Wait you didn't notice?? :D I doubt that I outsize you, I haven't gone to the dwarven lands. But that doesn't matter. I haven't finished the turn but I've had a decisive battle with your heroine, so I'll start the write up.

This map is a race to the deep, for friends the treasure vault. I have 3k mana or so despite researching a spell per turn since turn 6. It worked like this: turn one haste; turn 2-5 run towards the teleporter straying only for a dungeon or a city; only buy a single goblin 1hex, leave all the money for the deep, kill the other goblins rather than buying them; turn 6 buy the goblin city in the deep (I bought no troops at all anywhere else) and start getting the nodes. Then the leader starts exploring the treasure dungeons in the deep and conquering the cities solo - he's already a monster thanks to the equipment found (regeneration, healing, lifedrain, archery, marksmanship IV, and more). He soloes the lizard, azrac and finally dwarf cities in the deep, while I buy the orcs. By turn 10-11 I had control over the deep, each city building archers to man the towers where the teleporters lead to like Book's discovered. I used the first level of the leader to buy movement. Yes, only movement. To make him get to the deep faster, banking on the hope that I'd get some powerful item, which happened - the first item was regeneration+healing, the horn of plenty. Perfect to keep on fighting. Then a bit of defence and attack, then spellcasting.

I researched town portal first, then summon hero, then animate hero. When I wrote "that's nothing", 2? turns ago, I had 9 heroes, including 2 spellcaster Vs, the goblin and the lizard that became independent, for a total of 3 including the leader. Then I stole the azrac one from Southern. I can now summon or animate 4 heroes per turn. I had to kill a summoned hero that had some decent equipment, probably also from the lizards, because the ladies of pain weren't able to beat his resistance, then I reanimated him. My leader's town-portalled back to the caves - didn't want to leave him in the place with teleporters leading towards - where he's distributed his equipment to the other heores, 2 of which have just killed Southern's hero obtaining much more loot for other hero recruits. Sorry Southern - I'm competitive like this...

Now they both have a domination item and I'm dominating everything that I find right at he border with the orcs, I've already obtained a beholder... Let's just say that I feel pretty confident, enough not to bother conquering the rest and going for the kill.

Basically, in this map air magic is absolutely OP especially combined with this item list. There is no way anyone else can resist a stack of equipped heroes, this early in the game. As a result, it's comparatively pointless to do anything else than get heroes and equip them. Plus some random units as meatshields. All gold and mana goes to this strategy - some boats to make the heroes move around faster, that's about it.

How to play this map: send stuff in the deep asap, the first one to get there has an advantage that grows exponentially with the number of turns of lead. Unfortunately, it's not easy to fix: air magic is still random as you have to start with haste to have a big advantage, if you make the path to the vault longer for the air magicians you make it double important to have the luck of starting with haste...

I coudl have posted this in the feedback thread but there you're talking mostly about Xelm, maybe do a specific thread for Swirlmount? I have some ideas to share on fixing the above, that I consider to be a problem. First thing though would be to see if the others share this opinion. Some discussion is needed.

LOL.

Reading Arnuz's write up, I hate to say it but this is an unworkable map. I have no idea at all how to reach anywhere relevant in the deep. My scouts spent a good half a dozen turns or more running that prison loop. The goblins thoroughly blockaded the one apparent point of entrance; I had no hope of reaching it nor any clue it was actually important. Being able to summon massive spell casters like he describes makes it even worse.

I was mostly off exploring the frostling area in the extreme SW on the surface. So much empty space to deal with, and it was only possible to get as far as I did because I had swimming.

I avoided the prison and went for the flumen arcana. I think you can do it quickly if you get the air galley first.The galley would help a lot with breaking into the fortified tower if you don't wait too much, or if you bring along a hero.

IMHO:
- remove cities and mines from the deep, make it mana only
- remove lava and rocky tunnels from the deep
- add several full stacks of dragons roaming
- remove air galleys that'd make it easier to beat the dragons
Then it becomes something for the late game, not something that can be raced to. All that mana is useful only with several spellcasters anyways.

If you leave it as it is I'd remove air magic from the leaders, that's too large an advantage as shown. Even without the vault I wonder whether it doesn't also become an advantage once the dwarf or goblin takes the syron protected nodes and the nodes for which you need to rebuild a teleporter - 70 mana per turn plus 2 dedicated nodes, that's more than 100, enough to research summon hero fast and start summoning. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad with only the default items. I don't know.

Additionally: you could make it reachable only by warp party. Then there isn't a single hex that someone who gets there first can defend and fortify to prevent access to the others. To do this you could have the teleporters bring to a 1-hex place, without anything on top in the caves, at less than 19 hexes from the vault but at more than 19 from the other 1-hex spots.

By the way, Thereunto what happened to the dwarves?!?

I will do a total revamp of the deepest level's centre, and I have added another signpost to the prison teleporters :p
Also there was a misdirected teleporter, but it was in the dwarf section

Cool, try to have it protected so that it's not a race anymore, I also prefer the conquest phase like Book's pointing out. I mean, it's still going to be a race to the flumen arcana, but only once you get the resources to beat the dragons or whatever roaming guards you put there. It's just that big of an advantage. At least though it makes sense to rebuild the razed teleporter and to beat the syron guarding the 3 nodes :)

You reach the flumen arcana through the teleporter that you tried several times but only after I captured and manned the tower it leads to.
Right that reminds me - air magic's advantage is call hero which is super important with this set of items and this much mana, I wonder whether it wouldn't be better to either give everybody a tower with call hero, or add some more low-level hero prisoners close to the start, so that we can give all those items to someone to use.

Speaking of which: I saw a Syron sitting on one of three nodes, where the nodes form an island. I took the two he wasn't sitting on and left him guarding the third node. He simply wasn't worth the effort, and he made no effort to reclaim the two nodes I took.

Also also, I saw a number of structures that the game stated were owned by the Azracs (like those nodes), but they were actually indy controlled. I have no idea what was up with that. Taking them didn't trigger a war or anything.

I'd call that some seriously bad design, then. Not only did you get there first, but you were able to massively reinforce it before I even could have done anything to break through. It was made even worse by the fact that you had walls to protect it; I couldn't assault with a full stack because I have to include at least one, likely two rams in my attack.

There was no reason for me to think that site was anything worthwhile, and it would have required very, very significant effort on my part to break the blockade (assuming I even could). The fact that the whole area was locked away from the rest of my lands by a 1-way teleporter actively discouraged my going that direction because I had no idea what I'd be getting into, and I already had other paths of expansion (which turned out to be useless red herrings).

Turns out that being set to Area Guard is the problem, surprisingly. They will attack troops but not flagged nodes.
Setting them to scout fixes this, thanks.

I saw that too. Is it unique to this map? Seemed to be only a minor display error.

Part of the problem this time was a difference in how much the player knows the map I think (were you in the first Swirlmount game? But of course it definitely should be signposted more, and it should also have vision pools demonstrating what lies ahead. Also I will raze those towers, add an extra route for access, add guards, and maybe double the teleporters (ie two adjacent teleporters leading to very close destination points, just to lessen the chokepoint. Thanks for playtesting ... though I had hoped it'd be less of a shambles all around. Game over on an XL map by turn 20....

That should keep them all guarded, but in practice it simply means the lizards will never claim any of those nodes. Killing the Syron is simple (a stack of 8 archers can do it with only one or two losses), but it is very, very cost ineffective because of the time required. There is simply too much empty ground to cover and there weren't any good sites nearby to generate the necessary army.

I haven't seen it occur anywhere else. I have no idea what to make of it.

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I wasn't in the first Swirlmount game, so I was playing almost completely blind.

That said (and in a general sense), if a map has a single "correct" way to play , then I'm of the opinion that it isn't a very good map, especially if that 'correct' way is very out of line with the general conventions of the game (in this case, skipping all the 'normal' expansion because being first to the middle of the depths was the only thing that mattered). If I'm expanding about as fast as I can, not really making mistakes, and I see 9 fully decked out heroes rushing me before turn 30, I'd consign the map to the "bad map" bucket without a second thought and never play it again. To be fair, if I hadn't died, then Arnuz wouldn't have been able to summon the Lizard caster or the Azrac hero that I controlled, but that isn't much consolation because he'd be down to only 7 or 8 heroes.

I'm not sure most of your fixes for my prison problem actually fix the problem, and some of them will make it worse. Early on, I'm going scouting. I've got single guys out roaming so I know what sort of landscape I'm looking at and where the points of interest are (good sites, choke points, natural borders for players, backdoors, etc.). If I have lots and lots of area to cover, then I'm going to be spread very thin trying to find everything; the other option is focusing but quite likely picking a bad direction or otherwise missing things that might be important. If you add a second teleporter path, that's going to reduce the size of my combat forces and make a break through of a guarded area that much less likely. Putting in one-way paths in certain areas means I'm going to avoid committing anything of value to those areas because I don't know if it will lead anywhere useful or even if I'll ever be able to get it back.

By way of example, I would have had to commit my leader to break through the Goblin blockade, but I had no way of knowing whether they have another stack standing right next to it ready to kill my attackers (and kill my leader, removing me from the game). There was no way in hell I'm making the correct decision (send in my leader) when all I know is that my leader doesn't have a way back to all this open surface land if he goes down there. From my limited perception, that teleporter was all risk and my only reward would be a war with the goblins. After my leader walked past the one-way teleporter leading into that area (assuming my leader even went that direction, and wasn't off conquering some other area of the map), he wasn't coming back without a really, really good reason. The teleporter would have to drop me into a super appealing area for me to even consider investing the half dozen turns (oops, goblins already put up an 8 unit blockade) simply to walk over there, nevermind to start claiming anything.

Seeing pools generally don't give enough context to make the correct decision.

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On another note, the underground portions of this map didn't have any coherence, from what little I saw; the way teleporters and caves connected was actively confusing in trying to figure out where my units would be going unless I put in a lot of extra work using the game pathing to figure out where things put my units. For example, I got the airship, found the one way out of the fire pit, and after I teleported I had to spend a bunch of player time figuring out whether the stairs or the teleporter were the way out of this mess of hallways, or whether they'd loop me back into a long path I'd already traveled, or whether they lead to completely new territory. To be fair, maybe it would have come together later, since I really only saw a few portions.

I offer Xelm Plateau and the Shadow Magic map Sacred Flame for comparison.

Sacred Flame had several loops, and after you got mapping done, you could easily see the internal logic for how things connected. There was an inner ring of teleporters that looped to each other, and an outer ring of islands that had the ends connected by teleporters. The middle teleports of the outer ring dropped you back on the inner teleporters, and the one way teleports for each player dropped them near-ish the middle of an outer ring island.

Xelm Plateau teleporters changed your map layer and either put you in the same approximate area on the new layer (for the middle) or roughly in the far corner from the teleporter (middle layer, home area teleporters).

In either of these two maps, after I've explored a couple of examples, I can make a reasonable guess at where a newly discovered teleporter is likely to drop me.

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I feel kind of bad ragging on the map, because it looks like you did a lot of work on it, and to be fair, these are just my impressions and preferences. Others may handle things very differently than I do.

The central node area ought to have guards, as we have seen, but instead it has recruitable towns. Changing that ought to solve the problems.

I will also make the entrances to the central node nexus further away from each other, so that a blockade by another player is harder.

Ja, both the 1-way property and the importance of the destination ought to be signposted.

Perhaps I could plaster that whole region with them, but manually add some underground concealment items.

I don't understand the map's connections much either. I will check that the prison and arcane river teleporters point where they ought to, but after that I give up.

No problem, it is my own fault for deciding to make an XL map with a gimmick. I actually didn't put much effort into the map to start out with...

Well "heavily reinforced" is relative, I had 2 archers. But yes, you'd have had to have some wall breaker.

Southern don't double the teleporters, make it without teleporters and access through warp party. That way there aren't any choke points.

Moreover, make it so that the pools show the entire flumen arcana, and remove cities so that the only reinforcements that can arrive are from above.

Make players work to hold their advantage!

Even then - air has a strong medium and long term advantage with the power level of your items. Sure other schools have other nice mid-range spells that cost around 50. But I'd take a low level hero (to which I can give all the surplus items to level up with) before a gold rushed city any day.
Smaller issues:
- air node in the cavern unprotected
- cities with fixed garrisons can't be bought (example: dark elves)
- some fixed garrisons can be kited, like I did the first born protecting the azrac fire altar with just a goblin darter and shaman
- Azrac should have some less space, orcs and lizards some more and a clearer border perhaps. the west-east branches of the river might end further north?
- dwarves, orcs and lizards need some easier way to be attacked: lizards and dwarves can attack each other somewhat but at their borders, while azrac and goblins have teleporters bringing close to their 4-hex. I don't think orcs have any. I might be wrong.

When I first peeked with a scout, all you had was a wall and two archers.

Next peek was a wall, 7 archers, and a flyer (wyvern rider or green wyvern, I don't remember which). When I only have a 1 hex town in the area to make troops, and I can only attack with 6 or 7 units, then 7 archers and a flying T3 is a very strong guard.

I don't think I will go the Warp party route. Definitely will do some Warp party shenanigans in another map, though. Will do the rest of these.

Ja, I will redo the item set to be weaker and also reduce the number of item sites on the map.

I'll have to check this.

Well, unless it's meant that lizards and orcs balance each other, which now that I think of it is actually happening. Well at least in the 2 games I've been in :)
PS But then the dwarves need some avenue of attack, I might be wrong but I think they're the best defended faction.