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We’re now at the penultimate level, and victory is in sight. The Orc army is currently advancing toward King Llane’s home castle of Stormwind Keep, but first we’ll have to get through its two support cities of Goldshire and Moonbrook. Our orders are to completely raze those two towns and all their defenders, leaving the way clear for an assault on Stormwind Keep itself in the next mission.

Starting in this level, the entire tech tree for both sides is unlocked and we’ll be having to adjust our plans accordingly. Invisibility is still a problem, of course, so we can’t leave our base undefended at any point. The main concern is that the Conjurers now have the spell Summon Water Elemental. Water Elementals are pretty much the ultimate fighting unit for the Human side—they can still be killed with a direct hit from a Catapult, but other than that they’re extremely durable and take a lot of punishment, while also having a very powerful ranged attack. However, our Warlocks can summon an ultimate unit of their own, the Daemon. Daemons are even stronger than Water Elementals, and have the distinction of being the only unit in the game that can survive a direct Catapult hit. So my strategy is to simply play defense until I can train four Warlocks with the Summon Daemon spell, then rely on them for our attacks on the opposing bases.

We start with a sizable force, and I keep our two Raiders in our base to act as rearguards while our Grunts, Spearmen and one Catapult are all sent to guard a chokepoint near our base. As usual, I put plenty of effort into building up our Peon workforce, and also train some additional Grunts and Spearmen as additional defenders. Slowly but steadily, I build up our base and research the various upgrades—Daemons benefit from upgraded weapons and armor at the Blacksmith, so it’s definitely a good idea to invest in those. Our defenses do well at holding the line, although we run into trouble when a Catapult attacks—our own Catapults are able to neutralize it and we defeat the threat, but our defensive team takes considerable losses and I’m forced to rebuild. Meanwhile, invisible troops keep finding their way into our city, but our Raiders are still able to intercept and kill them. After quite some time, we finally build a Warlock Tower, but Summon Daemon still has to be researched before our Warlocks can use it. Researching it costs 3,000 gold, which takes plenty of additional time to save up for. Nevertheless, after a while we finally have the spell and four Warlocks who can use it. I have them each summon a Daemon, group our four Daemons together into an attack team, and have them advance.

Honestly, that’s basically the end of the Humans’ chances. One Daemon is exceptionally powerful, but four of them can mow through pretty much anything they send against us. The only real problem we have at this stage is a tough counterattack on our own base by invisible units that wipes out our base guards and a couple of buildings; I’m forced to train more Raiders and even move our Catapult into position to stop them. But on offense, our Daemons are pretty much unchallenged. They can only be active for a set period of time and disappear after that, but by the time they vanish they’ve already ravaged the first enemy base. Our four Warlocks, in the interim, have recharged their mana and can cast the spell again, so I simply summon four more Daemons and send them. It takes some time to destroy both bases because they’re both quite extensive and the Daemons are on a time limit, but victory is still only a matter of time. Soon both Goldshire and Moonbrook are history and we can continue our drive to Stormwind Keep.