[Lord Ludwig]

I came to this game a bit late and did not, until last weekend, have a lot of time to spend on it so I am not exposing any new grounds here, but I want to share my experience. Having some experience with TL and AP, I went straight away for impossible no loss. As usual, at first the stakes seemed impossibly high, but this game never stops astonishing me with it sheer tactical depth and its vast array of possible approaches.

I went mage and defeated the first boss with the strategy brilliantly outlined by Dobrev using the basic troops. This unlocked the dwarven area where I found a couple of trolls, which brought me victory in another couple of boss fights. Using them only at night gave me also a couple of bounties.

A peculiar fight with the trolls was against the Kraken. I failed in a very annoying way the first time: having eliminated the third tentacle by round 255 I was surrounded by stacks of devilfish up to 1300+, who took down one troll after I had thus defeated the Kraken itself. So I reloaded, having realized I had made two mistakes. 1) I shouldn't have bothered protecting my unit in the first rounds, as long as the devilfish were less than, say, 500 they couldn't do enough damage to take me out. SO that made for more fire arrows and quicker elimination of the tentacles. 2) I should have left one troll at home. Since it's better to be surrounded by low-number stacks of devilfish, counterattacks by my unit were more trouble than anything else. On the second attempt, the Kraken went down around turn 130 and the fish quickly followed.

Having thus unlocked the elven lands, I decided to see if Hagrid was really that powerful. He was indeed. I found only 4 Ancient Ents, but they basically pulled me through the rest of the game on their own (I used them as a single stack, no other units to worry about) with only three battles posing some difficulty.

First there was the metamorph guy. Going with AE meant facing some 1000+ of them and being smashed on turn 1. So for only this battle I went with TH (no TW around) which made it easy.

Second "problem" was the dirller. Not the driller in himself, who went down fine, but he left 4 stacks of RD, and they kept replenishing their ranks faster than I could kill them. Looked like a classical Mexican standoff, but I found a solution in a spell I had always considered useless before: oily mist! In the cramped space of the tunnel bridge a few OM's forced the droids to stay in the spell area, after which my fire arrows finally did enough damage to take them out.

The third and last problem I had in the final battle. Baal's ranged attack was surprisingly easy to handle, I don't know if he's toned down in comparison to AP or if it was just the huge defense rating of my AE (among other items I obviously had the botanology diploma) but a stone skin and now and then a magic spring were enough to keep damage in check without even resorting to divine armor. The problem came instead from the summoned Archdemons. Since I had only 4 AE where my leadership allowed 10 or 11, they were constantly halving my unit. THis forced me to direct my poison skull attacks from Baal himself to the Archdemons, but, even if a couple of times my unit was reduced to only 1 AE hovering dangerously in the red health zone, the unit survived and Baal went down around turn 80, quickly followed by his summons.

All in all a very nice little campaign, finished at level 61 (not many suppressable items, double hand of necropolis but no AK scrolls), score of 1121. Attached the combat statistics screen (the only one I took).