Rapier wrote:You want to take the first elven town the day that week 2 starts, that prevents the first week of the elfspawn. You want to rush up towards the phoenixes, turn right and kill the mages.
Then kill the earth elementals you find above you and to your left. Go up from there and clear out the Military post, it gives 2 treants. Finally head left, and take the second elvern town. (which is north-west of the first if you want a general area to head too).
With Expert logistics this should take you five days, without it I believe it takes 7, but you should still make it before the start of week 3. From there you have about 2-3 weeks, before Gilran makes a move on you, you need all that time to build up the second elf town. I hired one extra hero (doesn't matter what kind) in the first town, to run up the sprites, bladedancers, and hunters I had there (didn't upgrade the town more than that).
This strategy worked for my flatmate and I, on heroic. We had different hero builds (he went with ballistics and I went with luck, I had logistics and he had leadership ect...), different "weeks" and so on. It’s a solid strategy and, as far as I know from experience playing and forums, the only one which will work on heroic.
I'm playing on normal, as I'm not quite so good at Heroes, but this strategy worked for me, with some variance.
I picked nightmares as my starting bonus (I'd recommend pit fiends, personally, in hindsight) and started out by getting the moral and luck bonuses around the inferno town before fighting Gilraen, to insure I'd lose as little units as possible in the first fight. Then, as I waited for week two to start, I captured the ore mine, the gold mine guarded by the treants, and the lumber mill next to the elf town. Once week two started, I took the elf town, and rushed up. On the way up I took the crystal mine, and then the gem mine.
Taking the NW town is kind of a pain; I wasn't able to beat the hero with my intial force, or even dent him. However, he seems to be in mostly non-aggressive exploration mode, so I was able to slip past and take the town when he was out. After that, he just ignored me and moved south to take the town down there. I had to go back and retake everything a little later on; not a problem. I was back well before Gilraen showed up.
From there I rushed to build as many structures as possible; By the end of week 2 I had treants and unicorns, by the end of week 3 I had dragons. From there it was just a matter of building up my units and insuring his stray heroes didn't hold the southern town or the mines around it. The key to this map seems to be both in keeping a high flow of resources as well as a steady stream of units. Ironically, on higher difficulties it may be 'easier', as Gilraen dosen't come out until week 10 or more on average, so when he finally does show he has an incredibly large number of dragons, hunters, and druids. He also seems to have expert luck, so don't go in with a similair force expecting you can squeak by unless you can say the same for yourself. I had his stack of 15 dragons kill my stack of 20 on one of my previous attempts just because of a lucky shot. If you still can't muster a force, as the quoted poster suggested, have some heroes rush up units from the southern base. Since you have a little more time in normal, you should be able to safely build the southern base up to have all tiers of units.
Another thing to note about this map - character build can really, seriously have an effect on how well you do. My first attempts, I had taken sorcery and destruction. (I later found that destruction was useless, as I was just casting phantom forces every round on this map to multiply my archers.) On my second attempt I replaced them with luck (which is retardedly helpful on this map) and Defense (also very useful) and had a much, much easier time. Leadership should also be considered, if only to offset the morale penalties and increase your ability to recruit the random sylvan units that spawn all over the map. (Agrael CAN recruit them by the way, you don't need an elf hero, just a sufficiently big army.)
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