Stuck on Heroes III Lone Knight map by Hans C.

[cjlee]

I have been playing H3 again recently, and am having difficulty with The Lone Knight, a map by Hans C.

You play Prince Jasca, a necromancer trying to win back the world and rescue his parents and benefactor.

After 2 months I have hardly gotten anywhere. In particular I can't seem to find enough neutrals to kill. My skeleton stack is miniature. All factions of my foes are much too strong for me, with roughly equal stats and vastly larger numbers. Using cheat code reveals that they have as many castles and horde buildings as me if not more, so I'm not going to outgrow them. I'm pretty much run out of neutral stacks to convert into skeletons, and all unconquered territory lies behind some barrier that I can't beat unless I kill (or severely defeat) the computer faction guarding the keymaster tent or portal.

If anyone has tips on this map, I hope to hear them!

[Pitsu]

I understand you already got on water? Your aim is then to explore areas behind white borders first. Also light blue key may be helpful to invade enemies via their backdoors. And do not be afraid of losing ground. Perhaps try not to lose two starting towns, but all other towns will most likely be recaptured several times. With logistics, movement arties, admirals hat and town portal you should be able to wage guerilla war and pick battles with weaker AI heroes while avoiding strong ones until your armies grow.
hope it helps.

[cjlee]

Thanks for your reply Pitsu; I also figured that out on my own. I think it was some hint from the mapmaker via in game messages that made me think about exploring the water zones behind my 'safe' white borders.

I'm really impressed by HansC's genius. In most maps, the water has nothing apart from wood and the occasional border guard tent. Here he created a whole string of towns and isolated them from the mainlands but linked them by a separate portal, so they are their own world by themselves.

Turns out I was doing pretty well. Took eight months. There was some severe abuse of a strategy that I try to avoid whenever possible - the hire and fire strategy, basically sending someone to armageddon or meteor shower the enemy, retreat, rehire and do the same thing again. I think I re-hired at least 50 times on this map.

One thing I don't like about big mapmaker-created events: they can hurt game balance. After I'd finished I looked in the map editor and found that the computer player gets a huge bonus after 6 months. IE it suddenly gets much harder to win if you're attacking the final boss at the start of month 6 with the troops from 5 months. If I'd played this really quick like some of the people on maps4heroes.com, I could have finished this under 6 months. But since I arrived at the final boss at the start of the 7th month, the final boss had his huge bonus, and I couldn't beat that. I was forced to spend the rest of the month basically revisiting level up Trees while waiting for troops to grow.