As for the single archdemon, you can clear whole debir while heavily working on the medals. you should have trap 3 before fighting for verona scroll after clearing first 3 islands and most of rusty. Don't forget when playing demon line-up, I , eventough i did not do any quests in newly opened areas, i had access to demon army+demonologists. As i said earlier, you have to play super conservative, generally never go forward with your army, use summons from demonologists + demons, range attack from demonologists, scoffer imps, hit-and-run tactics with archdemons, clever spells with mage - fire arrow for burning big stack, fear spell on big stack, slow, dragon kick, anything that will stop enemy to hit you and if it happens, be it only one stack, so ressurecting is manageable.
As for the general no loss impossible start. No kitting means you do not get new continent scroll without fighting "stationary" creature stack guarding it. But you can do anything else - get treasures, lure enemies etc.so what i do at the very beggining is get easily accessible Bolo & Scarlet scroll, go to Bolo, get amulet of illumination from behind the robot G...something, get all possible leadership rods everywhere, back to debir. With your leadership get 3 or so paladins, go to scarlet, fight the skeletons to get archmagi from the tower. Now you have 4 archmagi - split them into four single archmagis + paladins. Back to debir and start serious fighting. This army will be enough to finish off debir believe me, while you cast only magic shield with archmagi, paladins do the killing, hero casts traps + stone skin, archmagi also move enemies onto traps. Pet dragon for mana acc. + treasures+kick on traps. Even some stacks in Scarlet you can defeat with this army, just increasing number of paladins. Eventually you can have paladins + 3 slots of archmagi + inquisitors (for rage generation). You should hit trap 2 ,guardian 2 , grand strategy 2 fairly quickly, don't forget to heavily "abuse" every single fight in debir aiming for 3-4 traps/fight + 20-25hits on guardian medal. keep pushing for trap 3, by then you should be close to guardian 3 as well. These two perks are very helpful. Once done with them, you can have the army set up you like. Many folks like to get to Zig-zag cave quickly as well, but for some reason i don't
As for my latest challenge being insane
. I honestly did not use kb scanner. I found a black dragon on rusty, which was a bit disappointing because it made many things easier, but i could not resist to take it