Completing Heroes of Might and Magic 3 – Ascension

Map Details:
-Name: Ascension
-Size: Medium
-Single Layer
-Objective: Destroy all enemies
-Loss Condition: Lose all towns and heroes
-Number of Players: Three (Red, Blue, Tan)

Ascension is one that I have played many times before as the Blue player, but tricked myself into thinking I hadn’t because this time I decided to play as Red, whose spawn area I wasn’t familiar with.

I played as Rampart using Kyrre. She is a logistics specialist, which basically means she benefits even more from one of the best skills in the game, allowing heroes to travel further distances. I chose to play Rampart because it’s one of my least-proffered towns despite being one of the best. I guess I just don’t like all the slow units in its roster like the dwarves and dendroids. Most factions have a slow unit in their roster, but not two. Alas, Kyrre’s specialty eased the issue somewhat on the overworld map and so did my luckiness of getting haste in my first mage guild. I also chose gold as my starting bonus and played on hard difficulty.

I restarted this map a couple of times because I wasn’t familiar with Red’s spawn. Twice I was cut off from my lumber camp and gem pond by Tan, from the north west, and on the third occasion I took a very bad fight with Blue in the north east that led to my swift defeat. On my fourth try I eventually realised what map I was on and where everyone else spawned, putting me in a comfortable position to win just like in All For One.

Despite my misgivings for slow units, my strategy soon became to horde Dwarves and use them as a bonk stack. What’s a bonk stack? Large numbers of low tier units capable to beating units they typically wouldn’t be able to. Once I got the miners guild for more dwarves every week, coupled with the castle and the Battle Dwarves upgrades, it was easy going. I took out Blue first in the north east. He was a Conflux town who had rushed his way to psychic elementals relatively quickly. I would have lost the siege for his town were it not for my bonk stack.

After his defeat, killing Tan was super easy. Admittedly I took a huge risk fighting Blue, as Tan was in my area at the time and I hadn’t left any defenders at home aside from a handful of dendroids and centaurs. But once Kyrre came home at the speed of sound (god bless logistics and heroes with it’s specialty), they were quickly repelled. Rather than have one large army, Tan had several small ones which made them an easy target for my bonk stack. They had also spawned as a Conflux town, but had not developed as much as Blue had despite how much longer they remained in the game.

This map wasn’t as good as All For One, but I did find it more challenging at least. And it was still fun!

Refer to the top image for Kyrre’s stats before her game winning battle. My final score is below: