Difficulty: Hard.
Your Portal max: 30 creatures.
Starting forces: 4 Imps, 2x Bile Demon, 2x Demon Spawn, 3x Troll (all 1st level)
Starting gold: 10000
Possible minions:
Attracted through portal: Dragon, Warlock, Orc, Bile Demon, Dark Mistress, Hellhound, Troll, Demonspawn.
Rooms:
Known at start: Basic Five, Bridge, Guard Post, Workshop, Barracks
Can be researched: Prison, Torture Chamber, Temple, Graveyard, Scavenger Room.
Spells:
Know at start: Sight of Evil, Call to Arms
Can research: Speed Creature, Conceal Creature, Hold Audience, Cave-In, Heal, Lightning, Protect Creature, Chicken, Disease.
Doors/Traps:
Can be manufactured: Braced, Iron, Magic Doors: Gas, Lightning, Lava, Boulder, Word of Power Traps.
Already available: Four Gas traps, protecting some of your doors.
Enemies: Heroes.
The heroes know your location. And they're coming to get you.
From all sides. This realm is the toughest so far: you will need to use the overhead map a
lot, to see where the enemies are coming from. It gets really hard, dragging your creatures
from fight to fight without really enough time in which to rest and heal up.
The first thing you want to do is start claiming all the
corridors, north, west, south and east. The further up the corridors you get before the heroes
appear, the further away from your realm the heroes will be. Use your transferred creature
(there is no excuse for not having one) to win fights quickly - against 2nd, 3rd and 4th-level
opposition, it should be able to do so. If you've transferred a Dragon, use the possession mode
and apply flame breath (you can tell whether your fire is accurate, the enemy will turn red;
if he doesn't, then momentarily stop breathing fire, turn round a little bit, either back off
or get closer, and then start blasting again, keep trying until he turns red - this means he
is quickly getting hurt.)
Get your creatures training and researching as fast as you can,
never mind manufacturing - you want to research at least as far as Speed Creature, Heal
(the two useful spells) and the Torture Chamber (to attract mistresses). Once you have all
these, there is no further need to research, so get all your warlocks and dragons in training
(if necessary, sell one of your Hatcheries off to build a second Training Room. You don't need
too many imps in this realm, only enough to keep the gold coming in to train your creatures.
(Note: Just to the south, off the western corridor, is a room
with a boulder trap and two Increase Levels in it. Set off the trap at the cost of an imp,
let it rumble around the room until it runs out, and collect the two Increase Levels. Use
them as soon as you have a lot of useful creatures - i.e. as many as possible of all the
available ones, apart from Trolls and Demonspawns on the grounds that there's no point in
attracting demonspawns when you can get dragons.)
Also look very carefully at the northwestern passage out of
your library. It leads out to the lake that surrounds this island. There are four Specials
in this lake, but it's not much use as you probably don't have time to get them - except,
possibly, the nearest one, in the northwestern corner, which is another Increase Level -
which might actually be of use to you. The two Resurrect Creature specials in the northeast
and southeast corners will probably be of no use to you. The Transfer Creature special in
the southwestern corner is another matter, but no use to you in this realm.
A small Prison can be useful at times, if you can knock
enemies out instead of killing them. Don't bother torturing, just let them starve, then
drop the Skeletons straight back into the fight and let them kill or be killed. Keep them
apart from your bile demons, as usual.
Eventually, the enemies should stop coming from all directions.
If you've actually managed to avoid using the Increase Levels so far, then now is the time to
use them. If you've managed to get either of the Resurrect Creature bonuses, then now is the
time to use them as well - preferably, before using any Increase Levels you may have saved.
Train creatures, mine gold as much as you can during this brief respite, and expect more
enemies to come at you, this time of higher level - you won't be able to do it with your
transferred creature alone any more. Eventually the Lord of the Land will come in with his
most powerful minions, from the east... If you're lucky, you should have managed to save up
enough gold to use the Lightning spell productively. If you've researched the Chicken spell
(which you may or may not have been able to do), then test it out on the Knight himself...
If you wish, after you have won, you can use the same trick as
you did last level (training only one creature, keeping the gold supply up if necessary by
building and selling magic doors in the workshop - build a larger workshop to do this, you
need at least 36 squares: not that you really need to, the enemies have dropped so much gold,
and there's a lot available) to keep your gold supply going long enough to train your chosen
transferred creature as far as you can. Or not: it isn't really that necessary to have a
transferred creature at all in the next level, although it can make things much easier...