Posts from The Necromancer's Path.

Subjective opinion. As they say, I've had enough. Once again, I downloaded a map. We start: a bare city, no mana, high threats all around; by the second battle, I took the ghost tower, and after that, who knows what to do—I'm just getting mowed down. You need gold, you need resources; you have to be a telepath to know how to play this, where to go, where to level up, otherwise it's a cloud of reloads and restarts from the beginning of the game. Why do you do this? What's the point? To put the player on their knees right from the start? Unless they are a mega-pro hardcore gamer, of course. Who is this game for? For what purpose? To study mathematics? Let us power up; it's just not interesting to play as a weakling without mana, without stats, without troops, without skills, and then you can crank up the difficulty. I am almost sure that if I waste a bunch of time on tedious, boring, monotonous leveling, another game will begin, and the balance will change radically—it'll become easy and uninteresting, possibly. But this headache at the beginning....
So I realized that this is the first map in the author's series; no point in trying further.

It happens.

This is a turn-based RPG first and foremost; regardless of the plot, gameplay comes first—or the story would have to be an absolute bombshell for one to ignore the gameplay, which is probably unrealistic given the game's capabilities.
Now imagine if the original had been released with this level of difficulty by default: where would the game be in the ratings, in history, who would even play it...
There's some kind of contradiction here: we are creating a story, but to actually play through it, you have to set the turn speed to maximum to reduce the time spent on battles with unit splitting, fast-forwarding, replaying, reloading, and installing Cheat Engine for "full immersion," so to speak. This simply forces one to set the turn speed to maximum in the settings, which is something I don't want to do...
Nothing personal, just IMHO. This is a critique not of this mod specifically, but of many similar ones.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

Food for thought.. I hope Take the Journey map; is it difficult? Yes. Is there a plot? Yes. Are there quests? Yes. I didn't finish it, but I played it a lot and saved my progress; it has replayability, and besides, it's not completed yet. Of course, not everything there is perfect, the quests are probably simpler—I can't really compare because in this map I can't develop properly while over there I can; it's interesting there, and it doesn't get easy over time despite the lack of a headache at the start of the game like here...

I shall pass your wisdom on to descendants.

And what if I write something more? Go on, have the last word)) To the same...

So, I fell ill, lying in bed with a fever, wondering what to do. And then it hit me: illness is associated with undead, and where is the coolest undead? That's right—in Heroes! And since I love replaying your scenarios for a second time, Astral, I decided to revisit the legendary "Necromancer's Path" and run Arantir around the map. But because my sickness made me doubt my mental faculties (and I hadn't played Heroes seriously in almost half a year), I decided not to show off and play it on a slightly more lite difficulty (specifically Veteran), while also finding out how big the difference is between Veteran and Hero

Month 1: The first week was simple: slowly clearing the surroundings where I could afford to, and as a true follower of Ashan, I sent my loyal companion Zoltan on a dangerous mission—specifically to "communize" the Cloak and the cursed Skull from the swamps, which he successfully accomplished. However, the second week left me in shock... Why shock? Because it was nothing other than Union Week (x3 unit growth, gold, and resources). Apparently, Ashan herself decided to give me a gift, and along with her will, she blessed this campaign for success. Realizing I couldn't miss such a chance, I immediately set out to capture every dwell I could reach. 3 ghost towers, two graveyards, a crypt, and a Necropolis outpost (all with x3 growth)—all this beauty gave me an army of absolutely brutal proportions for the second week + I managed to build liches and vampires in the town. Naturally, after such rapid troop accumulation, I immediately started clearing mines, stats, etc., etc.; essentially, my third week was economic. On the 7th day of the third week, Giovanni came to me; his army corresponded to what it should be on "Hero" (I assume thanks to Union Week), but since I was also seriously buffed, I managed to wipe out Giovanni losing only 50 skeletons and 30 ghosts.

Months 2-3: By the start of the 2nd month, leveling was going quite well, but there was one drawback—very little mana. The extra stats from "Education" simply told my precious knowledge to get lost, so much so that with Magic Attraction and a Hell Helmet providing +3 Knowledge (which I constantly had to wear instead of the skull just to have some kind of mana pool), I only had 105 mana, which is quite sad considering there are two characters here with Darkness and Summoning blocks. After clearing the map a bit more, I decided to head into Giovanni's lands to catch some stats and capture a couple of mines and dwells. I wandered there for about a week, and then Benedict appeared on the map. With the words "here we go!" I returned to town. The army was there, 5th guild was there, Phoenix, elementals, berserkers, subordinates, dispersion—everything was there. Besides the summoning block, it turned out Benedict also had Death's Step, which meant I had to be a bit careful with griffins and seraphs, but the battle was won with a loss of only 7 liches (I had as many as 61, so no big deal). Immediately after him, that same hated Kagrag appeared on the border (who in the past made me burn quite badly). I decided to go out to him and discovered that in the open field he refuses to fight me and runs away, but I lured him with my "six" and wiped him out in the open, although I lost 200 skeletons there. Well, while they were out of action, I had the opportunity to visit Patchwork. I completed his quest—sent him back to Nar-Shein and sent Caspar instead to loot everything that was in that canyon where Patchwork pushes us. Somewhere halfway through, Kagrag appeared again and started chasing Caspar. With Caspar, I stood at the very end of the canyon, stalling for as much time as possible (since at that moment I had gone into a portal for stats and the Tome of Darkness). Kagrag killed Caspar and... got stuck. I managed to snag mentorship and level up my "sixes," kill Giovanni three times, lock him up (by giving the cloak), kill Benedict a second time, and even cross the border, but Kagrag just stood there. Okay, I captured the city—even both of them—but the barbarian continued to stand motionless in Patchwork's canyon! I thought about leaving him there until the end of time, with his legion of goblins, a crowd of kentos with wargmoncers, a hundred shamans with executioners, and his 20 cyclops. But even so—I shall show mercy in the glory of Ashan and rid the poor fellow of eternal stagnation in this cursed place.

Months 4-6: There's nothing to talk about here. Vacuumed the map, did side quests, gathered one own "meat" in 3 castles. Visited Vessel, broke his face; visited a second time, drank some tea. And gave a good thrashing to the arriving Bertram. Blue elves are scary of course, but 7k skeleton archers with unicorn horn bows are even scarier)

In general, thanks again to Astral for such interesting maps—every walkthrough in one way or another remains unforgettable!

You're welcome!