Battle of Thorin final: uncharted water

Easiest way is catapults and druids. If you kill the elemental chief you get the water units.

Took me a while to beat this mission, and the advice here was not quite helpful. Here are the things that worked for me, partly based on advice I saw in another post here:

1. Get the castle, set up a robust defense of your choosing. Golems are good to slow down the attackers.

2. Send at least three Paladins and a Spirit to the "suspicious place" to get the three Mermaids. Be sure to charge up the Mermaids health with the Paladins and prepare to battle the four ice elements closest to you. Once the Mermaids come, those four will attack. Find a way to kill them without losing any of the Mermaids.

3. Once you've killed the four ice elements and still have your three Mermaids, set up yourself to attack the Ice Element Chief. Target him only, and do your best to kill him in one turn. In my experience, you need all three Mermaids to kill him, and at least two of them need to be Paladin-charged. Ice Element Chief has 120 HPs. Once you've killed him, all the other Ice Elements become yours to control. They do fill up your population, so be sure to get to your 50 pop limit before you go after him.

4. Take the Mermaids, capture the three villages in the lake. Use the Ice Elements to bolster your defences.

5. Grind down the Opposition with Ice Elements and Catapults. Best way for me was to set up the Ice Elements just outside the range of the enemy Catapults, set up my Catapults behind the Ice elements, charging them all with Paladin-health, and wiping out everything in range (the Enemy Golems, Paladins, Archers, and whatever else he spits out). His cash flow is cut since you took the three villages. Capture/destroy his villages when you can, deny him even more.

6. Once you've wiped out everything he creates and his cash flow drops, move in with the Ice Elements to kill the catapults. Some of the Elements will die, but if you have more than 5 Ice Elements, you should be able to do it.

7. Once the enemy Catapults are dead, get your commander over there and capture the castle.

8. As far as possible, don't engage the enemy level-9 Spirit. That mofo is the toughest thing on the board. The only thing that seems to damage him is an upgraded Catapault.