 Hello folks, welcome to another season of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. It's time for us to jump back into this game. It's been a while. Such a cool game. I just love it so much. Really excited to get in. I've had a real goo to get back into it over the last little while. What I like to do is I think I might go for a total of five opponents this time. I like to play on large maps with underground turned on, water content. I might go for islands and see how well behaved that is. Sometimes the maps can be a little bit funky when you have islands turned on, but we'll see how it behaves. I'm going to go for normal monster strength at maximum difficulty. I really really like going on maximum difficulty because it means that you've got to make some really tough decisions in the early game. In terms of advanced options, I have to pick a colour here. I think I might like to be purple. I don't know why. We're not doing tournaments here, so I don't think that's a thing. Conflux. Okay, very very interesting. I think it works okay as we reveal more of the map. There'll be less purple on the screen to be looking at. So we have Froy San is our starting town, and in Froy San there is a village hall, a fort, a tavern, and that's it. Oh, we do have the pixie building. And we start with Labitha, who has 24 pixies, three elementals. What do we know about Labitha? She has a ring of contouring, increases the duration of all of our spells by two, very very good, very very useful, especially if we are adept at casting spells. As an elementalist she is very adept at casting spells, which is great, and she loves casting stone skin. So guess what? Every time we cast stone skin it's going to last for an extra two turns, which is really really nice. This will also trigger off slow, which is a really important spell in the earth category. When we start the game we know stone skin and that's it. That's all we know for now. Okay, we have a look in the tavern. We are already being told that the grail is in the southeast, someone write that down, someone remember that because I'll probably forget that when the time comes to start looking for it. Southeast and we can either take a witch or a elementalist, stick the witch or barissa, the elementalist. Brissa has, is a elementalist, she's a fellow mage, much like Labitha. She's good at haste and she comes with a pretty poor army at the beginning. So I'll probably try to buy Brissa before the week is through. Obviously we have absolutely no money to start with as we discussed earlier. And if we want to we can actually have a very quick look at the town types we're up against. We've got dungeon, tower, rampart, stronghold and acropolis. So there's no doubles, so there's no situation where sometimes you can get, say there were two ramparts, if you can get a situation where one player in the mid-game controls both of those starting towns, you know, that that can create a different dynamic to the power levels between the factions. So we're all different, we're all distinct, very very interesting. Okay so that's what the town looks like and what our heroes look like. What else do we know about Labitha? She was born poor, her parents were slaughtered, peasantry during the war, taken by dendroids and brought into the service in Avli, her power over the earth developed quickly and then she jumped ship from the rampart style town to go and pursue her calling in the conflux. So hopefully we can all get behind Labitha. Now we have a village hall, we're going to want to upgrade that to a town hall, that's our top priority, 2,500 gold we need to save pretty much before we do anything else at all. We have leprechauns here which may give us gold, I think I'm tempted to go up this way first. Oh no, oh that's a terrible outcome, this thing doesn't do anything. Oh wow, I'm immune to forgetfulness, how wonderful. Guess how many times forgetfulness is going to be cast in this game by anyone? Yeah, none. Lots of imps, okay do we want to take on lots of imps to try to unlock or do we want to come down here? I can see a chest here, it might be unguarded, I think it's better to hit the great mystical garden, we're desperate for gold in the early stages of the game, there's naked gold here we can go for as well. So we'll curl our trajectory around to get a little bit more movement, you are kidding me. Actually this one's not too bad though but I really want money, Cape of Conjuring. Combo town right, so we have the Ring of Conjuring, Cape of Conjuring. I'll have to look it up actually, I think there's this weird thing that happens with artifacts, if you have the such-and-such of Conjuring as a parcel there might be a third thing of Conjuring that allows you to get a combine them into one big artifact, I'll need to just double check how that works. It doesn't come up very often in random maps, random games. We are in trouble though, I think I can see there's someone guarding that could be goblins there, let's have a look, yep it's goblins, there is a way through I can walk past them so I think we'll get the stone and we'll try to unlock that gold and that'll be day one, as I say not looking to spend a penny until we can get that town hall, I'm gonna make a beeline there and it looks like we're not doing anything else up here after the, well I guess we can go here right, I've got the smell book obviously so it's not gonna matter which way around, we do that my left clicks aren't always landing which is a bit annoying, I don't know why that is, okay we have the desert next door it's quite possible that this is area though will be completely inaccessible to us for a very long time, the coast down the bottom is interesting, altar of earth, shackles of war and it's all about artifacts, very interesting, lots of halberds are real real tough ask for us in the early game lots of familiars not so much, I'm quite eager to try to unlock that mercury mine, a pack of manticores is gonna block us off all of this for quite a long time anyway, we can build a ship at some point this is the effect of having islands that you do have actually some water on the map, I find sometimes with the random map it doesn't really generate enough water for me, I'd like there to be more tempted here with lots of familiars as well to get in there but yeah for now we need to unlock obviously the stone in order to do that we're gonna have to get past lots of knolls we've got a free access to an altar of water though which is really really good, yeah we're gonna need to obviously break through these imps as well so early game looks like it's gonna be knolls, familiars, imps, halberds, pikemen, this would be a really good one to smash through as well, can't see what that is on the other side of there that might be a that might be a location of some importance there's like a mud bubbling thing going on there as well, okay so let's see what we learn stone skin, I really wanted slow or anything actually that I don't already have, we found 700 gold in that pile so sadly it's gonna be a whole extra day before we can build the town hall exceptionally disappointing, we're gonna have to make a decision stone skin isn't enough to win this fight I don't think but we probably can win this fight with stone skin uh how long is it gonna take me to get there I'm not fighting the familiars with this army and I probably don't know oh yeah she has basic wisdom actually so yeah she would be able to use that spell from magic thought um might be worth popping in here actually as well just to see what we've got but yeah that's easy easy enough for now to just end the turn is it worth doing this or should we be smashing these guys right now to try to get the town hall today there's 500 gold in it for us extra obviously a day worth of having the town hall if we do that uh I don't know I think uh I'm gonna bank on this being a decent spell instead that's probably that might be wrong less I don't think these things can be blessed even though can they I mean blessing as you can see here damage two to eight that becomes eight so blessing these things is going to be fantastic if we're allowed to do it uh with the sprites or what are these guys pixies you really we really don't want to be losing pixies we want to preserve their lives for as long as possible I just don't think we have the luxury though in this game yeah so we're gonna have to wait another day I don't know what to do it might be slightly more efficient to stand here get this wood gallop over here try and knock that over and get the witches out and this gold all in one turn uh I think that's what we're gonna do interested to see if bless works I mean we don't need the gold as urgently now we can wait another day because we've obviously had to wait anyway so let's do this let's get that online and we'll stay keep them together yeah all right let's see what happens I can target them so that's really gonna be good uh so we just wait here we are happy to trade spell points for um HP basically we're happy to keep casting things like stones get in blessed to really minimize the damage we take fortunately imps are fairly useless creatures yeah so you know what's I gonna do 23 to 46 these things have these things have 28 health I don't even think I am gonna bless um but I don't really want to get set upon by the imps that in the following turn uh so I might do a kite move or I kind of move and counter move I could actually fly down here and attack these imps on turn two maybe use these guys to body block I think that sounds okay I don't think it's worth spending spell points yet yeah there you go um yeah I think we can alpha strike actually now on turn two this fight's going much much better than I thought yeah I don't even need to cast a spell for this I think it's due to the way that they're laying out oh come on baby uh I think it's due to the way that they've laid out in lots of small stacks it's just perfect perfect sizing for the pixies normally I don't really like pixies um at the beginning of the game but with this particular layout quite quite good should I go again or should I wait I feel like I want to move the air elementals to here because they're gonna go next kill the stack that's here and body block um they have health 25 these things are gonna deal about at most 14 damage but it's probably more like attack skill two against my defense skill 10 I don't want to use her until okay only five the imp did one damage okay yeah this is absolutely fine I don't even think this guy can attack now because that guy lived he can't get to me come on right this is her this is the end of her extra turn and I didn't need to spend a single spell point what is her morale anyway it's just a basic morale we just got lucky um so we'll definitely take this gives me confidence makes me want to go back over and unlock the uh shrine of magical thought anyway labita receives 132 experience and look at how overjoyed some knight is that she did that that's obviously not her uh we both beat the familiars and the imps we never tick this uh this is just a feature of the hd patch for the game um so a few house rules I don't tick that I don't tick the cancel button uh unless something really ridiculous happened or there's a glitch or something weird happened and I don't want to lose my whole game um I also don't use the oh sometimes it says invite invite hero I don't like to do that because it's not in the base game um anyway not a big deal all right labita keep working please uh now I think I said this in the last video I made with this starting profile we have to second select gold every time in week one it's still true well into week two and beyond intelligence an ancient witch living in a strange hut welcomes us teaching intelligence for her own inscrutable purposes remind me what that does again all my spell points my maximum spell points go up from 30 to 37 okay not bad increases basically it turns it turns knowledge uh right up to 11 knowledge and intelligence some might argue are two different things but in this game they they were pulling in the same direction um okay how far can we get let me get it here so we actually ended up with 4700 we only needed 2500 but we can finally buy the town hall that's a good two turns later than I like um and I already feel like we're kind of a little bit unhappy at uh being this far behind already but anyway that's okay wow enemy turn was quick there I actually forgot that we had I didn't spot that we had this hut so we could have burned through all of our 30 spell points and not been worried and it gives me a lot of comfort going into the null fight here uh we should think though about what we're going to spend our money on we want to get as many sprites online as possible as quickly as possible and the way to do that is to make sure we have a garden of life which gives us 10 additional pixies per week which is just great that's going to go from 20 to 30 and we want to upgrade this uh to get to get these sprites uh online uh however having said that um do we need to do that immediately and what is labita going to do in the meantime so what she could do in the meantime is gallop back to the town buy the 19 or 20 that are here upgrade everything so a thousand bucks to upgrade the lantern let's say 500 to buy the 20 another certain amount of money maybe five or seven hundred to upgrade all their existing pixies with the idea of then galloping back to uh purchase some water elementals and then move on to the nulls I don't know about this uh I do want to poke my head through that doorway as well I don't know if I should be spending too much money at this water of water of altar altar of water um i'm not sure right folks just back there went had a quick look um the the two conjuring artifacts do actually uh combined together you need the color of conjuring and if you've got all three you can blend them into one single ring of the magi which gives you all of the bonuses then makes it basically that your spells never ever run out or never ever expire so not a massive priority if we come across it great but I don't think it's going to be a huge deal um I think uh the other thing is I may have teleported the camera just out of the way so you can see labita's army um a little bit of resizing just uh just done there as well I think um water elementals even though I don't have to build the dwelling and uh I'm going to be letting you go to waste here um is is worth is a is a value worth foregoing to get the sprites online uh so we're going to go galloping back to uh to base here um we're going to upgrade the land and upgrade the girls 120 bucks to do that because these things are just spectacular they're so much better than pixies um and having 44 of them in my army uh is is is pretty darn uh excellent uh so there's an x there we've spent uh we've built something today so that's that and now I'm looking at these thinking about before I go and unlock the stone which okay urgently we do need we are going to pick up some free stone we're already at five stone what we want to do next is build things like marketplaces blacksmiths mage guilds okay five stone there we want to get an altar of air five stone there I don't need the mine desperately right down to the wire I could use labita to go and try and um unlock some of these other areas things we talked about before this one especially very very tempting um to go and hit the lots of familiars uh I like the default is to just gallop around here smash through these gnolls um pick up all this free stuff set that up come galloping back around and then in week two maybe on our way back around by the water elementals come down here hit the pikeman come back in here pick up maybe some air elementals and some more sprites obviously then come down and clear this this guy get this get this she can't be everywhere at once so anything that's producing constantly producing free resources for you every turn you spend not unlocking it is a turn that you're not getting that free resource so it tends to be better to leave things sitting that can wait for later in order to your free resources so to speak online so I think we're good to end the turn okay day six lots of gnolls I think I'm happy with one big stack I think that's the best way of configuring your sprites okay so these guys are tough health six and defense skill six my attack skill is three so six times 20 they've got about 120 score 110 110 health in their stack and I'm going to deal at most about 80 odd so this is going to be a tough fight I'm going to need to probably bless the sprites damage one to three they love to be blessed and then we're going to have to try to trick the the basic gnolls into not supporting their friends which I've just about succeeded in doing right so these basic gnolls cannot come down and attack me if I'm standing here and so we're going to want to bring these guys up in support hopefully we won't need them let's go for it bless you my dear oh well that's okay because I can move how bad oh I did not expect that 40 did I do the maths wrong I guess 44 times 3 is 120 something it must have just barely been enough where's the battle log I don't know if I can see it she did 122 damage it must have just barely been enough to kill them all and because bless just takes away the variance she's now dealing the full damage this I think mathematically is going to be the exact same outcome uh how far can they move to support me if I'm wrong one two three four five six seven eight wow these guys are great I don't know they can move movement eight over grass so your tier two unit has movement seven eight over grass very very solid air elemental I must say this fight all of these fights have gone way better than I expected okay well there's money to be made right here right now we could just do that push spacebar to go back are there any other green portal locations I should be aware of it doesn't use any movement to do this so you can just check to be sure anyway as you can see this is at the bottom of the map underground completely randomly different location I very much want to do this and uh clear this it's just a question of when do I do it on the way back I think for the same reason we talked about before we do do it on the way back we don't lose much momentum by going here in his younger days he would have done it himself but he needs our help a friend of mine recently had an heirloom stolen necklace of swiftness please please bring me anything that fits the description um necklace of swiftness uh the problem is the necklace of swiftness is quite good and gives all of your creatures plus one movement uh which we kind of want um take this gold because it's on our way or did that cost us I don't know uh we won't need 11 stone so okay right this thing here is uh school of all will give you extra attack or defense your choice for a thousand gold uh one thousand gold is something we can't afford and the slightest at this stage of the game okay getting ready for the end of the week there's two days left before we get fresh pixies we've got two choices we can either start to build up our heir elementals uh no we don't we have to build a mage guild first okay so that's something to remember actually yes they're great but geez you've got to do this first um the problem with the mage guild is it doesn't do anything for us immediately in the fights that we're about to engage in well that's not true because we're going to fight pikeman and halberds after visiting the town so it's not the worst thing in the world to build a mage guild today for two grand and then the altar of air we will be able to afford tomorrow the problem with that is we don't have the garden of life and i really really want the garden of life and you can already actually see the impact of that very first chest we opened with the artifact we didn't want you can already see the effect of that like being one day out if we built the town hall one day sooner we would have an extra day up our sleeve because we obviously have the money to do the all of the things we want we want to build this this and this but we don't have enough days between now and the end of the week to get everything we want and so you've got to choose and that's what's so beautiful about the game is it forces you to choose like you have to pick one you can either go mage guild garden or mage guild altar or mage guild and just not worry about either of them um or do something else entirely you can mark it as blacksmith blacksmith i think is ammo can't see the list is okay um yeah i mean i don't know what for sure what i'm doing so in that scenario i pick the thing that is biggest no brainer uh and for me that's probably the garden um because 10 sprites sprites as you just saw in the early game so so powerful uh but the ramifications of that are going to be and even this not having that two stone little things like that they just really add up so as you make if you know you're heading say in this direction it's really important that you're doing this on the way don't just let it auto gallop up to there um even though that probably wouldn't make much difference if there's if getting here involves running to there then run to there and then get there thing um like likewise here run to the hex that you want to be on then pick up the resource and keep moving you'll save yourself some movement over the long run by doing that so i think we are popping in uh to visit the gremlins okay sorry quick pause there but uh we're back um yeah we're gonna get the gremlins just thinking about what we want to build on our last day of the week um couldn't get our way couldn't get all the stuff we wanted we really wanted this thing built before the end of week one i think though we know we're building this because of everything it's the seed of everything else in the in the town i think um it's very magical town the conflux um magic university comes after this there's a thing where you can teach heroes different schools that you can see it there behind there uh so there's our mage guild magic university you can pay to learn any or all of the four schools but it is quite expensive as you can see um so certainly not something we're going to be able to afford uh anytime soon so tomorrow we'll pop through the portal here week of the mongoose suits us nicely we don't want anything crazy um we certainly don't want a week of the skeleton or something um for the benefit of our opponent now the way this works if you walk here they'll fight the gremlins um okay so um they are spread out um just checking my levels and everything they're okay yeah um given how well we went against the nulls and imps and stuff i think the sprites are probably going to be able to just annihilate these without spending any spell points that morale flash doesn't scare me should i attack i don't think i should it's possible risk of losing one if i'm a bit careless which it is possible to to be careless now they actually have stupidly isolated themselves these guys can't come to the rescue so the sprites should be able to just kill these now as you can see um if these guys get a morale flash it would be bad though there's a wishing well on my way back so i'm just not going to take any risks here i died this is over you would never waste five spell points doing this but i think it's better to kill this stack and then hopefully these guys can kill this stack and we're just done and we spend the five five mana points oh we didn't even manage it there you go that shouldn't matter though yeah all right 192 experience uh for killing the gremlins very nice we are coming back so we'll get the sulfur on the way back um we really want the money lots of familiars guarding a spell scroll taking the money as we said earlier oh that's a good weapon the nulls flail there's a spell camp here i really really want to get back to base uh i can't take on lots of basilics but i can run through here to see what's guarding the nulls flail it's probably not something i can fight anyway having gone through the portal it's worth taking the time to explore uh a little bit because the fog of war doesn't go away like you get full access oh man this is just too good to say no to i'm gonna have to stick around here