Completing Heroes of Might and Magic 3 – Dead and Buried

Map Details:
-Map: Dead and Buried
-Size: Small
-Victory Condition: Defeat all enemies
-Loss Condition: Lose all towns and heroes
-Difficulty: Hard
-Players: Three (Red, Blue, Green).

Player Details:
-Red (Me): Conflux town, Fiur starting hero (Fire Elementals Specialty), gold starting bonus.
-Blue (CPU): Dungeon town, Darkstorm starting hero (Stone Skin Specialty), artifact starting bonus.
-Green (CPU: Necropolis town, Sandro starting hero (Sorcery Specialty), resource starting bonus.

I chose to play Conflux because the elemental unit roster is just so fun, and often allows bland units to upgrade into interesting variants that changes how you have to use them. Picking Fiur as my primary hero was just a bit of fun really because I like fire elementals. There are definitely better heroes than him in their roster. Also, his portrait looks like the galaxy brain meme.

Anyway, taking out Green didn’t take long. He landed a hero on my shores with 1 skeleton, which I killed. I then hijacked his boat and sailed over to him where I took his unguarded town. With no territory left Sandro came running back with his army, but I had built a castle and hired a few vampires to reinforce me by the time he got there and prevented him from getting in. For green it was all over quite quickly.

Blue posed more of a challenge and put pressure on me with a small but high quality army in the early game. He took a lot of my mines while Fiur was dealing with Sandro, and I was basically hiding inside my Conflux from him with my back up hero and a smaller force. After a week of having to put up with him, and my resources having been drained, I had enough units for my backup hero to defeat him. I sent the backup hero to explore with only a single pixie the underground where he was ambushed by Blue’s secondary force. Luckily I managed to retreat before he defeat the hero. I rehired the backup hero straight away the next day and sent him back under with the large force I had at home. He defeated Blue’s army and delved deeper underground.

Meanwhile, I was scouting for any more towns on the overworld with Fiur, who found very little other than a Blue scout on a boat. He sunk him, obviously. But from here on out, Fiur doesn’t really do a lot. I guess he retired after killing Green.

Blue trudged through the underground and found Blue’s dungeon town. He took it and left to pursue what he, at the time, thought was Blue’s last army. But then ANOTHER scout hero retook the dungeon town while he was away. After killing what he had thought was Blue’s last army, he went back on himself and once again besieged the dungeon town. Winning that battle won the game.

It was a bit tedious because I was unfamiliar with the map, but still fun and relatively easy. Normally I struggle on small maps, but a relatively good start set me up here.

NOTE: It appears I lost track of just how many scout heroes I sent out and lost to Blue, and possibly confused some of them for the many scout heroes he had created whom I killed too. My backup hero (stats below) who took his final Dungeon town turns out to be only level 1, when the events I have described above should place him at least at level 3 or 4. It seems we traded so many scouting parties in skirmishes that I couldn’t keep track of who was who during the final stretch of the game. Oh well. To avoid this happening again, when I inevitable reach much larger maps with longer play times, I’ll have to start keeping hard notes on what the hell is happening.

Below is my final score, as well as the stats for the hero who took the final Dungeon Town. Fiur’s stats are in the above image.