Difficulty: Medium to hard.
Your Portal max: 40 creatures.
Enemy Portal max: 35, 35.
Starting forces: 8 Imps (1st level)
Enemy's starting forces:
Blue keeper: 7 Imps (1st level).
Green keeper: 4 Imps (1st level).
Starting gold: 7500
Enemy's starting gold: 7500, 7500
Possible minions:
Attracted through portal: Warlock, Dragon, Orc, Troll, Dark Mistress, Vampire, Hellhound.
Can be found elsewhere in level: 1 Bile Demon (7th level), 5 Ghosts (3rd level), 6 low-level Skeletons.
Rooms:
Known at start: Basic Five
Can be researched: All others.
Spells:
Can research: Sight of Evil, Speed Creature, Call to Arms, Conceal Creature, Hold Audience, Cave-In, Heal, Lightning, Protect Creature, Chicken, Disease, Armageddon, Destroy Walls.
Doors/Traps:
Can be manufactured: Iron Door; Alarm, Boulder, Word of Power Traps..
Enemies: Two allied Keepers, the Lord of the Land and his minions.
Once again, you face two Keepers. This time, they're not allied,
but that doesn't really matter as they're never going to meet each other. The three of you are
separated by a large lake with a nearly-abandoned fortress in the centre - and there are some
high-level heroes wandering around the lake, namely a 10th-level Knight and two 10th-level
Samurai. Your biggest danger is breaking into the lake before you're ready to meet them: one way
to keep them out, if you break into the lake too early, is to place a Guard Post on the square
adjacent to the lake, onto which they cannot climb up. You can, from there, explore carefully by
building two bridge tiles out from the Guard Post, and selling the one that actually connects to
it... If you get too close to the central castle (and you are dangerously likely to do so,
especially if an exploring Imp is seen by one of the unaligned Ghosts from inside the castle and
sets off the action point), you will set off two more hero parties, of Dwarves and Witches...
One thing you could try and do is break into the blue dungeon
deliberately (possess an Imp to do this with, run over the water and dig straight in), having
kept the heroes out of your own dungeon by the method described above, or wait till he breaks
into the water himself, which he is more than likely to do. Make sure you've got powerful
enough creatures to subdue the weakened heroes, if this happens: Orcs and Mistresses for
preference - and a couple of Dragons too, but Orcs and Mistresses are best as you can use them
to imprison the enemies with, whereas Dragons' flame breath can only kill them. Note, also,
that you can attract Vampires through your Portal in this level, with a Graveyard of 30 or more
squares (only 3 vampires can be attracted this way.) You want to at least have got the Barracks,
Prison and Torture Chamber by now, and the Heal spell, and have got the gems in the northwest
(you will be unopposed in this at least.)
The three heroes, if they all enter the blue dungeon together and
early enough (but not too early), will most likely destroy him, but be hurt in the process...
use Sight of Evil to keep tabs on the fight. If you're *really* lucky, both samurai will be
badly hurt but will survive. (And yes, you want them to survive, because you want to capture
them: Samurai are *nice* when they're on your side.) Let them into your realm, and take them
prisoner if you can. Convert them all if you can, rather than letting the samurai starve... If
the hero invasion of the blue dungeon is delayed too long, the blue keeper may beat the heroes:
in which case, you want to destroy the blue dungeon while he's still weakened, hitting him with
everything you have.
Ideally, you'll be able to trigger off the second hero attack, by
the dwarves and witches when you enter the central castle, at a time of *your* choosing rather
than theirs, and kill them all, or capture and convert them (starve the dwarves, convert the
witches.) If not, they will come and get you anyway. You can keep them out as long as you like,
with the guard post adjacent to the water, by selling the bridge that leads to the guard post...
The green keeper may have broken into the water by now, and be
mining the gold on the island in the east of the realm. If he is, then drive him off the island,
claim any bridge he's built to it, and sell it. He probably won't come out again. (Invisible
imps, and Lightning strikes on his own imps, do this better than an invasion.) If he hasn't
broken into the water yet, then fortify the walls of his section of the dungeon against him
(you need to actually dig in one square, and fortify the *second* tile in, so as to provide
each fortified tile with one of your claimed tiles next to it, so the wall doesn't turn back to
earth when he claims a tile next to it himself.) Behind the far northeastern gold seam is a
small prison containing a single Bile Demon - the only one in the realm - which you can only
enter with the Destroy Walls spell, when you research it.
The central hero fortress has one more ambush: a mixed party of
mid-level Archers and Barbarians will attack, the moment you enter one of the corridors. The
rest of it is completely filled with traps, two Increase Level specials, one Locate Hidden World
and no less than 23 Make Safe specials. There is also a Transfer Creature hidden beyond the
westernmost of the two southern arms of the lake.
You can finish off the green keeper in two ways: either the
conventional way, invading with imps (invisible or not) claiming territory as you go, and beat
him up in melee, or do it in style by filling your Heart area with Lightning and Word of Power
traps, casting Armageddon and winning the battle easily before invading his realm unopposed
(well, he may have gained a couple of 1st-level creatures, but they don't really matter.) If
there are two other keepers, feel free to do exactly the same anyway, your traps will mince
the enemy's creatures all at once, and your gang of highly-trained slimebags should be able to
take care of the remainder. Pick up your eight highest-level Imps before casting Armageddon,
then you can drop them where you want when the fight is over, either to claim territory or
drag prisoners in...
(And finally... There are two ways to get anywhere in the next
realm, and which you choose depends on your transferred minion. One of them is to take through
a big-hitting melee creature - high-level Horny for preference, which is why you need the bile
demon, to sacrifice along with a troll and mistress to create Horny - and smash straight into
the enemy realm and destroy his creatures and the Heart. It's harder than before, as the enemy
starts off with two powerful creatures, in fact Horny may even lose. The other way is the very
hard but more reliable way: you're going to be short of researchers, and need a powerful
creature to fight your melee - not to win fast, but to *survive* until the enemy gets pissed
off with fighting - so take a Dragon, who can survive a long time in a fight, and also research,
or take a Vampire and keep him away from your Warlock.)