Ok, So I'm on the last level of Roland's campaign. I took the Ultimate Crown instead of carry over forces. I need some help. Is it impossible to beat Final Justice without carry over forces? Cause it seems that way. Has anyone done it? Also I defected from Archibald so I also do not have the dwarf alliance. Any help and strategy would be appreciated. Thanks

I replayed Homm 2 half a year ago, and I decided that this time I'd defect in both campaign. So I had the same conditions as you (defected, no dwarf alliance, ultimate crown). Also the Sorceress Guild, which I assume you have?

Don't expand too far with your starting heroes in the beginning, but secure your own area. Have expendable heroes (preferably Warlocks for their scouting) explore the roads, both to find resources, but also to get earlier warning of invading armies. Your experienced heroes should visit all stat and XP boosting sites, and visit all the magic guilds (build them up ASAP), and then start mopping up your starting area in earnest, and secure resources, magic items and valuable experience. Try to attack enemies of same alignment as your own. This will increase chances of them joining if you have only four combat slots occupied. Also don't forget to secure any possible Gold and Gems Mines ASAP.
You want your heroes as strong as possible when clashing with Archibald's heroes.

You will want to build up three army forces, but Titans are frightfully expensive (and Giants are extremely expensive to upgrade), so it may be better to only concentrate on two castles.

Yep, I got the Sorceress Guild. My last restart I thought I was doing good, but the computer had units in the hundreds and destroyed me. Thank you for your advice. Will try out.

Just to add on to what PetrusOctavianus said, while you want your heroes as strong as possible, you really don't have a lot of time to do so. You start with 3 castles but the enemy starts with 9 (6 of which are not castles yet) and if you wait too long, the enemy will build them up and you'll be in a world of hurt very quickly. I was never able to go on the offensive quick enough so I can't give any tips on how to get started :(, I'm assuming you'll want to start attacking after the first week when you get a few more level 6 units on a strong hero but I could never do it fast enough. But even using that tactic, your attacking hero will only be able to cover one exit but this leaves the other pretty much undefended.

It's been 4 days since your last post, have you had any luck so far? I would also like to know if beating that scenario withthe crown is possible cosI was never able to do it

Of course it's possible. If you are used to playing HoMM maps on Impossible it's not that hard. I seem to recall that the last map of the main campaign of the Price of Loyalty was much harder, and was really touch and go.

You just have to build up heroes and forces ASAP in the beginning. The enemy will send his heroes your way eventually, but they will not have very large armies yet. If you can kill off some of his heroes before they can retreat, his next army may be led by an inexperienced hero which will make things easier, and if you're lucky you may be able to recruit defeated heroes yourself.
Also, use the Locate spells to keep track of enemy heroes. When you see one of them is definitely heading your way you need to be prepared to meet it with one of your own armies.

Every time I think I'm building up a strong enough army a dude comes with red dragons and wrecks me pretty good.

Heh heh, well, you're the strategy game god, not me ;).

I still remember how much you helped me out when I was starting out with Master of Orion and I've seen a lot of your posts helping others in strategy games, so I'm not surprised that scenarios like this won't phase you ;). I usually play scenarios on normal difficulty, sometimes hard, never tried playing one through on impossible though. Yup, that happened to me too except the first few times I played this map, I usually got stomped by the barbarian troops. When they started coming I just couldn't get the momentum to push back. That's why I think part of the strategy is attacking right after the end of the first week before the enemy can built up their other towns.

Just out of curiosity, did you get the "Corlagon Defeated" bonus? It should be pretty helpful not having Corlagon breathing down your neck at the start of the mission.

To get it, you need to defeat Corlagon in mission 9; that means not letting him retreat.

Unfortunately, he retreated on me

You might want to redo scenario 9 and make sure to defeat Corlagon in that case, if you're having a particularly hard time at the start of scenario 10.

Your first order of business in scenario 10 is to defend your castles, and that might be easier if Corlagon isn't threatening your Wizard castle. (You can then allocate more assets to defending your Sorceress castle against the other enemy hero.)

So I know this is a pretty severe necro, but I felt like leaving a nice tip that helped me win the scenario, in case someone else runs into this thread searching for a secret to winning which isn't "go back and pick The Gauntlet over the Crown".

There's a buffer zone between your Knight and Sorceress castles and the enemy necromancers to the northwest, consisting of a dry/cracked desert with 4 neutral barbarian towns distributed along it, one on each outer side of the area, and two closer together in the middle.

Now, while it seems obvious that capturing these and holding them could be a massive benefit in terms of strategic leverage, what is less obvious is the benefit of fighting over them, rather than your own castles or the AI's castles. Fighting in the buffer zone let's you catch the AI heroes more easily out in the open, or in the worst case, in half-built castles.

What's more important than even that is the massive amount of resources which lies around there at the beginning of the game, as well as how very doable it is to use a single phoenix to capture the barbarian towns.

So at day 1, buy an extra hero (in addition to Sister Eliza) preferably a barbarian (for the pathinding) get them a single phoenix (both for the utra fast speed AND for the ability to capture towns) and send them north along the road and then east into the desert at the first opportunity, follow the ridge of mountains to the north and curve around them (so at the first opportunity after entering the desert, go east and then north, then northwest. clean up the resources, grab the town, go east and grab the other town. Don't forget the observation tower.

I'm entirely uncertain as to whether building up and/or trying to defend the towns at all in the early-mid game is at all useful, because it can be tricky to do until you can get a sizeable force to hang around. But taking them in the first place is definitively useful, and getting the map awareness and free resources (soo much gold) helps a lot.

I hope this is of use to someone, and not just a wasteful necro.

Hey! So I just beat the final mission last night. I've come to this thread a couple times in the manner of about three weeks as I've tried to complete the mission. I loved playing Heroes 2 as a kid and beat it several times easy enough. I must have always grabbed the Army perk when I was younger, cause there is no way I would've been able to beat this. This mission has personally made me a better Heroes player and pushed me to my limits of what I could do in the game. I had to restart probably 15 times until I finally got it.

The key for me was, as mentioned earlier, getting the XP boosts and artifacts and securing my own area first. Then expanding to the North of your wizard city to grab another gem mine and extra gold mine. Probably best to send someone up there with Pathfinding so you're not spending too much time up there.

After that, the key is getting your titans built up. I found that buying giants first is fine, but do not upgrade them. The cost is way too high. Once you buy the upgrade buy them from there, and leave your existing giants as giants. You'll be looking to get at least end up with 9ish Giants and 6ish titan.

Simultaneously you need to be building up your Sorcerers army. With luck you will get one of the spells Holy Word, or even better, Holy Shout. Once your army is around 12ish phoenix, send them up to the North and attack the Castle that is at the end of the path. Using Holy magic and your full army should be able to take out the castle. If you time it right you hopefully will be close to the end of the week and can replenish your forces. There's another Necromancer Castle to the Northwest, try to take and hold that one also.

This should grab the AIs attention and send multiple forces after your Necromancer holdings. Try to be as annoying as you can, the objective is to draw out the other enemy Heroes and get them away from the Warlock Castles. Once you have done this, take your strongest Hero and take them up the left hand path at the fork in the road by the gem mine. This path will lead you directly to the Warlock Castle. Your goal here is to take this castle first and then push further north to take the second Warlock Castle. Hopefully with the AI distracted with your Necromancer push you can take these two and buy as many black dragons as you can.

From here the game turns into a Cat and Mouse game of you trying to hold the Warlock Castles and crush anyone that comes near you. While your'e stomping the armies trying to reclaim the Warlock Castles, build up your forces in your cities to the south. I used my Knight city just for defense to the south and then used the Wizard and Sorcerer for further expansions and offense. You will eventually whittle their forces down and with the power of the dragons no one can contest you.

Then just build one big bad army and go squash Archibald.

This took a lot of effort and luck, but it worked for me! I wish you the best of luck and don't give up! The feeling of satisfaction from beating this level will be with me for a long time. Also another strategy that I would have tried was just building the biggest baddest army, just with my three castles and then just ignore everyone and go for Archibald....maybe that would have worked better?

How hard is it, with Crown instead of army, to capture the boat on that little bit of water at the baseline? With that boat we can go get the chart of the main river, and claim Archibald's boat by Summon Boat. Next, how about attacking not Archibald's castle, but his side-kick (relatively weak once we are past the mob of dragons blocking the pass - is Sister Eliza, who can get there fastest, good enough to beat them?) because then we'd control lots of mines (and he wouldn't).

In my opinion this game is too much random. That is why many of the advices and guides (e.g. do this first week, then go left, then capture this castle etc.) don't really work. Which units are guarding what, which artifacts are there, what computer does (sometimes he is way to aggresive and smashes you right away, other times he does something so utterly stupid that it means a difference between trivial victory and really impossible mission), what secondary skills you are offered (instead of pathfinding and logistics you get stupid eagle eye, navigation and estates and goodbye win) etc. - all of this influences the game way too much. I had the same issue with HOMAM1 last mission. When I played it the first time, all the mobs around my starting position were quite difficult to kill, I had too many losses, was too slow and then allied enemies crushed me from all directions. I restarted the mission and voila - all units around my starting position wanted to join my hero. No different strategy on my side, nothing done differently. Just instead of having 40 peasants and 10 archers first week I had like 200 peasants and 50 archers. I was immediately able to take out stronger mobs, take mines, artifacts, stat boosts etc., some enemy castles and the mission was easy.

Back to the topic. Some advice I can still give, which made me win this map on the first try, even though I admit that difficulty spike was quite high in comparison to the missions before this:

- First day buy everything in Sorceress town with Sorceress hero (from the best to the worst meaning Phoenix first) and camp in the castle. You need to kill that first purple hero who attacks you first night without losing that castle.

- Roland with the crown and 2 Giants is really very strong against neutral armies. He can take out almost everything without losing a single Giant (even 10 Cyclops guarding good artifact - it was Boots of mobility for me, which made quite an impact). So start clearing starting location with him right away and don't lose any time (don't backtrack, use secondary hero to get resources etc.).

- Don't buy any Giants and push everything to the goal of upgrading Cloud Castle (mines, resources on the ground and eventually trading in marketplace). Once you have this and you are able to upgrade those 2 starting Giants (but it is also ok to mix Giants and Titans as someone already said here) and have some Titans you should really be ok. The enemy is not very aggresive if you have your heroes with large armies in your towns. Head north with Roland (with his crown and other good artifacts) with Titans/Giants only. My recommended path the is the eastern one (not the most eastern one but the one leading to the Green enemy).

- With Roland having some good spells, 11 Titans (no other units in the army), Expert logistics and Expert pathfinding I was really able to clear the whole map (except Archibald but that doesn't matter, he is waiting for you and not doing anything). The thing is that Titans are so strong, Roland's stats make too much difference and AI is really stupid when they face Titans only (always waste time casting Disrupting Ray only) that you are really able to kill pretty much everything with just that. It is also quite important to get Dimension door later on, that can be used to prevent enemis from recapturing Castles even with just a single Roland hero :-) Since he is Wizard, he should have quite high Knowledge (even without luck on artifacts) so you can abuse it a lot.

I have beaten the map - had to reload lots and lots of times, came in with the crown and didnt defect. But now I dont have a boat to sail to Archibald???? And neither of my heroes or towns has the Summon Boat spell. What the...?