Castle
Castle is the place you build all your improvements and hire your heroes from. It’s your home, defend it. It also produces 1000 gold per turn, BTW one turn is one day. Different castle type also decides what kind of troops you can produce. Capture as many enemy castles as you can, this is normally what you need to do to win in most scenario.
Towns
Towns are the only places in game that can be build into castles. This makes the towns almost as useful as castles. Towns generally are neutral at the beginning with some kind of defenses. Always conquer the neutral town upon discovery as you can manage. Don’t start any suicidal operation, it will, generally, do you no good. A town is fairly easy to conquer compared to a castle They don’t have a wall to protect itself. When you attack, it is the same as fighting on plains. I recommend you to change towns into castles as soon as possible.
Mines
You need to capture mines or you will soon draw your resource reserve empty. You will need all the resources to build city improvements, produce troops and hire heroes. To capture a mine and claim it yours, just have a hero walk into it. You will see a little flag of your color on top of it after capturing. Capture as many as you can. Always reclaim the mine if it is captured by other lords’ heroes. Don’t leave those mines without checking back later!!
Hero
To capture mines, you need heroes. To fight and conquer others you need heroes. The concept of hero is very useful in this game. A hero is needed to lead your troops. Without a hero, your troops are not going anywhere but defending your castle. Hero is the leader and soul of your troops . A hero can cast spells when you have researched/found spells, and with a spell book in the hero’s inventory. A hero can hold up to 14 of whatever artifacts he/she may find and use them. Different types of heroes have different modifiers and abilities, I will discuss these later.
City Improvements
You need to build city improvements. Most of the improvements produces troops, the detailed list will be in the troops section. Every castle has some common improvements:
Magic guild
4 levels totally. Each level you add, you get additional spells. With magic guild, you can also, for 500 gold, buy spell books for non-spell casting heroes like knights and barbarians.
Thieves guild
Gives you information on your standings among other players in different categories. The more guilds you own, the more info you get. But I don’t really find it that useful to build one in every castle.
Well
This one is useful. It increase the productions of your troops in that castle by 2 per week. It may not be much for peasants or sprites and such, but when you need dragons or phoenix, 2 units takes two weeks to produce.
Tavern
Increase the morale of your defending troops.
Shipyard
Produces ships, if you are on the sea shore; you can't build a shipyard if you are not on the sea shore. Also, only one ship can dock at a shipyard at any given time. You have to move the boat before you can produce another one.
Troops
You need to, of course, produce troops, to fight other lords. The status and cost of different troops are discussed in details in troops section.
Artifacts
You will want to find and grab those artifacts available in each scenario. You don’t HAVE TO but it will help, well mostly. There are artifacts that will hurt you rather than help you. And once you find the artifacts, you can’t destroy it nor drop it. You can't trade it either. It HAS to be carried on the original hero who found it. Note, only the bad artifacts can't be transferred. You can trade between your own heroes good artifacts and troops. My advice is this. Grab everything that you can get your hands on. If you do find a ‘bad’ artifact, let this hero carry it (you don't really have a choice there.) then, if you want, you can give him minimal troops like one of the weakest and let him fight other lords’ heroes, after he is defeated, the winning party will have to pick up the artifact up and now it’s their problem. Beware though, you might forget who picked up your bad luck later and fight that same hero again only to find out you got your bad luck back. So a more safe way is to keep him to dig up all the artifacts, then redistribute them. If you do choose to do this, remember don't keep him in the castles that are likely to be attacked, because when attacked the hero in the castle will assume the role of troop leader and the artifacts he carries will effect all the troops. Or better yet, you can leave that hero in some place where nobody will ever be. Of course you can just forget about the bad one just give all good ones to this hero to counter balance it and give him as many troops as possible and he is still a good fighter. You can get to the point where you have so many troops under the command of one hero that you don't have to worry about spells, luck or anything else. you can kill any enemy troops within one turn. Then who cares what the hero is carrying. Among the artifacts, there is a biggie in every scenario, that is buried somewhere. You need to solve a puzzle to see where it’s buried. You solve the puzzle by find pieces of the treasure map from different obelisks. After you fit all the pieces together (don’t worry computer does that for you.), you can see the red mark on the map indicating the location of the artifact. One trick to this is to start digging before you have all the pieces. As long as you can make a good guess where it is, start digging. You will be happy with that artifact, it’s much better than other artifacts. While normal artifacts may give your hero +2 attack skill, or +2 defense skill, or +2 spell skills, the one that you dig up will add 12 to a skill. Artifacts are generally defended by some neutral troops on the way. After you reach for the artifacts, three things may happen. You may get it for free (the best), or you can buy it for 2000 gold, the worst is you may find a pack of rogues defending it. You never know which situation will happen. It’s pure luck. So be always prepared for a battle.
Misc
You may also find other strange looking things. Always remember to right click if you are not sure. Most things you walk into won’t hurt you. Even if they will, you will be asked if you want to go in that place or not. This is a always a good indicator and you should expect a battle ahead. I will give some examples below but you can find these out easily. Examples of good ones
The fountain and ring bless your troops and make them lucky. The statue give you good morale. Capturing a lighthouse increases your troops' move on sea. Windmill gives you a small amount of resource every week, but you have to walk to it every week to receive it. Some dwellings for peasants and goblins or archers are out there. Also dwellings for nomads rogues and genies. (yes, the genies in the lamp)
Examples of bad ones
The ship wreck, grave yard and cave have monsters and ghosts inside, but you can always find something useful in return if you win the battle. However, if you or someone has already searched those places and killed all the monsters, and you search again, you will find nothing and your troops’ morale becomes low.
??? It's your call
The strangest of them all is the dragon city. You can consider that a good place to visit if you have a large army. After you attack the city and kill all the dragons in there, the rest of the dragon will offer you 1000 gold per day and defend the city for you. And you ask how come there are dragons left if your army killed them all? Maybe dragons are magical and can rise from their ashes. Wait that's phoenix. OK! Baby dragons from the city's day care center! Satisfied? I didn't design the game!! Anyway, it's like a gold mine with defenders; and in easy settings, other lords never attack the city. In the harder setting, they might when they find it.