The Storming of Dollaran: Storm and Stress achievement

[Frostmourne]

I have finished the game, which was brilliant by the way, and now I am looking to close out all achievements. I have only 3 left and this is one of them. I have tried and tried and tried, but it just seems to be impossible to get this achievement.

I have managed to get enough traps up and running that base invaders do not bother me. What absolutely crushes me is getting past the last gate (after the catapults). To get the <40 minute achievement, I usually only manage to get one evil-well, 2 orcs, 2 nagas and around 6 imps. But JESUS F-IN CHRIST! That last gate has so many high-level mobs behind it, I just cannot get around them.

If anyone has gotten this achievement, I would appreciate any advice on how you managed to do it in 40 minutes.

[tdb]

It took a bit of trying for me as well, but I eventually did it by going all demons. Trying with horde resulted in too slow pacing either because of long resurrection times or due to trying to avoid losses and playing carefully. Demons have the fastest recovery from losses. I'm writing this guide from memory so feel free to adapt it to your own playstyle.

Start by unlocking the spider demons, then get about three imps and about two spider demons. Rush the first island of evil when you have those. I don't recall exactly how the timing with the first hero attack was; you may want to save just before going for the island so you can reload if the first attack turns to have bad timing. Don't mind your the two horde creatures you got at start dying. In fact if they don't die early you may want to toss them out and replace them with demons.

Don't bother escorting Crowley anywhere yet. He even has enough HP that you don't need to immediately rescue him from heroes if you have something more important to do.

When you get the island of evil, unlock and build the arcanium. Remember the first rule of playing demons: always keep plenty of mana around! Try to boost your economy by getting more little snots as well.

Your next research priorities are succubus, chamber of relaxation and the demon gate spell. Since the lecture hall is on the way to succubus, build one of those as well. The increased mana storage comes in handy for spells and increased gold capacity helps your economy.

Unlock the graveyard and prison if you want as well; the free undead are useful cannon fodder. Don't bother with a turture chamber though, despite the narrator's nagging. Converting heroes takes too much time which is better spent on attacking.

Keep increasing your population count when you have a bit of extra evilness. You should be able to take the second island of evilness to the right when you have a few succubi and maybe 10 creatures in total. Since we're playing demons, don't mind if an imp or two dies and just press on to your target.

When there's an otherwise slow moment, see about assaulting the hero camps, particularly the one to the left. It lets you flank a few groups of heroes in the middle of the map.

You should be able to get 15-ish demons around 25-30 minutes into the mission. I recommend a roughly even amount of imps and succubi, and a few less spider demons. I think my highest creatures were level 5 or so. Make sure you have the mana shield spell and full mana store (2000+, more is better). Meteor storm is also very useful. It's time to begin the assault!

Getting crowley through the middle of the map should be a cakewalk. Then divert your army to the right to avoid the catapults. Once you approach the outer gate, use Crowley's skill to get him through the pass.

The tactic with decimating the heroes within the walls is to protect your army with mana shield and stun enemies with meteor storm. Keep spamming mana shield at your frontline troops every few seconds and throw in a demon strength every now and then too. You don't need to kill everyone, just focus on heroes within Crowley's circle so he can reach the second gate.

As a final bit of advice, using an external timer (your mobile phone probably has one) is very useful. Take note on how long it took you to reach key events such as capturing islands of evilness and how long the final assault took. Play the game to the completion and if you still fail the timer, use your notes to work out when you need to start the assault and try to get the preparations done faster.

[ckay_]

40 mins achievement is impossible! QQ

[tdb]

Then how do 2.4% of players, including myself, have it?

Patch 1.3.1 significantly increased the cooldown of mana shield, so you have to be more careful with it.

[Vavalur]

I pretty much used the same strat as tdb. Focus demons, when you're recovering from losses let the demons regenerate the mana, in battle use mana shield, demonic strength, and meteor shower. As for heroes entering your dungeon, route all of the entrances to one area and just make it a long and bending tunnel. This gives you time to finish a fight before using the portal to go back and defend.

[RED-FROG]

I just did the achievement really on the first try (ok after restarting 2 times because of bad very beginning. Scouting, checking out where the enemies are at the start.

https://abload.de/img/20171106225730_13dkuz.jpg

I had this army for the final charge. 30 minutes into the map.

https://abload.de/img/20171106225936_18lkpy.jpg

And that's the research tree after 30 minutes.


At this very moment, it was time to teleport all units to the center and charge through the tight valley. Your units will be under heavy mortar attack so you must charge through.

Before I could charge, the game spawned enemies which have to be defeated before going into the mortar.
While you charge, your dungeon may be under attack as well. There was no time/gold to put traps into my dungeon, only a few doors.
You will have to drop new teleports and keep digging for gold and keep creating new units as they die. Create, teleport, charge create, ..charge... :-P

[dragoon8011]

Tip:when you get to the last area, try to get crowely (big demon) into the middle-ish and activate the ability. he will push right through and the end triggers if he hits the gate

just got the dang thing too

[Cooper]

I seriously hate timed achievements, especialy in games with this kind of build/recruit/research menus. If you could pause and plan things out then ok, but time keeps going here. I tryed this one 8 times already. All my creatures die fast thx to AoE of the Apretices (2-3) that are with each group since early on I can afford only 2 nagas and not a single healing potion drops. I know it is possible, but I am not so fast with the mouse to do what I need to do and personaly prefer Dungeons 2 creature style of upgrading and research.

Would apriciate if someone could do a vid guide for this and the other timed achievements. Thanks in advance.

[Dragon]

Originally posted by ckay:

40 mins achievement is impossible! QQ

It's not impossible.

I found this thread via google. Then I somewhat followed tdb's guide above and I earned this Achievement. Thanks tdb!

At first I did it in 38:15. Then I wanted to see the end cutscene again so I loaded my quicksave just before the final gate, and that time I beat it in 37:55.

However, I did not make any succubi whatsoever.

My army consisted of 6 imps, 9 arachnids, 1 skeleton archer, and 1 zombie. I upgraded the arachnids with chitin armor.

I have no idea where the skeleton archer or zombie came from; I definitely did not build any graveyard, nor prison. But it doesn't matter anyway because they didn't do anything significant in the battle.

I never moved Crowley at all whatsoever until 30 minutes into the game. That's when I moved him for the first time, and once I started, I kept going all the way, except for a quick portal or two back to take care of some invading heroes in my Dungeon.

[Rubyeyed]

pro tip from me for the last part, get the escort as far as you can and when the mage blob aggroes an your gyus use the ability you get for that mission to force the escort to move. When Crowley touches the gate behind the blob the mission is over.

also for the catapults in the middle, escort Crowley with one monster only and when on the other side just make a portal and move the rest of your guys through there so they are all at 100% for the final part

[wcis]

I also finally did this with time 39:11... Only horde units, all 3 evil pits conquered and all tents up to the final gate destroyed. Had like 1 minute to go and no chance to this "legally", so I just rushed inside, waited for Crowley to get a little bit closer and instantly activated his skill - this saved me.

[Kiaren]

As a tip, you can bypass the catapult ambush by circling around the right hand side.that takes you to the main gates: Skip them, and keep left to where the catapults are. You will sneak up behind the catapults, so you can kill them without getting attacked by them.

Makes moving Crowley up so much easier.

[FenixAzul]

Originally posted by ckay:

40 mins achievement is impossible! QQ

actually, it is not even the hardest achievement of the game

[Pennexur]

Originally posted by Rubyeyed:

pro tip from me for the last part, get the escort as far as you can and when the mage blob aggroes an your gyus use the ability you get for that mission to force the escort to move. When Crowley touches the gate behind the blob the mission is over.

also for the catapults in the middle, escort Crowley with one monster only and when on the other side just make a portal and move the rest of your guys through there so they are all at 100% for the final part

Reply from five years in the future. THANK YOU. I had a save at 38 minutes with 7 arachs, 4-5 imps, and 1 succubus (not worth it) walking up to Crowly who was standing IN the gateway to enter the blob area. I was trying to figure out if I could salvage this savegame, or if I had to go back a few saves, or else start over. Came back here to the forum which I'd scanned previously, though I'd missed your post originally.

I should have figured this out on my own. Sure enough, pushed past that first blob on my own, got Crowley close enough, and one ability push later, he was waltzing in and the game was done.

(I'd gotten the other achievement for this level earlier in the night, then restarted just for this one. Thought I'd be here for days, but you just saved me a LOT of work!)

[Tymgosi]

Have they patched it or otherwise made this mission harder? I've had 5 or 6 attempts at it, and even trying TBD's demon strategy it just DOES NOT WORK for me. I'm either starved for evil, or gold, or gobblers or SOMETHING, which hinders my growth and means I can't get the mission done, much less make the achievement. And I'm wondering where the "third camp" for the silver achievement is, because I'm only showing 2 on the map.

[Primrose]

Just got this in at 36:11; all demons, mainly the arachnids (they're absolute champs with the research buff, though I still felt the need to micro-manage them a bit by pulling low-health ones towards the back of the group) but still had a few imps. Targeted the Well in the southeast corner, cleared the camp there to slow down assaults, then went up the west path to get the camp on that side.
Used Crowley's Rush ability occasionally to keep him somewhat close to the ballista tower in the start every time waves pushed him back and buy a bit of extra time to get my army back to kill them off.

I used a LOT of mana between Meteor Storm and the Demon Strength spells (fully charged both of them nearly every time; a bit overkill on the Meteor for some groups for the squishier enemies, but the extra damage helps to trim down the beefier guys), and actually went out the north-west dungeon entrance to wipe out the catapults before pushing Crowley up through the chokepoint.
I had enough Arcanium space to hold up to 5k+ mana though I don't think I ever went over 3k, between unit deaths and spell usage.

I definitely felt a struggle with money troubles, though something that seemed to help me was to prioritize early on digging straight through to the eastern wall, clear the spider den (easy enough with 2 imps and 2-3 arachs), then dig along the map edge northwards until I hit the diamond node along the northern edge of the dungeon map, then making a decent-sized treasury around it (started with something like 12 tiles then grew out to maybe 20 tiles total? a bit more?) so my Snots will give it a bit of priority and an easy dumping ground (be careful not to dig much further south as you can open up another spider den, with this one being much beefier and it will regularly send out equally beefy patrols to your Dungeonheart! you can try breaching it for more space and a faster route for Snots pre-teleport once you've got more troops iyw but probably not needed.) If they're not working the diamond node and the treasury is low, just tap F4 once or twice to quickly scoop up less occupied Snots and drop them close to the node.

Gobblers I easily had to increase the room size to fit something like 21 or 27 at a time to keep my army happy, along with the 100% growth research buff to actually have the damn things spawn fast enough.

Ended the game with around 9 arachs and 3 imps out on the overworld, and another 2 imps staying behind to generate mana (plus a single goblin that I was using to make doors for 100% efficiency rooms, idk if it's worth the trouble but it feels nice). Might've had enough time to prep a bit more first and properly clear out the gated zone, but knew I was running pretty close and used the Rush ability to cross the threshold (Crowley made it from less than halfway between the 2 gates, though I kept the rest of my units behind him so I didn't aggro any enemies early).

Thank gods the achievements don't require you to do them all on the same run, though; gonna enjoy taking my time on clearing out all the camps my next session...