Elwin and Shaera
I hate the nature campaign. Your first two missions are absolute slogs, even if you rush things as much as you can you're still bogged down in fighting your way through towns and heroes. At least with only one primary hero he eats up all the experience and stat bonuses. This one would have been nicer if they made the campaign about Elwin and Shaera have Elwin and Shaera as your only heroes and maybe they spend the campaign together as opposed to one being in text except when she's actually a hero in the last level for some reason? She has a portrait but she just sits in one corner of the map. Good if you wanted that portrait for your custom map, I guess.
I don't remember anything about the proceeding maps, except they used a ton of one-way portals and after the second/third mission my strategy became, Elwin runs around killing everything he can, when he can't he gathers up a army from his towns. In the final level I was dealing with these annoying one-way portals so much. They had them outside every town you could capture until you reached the area the player was in. It wasn't difficult, they give you sort of well built hero for the final level and the two of them just soloed the entire opening section by themselves. But they just sent so many and it was so tedious getting them all down. Do you know what happens when they run out of a particular type of hero, male or female? They generate new ones with the same portraits.
Might heroes get combat, basic combat and ranged, which is very nice. Nature magic, on the other hand, is a weird mismash of random bullshit they thought was cool. Nature magic's special is summoning, in which you get up to 50 or so XP of some nature unit depending on the level. It's just useless compared to other specials. Resurrect insures you aren't completely crippled after taking out an enemy army, necromancy is the same. Hypnotize means your army size quickly increases if you go after seemingly useless stacks and sorcery or whatever Chaos's special is just increases the power of your spells. This doesn't even scale, it's just 1 or 2 units per turn. It's basically just fodder if you're having your hero solo a bunch of areas.
Nature units are fast and a bit focused on melee units. Elves have some nice abilities, but in practice they're weak for what they are. Shooting twice is only nice if it does a decent amount of damage. Still they're the only real ranged unit outside of the creature portal, so I found myself buying them almost exclusively. I rounded out the town often by exclusively using wormworts or whatever they're called, because they actually deal decent damage and hit enemies with weakness.
By the same token I exclusively used fairie dragons, their spellcasting abilities were very useful. I imagine they're less useful in regular matches that aren't nature against nature, nature has no defense against spells outside of the odd hero.
Half-Dead
Hmm, the intro text mentions the heroine of the Order campaign. I wonder what order these all are supposed to technically take place in? Anyway, the first level of this one is a bit weird, because its really against you to actually play the first level as death, you only get barbarian towns until you go to the other side of a river, even then its just nature and order. Instead your death army is gathered from various dwellings. I basically just played it as barbarian, but with a hero using necromancy. It might not be the optimal way to play it, because despite rushing the first two, order only lost because I captured his town as he was devastating my barbarian ones.
The second is more a proper one. There's nothing special about it, the usual one-way portals into your territory. Easier than most, perhaps because the undead suffer no morale, or perhaps because the enemy AI, in its infinite wisdom to steal troops away from me and ignore their own morale, tends to hire undead creatures. Scores of vampires in a death army are a threat. Scores of vampires in a life army is not the wisest strategy. You just handed me a free action in which to cast a spell ruining most of your units.
The third is just an absolute slog. I swear just walking across the map takes a month. I figured out a strategy to ensure I would eventually get a decisive advantage over the enemy in nearly all situations, capture towns they don't have their big heroes at, then, when they approach, buy off all the creatures and ship them somewhere else.
Then it gets more or less fairly mundane with the final map, despite some time requirements, is quite nice to play.
I dislike how death is now the necromancy town+krogan. Its a weird change. I also question why gargoyles are now part of death for some reason. Its weird. The undead should be on their own, and the demons should be in another town. Anyway, as death you are overwhelmingly focused on melee combat, with slow, beefed up defensive units. Skeletons, zombies and ghosts are much harder to kill than they rightly should and makes up for their other weaknesses. With skeletons and ghosts you're probably going to be seeing a lot of them thanks to necromancy raising them.
Demons are for the most part, the better choice. Imps are fast but otherwise useless, draining a few points of mana is hardly worth it. Cerebri are very useful since they attack multiple enemies. Poison Spawn are the only ranged unit, which makes them valuable even if the other choice is vampires. I'm 50/50 on whether devils or bone dragons are more useful. Their teleport move is somewhat broken against the AI if you have them wait, but they seem weaker than they should.
Might heroes are basically just edgelord knights, right down to having the same skill. Death magic, on the other hand, is quite useful since basically every negative effect spell is here. Outside of the very useful misfortune. Necromancy is very useful, almost as useful as resurrection. Its annoying about how limited it is in this game, but I guess that's for balance purposes since it could be broken in Heroes 3. If you add in nature magic, death magic gets some demon summoning spells which cost a very high amount of magic. Which makes it nice, but kind of annoying.
Took some time off, then slowly got back in with a few scenarios. Order's later power is heavily balanced by them being kind of shit starting out. A level 1 order mage with some dwarves and halflings are basically screwed against most ranged enemies.
The Pirate's Daughter
The most tedious campaign at least at first. You're playing as a pirate, in a sense, but in practice you dump the pirates as soon as you're able. Chaos is a bit overpowered when going so the opening map ensures you take as long as possible to get that power. So you wander around at sea for a good ten turns unless you realize the town you see through an eye is in fact, where you should be heading. If I'm honest, the sea shit is just completely pointless and pirates are a complete distraction.
The first half of this large map is then about dealing with green, who has three barbarian towns to start with, if not more. At any point, Green can decide to tear you limb from limb, because he gets a two-way teleport into your territory but you can't get into some of his towns thanks to a border guard. You really have to speed through this one, something that's very hard. Helped by the fact that I know that one of the two heroes you get in this campaign is going to betray the player later, so he gets all the scouting skills.
Still, both green and blue end up having more units than me, green in particular has something like 70 thunderbirds before long. I grind down green, but I really only won thanks to two strokes of luck. Firstly, Green went after blue, which meant they were losing units to each other, not me. The second is that blue's primary hero and army, which was so powerful from not having to fight anyone at all that I'd never win otherwise, was on a small island just as I was approaching. I stole his boat and just left him there. He never bothered sending another boat after him. Finally, after just over 11 months, I won. Is this an unusual experience? No idea.
Map 2...is far easier. Within 2 weeks I've killed the purple player and have three towns. And that's just with two heroes at level 12, one of which I intentionally crippled as a fighter. Within a month the green player is dead too, leaving just the blue player, who only has one town to my five. Later two towns, but I still have the eventual advantage. Despite somehow managing to pick up his own Tawni Belfour. (HUH?)
The third map is basically map 1, except almost everything is a chaos town and I can afford to have Tawni steamroll most of the map with Pete. Enemy players keep getting their own Tawni, but fortunately mine is still the strongest. This takes a while to deal with, but it isn't that bad because its just moving through an already clear map. At this point, you get another important hero, Cyrca or whatever, who is naturally weaker than the other two. At least if you make Pete good as opposed to the person you dump scouting and nobility skills on. The map design is failing, because several locations aren't actually accessible.
Map 4 is your usual bullshit "enemy teleports to you one-way" map, with the added bonus that reaching the enemy takes forever. You have to go through an underwater river on boat, and god help you if you miss the side area which has the green tent you need to reach the town with a shipyard. Now the enemy has their own Cyrca, but the good news is that she isn't as strong as mine.
The final map is more of the same, but this one was nicely paced and the enemy can't really fight against me at this point. I divided up Cyrca and Tawni, so I was cutting through twice as many troops. Its really fun just killing things with a high end hero. At the end there's a section where you have to reach two locations within 5 days, which because only one of my heroes actually had seamanship, made one a just in time thing.
Chaos is weird. This one got really shuffled up. I guess that's true of all of them outside of order and life, but these feel more awkwardly put in. Sure, death is merging two different towns together, but that's at least done in a way that makes sense. Two groups of evil people grouping together. Nature merges Rampart and Conflux, but frankly Conflux was always the town that was slapped together. Might makes their changes work. Chaos is just Dungeon but now you got bandits, orcs, efreti and hydras. I'm not the only one who thinks its slapdash, right?
This also carries over to the units themselves, because a lot are broken for or against you. Bandits are the worst fodder troop in the game. A stack of 100 medusas, meanwhile, is very scary, because their ability to instant kill some troops is just that powerful. They're the only unit who were scary to fight as with a solo hero. The other tier 2 unit, minotaurs, are also broken, because their block ability seems to activate just whenever it would be least convenient for you. Hydra are nice as far as tier 4 units go, but there's no reason to ever not pick up a black dragon. They're more powerful than anything else in the base game, immunity to magic or no immunity to magic.
Might heros get scouting, which is nice because you can actually traverse through some maps in a decent number of days. On the other hand, its the worst choice for a hero you're just leaving in a town for when the enemy comes through. I ended up picking up either nature or death heroes for the most part. Magic heroes, well, they start off weak, but they end up very powerful. They get all the damage spells, but more importantly, they get misfortune, first strike and confusion. Outside of a few life spells I think it could stand entirely on its own.
Also, chaos magic + combat is one of the best classes. Immunity to fire damage is very useful if it takes you forever to get grandmaster magic resistance.
As far as rating these campaigns go...
Fun factor: M>L>C>O>D>N
Story:C>M>O>L>D>N
Might and Life were the most well-structured. I want a few more heroes I can play around with rather than just have one or maybe two campaign heroes. This is not entirely why I disliked Death and Nature, they were just slogs and the stories were the worst. Chaos and Order had some good ideas and some good maps, but they also had some slogs going on.
Playing through all these campaigns again, I kind of realize how many classes get shafted for whatever reason. Some will have really powerful abilities, others are defacto pointless. Others, like any two combinations of magics, tend to be a bit hard to hold onto. I found it a good idea to have three magic abilities on my heroes when I could. Only one hero in a party needs tactics or scouting. But three magic skills gets you Archmage, even if two are close to being maxed out and the other is barely there.
Now, I wonder if the expansion campaigns are any good.
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