Tips for Burn the Shadows mission?

[ppaladin123]

The map is huge....there are 8 enemy leaders and including mine an enormous number of heroes and armies everywhere. And only one Sundren with mystical wand necessary to capture the two leaders we actually care about.

Who should I go after first? What should I look out for? How do I deal with the enormous gold requirements that build up while I try to build armies to protect my cities and simulatenous support all the armies that keep showing up to help?

[Dunadd]

There are two ways to do it - one is just finding the two enemy leaders and capturing them. The other is to build two or more field armies each of two heroes plus 5 units or more and start clearing out locations and capturing enemy cities from the same AI lord - and just keep going till that AI lord surrenders. It's quite do-able if you save your game frequently , so you can reload if things go badly.

You get a lot of re-inforcements fairly early on - and the main problem is paying them. I would consider disbanding most of the ship units as they cost a fortune.

Sundren can get sprint, assassins strike and Total Awareness. Turn her into a melee hero and she'll be almost unstoppable.

Get your draconian druid hero the Vines spell and lightning and he can lead armies to take cities too.

You do have to expand and attack the enemy fast though. Leave it too long and they'll take you down by weight of numbers.

[Dunadd]

Oh and P.S use charm and befriend animal a lot to get yourself new units in battle, You can save before a fight and reload if the charm/ befriend fails. That helps build up your armies faster.

[Gloweye]

You'll want a doomstack - consisting of Sundren, some other heroes, and probably whatever T4's that you like. This one tours the map, going from player to player, hunting down all leaders and imprisoning them.

You'll get peace with every leader you lock up, regardless of whether you need them or not.

This should cover the front on the side of the map they're on. You can easily hold back 2 or 3 players with a stack like that.

The rest of your resources go to expansion early on, and to the other front after that.

[ppaladin123]

Wait....you can imprison the other leaders? I was under the impression there were just 2 prisons and you could only use the ability on the two leaders you are targeting. That changes things up a bit.

[Gloweye]

No, the prisons have space for every leader.

[ppaladin123]

Ooh, they really should have noted that in the mission intro. Thanks a lot Merlin.

[ppaladin123]

Beat it on turn 30 with a doom stack and an army led by edward plowing through everything. Leonidas was out eploring the north early so I jumped him and then hightailed it to the west of the map....caught elf daddy by surprise...ended him and then was able to hold out against a lot of agressive armies for 3 turns. Hurray.

[Dunadd]

You can do it in 30 turns by just capturing the two main enemy leaders- but it's a lot more fun and more of a challenge taking longer to do it and defeating most of the armies.

I had Sundren and Edward in the East and the Draconian druid in the West

[ppaladin123]

I had a lot of fun hunting the leaders!

[Dunadd]

fair enough - whatever is most fun for each person

[ppaladin123]

Honestly I feel required to beat all the campaigns but the whole "you have 5 heroes...none can die...also there is a time limit....also you never really have the need/ability to upgrade yur cities much" style of the first campaign was not great. I am going to start the Halfling campaign soon...interested to see what they did differently as they moved into the expansions.

[Gloweye]

Originally posted by ppaladin123:

Honestly I feel required to beat all the campaigns but the whole "you have 5 heroes...none can die...also there is a time limit....also you never really have the need/ability to upgrade yur cities much" style of the first campaign was not great. I am going to start the Halfling campaign soon...interested to see what they did differently as they moved into the expansions.

wut ? There's only one level which has a time limit.

[ppaladin123]

That is a relief! Was not pleased with that (although I finished with plenty of time left).