Posts from The Necromancer's Path.

I played the latest version and was pleasantly surprised by the improvements, which made an already good map even better. First and foremost, this applies to the gameplay. The constantly respawning enemies with a lot of hit points behave very aggressively and don't let the player relax, which gives the game a special drive. As a result, I completed the map with a hero, though not without difficulty, in 127 days (and received a Thunderlord as a reward). I must admit, the latest version is more difficult than the initial one (before, I could complete it in 100 days). Thank you to the author for their work and creative approach.

The map is excellent, I liked everything, just one question - what's wrong with this Giovanni?)) Okay, he works his shift, attacking every two turns like a model Soviet worker, without missing a single one, let him be. But why does this hard worker's army constantly change during the game? I mean: he attacks my chaotic cockroach, loses half his army... but when my turn comes, his army is already different. Sometimes he adds liches, sometimes dragons, or some other random units. It's not like he's calling in reinforcements from the castles for mana - no, he always has full mana. It's not that it helps him much, but I've never seen anything like it)

Yes, that's exactly the problem – I'm playing without balance mods. There's only one of your maps in the maps folder. I watched a video walkthrough of your map on YouTube:
There, under your guidance, a guy named Remix plays through the map. But he plays through the old version of the map, v0.2 beta, from September 1, 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzJr53T2-uY

That version is very different from the latest one, as you made many changes and improvements that directly or indirectly affected Giovanni and the blue player.
In particular:

v1.1 (09/26/2018)
— Giovanni's Education has been replaced with Leadership.
v1.2 (12/09/2018)
— The number of days Giovanni is blocked has been reduced from 28 to 21, and the cost has been increased from 35,000 experience to 45,000. Also, experience is now taken from the hero who activated the event, rather than a fixed amount from Arantir.
— The "Raise Dead" spell has been removed from Arantir's champion heroes at the start, but they have been given "Slow" instead.
— Arantir's champion heroes, as well as Lucretia from Giovanni's champion heroes, are now "immortal" and always return to the tavern.
— The strength of the blue AI has been increased, and several additional scripts have been added for its main heroes and cities.
— The blue AI no longer visits Giovanni's lands.
— Giovanni becomes stronger at a certain point in the game.

There were many other changes that ultimately affected the walkthrough, making it more difficult. For example, Giovanni comes to me exactly every 15 days.
In the old version that Remix played, he appeared after a month. At the same time, he was much weaker in terms of army and stats.

I like it. After the stressful previous one, this is much better. It's also important to me that I really dislike those fat, short creatures, and here we have my favorite faction, which is the easiest to play with two heroes (all the meat goes to the secondary hero until mentoring is available, and the guards can take care of themselves). There's a fountain! The only thing that bothers me is the wandering monk with a reward of 9000. For that much money, giving him something at this stage of the game is pure volunteer work. The bosses weren't a problem and were defeated on the first try without any difficulty (I completed the last one without any losses, on the previous one I lost about 200 ghosts, but I didn't replay it). The map is designed for mentoring (the quest for necromancy clearly indicates this), and with mentoring, Giovanni is not a problem, although the fact of his existence is unpleasant in itself. It's better not to finish off the Orc right away; you can level up on him, just don't scare him with too much meat. Just to clarify, this is on Veteran difficulty (I'm preserving my sanity, and I don't like playing author-made maps of high difficulty on Hero mode - I often have to replay them). It's beautiful. The inaccessible zones are excellently implemented; usually, if you can't go somewhere, there's absolutely no life there (it's like solipsism). Thank you, it's great that I somehow missed such excellent maps before, and I hope I haven't played the next one yet. Giovanni must die... I really want to - that vampire brat is annoying.

The hut is probably an unnoticed oversight. I'll fix it soon.