New Beginnings → Driving for the Boots

[Grail Quest]

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[Grail Quest]

Before week 2, build Homesteads. On the first day of week 2, build Upgraded Homesteads and use them to kill the stacks in your area. Best combined with Gem and Expert Earth and Water magic, which lets you use Forgetfulness against ranged attackers, and Slow against all targets. Try not to lose any Grand Elves since castle towers will kill enough of them later. As you probably do not have 7 types of creatures, split the Grand Elf stacks so that you need not commit a large stack to picking off small enemy stacks (sometimes 20 or so creatures will come at you in seven small stacks).



This map may be impossible on more than Normal Difficulty. Even on the easiest level, it can be an even fight if you don't use your resources strategically. The reason is Red has many castles, and by the time you penetrate their area (past the green border guard), they may have built up a lot of Dragons.

I played on a harder difficulty once, and was heading down to their area with 3 Bone Dragons, but one of their heroes was coming up with (among other things) a mix of 24 Bone and Ghost Dragons! I cheated to have a look at their castles -- EVERY ONE was either fully built or nearly fully upgraded.

The border guard protects you from being overwhelmed, and it is easy to be overwhelmed unless you can destroy their main stacks without too many losses. You simply cannot out-build the Red faction, and if you have fallen behind in the early game in assembling an army, you will probably lose.

Something you can do is invest in getting the Town Portal scroll and hopefully by now either Gem or Clancy or both have Expert Earth Magic. Another thing is to build only money and resources in the neutral Rampart towns you captured. Do focus on building up the Necropolis that sits just before the bottleneck to the Red area. If you don't have Expert-level Town Portal, you can emergency-buy troops there to fight off incursions into your area while your Rampart army penetrates their territory.

If you can generally hold out against purchases until early in the week (that is, after the Treasuries have given you interest on accumulated gold), you may be able to field one strong and one weak army.

If you try to build all Ramparts to produce troops, you can probably do so, but will likely not have enough money to buy them anyway. And without Expert-level Town Portal, they may be too far to send timely reinforcements. Nevertheless, even if they only have Forts, you may wish to build Homesteads, as Grand Elves are absolutely priceless.



Quest
Edited on Wed, Jun 13 2007, 10:58 by Grail Quest

[belle_wag]

Clancy doesn't carry over to another campaign, but Gem does.

[fargus]

Just wanted to say this map is definitely possible on higher difficulty than normal. I beat it on Expert and I'd wager it can be done on Impossible with the right preparation.



If you played the last 3 maps correctly your heroes should be Expert in all or almost all of skills and have decent stats. To do the beginning of this map i used Grand Elves, with Dwarves and Centaur to block using expert tactics. By using offensive spells like lightning bolt, and magic like expert slow you will be easily able to clear your area with Gem's casting ability. In fact, you can defeat the pink player during the 2nd to 3rd week this way and that is exactly what I did. Defeating him early you get a lot more income, I built up two rampart castles and used Necropolis for resource silo and gold.



Now the real key to winning this map is basically strong spells, Expert Earth being a must for the town portal scroll they give you. Since he has so much creature dwelling, if your spells are strong you will more than compensate for army - Destroy Undead, Implosion, for example. I had expert earth and air magic - however I was lucky enough to get Armageddon from the previous map. Therefore I made it my immediate priority after taking out pink player to get gold dragons. You can start to take from the green dragon dwelling during 2nd week and this helps your dragon count a lot. After getting town portal, Gem had an army of only Gold Dragons and could just town portal, face enemy hero, Armageddon, and win repeatedly, using mage guild to refill mana. Clancy used all other Rampart troops, this way I fought on two fronts. This method is extremely strong, and probably a little cheap to be honest. However if you're looking to beat it on higher difficulty then this is the way to go. I even cleared the topia in the bottom left before the comp did and got some nice relics, making the final fights rather a breeze. Hardest part about this map was the frustrating cover of darkness probably

[fargus]

double post, sorry
Edited on Thu, Jun 17 2010, 20:41 by fargus