Elf Mission 3 - Promised Lands

[Rotpar]

I'm an old AoW veteran but it's been a while since I last played. The third mission of the elven campaign is proving to be a colossal pain in the ass for me. It seems like the enemy is just too well entrenched and can outproduce me.

I've built two cities in addition to the starting one, trying to get as many treasure sites under control as possible. I built up an army of low tier units and summons, lost much of them taking the first goblin city. Now I'm at war with two out of three players, I have no idea where any of their cities are and they have massive armies stomping around with high tier units. I found the friendly orcs, brought the leader to the dragon, and the elves and now I have more fronts to protect that they can just squish. The first orc town with the new hero and his backup gets attacked by a big beetle and a warbreed a few turns later; the rest of my army is chasing around the enemy orc warlord and his giant pack of hellhounds, powerful shadows are coming from underground.

Was I supposed to be turtling and building for a lot longer than I did? Was I supposed to find and build up my allies long before starting the war to conquer the region?

It's proving to be surprisingly frustrating for the third mission in the game.

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

First off: Promised Lnad is the second mission, not the 3rd. The Tutorial doesn't count.

Which only makes it worse. :-)

You're not the first to struggle with this. There are many threads in this forum full of advice about this specific scenario. I suggest you do a search.

Was I supposed to be turtling and building for a lot longer than I did? Was I supposed to find and build up my allies long before starting the war to conquer the region?

It's proving to be surprisingly frustrating for the third mission in the game.

In general: No. The complete opposite. You are supposed to attack BEFORE the enemy can outpace you too much.

You start with a few crappy units and a few heroes. The enemy starts with a big empire and big cities. The longer you wait, the bigger the gap grows.

You have to fight early and win. This goes for all campaign scenarios.

If the Goblins are building Shadow Stalkers, chances are you're too late.

The easiest way to win would be too bee-line for the dragon and then use it to defeat the Goblins. Then you can take on the Orcs. Once those two fall, the last enemy won't be able to out-produce you and you can fight on even terms.

[Erke]

What I'm wondering is:
Isn't there a peaceful solution? Is the AI bound to refuse any proposal in this level? Or can we somehow convince at least the goblin and orc to be an ally?
I know the script says to regain the land etc but I'm just wondering...
So far they've been denying my proposals

[Beckelhimer]

I'm on this same mission. I haven't started playing it yet though. I was looking online just trying to see how long these campaigns were just so I could get an idea on how much time I want to put in. And all I kept seeing was things like, "Play the tutorial then go straight to randoms." Apparently this mission alone has been everyone's stopping point.

This is my first time playing an AoW game but I have been enjoying it so far. I will probably go to a random game instead of starting this mission cause I don't want it to ruin my experience.

[HippieJesus]

The best thing to do early on is keep attacking. You get some early units when you take over the locations. Use those to take down at least a few cities before taking a few turns to build up. Taking down the underground goblin city nearest your starting location and that will take a lot of early pressure off. Once you clear a path to the dragon and finish that quest, you can start to take more time on the rest of the map.

The orcs don't really start attacking unless you reveal them and wake them up, so as long as you don't go south before you're ready, you should be able to clear the remainder of the map fairly easily. The hardest part is the first 10 turns or so because you have to just keep attacking when it feels like a bad idea.

[Dunadd]

I had to restart this one a couple of times. Easiest way I found was to respec the draconian druid to being able to charm animals and charm the giant hunter spiders and other animals. And Sundren use charm to convert units in battles too. I both took over and built cities before trying to move too far West or North. Required a lot of saving and reloading too. And took a long time.

[SquidwardTentacles]

This mission is hard to start, the problem is that friendly orcish city is blocking path for foes armies making you feel that life is easy enough, but as soon as it joins your empire, the great suffering starts. (I played on hard difficulty).
If you meet allied orcs unprepared, you may lose this city quicky, but if you wait too long, you may meet T4 spam from goblins and enemy orcs and also lose it but not so quickly mb.
Optimal preparations is mass producing hunters, flamers and elders (t2 support). And summoning as much t2 beasts as you can. Elders do significant fire damage to all enemies (except summoned hell hounds but they can be killed easily buy hunters or tamed) and to tanky shadow stalkers as well.
Before annexing orc town, I had about dozen of hunters\flamers, several elders, one initial shaman, tamed T3 spider and a stack of T2 beasts. The main pain there was that that city got strong debuffs from 2 enemies that lowered morale, both of defending army and of the city, making it to rebel on siege fight (all gates opened, rebel units spawned, low morale triggered low damage) and orcs army had 8 manticore riders among other phalanx and warbreed units. So I decided not to wait for ths doomed siege, and right after joining orc city I established a fortress to the south, and upgrading it.
Same moment I defeated goblin army with shadow stalkers, which proceeded from the west.
Orcs advanced through the narrow passage slowly, and I managed to ambush and destroy few separated packs with stealth hunters and mobile griffins pack. after doing it I gathered all survived forces in established fortress, which closed the path and was difficult to evade.
So, huge orcish army attacked me in the fortress, They had 8 manticore riders, 8 warbreed, 6 phalanx, come cavalry and hell hounds. I got 4 heroes, 4 hunters, 1 flamer, 1 elder, (lost much of them in previous battles), 2 shamans (started to produce them recently), 1 shock serpent king, 1 poisnous serpent king, 2 queen spiders, 1 trebuchet and 2 griffins.
I had stone walls, gates, full morale and no nasty rebels, so I won this with losing only griffins and 1 flamer.
Win strategy was to gather all heroes and ranged units closely to 1 side of the wall, and block all entrances with the beasts. Shock serpent got as much buffs and heals as I had, because he disabled fat units well and they got increased damage from ranged attacks, ensiring fast manticores annihilation. Spiders web and shamant entanglement also was helpful.
This victory gave me time to summon and hire more t3-t4 units and improve economics so the rest of the game was much easier

[dtt.scanner]

I lost it on the first attempt. Won it on the second attempt by taking the key points early. I wish I could remember more about the map. Replaying it now.