Yeah, I know about the quest with your crown. Only, Dwarf campaign have 0 quests thus far and already finished 4 missions out of 7. Hidden ti,e limit in the last one costed me a retry btw.

About Ring of trolls - well, I know nothing about multiplayer stuff of this game (obviously). Reminder: I'm noob who play this game second time in life (first time was back when I was a teenager).
In campaigns (where you start with either almost nothing or literally nothing) the Ring reeaaally helps, way more than any other item. Vampirism as a skill is undead-only - and I try to roleplay a little, so... But yeah, both this guy and regen Demon are pretty good. Healing is blocked by poison/desease, not to mention with my luck Healing 5 gives 1-3 hp most of the time. I think I saw a vampirism item only once despite always finishing available quests and conquering all provinces in the OG campaign. Again must be my luck

I'm guessing there are no quests in the Dwarf campaign then. I didn't finish it so I also didn't know about the hidden time limit on some maps.

There isn't that much poison/disease in the game unless the campaigns have a heavy dose of those races with those skills so normally Healing is very good. Here is something you may not know. Healing is one skill that goes past +5 so if your hero has +5 and you have an item with +5 you get +10 healing so you can heal more than normal.

There are a *lot* of items in the game so it does take a while to get certain ones. If you keep a lot of gold on hand you can at get more Merchant offers of items so that's one way to get more chances at items you want. The Warlord with the Merchant skill (Rune) can build up a really large gold supply and generate a lot of offers but it's unlikely you are playing such a Warlord.

KGB

There is a quest in the second last mission of the Dwarf campaign. I got one about dragon treasures lol.

I guess I'm very unlucky because almost every enemy with poison/decease apply one before death. I actually had an experiment with an enemy spider (Poison +1). It got only 1-2 attack before death, yet I needed 6 reloads to see it die without using Poison. Than I checked in-game "Help", only to see that Poison +1 have merely 20% chance to trigger. Yeah...

Yes, I had no idea about healing being unique in this regard. Thanks!

Actually, default protagonist for the Dwarf campaign have Rune Magic. And I finally got your crown from a merchant. Now all 3 of my warlords have one. Feels nice

One more question - how Curse and Negate work against each other? Both have equal level.
My current understanding: if Negate-or straight up fight Curse-r, Curse just won't work. If Curse-r is still in reserve, a Negate-or that enters the combat can be cursed as easily as anyone else and his Negate will drop to half-level. Is this correct? Or Negate can protect against backline-casted Curse too?

Edit: you said that you didn't finish dwarf camapaign but you are the only one I can ask, so I'll try. What am I supposed to do in mission 6? Main mission is to find late king's Mail. I've got some messages telling me that it's somewhere in the east and that orc chiefs quarreling over it. I took over the whole map (except for their capitals), cleansed all ruins - nothing. If I finish them, I lose with a message that the Mail is lost forever due to me killing orc chiefs before finding it. Even tried replaying the whole mission - same result. Maybe I'm missing something obvious but I just have no idea what am supposed to do.

You are very unlucky indeed if it took 6 times to kill a single Spider without being poisoned. You are 2/3 likely to make it successfully if the Spider gets 2 strikes.

Negate/Curse - If Curse = Negate or Curse < Negate then Curse does not work. If Curse > Negate then only the left over amount has a chance to work (so if Curse is 3 and Negate is 2 it works like Curse 1). The Negate power affects all Curse (from the unit in combat and any back line units). Note that Evil units can't be cursed or blessed so this doesn't apply to them.

OK, I took a peek in the Dwarf06.evt file. This has the events and mission data for your scenario. Did you get any of the hint messages that are in this file as you conquered the map? The win conditions for 60 and 61 (looks like you can play 1 of 2 sides?) look like they should happen after conquering a specific city (60) finishing a quest (possibly the main quest since you said this map has that main quest) and banishing something. I am not sure exactly what the banishing part means. Did you complete the main quest?

KGB

P.S. Glad your Merchant skill bought you my Crown!

Like I said, in both tries I only got 2 messages:
1)Somewhere around turn 10: scouts say that the Mail is somewhere in the east of orc land.
2)After taking a city at the orc side of the water border: a prisoner orc says that [orc chiefs names] quarreling over the mail.

I'm not sure what do you mean by playing "one or two sides" - this map have 3 players: 1 Dwarf (human player) and 2 allied Orcs (AI).

Cities 60 and 61 are capitals of the 2 orc players. Taking either of them tells "you killed [chief name] but did not found the Mail!". Taking both make me fail the mission, as the Mail "now lost forever".

The main quest is about that damn Mail. Storywise, it belonged to the dwarfking, who was killed by the Orcs. We must find it before having our revenge. Like I said, I have no idea where it is. The hints are rather useless two - both opc capitals are in the far east of the map. What quarreling supposed to mean? My only idea was Vilanich (city 73) - it's near the capitals (=east) and is kinda between them but nope. No idea what "banishing" is about.

I tried taking every city and every ruin on the map. Tried doing this with both Orcs alive or after killing one of them. Tried replaying the whole mission. Nothing.

when I said quest, I meant the 4 part quest that most maps come with (the one you can start on turn 1 in your capitol). I think you said it was the Dragons treasure one.

There are 2 things you can do here:

1) You can try re-playing the scenario again. But this time, make sure that the 4 part quest is the one for the Mithral mail (ie restart until you get that one). I have a feeling the Mithral mail quest is the one that was supposed to be here on this map (it's possible that the evt file contains a custom quest because it appears there is enough wording for one and maybe it no longer works for some reason).

2) Edit the Dwarf06.evt file. Change the winning conditions so that anything you do is considered a victory (ie just make them all go to Dwarf7).

If you do #1, you at least get the Mithral Mail for one of your retinue heroes.

KGB

I too checked the Dwarf06.evt file.
It looks to me as if this mission have multiple possible variants of where the Mail could be? With different sets of hint messages? With [Mail Quest 1,2,3], [Mail Quest 4] and [Mail Quest 5,6,7] being different variants? I always got the same variant through.

Section "Mail Quest 4" contains all the messages I've got - and it seems that in this variant ("the Mithril Mail in the east of the orc land" > "Inadrakz and Ornomat have quarreled about the Mail") the Mithril Mail should be given by event after taking the city73 (aka Vilanich). The very same city I wrote about in my previous post. After that I'm supposed to finish off orcs to win the mission.

Edit: I found it! Script for the event (founding the Mail in the city73) has a little mistake in this line:

<Trigger type="counter_eq" data1="1" String1="mailquest"/>

It, being part of "Mail Quest 4", should have data1="4". And that's it! The event will properly trigger after taking city73 and the mission will progress as it should. I just finally finished it.

I have no more questions, but I want to thank you again - you were very kind and helpful. I wish you all the best
P.S. Thanks again for your Crown(s).

Awesome to hear you found the issue and that you finally we able to finish the the scenario. Good luck with the rest of the Campaign and then the Amthor sequel.

KGB

Hello to anyone who reads this. I was not sure if I should start a new them or not. Hopefully continuing this one is fine.

I wonder, was there ever a race tier list? Even a rough one? I played years ago and only against AI so my experience is limited.
Subjectively I remember feeling that Dwarves, or their crossbowmen at least, were overpowered.
Wood Elves gave me the opposite impression. Outside of easily available archers, they felt kinda weak both as my own race and as enemies.

I do understand that just going to a comatose forum to ask a question about a game I played years ago is weird

Quaranyr,

Great to see you are still around and thinking about the game. There is some news on that front as Warlords IV is being ported to Steam and will be available soon using the patches I created. That means new players may be coming here.

There is not 'one' race tier list. The reason for that is that some races are better with lower level Warlords and some are better with higher level Warlords. Also obviously, the Warlord skills themselves really matter for a race (Divine magic far less useful on an Evil race for example).

Things that matter for how good a race is:
1) The unit skills that the race has access to. Not all skills are equal as you know so having access to the better skills (Heal, Bless, Curse, Negate, Archery, First Strike, Fire, Bloodlust etc) makes a race better.
2) The unit skills that the 2 adjacent races have. Since you can build the adjacent race units at the same speed as your own, getting access to better skills (especially ones your race doesn't have) is really important (if you have Archery then getting Archery from the adjacent race isn't useful but if the adjacent race has Heal and you don't that's important).
3) The Movement the Race has. Obviously the faster the movement the better the race is since you expand faster and can attack enemies that may not be able to attack you. I avoid any race that doesn't move 19+ a turn.
4) The level of your Warlord. I break this down into Low, Medium and High. Low level Warlords are <L10, Medium level Warlords are L11-20 and High level Warlords are level 20+. When Warlord levels are low, they don't influence the game much (slower spell research, weaker Altars, less mana, low skill levels, weaker Capital city units etc) so the Race units matter more. When Warlord levels are high, the race units matter much less than the power of the Warlord since the spells, skills, mana etc play a much bigger role in the game. Most human multiplayer games were with High level Warlords typically L25+.
5) Your Warlord Major/Minor skills. This one should be obvious but the Major/Minor skills need to match well with the Race (ie Divine with the 2 Good races). Some races work well with quite a few different Major/Minor skill combinations while some others really aren't very good unless you have certain Major/Minor skills.

The 3 Races I think are the best are:
Dark Elves
Ogres
Empire


KGB