Olmer123 wrote:
3) Fortress army isn't actually TAHT durable. It is the beastmaster who makes it. Especially Tazar is insane with his armorer. You actually need a HERO, not some good strategy (of course it is always welcome but...). Bringing a barbarian, or at least Mephala is imho very good idea. Then you'll find that the sheer force of Rampart may be enough (if you play good that is).
Experience sharing :
To get a better picture on the creatures involved, yesterday I played an old Thousand Island map. This map require you to kill a Fortress hero with his/her critters in the mid-south of the map.
I'm using Cyra, and by the time she reached lvl 18, a camp of 48 grand elves joined. By then Cyra already had attack skill of 16, she has no Archery, but Expert Water, Air (complete will all the spells you want to maximize her ranged damage) plus artifacts bow cherrywood and angel arrow (that's a +5 % and + 15% ) which I think compensates the lack of Archery skill.
I go to storm one Necropolis. Cyra was lucky to get it unguarded, but there's still around skeletons, zombies, and vampires. Using her skill, I cast Precision and shoot the zombies with grand elves. To my surprise, they can take only 20 zombies then despite the fact of all the enhancement I put them with. Of course, the zombies were behind the castle gate.
Later I take on one neutral demons. Cyra now has 18 attack but the grand elves were downed to 44. Blessed, they can take out 15 demons.
Storming the Fortress castle, I found it to be guarded by Tiva with 10 defense skill. Didn't know what skills she'd got. Her chaos hydra foolishly stand in front of the gate, and I blocked them with naga queens. I used 249 archmagi to put an end to the 35 chaos hydra. It didn't work. Blessed, they were able to kill only 7 chaos hydra. And that's without range penalty. I didn't even consider bringing along that 44 grand elves.
Unlike certain others, I'm not very good at calculating things. What I said was what happened in my experience, not in my calculator.
I'm sorry, but I get an impression that to say grand elves will simply take care of anything for Rampart is a bit of exaggeration (especially against Fortress). At least, they're not going to do that with sheer power.
And to say that Fortress creatures are actually not that durable is of course should be explained with what durability means in the first place.