I suspect you wouldn't have gotten as far as you might have thought in hurting the High Men. Pretty much every High Man mook has True Seeing, so they could see you at the tower (and they almost certainly saw the battle for the tower). I didn't really register it at the time, but thinking back, Jyri took up a very good defensive position in case your leader attacked. I think the entire water route from that tower was blocked by High Men troops; you'd have to deal with their entire land army if you attacked the seeing pool, and they had two adjacent dragon ships if you attacked the water.

Speaking for myself, my leader would have taken one look and noped right on out of there.

My hero had 10 att, 10 dam, and 10 def, and I think he had the Holy Champion helmet on too. Your leader was strong, but my hero had the better stats and he had some back up to try and distract your leader from attacking him.

Assuming you didn't pick up a new items since the Hell Hound, you did a good job hiding your full power. However, your leader was already rather scary even then.

It is a very interesting map, and there are a LOT of little tricks that can come into play.

Speaking for myself, I'm not all that fond of making all the power spells available to everyone so easily. It reduces uniqueness, and (again, speaking for myself) I feel a little bit cheated when I see that a bunch of just my spells seem to be available to everyone. "So, everyone can buy Haste and Great Eagles, but I don't get access to Stone Skin or Bless or Fury or any of their good spells? Bah."

The only Air spells that really matter are Haste and Great Eagle at the lower levels, and situationally Freeze Water. if you leave Wind Walking in the middle as well, then Air kind of gets shafted, since everyone has all its good spells but it doesn't have anyone else's good spells.

The Mastery spells are prohibitively expensive, and making all of them available to anyone lets each player choose whether and where to invest. Alternatively, make the various neutral spells (ex. Town Gate) available in the middle, then players can choose whether to spend research and time or whether to spend gold to acquire them.

I'd actually suggest giving everyone Fire Sprite instead of Fire Halo. Fire Sprite isn't a great summon, but it can get past the lava without also allowing the player to make any/all important units immune to Fire spells/damage. The High Men and Undead will have a little more trouble managing the unit, but High Men have liberal access to True Seeing (strips one of the big leader defenses on this map) and Undead have easy access to Spiders and Animate Ruins.

Huh. That's kind of interesting; not sure how it will play out. I almost like having a transport ship be the initial boat though, because it makes the player choose how much risk they want to take, while a Galleon is just going to be safe.

I'd suggest adding more Dungeons instead, and replacing some of the existing ruins with Dungeons. There are already too many items, and especially the weak stuff is just going to be left lying around as it is. In the meantime, Dungeons might (or might not) yield units one can use, but one still has to find a way to get those units to useful places.

In line with that, maybe skip the land bridges to the middle. I like the water theme as a way of making boats matter.

The trick was the weakness in the thickness of the cave walls. I had summon spider queued. I would have been able to cast the spider (2 hex summoning radius and it can't appear on water) take the 1 block city, town gate to the town and start causing havoc within his base. With my second army was ready to town gate in at the moment I had a city within his defences and drill open a hole in the wall for future attacks. The next turn I could have town gated to a safe location to plan the next attack against another player and get within another defensive parameter (probably Southern's defenses next because I had easy access to your domain and cyberrods domain with the goblin 4 block).

The biggest problem I had was vision. I needed the eagle to scout out the terrain first. The lack of night vision especially (halves the vision distance without it) was an issue (and made for an interestingly enjoyable handicap). With vision iv and night vision you can see 12 hexes away with 7 hexes of trueseeing (vision range/2 +1). I had my hero building vision IV with trueseeing but I didn't have night vision.

Agreed
Agreed
That's true, but even so i think I'll make it a galleon, becuase I have a great affection for rarely seen units like it and the Musketeer.

I'll do that with the Dungeons.
I think boats would still be very useful even with the presence of bridges.

Huh. I thought True Seeing extended as far as the unit's vision range. So basic vision + true seeing would let you see 4/2 hexes (surface/underground) or 4/4 with night vision.

Dark Elves, Day 28

We see the Azracs have signed another peace treaty.

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After some testing with trueseeing, I had the wrong idea. It works to the length of a units vision up to a maximum of 7 hexes.

Azracs, Day 29

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Dark Elves, Day 29

We continue our pursuit of the Azrac army.

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Shopping Spree!

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Dark Elves, Day 30

The Azracs feel before us on one front, while they try to horn in on our expansion in another front.

The Azracs have quite a lot of boats.

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Dark Elves, Day 31

We humbly thank the Azracs for their very generous donations to our coffers. If they want the Undead homeland so much, then I guess they can have it.

TS