Wow, the 5th mission Tunnels of Ice!!!

To give a little explanation for those who don't know it, the player starts in the top right corner with a town, 2 neutral towns and 4 paths out, each guarded by a pack of black dragons.

Around the end of week 3/start of week 4, an enemy hero invades, handily defeating a pack of dragons. Even after that, their army is pretty beefy and also includes two crystal dragons and 4 golden dragons.

I haven't found a way to defeat them - in terms of economy there simply aren't enough resources to get more than two towns up to black dragons and they still can't chip the opposing dragons down in time plus it cripples the starting economy so you can't field much of an army besides the dragons. The other option is to buy 3 azure dragons from a dwelling - but this results in the same issue of the starting economy being totally wrecked.

Tested this on normal difficulty, still the same issue. Help?

For the record, I've beaten HoMM 3 and all the other Chronicles games. I'm not an amazing player but I am pretty good at min-maxing the economy, movement and abusing spell mechanics. In this particular case, Tarnum is level 24 and can cast maxed slow, unfortunately I haven't gotten an implosion spell which... might help?

I don't remember the details of this campaign, or this particular map. So I consulted my notes which says: So I'm pretty sure those starting towns are red herrings, and you should spend your money recruiting those Azure Dragons and blitz the map.

I found that blitzkrieg is the best strategy for most of the Chronicles and expansion campaign maps, especially when you have Azure Dragons.

I don't recall this scenario at all, which means it didn't make an impression.

I agree with Petrus. If you can get the Azure dragons, then take the Azure dragons and proceed to rofl stomp on everything. 3 Azures is a ridiculously powerful army; you may be able to split them into 3 different armies and roflstomp in 3 directions at once.