starting to believe the key to this game is patience, and waiting until i've made use of every single piece of gold i can find on the map then just building a big army of kill. that was how i managed to win the last mission i had trouble with. then there were choke points that were a nightmare to try to squeeze units through, while the single archer out of them who wins the pathfinding lottery gets immediately slaughtered. i had pics of what a circus it was but i've reinstalled my OS since then and i guess they're gone now

the next mission introduced catapults and i made a lot of oopsies figuring out how they worked! they can take out any and all of my guys in a radius, including shots fired by my own catapults, because they're weird and goofy to control and there's this nonspecific delay i just kinda aim somewhere and then it shoots whenever i don't know, i don't know! but i'm gonna have to know soon enough because they can very easily turn the tides. that was a 70+ minute game i was sure i had, until those aforementioned tides got suddenly turned as was previously stated could occur

it was around this time i realized, i don't think this game is running correctly? there's no music, which is weird considering the videos i watch all have music, it's just that the music is terrible so i didn't care to think much of it. trying to scroll across the map instead of directly clicking on it immediately jumps to the opposite border, which i wondered what the point of such a function could be. then also the water shimmering animation was at 10000 fps and my fans were awfully loud trying to run this 1994 DOS game. turned out Lutris was overriding some DOSBox settings and causing this game to be totally overwhelmed by my CPU being what, thousands of times faster than any consumer CPU was at the time

now that i've converted that excess computer power into brain power i am warsmart enough to claim victory. still getting the hang of catapults sorry to that one guy

sometimes this game, after worrying that i'm about to have totally wasted the past two hours (probably over-preparing), makes things all feel worth it in the end when i'm watching my guys lay finally siege to orctown. sometimes, it hits me with a linear level that makes things all feel pointless again. it's funny that there was a point when i thought it could be a nice change of pace to get a mission like this, when now i'm just sitting watching a video of someone else playing, because i do not have the otherworldly patience of someone willing to spend hours trial-and-erroring their way down a long winding path. at least before when i'd fail i'd have more flexibility in changing up my strategy, but now more often than not it's "ok this time i'll do this to account for this game's awful pathfinding"

i'm just over halfway through the human campaign and i'm wondering if i really want to keep going or move on for now. my biggest qualm is that it'll only be more frustrating coming back to this after having played the later games, because i want to power through it at some point. i've come this far (about a third of the way), this game will not best me now. For Gielinor

update from an hour later: it bested me. i could probably power through this game given enough time but i don't think it's worth it. i would say it's okay because "i get it", like i've seen the game now, but then i just tried the next mission and it introduced some new summoning garbage i didn't feel like dealing with. when a video walkthrough from someone who knows what they're doing is almost an hour long that's how i know it's probably not worth it

and it's apparently canon that the humans lost anyway so now this was even more of a waste of time. wait actually if i'm giving up on the game then that means i'm conceding to the orcs, and they win the war anyway, sooo that means i've completed the game! wow. i knew i could do it if i just stuck to it