Timing

• Pausing the game (with ingame pause, P), does not stop the timer.
• Quickloading reloads the time played for the map to what it was at the point saved.
• F3 does not speed up the timer, even though the game runs faster. Using F3 should be an independent category.

Main strategies

Castle is the best spell in the game for killing most, but not all monsters. However, there are numerous situation where you need to build up your castle. You can raze your castle again by pressing Shift+L.

Sufficient mana must be gathered before starting mana gathering missions (see bug note). Planning on which mana to get and optimizing balloon routes (at least on the earlier levels) is crucial. (And no, there is no way to control your balloons.)

When the mission objective is to kill all monsters of a particular kind, it usually cares about all monsters of that kind that are alive at the moment. There are often ways to spawn new monster of that kind, which will then be included in the objective, so try to avoid that as much as possible.

Bugs

Fast-Quitting

When you have completed all missions and is asked to fly to the exit, you can just press esc, hit confirm and leave it immediately. The game will consider you to have beaten the level. This is probably not a bug. A tiny bit unfortunate, since some levels are almost built around exiting the level (looking at you, level 6).

Mana mission skip

Mana gathering missions are set up so that you need to gather a certain % of the level’s current max mana in your castle. How far the castle’s mana meter is from it’s maximum is an indication of this. Usually when you start such a mission, the game spawns monsters, which raises the total amount of mana on the level, and by consequence, raise the total amount of mana you need to pass the mission. However, it spawns these monsters after checking your mana. So if you have more % mana then required when you start the mission, you’ll not only pass it immediately, but the total amount of mana you needed was less than if you had not. You should always aim to do this, as it speeds up the mana missions, which are a time consuming part of the game. Not entirely sure this is a bug either (the first Cymmerian level talks about it explicitly).

Quicksave / quickload

Aren’t free of weird effects. In particular it seems that mana missions can be skipped by playing through the map normally, and then quickloading back to an earlier point when the mana mission just got available. Even if you don’t have enough mana, the mission can be passed (observed once). Abusing this bug and using the in-game timer, should be considered its own category, if it should be allowed at all. (There would be no real-time restrictions on such a run.)

Castle razing

By building your castle next to other buildings, and then, with some trickery, upgrading it, you can raze the other buildings instantly. Noted to be useful on level 2, 10, 11 and 16.

Castle digging

By being super smurfy, you can get your castle to raze indestructible walls. This seems to work best when building a completely new castle (level 1) and somehow tricking the collision detection (hit something!) for the castle projectile to still build instead of being prevented. This is useful on level 12 and possible on 25.

Diagonal movement

As in a lot of other old games, moving diagonally has higher speed than just moving straight forward. Because there is a maximum turning velocity (mouse control in mc2 is not like in regular fps:s) this is hard to utilize perfectly while still doing other tasks. The speed up spell seems to affect only forward and backwards movement, so when using it it’s sufficient to cast it first while going straight forward, and then add a strafe key and a slight counter angle with the mouse.

Crashing

(of the bad variety.) The game is more unstable on high resolution, and will frequently crash in certain situations.