epic war 3 100% speedrun 4,

Ay knew sub 3:30 was possible. Recorded 8/21/20. My 4th (and almost certainly final) speed run attempt.
I had no recording issues this time, except for the usual unadjustable sound which you can't tell. Also, the game for some reason reset the volume to 0 after I do the exit-continue trick??? Annoying, probably amounted to 30-60 seconds of time to reset the volume, but I'm more than happy with 3:23:59 so w/e. You can see me initially reset the volume to full the first time, but after I only up the volume for music 3-4 times and sound effects 2.
Gameplay wise, everything went well except for that one loss during the red hero campaign... Man before that loss I swear I was on a sub-49 minute pace... That loss combined with over 1 minute of exit+continue one time led to an otherwise really good red campaign. I've done 33 minutes on orange before (speed run 1), so 34 minutes was a little disappointing considering that. 26 minutes on yellow is one minute worse than my best (speed run 1), but I did yellow 2nd to last there and 3rd here, so that's understandable. 22-23 minutes on light blue was really damn good, no complaints there. Wish it were a cleaner 22 minutes though ;) Dark blue was 26 minutes, which was ok I guess. I was hoping for 25 (which would tie PB, speed run 1) though. Green was also 26, which IS a PB, but I also was hoping for 25 here.
I can't actually pinpoint obvious areas of improvement though.
This was by far my best, so here are more details, instead of my usual focus on what went wrong/could be improved.
1) Got pretty lucky with my castles being attacked in the red campaign...until the one where I lost 4 auto-fights in a row... I think my luck other than that was pretty standard, not particularly good or bad.
2) I have to admit, I played through the game once over the day before, which was enough time to settle on a strategy I liked, hence why this time around I have little to no hesitation when picking units and upgrades. I also played the cave of trials a ton to see if I could beat all of them in 3 minutes.
Anyways, here's a list of everything I was able to really solidify as my strategy:
2a) I got comet lv. 3 instead of goblin lv. 4 after the first battle because of bad experiences with encountering succubuses in the first two battles... I guess I got lucky here with avoiding it when having all level 1 stuff, and then avoiding it again with better, but still mediocre stuff. But, I
2b) I settled on the red-orange-yellow-light blue-dark blue-green order (flipping light blue and yellow from attempt #3). The idea behind this flip was yellow has more mana than light blue, so while I lacked the duo of mermaid-witch, I had more mana to work with for spells and better units, as opposed to if I had less mana and no second ranged unit unlocked.
2c) I settled on "campaign-opening loadouts". Specifically, goblin-engineer-succubus for orange and phantom armor-black knight for everything else. I still don't know how many castles I have to beat to for each mana boost, so I guess that's an area for improvement if I really wanted to do this again lol. I ended up going with succubus as the 3rd unit when my mana allowed for it, since that push back and "slicing upwards through all enemies" effect of it is just insanely OP., though as you can see in the video I hadn't fully decided this yet.
2d) I made a small change to my final loadouts. By the end of this, my preferred loadout was phantom armor-black knight-dragon rider-mermaid-witch-succubus, compared to centaur instead of phantom armor in my previous runs. What this allowed me to do was sacrifice the phantom armors early game while allowing me to spare the health of my knights and riders so as to better deal with the revenge waves. Last time (SR3) I settled on the spell combo comet-arrows-invicibility-berzerker-ice storm-phoenix, and today/yday confirmed it. The idea is arrows for quicker early games, ice/phoenix bc of 50 vs 55 sec recharge time for lv 5. Other 3 are clear.
2e) I also made general changes to my loadout picking order. Basically, it went phantom armor-knight,+succubus,+witch,+rider,+mermaid. Also, health+arrows before "big spells". But tbh, most of this came down to circumstance and feel.
2f) Cave of trials. Figured out this "blitzkrieg" strat where I rush the castle. I practiced COT 1 and 2 2-3 time, 4 3-4 times, and 3 8+ times to see if I could consistently do all of them in 3 minutes or less. 1, 2, and 4 were all pretty straightforward (titan in 4 coming out late helped a ton), but I struggled mightily on COT3, as evidenced in this video lol. I was only able to achieve about a 50% success rate. Problem is, the damn thunder titan has so much frickin health, as well as hp-boosted thunder sparks being a pain in the ass. COT5 unavoidably takes 4 minutes though I think.
Campaign times:~51,34,26,22,26,26
COT times:~3,3,4,3,4
1 was quite solid, 4 really good, the rest not bad at all. COT1,2,4,5 were p much optimal, 3 almost.
5kchar