Difficulty: Easy.
Your Portal max: 30 creatures.
Enemy Portal max: 25 creatures.
Starting forces: 4 Imps (1st level).
Enemy's starting forces: 3 Imps (1st level)
Starting gold: 2000
Enemy's starting gold: 14500
Possible minions:
Attracted through portal: Fly, Spider, Beetle, Demon Spawn, Warlock, Troll,
Bile Demon, Dark Mistress.
Found elsewhere in the realm: 3 Dark Mistresses (1x3rd, 2x4th level)
Can create your own from captured minions: Skeleton, Ghost.
Rooms:
Known at start: Basic Five.
Can be researched: Bridge, Workshop, Prison.
Can be found elsewhere in the realm: Torture Chamber.
Spells:
Can research: Sight of Evil, Speed Creature, Call to Arms, Heal, Lightning.
Doors/Traps: Wooden Door, Braced Door, Poison Gas Trap, Lightning Trap.
Enemies: One enemy Keeper, 4 hero Fairies (1st level).
It's another of those "divided-in-two" realms.
This time, you've got about the same amount of gold near your respective Hearts,
but the enemy starts with more reserves - equivalent to about 12 gold blocks. What
separates you this time is a lake with an odd rock formation in the centre,
and a hell of a lot of gold. This lake is patrolled by four hero Fairies:
but, as they are all at 1st level, they are utter wimps and will fall to
almost anything except flies and beetles. They will attack whoever breaks
into the lake first: this may be you, or it may be your enemy. It doesn't
really matter.
Build your basic dungeon (Lair, Hatchery,
safely-defended Library, Training Room, Treasure Room near the gold, and clear
out space for a Workshop, to be built when you have researched the room:
all at least 5x5, in the hope of getting the best minions for your dungeon and
leaving him with the worst), and then take steps to gain control of the gold in the
middle, because whoever controls that will win for certain. You have a
small advantage of numbers over him, but more creatures also means more
money spent on training... and, of course, if you do get better minions
than your enemy, this also means they cost more to train anyway.
In this realm, you get one new useful spell:
the spell of Lightning Strike. And you have enough gold to use it to great
effect: you can strike one creature, or increase the power - at full power,
it affects all enemy creatures within a radius, and never affects your own,
so it's a great spell. You can also build Lightning Traps in your workshop,
which act in a similar manner. And Braced Doors, which are harder to break down than
Wooden Doors.
(However, there is one annoyance with Workshops:
you can't command a particular item to be made, your workers will only make items
according to whichever you have least of. If you have the same number of items of
different types, then they will make the less powerful one first: so you
can't make a Lightning Trap unless you already have at least one more
Poison Gas trap sitting idle in your workshop, and the same with Wooden and
Braced Doors.)
Once the Fairies are dead (whoever kills them),
you can safely go for the gold in the middle of the lake: the enemy keeper is,
fortunately, fairly defensive-minded and unlikely to contest your attempt.
Dig straight through to the central square surrounded by the gold, to find something
nice and new for this realm, to ensure your "domination" and the enemy's
"submission"... some of the more kinky-minded of this kingdom's inhabitants
have set up a Torture Chamber, staffed by three Dark Mistresses who will
gladly join you. They are great fighters at the best of times, and when
they reach higher levels they get truly wonderful powers - they can fire
Lightning at 6th level or better, making them your best distance attackers,
and they can even haste themselves at 7th-level, making them truly
terrifying in combat. Better still, at 9th level (which you may not have
enough cash to let them reach), they can heal themselves by Draining life
from their enemies, and at 10th level they learn to teleport straight into
battle. Do they really need any more to recommend them? You want as many of
these as you can get, in any given realm...
(Note: The only problems with Mistresses are:
(1) If there isn't room in your Training Room for them they will head straight
for the torture tables to, erm, "amuse" themselves, and may forget to come back to
training, so you have to keep reminding them politely to keep training. A
short sharp slap should do it, after dropping them in the Training Room...
(2) If you should capture and convert a hero Samurai - an even better
minion than a Mistress, because in addition to Haste and Lightning he also
has Freeze, and hits harder in melee - then you have to keep him and her
apart, as his misplaced sense of honour disapproves of all forms of
torture, or they will fight to the death.)
If you have managed to make a Prison and capture the
Fairies in it (or if you capture a stray enemy creature), you will be able to let
them starve and become a Skeleton. Alternatively, if you capture enemy creatures you
can torture them, which may make them defect to your side. Alternatively,
they may reveal map details of the enemy dungeon, which you can use to your
advantage: or they may, if they run out of hit points, die and return as
Ghosts. Ghosts are weak and take ages to train, so I wouldn't recommend
this: feed creatures chickens to keep their health up to stop them dying
under torture.
Once again, time your assault on your enemy carefully.
You have superiority in both gold and numbers, so your minions will be
higher-trained and more numerous, so a single grand melee should smash him.
If things should go wrong, and he should invade your dungeon, drop traps at
the entrance. But you shouldn't need to. Crush him to a pulp, and chalk up
another victory for your Hand of Evil...