Homm4 The Gathering Storm Walkthrough

[cjleeagain]

I wrote this in the past year when I replayed H4 The Gathering Storm.
Sadly, some information was lost thanks to having to reinstall Windows 10 after an updates debacle.

I liked The Gathering Storm very much. The campaigns were varied, challenging and helped to introduce you to less-often used classes of heroes.

I did notice that Celestial Heavens doesn’t have walkthroughs for The Gathering Storm.

Recently I went back to play HOMM4. So I thought I’d write one or two walkthroughs. This is my contribution, nearly 2 decades after that game first came out! (Feel free to put it on the site!)

Introduction and Overview

First off, I loved this campaign for its inclusiveness. It’s not centered on a single ultramacho male hero with supporting female cast and weak nerdy male supporting spellcaster. It’s actually a total of 6 campaigns. The last campaign is unlocked after you finish 5 campaigns to develop 5 different heroes, two women and three men.

In many RPGs, women are given marginal roles. And frankly, most of the time we simply can’t visualize women in brute-force roles because real life women are indeed substantially weaker and smaller than men. Sexual dimorphism is an integral part of our species, so you’re not going to have many musclewomen and the strongest musclewomen will never match the strongest musclemen.

So any campaign designed around a female tank would simply look weird.

And too often, the main part of any narrative storyline is focused on the male ‘lead’ who is often a muscle bound tank. EG Conan the Barbarian, not Conan the Supporting Medic.

But it doesn’t have to be so. Just because women are not the main combatants in most situations, doesn’t mean that women have inferior roles. And this also applies to men who are not traditional combat tanks fronting for the party. So you need to craft a storyline that gives all members of a party equal opportunity to shine and show the world what they are capable of.

In this campaign, you are going to see 5 separate heroes develop. They are very different people and have very different roles to play, but all are vital in the final battle against a very powerful villain Hexis.

I have played The Gathering Storm at least 4 times before. Twice in the early 2000s when the game came out, once in the mid-2000s and I am now replaying it again. I have played the game on Advanced, Hard and Champion. I have never played this on the easiest difficulties.

There are 5 campaigns to develop 5 heroes, after which they get together and fight one last campaign together. So you actually have 6 campaigns and 6 opportunities to choose your difficulty setting. You don’t need to play on the same difficulty setting throughout. This is quite important because H4 is very heroes centered, and I’m sure most of your playing styles are not the same. You will definitely not find all heroes’ campaigns equally challenging.

Because I last played this quite a long time ago, I don’t remember how I finished all campaigns on Champion. My current walkthroughs will be based on whatever difficulty settings I can manage currently, which means most campaigns for this walkthrough will not be played on Champion.

I will still do my best to develop my heroes, and my walkthroughs will reflect that.

It is possible to beat Hexis on Champion with as few as 3 heroes. It’s more challenging and fun that way. But if you hope to do that, you cannot neglect hero development.

I vaguely remember that when I played this on Champion years ago, I was able to beat Hexis using combinations of 3 or 4 heroes. I replayed the final battle over 20 times using combinations of different heroes, just for fun. Surprisingly, it was not the melee tank Dogwoggle who was indispensible in a 3-hero team. It was the Dark Priestess Alita Eventide who was crucial. This is because she had the most opportunity to build up during her campaign. I remember I got her to level 44-46, and as a Dark Priestess, her retaliation (1 hp healed per 2 hp of melee damage inflicted) will heal herself, so she can afford to focus on casting spells to support the rest. Alita was necessary because we needed her to cast Hand of Death, Vampiric Touch as well as Divine Intervention.

Most of you will find that Alita is the only person who can cast Hand of Death in the battle against Hexis. In most cases, Bohb the Archmage is the only other person who will also have Death Magic. But in Bohb’s campaign, his main chances to learn Death Magic come in the final campaign when he is already level 26, so Bohb is not likely to have Grandmaster Death Magic in the final battle against Hexis. Being able to cast Hand of Death is a big advantage right off the bat.

All 3-hero takedowns of Hexis had to include Alita as a team member.

Also, the female hero Agraynel is not as useless in combat as one might think. Although so many of her skill points were devoted to Stealth and Pathfinding, as a Bard she has valuable contributions also. In particular: your team has at least 5 separate factions. If you use Alita Eventide to raise vampires, your team will have 6 factions! Morale for everyone is rock bottom, so you’ll be crushed by Hexis whose gargantuans will be flinging cyclops-style rocks not once but twice every turn before you can move! But Agraynel always has great morale, so she must start out casting Mass Fervor to save everybody!

In general it was Kodzuss that I most easily excluded from the final battle against Hexis. Chaos magic may look dramatic at lower levels, but against really magic-immune enemy heroes with huge armies, Chaos is weak. All my 3-hero takedowns of Hexis had Kodzuss being among the excluded heroes.

No surprise here, but I did find it impossible to beat Hexis on Champion with only 3 heroes, unless I also brought a substantial army with me. But your side is not going to have many chances to recruit on the final map. Even if you take a Summoning route and have Bohb plus Agraynel summoning like mad, you still need to survive the first few rounds. So if you’re hoping to try this 3-hero confrontation out, you must have Alita Eventide with Grandmaster Necromancy so she generates lots of vampires. It would also be useful if you had some other hero with diplomacy or charm, so that you had plenty of other units to serve as cannon fodder in the first few rounds. I generally found Bohb to be very useful even in the 3 hero-fights. But the only way to keep Bohb alive, is to have a substantial cannon fodder army to distract enemies from attacking Bohb.

[cjleeagain]

Agraynel: A Bard’s Tale

Agraynel’s campaign is by far the easiest. I would recommend everyone play it on Champion. Because it is so easy, I intend to replay it later using a ‘fastest possible approach’ to see if I can get a Megadragon score.

Walkthrough for A Bard’s Tale


Agraynel Map 1

You start next to some zombies guarding two altars of nature magic. You have advanced stealth. You know what to do, right?

Be prepared to load and save until you get what you want from the Nature Altars. Always reject summoning which is a worthless skill when playing on Champion. You want to get to Grandmaster Nature Magic as fast as you can, and you don’t want to waste 5 skill points on summoning 1 measly semi-useless creature everyday to break your stealth. In HOMM4, once the system decides that you like Summoning, they will keep offering you summoning skill every level up and that will limit your options.

Just a bit to the NW, half a day away, are some leprechauns guarding Equestrian Gloves (+25% movement) and a cap of knowledge (+5 spell points). Again, you know what to do, right?

And another little bit to the NW lies two Scouting Altars and a Learning Stone (+1000 xp). What the hell, they should just have started Agraynel on Expert Scouting to begin with. It’s not as if we would choose anything else, should we?

But at this point, you should not get any more Scouting/ Stealth related skills. That is because you have a quest hut to the West that will give you Grandmaster Stealth. The point of upping your stealth early on is only so that you can flag all the mines and gather all resources in the region, because you need to pay 20 of each resource for being given Grandmaster Stealth at the Quest Hut.

Repeat throughout this scenario since almost everything is guarded by level 1 or 2 creatures. Especially in your starting area where everyone is a level 1 creature except for level 3 creatures guarding the Gold Mines.

Your job is to capture the Necromancer town of Twin Pines. It’s to the NW. There are four other neutral towns in this scenario, two Death and three Nature in total.

The best and most developed Nature Town is Davenport to the South. It’s only 2 days away, but guarded by a band of Thunderbirds. But you can’t get to the rest of the map unless you pass these Thunderbirds and Davenport. You know what this means. There’s no escape. Because you can’t possibly build up combat skills and magic resistance enough, and because these are such fast creatures, you have to get Grandmaster Stealth in your starting area.

No way you can summon enough creatures to fight these Thunderbirds. Your career path is already laid out.

Fortunately your level cap is 18.

So start out grabbing all the resources you can get and flagging everything. It’s not hard at all on Champion. When you have enough of each resource, visit the Quest Hut and get Grandmaster Stealth. Now make your way past the Thunderbirds to Davenport, which will fall very easily.

Your next quest is to rescue Larinath, a Fireguard imprisoned just one day’s walk away to the Southwest of Davenport. Larinath has combat, archery and at least Expert Fire Magic and is armed with a Chaos Staff (+50% damage to spells).

You can easily sneak past the sentries to liberate Larinath. Once you do so however, the sentries become aware of you and a fight ensures. It’s not hard to win this but you don’t even have to win it because you two can always flee back to Davenport! After this it is straightforward. With Larinath, you will conquer almost everything on your three quarters of this map. At most a few hires are required to encourage enemy stacks to split. I never had a serious army until I’d cleared and conquered the next two Nature Towns and liberated all mines to join my empire.

One note is that Davenport has a fully built mage guild (up to level 4; level 5 mage guilds are banned on this map.) When I took it, I didn’t even have Expert Nature Magic, so I had to level up first by fighting elsewhere before backtracking here to learn the spells.

And now you are faced with a Dilemma. There are two ways into the Necro area in the NW where there are two Death Towns. Both are guarded by gigantic stacks. One features Phoenixes and Waspworts. The other, Bone Dragons and Vampires.

On lower difficulty settings, you can eventually build an army big enough to beat these in conventional warfare. I have done so before on Hard. On Champion, that’s impossible within any near framework of time. These stacks are so huge that you would get 4000+xp just by sneaking past them! Even though you have three Nature towns, the guardian stacks start out so big, that their weekly growth will be fast. You can sneak through, but that means you would have no army.

Much to my surprise, when I snuck through as a level 12 hero (leaving Larinath behind), Twin Pines was barely guarded. I could have taken it immediately, but that means I’d go to the next mission as a level 12 hero without even any level 3 Nature spells. If you enjoy a thorough playthrough like me, you wouldn’t want to end the scenario at this point. But I can imagine Wimfrits or someone really good doing just that.

Having played through the campaign, I do think the next map is winnable even if you end this scenario quickly as a level 12 with no level 3 Nature Spells. You’re hardly going to be attacked in the next map, and you have Grandmaster Stealth, so you will have all opportunities to level up, learn spells, etc.

If you do not end this scenario early, then you have to work pretty hard for the next few weeks. There is enough experience on your 3/4 share of the map to level up to level 18, if you don’t bring Larinath around all the time. If you bring Larinath around you’d have an easier time but nothing extremely hard. Just takes longer because your Faerie Dragons or Water Elementals will have to spend more time casting spells to kill enough enemies to level up the two of you (and Larinath is NOT going to follow you to the next scenario!).

When I played through with both of them fighting every battle, I got Agraynel to level 17 and him to level 15. I ran out of things to kill in my 3/4 side of the map. Although I had the choice of using the Coliseum of Might, on champion that involves fighting more Black Dragons than a level 17 Bard with no level 4 summons can handle. You’d need many potions of immortality because you take too much damage and have no grandmaster melee to fight.

What got Agraynel from level 17 to 18 was when she snuck into the Death area and started taking their castles and mines.

The only seriously hard battle you need to fight is against the Thunderbirds guarding the space between your starting area and Davenport. I had to play this a few times to get this right, because Thunderbirds can cross the battlefield in one turn and kill your Faerie Dragons right off. You need to fight this battle if you’ve chosen to max out at level 18 first before hitting Twin Pines.

Once you’ve snuck into the Necromancers’ area the first time round, you trigger some sort of response from the AI. From then on the computer will build. So you can’t come back half-prepared. You need to at least build up your combat skills (the enemy has Venom Spawn on turrents) and you need plenty of good level 3 summons so you have to build up the mage guilds in the two other Nature Towns you capture. (I rarely use potions of immortality and didn’t need it to win this scenario; I just purchased a couple bottles as an insurance policy.)

Remember, you’re fighting alone. No way the rest of your army can make it past the Phoenixes. At one point I tried with 15 Faerie Dragons (plus Larinath and other troops). But the enemy outnumbered me so greatly that I couldn’t brute force past them. Agraynel will have to do this alone. So max out everything you can and sneak into the necromancers’ zone again. The enemy doesn’t seem to be scripted to stay in its castle all the time, because I was able to hit and run two enemy heroes outside their castles. After a bit of whittling down, I assaulted Twin Pines and took it to end the scenario.

[cjleeagain]

Scenario Two

This scenario has a level cap of 25. If you’re coming in as a level 18, there is just enough experience for you to hit level 22, after which you can level up three more times because there are two Trees of Knowledge and one Coliseum of Might.

If you’re coming in as a level 12 having opted to end the first scenario early, you should be able to hit level 21 and then level up three more times. There won’t be enough xp on the map to max out level cap.

Coming in as a level 12 isn’t that bad since Stealth serves you far better than Nature spells. You cannot learn Grandmaster Nature magic from guilds on this map because the mage guilds have level capped at 4. The only way to learn Grandmaster Nature Magic is via the Conservatory of Nature on the bottom left/ Southwest extreme corner.

In my playthrough I bought a scroll of Summon Phoenix and learned it, but I can assure you that there is no need. This map is entirely winnable without Grandmaster Nature Magic. I didn’t even Summon Phoenix once. It won’t give you a head start in the next map either. So you can go ahead and develop combat skills if you prefer.

Much to my annoyance, after I’d gotten Grandmaster Combat in the previous map, I was never offered Magic Resistance even once. I consider it ultra-important to get Magic Resistance on a hero because it keeps enemy spellcasters from blasting you to death in one shot. I don’t care for Grandmaster Melee because that’s useless except when fighting in the Coliseum of Might. So I had no choice. My Agraynel finished this map with: Grandmaster Combat, Grandmaster Stealth/ Pathfinding/ Scouting, Grandmaster Nature Magic, Advanced Chaos Magic with Basic Conjuration and Basic Life Magic.

In the next map, I didn’t use Grandmaster Nature Magic at all in the first two weeks since it was entirely spent sneaking around.

OK, I have digressed a lot. This is supposed to be a walkthrough.

You start this map at a Nature Town in the top left. There are three other towns – one neutral Nature Town to your south, and two Death towns – one to the NE and one to the SE. The map is roughly divided into two parts with only one connecting bridge. Your half of the map has more resources and more creature dwellings even though you cannot build level 5 mage guilds.

The open nature of this map makes it kind of hard to write a walkthrough for. There are so many ways to play it. I’ve played on lower difficulties and it’s the same as playing on Champion – the enemy doesn’t attack you. So you have a free hand from day one to sneakily visit all gold mines, flag dwellings, grab stat boosts, etc. Even on Champion it isn’t hard at all. I don’t feel like a champion when I am trapising through an unchallenged landscape. Of course, there are many creature stacks – especially the many thunderbird stacks and stacks with genies or water elementals – that you can’t kill on your own. But you can flag or steal resources first, and come back later when you have a substantial army. When you have Grandmaster Stealth, it is always worth it to visit a location, because you get experience from sneaking!

The only reason to fight difficult battles on this map is so that you can max out the experience. If you choose to avoid the most difficult battles, I estimate that you can only get to level 20 (23 after visiting the Trees of Knowledge and Coliseum of Might). Due to the nature of Championship play (huge neutral stacks requiring brainpower rather than brute force to defeat), I do not think it wise to get Phoenixes instead of Faerie Dragons, and Mantises instead of Water Elementals.

The plot and map description seem to hint that it is good to hire Thunderbirds on this map. There are no less than three Thunderbird dwellings, which with time would yield you a seriously big army. But I’ve never found it useful to hire Thunderbirds at all. They are basically like Phoenixes – fast and dangerous level 4s – but lacking in special skills or abilities like the Faerie Dragons and Water Elementals. Thunderbirds are great units for brute force tactics – eg when paired with a General with Grandmaster Tactics to deliver a quick and lethal blow. They are not great when playing on Champion difficulty.

The goal of this map is to take the Death town of Blightwood which is located furthest from your starting position, on the SE part of the map. Having played this map on different difficulties, I find the same problem every time – if you make a beeline for that town from day one, you would be able to take Blightwood with minimal resistance.

I started this map as a level 18 and could have taken Blightwood without hitting level 19.

If you started as level 12, you might end the scenario as a level 12. (I say might, because if you started as level 12 you probably haven’t build up much other skills. Blightwood is usually defended, so at least you need to take out a bunch of level 1 and 2 creatures and I’m not sure if a level 12 hero could reliably do that.)

The computer seems to prefer garrisoning the Death town to the NE (Death’s Gate) – the one adjacent to the bridge between the left and right halves of the map. This is a strategy that works for visible enemies. The computer aggressively attacked all visible units and armies that tried approaching the bridge.

Since I have Grandmaster Stealth, I always got past Death’s Gate easily. Your true target Blightwood is never half or even one quarter as well defended as Death’s Gate. In every playthrough I did, Death’s Gate had Devils and Venom spawn and a high level General, making them very hard to defeat early on. Blightwood usually only has level 1 and 2 creatures. On one playthrough, it even had no units to defend because its hero had taken the troops and gotten killed when trying to clear a nearby mine.

[cjleeagain]

Scenario Three

This is the last scenario in Agraynel’s campaign.

You’re thrown into a scenario with some really fearsome looking enemies. You start with a Nature town and some level one creatures. There are three more neutral, poorly defended Nature towns to your north.

Your enemies are allied, and they start with Bone Dragons and Black Dragons and high level generals. Orange Chaos has 4 towns to the West. Red Death has 2 towns to the Northwest, located next to each other.

Fortunately they are not aggressive and will stay in their area for most of the scenario. You have Grandmaster Stealth, and right from the start it is hinted that you should fight most of this war alone and stealthily.

Your job is to find Aiffe’s Mandolin. It is buried in a location guarded by 9 oracles. 6 of these oracles, you can just use your stealth to visit. The problem is that 3 of these oracles – including two deep in enemy territory – are very well guarded and placement of the sentries blocks your access completely. So you will need to build a large army at some point.

Although in every playthrough I enjoyed stealthily grabbing all resources and level-ups in the first two months, unimpeded by the enemy, eventually I always recruited troops and brute-bashed the enemy and took all their towns. This is because of that three oracles. The computer players are easier to beat than some of these very huge neutral stacks blocking the oracles, so why not beat them and take their towns? Every town gives you extra cash. Chaos towns have Thieves’ Guilds which give you hero-improvement opportunities.

In this map you can just manage to get to level 27. There is a Coliseum of might in the NW, a Coliseum of Magic in the N, and a Tree of Wisdom just two days’ north of your starting position (but guarded by the same huge stack of neutrals that is blocking your access to a Golden oracle.) So after hitting level 27, you can shoot straight to level 30 by visiting all three locations.

If you chose to play the first two scenarios ultra quickly, you might enter this scenario as a level 13 or 14. You can still beat this map, but won’t be able to hit level cap.

In my playthroughs I never seriously developed any secondary heroes. I did make good use of a tavern located roughly in the middle of the map, and hired one Lord per Nature town. There are no learning stones on this map, but several Veteran’s Guilds and one War University, so I generally managed to get my Lords to advanced or expert nobility with only a few insignificant battles (mostly to kill wandering enemy stacks with a couple medusa, a couple minotaurs, that kind of thing). They were still very low level, maybe level 2 only, until I captured the four Chaos towns which allowed them to get 4000xp just by doing a tour of duty visting each town.

If you do want to develop a secondary hero, you have to be careful sharing the experience. If your Agraynel started this scenario at level 25, there should be just enough experience and opportunities on the map to get another hero to level 12 or so/ Grandmaster Tactics. Having a General would make it easier to kill the last three gigantic stacks that are guarding the oracles. Your General should step out of fights that Agraynel can handle herself, so that she has enough xp for herself. If your General gets to level 15 or so, you’ll definitely not be able to get Agraynel to the level cap of 30.

Overall, a perfectly enjoyable map spoilt again by the fact that the AI is so bad.

[cjleeagain]

This is my walkthrough for Bohb’s campaign from The Gathering Storm.

Bohb is the name of the Archmage/ Wizard member of the 5-person Gathering Storm team.

Bohb’s campaign put me in a dilemma. On one hand, I intended to do a playthrough on the hardest possible setting because I wanted to write a walkthrough after I was done. On the other hand, the campaign is really very frustrating and rewardless on Champion difficulty settings.

The reason why Bohb’s campaign is so difficult, is because Bohb can never learn any combat skills. You start out with all your skill slots filled with the Basic version of every type of magic, so you can only learn magic skills. Bohb is essentially a glass cannon all the way throughout the campaign. He’s always the first to die in any battle against Hexis at the end.

Old timers like me should remember that when Heroes 4 first came out, it was quite a headache for us. We’d gotten used to Heroes 1, 2 and 3 where the Hero is never directly in the fray, so keeping our heroes alive was never an issue. Then in the course of the original Heroes 4 campaigns – we probably all learned to choose Combat whenever possible for our heroes. Even Advanced or Expert Combat made a huge difference in keeping our heroes alive.

This is the first time I was forced to play a hero who could not gain any combat skills at all, and it was really hell.

I have played Bohb’s campaign on Champion before. It took a lot of time. Time that, as an older man, I no longer have. Basically there is a lot of backtracking where your partner Violet has to bring your corpse to a city or a sanctuary for revival, you need to keep purchasing potions of immortality, Bohb ends up several levels below Violet because he dies and doesn’t get the experience from important battles, and so on.

The good thing however, as my words suggest, is that Bohb CAN afford to die. In his campaign scenarios, the lose condition is ‘lose all towns and armies’. You will lose Bohb many times. It just can’t be helped.

When I played his campaign this year on Champion, I was at first prepared for a hard slog. But what happened to make me change my mind and play through on Advanced (therefore writing a weaker walkthrough)? It was something most of us usually don’t even notice. It was a Month of the Gargoyle on his first map, The Island of Pyre!

In Bohb’s first map, you get opportunities to learn Nature Magic at various shrines. Every playthrough in the past had included Wasp Swarm. You have no other opportunities to learn other magic types until after you take an enemy Nature town which is quite late into the game. But when you have a month of the Gargoyle on Champion difficulty, you have to fight an entire army of these monsters every few steps. And Gargoyles can’t be Wasp Swarmed, Song of Peaced or Confused. You don’t have slow and you don’t have access to Genies. Every battle they would make a beeline for Bohb and swarm him immediately. And Bohb had no healing spells at that point. A junior hero with no combat skills drops dead in just one mass attack from Gargoyles. Carrying around Potions of Healing is useless because they are just too fast. This shows how ridiculously overpowered the Death Faction is in Heroes4 – they have the strongest creatures and these strong creatures can’t be mind-controlled and they are so fast. So I gave up, and changed the difficulty setting to Advanced, and that is the difficulty on which I’m writing this walkthrough.

One thing that I must warn you against during Bohb’s campaign, is trying too hard to win fast. I know many of you are high score enthusiasts. But Bohb’s power lies in spells that he has to learn when visiting towns, while the only way to build up his combat skills is to visit as many Might towns as possible for their Arenas of Honor and Wrestling Pits.

In all 5 of Bohb’s campaign scenarios, you win by gaining possession of a certain artifact in Nevar’s set. This always involves killing the main opponent. Heroes 4’s AI is so bad that you should have no difficulty killing this enemy regardless of the difficulty setting. (In previous playthroughs when I did play Bohb on Champion, I never had serious difficulty with opposing factions. My headaches all came from the super giant stacks of neutrals that I had to fight in order to level up.)

Don’t be rash. When you see an enemy army, don’t just charge forward and kill everybody. Your main opponent will probably be wandering around aimlessly, sometimes with only a minimal army. If you kill this person and get the artifact, the scenario ends immediately. Which means you’ve just exited a scenario without attaining the true objective – learning as many spells as you can and levelling up to the max.

With Agraynel, you can afford to be hurried and complete the scenario quickly. Dogwoggle is going to be incredibly strong and hard to kill no matter how fast you finish his scenario. Please don’t do that with Bohb. Firstly, he will always be the first to die when fighting Hexis. So you need to get Bohb to visit as many site locations as possible to up his stats and keep him alive a bit longer. Secondly, Bohb is an Archmage, basically the jack of all trades guy whose spells are needed to supplement everybody else. If you move too quickly, you’ll wind up with a very mediocre jack of all trades who only knows level 3 spells. But in the final campaign, being able to cast Divine Intervention, Hypnotize, Dragon Strength, Summon Mantis, Cloud of Confusion, etc are all very valuable. You will probably find it hard to get Grandmaster skills in more than 3 magic schools, but that already makes Bohb a strong supporting caster.

[cjleeagain]

Map one: The Island of Pyre

This Island is actually three islands joined together by bridges. You start in a Might town on the top right. Several days to the SE there is another Might town. Then several more days to the W, on a separate island, is yet another Might town. In the N of the same island as this Might town, there is a Nature town. Then there is yet another Nature town on the last island, to the NW.
Bohb starts out with a modest starting army and a General called Violet. Violet has Combat and Tactics skills, no restrictions on her growth. In practice you will find she stays a General all the way and that’s fine. You will have an opportunity to learn Scouting via a Beastmaster Hut, but don’t waste skill points on upping Violet’s pathfinding skills because in this scenario you’re about to pick up the Wayfaring Boots which will eliminate terrain penalties and increase your movement at the same time! The Boots will accompany Bohb for the rest of the campaign.

There are opportunities for you to train Violet in magic skills along the way, although realistically you probably don’t have money for that and it isn’t necessary or helpful.

Training Violet up as a General is a no-brainer, but I should add something. In many scenarios, I focus on upping the basic Tactics skills and tend to leave the Leadership part out. But that’s because I’m playing one faction. In Bohb’s scenarios, I always tried to increase the Leadership whenever possible, because your forces will be from mixed factions. Already Bohb starts out a different faction from Violet, and on every map Bohb will be using the towns of a third faction. Morale is a problem, so up Violet’s Leadership!

Next to your starting position are two items which are very useful – a crossbow for Violet, and an Apprentice’s Handbook which offers level 1 spells for Bohb. I daresay that playing this scenario on the Novice difficulty setting would be harder than playing it on Champion setting, if you play as Novice but deliberately do not pick up that Apprentice’s Handbook!

There are a bunch of usually unguarded Nature shrines scattered about within 2 days from your starting town. Until you conquer a Nature town, you don’t have other opportunities to learn spells.

About 3 days to the SE of your starting town is an area called the College of Nature Magic. Similar Colleges are found in all 5 of Bohb’s scenarios, and there is always a little sign that says College of X Magic. These are places where you can find magic altars that match the theme X of the current scenario, a Library, a Sacred Fountain, a Magic Conservatory where the magic type X matches the theme of the current scenario, and a Magic University which teaches 4 types of magic skills.

In my playthroughs, I have found that these Magic Universities always seem to offer secondary magic skills that match the theme of the scenario. So in this scenario where the main opponent is a Nature caster, this Magic University offers courses in Basic Meditation and Basic Herbalism (as well as two other magic skills). In the last scenario where the main opponent is a Death caster, the Magic University in that scenario offered Basic Occultism and Basic Demonology (as well as two other magic skills).

So you should focus on building your magic skills strategically. If you purchase Basic Meditation instead of choosing it as a skill when you level up, you will already have Basic Meditation at your next level up. So you would be able to advance your knowledge of magic more quickly.

Knowing how this worked, I never got Basic Demonology for Bohb despite being offered it during level ups. In the fifth Bohb scenario I simply visited the College of Death Magic and purchased Basic Demonology. Then I visited the nearby Death Altars, and got to Expert Death Magic quickly.

In every one of Bohb’s scenarios, you should make a beeline for the corresponding University as soon as you can.

In my playthrough, once I had secured all the mines and creature generators in the region, I went for the University of Nature Magic. It was guarded by a single Phoenix, which was quite painful early in the game. Fortunately the Phoenix made a beeline for – you’ve guessed it – Bohb. This meant that the Phoenix was now very close to both Violet and my Centaurs. At this early point in the game, it is better to spend 1000 gold on an Immortality Potion/ 500 Gold on a Healing Potion, rather than risk your troops, because you have few troops and need to keep them alive for the next battle. Centaurs have Short Range, and at this point Violet doesn’t have Expert Archery, so they need the Phoenix to helpfully come close in order to inflict serious damage.

Your enemies are one Might faction and one Nature faction. Your heroes are limited to level 12 for this scenario. The enemy apparently is not – I first met her when she was level 10, but she was level 14 at the end. The enemy castles can build level 5 Druid Halls, although Bohb is unlikely to reach Master Nature Magic due to level cap. But you should try to attain Expert Nature Magic in this scenario. Being able to summon Elementals in the next scenario really makes life a lot easier. Fire Elementals and Water Elementals are able to protect Bohb while shooting at the enemy. In contrast, fragile Elves can’t act as Bohb’s meat shield.

The official objective of this scenario is to gain the Wayfaring Boots by killing the main enemy Nature Magic caster, the Beastmaster called Eradawn. Unofficially, the objective of this scenario is to learn as much Nature Magic as Bohb can.

In every playthrough, I always wound up meeting Eradawn long before I attained level cap or visited all locations. She is typically accompanied by an archer of slightly lower level. Usually both will have at least Expert combat skills and Eradawn usually has Expert Nature Magic. (Since I didn’t fight straight away, in my final battle with them, Eradawn was at Master Combat and Master Nature Magic, and her archer companion had Grandmaster Combat and Expert archery.)

Fortunately the computer is not too aggressive. Eradawn won’t pick a fight with you if you have a decent sized army. You can march all over her territory, take her towns, kill her ally, basically do everything you can to max your spell knowledge and visit all locations before choosing the final battle.

Beating Eradawn is not very hard, but no picnic either. Once you start conquering her lands, she will typically be holed up in a town. Which means Eradawn and her archer companion will almost certainly be standing on turrets which makes them difficult to kill while they can easily shoot Bohb to death from where they are standing.

When I have a Might town, I normally get Cyclopses. In this scenario there are a total of three Might towns. During this playthrough I wound up with two towns producing cyclopses and one producing Ogre Mages, so I still had a decent cyclops army which was crucial to me beating Eradawn.

Could this have been won with a huge Ogre Mage army? You need way more Ogre Mages than Cyclops to besiege the same castle. You need to survive three, four shots before you can get inside and you need to survive more shots before you can kill the shooters.

Furthermore, at this point there is no outcasting Eradawn. Bohb will almost certainly have inferior summoning skills.

When writing this walkthrough I have to think about how another player might fare. It could be very difficult if you don’t have cyclopses. This is because your final battle against Eradawn would involve either cyclopes or elves from her side standing on turrets shooting at you, you can’t out summon her, her archer companion is strong, and you don’t have many other spells to choose from. When I tried playing without cyclopses just to see how it would be like, I found that Displacement (which you won’t learn in this scenario, but will have access to via your Apprentice’s Handbook) was by far the most important spell for besieging the castle. You will also have access to spells like Blur and Bind Wound thanks to the same Handbook. Keep displacing the enemy shooters and healing Bohb until your melee forces break down the gate.

[cjleeagain]

Scenario 2: Slart’s Fjord

Bohb’s next scenario is called Slart’s Fjord. There he is up against the Order Wizard Delnar, and also has to defeat a Might hero called Gurt.

You start in a Nature Town on the SW. The level 1 creature dwellings are already built, and you have one week’s worth of sprites and wolves sitting in town already. There is one other Nature Town to your N. To the NE are two Might Towns owned by Gurt. This is the Western half of the map. Delnar and his three Order Towns are in the Eastern Half of the map. There is only 1 access point to the Eastern Half of the map, in the far north. This access point is practically guarded by the two Might towns.

With a Geography like that, it is obvious that you have to kill Gurt first before you can attack Delnar. And you should. There is a Pyre (Phoenix Dwelling) to the NW that is blocked off, with a Quest Hut outside. Once you kill Gurt, you only have to visit this Quest Hut, and you will be rewarded doubly – once by gaining access to the Pyre, and once more by having Pyres built free of charge for you in your two Nature Towns!

(BTW, you start with only 1 Nature Town. I grabbed the second Nature Town very quickly because it was so close by. But if you bypass this second town and don’t take control of it before you kill Gurt and visit the Quest hut, I do not know if they will automatically build a Pyre for you after you take that second Nature Town.)

In any case, there is no need for you to build any creature dwellings whatsoever in your Nature Towns! Reserve all resources for your Mage Guilds and Sacred Groves. The Pyres will be built even if the other conditions are not met (such as lower level creature dwellings being built first).

It was easy to take down Gurt. He was only level 10 when I came to him, and both my heroes were higher level. Gurt doesn’t start out with a big army. So once you have secured your immediate surroundings (basically flagged the sawmill and ore mine), you can advance up north quickly, taking the second nature town and both the Might towns. There’s nothing much to it.

As with most Heroes 4 scenarios, the hardest opponents are not the AI heroes but the neutrals. Even on Advanced difficulty, the Neutral stacks are big, and they are fairly challenging because they always make a beeline for Bohb. At this point you don’t have Summon Mantis (which can pin down enemy stacks and stop them from attacking Bohb) or Summon Faerie Dragon (which can cast confusion to keep them from attacking Bohb.) In Scenario 3 of Bohb’s campaign, he will get hold of an artifact that gives him Heavenly Shield. After that it will be much easier to keep Bohb alive. But in Scenario 2 that’s all still far away. Bohb is basically the biggest obstacle to making progress in this scenario.

While many players boast about being able to get through a scenario or campaign without hiring anything, I can’t do it. And I heartily dislike the people who eventually admit that they did hire one sprite or two per battle, and go on to call these ‘insignificant’ hires. Well, that’s not insignificant at all.

One sprite or two is what you need in nearly every major battle in this Scenario. Bohb is still very weak at this point, with no Heavenly Shield artifact and few really strong spells. You need sprites to stand in front of him. You could have wolves instead, but they’d slow down your army’s movements. Sprites are also for the purpose of blocking ranged attacks, giving Violet more freedom to move while Bohb remains protected, and for causing the AI to split stacks making them smaller and less likely to be able to kill Bohb in one hit.

Anyway, once you’ve secured your half of the map by taking all four towns, you can consolidate control. The sole access point between you and Delnar’s lands are guarded by a pack of Titans. At this early stage you have no way of beating these Titans, so might as well visit the College of Order Magic to the East of your starting town, as well as visit all possible locations and stat boosters on this half of the map.

The AI seems to have difficulty producing a consistent Delnar. In previous playthroughs, he was sometimes pretty powerful. When you have a high level mage in a fortified town with Titans standing on turrets, that is a tough fight. In my playthrough this time, he only got to level 14 and was pretty slack, not resisting when I took all 3 of his towns while he wandered the snowy wastes with an army strong enough to put up serious resistance if only they were standing on turrets.

Anyway, your official objective is the hat that Delnar is wearing. Your true objective is to learn everything under the sun. Since Delnar has three Order towns, you can potentially learn a lot of Magic skills from their academies – and should. There is just enough xp on the map to level up to the cap of 18, after which you should visit all mage guilds and build up your spell repository, before the final confrontation with Delnar.

If you’re fighting him outside a town, winning is a no brainer. If you have to confront Delnar when he’s in a town, he’ll have titans on turrets. Although your phoenixes will almost certainly outnumber his titans substantially, they’ll be decimated quickly. At this stage the best spell to use again is displacement.

My Bohb finished this scenario with:
Advanced Life Magic
Expert Order Magic with Teleport, Forgetfulness, Mass Dispel, Mass Blur and Mass Precision.
Basic Death Magic
Advanced Chaos Magic
Grandmaster Nature Magic with Summon Phoenix and Faerie Dragon.
Bohb didn’t have any secondary skills like Charm or Summoning or Resurrection.

Violet was at Grandmaster Combat, Basic Melee, Expert Archery, Master Magic Resistance, Expert Tactics, Advanced Offence, Master Defence, Master Leadership. She also had basic Scouting, which is really helpful and didn’t cost any money anyway thanks to that Beastmaster Hut on Map 1, Island of Pyre.

[cjleeagain]

Map 3: Lambent Plains

In this third scenario, Bohb is facing the Master of Life Magic, Alberon. He’s trying to get (aka rob) the Angelfeather Cloak from Alberon.
This is probably the most boring of Bohb’s 5 maps, given the irritating geography and the layout. If you want to properly level up and learn spells, you need to do a lot of walking and backtracking. Of course you could just charge and fight in a linear manner, but you’ll end up finishing this map before the end of a month, at level 19 with few crucial spells learned.

You start out on a snowy island at the NE with two Order towns. This island has few resources, and you’ll be gem-constricted for the entire scenario. Building up these towns is going to be very painful. But build them up you must, because you have to face a bunch of Angels. No genies means an ultra painful, possibly impossible fight.

To the far NE of the map, East of your starting island, is an Island called The College of Life. The island is guarded by a pack of Angels.

Due to the poverty of experience opportunities on this map, I recommend you ditch Violet once you’ve beaten your Might opponent Oreha.

Oreha is a General, and way too powerful for a magic hero like Bohb to take on. Oreha will have a few Dragons, and Bohb’s army will be decimated in no time. Even your level 4 Summons will be wiped out by Oreha’s army very quickly, so you need a General like Violet boosting the troops on your side. But once this battle is done, you need to fight every single other battle with only Bohb. Otherwise you cannot hope to max out your experience.

Everytime I play this map, I find myself conquering my snowy island in no time. I don’t have resources to build much, so I just build a boat and sail south to the nearest enemy town, Talsi to the SE of the map. This is too early to take on the pack of Angels defending the island with College of Life Magic.

Talsi is usually easy to beat, even without troops. There’s no point bringing Order troops at this point because they’re all slow walkers. Impossible to get genies so quickly.

After that, I have two choices to take out the other two Might towns owned by Oreha. To head for Mersch to the West through a Pink Portal, or to head for Remich in the North. I always take out whatever town is easier to beat first. Mersch is always more developed, and there is a Dragon Cave on the island, so it makes sense to take it first and hopefully hire a Black Dragon.

The Black Dragon isn’t necessary for winning the scenario, but it is very necessary for keeping Bohb alive. It needs to stand in front of Bohb so that Violet has freedom of movement during a battle. At this point, Bohb has the Archmage’s Hat and the Wayfaring Boots from earlier scenarios. Bohb is still very easy to kill, until he gains the valuable Angelfeather Cloak that grants him Heavenly Shield.

The rest of the map is accessible to the NW and W of Remich. There are 4 Life Towns. Everytime I played this scenario, Alberon has been easy to kill early in the game. It’s Oreha that is very difficult, since he is usually slightly stronger than Violet and can shoot Bohb to death in just one turn. Even the Black Dragon can only last 2 turns against Oreha.

As you know, Might towns turn dangerous very quickly because of their Generals and Breeding Pens. Pure spellcasters like Bohb are extremely vulnerable to huge and strong Might armies. So it is important not to allow Oreha’s side to reproduce. Try to take him out asap. I normally dislike the use of Immortality potions, but had to fight Oreha with potions.

After taking down Oreha, I took Violet out of my army and used her to guard Remich. The enemy must pass Remich in order to get to the other two Might towns, and Violet is strong enough to hold off an entire army of Life troops. Then I used Bohb and his Black Dragon (no other troops) and assaulted Alberon’s Life faction in a blitzkreig that took out 3 Life Towns in no time at all. The computer is really weak here. I could easily have ended Alberon as well, but that would leave me severely disadvantaged in terms of learning Life and Order Magic. I always consider Life and Order magic must haves.

Having taken many Life towns and crippled Alberon’s income, I now backtracked and sailed back to my island in the NE. Not having enough resources to both build mage guilds and Altars of Wishes for genies, I had to forego building any mage guilds in my Order Towns in the NE. It’s cheaper to build Mage Guilds in the Life Towns, since you only need ore and wood, and you only need to build an Order of Enchantment once.

Bohb picked up the few genies that were available (total of 7) and we sailed to the NE College of Life. There we had to face 23 Angels. This is exactly the type of battle where genies shine best in. Angels are vulnerable to Song of Peace and Slow.

After getting Life Magic in the NE, Bohb came back down to finish his conquests. Alberon had taken back two of his towns in the meantime, which meant he hired troops. This map is very poor in experience, so if Alberon had not done his hiring, I wouldn’t have enemies to kill and would not be able to max out to the level cap of 22.

Anyway, I marched all over the map doing my best to get the max experience, and still didn’t get to level 22. I attained Master Life and Master Order magic, and learned all the spells that I could.

In order to encourage Alberon to hire more troops for me to kill, I moved Violet away from Remich. Alberon pounced and captured the town. Now with everything else I’d wanted done, my Bohb came back with an army that included 13 Thunderbirds, 34 Cyclopses, 12 genies and 12 Dragon Golems. Again my most crucial spell proved to be that level one Order spell – displacement.

Alberon had dozens of monks, together with scores of centaurs and various other Life and Might troops. His army was pretty weak. But don’t underestimate the power of Life Magic. I’ve played this different ways, just to see how things would turn out. You don’t even need the Monks standing on turrets to kill Bohb – the Centaurs are strong enough. And if Bohb was killed early in a siege, my side could be wiped out even though my army was clearly far superior, because of the endless buffs that Alberon would be applying to his guys.

After trying different tactics just to see how things would turn out, I used my cyclopses to shoot Alberon dead immediately, and the scenario finished with no losses on my side. My total losses this scenario were limited to my summoned troops and those who had to fight Oreha. I reached level 22 as a result of this battle.

[cjleeagain]

Map 4: Mt Anon

After being with Violet for 3 maps, Bohb has now gained the Angelfeather cloak. Henceforth he will proceed alone.

Your purpose on this map is to ‘retrieve’ (aka rob) the Ring of Flares from Raylon, the master of Chaos Magic.

You start out on the SW corner of the map. Your home area is one long strip that runs across the south of the map, with three Life Towns on it. There are not many resources in your home area, so it would be pretty tough to build up your towns quickly. (I never built up my towns apart from the mage guilds.)

Your main enemy is separated from you on a volcanic island with 4 Chaos towns on it.

There are a bunch of mines scattered on islands throughout the map. I believe they are distractions, and never visit them or clear them.

The College of Chaos magic in this scenario is on the eastern edge of your territory. You have to pass through that area to get to the only shipyard in this scenario.

Unlike other maps, this one has very sufficient opportunity to gain experience. Your level cap is 26, and you should be able to max out here from killing the neutrals on Raylon’s island and your starting territory. There are also other opportunities to up your level: one coliseum of magic, one tree of knowledge, three coliseums of might. Take this as a BIG hint. If you rushed the first three maps, now is your chance to hit level 26 and catch up on all the magic learning that you missed earlier.

This is an important map because you’re not under much pressure here. Raylon can’t get to you from his island, unless you leave a boat lying around for him to take. With three Life Towns and four Chaos Towns all of which can build level 5 mage guilds, you will have ample opportunity to get spells from all magic schools. To further improve your chances of getting the spells you like, there is a Conservatory of Life near your starting position, and there is also the Conservatory of Chaos in the College of Chaos area.

There is also an island on the NW accessible only via a yellow portal located in the sea between your starting land and Raylon’s island. That island doesn’t have much apart from Life creature dwellings, and you can ignore it totally.

This map is really easy. Winning it is a no brainer on advanced. I remember when I played this campaign on Champion, it was also extremely easy. Once Bohb is facing a spellcaster rather than a General, it becomes a battle of magic that he can win. With spells like Mass Slow and Berserk and Forgetfulness, Bohb is nowhere as likely to fall to strong neutrals as he was in earlier scenarios.

Bohb started the scenario alone. He hired three Lords along the way to take care of his three Life towns. After Bohb crossed the sea to Raylon’s Island, he hired a thief to bring him around. Having Grandmaster Pathfinding + Angels + the Wayfaring boots (+25% movement) gave Bohb’s army an impressive 60 movement every turn!

If it was possible to change difficulty setting on every scenario, I would definitely choose to play this on Champion. (Not as if Champion makes it all that challenging, but hey I do like getting a higher score.)

Bohb finished this scenario with Grandmaster Life Magic, Master Order, Basic Death, Expert Chaos and Grandmaster Nature magic. The only secondary magic skill Bohb got was Basic Sorcery, and it was because this was repeatedly forced on him despite me saving and reloading to try and get other skills. I normally prefer to increase my proficiency in magic schools before coming for the Secondary magic skills.

Sorcery is not that great a skill to have unless you are a Chaos caster. Unlike the Archmage class which gives you +20% effectiveness in all schools of magic, Sorcery only increases direct damage. It does not increase the healing ability of your life spells. Throughout this campaign I tried very hard to avoid choosing Sorcery, so that I could focus on improving my other skills.

I had focused my efforts on attaining Grandmaster Life Magic. This is the last scenario in Bohb’s campaign that you can get Life Magic. Chaos magic isn’t that wonderful. This time I didn’t try to get Grandmaster Order magic because I’m not playing on Champion and don’t need Hypnotize.

[cjleeagain]

Map 5: Mire of the Dead

In this final map of Bohb’s campaign, he needs to grab the Staff of Disruption from the Dark Lord Cardonis, the Master of Death magic.

This map is basically divided into two. You’re on the West, with 4 Chaos towns. Your sole opponent is on the East, in the middle of swampland with 4 Death towns. There is a bunch of Bone Dragons blocking the only path between your territories.

Thanks to the terrible H4 AI, your enemy will never really get powerful. When I invaded his side, the vast majority of neutral creatures had not been cleared.

Level cap is 30. This map is your last opportunity to level up. If you have been religiously milking every previous map for its experience, you will easily meet level 30 on this map since there are 3 locations where you can gain one level each. The neutrals on this map might add 3 levels if you start at level 24. (I started at 26, cleared just enough neutrals to reach 27, then quickly used all the 3 locations to hit level 30. Half the neutrals on this map were still around when I confronted my boss opponent.)

If you have been moving a bit too fast on previous maps, this is the last one where you can learn things and level up, so make them count! The fact that there are chaos and death towns, means that you can get spells for 4 spell schools.

As I warned you earlier, you should have maxed out your life magic on map 4 and gotten all the life spells possible, so that you would have Guardian Angel, Sanctuary and Divine Intervention. Life Magic is essential because when facing Hexis, you need two Heroes with Grandmaster Life Magic so that they can protect and resurrect each other.

Then you probably had maxed out all your Nature Magic spells already.

Whether or not you have Grandmaster Order Magic, Chaos Magic and Death magic, and how many spells you actually have from these schools, probably don’t matter so much. You’ve had so many opportunities to learn spells in the last few maps, that you probably do have a bunch of essential Order spells like Mass Slow, Berserk, Forgetfulness. So you can finish this map quickly if you like, without bothering to build up your guilds to get spells.

Thanks to my playstyle, I like to thoroughly explore every map and visit all locations. So I leveled to the max and got my stats up to the max.

My opponent was a level 30 Dark Lord. Sigh, total joke of an enemy. A Dark Lord’s specialty is to give his opponent maximum negative morale during melee fights. This is one of the weakest hero specialties. Especially when Cardonis is a spellcaster, so why would he even try to do melee fighting?

I had Black Dragons. That guy – and I kid you not – had only Venom Spawn as his best unit. What is the H4 AI doing?

I took him out within 2 shots. Again, a battle that was far easier than just about any of my confrontations with neutrals.

I finished this scenario with Grandmaster Life, Order and Nature magic. I had Expert Death and Master Chaos magic. Thanks to my efforts to religiously avoid choosing Sorcery, I was still only at Basic Sorcery, HAHA! If I had been easygoing and just accepted the computer’s crappy choices, I’d be at Grandmaster Sorcery by now – and accordingly have 4 fewer advancements in other Magic skills. So I’d definitely have lost at least 1 Grandmaster skill.

After this, when playing the Final Campaign against Hexis, I will still have many opportunities to level up. But I won’t be getting Chaos magic anymore. Master Chaos already gives me Cloud of Confusion, Mass First Strike and Cat Reflexes. The level 5 Chaos spells are all for direct damage, and two of them can hit your own side, so what’s the point of learning them?

I will be targeting to learn Death Magic in the Final Campaign so that I can cast Hand of Death. I will need to rise 6 levels to get there – entirely feasible in the Final Campaign.

[cjleeagain]

Alita Eventide

I really wonder how I did it on Champion last time. I frankly could not repeat my performance, and had to lower the difficulty to Advanced. So this walkthrough is also written with Advanced Difficulty in mind.

I did remember one thing about playing Alita on Champion. It was incredibly difficult, and one single factor mattered more than anything else – morale. Because you are a dark priestess and travel with a mixed Life/Death army all the time, your side has perpetually low morale so even seemingly weak opponents are dangerous because they always get to act before your side does.
Another absolutely important thing to remember on Champion, is that Alita is a Dark Priestess. Her troops will never be enough, so she needs to do some meat-shielding herself. She can recover some damage from melee combat, which allows her to attack living enemies and use up their retaliation before her other troops close in.

Even on Advanced, I had to play this with some creativity.
For example, you do not take the first town you see, in the NE. It is only possible on low difficulty settings. But because your troops are so slow, it is advisable that you grab the two mines next to this town.
As you approach this town, there are scores of footmen blocking the road. You have to kill them to advance. Shoot to win this battle with no casualties – Alita is level 5 and can suck HP from these footmen, so she can stand in front and take blows while the rest of your forces fight the footmen. Once the footmen are down, head slightly NE to take an undefended ore mine.
Because your army is so slow and the terrain at this point is snow, you should also fight the pack of elves to the N for a pair of snowshoes. These Elves will focus on Alita (who can cast bind wound on herself) while your crossbowmen can finish the Elves off.
With the Elves gone and the snowshoes on your feet, you can now visit the nearby Barrow Mound and fight the ghosts so that you can hire more ghosts.
Try not to lose any crossbowmen when fighting the ghosts, since they are your only ranged power.
Now head for the Death town nearby, Lievertje. Attacking it without ghosts on your side is tough, since they have cerberi defending it.
Once you have taken Lievertje, flag the sawmill nearby and continue south. Lievertje will only let you build up to level 2 troop dwellings, so you have to grab the town in the south which will let you build Mansions for Vampires.
Now what should you get? Ghosts are more expensive, and they require you to build an undead transformer (not as if you want to convert crossbowmen into skeletons!). So I would prefer to get a torture chamber and kennels instead.
After that, head south to capture a second Death town Scythe.

There are Life and Nature towns on this map. So do not bother to get Life magic whenever levelling up. Increase your Death magic skills instead. You can always buy skills like Sprituality at the Academies in Life Towns.
To the W of Scythe you will find a quest hut where the Dwarven Farmer wants you to retrieve his shield and hammer for 8000 gold and gems, crystals, etc. It’s a worthwhile quest since you are short on resources and want to get vampires asap.
The shield and hammer are less than a day directly to the south of the quest hut, guarded by scores of crossbowmen. Normally I won’t dare to take these on so early in the game, but when playing Death, you have skeletons and skeletons are cheap. Put the skeletons in front while using your crossbowmen to trade shots with the enemy crossbowmen. You won’t lose too many skeletons.
While taking Scythe you will have heard about Allenvale being captured and held in a prison. That prison is directly to the S of Scythe, accessed via a snowy valley to the SE of Scythe. It’s guarded by dozens of Ballista, which basically means you either need enough skeletons to stand in front while your crossbowmen do their thing, or you need to hire enough fast moving ghosts to take out the ballista.

Allenvale is a level 1 knight, so I figure he would work best as a general. The two of you have a level cap of 18, and getting there with two heroes would be a serious challenge on this map. But you should not stint on getting Allenvale experience, since he would be a big help to Alita for the next two maps as well. With Allenvale’s protection, you can focus on first maximizing Alita’s Life and Death skills and not worry too much about getting Grandmaster Combat just to survive. Since you have a level cap of 32 for the first 3 maps, you can definitely get grandmaster Life and Death magic before Alita’s fourth and last mission, which she has to go through without Allenvale.

In fact, you will probably be faced with a dilemma through her campaign. Should you keep Alita as a Dark Priestess, or should you turn her into an Archmage?
The Archmage part is easily done, since Alita has so many chances to learn other schools of magic, especially Nature Magic.

In my previous playthroughs, my Alita always wound up an Archmage with three or four schools of magic. One time she got to Grandmaster Nature magic, which was awesome because along with Bohb, she could now summon tons of Devils.
One time I got Alita to Grandmaster Order, which was also very useful.
In one playthrough, I tried to be disciplined and ignored all opportunities to learn other magic types. Instead I learned scouting and combat. This did help Alita move more quickly on the map. But I soon found it pretty difficult going. The reason is that if you want to really play Alita to her best, she should be throwing out Hand of Death and other mana intensive spells every turn. Having only two schools of magic means less mana and less mana recovery. Eventually I gave in and took on another magic skill.

After taking your first two towns, what next? There are several routes into enemy territory, but they are guarded by color gates. You can feasibly take only one route – the Garrison two days NE of Scythe. That is guarded by a pack of monks. There is another way into enemy territory, but that involves fighting scores of Griffins along a narrow passage in the south.

Bear in mind when I say something is 2 days’ journey, I am thinking of a journey where your troops are vampires, ghosts and imps. Death units tend to be either very slow or very fast. While I used skeletons and cerberi early in the game, after the Garrison was taken I did not use slow units much. I did have access

I don’t really know how this game is coded, but Alita the Dark Priestess is still classified as Life faction. I don’t think the system allows her to get Necromancy. Every time I play this campaign, Necromancy takes a long time to come by and is always purchased at some school. Early on I did pick up an Amulet of the Undertaker, which allows Alita to raise skeletons after every battle. Eventually I did build up a big skeleton army. But I never used that army. I just marched the skeletons off to accumulate them. You don’t need to raise undead to win.

When playing, do be aware that all towns on this map have building restrictions. You can’t get Level 4 units anywhere (your Orange Life enemy starts with three Angels). Only one death town can get Vampires and the other Death town is limited to level 2 units.

The same pattern holds for the enemy. Your enemies are both Life factions, Red and Orange. Red starts in the North and Orange in the NW. Both start with only 1 town, and there are two other Neutral towns in their area, one a Nature town and one a Life town. Your goal is to meet an informant on an island. The island is accessed by a portal at the back of Orange’s territory in the far NW, so you theoretically do not have to beat Orange in order to win. I vaguely remember playing this on Champion a long time ago; I could not beat Orange because he had too many ballista on turrets and I didn’t have ranged attackers. So I bypassed Orange town and met up with the Informant.

The enemy doesn’t have access to more resources or towns than you so you are not under much time pressure. Red’s starting town can only build up to level 2 units, and the neutral town in Red’s area can only build up to level 2 also.

Orange’s starting town can build up to level 3 units, but since the other town in Orange’s area is a Nature town that can only build up to level 2, you don’t ever have to fear Orange accumulating a big army.

Once through the Garrison you are in Red’s territory. It’s seriously no challenge on Advanced. When you have conquered Red, there is a single bridge that leads into Orange’s territory. On Champion, I remember having severe difficulty, but that was mainly because of my slow start. Apart from their 3-Angel advantage, the enemy isn’t actually going to be stronger than you.

Nonetheless, beating Orange is not too straightforward. When you invade Orange territory they will make a beeline to their starting town in the NE. Laying siege to them is moderately painful on Advanced. This is because Orange has crusaders and ballistas on turrets.

At this point you have probably gotten used to using Vampires to crush every single neutral stack. Every time I play this scenario, I always find myself fighting organic units or death faction units. I don’t remember coming across golems or elementals. But Crusaders are pretty strong vs Vampires so do not fight them directly with your vampires.

It was unintended, but my key to beating Orange in this playthrough was to have both Alita and Allenvale with Advanced Life magic and Song of Peace. Song of Peace works best on Crusaders thanks to their Death Ward.

In this playthrough I didn’t deliberately make Allenvale a crusader. But I’d focused on building up his tactics skills first, especially Leadership. So by the time I invaded Red’s area, Allenvale had plenty of tactics skills. Then I purchased Life magic in the Seminaries, and he wound up with Advanced Life Magic.

One warning about this map: it is experience poor. Every time I play it, I have had the greatest difficulty in hitting level cap.

You have to be disciplined. Always take xp from chests even if it is 500xp. Don’t let your hired Lords take xp from chests. Even with that, I could only get Alita to level 16 and Allenvale to 13 by the time I beat Orange. I had to march all over the map, killing all the neutrals that pop up during ‘month of the...’, before I could get Alita to level 17. Then I sent her off to the Tree of Knowledge at 84,99 to max out at 18. I used Allenvale to kill a last few neutrals, barely squeezing him to level 15, then visited the Tree to get level 16.

Allenvale will always be lower level than Alita because she is already at least level 6 when she rescues Allenvale who is level 1 at time of rescue.

At this point I was late into Month 3. If I’d waited a bit I could get another Month of the..., but I really didn’t want to drag this scenario into the fourth month!

My heroes finished with:
Allenvale Level 16. Expert Tactics with Grandmaster Leadership, Master Combat with no sub-skills, Advanced Life Magic, Advanced Order Magic.

I have consistently found it really good to train Generals in some basic life and order magic. It’s easy to do this because you can just buy the skills in any Order or Life town, after which you just pay to upgrade them whenever you visit a Magic Library. You don’t actually have to waste a skill point on learning these magic skills when leveling up. Even very basic spells like Bind Wound, Exorcism, Displacement, Precision, Dispel are incredibly powerful.

I don’t really want Allenvale to be a Crusader, so I’ll change his hero class back to General when possible.

Alita level 18, Advanced Combat with no sub-skills, Advanced Life Magic, Advanced Order Magic, Master Death Magic, Advanced Nature Magic.

I’d held off improving Alita’s Life Magic because I was hoping to buy Spirituality from a Seminary, but all three Life towns didn’t have Spirituality to teach. Also, I’d focused earlier on upping my Death Magic skills because I really like Vampiric Touch and Hand of Death and hope to get these asap.

[cjleeagain]

Map 2

Everytime I play this scenario, I play it wrong. But since you’re reading my walkthrough, you have the opportunity to make things right!

You start in the SW with no town. This area, what I’ll call your ‘home area’, is basically an island with two bridges one in the N and one to the E. You have one of each mine except no gold mine. There is a neutral Nature Town just steps from you. You do not have to fight, because once you approach the town it will become yours.

Unless your hero builds are bad, most battles in this home area can be fought alone. So you can split up Alita and Allenvale so that you can capture mines and clear the neutrals more quickly. There are a number of useful items that you can pick up, and eventually you do need to win this map using troops, so you should really clear your home area first.

There are two opponents: Red is a Might enemy with two
Orange is a Life enemy.
Orange has two towns. Red starts with one.
Every time I play this I do the wrong thing because I forgot what happened the last time I played.
There is a quest to kill red by going East. That is wrong, because Ula isn’t to be found there.
Red is to the North.
So don’t waste time. Go north, take out Red,

They’re easy to beat as long as you have two heroes on your side. Because X is a level x general accompanied by a baby hero.
Although I had troops with me by then, they weren’t necessary.

Around this time, Orange will start out of its area and start bothering you. They have a few level 15 and 16 heroes. They have two towns, but one cannot build level 4 dwellings and the other will have champions not angels. So Orange is not a major threat.
You cannot enter Orange’s area which is guarded by red barriers. You have to complete a Dwarven quest on the far East of the map first. Although the quest says to ....., actually as long as Red is dead you will finish this quest.
The quest is essential because the dwarves will bust a hole on the map for you to enter Orange’s territory.

You enter Orange’s lands in the East, just a day south of their town Brisbane. This is the town that cannot build level 4 dwellings.

Orange’s main town is Lenceros, roughtly at the middle-north of the map. Should not have any difficulty taking them when you have two heroes.

Your objective is to obtain the Ring of Light, and it is most fortunately not equipped on any hero. Bohb’s missions were made more complicated by the fact that I wanted to conquer every town to get the spells, but always had to avoid beating the main enemy hero so that the mission doesn’t end too soon.

In Alita’s scenario, the Ring of Light is guarded by a hero that doesn’t move. And this is guarded by a quest gate half a day SW of Lenceros. Only Alita can get to that hero.

And there, after an easy map, you come to your hardest battle. The enemy is a level 22 Paladin with scores of Champions, a Company of Crusaders, and hundreds of lower level creatures. My Alita had a terrible build. I had done all I could to increase her Death magic in the previous map, and she has Master Death Magic without the corresponding spells. I was still weak in the other spell schools. Once I became an archmage I wasn’t getting offered Life magic at all; it was ridiculous.

I should warn you that this map is experience poor. Although the level cap is 25, you definitely cannot have both heroes hit level 25. Your best bet is to shoot for Alita to get to 23, by isolating her from Allenvale once you’ve fought the main battles. Then there is a Coliseum of Might and a Tree of Knowledge to get Alita to level 25.
Allenvale will be at level 21. Even after killing every single neutral and ‘month of the’ and hitting the creature dwellings, Allenvale was still short of level 22.

[cjleeagain]

Map 3

This map is thoroughly boring. I found it very much the definition of Grind, where you are fighting endless pointless battles against weak creatures just to level up.


Adding to the Grind nature of this map, you have to fulfill several quests to finish this scenario. But these don’t involve interesting battles. You need to get past a Red barrier and a Blue barrier. To get past the Red, you have to visit the Red keymaster at which is guarded by a
The Blue barrier need the Blue keymaster at. To gain access, you need to accumulate 12 vampires.
So it’s pathetic.
Worst of all, the main enemy on this map is weak but protected by a gate that only they acn pass through. So while you are leveling up Alita, the enemy can harass you. But they are not strong enough to offer challenge or much experience.
It is very pathetic.
There are only 2 level up structures, a Tree of Knowledge at , and a Coliseum of Might at
I separated my heroes and did my best to reserve most of the experience for Alita, but was unable to get Alita to level 28, so after leveling up twice at the structures, I was still not level 30.
Allenvale started this map at level 23, and was only able to get to level 26 by the end. It is not important to level up Allenvale or build this hero, since he won’t be around for the first half of the final map in this campaign.

-=-=-
(the following is incomplete due to data loss from screwed up Windows update followed by reinstall.) I'm posting anyway,; someday I will go back to my savegames. For now I have no time.
Map 4

This is the last map in the campaign. It is Small in size, but has 4 level up structures here: Two Trees of Knowledge at , one Coliseum of Might at, and one Coliseum of Magic at.
Alita

In my previous playthroughs, I built up Alita’s Necromancy so I always played through with Vampires (from Grandmaster Necromancy). This time I decided to play it differently, so I totally avoided getting necromancy. I shot for Demonology instead. But since it is very hard to build up Nature and Death magic at the same time, I was only able to get to level 4 Demonology at this stage, with these ugly Venom Spawn things.
Playing this on Advanced Difficulty by summoning Venom spawn is a lot harder than playing this on Champion Difficulty with Grandmaster Necromancy and a vampire army. It also requires a lot more micromanagement.
Still, the result will be worth it eventually. Demonology lets you summon more creatures than just plain Nature Magic summoning spells. Being able to summon 22 to 30 Devils in one casting to assassinate Hexis is quite strong. Moreover, Bohb may be able to do the same, so you can get more than 50 Devils per turn.