Posts from Across the seas, across the waves.

What a mess, they beat me with Elves for the second time. A month later, Valeria showed up with a ton of resources and it was over. I'll try Necropolis.

I completed the scenario on the second attempt, playing as Vittorio, and finished in 216 turns. On my first try, I attempted to complete it as the Elves on Direll, but the lack of wood and a large army of mages disrupted my plans to complete this map in a non-trivial way . The beginning seemed interesting to me – tolerable starting positions, the presence of quests, and custom objects. The design is good; you can see that the author worked on the details, although there are some questions in certain moments. The enemies are moderately strong, which makes the game quite interesting at the beginning.
What I didn't like was the changed stats of the wolves, water elementals, and manticores. I believe that if you are going to change the stats of standard units, it is better to recolor them and give them different names so as not to confuse and have to reload the last save. I also think that sudden battles are a bad practice in map design. In cases where the second hero captures a sawmill without saving beforehand, and then a pack of buffed wolves with increased speed attacks you, it's unpleasant. I appreciated the creativity of adding custom music; it's a cool feature, although I like the original soundtrack written by Paul Romero even more. It's a pity that this feature works poorly, causing the music to overlap. All interest in playing disappeared after defeating 3 companions. I would cut out the segment where you have to find 4 companions underground without hesitation. Moreover, for some reason, the author didn't place a shipyard underground, so I had to wait for the dwarf to get off the ship so that I could take it over by summoning a ship. I didn't understand how to finish the map because I had the last task left – to survive. I hope the author will fix this bug.
In the end, the map is for those who like it (and I am one of those people). There are interesting ideas, a good map design, moderately difficult opponents, and quests. The author has room to grow, and I hope that in the future, new interesting maps will be released by this author. My rating is 6.5/10

Some of the map files are located in Maps/SingleMisssions/, and some in Maps/SingleMissions/1.0/ (the version without experiments). The map tag is configured correctly, so the map is visible, but relative paths to some of the texts may become incorrect in the future. So far, I haven't found any such bugs!

The design is excellent, there are enough scripts to prevent the map from looking static, and the battles are intense. For "Defeat All," it's definitely a 10/10.

I played through the map as the Hero; my opinion is mixed.

1. The map's landscape is excellent, 5/5.

2. The difficulty is moderate at the start (almost all of the starting neutral creatures for the Warlock turned out to be archers, which made the game more difficult), but it decreases to zero by the 3rd month of the game.

3. The AI is very stupid, which is unfortunately the biggest drawback of the map. They lose troops in wars against each other without a fight, simply running away. In the first month, the yellow and green players came to me, and I couldn't kill either of them. As a result, the green player killed the yellow player, and a week later, I was ready to fight the green player, but he ran away. Honestly, I was more surprised by something else. The fact that the Dwarf was defeated by the green player. How is that even possible? For reference, only the green player descended into the Dungeon through the right entrance. And what is confusing about this is that after descending into the Dungeon, it takes him a whole week, or even 10 days, to reach the castle through that entrance, but somehow he managed to run to the main castle, take it, and then run to the 2nd Dwarf castle in just three turns. A notification popped up saying that the brown hero had fallen, and after 3 days, the green hero appeared on my map, who had just taken the 2nd castle, and yes, it was him who killed the Dwarf, and he had a huge army. There was no one else in the Dungeon, and the central castle was green, and all the exits were blocked by garrisons. In general, it's an unclear moment. Also, it was strange that the Dwarf didn't capture his 2nd castle in 4 months; that's ridiculous. And the Dwarf has the highest unit growth rate, so I don't know how the green player could defeat him, even though I was periodically depriving him of troops.

4. The routes are long. It takes a lot of time to reach someone, especially if you need to catch them with multiple teleports. By the 3rd month, I wasn't afraid of anyone anymore, but it took me another 4 months just to catch all the heroes. I had Marauding skill maxed out, and it still took that long. The Elven artifact for sea range didn't work for me at all.

5. Interesting visual effects and scripts. Unfortunately, I only reached my island on the other side, where Tom Chaos is, on the 5th month, and that's when I saw the effect of the barrier appearing and then being burned. I hadn't seen that before. Also, I reached the Dungeon with 3 keys on the 6th month and was pleasantly surprised by the internal features, it's a pity that they can only be obtained at the end of the game, when they are no longer useful. By the way, the Manticore has some kind of problem with the math. For example: I had 7 Manticores with 120 attack, and their damage was 350-440. But, in a battle with neutral dragons, which were 400 in number, in groups of 4, I killed 100-110 dragons with one Manticore. That's ridiculous. As far as I know, the game mechanics limit the damage indicators. In the sense that they cannot inflict more than 100% additional damage from the difference in attack and defense. Given these stats, the Manticore should inflict 700-900 damage with an attack of 60 against the dragon's defense of 30, and that should be the maximum possible damage, but something is wrong here. The dragon has 220 HP, so it should die in the best case scenario, approximately 26-27 dragons, which means the damage was multiplied by 4.

I would recommend adding additional portals on the map so that routes can be shortened (I started using the teleport script on the 7th month to catch up with everyone, because it could continue indefinitely), adding beacons (there is only 1 for the green player), making the AI more difficult and reworking its logic, and ideally, it would be possible to combine heroes, such as 1x2x2 or 1x4, but in the second case, you would have to add a castle for the hero and set up garrisons for the possibility of development. And fix the bug with the Dwarf capturing the 2nd castle, or remove it altogether. So that the Dwarf captures it, or the game starts with two heroes. And yes, there are too many artifacts on the map, especially Dwarf armor. There were also a lot of dragon items, but only 1 cloak. Remove Sandro's cloak; it's useless. There are no neutral creatures with immunity that guard something valuable on the map, so you have to kill two legions of vampires, and the enemies don't have such units either. And yes, all the main quests don't end the game; after killing all the heroes and getting the Tear of Ash, the game doesn't end.

At the very least, preventing AI from fleeing battles is a matter of a single script line.

At a minimum, preventing the AI from fleeing battles is a matter of a single script line.

Maybe add shackles?

I replayed as Humans, and Vitya completed the map in 93 days. It's a wonderful map; it's a pleasure to play, and I wouldn't change anything; everything is in its place.