyone he had managed to kill on the first turn.
In the end, the losses from all battles were 152 creatures out of 3171 recruited, which is less than 5% of the accumulated army—quite a "dud" it turned out to be. :eek:
Though, of course, maybe if I had chosen the light side of the force instead of the dark, it would have been different.
I am attaching the battle replays with the bosses:
