Hi!

I need some help with a map called "Pandemonium" in HoMM2. I'm even playing it on easy and it seems unbeatable.

You begin with no mines and none are really that nearby relatively speaking. There are a bunch of enemy heroes by your fortress at the very beginning. You also have a bunch of your own heroes but they're all in their "just hired" state with a few tier 1 and, if you're lucky, tier 2 creatures.

The exception is the yellow team, which starts with a very well-developed Necromancer castle and much stronger heroes with more troops (mostly Skeletons, but some Mummies and Mutant Zombies for good measure).

To make conditions even tougher, you must keep your starting castle or you lose. The victory condition is to earn 200,000 gold or conquer everyone else.

I've tried a few different things, but no matter how I tackle it, eventually the yellow team takes down everyone else and then finally me. Their heroes seem virtually unbeatable within the first week. Even if you manage to take down one of them (which I have), the other two near your castle are too strong to take down as well.

Anyone have any pointers for this map?

Well, some additional play and I figured out one strategy for beating it (at least on easy).

I grabbed as much gold as I could from the surrounding area on my first turn and then used all my money to keep buying heroes just for their creatures. I also consolidated my forces a little more wisely and dismissed any heroes that were left with only one creature (to keep the CPU players from getting some easy XP). Finally, I was able to use one hero to rush the blue player's castle within the first week. From there I sort of turtled up until I could both defend my castles and have some expeditionary forces. In the meantime, I got a little lucky in that yellow and green spent most of their time beating up on each other until green actually beat yellow. With his strength spent on that, I was able to sweep in with my built up forces and mop up green.

The map doesn't seem to have nearly enough resources to reasonably build up the 200,000 gold victory condition. Perhaps that's one strategy for winning an effective stalemate on tougher difficulties, but I'm still not sure how that would work.

This was by far the toughest HoMM map I've played so far, but I'm playing most of them on easy. I don't have nearly enough time in my life to slog through every map the way I am unless I dial down the difficulty. ^_^

This is one of the most interesting HoMM2 maps. The other one is the Pyramid. And Last Hope by a great map-maker Timothy Duncan.

I have fond memories of trying to beat Pandemonium as fast as possible. I beat it on Impossible difficulty level (the only one worth playing, as AI is horrible in this game, and is its only serious flaw) in 9 days. The most memorable battle, the defending siege of my sneakily acquired (through the teleport) yellow necro castle, left me with 1 Sprite, and only after several tries. I still have plenty of saves somewhere, sometimes a few per turn ;) I wonder if it is possible to beat it a day or two faster. Maybe it is but I'm not going to try, I'm happy with my score.

I managed to beat Pyramid in 11 days on Impossible, but there is a madman who beat it in 9. He probably needed absolutely everything on the map, including AI movements, to be perfectly in his favour to beat it in 9 days, but it is still very impressive.

My record for Last Hope was 9 days for a long time, but IIRC, I then tried a different strategy and beat it in 7 days. I'm not sure if I still have my save games somewhere, I hope I'm not lying about this one.

Timothy Duncan also made a great map called THUNK, which I beat in 30 days on Impossible, but you could definitely do it several days faster.

The above mentioned maps are more like puzzles that you play for high score. If I were to choose the best maps that you play for fun and the beauty of the environment, I would choose Broken Alliance, Seven Lakes and Beltway. You can play these maps many times and the amazing ambience and gameplay is always there.

Price of Loyalty doesn't have maps that are as memorable as the ones mentioned above, but has cool campaigns that can be aggressively played for high-scores.

Anyway, I'm glad I found this thread, HoMM2 is my favourite game of all time and I still occasionally play it.