Posts from Walkthroughs for custom maps.

I don't understand. What prevents the necessary battles from being held during events?

bonus for morale and luck

Yeah, or place a cursed ground tile so it's not visible. And this is OBI, supposedly a sadist)) I stupidly didn't pay attention to the landscape during the battle with the Draconians and didn't understand at all why the morale wasn't increasing; we were fighting on grass...

And I definitely don't understand why an oasis should be disguised as a well. Of course, it's a matter of taste, and it might appeal to some, but I'm more than sure that true connoisseurs will mostly disapprove of such a blatant replacement of objects.

The game doesn't allow you to place mixed neutral creatures.

Campaign name: The Fantastic Four Returns
Author: Maxuta-Phoenix
Downloaded: from this post

The epic saga with yet another campaign by this author has finally ended. I played at a leisurely pace for a total of about a month of real time. If I compare it to "Risen from Hell", "The Fantastic 4" is both easier and harder. Easier because the individual missions are simpler, but there are more of them (12 vs. 7). Harder because they come in blocks of development across 5 different story branches, requiring you to unite all the heroes in the final mission of the campaign. In "Risen from Hell", all seven scenarios were a sequential development of the starting heroes.

The plot is fairly simple: there is a certain Lord Max, who has completely decayed from old age. So his friends decided to save him by rushing off to find the components of the Wizard's Well. Overall, there isn't a huge amount of text along the way, but it is presented in a very funny, witty style. The campaign's humor reminded me of jokes about Petka and Vasily Ivanovich. The author put particular effort into the names of the enemy heroes. At times, it was hard to keep from laughing.

The gameplay in the campaign is quite similar to "Risen from Hell", but the missions aren't as tedious and stressful, so I had more enjoyment playing. I won't describe all the scenarios in detail this time, but will briefly outline the walkthrough according to the story blocks.

Anastasia's Missions
1. Artyukha's Problems
2. Mountain Pass
3. In Search of a Way Out

Anastasia (Mephala) enters the game first. Her final goal is the search for the Amulet of Mana. The first two missions are perhaps the easiest of any I've played by Maxuta-Phoenix. In "Artyukha's Problems", you need to defeat the Dungeon heroes using troops from Castles (mostly cavalry). To do this, you'll have to fight several medium-difficulty battles to tip the power balance in your favor. You'll also need to jump into the underground using the Dimension Door to get the Cape of Speed. Notable: the loss condition is the death of an allied hero (!), who sits stationary in a town so that the AI can actually kill him. Otherwise, from what I've observed, the AI doesn't touch our roaming allies unless they block their path. Special attention needs to be paid to leveling the hero's secondary skills: this is a key point of the campaign, and you can only properly figure it out by studying the mission blocks beforehand. I'll upload my skill choices for all key heroes in the screenshots.

In the second mission, you need to deal with the Barbarians on the surface part of the map and the Ramparts in the underground, ultimately assembling an alliance of angels and delivering them to the only Tower on the map that cannot be lost to enemies (loss condition – losing the town, the most stressful loss condition in the game, in my opinion). The map reminded me of mission 3 of "Risen from Hell", there was also running around with Barbarians, but in "The Fantastic Four" the mission is simpler, though I still had to run a lot, as the map's landscape and the layout of colored border gates and monoliths significantly hinder the swift elimination of the Barbarians. Before finishing the mission, I fought through 4000 Azure Dragons in a head-on battle to level my hero up to the maximum level 35.

Next, we deal with that famous map "In Search of a Way Out". You have three months to collect the components of the Admiral's Hat, each guarded by 700 Black Dragons. Here, the leveling from previous missions will come back to haunt us fully, including the set of learned spells. A mandatory non-obvious skill: Eagle Eye for Resurrection. The generation of Dragon Utopias is of huge importance. The gameplay is built on the following principle: you need to visit tents in different corners of the map, while fending off enemies that pop up and recapturing free accessible towns along the way to avoid losing due to having no towns for 7 days. In the first few weeks, you can still fight off roaming heroes, but then they build up their armies, and we become a punching bag for most enemies. The action becomes unreal when the AI rushes from all sides to kill us, forcing us to maneuver with no room for error. All this time, we collect Minotaurs from caches along the way and try to steal the Minotaur growth in accessible enemy towns. By the way, Hypnosis was very useful on this map (access to Blind is traditionally limited until the final mission). Two moments stood out: 1) the battle defending a town where I re-hypnotized all enemy stacks and sent them to their deaths in the moat (it was problematic to kill them in melee due to the AI's Fire Shield buffs); 2) an artifact granting immunity to Hypnosis on one of the enemy leaders I also got lucky with the Necromancers' surface town generating Armageddon (I didn't intentionally generate it, and it helped a lot later).

Mission of Gena's Wife (Karasuchka)
4. Uprising

Lord Gena went to help friends search for artifacts to assemble the Wizard's Well, leaving the command of the Necromancer forces to his wife (Tamika) with her quarrelsome nature. The wife had a falling out with the Necromancers, as well as with the underground dwellers, who started a rebellion against her.

Overall, the mission looks suspiciously easy, and this hides the author's cruel intent: we will have to play against all the Necromancers we play through this scenario in mission 12. That is, we are leveling up our future enemies with our own hands! And you can level them so much that you'll have to restart the campaign from this very mission 4 if you learn spells like Flight and/or Dimension Door. I figured this out in advance, so I didn't level anyone properly, but the author still managed to surprise me. All those Necromancers went into mission 12 with the troops they had at the end of the map, which were legions of Skeletons and hordes of other undead

Missions of Lord Gena
5. Under Fire
6. Son of Saint Alexander

A fairly difficult branch. Lord Gena is an undercover agent. He seems like a Necromancer, but is actually serving the forces of good. In the fifth mission, you need to obtain the Angel Wings. The surface part of the map is the domain of the Wizards, and the underground traditionally belongs to the Dungeon. Both the Wizards and Warlocks caused a lot of trouble. The key to success is generating Pathfinding in the Witch Hut near the starting town and getting Logistics immediately on level-ups, otherwise we'll be killed quickly. Another important feature of the scenario is that enemy heroes can be re-hired by the human player, using the AI's leaders, and thus the map is controlled. The turning point is buying out one of two Resurrection specialists. But you need to remember that Lord Gena continues in the campaign later, so he needs to be maximally boosted on stats and secondary skills in this mission.

I blitzed through the sixth mission, as I didn't see a way to control the map, which I regretted for a long time. Above is the domain of our useless ally (again, you can't lose the allied hero, this time an active one), and the underground is hell both literally and figuratively. Several Inferno flags on a cramped map, all heroes powerful and mobile, and not available for us to rehire. The mission goal is to take the Talisman of Mana from the King of Hell. Since almost all towns on the surface belong to our ally, we have nowhere to get an army. So the plan was to break into the top-left corner, grab the level 4 Cons, and run straight to the King of Hell, placing Order of Fire flags in any Inferno we stumbled upon (I only visited about a third of the available towns). There's also a red sphere on the map guarded by Azures, probably a hint at a positional warfare option, but I didn't see its significant benefit.

Missions of Vasek Skull
7. When Vasek Skull is Sober
8. When Vasek Skull is Drunk
9. When Vasek Skull is of Sound Mind

From the author's description: "When Vasek Skull (Clancy) is sober, he tries to become governor. And if that means wiping out settlements of Dwarves and Elves, he'll do it, not even wiping the sweat from his bald skull." So, the story line of Vasek Skull begins with a punitive operation against the forest dwellers. Of course, they will resist with all their might. Overall, a fairly standard mission with a lot of running around (the map is L-size this time instead of the usual M). We visit tents in different corners of the map and engage in prolonged skirmishing with the AI. It's important to max out learning spells in towns on the map; secondary skills can be leveled however you want.

But the eighth mission really surprised me with its uniqueness. Vasek Skull became governor and went on such a bender that he woke up in a swamp, having forgotten all his secondary skills. On the way to the castle, events push secondary skills onto us, and these will be Mysticism, Diplomacy, Estates, Ballistics, Artillery, First Aid, Resistance, and Pathfinding. You cannot level up in this mission, and all these skills are basic. The most curious thing is that the most useful skill from the list is probably Mysticism, since there are no guilds in towns on the map, and the well in the accessible area takes all your money for visiting. Overall, the enemies aren't particularly extraordinary, but because our hero is a complete fool, I still had to put in considerable effort.

In the ninth mission, Death is chasing Vasek Skull. An enemy Necromancer with a huge advantage in stats, mana, and troops. And we need to kill him. The trick is that our main hero absolutely cannot do this, as we have no arguments for a conversation. The key to beating it is buying out auxiliary heroes and setting up dozens of ambushes for Death. The map itself is easy to control; you just need to skillfully level your secondary skills in this mission. It is especially important to take Scholar. This can only be done here, and it will be the path to teaching all heroes Resurrection and the rest of the magic in mission 12. Also, Vasek Skull picks up the last component of the Wizard's Well.

Missions of Lord Max
10. Don Quixote
11. Old Age is No Joy

Lord Max (Gelu) decided to unwind a bit while the others were collecting his Wizard's Well. The peculiarity of Lord Max's branch is that it's completely impossible to give him decent stats. He starts the game as the most pitiful weakling and ends the same way. In the first mission, Lord Max is looking for the Sandals of the Saint (so his feet don't sweat), and I had to artificially delay my progress to level up his secondary Sorcery skill in fights with the AI (!), because with a level 1 skill, the next mission was impossible. Total insanity. Also, mission 10 had the longest battle of the campaign – a three-hour capture of a Dwarf dwelling using 9 Snipers and 3 Horses. A million restarts due to Dwarves' morale on the grass

I liked mission 11 even more than the third. The goal is to build a Capitol! This map takes the crown as the poorest map in Heroes away from Limes Inferior. You'll have to cherish every stone and piece of wood, moreover, generate stone at the single Ore Pit on the map, and convert gold into wood at one of the external markets. And all around, there are Rogues roaming. Literally. There are dozens of Rogue recruiter dwellings on the map, and you'll have to destroy very, very many of them before you scrape together enough for the Capitol. Rogues with Ballistas are especially scary

Finale
12. Revitalization

The Fantastic Four are assembled. You need to simultaneously establish order in four local areas. The mission starts with a verbal spat between the four and Karasuchka, after which we see who one of our enemies will be. Here, surely most players experienced real shock, as the probability of having to replay the campaign from mission 4 is quite high, and we see this immediately at the start of mission 12. I was also stunned that the Necromancers came into the mission with their undeleted armies, which I couldn't even suspect, as the campaign editor is still a dark forest to me in such matters.

The mission is very difficult and extremely elaborate. Definitely the hardest in the campaign. It took me several days to think over a plan before I even sat down to play it. You need to distribute the four heroes to different zones through one-way monoliths. The enemies in the zones vary in strength, and through testing I had to determine who could fight in which zone. The largest zone belongs to our Necromancers, and the other three are Bogu (all heroes with high Defense), Barbarians (moderately strong), and Dungeon (the toughest, with tons of mana for spamming elementals). The locations are difficult in terms of logistics. In all zones, the towns behind the brown tent are not capturable. To visit the brown tent, all 4 heroes must simultaneously leave their zones and defeat an insanely strong hero in a Tower, then return via the buyback to the four zones. And the return issue is very delicate. For this, you'll have to use the remaining four completely fresh zero-level heroes. In the Dungeon and Barbarian zones, these helpers must capture the enemy central town behind the brown tent. You must time it so that no heroes are defending in both cases, as they are all well-leveled and won't be defeated by our weaklings. In the Bogu zone, you need to drag the weakling from the start and protect him at all costs until he reaches the island with the Tavern and digs in there. For the Necromancers, the fourth hero reaches the Tavern without much trouble once the other return issues are resolved. Also, on my map, the Barbarian hero Banzai was jumping around like a mountain goat using the Dimension Door. He even jumped into the Bogu zone once and killed my helper near the Tavern. I had to roll back a couple of days so Banzai would change his route.

In connection with all this, you need to perfect the balance. There is very little income on the map, so you'll have to rack your brains over where and which troops to gather so that the weaklings can later capture the central towns simultaneously, and we can defeat the Dragon in the Tower. This Dragon really surprised me: stats of 80 against our best heroes' 20-30, nearly a thousand mana, all schools of magic, spells for every taste, 45% resistance, and Tower troops with the Grail built. I barely killed him with Mephala in the middle of the second month. The battle's difficulty is on par with the particularly crazy fights from Metataxer, with gradual exhaustion of shooter ammo, mana exhaustion on the verge of collapse due to elemental spamming, Armageddon through resistance, and finishing off Golems with Minotaurs, which I had to think to gather in the first place. And this is in a campaign from 2001!

Anyway, the plan came together smoothly. The result: 2100 points for completing the campaign and an Archangel rank.

The screenshots show the skill development for all heroes. For Lord Gena, ideally, I would have taken Navigation instead of Eagle Eye, but I realized that too late, and I managed to manage without it anyway. As I already wrote, I liked this campaign more than "Risen from Hell". Some of the author's ideas are mind-blowing, although the principle of mission design is still more or less similar, which slightly detracts from the overall positive impression.

I agree with this. I've always been against objects with altered interfaces. It's fine when there are only 1-2 of them on the entire map, or if they serve a decorative function, that's okay. But when there are many of them and the entire map is filled with them, it's too much.

Replaced objects have their reasons. In the case of the well, the question is: can the well only replenish mana? What about restoring energy, which is quite inherent to water? To hint at this to the player, I placed an event along the way with a message indicating this action. Decorations also have their place and significant reasons. I fully justify the seer's hut being in the form of an elven house; an elf winemaker lives there. The seer's hut in the form of a forge, because there... *drumroll*... a blacksmith works! Doesn't it seem to you that a blacksmith should be closer to a forge than to a mushroom-shaped house, for example? I won't even mention the straw hut – it's like a blacksmith who is a masochist and a suicide. The Pandora's box with mana in the form of a bottle on the surface of the water also makes perfect sense.

It's just a matter of habit, gentlemen. Nothing more.

Looking for a solution

Simply crushed them with brute force. There were attempts to do it in the 3rd month, but there wasn't enough power.

I don't know if anyone is interested in reviews of simple maps, but I'll leave mine anyway. If you're interested, I can write about other maps I've completed as well.