For many ages, the inhabitants of a small kingdom has relied on their powerful magic abillties to survive. As their new, young leader, will you continue this tradition in your quest to topple your might-orientet enemies, or will you use their own weapon against them?
Be warned though, only the best magician will prevail in ths quest...
Author: Dark_Elf, 25-03-2009 23:42 a great map! but to easy....i love chalenges...
and i played it with necromancer on impossible level...
the AI hoeroes traped on tho one way gate and refused to go back...so i run after them to have some fight without a real resson (7 dayes without a castle i'd win anyway....)
Author: Franzy, 09-03-2009 00:55 Review Story&Idea: 1/5
No real story, good old kill'em all Heroes3 style map. Idea is plain as it is... Nothing more to say.
Style&Design: 4/5
Good. A few flaws, but other than that nice classical design except that monsters are also used as a scenery part. Not if it's a very good idea though, but looks very fresh. Would look better if the author also disabled markers under creatures.
Balance&Difficulty: 4.5/5
Almost excellent. Played on hero, and it was really hard, especially the first grand battle with Biara who had twice as large army the moment we meet. Had to lure her to my castle, and kill her there (destoying catapult really helps). Only pack of my tans survived... Which were enough to kill other two enemies. Green was too stupid (left his castle and had no town portal to return. So I captured empty castle and just waited 7 days...), and yellow was too passive (just sit and his castle waiting for me).
The main difficulty is that you have limited creature growth: you can't build castles and you have no creature dwellings around your town at all (opponent have plenty of those in addition to castles). You can find grail later in the game, which helps a bit. Great thing is that you have to change strategy all the time. I've changed skills with mentor's help several times!
Map quality: 3/5
No scripts. At all. No secondary objectives either. This is not what we expect from a H5 map. It really looks like a H3 map on H5 engine. No quests, no story, no scripted events... Com'on, you have to use all the amizing possibilities the game gives you. Other than that, good. No bugs, no notable errors, just a few design glitches.
Replay value: high
You can choose your faction and your hero, so there is a high replay value. Also different factions should play differently. I believe the easiest faction to play is Haven (additional building, can upgrade creatures to compensate low growth). Then Dwarves (rune magic really helps, and the resources are abundant). The hardest would be Orcs. They can't use magic, and without it they have very little chance (as enemy numbers are overwhelming). They start faster (a lot of magic shrines around the town give a huge xp boost), but will surely have hard time beating the blue player. Magic dampening skills won't help them, as enemies represent MIGHT, and don't have good spells. Other factions are somewhere in between, with dark elves being the weakest after the orcs (destructive magic won't really help against 100+ stacks of devils and archangles).
Overall mark: 4/5
Very good map for experienced players who seek challenge and traditional old-school gameplay.
Hints: Black magic is a must have for every faction. You just can't win without Berserk and Dominate Mind here. Take War Machines, first aid, ballista and Destructive magic in the beginning. Ditch them later for dark magic using mentor. Light magic for all except necromancers and barbarians is also a good choice, provided you'll get a ressurection spell from shop or your magic guild. You absolutely have to avoid losses here.
Logistics is not really important on this map (very little chances to race against enemy heroes). You can take it in the beginning and exchange for battle skill (offence, defence, luck, morale) later, before the grand fight against main enemy forces.
Notes to map author:
1) Please place Boots of Fast Travel somewhere near main town or at least somewhere on the map. Map is large, and long walk are really annoying.
2) Blue player can reach tan keymaster without having red key. Not that he can reach tan borderguard, but still... :) Check the accessibility in the map editor.
3) Area with one-way teleports can be a real trap for enemy heroes. I'd suggest force-give town portal spell to all enemy heroes with scripts.
Author: Helena (Netherlands), 30-01-2009 23:02 Still a bit too difficult? It is a very well designed but also very difficult map. In fact, I could not beat the opponent heroes directly, I had to wait for them to come and try to beat me in my home castle which obviously failed. Only the last hero I could defeat in the open and just barely... To me this indicates that indeed it is a very difficult map.
Author: michael (U.S.), 27-01-2009 06:42 very good map the only prob was no team play but other than that it rocks!!!! Thaanks alot:P