GOTM1: Win by Spell of Making as Pariden [This is a friendly contest ... all are welcome to play]

I'm in.

Even though I've only completed a few games. Never played  hard either.

Cheers.

i will give it a try - i do not remember when last time i played hard, but the 'speed' can be a challenge

this sounds fun.  I'll give it a go.

Ok, had a free evening and i finished it  

Gotta win by spell of making dude not conquest

Alright I'm in. I'll start right now!

Edit: I assume WHO I face does not matter right?

Edit2:  MISERABLE FAILURE! Oh noooo, my custom race (my opponent) crushed my poor little ass.

Seems like a straight up - no units - b-line towards the spell doesn't cut it on this difficulty level (didn't even start to build any tower allthough I did finish the research on turn 183)... too bad. At least QProcipinee was a good fighter in this game and even took out some troll lairs

Good luck anybody else. This one was too heart for me

I assume you are supposed to start with the save game Trojasmic provided. Opponents are set. 

I just started, so far I have encountered a whole bunch of nothing...I probably won't set the season record.

Oh well, I just created a new game with my custom opponents. And failed.

I guess I should use his save game though for my next try. Totally missed that Trojasmic posted a save

hehe, stupid me  

i got confused with the victory conditions screen seeing conquest is not unchecked, then i realized it cannot be unchecked ... 

Never played any type of victory, but conquest before. 

Question: it is fully research type of victory right? So the challenge is to make as effective research machine ?

Yes that is correct.  Once you get the Book of Mastery tech researched, then you have to build some towers (requires lots of resources and production points) and then cast the Spell of Making which takes 10 turns and costs lots of mana.  So the challenge is to make an effective research machine.

So I got 3 conclaves up pretty quickly.  I have 2 Commanders who are specializing in Lore Mastery.  I'm about 90 turns into my game and I'm about to start researching the Book of Mastery tech.  I finally found all of the AI opponents.  They aren't doing much so I decided to start a little side war with Yithril just to keep things interesting. 

I just finished researching the Book of Mastery tech on turn 107.  I'd be interested in hearing what people have done to research it sooner than that.  Is it possible to get it under 100 turns?

so far Ive had my main stack and one city destroyed monsters..  i'm not throwing in the towel yet.  just taking a break.

hey stein, I had one of my cities that was building one of the final towers get sacked by a bunch of crag spawn so I feel your pain... argh!  I finished the game on Turn 159.

32h for a game????? 

that's really, really long ... 

N/A

well i finished game in 110 turns conquering all world in 4h

his game is 159 turns and it is a research victory - without many battles that slows you down, and his game  is 32h long ...

N/A

Maybe that's what happens when you leave the game running overnight or something.

hehehe

that's what i was thinking  

no offence ment

I know it doesn't count playing it a second time, but I wanted to see if I could improve on a few things and I did!  I won in 143 turns and even got a 10,000+ point score.  What I did differently:

a )  tried to get the conclaves to level 4 (i was able to get one to level 4 before researching the book of mastery tech, i wish i could have got the other two to level 4 too)

b )  generally built more cities... in my first game, i was hesitant to build too many cities for fear of the unrest penalty ... meh... building lots of cities is key

c )  prepared and protected my production cities better so i could crank out the towers faster

Seems like only our dear thread creator was able to finish his game, ... yet.

I downloaded your savegame, but apart from my first try (which was not with your savegame.. whoops), I didn't find any spare time.

I also noticed that I have no idea how to beat a difficulty higher than easy. Shameless plug asking for advice.

How do you guys play challenges like this? Do you save/reload? And if so how much?

Normally I play ironmode (no save/reload allowed), where the goal is to win the game, and it doesn't matter at all how long it takes.
For a challenge like this where the goal is to win as quickly as possible, I need to remove any safety cushions in my play. But if I do that, I feel that the game becomes too much luck dependant. If I would play the savegame five times in iron mode, I believe my best result would be the game that I was luckiest, and not the one that I played the best.

In my opinion speed challenges and ironmode play do not go hand in hand.

PS: Good job Trojasmic on the 143 turns. Even with a couple of reloads allowed, I would still struggle to beat that score.

Well the rules explicitly say do not load from autosaves unless you crash. Of course you can still save manually each turn by using the Quicksave function (Ctrl+S).

With a speed challenge like this, who knowing how to proceed is key. So you gotta try reloading from time to time to try a different strategy.

The intention is that you not play turns over, but hey, this is all just for fun and a chance to share and hone strategies.  I was able to get through my games without playing turns over... I even lost my best production city while it was making one of the towers when it got ransacked by Crag Spawn during my first game... argh!  I made sure I took out those Crag Spawn in the second game.  

So I finished it.

I used no exploits, but had some knowledge of the map because of 2 short previous tries. I also reloaded around 40 times in total.
Most of the reloads I used in the beginning to get a very powerful start.

I finished researching Book of mastery at turn 96, and finished the scenario at turn 122.

The Good:

• I very quickly settled a couple of cities on good locations.
• I beelined to the tech which allows tech treaties. I think this is important.
• I build a couple of warhammer/ironskin/constitution/fast units early to kill monsters and gain experience to get the lore traits for my champions.

The Bad:

• I should have built more scouts. It took too long to find all AI opponents. I wasted a lot of tech treaty turns.
• I built too many cities. I built 9 and 3 of them I should never have built.
• I got careless and bored nearing the end of the game. With more attention I should be able to at least remove another 5 turns.