Posts from How do I complete the final mission playing as Roland?

Thanks to those who advised me to rush to the center of the map to the castles with dragons! I just completed it using that method:smile03:, and I went there late (I don't remember exactly, but Roland already had a small army: 12 giants, 8 crusaders, 10 upgraded knights, 64 upgraded dwarves, and some others) and instead of completing mission 8, I completed mission 7 (where you have to find the crown).
In the end, I gathered dragons and titans and defeated all the enemies on the continent; however, Archibald's army was impressive (there were 48 black dragons alone:eek:).

By the way, did anyone else have a bug where the enemy (in my case, the green) hero teleported across the river north of the castle with the titans and got stuck in the desert near the pyramid? For almost the entire mission, he wandered around it and only "detached" when the green player had no more cities:D.

Here's the answer, a couple of years late! Of course, instead of going for the crown, we complete the mission to gather troops. Here, the question is whether the map unlock code and loading the save file are considered cheating, especially if the code is written on a signpost in mission 5. So, in the mission to gather troops, we rush directly to the Sorcerer's Castle, capturing a small number of stone, sulfur, and mine tiles along the way. Then, we rebuild it, clearing the path for the second heroes to gather resources, who can be recruited there. If we're lucky and some dragons join our party on the map, we'll end up with 36 combat points by the end of the mission, as I did. If not, we'll have around 20 after capturing the last castle, plus the rest of the army – which is also needed. In the final mission, we give Roland 15 dragons, which is enough to defeat any enemy without losses. We then divide the rest of the army between two heroes and rush in all directions to capture everything. In the direction of the Necropolis, my hero failed, but the others quickly arrived from the Sorcerer and Barbarian factions. The Barbarian Castle at the top was captured by the already built Barbarian army. After capturing all the castles, starting with the Sorcerer's, we gather the best troops, led by dragons, in a couple of weeks and easily defeat Archibald, who had far fewer dragons than I did. There was no Armageddon, and most of the enemy troops were controlled. In general, we use a gameplay strategy similar to the "genocide" plan in The Curse of the Serpent King. Quite a successful move is to capture a castle right under the nose of a strong enemy hero and set up nearby. The enemy takes the castle back and leaves part of their army in it, which helps in battle, if, of course, the enemy doesn't decide that they are too weak and doesn't stay in the castle...

That's strange, I've never had any problems there. I always took the crown after completing both storylines. Then, in the final, I gathered a few resources, checked the castles for the presence of a "portal," and that was it. It's even easier with Roland, as you don't need to travel a long path to reach Archibald; you can simply jump across the gaps (found by trial and error) on the left side of the map.