Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday. So as of tomorrow, I will be one month into my year without social media. I left Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter because I felt like I couldn't effectively regulate the amount of time I was spending on those platforms or the experience I was having, and also I was looking at my phone hundreds of times per day, which just kind of freaked me out, so I decided to take a year off. For my computer, I use a Chrome extension called StayFocused, which has a so-called nuclear option where you can block access to certain websites completely. And then I use the ScreenTime app on my phone to disable Safari in the App Store, and I deleted all of the, like, attention-grabbing apps. Now, my phone still does a lot of things. It can order food and hail rides and check-in for flights and take high-resolution video and predict the weather, and also it's a phone. Now that I think about it, it's basically a magic wand. It's just a magic wand that can't tell me how people feel about Will Smith being in the Aladdin movie. How's it going so far? Um, okay. The first thing I learned is that without really being aware of it, I type the words Reddit and Twitter and Facebook into a web browser, like, dozens of times per day. Like, I had noticed that it had become harder to, like, lose myself in a book, for instance, without feeling an urge to check my phone or open my computer, but I did not realize how fractured my attention had become, or how many times per day I would answer the first hint of boredom or stasis by going to Reddit. A month in, I am happier. Or, at least, less anxious. One of the weird things about social media for me is that it tends to make me feel very itchy in a way that only social media can scratch, and turning it off has mostly cured that itch. Also, I have more time. I had time, for instance, to write an art assignment video about Agnes Martin, which you can check out in the doobly-doo, and I have more time with my family, which is nice. Another advantage is that I spend less time looking at the news, but I think I might be better informed. Like, I have a much better idea, for instance, of what's going on in Yemen than I did a month ago. Also, because I'm reading my hometown newspaper, I feel like I understand my IRL community a little bit better. Lastly, I'm getting bored more often. Now, don't get me wrong, boredom is unpleasant, but if I can let myself be bored, which is a big if, as I'll get to in a moment, then I find myself, like, having thoughts, which is really nice. Also, those thoughts, because I can't share them on Twitter, are, like, mine. All that noted, leaving the social internet hasn't been, like, the magical experience I'd hoped for. For one thing, I miss it more than I expected to. I miss reading funny Reddit threads on soccer. I miss the feeling of camaraderie on Twitter. But the bigger issue, and maybe I should have seen this coming, is that simply eliminating certain social media platforms from my life doesn't fix anything. It doesn't unfracture my attention, and it doesn't make my information diet inherently healthier, because it turns out there are lots of other websites that are happy to feed without nourishing and distract without enriching. Not being able to get to, like, any websites on my phone has been really good for me, I think, but I need the internet on my computer, and more to the point, the internet is not the problem. My internet is the problem. And the thing I've learned this month is that for my internet to change, I need to change. For the next 10 weeks over at Crash Course, I'm hosting a series on navigating digital information. It tries to take an evidence-based approach to evaluating the quality of the information we encounter online, and spotting and dismissing misinformation. Now, I have sometimes believed that I'm, like, immune to misinformation, but I've come to understand that such a belief actually makes you more susceptible to it. And the tools I've learned through working on this Crash Course have been super helpful to me, both in terms of how I research online and in terms of what kinds of information I ingest. In fact, I think it's positively affected my internet more than any particular website I've blocked, so I really hope you'll check it out. That said, I am gonna stay off social media for the rest of the year. I don't know that I recommend it in general, but I think it is necessary for me. I need to discover more of what lies on the other side of boredom. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.


Hi, how's everyone doing today? All right. Let me start up by welcoming you here to the talk. We're going to dive into a case study on a user's real-world path to OpenStack with Big Fish Games. And we'll do introductions to the second here. We're going to do a little bit different format. We're not going to go through a pile of slides, because I assume you've seen enough slides in the last two days, and we'll see for the next two days. And we just want to go into a Q&A session with us, Blue Box, the provider, and Big Fish Games, the customer. So, first of all, I'm Pernan Alvarez, the Vice President of Product and Operations for Blue Box. Blue Box has a company with 10 years of operating experience in managed hosting, three global data centers, about 600 customers worldwide. Our primary focus today is private hosted OpenStack, which is a fully managed offering where we take care of all the troubles. Our data center, our network, our hardware procurement. We let you focus on working with OpenStack, not on OpenStack, which is what we're here to talk about today with Big Fish. And to my left here is Andreas Stoller. Andreas, do you want to give yourself an introduction? Sure. Hi, everybody. I'm Andreas Stoller. I'm a senior architect at Big Fish Games. Big Fish Games has been around for about 12 years. It's become a leading provider of casual games, which probably none of you guys play. But anyway, lots of people do. And that's why I'm here. I've been there for about a little over eight years. During that time, the company's grown from about 70 to about 700 employees, you know, 40 million to well over $250 million in revenue. You know, a typical game model is you download a game and if you like it, you can buy it. That was a very simple thing. And over that time, we've grown up to three data centers. We have about 1,500 servers. And to support the downloadable game business, we're now pushing over 40 gigabits of traffic. We do make some games in our studio, but we typically contract with about over 500 partners who make games and sell their games exclusively through our marketplace and e-commerce site. So a pretty large and well-established IT organization. Yes. Lots of practices and procedures in place. So you recently had a change in business model where you added a new style of game free-to-play. And there's some challenges with that. Do you want to dive into what the free-to-play model is and some of the challenges in delivering that? Right. So both mobile and free-to-play have presented two new challenges. The free-to-play games seems to be the way of the future. In that situation, instead of downloading an executable and having it lock out after an hour and then you have to buy it, you download the game, you can keep playing, you can grind away forever, but you can also buy a little magic dust and diamonds and chips. So if you like the casino game, you should really play that casino game actually, in the game as you're going. And that model proved very successful and we're just a couple of years into that. The challenge of that is that we're working with well over 500 developers and for them it was a fire and forget model, kind of like UDP games. They gave us the game and we put it on our servers and you can download it and they were done. After that they were completely done. Well now we've got all these developers which to support in-game purchases, we need a back-end infrastructure to support these games and each game needs its own back-end infrastructure because each game is a unique entity. So that's a new challenge for us and all these mobile developers, partners, free-to-play game partners are mostly game developers and some of them have very little server-side experience writing server-side code. So we have to help them along a little bit. We can't just send them off. So your previous infrastructure was more of a traditional IT architecture and access controls and the devs were, the third-party developers, the 500 third-party developers were not satisfied with this. It was deemed as unfriendly. Yeah.  We had our nice development environments, QA, stage environments. They were all in-house and since they were all employees that was very easy to do. Well now we're looking at signing up these partners that need development environments and such but they aren't actually employees. So we need to give them VPN accounts that made the InfoSec guys and the company pull their hair out. We had to sign contracts and non-disclosure agreements to get the VPN going and after about 28, 29 days we'd get their VPN accounts squared away and all their access done. 30th day, the account would shut off due to InfoSec policy to go back and re-enable it. It was painful, so it took us a month to get one, to onboard one developer on one game. It was really terrible. So the next logical step is you start diving into public cloud.  Mixed. I mean, it was certainly the most scalable. We wanted Amazon AWS like every else did years ago. It was poking around with the cloud and that worked fine and we were able to spin up as much instances as we needed and could give our partners access very easily because it wasn't in our infrastructure. But I mean, the performance in Amazon is terrible and if you're running 24i7, it gets very expensive, especially because of the performance. We had to basically over build everything. I mean, it was crazy. IO performance in the databases was so horrible we would mash together four elastic block storage units into software array to try to squeak some kind of IO performance out of it. But, you know, at the end of the day, six months later, we have two games run and they're each costing us about $70,000 a month to run in Amazon AWS. And that was even with automatic scaling going up and down. You had to keep the databases there. Yeah, so the business was not too pleased with that because those getting from not making $70,000 a month. We decided to bring that back in-house. We spent about $70,000, actually a little less on gear, put it in one rack in our data center and those games are running twice as fast as they ever did in Amazon. And that made the business a little bit sketchy on going back to the cloud again. Yeah, but it rolled the clock forward. 12 months, 13 months. You went back and looked at cloud options again and there were some business drivers with free-to-play. Right. Well, the business driver for free-to-for going to the cloud again was scalability. So after our sort of unfortunate cloud experience, we tried to go down another product line, which was streaming games. And that was even more impossible in the cloud because we needed GPU-enabled units in Amazon, which is really expensive.  We ended up signing contracts for Data Center Space, bought hundreds and hundreds of servers. And, well, that business line never really took off. So at the end of the day, we were holding a bag with all the racks and racks of Data Center Space, hundreds of servers that we don't- and video graphics cards in them that are completely useless for anything else. For games that may have been a smash hit or it turned out to be nice. Yeah, and then streaming product, we were not there to support, you know, Gaikai on live didn't really make it either. So it's not just because we were bad. It was tough enough to crack. So hybrid starts to make sense at that point, right? Where you can have a mix of on-demand as well as a mix of legacy IT infrastructure. Right, we were really interested in being able to utilize some of our own infrastructure that we had and expertise. Obviously, we have large three data centers, big data centers. Tech engineers, DBAs. We have very nice, fancy F5 load balancers that work great. We have 40 gigabytes of upstream bandwidth. We wanted to take advantage of that, but we also wanted some flexibility in scaling. So we started looking around it, some private club providers, ones that we could connect, make a back end connection to our data center. Right. We ended up at Blue Box. So Big Fish Games ended up contracting with us last year to deploy a hybrid cloud where there's a mixed environment between our two data centers cross-connected. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what lives in each organization's facility, how it's connected, what pieces did you need to maintain to be successful? Yeah, so what we really knew is that all virtualized databases are not such a great idea and bare metal is kind of the way to go at the current time. So we wanted to run our own databases and our own infrastructure. We wanted to use our own bandwidth and our own load balancers because we can take advantage of the APIs to automatically spin up things there. But we wanted to move the application servers because the other challenge with free-to-play games is right now we're on-boarding, we're launching a game a week and most of these will not hit, but one of them's going to and when it does, we're going to need to build 100 application servers like in 15 minutes to support it. So it comes Blue Box and Hybrid Cloud and we have all our application servers over in their cloud. We got two 10 gig cross-connects that happen to be in the same data center as our data center is in Seattle. And also they have a facility in Aspern so we can expand out there as well. So we're using the cross-connects, we use the application servers over in Blue Box's cloud. They are now configured as nodes in our F5. They talk to the databases in our data center and the games connect to our load balancers and use our upstream bandwidth.  That's right. Yeah, and even better we were able to leverage all our existing CF engine configurations on the virtual images that we spin up in Blue Box's cloud. So it was really easy to make that happen. Excellent. What other design considerations went into this IT infrastructure, contracts, things that made you think that hybrid was the right way to go? Yeah, like I said, we had a... I mean, we've been doing this for a while and we have a lot of data center space and a lot of expertise in-house. We did poke around in OpenStack a little bit but OpenStack is pretty new and about this time last year when we started to look into it and all those sites that say it's been up OpenStack in 15 minutes, wow, it took a little longer than that actually in most cases and we found we could probably do it but we were way too busy and I couldn't dedicate like half of my team to building this thing up and making it enterprise like for four or six months traveling along it would take them at least that long. We need to get to market now because the game industry is really competitive and if a game is a month late I mean somebody else is going to take it over with the same game and then you get no attraction. So it was time to market really. We need to get to market fast and leveraging OpenStack and a excellent provider such as BlueBox really helped us along that path. Nice plug, thank you. I appreciate that. So time to market. So time to market. We're paying them, actually. Technically, yes. Time to market was one of the main considerations. You looked at on-prem, you obviously had some experience with public so Hosted made sense for you guys to get on board right now. Yes, indeed. So now I'm going to shameless plug why BlueBox? Well, BlueBox had a number of things that we found attractive. Like I said, we were pretty convinced we needed to do some kind of hybrid cloud to be able to leverage our own data center space and expertise but have some scalability out there. We knew we wanted some kind of backing out-of-band connection to whatever provider's network we would be partnering with. So we started looking at vendors and we also early identified some of these cloud frameworks. A couple years ago, CloudStack seemed interesting and OpenStack seemed interesting. They were in the same space but in the last year, OpenStack really took over that. They got the industry support and the commits to the repository is really skyrocketed. So we're also convinced that we wanted to go to OpenStack where we think OpenStack is now, or I do, OpenStack is now where Linux was in 1997 or where VMware was in 2001. At those times, people thought you were kind of crazy to use this. Who are these hippies running this open source operating system? You guys are crazy. You need to use Microsoft. Microsoft, that's the only thing. Well, look at us now. Same thing with VMware. That's crazy, but that's the industry standard these days. I'm pretty convinced that OpenStack is going to become the industry standard in the years to come. So given that, we wanted to use OpenStack. We looked at several providers. Only a couple of them were supporting OpenStack and among those, meeting with BlueBox guys, we found their data center was in the same location as ours and that's very easy and low latency. Latency between our application servers and the database servers is really critical to the games because sometimes there's a lot of back and forth before it goes out to the client app. So that can really amplify. And then after meeting with the guys, we felt that they were an excellent partner that we could learn about this OpenStack thing and grow with it as it became more mature. So now we've been in deployment for about nine months. What are the results to the business? What are the real business results? Yeah, well, so like I said, using our traditional model of spending up VMs and VPN accounts, it took us a month to get a new partner onboarded. Now it takes us really a couple of hours. And we are so much faster than business, they can't sign contracts fast enough for us. We're way ahead of them, which is a good place to be in IT. You're rarely there. So can't get comfortable now, but yeah, that's... It's a great business results, but what about user experience? User experience. 500 developers out across the planet. They previously had a lot of friction. Right. Yeah, the other benefits were that now all their environments are publicly available on the Internet. So when they're testing these games on their mobile environments, they can get to them. Our partners don't require VPN access because they go through the OpenStack portal to access their instances, and they can deploy the code themselves and do all the testing on all theirs. They have two QA environments, the stage environment and production environment, all with full CDN support, and they're all identical, except that there's more instances and the base is bigger. So now we went from taking a month to deploy to a couple of hours. That's really the driver, and the developers are happy. Certainly not all unicorns and rainbows. There's been challenges. Yeah. OpenStack is still maturing, I would say, and there's a couple of Opsies along the way. We had some servers go down on us. I won't go into the details of that, but for a couple of hours, it makes the business a little nervous because this is new technology, so that's probably our biggest challenge going forward is convincing the business that this is really a stable technology and it's going to be the platform in the future. So any team culture challenges with bringing on this new technology? There are some because it's so new, and we still have partners that are not employees that can get console access on instances that technically have access to some of our shared services. That makes the traditional IT guys pretty nervous and the InfoSec guys pretty nervous. But I think we've put enough guardrails around it to keep in a good shape. What about the general transition? On a daily basis, from really 100% traditional IT? Well, I mean, the kicker there to business is that instead of paying Amazon $70,000 a month to support one game where we now have about 30 games running on our Opsac platform and let's just say it's costing less than that to support about 30 games. What about other workloads planned for this cloud? Everything is self-service and I think there needs to be a little bit of growth with our internal developers to be able to manage self-service themselves. But that's really the dev-opt model going forward. They have to understand better where their code is going and what it's doing when it gets there. So really it actually is driving, it's helping drive that model. So our next steps are to be able to just hand off a quota to each one of our developers and say, here you guys run with it don't call us unless the instances start. Otherwise it's your code and it's your problem. Right. And I think my sales teams in the audience I have to ask the obvious question. What are your expansion plans with this fine product? Well, our expansion plans are we're launching a game a week that may accelerate and we're hoping that several of those games become hits and that we are forced into expanding. So that summarizes my questions. I'd like to open it up to the audience for Q&A either to Big Fish or to Blue Box. Anything we can tell you about the environment? Just grab the mic. Any questions? Nope. Or you can yell. That's a question for me. I take it. Repeat the question. The question was how are we deploying code to the instances and configuring them? So we had a we have been using CF Engine to configure instances so as soon as we bring up a node it becomes it classifies itself by the name of the host so it automatically installs all the packages it needs once you spin out that VM. That's done in less than 10 minutes. Then our release team utilizes Jenkins mostly to both hit the APIs on our Fives to configure the nodes and Vips and deploy code and actually what we end up doing is we hand that once they configure the Jenkins jobs we hand that off to the game producers and then we're totally out of it. So it's all we let these guys that have no idea really what's going on the game producers really have no idea of the technology that's going on. They hit the button and if it doesn't work they can hit the back button and we never have to get involved. What level of orchestration and are we using heat I think is the question? Yeah this is we're not using heat in this deployment this is primarily Nova, Neutron, Horizon, Keystone. So it's a pretty standard installation primarily focused on compute. They had we have a mixed environment with a lot of existing IT infrastructure on the storage side so they're leveraging a lot of that that's there. Yes sir. We can both answer that once you go ahead first. Yes. What experience have we had with PCI audits and other compliant organizations? Right since most of this is in the mobile world it's not our problem because we're tied by Apple. You can't do anything except send your money through Apple and hope that they give us some of it. It's similar with Android so we don't deal with that at all. There are PC applications as well because we're pretty equal opportunity. Those ones we do have an e-commerce system but that one is well protected and sequestered behind a set of firewalls and then it just by API call sends the payload this customer bought these many chips into the servers so that can show up in the game but the interaction between the game servers and the client game itself actually doesn't have, there's no e-com that way the e-com goes this way and then back around. So we've been in pretty good shape with PCI actually. And for Blue Box we host a lot of HIPAA PCI based companies, compliant companies we do regular PCI audits with several of those companies and you're operating history of compliance and security so it's very common for us almost on a monthly basis we have somebody doing a tour and an audit. Any other questions? Yes sir. So the question is what release and how big so this is based on Havana and this particular instance is still fairly small it's under 20 nodes and we have lots of those for lots of different customers our primary focus is building lots of private clouds for lots of customers rather than building one large cloud for public consumption. Yeah, we expand with Blue Box by the hypervisor so when we need more nodes if our hypervisors are full we get a whole one new box and that shows up. It's great compared to Khan because the oversubscription is completely in our control so we can oversubscribe all we like which is great, I think we have some future plans maybe to put QA in stage environments on a certain set of hypervisors and oversubscribe the hell out of those and then keep our production ones a little bit more one to one. And we're able to get one plus. We're able to give that level of control to the customer so they can manage the subscription rate or use host aggregates to focus workloads towards a particular part of the fleet so it's actually much more flexible than a lot of the standard. Yeah, so we have the, so to big fish people in my admins we have full access to the API and CLI tools what we expose to our partners is just the interface and they usually just go into the portal and get a console to check out why their code is broken but they have a much limited access which is perfect it's exactly what we need. Yes, can you step the mic I can't hear that for him, sorry. How do you provide high availability within OpenStack? Ah, yes, so we have a distributed control plane our product is based on a three node architecture initially so every private cloud gets three nodes and that's where we do HA for the control plane we slice a little bit of the capacity off of those first three nodes for Nova and for Neutron and the HA databases we have the third node there as an arbiter for the Percona database and we're using Ucarp on Neutron for HA failover and HA rabbit for all the queues so those first three nodes just we shave a little bit off and then every node that adds on to the cloud has full service capacity. Correct. What were the challenges with I think there was any challenges in the integration between the split environments of Blue Box and Big Fish where your databases were in your data center? Yeah, I mean so it was a little challenging on well it was easy on one hand because that's what the DBAs wanted to do because they like their bare metal and their server and everything the biggest challenge I think was the networking component and the access controls it's all minus QL Percona minus QL and they like to keep those access controls really tight and when we first deployed there was a little bit of weirdness through the Neutron networking layer at first it was all matted through one IP and then we solved that problem and I think we're going to actually solve that problem a little bit better coming up here in the future and the other thing we were concerned about was latency and since we're I think four floors between each other in a high-rise data center it's pretty good. Yeah, it's land speed between the two. Yes sir. No, it's actually part of our normal product so if they need to express host aggregates we actually do that configuration for them or if they want to change the subscription weight we can do that for them. They don't actually modify the underlying OpenStack. So we build and maintain the entire OpenStack infrastructure and give them the API UI and CLI and then do all the management. So the following question is what was the relationship there? Obviously we're doing advanced things with OpenStack how does the customer know to communicate with us and how does BlueBox know what the customer needs so part of our engagement is that we work very closely with each of the customers. We know that this is a big cultural as well as technological challenge for customers to move from traditional IT into an OpenStack based public or private cloud. So our value add is we really sit down with the customer and understand what their business case is, understand what their workload is and work with them through that. We keep everything pretty well productized but we can change a little bit in some parameters like the type of hardware we'll move to SSDs for some types of workloads or say to drives for other types of workloads or different CPUs but it's all really based on the relationship and understanding the business. Any more questions? Yes sir. That's right. It's an instance of OpenStack for each customer this really contains the failure domain so each customer has a contained control plane and service plane where they can spin up of course containers or food instances or heat orchestration as we've just deployed or so we keep everything in that scope our special sauce is the back end management is the bare metal provisioning is inventory management is the tied in support systems so that's where we do we're doing 100% community OpenStack but it's dedicated per customer and that way if there is if something an upgrade or a failure it's not big fish isn't affected by some other customers It's really isolated enough so I mean even in OpenStack instances one game pretty much can't affect the other game because they have their own nodes I mean they would have to do something really horribly bad to affect the full OpenStack infrastructure And back to the gentleman over there who asked about PCI this is why a lot of PCI hip customers like this deployment model it alleviates the shared infrastructure concern and makes those audits much much easier it's much easier to control security in that model Any other questions? The question is do we have any challenges with over the network environment? So the question is do we have any challenges with the network environment after we've deployed this I think that's actually the primary challenge I think Neutron is probably one of the most difficult components in OpenStack to effectively manage at scale but a lot of there's gotchas in there and I think that's our primary challenge has been in deploying and managing and maintaining Neutron I think the compute is very stable Swift is very stable even some of the newer components are coming out they're stable, they're easier to manage but Neutron is still where we spend a lot of our energy Yeah I can expand on that I can expand on that a little bit when we first did our spun up or proof of concept we wanted to actually do business with them the latency was pretty bad enough that it would have made some of our games fail OVS We knew from our previous experience with Zen that OpenVswitch was a problem and so we asked these guys is that part of one of the components they're like why yes it is and so we forced them to upgrade OpenVswitch to what 11 I can't remember the versions but 11 and that I wouldn't say eliminated latency problems but it made it acceptable Any other questions? Who's ready for some lunch? Alright I want to say thanks for coming and listening to us talk about OpenStack and how we got there if you have any additional questions we'll be standing up here for a few minutes we appreciate your time and look forward to seeing you around the conference Thank you


Rapture can get there right he can do that yeah okay he's gonna do that job for us he's gonna bring us the rest of the demons tomorrow she's never been there in all the travels isn't amazing I could kill him actually take time out of my busy schedule is there any point no really just takes time out that means he's he's a nobody look how fast she can go with the boots that's avoiding the windmill I never know whether if you want to run run run along this road should you let it do that or should you go to the windmill can someone tell me that if anyone's watching in the comments what's more efficient right maybe I could test if I can figure out myself maybe so she could get to here she could get to just before that corner but if she goes here let's see how far she can go okay maybe I'll test myself right so let's see so she goes here oh it does matter look at that it does matter she's got two extra movement points from going there instead of going around the window there you go the other thing I could do is learn what level two spells do I want to learn though that she doesn't already know can't think of any do this get your butt back around here find out I forgot about tactics I can't get there but I could kill these for you but I'll kill these get that done I bet you though okay the Masters probably won't live but I'm just gonna say this deal well let's say I got the devils next to them but there was 10 left with these were normal gogs I could finish the stack off with gogs because they're mad gogs they'll incinerate the devils and I like to do the math so figure out if it's 160 damage if it is they can't attack I can't use it if they can kill any fruit but I'm playing so badly it wouldn't surprise me if they do he took 10 damage a horde of gnolls for the spells bro will I do all this protection sorry for watching this annoying combat mirth is third level so that's at least a spell I couldn't have cast otherwise yeah something mirth third level spell takes 12 increase increases one guys morale I don't remember how much it increases it it's not a whole lot though I don't think right she's got this job to do kind of come back around this way to do this job so disappointed in you Josephine that has more dudes in the end before blue is on a proper resurgence they've played better than me well they didn't take that well I played idiotically with Iona what's with all the mermaids mermaids I do anything is that a purple hero out there what is that looks like a purple flag flying now we're interested to see what the heck that is it's gonna be another ship yeah there's a purple hero out there right access you got to kill little red knights mate I don't know how this is gonna go it's an awkward fight awkward compositions is that the maximum is that 20 is that the hugest size you can have for a pack I think it is yeah so you have movement nine and you have movement nine so let's all wait and then we'll move this guy to a square where this is no morale flashes incoming yeah pixies are all completely dead I've got to do some fun body body blocking stuff here so where can she get to she get to there who are you you're that if she stood yeah let's try to bait them yeah okay that's actually good I accidentally block off the route for the magic elementals to get in there so I have to move now so instead of that I could go over here and then wow I'm gonna deal massive damage I'm gonna kill three of them firemen elemental would finish that off me I don't want I want to be out in the open so they all surround me to okay I that I think that was on a low roll yeah so if I stand here that's a proper nuisance yeah I'll stand here I'll stand here I did not see that you can't get to the fire elementals is actually good okay he's just that's good 16 hasn't acted yet you should probably attack the stack that hasn't acted yet all right let's pile a lightning bolt it's a very wasteful turn you still got the act and you still got it one two three oh wait hang on if she stands here you can't do anything you can't get through there what's up let's go let's between the two of us do this and then we're glued together the way I wanted to be that's a mistake sorry I thought I thought it was the magic elementals turn I was moving the magic elementals wasn't a terrible mistake then they're all gonna act they're all gonna gang up on I'm gonna kill two anyway so I may as well kill this one as I see this they've done very well and avoiding you know with the two hexes they've done very well avoiding multiple attacks from their magic ellies that would be able to escape at this time but I'm gonna so I can deal about a hundred damn chance of killing both of them who's first act next turn this guy yeah then if I get out the way oh this is good okay well done me I'm patting myself on the back for the spot in that he acts first next turn and then the magic ellie is gonna slide in here what a way to finish you little beauty no more I don't even need to spend any more spell points now look at this what's this look at my losses in the last campaign I had this thing going where I had the shackles of war and I had resurrection and I was losing nobody I was going around the map just kicking butt and this one the attrition is just atrocious and the alliteration is allosaurus go on be a firemage well mysticism am I up for this I'm gonna do this oh he's already a mysticism anyway okay so basic firemage I don't know curse yet but I'll get there won't I with curse and it'll help with blind doesn't buy me more blinds now though they kind of do the same thing right I'll go from two to three a day I'll take the fire magic he's a he's a leadership useless for me okay so alright we ready to open the box people let's go come on you discover 12 gold dragons are we ready here we go we do I just what do you mean relieved but relieved don't do that little triumphant music playing the music of despair third level spell up here if I can beat a throng of gogs what a trick on a throng of gogs actually we'll just be worth it and there's stuff up here I can see wood up here I'm gonna do this 50 of them in three stacks hypnotize that would be so good at that work there's too many this is stupid 100 man tell you what man so at least they're gonna stay blind for a while right wait do your thing no I was one should I blind the other one probably better to just haste this guy right I don't think we're gonna have too much trouble 41 left like hasty for this well blind so the advantage of blind is that he walks to here and then these guys do all the work they don't do anything what do I say if I save two spell points so how much damn can you deal about five out 120 and that's gonna be enough to kill about 18 of them when they crack back they'll deal 60 odd I've got defense 10 and they've got attack oh no they won't because yeah okay I think I think haste is okay I think we'll save the two spell points I think it's okay oh you look really impressive now don't you flying across the field at top speed no terrible terrible terrible maths trotters didn't work it out properly they didn't kill anyone near as many as they supposed to these guys are now only 27 and then left woeful losing an alley losing a gorgeous stinks terrible terrible outcome next turn they're awake again I've got a good chance of losing so what should I do should I wake them up but then they get a turn which is stupid I'm not using any more spell points just out of principle no I'm not right just wait do I need to run away they just I mean if I wait they're just gonna run around to kill I don't wait because I don't wait because they're gonna be pretty sore after taking this hit from 11 left I'm gonna use one no not good well then again there's a hundred and forty different ways expert wisdom I'm gonna do resistance I think resistance matters now level six is nice though what are these a throng of zombies might be okay and I run out of moves not having it my own way is pretty a lot of people pretty unlikely to say that not at all blue what are you doing what are you doing there is a strong hold here good that just looks like a starting army and she's a completely new starting hero well isn't this hilarious I don't think it's not quite fighting right I'm just gonna flee and never hire her again not care why waste everyone's time let's run I cure your ox cool Navy setting like for the fight but right who you okay I think we have to try right what else can I do to buff up the defenses here lives of fear and to to the defense skill well that's something could get hundreds very expensive way to try to defend the town the Gorgons the soldiers cost 5 to stuff we know we want to do she decided that she does want the extra demons slow me down so not really we'll just let them let the imps go I think you come to here I'll expand my knowledge of the garden of the monk sitting in the center of the garden invites you to meditate you do enough for a short time you feel enlightened all right Picardram my old nemesis Picardram you son of a gun I'm saying my army can beat your army plus yes see a few giants you don't even have them in Titan mode I don't understand why that is if you run out of money you couldn't afford Titans so you bought Giants instead right what is this I can't use that I don't know how do you sacrifice I've never built a successful sacrifice bill you come across a lavish shrine attended by a group of high priests and they give you force field force field isn't very good what we use that for with this composition from the zombies I think the time has come to just have a look and then prizes and good enough and I want to come back down here do this yes tell with you guys yes or by the power of my forces like don't be don't be I don't deserve your or am I being too hard on myself maybe it's getting old I'm sorry try to be more try to be less furious with myself are you guys stupid enough to you are this you've got my cross-camp in there series you crack up with laughter when they watch you try to swing a spear a halibut laughing they give you a sword and ask to see that but wet themselves as you attempt to swing it stupidly around your head they welcome you however to your troops and you invite them to train with them and somehow you do manage to walk away having learned something about how to attack who's dead why am I missing a hero oh yeah yeah the water girl okay I'm missing the water hero the eagle eagle our hero all right so I can spend this money right we better make a start so we know we want castle as a starting point we will be buying these but I didn't think just yet he's not gonna come get me tomorrow but also critically like four heroes I just don't feel I need more I don't want to spend the 2,500 gold it's like Picardram's in the wrong part of town like he's out of position I think this is gonna really hurt me grab their stuff as we go the same way they've done to me so many times hello who are you Grendan not good enough my friend you need to find someone with a stack of six titans and 15 naga queens otherwise this game could be over well for you at least a throng of knolls we should be able to get past them I'm not gonna go to the stock pile yeah that means they think it's a bit the fight's easy let them come over they go for one fire elementals are almost a complete waste of money so you know magic elementals are so insane they're so good everything else in the conflict stinks except for the phoenixes and the sprites I suppose okay so does this just deal massive damage I suppose it does okay I don't think I'd be able to kill 55 maybe that's that new found attack skill a axis I hold it by the hilt of the sword I've been holding it by the blade my hands are covered in blood all the time every time I try to wield a sword I was doing it wrong the whole time hello hellhole pack of green dragons is too rich for my blood I think yeah there are sprites but this means there's another inferno somewhere nearby I need this or about as much as I need a no I wait I do need a lot of lots of marksman lots of marksman could be blinded they could be messed with I desperately need the actual pit fiends it's more the inferno that's nearby that I'm interested in stay on the road lots of stormies yeah again don't really need any of this stuff I don't fight the dwarves that much there's inferno it's gray it's got trips I can easily slaughter that's nice and look at that it's nestled in the corner so the underground is quite rich in this map it's quite a lot richer interesting map to come back here just grabs enough stuff I'm trying to go up here flag this and so be able to scare him off I only do so I need to do that and it seems like it's not very good use of my money but I can't have you wandering around up there taking my mercury is there any case for another hero I think that is right we could put another hero here to get ready to bring more elementals and stuff down to access if it's gonna be a longer game we want to build this up into something big as well you can come back up this way come come on his way back though do I want another hero we don't need another hero I want to waste this money buying she's still got the 5000 experience you came out with came out of the prison with literally nothing with her except sail around wisdom she can't gallop around snow I'm not gonna hire her I don't want that necromancer so I think you can dismiss can you dismiss the hero though now in this version of the game I'm playing in other versions you can invite your own hero which I like I like that you think you have to get work with what you give in kind of thing boy oh boy oh no hang on so I built the castle he ran away as a result of me building the castle you change so that's what they all do that's what they all do they all just that's what tan and orange did as well I don't know I guess I'll just run for it so obviously I'm gonna go do that gig cuz then I can just come back down I still have three days before I have to actually take the town so why let that army live each but I might cast it anyway for flavor reasons let's have a look he's got 11 spell points his fastest unit is seven eight and it'll die very quickly I'll make sure that this is dead what's my two three four five six and eight nine ten yeah okay so I can't quite get there but I don't have to fight it right kill the other things first ignore the else who cares and the magogs actually could be useful because they can attack the hello card it'll work properly all right so I'm not even gonna try and defend the gogs maybe I might be doing away spell points on this fight if I can help it oh a grinden power three knowledge six he's obviously an elementalist he has the nulls flail I remember that that seems good that seems like a pretty good target 360 I'm gonna kill nearly all of them but not quite all of them then the devils go and kill the Pegasi other unicorn I mean or I could just do this kill them for sure come boys I believe in you okay that are the devil you know the devil I know is this guy I don't think the dogs and the dwarfs are gonna kill that's what he casts he might pass something to have morale I do have plus morale so let's do let's move when a player comes together baby although having said that I don't actually want to use it yet something like oh you had a nice boat well that's not the magogs fault sitting in the center of a different guy invites you to meditate with him you do so and after bad and bad mouthing the first month for a while you end up feeling quite enlightened that's good and we're ready to rock okay so it's just a gimme right so do this there's that big scouting you're going to see this fight's a joke but sadly I will be losing my balls again not there for 10 bucks tonight so I can take the castle that's what should be like it should be to the gamble here like a good human opponent would have had seven stacks here everybody made three flies to ensure a second round she probably should have well I can only make one extra stack I think this will pay this is awesome but she's not really gonna be big on earth she does no slow she's already a fine age and she's not a very good mage anyway plus one spell power though and finally so she'll have three that's mage no just be an armorer come in here learn whatever's in here let's have a look around fully developed town but only a level one major oh my god yeah but it is they do have Titans right no just giants where'd you get your Titans from you know how I only came up to me with Titans oh yeah look out town look at that I can see everything a little weapon over here I think that centaurs acts is worse than my current weapon that's pretty mean fight lots of Monarchs but with blind and this army I'd be able to kill it but what I really want to do is come up here take this town take that town and I think the game's nearly over like it's even though I played badly in the second half the combination of luck and maybe some good decisions in the first half have I've met that I've been able to nick it this will be over pretty quickly let's just do this come on sorry wasting time wasting time you can skip I forgive you if you want to scroll ahead look at wasting everyone's time they're gonna get to me 26 damage sloppy is the word in a tentative stupid yeah yeah luck I had luck in the last thing and it was actually not bad and luck does matter with elementals it works with them on the other hand being able to do expert lined is worthwhile oh sweet I can hire some guys look at all the guys they have so between those guys that are here and the hellhole I can get past the lots of marks when I use some spells for that though I could set this guy up couldn't I or he could just keep galloping and not worry about those soldiers not worry about the hellhole just kidding me could build a mage killed here with beef up his spell points yeah I think that might be worthwhile he has to spend a lot of good unlocking though come back to this what she doing she's not staying the night right she's moving on pay a grant for her to learn another knowledge or I can pay to have her learn some more spells but again there's nothing in the fire school that I want to learn at level 2 that I don't already know you study the glyphs on the wall and gain insight into the workings of various magics fascinating why the original owners didn't bother building it for themselves we'll never know if he's not I'll have plenty of time then to get ready to buy next week's troops over by these last week okay so I've done that and do this good job that's a good job well Sasha's just doing a thing do I want to beef up the defenses here hydropons the only way to do it very expensive I don't think Hendricks coming back today at least so we're back to here so everyone else has been solved do we want to do this lots of air alleys into what could be soul crushing I don't think I don't know how they level up but I don't think there'll be five stacks of 30 I'm not gonna do that that would be that interesting and fun thing to do but I just don't need angels I just don't think I'm on angels the dwarven treasury should be pretty easy for access so we'll try that if I build a tavern in here I get extra yeah these are cheap and it gives me extra thieves guild info okay and now we're talking we've got all the info unlocked so kingdom army strength is purple OMG archangels are online blue is the town that's is the faction that's nearly dead but it does mean that Fiona's going to get a comeuppance from the archangels the archangels are gonna kill the devils so that's actually really really important Intel it means that we don't have the luxury of recklessly going for it okay so I told me that purple has been digging underground as well like I have found that under underground access and they've gone down through it through one of these Hendricks yeah well okay I don't think I can defend the fortress against archangels no but it's gonna be one of my it's gonna be a useless spell it doesn't really matter who it is doesn't it it's got to be before day one so that on day one I can move yeah so she's back people Tiva slow as a wet week as well with the stupid knoll that she found there's just no point doing anything with this woman but I'm staying for the night here not building anything else that's nobody okay here's a drink finally what are you packing son oh here they are okay a few archangels so if it's three we're in very big trouble we should probably abandon the fortress should we defend it and then there's the question of the conflux like we need to get back and defend the conflux because he's coming yeah we try to give him a bloodiest nose we can we slow him down as much as possible yep okay so glyphs of fear let's do this terrifying glyphs Josephine it's been a pleasure no it hasn't actually your efforts against Picardram with poultry and not good enough and I just hope that you in this final episode you know in your final last stand that you're able to make amends for what was a dreadful performance against Picardram frankly I know it's harsh but that's where we're at yeah get ready we're going to set Fiona up window to here and then you're gonna go up you're gonna get to about here so that's where I'll stay waiting for you and I'll get to about here I might even get down to here actually for you it's pretty good yeah I guess that's all right she could actually pop back in I should have maybe could have let's see let's just see what you can do I don't think a second level major guild is worthwhile all right so access needs to I was gonna say access needs to get his butt back here to defend this area against this which I think is true still just about have time to get the dwarves done so we'll be optimistic how's this gonna work exactly you have speed 9 I speak 9 but I go first in round 2 they can't it's not possible that's just because the composition so bad right so with that said do I want to do this this is a joke like these guys can't even defend each other that's just wonderful one two three I don't really care because I stood there 20 damage I lost supposed to lose meaningful damage they're coming from them you are joking right so look if I slow them it's the same as blind and they've got magic resistance so 40% magic resistance so it's a 50-50 right so they are slowed did not want to spend spell points on this either but here we are all right your son's bearded losers pot and kettle come on man 10 spell points down the gover and a fire elemental good playing like garbage basic offense could be good with this yeah that's not too bad but it's gonna tell me that anyway I don't care about these resources and stuff let's just go the fastest way is this the fastest way though yeah there's a chance of messing that fight up as well so just on that basis we'll do it all right she's doing she's ready for the final stand the last great last stand coming tide of heaven oh who's this now doubling down fortress is about to fall edrick and Sylvia champions and zealots griffons and she's got like all the other stuff okay access just needs to get his butt cheeks back to defend the complex and we need to prepare the complex I've probably messed up I should have been preparing apart from obviously wanting the castle we're gonna want to upgrade our stuff could 45 grand a lot money I could actually get I've messed up I should have been building and preparing so castle gives us the extra beef that we'll need we won't be firing but there's still time to upgrade elementals okay because we plan to buy a lot of things tomorrow here with my guy I'm not gonna be able to we're not using it so this will work he says what can you do my friend not this guy not this guy tomorrow he has dead set not moved she's already moved few squares she will be able to get about to there and we're gonna put the pressure on because I think all of purple's energy and effort is down here now so we're gonna try and sandwich them conquering fortress is pointless for them like it doesn't gel with anything they're doing it's not pointless obviously that's all point of getting used to conquest the conquest right I was gonna try and do this to see if it matters okay just get ready to receive the army yeah messed up with conflux for sure I should have been building up building up the capabilities all right Josephine time to die with all that too there are two blind 30 out of 10 spell points Resurrection is the first thing he does how many times per combat can he do that he has to waste a turn dispelling so that's something as well many other routes to victory so here's one of the reasons why Archangels are not as we're just dragging to my opinion in terms of excitement factor as I've said in that tea list video nothing personal my dear I guess my guys will shoot I suppose I think I'd rather shoot these than I might even kill one here good good arrow tower delightful one wow that's huge instead of blinding his own guy it said curing his guy so maybe he doesn't know cure if that's true how long is blind gonna last very long she's power level two so I'm gonna save my spell points and do it again and then we're just not really because I'm blind as a bat let's just stay on defense so they are gonna come and try and stand here they have to walk through two layers of time very good yes to blinding oh my god he doesn't know you're gonna stand here to come down here and try to stand here don't care about it it's well I do care about yeah come and stand here I don't know if that's gonna work exactly we are making you pay miss Josephine is what I wanted but look at that look at that attrition gorgeous pathetic oh man finally goes down five griffins I'll kill two if I do this he has triple morale and he can't attack on the turn he doesn't oh I'm so sorry to hear that so we'll get this guy ready to replace the current guy the archangels are back anyway now but flying like flies in the tar pit in front of my fortress this is real great attrition beautiful tar pit in the arrow towers do it's okay finally gets out of there finally they've breached the walls griffins can only kill one of these two stacks if I run up here although the archangels are online weakness isn't gonna matter die good wounds those champions I mean oh the top it kills the entire group why did you stand there was the point of that if I attack well I'd survive the retaliation four times six 24 I think I'll survive the retaliation to kill that last one and survive again okay okay just being you redeem yourself well done thank you we'll get a truly notable mention oh no sure are they gonna get to me at the end time we get that I think it's going to go out fighting well for that's pretty good that's pretty good for champions that's that's not bad now he is coming though for good is he I have to kill girl on the way what I'm gonna get there I'm still gonna get I will get there even if I have to kill girl first do we have to do this all right we're gonna do good these guys all three of these starting troops for the stronghold are pretty weak I think yeah they just don't they just don't excite any way you don't get enough of it don't do enough damage why don't you run away okay I'm there and I'm safe it's day one but let's just get home cope with archangels coming up cope with that residual army coming through okay they bought the hydras they paid for and bought hydras on day one then what there wasn't a hydro pond there do you that make some weird decisions the AI doesn't it was it day seven no it was day seven so they built the hydro pond bought one hydro to ruin their morale because why not yeah and then came galloping back out again announced day one and there's more hydras here for you to go back and get right let's just deal with this first because I can't set Fiona up until I know what's happening here I know that that's happening that's looking quite like quite a nice stack I think this is happening right because that's gonna be quite good in defense yeah this will be expensive it's very expensive probably have no choice so I actually think my standing I don't need to overreact my standing army Sylvia wasn't very good if she comes back my standing army will easily beat the two archangels plus my way better mage my much better mage than he is so you can't overreact another way of looking at this is that I could pile in right I could wait till tomorrow get all the other get all the other elementals then come galloping back out and just undo this injustice so that's why I might actually end up doing all right let's do this I'm satisfied I think he's got enough I don't think he needs more I think the tar pit did an amazing job you know this girl wants we know she wants this we know she wants the mangos yeah I have enough money for all that and I can still buy the storm elementals if I want to okay I don't need him so I don't need pit fiends well 12 so we're gonna make that decision I think we just do that just do that it's fine what are you worried about don't worry about what is the I never use these I'm not gonna need them ended at a strange point here I was just about to hand this big injection of troops to Fiona when I don't know what happened someone needed something I couldn't keep playing and it was yesterday or the day before no day before right anyway you don't need to know the details of my personal life no matter how fascinating they may be yeah we had this cool concertina thing going raxha is bringing the army giving it to Tiva Tiva is going to give it to Fiona we're going to use Picardram couldn't come back here but there are troops fresh troops in Silver Spire to defend Silver Spire Piano's gonna flag this come galloping into here and hopefully cause all kinds of headaches but whoever this is by the way a new thing I think I've figured out I think this thing here is a hill fort something is coming back into my memory I think it's very highly possible that the archangels that we saw earlier that took the fortress office are actually really angels that have had a bit of training at the hill fort okay with that said though does that make a difference not really right having access to a hill fort right next to your empire is just always going to be pretty so much value if you just habitually go past it every time on day one so I don't know maybe that's not really a thing like as in maybe that doesn't cheap and cheap in them an archangel that is an archangel right still gonna hurt like hell when it hits you now I messed up I didn't run through the windmill so Tiva has to waste a move doing this but in doing so she learns all the juicy stuff from Raksha which is great and I have an opportunity to just be really risky kill the knoll and leave each of them with one sprite to really improve their land movement loinus is floating around is that worth doing it's a bit gambly we're gonna get some gargoyles or something someone at some point can do that it's very gambling but we'll do it we'll do it I really don't think I need to care about the van vines cowl right so Tiva takes the army she's gonna come up short substantially short actually yeah where is that purple idiot okay he's up here not too worried though right not too worried Tiva bring me the horizon I'll collect it off you right now you've wasted my time back and forward Fiona will not be impressed with that I think you take those extra steps give me them yes so this army is formidable and against and Rick she will you know she will reign supreme I think we want to have a think about split out so we've got everything except familiars and is it going to be worth it to make sure we've got all seven slots filled I don't know probably yes I've got the extra movement they have movement 10 so starting from one of these squares seems good the devils and if we don't opposite sides of each other this means on this square the devils so the ifrit sultans will be able to get over the map every time just about I think decent artifacts yeah plus one movement good land speed a bit of mirth going on Tiva still doesn't have a first aid tent but happy for her to just go on required and feel like maybe I could get another hero for here to sort of tag up with Tiva and become they can become the guardians of the tower Raxia goes back this way Axis is stuck defending the conflicts over here I think I decided 19 magic elementals are just way too hard for Edrick to deal with like he's gonna need to go and get more hydras and other stuff you know fortress doesn't help him and like it's a pyrrhic victory pyrrhic victory taking the tower off me now I'm so eager that I'm gonna skip this and let Tiva flag it for me as well as the windmill there's the hillfort and just occurred to me I can upgrade the devils so she probably do that I can get there now and do that I got 22 grand in the bank oh man I'm sitting there and my logic my brain is going oh that's how they did it with the archangels it's so unfair it's not just their hillfort it's anybody's oh I just spent that money I didn't even what was that 10 grand that felt good it was 14 grand but that was that was really really good that just happened I just found myself clicking right can I see what's in the rampart do I want to conquer the rampart or do I want to continue galloping down into here doesn't matter she only got three move points anyway okay okay okay yes all right well on that basis should we have a look at what we've got in terms of options for the tower I hope my levels are coming through okay I've got the audio turned down on my desktop so yeah you can hear me and the music isn't drowning it at all out or vice-versa right we already knew that about magos that doesn't help much Olima very good at weakness I love ballistics I know most of you out there think ballistics is a waste of time but I think it's awesome yeah and we're in a mage guilty place not really just level one okay or we can have adjit the Beholder Lord basically to ship basic resistance this guy is not gonna do much for us I think Olima is the one I want fits the theme of being a heretic yeah let's go ahead and hire Olima and like I said before how fast are these they're not very fast looking for fast units remind me how fast is a master gremlin speed five will hire a handful of these trees that quite expensive actually sorry brief edit there what was I gonna do oh yeah Olima welcome to the fold Olima okay Olima has some spells whatever it'd be good if you could go and learn the things can she get to the educator ration ration is not a good job of educating the crew I think as any don't really think you can what I'm really wanted to do with her was kind of distribute the gargoyles around to just make everyone a bit more robust do these jobs that are here maybe do that hire some tower guys to go and get the ring of life maybe isn't worth bothering did I need to hire a lemur I probably didn't all I need someone to run up and down between here and there as well might be nice to have someone to follow Fiona around how fast is a gargoyle six no nine they're obsidian's okay great yeah let's do something like this three each there's been nine as well right yes that's really matter for us very good right it's day one I don't want to build anything unless I want to build it here that's a village hall probably should have made that upgrade some time ago many of you may be screaming at the screen for me not having done that that's usually a fairly low to the ground no brainer upgrade to little towns like this that don't don't have a fortification I wonder how much money I've lost by not doing that might be that much okay so we're ready to defend the cornflux if Edward comes through the portal but I suspect he'll muck around here probably flag this and just sort of sit here and if that's the case then I may be able to come back and even could I take the castle back off him could I take the fortress back off him don't really need to write like I don't have to do that come back and get the gold mine off him and just besiege him with a big cornflux army yeah that's right number remembering now as well from two days ago I don't have enough build slots left to upgrade the energy and to get energy elementals and ice elementals I can only get one unless I take a whole extra day but maybe I can afford a whole extra day overthinking things as usual lose sailing around uselessly lioness you're a joke whoa whoa whoa hello well well well see L keel I don't know how to pronounce anything in the game now you're the much fated hero of your your armies impressive but Fiona's is better please accept this magic arrow as a token of my intent and I mean you later oh Limo it says you're cowardly but I don't think you're cowardly that is just gorgeous so CL didn't want to die behind the walls I could go and flag the town but that's a bit risky I don't want her running around down in here mucking about yeah this this is just a this is just a huge huge advantage the arch devils will go first I believe and on turn one what am I gonna do I do have basic haste it could be really relevant I should have checked how many spell points CL had I didn't absorb that information okay so thinking about it we're gonna want to fly over land next to the marksman and annihilate the crusaders on turn one and seven arch devils should do that comfortably if I put them in a position to do so at the top he has dragons and griffons but neither of them can get to the magogs if the dragons are down the bottom of the screen I think they were hang on I can check and remind myself yeah the dragons are down the bottom of the screen so my magogs are gonna be at the top of the screen here by putting them on the left I might just plonk him back in yeah we'll make it that your prize for flying over is that you get to hit the pit lords this fight is so I'm just gonna I'm just gonna slaughter them do I need do I even need haste royal griffons will have the same speed as me if I don't I don't know all right let's just get let's just get into the fight juiciest fight of the campaign but still fairly one-sided that right oh yeah sorry I'm wasting everyone's time I can arrange I can make my arrangements so I get the first term with the arch devils I'm gonna cast haste on the doggies and we're just gonna fly over and kind of do what the AI would do we're gonna position the devils and e freaks so the marksman can't do anything use the attacks to really slaughter the crusaders which I think is actually the most scary stack and the dogs are going to attack the first day tent and get a three-way three-headed attack down there off expert not expert haste basic haste I think that's the way to go the crackback will hurt a bit the dragons the griffons and stuff will hurt but I think it's better than wasting our advantage sitting back CL can't haste the dragons but she could haste the champions and their charging bonus or hurt the marksman will get to shoot without with impunity not really what we want to see so I think that's what we're gonna do let's begin my decision is I'm gonna start here and then on the e freaks turn see the thing is CL has 47 spell points that's just exceptional do I want to do this as well okay so I'm decided I'm gonna haste the dogs get that hit in there I think it's a really nice hit I had planned to finish the crusaders off but I'm wondering now if I'd instead you go for the unicorns I have the potential to kill three pos three or three to four they can't blind the e-freak in response because I'm immune to blind yeah and the stack as it stands these guys strike twice deal about 180 odd damage actually deal nearly as much damage as 8 unicorns I forgot how strong crusaders are when they attack your retaliation isn't really an issue unicorns or crusaders unicorns come trotting out here be a bit of a pain in the butt I think I'm gonna go for the unicorns this is all pretty standard force nicer force better than three I might have lost one in response now I think the way this works is if I just attack the first a tent this triple thing will happen and it's weird that I'm playing the Cerberus hero this is the first time we've actually in the whole campaign been able to leverage the three-headed attack and that's an idiotic thing to do you've just killed two of your own unicorns I have seen better AI performances than this in my time I must say I really have maybe it's fear of magogs he wanted to avoid sending next to the crusader that something like that five Cerberus parrot perish another two perish make sure we're gonna be able to connect he's not going to kill the last e-freak that's interesting he's gonna try and blind mmm done off done off I approve of that one now I'm pretty sure the e-freaks resist the magog fireball really want to find out the hard way though do I the dogs don't so you can see here what a problem that is I can attack the champions that won't kill one though probably mutified do I resist a magog fireball 32 of them aren't doing much anyway let's find out Jesus I didn't even I mean I knew they were bad I just didn't know that they were that bad that even e-freak can't resist the fireball really all you people out there who just like responded to the creatures tier list on magogs an army why would you annoy the devils and then up crusader it's nothing worse okay well I hated that crusaders now I want to think about whether I can win the game with another haste so I have three attacks coming up so three of these stacks can kill the griffons in one hit maybe yet they might die to the archdevil's tell me what's wrong with that there's nothing wrong with it one 87 so that's a kill dogs come come next don't get in the way stand here to do it so annoyed man magog fireballs hurt e-freak sultans as stupid as that right now's the time to do it you're out of the game you're dead yeah of course you of course you're dead and now the marksman it didn't even need him you do nothing do nothing I've actually got a couple of turns to do anything else I want to do cure doesn't bring back any dead bodies that would be good I don't want to do anything else right I just want to win yeah games over the fights over archdevil's on level three versus level three CL nice knowing you really needed to get your house in order bad right one of these e-freaks died because I was experimenting with magogs okay I got some sort of little thing there ballistics gonna take it I'm gonna take it because it's the greatest skill ever I can run all the way back up here great moves the rampart is mine can anyone find out for me if the rampart is mine and what happened a lima died yeah but she died well what should I do next Picard Ram still being a coward okay I think I just run back up and play play dumb if I have to run back down here if they start sending once I'm back down here yeah just do that right can't learn those it's not worth it to do that I think expert scouting once again okay yes I can actually take the town today so that seems excellent use my expert ballistics to get stuff done I'm gonna take casualties though which is sad should I do this don't think that's necessary right we want to just land next to the elves and kill them take me to here so blue has still this is all blue so purple has the town but and seal was a purple hero that I killed I think I get them mixed up blue and purple we just take it right we can take it and spend the night in the mage kill I hope it's magogs that die here 28 normal elves I suck I suck am I see I have the discretion now to use the catapult any which way I want I can go for this I could go for the gate having these three guys am I likely to knock the gate down fast enough for it to matter I think so I think it's worth going for it we go for the gate okay didn't come off on that occasion this may have been stupid of me to line these guys up this way this thing coming yeah I feel dumb now that's gonna hurt like hell all right pop in here do this wow 30 damage you did 30 damage feel sorry for you spell points aren't an issue here I can spend as many as I want how fucking you move you can get up there yeah and then do this I guess I'll dangle the dogs okay I brought the other one okay I eventually did this one come to here that happens now the magogs actually do have a target so that's interesting you got a good magog target wouldn't it well at least they've provided good meat for I'm just gonna do this again come on open it up it's only basic ballistics right so it takes a while to get online probably that's a kill it'll probably kill them nothing see what happens here with unicorns I don't have much else to do here taking more tower hits than I want to yeah it's hard to get leverage right I'm just wait did lose another a freedom there's one of them left right so here I could 7 to 14 you've got 12 left I'm just gonna go for that I mean I know what's okay it's gonna kill them anyway yeah okay they're not in danger the devil the devil is not in danger so I'm gonna be able to blind it increased his morale by one this stinks well actually they don't care about the magogs too much and could I raise demons from that stack maybe that's a thing yes yes so I think I can alpha strike and then blind again is maybe what I want to do that is gonna be what I want to do and then I just have to check to see if I lose an e-freed that was good so they're gonna kill another four and you're gonna swing back with about 40 to 50 damage so I don't think I lose another e-freed from this yeah I don't lose another binding is in play fire shield right so can you wait can you do this how many do I get what is the maths for the number of deal 11 seems really good 11 seems very very good more than I deserve I don't know I might be missing some opportunities here as I go but I won't risk the magic resistance that he does this useless move oh he dies voluntarily so that's good all right we have to take one more shot from the arrow tower now if the arrow tower shoots the e-freeds that's gonna be that's gonna be the way it is damn I had 14 when she started the campaign man 14 that hurts must say that does hurt is it time what she got she's got 10 knowledge who would have benefited from getting into the fight sooner didn't get to so I missed out on wisdom and do I regret it no I don't forgetfulness there's a mirth I already know destroy undead it might be relevant blind I already know no so useless mage guild and only 19 dwarfs he has a first aid tent already let's have a look at this tabard the dragon wing tab but one on the shoulders increases knowledge and power by plus two which is quite good she's gonna spend the night she has no choice but she's impervious she can see for miles thanks to the scouting I mean just great great great stuff now did we actually see where Edric landed no so Sylvia's here what did Edric end up doing I'm gonna really play the turn here I don't know they did blue did this loinus mucked around oh Edric which just went into the fortress okay so he went in and vanished into the fortress so this to me is them saying we think the game's over we're going to make the last stand here in hermit Cove which we acquired inappropriate you know which we inappropriate it from me we've got a bragg tag army of all kinds of different troops from different towns and there's no way in hell we're going to be able to defend this we might run through the portal but if we do that whatever we bring through has to face 19 magic elementals and I think we can all agree how that will end access is just here laughing waiting for them bring it hasn't even bothered hiring these yet maybe I should start to to hedge against plague ages of time acres of time I don't want to be caught short with the upgrades though so water actually feels like the one I want more can I afford 20 yeah we're not hill forwarding these right where we probably are hill forwarding the devils I don't think it's gonna come to that I have a feeling we're way ahead now so yeah we're first on everything their best hero is this and they're yeah Picardram is down the bottom he's already out of the game I think we're heading towards the end game folks which is a ridiculously early but the map has been so ridiculously configured and the AI decision-making on this map has been so bad like as bad as I've seen I think some of the worst AI decisions I've seen which has helped massively I mean really has helped you know okay how about we just hire a Lima back here once we're ready that's not visited that's not visited so there's no time for all this or any of that stuff really grails don't think he could run around do some stuff up here for us Tiva there's some errands to run up here find out what that is maybe you teach it to everyone else what is it protection from earth okay I can afford to do this without thinking too hard about tabin erotic any reason to do anything here with access is that any reason to buy anything given that this army can't get here yet and this army is full of the wrong type of troops right there are no common stacks yeah yeah no I think we're heading towards the end honest let's get another marketplace up just seems good we don't want to build anything here increases the luck only when defending a seed which I don't plan doing it's another problem over the AI like where are your grandals have you not done the grandale fuck rate look at how much it costs 10 wood and 15 hundred bucks to get the best unit in the game the green elf is just a good it's just kind of good I mean it's not bad but where are your priorities you're like a teenage boy who needs a good sit down and talking to where are your priorities young man is that worth doing because I don't really want it yeah it is definitely worth doing right so this will look a bit jarring Fiona will become our back hero but that's okay we'll hire this lady Marius me a couple of dogs grab a first aid tent grab a spellbook so she'll immediately pay us back there we go like that what that mercury what else I want this let's go do this our loinus is there I forgot about him all right there's dwarfs back here though right see what I mean she pops out at the bottom okay looks like blue's just given up or Picard rams just given up yeah all right let's see what happens so they're hiding behind their walls here the only active hero that isn't me is Sylvia by active I mean relevance a loinus is just mucking around Sylvia Gallops back no need to invest more money in the conflicts now Marius come to your thing for us right we're ready to ride out I have time for that if I get a move on I'll be able to take this castle I might I might take the fortress by take the castle and fortress before the end of day seven tree of knowledge hello friend a lemurs back here she could go get these demons do you have time for that yeah learn cure she already knows it feeling like we're in cruise control here mostly due to the astounding astoundingly bad decisions made by the AI I have to say picture and if you come anywhere near me I'm just gonna buy everything that's here she could do this I forgot about that okay didn't realize you're gonna be in this area here you've done all this this will be done they have a good use for rashka this week you're just holding court here let's continue our upgrade program though don't think there's much downside in doing that yeah so I need to buy these trips yet though and more grades here head towards City Hall the last thing we need we still have a lot of money to spend to get to City Hall it's gonna be worthwhile I think so yeah enough alright all eyes on Sylvia and Eric they bought a pack of dragonflies now I think this army has to face me before the end of the week though yeah the seafaring heroes don't matter they're just no bodies okay okay Sylvia's gone back to defend how will that integrate with that I don't think it'll be able to right lots of dwarves pack of grand elves but the yeah the two armies don't mix properly so I don't know what'll happen here when I attack any reason to not do this none that I can think of grab this on the way it's a nice setup they had here with the archers tower very nice cool thing is ballistic gives me the first turn that's another key key thing here so even if the Archangel is speed 19 and I'm speed 18 I still get the first turn yeah I have to spell and cure if she tries to blind my devils she does buy my different haste isn't really I'm just trying to get in right I just want to get my ground guys second shot haste that's a joke okay well thanks for standing there that's exactly where I would want you to stand right do I want to okay much of there's a good way to fight this so I'm just gonna do this and try to get it done cheaply with these guys assuming the blister doesn't work pretty handy but they've actually blocked off the help it is from continuing so should I offer I don't think I'm gonna offer the yeah this is okay this works what really well to oh no actually they died though so they make room for the crusaders now I think it's gonna matter though right I'm just gonna let the crusaders hit the devils twice 32 and 32 is 64 yeah come to here 39 it's meaningful right direct hit we are in ballistics thank you very much ballistics well done how do I avoid losing I want to really make sure I avoid losing a devil here if I could get away with avoiding losing either would be amazing so the Pegasi have movement 13 if I haste these dogs they'll get in here before the 13 plus three it's not clear that I'll go before the Pegasi but I do go before these other two these have movement six but I have seven and eight respectively which will be enough to kill 20 battle dwarves I think 400 damage would be enough right between these three stacks to kill the dwarves so what I'm saying is let's deny I've 14 so I before Pegasi so they use the E free to kill the Pegasi use the devils to kill the big stack here and I might avoid the need for I might avoid the need for another turn these guys can actually get there I want to help us your speed seven I think 48 devils do more damage than the 44 server is so I think he's gonna do at least 80 damage right so but you can you get there six one two three four five six you can't get there you're doing less damage than you it's gonna go down I might need to end up attempting a lightning bolt on the dwarves let's go do your cup bless these could bloodlust them 48 horn demons can they deal no that's 400 HP and I'm dealing at least 400 HP of damage to the maths so that's that lost 10 dogs Fiona is now a level 13 it's this right a head groom approaches leading a fine-looking warhorse this steed will help speed you in your travels alas his endurance will wane with a lot of heavy riding and you must return for a fresh mount at the start of each week Julie noted my dear fellow and look wow they have got our angels upgraded I'll be tempted to buy that one docks the morale right but that's okay worth it for the resurrection how good is the resurrection based on the size of the stack of our angels that you have I don't know is she moving today yeah probably right we just want to come down here and finish the fortress that said is everything else I want to take out of you like a ballistic and I maybe what I learned in here scuttleboat I learned bless but me I've forgotten that stables buff that you get man castle is a strong town like every week all of you guys get bonus movement and you get the stables really early on in the build order of the town these 11 demons are they doing anything for me I leave them behind I don't think they're gonna matter hey is there any flying unit I could use to fly over the walls and die and get raised up let's do that is this a thing the Griffins fly over the walls and die on turn one and then I raise them into demons see what I get how many demons do I get from a thing I got 11 demons out of 50 gogs probably not a thing I don't actually know the maths how many demons you get for you know when you when you hit the raise dead button does it depend on the number of pit lords in the stack probably I should probably know that but I haven't played every faction every few weeks constantly for the last 20 years I say I've played the game for a long time but with big gaps in between and Tiva is here with full movement Picotram is going to have to come around and have a crack at me at some point but not yet Marius is busy doing this we haven't given a single quest give a requested item I just got any due to anything TV you may as well stay there access you may as well stay there in the castle there is some point to hiring someone I think we can have Thor Grimm and Verdish well yeah Verdish kind of goes with Verdish kind of goes with one of this one is Tiva kindred spirits starts with the first day 10 okay that's kind of interesting probably that's what I want first and foremost right I do that a thousand bucks a day pretty good you go here anything else to be done probably not I have the arc I have the upgraded portal of glory oh man look at this town we have a knotted town didn't got zealots whoever bothers with zealots okay okay we're pretty much in cruise control I mean I'm getting too cocky too big for my boots here comes desperation mode so blue have landed Picotram blues heroes have abandoned him and he's been banished from the land you didn't even try he just vanished into thin air so it's all over for blue time to put purple to the sword with my boots and my logistics to our logistics no it's just the boots how good is the boots of speed look what I can do with the boots of speed two plus signs on her movement so good this could be it people Chandra what is there any reason not to just go for it I don't think so I think I'm overthinking things seven archdevil's is enough to do the stuff it's gonna be a bit messier than the other fights were but this is just a gimme so we just want to annoy and avoid Chandra doing anything annoying and I have tons of spell points we both have tactics we both have the same level of tactics that's that's really cool when two heroes both have tactics they wear each other neutralize each other I'm sure they're overthinking it wasting everybody's time you guys want to click on to some other video now I get it you can see that it's you can see that off the campaign is nearing an end Mara to do anything I don't think boys but if you are going to click a different video click one of my other videos all right to stay with me man come on please I've got to get the views up boom glorious victory well let's just see this is the real fight okay Edric hasn't done enough 66 means he's neutralized a bit of my advantage to archangels I think we'll want to leverage the hatred and get them dead quickly so let's just make sure I can do that ballistics gives me the first turn so I have the agency to do that once they're down here can these guys get to a movement six one two three four five six they will not be able to reach me with the Idris don't mind getting rooted to the spot by this too much and I think that matters doesn't make sense to use the hatred to kill the two archangels quickly 170 now advanced so I might wait and let him do his thing they always cure if he blinds so yeah we're just gonna pile in here try to get my troops in through the gate I'm not expert I'm already open to get those that's good so I'm going first with speed 18 I think I'm gonna wait right what's the downside of that the zealots get to shoot who cares yeah come over yeah okay well the dogs will not enjoy that but I want to see how much damage will I want to see how much damage the demons will do against the archangels before I make my decision so I'm not doing much at all see if the liverns want to come out this as well actually let's wait how much damage do I do not enough to kill one so do me a favor and smack these up happy if you sally forth with the hydras to kill these but boiling Tata's 90 damage I didn't know I was standing on the tar there I'm gonna want to raise demons out of the dog I just want to hit this okay I can be convinced to attack the white ones with this I really thought seven would kill two how much damage did you deal boys 300 damage and killed one only barely killed one so these guys deal 50 they have health 250 and attack and defense 30 30 I have 26 28 nearly as good my damage is way worse and my health is 80% my damage is about 70% is 70% my health is 80% and my two skills but then I'll try that we hate each other I thought the hatred would make me deal Matt so how much did hatred matter 35 times 7 it's 200 and something so hatred added 50% right he's out of spell points 112 so I could kill the archangel but what else are the devils doing well they're teleporting over and killing the zealots and hydras and stuff yeah the hydras might want to get hit by the devils right so enough this is right finish them off get off my lawn go for this I think if you go for this you get a higher probability of success but this town doesn't do as much damage looks good oh come on hit it so let's have no melee penalty though and if the basilisks die on the ramp I get guaranteed access no guarantees I'll kill that 80 feet saltons aren't actually that seems like a good attack yeah this should be a kill we messed up I was probably supposed to make a small stack of guys that died it can be resurrected pretty bad attrition on this fight I just do their thing but then again a drip expert leadership one would have to say you have lost three we have to miss out oh step off the tar that would have been good that was a stupid mistake yes ballista any relevant okay that's a good that's very good for us that's what they're there for beautiful right finish them yeah good height yes is that a kill that's not if I stand yeah okay I haven't done the analysis it's probably wrong but I'll do this 33 backs pretty handy yeah I'm gonna get shot tack and then see if again if I was to bless it would really work no it wouldn't it wouldn't quite have enough increases the hand-to-hand or I can just take 170 surely it's landing by so I get to do this and then see I might have them here right three more and 22 dogs yeah it's not a an army or a build it's very resilient but then again it's month to week three right so it's like the late game or mopping up the map but our hero isn't very old she's only 14 she doesn't have artifacts she's got really bad artifacts so there's only so much you can expect from her now in case anyone hasn't seen my other videos I never take diplomacy just on principle because it's broken as a skill ruins the game that said expert earth expert air magics no slouch either now I think you'll find purplers out of towns they never unlocked any underground the genies are still here where's the underground up here right there are lots of soldiers so I think we're done I think the end of this week is the end of the game we could have a quick look in here to see if the thieves guild can tell us anything loinor still lives and he has arches anything we just don't know if there's another town please we'll do some of these things okay what's that my 17th interruption and we are getting this goddamn campaign finished flag the gray stuff that's here now after the death of blue doing stuff wait here until the end of the week you can wait there blues dead anyway there's no threat here okay stand about there maybe axis is there any reason for you to stay there don't think so I think we're done here is it over let's just loin us out on the water now right over man what should we do should we go fight these vampire lords for some fun lots of vampire lords love to have a blind one of them can't do that 200 points of damage could be and I kill five just direct to him what do you reckon slow make their movement six one two three four five six one two that's actually quite useful to yeah slow is not as good as blind but it's not too bad these guys will skip the turn the list you're gonna attack the first aid tent hopefully go I could run away that I'm gonna do it with this guy I'm gonna skip his turn I think the devils are gonna do very nice damage I mean it's the devil show right before we were all here to see yeah yes this is fine six move away don't care throw the demon away do I need to know absolutely not this too to devil hits in a row coming big guys do a lot heavy lifting for me there we go them a horde of royal griffons it's not much else really down here I'm not gonna yeah I can't tell if you're watching if you care what's down here now at this point these fights all actually look really basic look this is a level these are all week one type stacks and raw and rewards there's nothing really juicy down here no mid game or late game stuff so I don't think I'll bother cracking through into the underground exploring the rest I think I'm just gonna let the game let Linus do his thing try to stop him doing anything sneaky oops that was a mistake coming back to the rampart for one last hurrah who is that Marius sorry it was clicking here too much of a hurry it would be stupid if Linus somehow was able to kill those dwarfs spend some of my 87 grand here all masters okay come on up don't think it'll matter this is playing up here right finish this off flagging stuff as we go seemed good I think we're done here aren't we strollers just right so could I gallop out and kill him we hire somebody to go about and kill him on the coast she was an enemy she's now come into the Coven Linus love your work afraid it's all over and we got to have a fight out on the water purple has been vanquished congratulations all your enemies have been defeated in victory is yours cool it's on deal and we get the dragon doing his thing look at that the fireman the flames of victory gotta love that yeah I just had to move my camera there did this weird thing when I was moving it so done deal I'm pretty sure I got exactly 440 in the last conflicts campaign as well so I wonder if it's that if you plan an extra large map you've got to get it done faster huh I don't know how that works anyway I hope you guys enjoyed this one it was a weird one it was interesting I think it was more fun in the first half in the second half we didn't really the game didn't really step up into any real massive you know big stack months big stacks of monsters juking it out and killing each other yeah I think it was more the juiciest parts were probably the defense of the inferno the series of sieges the defense of the fortress you know with Josephine's last stand I was probably the highlight I suppose one of the highlights anyway sort of you know a really really noble defeat or you know trying to know it was the wrong word but but a defeat where you really make them pay and that really bought us you know a really cruisey end game so anyway we're all done here for this one I probably will go ahead and roll into a new series pretty quickly so if you've stuck with me through the whole campaign here I don't know how many videos it'll end up being maybe four or five episodes if you're here on the last episode thanks very much and I'll see you again soon for the next one bye for now