Walkthrough: Campaign Lost Stories

[cjlee]

Walkthrough Campaign Lost Stories

OK, I am poor at writing walkthroughs. I don’t even remember the names of the maps that I play! But at least I do pay attention to what works and what doesn’t, so hopefully the write-ups I do will be helpful to some people.

Map 1:

You start out as a lone wizard called Genevieve Seymour (GS) on an unknown island. Like in all traditional campaigns, your objective is to level up as much as possible.

Having played this through twice, I must warn everyone against trying out their favourite hero builds. GS is limited to level 8 on this map. She must also reach an arcane knowledge of 8 on this map to pass. While I normally put more skill points in logistics and metamagic, I have to be careful in this case. You can put 2 skill points in logistics and snatch and still reach arcane knowledge 8, because of two stat boosters here that grant you increased arcane knowledge. But remember, spend your limited skill points on magic skills! Do not get any metamagic because they do not count!

None of the battles are very hard, but you need to fight most neutrals to level up or reach stat boosters. You can’t rely on quick combat as a wizard, because the AI doesn’t do spells. It is easy to lose too many troops that you can’t continue.

Pick gold from all treasure chests. You need to hire mercenaries to keep going.

Once you have maxed experience and arcane knowledge, you are supposed to visit 5 observatories which teach you lots of spells. Map ends.

Map 2:

You start out with GS and a new hero Pheron, a Blademage.

And here I learn of the power of a might Academy hero. I had never played a truly might academy hero before. The alchemists of Heroes III or battle mages of Heroes IV are absolutely nothing compared with a Heroes VII Blademage.

The blademage I got, originally had more points in attack than in defense, magic and spirit combined.

He was a terrible spellcaster and quite mediocre in keeping his troops alive, but in his hands, the Cabirs turned out really deadly. By the time he was level 15, 40 Cabirs with storm arrows could hit low level enemies for 1000 damage!

So I have to take back my earlier statements that Academy troops are useless. They aren’t. It was the weak wizard heroes who made them useless. Thanks to poorly designed campaign scenarios, we never got to play with blademages and didn’t realize how useful they are!

Anyway this map is not hard. You walk all over, level up to the max, and the main enemy hero is kept shielded behind a barrier until when you are ready to attack. You are not under time pressure.

Map 3

This scenario is pretty hard mainly because of the time limit. 8 weeks is very little time considering you have to visit almost every location on the map.

Do not look at the map and assume you can traverse it quickly. I think the underlying terrain is swamp or something; my heroes move so slowly over it despite having invested 4 points in logistics including pathfinding and snatch!

Some players are in the habit of ignoring resource pickups when they see they don’t have access to a castle. That is undoable for this map. You must pick up at least 10 of each resource. There are many short cuts in the form of portals, but portals have to be repaired using resources which are priced in the multiples of 10. Without portals, you can forget about winning this map.

The first objective is to reach a cabin on the edge of a crater at the NE (top right) part of this map. You should make a beeline there. The crater is ridiculous; it takes 3 days to get around it and 3 more days to get back. Only Pheron needs to get to the crater where you are told to visit all elemental lords. GS can go straight to any of the 4 elemental lords on the map.

After this objective is met, GS should have obtained all important spells. I leveled her and Pheron to the max, then wasted several days trying to figure out how to solve the second objective, the sea snakes. It turns out that although there are many medusas and mermaids in the waters, none of them are the sea snakes that are part of this objective!

The sea snakes are actually a group of non-interactive hydras in the SE of the map that cannot be clicked on or right clicked. In order to fight them, you max your army, then send a hero in a boat to approach these hydras. When you get near, an event triggers and you fight about 27 Hydras.

It should be a non brainer battle. Next map!

Map 4

You start out in a boat and have to look for a way to land. Go to the sea captain’s cabin where you get a quest to kill a sea snake (aka hydra). Once that is done, you are shown a place to land. Go over and land.

This map is another of those filled with mini kingdoms separated from each other by barriers, underground/ aboveground staircases, and portals. It takes a lot of time to move around, but there are very few remotely challenging battles. Once again, another dull trudge through all kinds of exotic environments that look visually different but which don’t offer any real challenge.

It is not like Heroes III terrain, where cursed ground battles, or lava battles, make a big difference. Heroes VII terrain looks better than Heroes III, but don’t contribute to gameplay.

You have to cover all ground. You can’t really find shortcuts, so it is a matter of conquering and killing everything you see until you make it all the way to the Chaos/ Fire mage who is supposed to be your boss enemy. Because of the convoluted but linear nature of this map, you will pass by many stat boosters. Visit all of them since you have nothing else to do.

The AI is so stupid that it handed the entire enemy army to a level 1 hero who was crushed with ease by my forces. After which, killing the boss enemy was mind numbingly easy. The AI had the boss enemy casting fire spells on my Cabirs. Who are partially immune to fire. This boss had Magic power of 32, but my Pheron had magic power of 27 and spirit 18. Yet another poorly calibrated scenario if your blademage (might hero) is nearly as powerful in magic as the so called boss opponent!

Map 5

Supposed to be the climax. In reality it was another brainless scenario. GS and Pheron have been separated, and will not meet for the entire game. Pheron is aboveground, and he has to conquer everything he sees so that he can gain access to Dragon Altars (for unlocking barriers). He also has the job of killing two supposedly powerful enemy mages. In reality, the enemy mages are so incompetent that I can’t remember fighting them. I can’t tell them apart from their flunkies.

This is not like Heroes V, where a Warlock has seriously destructive Irresistible Magic. Or a Necromancer can let off a Banshee Wail and demoralize your entire army. In Heroes VII, enemy boss heroes supposedly specialized in some spell aren’t really powerful. Most of the time they like to cast foolish spells like Time Control (which has very limited mass effects) or Celestial Armour (which is useless). So my Pheron steamrolled all the enemies with his tiny army, and I never even noticed the enemy bosses. I think one was specialized in Earth and one in Water, but can’t remember. They didn’t make a difference. (You would think a Water hero should start out casting Tsunami to cripple my forces, but they never did.)

GS is underground, and she is supposed to complete some tasks to rise in death magic (dark magic). Kill crusaders (justicars), kill angels, kill abbots. There is a lot of walking around, but nothing that is remotely challenging. You should pick up resources so that you can afford to mend the portals which speed up your travel, but don’t bother building the castles. It is a waste of time. You will never need to make a single hire. I never hired anyone.

This scenario is never even remotely hard.

At the climax, GS is supposed to kill two enemy heroes. She had only her starting forces, now whittled down to 20 Cabirs, 15 Genies, 30 Gargoyles. One enemy had 15 Titans, 20 Arcane Eagles, and other similarly powerful stacks. Another enemy had 4 stacks of 5 Seraphs/ Celestials each, plus 2 stacks of 20 Abbots.

Even worse, a bug prevented me from fielding my Cabirs. So I went into battle with only 2 stacks! Yet for both of these opponents, I was able to win with Zero casualties.

How? Summon elementals.

My GS had spell power 77 by this point, and she was so overpowered I took down all her artifacts to give the enemy a breathing chance. No dice. In 1 turn she can summon elementals twice, and in 2 turns, there were so many elementals on the field that battle was laughably easy. In any case I would have won easily without this spell; it would just have taken a few more rounds with some casualties.


Campaign over.

[Brainiac]

In Map 5 I did not find the last two battles (Oepelam and Grumthor) as easy as cjlee did. My GS was (only) Magic 63. So I picked up as many Death units as I could before I visited the Scholar's Palace. I made liberal use of Summon Elementals and Implosion, so I got out of the battle with Oepelam with only a few losses. Grumthor decimated my forces with Earthquake (wow!), but I was able to finish his team before he could cast it again.

Before that, finding a way to the 2 towns with Pherlon mystified me for some time. I thought GS would unlock the way there, but eventually it became clear she would not. MANY turns later I got bored and sailed around until I noticed the cove and sailed under the whale (?) bones. If you wait that long, one of the Elemental heroes becomes a challenge.

On Normal difficulty, I was able to get GS to 28 and Pherlon to 27.

[cjleeagain]

Sorry for the late response Brainiac!

I'm also writing this for anybody else who might be reading.

One common theme for most experienced players, is that Heroes 7 is very easy, ultra easy, or insanely easy. Despite all the updates and patches, consensus says H7 AI is terrible. So it's not that I am a particularly good player.

However there is also one theme that I noticed since Heroes 2. Possibly it applies to H7 also. I also made it a point to mention in some articles that I have posted on Celestialheavens in the past.

Higher difficulty settings are often significantly easier than lower difficulty settings at the end.

Now, at the START, you are still going to find it tough going. This is because you start with less resources and enemy stacks are bigger. Your first two mines (ore and wood) are probably going to be quite painful.

However, the human player will usually outplay the AI after the initial moves. So after a month or two, this starts to show up. Your AI doesn't clear its home area well. It takes too many casualties leaving a smaller army. It doesn't level up its heroes so effectively. It allows its main hero to walk around with a depleted army and puts most of its troops with a level 1 hero back home. And so on.

In general I would play H4 and H5 on higher difficulty settings because it is usually easier in endgame. Low difficulty settings means smaller neutral stacks, so the AI winds up beating them all, having few casualties, accumulating a bigger army with a higher level hero. H7 is probably the same.