Heroes of Might and Magic 2 Speedrun - Wizard's Isle Campaign - [44:41]

Speedrun of the Wizard's Isle campaign from the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 Price of Loyalty expansion. There wasn't a huge amount to refine with this run. Everything is based around destroying key castles that start the game with obscene stacks of units, so the goal of each map becomes how to get a doomstack in the shortest amount of time. On the first map I rushed the warlock castle, grabbing the sulfur and gems that are always on the starting island. This helps snagging an early maze and swamp. By ignoring the town and rushing the castle you can just walk in and skip the fight. If you're feeling really cheeky, I had some success ignoring the town completely and just starting to turn cycle here, relying on the other players to finish off green for you. However the lack of a sawmill hurt when attempting that. Get a black tower, cycle to roughly 40 dragons, win. I feel the second map has the most room for further optimization. There could even be an argument made for just clearing the map and building an army from all the castles that way, but I haven't bothered to try. There's also a random town in the desert that I feel if it generated as warlock would give them best odds, however that is a 1/6 chance and I wasn't going to keep grinding out the first map for that to happen. If you got really lucky you could have Warlock town in the desert, dimension door from the pyramid, easy rush. Alternatively you can get some bone dragons and rush the key tent in the north east and then surrender back. It's dodgy though because they are often stronger and attack you before reaching the tent. Again, turn cycle to a safe point, take castle, repeating method. Only difference is this time you block the stone liths to ensure you aren't interrupted. Final map is more of the same. Pickup some mines and resources to support the cloud castle. Cycle to month 4, move to mainland grabbing all might bonuses, then snag the two centre castles. Block the corridor and turn cycle, grabbing dragons once a month to reduce odds of getting attacked. Red has a modifier on this map that drains their resources so it is highly unlikely that you have to worry about dimension door if yellow is vanquished. Turn cycle until you think you can beat roughly 100 red and black dragons, then attack. Alternate method I used in my earlier runs was build a laboratory at the undead castle, and add that to your first doomstack. Then at month 8, train a new hero to bring all the titans and bone dragons to your main hero and attack at that point. To be honest the only reason I didn't try that method in this run is I was really tired and didn't have to brainpower to mess around with the marketplace in an efficient manner.