A Pirate's Daughter → Bay of Maids

[Pacifist]

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[Pacifist]

You can capture the first town on first day with Tawni if she has GM pathfinding. With Cyrca and her crocodile boots go take the efreet (don't move efreet alone without boots). Cyrca takes the artifact first if she wishes. Next 2 steps diretion movement enhancer building. Tawni joins this army and takes the place of Cyrca while Cyrca and the minotaurs step back. Now Tawni hits the movement bonus and she can capture the town with some movement left. You will not be able to build anything on impossible difficulty but still can be woth the trouble .

[Wheeler Dealer]

Bay of Maids, max 28.

Both Tawni and Cyrca reached L28. The last battle was a joke. No way to eliminate Blue so he continued to harass throughout. I ultimately had three secondary armies, one on each continent, all able to defend their territory.

A couple of general observations: Expert/Master Necromancy can be quite useful. Tawni spent most of two scenarios generating ghosts. Often, she would enter combat with 6 stacks of ghosts, 5 singles and the rest in reserve. The singles could decoy and or age the enemy while Tawni carved them up. Sometimes the reserve stack, with First Strike, was a powerful finishing force. In the final battle I had 909 ghosts.

I had long known that battlefields had different terrain that affected the movement of the creatures, but I hadn't really appreciated how I could use that to my advantage. The terrain on the battlefield is the same as the terrain where you engage on the main map. Try to engage on terrain where your enemy is hindered. Sometimes Terrain Walk gives your units more movement than Haste/Speed.

Here are some excerpts from my journal.

Week 1, Using Pacifist's tactics from 2011, Tawni captured the eastern town on day 1! Cyra can't beat the garrison blocking the road to the neutral asylum in the NE. Tawni and her company of ghosts jumped through a yellow portal into a band of BDs. Decided on my time travel spell.

Probably would have been better off to follow the walkthrough and send Cyrca east and Tawni north.

Week 2, Tawni hustled up north (43 mp) with her ghosts. When Cyrca, Tawni and a company of ghosts attacked the garrison the defenders didn't charge, so I cast Mana Flare and every positive spell I could on my troops while I waited for the 12 Hydras to die from poisoning, so I only had to fight the 3 BDs. I overdid it, lost only a few ghosts. Immediately took this army to capture the neutral asylum on day one, week two.

Blue sent 2 armies through the Dragon Portal Exit just NW of my first town. The first was defeated by the neutral bandits nearby, but the second broke through. Tawni sped to the rescue with her ghosts. I let them surrender for the gold.

Week 4, Tawni crossed underground to the west continent. Tawni doubled back to join Cyrca to take the underground medusa area, to no avail, only Cyrca and medusae can enter.

Week 6, Tawni took the last purple asylum, lost 90/550 ghosts (vs. 6 BDs & many shooters on the towers). Purple eliminated. Now just building for a while.

Week 11, Tawni reached L27. (Should have immediately sent her to the ToK and then to join Cyrca.) Building. I don't see any way to reach the only Blue town. That first pirate ship in the blockade looks formidable!

Week 14, Tawni learned GM Necromancy.

Week 17, cleared the blockade. Cyrca is 3,108 xp short of XL27. Surely, I can get that before taking the journey to the ToK.

Week 19, Pete has 100 Hydras, 200 minotaurs, 200 evil eyes, 350 pirates, 202 sprites and 104 wolves (not sure that summoning skill helped him). I have 47 BDs, 176 Efreeti, 89 Vampires, 21 Nightmares and 909 ghosts. I lost 1 BD and 7 ghosts, and the computer rated this battle even!?!

Won on 5,3,3.

[cjleeagain]

Wheeler Dealer, I gotta ask you.

You got Tawni to Gm Necro on this map. But to get there, you need 11 levels of Death, right?

Let's assume you had 3 Death shrines and maybe a couple of skill purchases. (I really can't remember the maps). That still leaves you spending 6 valuable skill points for Death magic.

I can see you getting to GM pathfinding and GM combat, or GM Death/ Necro and GM Combat. But basically something's got to go, can't be GM everything. So what skills did you prioritize along the way?

Another problem is with the morale. Undead is always going to bring down morale a lot. So Tawni's troops are always going to move slower. Against the enemies in this campaign (Pete Girly's hydras, Mermaid Queen) it's not so dangerous to move second. But I imagine against a Nature opponent you might get screwed when a flying creature gets to attack first and causes your black dragons to burn their own side. So were you hampered by morale every battle?

What was your Pete Girly build?

I've played Pete Girly with tactics before and it is definitely a terrible idea to build him up to be a dangerous general. I think someone (maybe Maltz) once recommended giving Pete Grandmaster pathfinding, so that he is useful on map 1 but not so dangerous when he betrays you.

[Wheeler Dealer]

This was the 4th Scenario; I bought a lot of skills along the way. I got all the basic Death skills w/o using my XP advancements.

Tawni 's build:
Tactics EABE 9
Combat E-GE 11
Scout MGGM 18
Death EABG 11 (Raise Ghosts is a favorite)
Chaos MMMM 16

That's 65 skill steps. A L28 hero would have 29 from XP only, so she got 36 from Altars or other structures.

I gave Tawni all the one-shot plus ups.

Confession, I often would rerun a skill acquisition to get something I liked better. Why take Mele when you never fight hand to hand? Why take Defense when you don't plan to defend? Once she was saddled with Advanced Necromancy additional Necromancy became a priority.

The Expert Leadership helped with the morale, and artifacts were kicking in another +5. Chaos troops were at +6 morale in the final battle.

At the end of Scenario 3, Straits of the Lost, a L23 Pete Girly looked like this:

Combat GBGE 14
Scout EEAB 9
Death EAAB 8
Chaos ABB- 4
Nature BB-A 4

When I played this Campaign on Expert in 2018 my L31 Tawni looked like this at the end:

Tactics MAGG 16
Combat MAGG 16
Scout GGGG 20
Death MEMB 12
Chaos EEEG 14

[cjleeagain]

Wow.

Hearing from you really makes me want to replay this. I've played this campaign several times, but never with Tawni doing so much magic. I have always played her as a Might, and Cyrca as Magic.

The consequences of my decision was that Tawni was always incredibly strong. But the rest of her army was just useless. And being GM pathfinder traveling with dragons, meant that on every replay of the last mission, Tawni was always way ahead of Cyrca. A lot of waiting time.

With Tawni getting 36 points from altars, I get the impression that you didn't give Cyrca too much? Thanks to Maltz's early warning that you need two strong heroes to fight in the last mission, I always developed them equally. So my Might Tawni was always useless at magics.

[Wheeler Dealer]

Once I rescued Cyrca, I tried to give her most of the Gems and Altars. Some weren't possible and a few just didn't make sense based on her build.

Between Gems, Altars and structures where I could buy skills, in this scenario, Tawni went from 54 ss to 65 ss and Cyrca went from 36 to 50 ss. (5 ss each came from xp of course)

Cyrca looked like this at L28:

Tactics ABAE 8
Combat A-MA 8
Scout AAMB 9
Chaos GGGG 20
Nature AA-B 5

Quicksand played a big part in a few of Cyrca's battles. Summoning was only chosen after at least one reload to avoid it, but the summoned creatures were quickly separated to scout, gather, occupy mines (for the increased visibility) or to speed up a supporting hero.

I am currently at m2w4d7 of the next scenario and have not purchased any creatures for armies. Tawni has produced 258 Vampires and Cyrca has 90 of them. Each hero has Warlock or Fireguard at about L15 for support.

[cjleeagain]

It's so awesome to have a forum like this!

I don't fully remember Cyrca anymore, but it's interesting that you developed Scouting. I didn't do it on two tries, and found the going immensely difficult. So I used to hire somebody to do pathfinding for Cyrca.

I find Cyrca's build, even on your playthrough, confusing. I know she should be all GGGG Chaos. And since I never gave Tawni the Death altars and gems, naturally Cyrca got them all. but her death magics were always still vastly inferior. I can't quite figure out what Cyrca should be like.

Quicksand did become Cyrca's mainstay for me too. Confusion also. Chaos magic's direct damage is quite useless actually.

Reading what you write about Tawni's 258 vampires, I'm really impressed. I never thought Tawni could be a necromancer. But your logic is sound. On any fight-rich map, you can build huge undead armies.

[Wheeler Dealer]

My thought was that both heroes needed to be able to lead an army to the end, so they both needed tactics and scouting. Combat is needed for all heroes, so that allowed each only 2 magic schools. One gets Nature and the other Death. I suppose I might have ignored Cyrca's Tactics and hired a death knight for that instead of another magic user.

Sometimes many magic schools are just redundant, there are usually other ways to deal with a problem instead of the perfect answer from a particular magic school.

I agree that the direct damage spells don't help very often in this campaign (maybe always), but the Mass First Strike, Mass Slayer, Mass Confusion, Mass Misfortune, Cat Reflexes are game changers. The second magic user was chosen for the lesser forms of these spells.

The difference in Level 31 and 32 is 115K xp, enough to get a LL22 helper or 2 L18 sidekicks for each hero.

[snowyyy]

You can capture the first town on first day with Tawni if she has GM pathfinding. With Cyrca and her crocodile boots go take the efreet (don't move efreet alone without boots). Cyrca takes the artifact first if she wishes. Next 2 steps diretion movement enhancer building. Tawni joins this army and takes the place of Cyrca while Cyrca and the minotaurs step back. Now Tawni hits the movement bonus and she can capture the town with some movement left. You will not be able to build anything on impossible difficulty but still can be woth the trouble .

Thank you for sharing your strategy for capturing the first town in the game you mentioned. I hope this information is helpful to others who may be trying to play the game. However, I'm afraid I don't have any information about the specific game or scenario you're referring to, so I'm unable to provide further assistance or clarification. Can you please provide more context or the name of the game you're playing?

[Wheeler Dealer]

I don't think there was a question. I used Pacifist's strategy, it worked great, but I thought it might have slowed me down capturing the second town.

We were playing HOMM IV, A Pirate's Daughter → Bay of Maids, Champion difficulty.