General Hints and Tips for game plays.

This section deals with specific issues that you may encounter in the game. Also questions others ask me. You can consider this mainly a FAQ or Q&A section. There may be repetition of what I have already wrote about in the early sections.

In Campaign game which lord / queen should I choose?
It depends. When you choose a lord, you are actually choosing the type of castle/troops to start your game with. After you decide, you will always start the campaign scenario with that type of castle. For details on lord/castle combanation see the troops section. Everyone has his/her preferences on types of troops. After one game or two, you will have your own preference, too. For starters, Knight casltes give you cheap and relatively OK troops. Babarian/Sorceress castles both have 2 kinds of shooters and good for castle attacking. Warlock castle give you powerful troops ( advanced troops are more powerful) but very expensive. I always pick soceress castle for no reason. Guess I like the shooters and phoenix. I suggest the starters to choose Knight castles or Babarian castle.

What should I do the first day?
In most games you start with one castle and one hero on the first day. Your first mission is to explore the surroundings and pick up near by treasures, artifacts or whatever that is NOT GUARDED. You don't have the stroops needed to fight. So don't even stop near any creatures. Don't forget to build a dwelling in your castle. You can build one a day. Then hire another hero. Don't think you would need that 2500 gold for something else. Your reserve is generally enough for several days of building, and you do need at least two heroes at the start of the game.

What should I do the first week?
By now you should have at least two heroes, but don't go over three since you don't want to split your troops to too many heroes. You don't have many troops yet. Don't even consider the third hero for at least a week or two. DO remember, however, to build one dwelling everyday the first week. Build dwellings that produces armies first. When you ar low in funds or you can't build the dwellings then build well and mage guild. This should open up more dwellings for you to build, since some dwellings requires the building of well or mage guild first. Leave the Thieves guild and Tavern to the last. Send your heroes to explore the nearby land. Don't go too far though. You can't go very far without fighting. One thing you can do is to give all troops to one hero and send them exploring, while the other one with minimum troops go around pick up goodies, and protect your castle in case other lord find you too fast. Don't leave the castle empty.

Should I fight those creatures to get to the mine/artifact?
It depends. You can look up the troops section for relative strength of troops. The creature guarding the mine/artifact is normally in 5 groups of 4-5 creatures per group, unless they are paladins or dragons. That will be 1-2 per group. Compare that to your army's strength and make a decision. If the guarding creatures are slow and you have shooters then you have an advantage. If it's the other way around then you have disadvantages. The problem will be the slowly walking troops suffer from the shooters while walking close. If you have some flying units then you can use them to tie up enemy shooters, genereally 3 of them if your flying units stand in the middle. They can't shot with an enemy unit next to them and their hand-to-hand damage suck. The same apply to your shooters so when you distribute your troops in hero's window, put the shooters at the beginning and/or the end of all the troops. That will put them in the corner of the combat window. Then you don't need as many troops to surround them to protect them. Now if you need that mine desperately then you have to fight that creature to get to it. But sometimes you can walk around the creatures and capture the mine. Don't fight the creatures that are blocking the road. They can at least slow down your enemy's approach. When you feel you are ready and strong enought to expand beyond that point.

The enemy took all my castles what should I do?
If ALL of your castles are gone, you should get a message telling you that you need to get your castle back within 7 days or you are doomed. Do it!! Gather all the heroes together and combine all the troops/artifacts on the most powerful hero. Use the rest hero to attack ONE castle to weaken its defense then use the hero with all the troops to take it over. If you fail, you either start a new game or load the game again, assumming you have saved it earlier. If you did win this battle, it's likely you won't have the strength to take over another castle for a while. What you should do is defend the only castle you have, and let other lord fight each other. Most of them will get weakened or even conquered. While they are fighting, you should use all your resources and gold to build powerful armies. But watch your resources, they may run out. Even if you are not fighting others, keep an eye on everyone. I recommand you turn on the view enemy move option. When you see a castle with weak defense near you, your chance is here and grab it. Go attack it and defend it. Then you have more gold coming in and you can build more armies. This way you can come back into battle and hopefully win this scenario. You should attack the weakest lord when you have the chance. There is a good chance that you may wipe him off the map. Then, you have the foundation to fight the one most powerful lord that is left. The only disadvantage is the one left over may be too powerful when you are finally ready to face him. But don't be discouraged by it. This is the time your start saving on dragons and phoenix or cyclops. Stack whole bunch of those on one or two of your heores then go kill. Most enemy heroes have their troops spread over on everyone of them. You can gather all of your troops and you can kill them without a lot of difficulties.

An enemy hero is approaching my castle, I don't have enough defense, what should I do?
Ok, first make sure if you have any hero that CAN defeat the approaching enemy with "Demension door" spell. If so, you maybe able to teleport that hero in time for the fight. If not, do you have money? I am talking about 5k or 10k even. If you do, you can do a couple of things. One thing you can do is buy up all the troops avialable in that castle and a hero to lead them. Let the hero flee out of the castle. The computer AI wouldnt attack them, he will go for the castle. I talked about this strategy earlier in this doc. Go find it. Another thing you can do if you have 'Storm' or 'Armageddon' spell then you can hire a WARLOCK/SOCERESS to go on a suicidial mission. Only give them the original troops that came with them and let them go fight the enemy. Cast 'Storm' or 'Armageddon' upon contact. This should wipe out all your units but that should take care some of the enemy too. If you have money just keep doing this until you run out of money or the enemy got beat up and can't take your castle no more. Oh another thing, if your castle does not have a lot of improvement in it, then it's not a bad idea to lose it to the enmey. Under one condition though, make sure you can take it back very soon. After you take it back, you might get extra improvments built by your enemy. If you take all the troops away and take back the castle within a week then you can get the extra improvements easily since the defense in castle is weak.( the computer can't get more troops out of the dwellings.) If you DO have lots of improvement and you DO want to defend your army, there is another thing you can do, only if the approaching enemy is low on shooters and flyers. You can get some flying units, buy them from dwelling or hire warlock/soceress who comes with flying units. Your weak flying units will get attacked last. So you can hide it in one corner. let all other units fight and kill as many enemy as possible, make sure you do shooter and flyers first. Always hide your flying units in one of the four corners of the battlefield where enemy can't reach within one turn. Remove spells on the flyers if needed. For each round, your guarding tower will shoot flaming arrow at the enemy and if you keep the flyers out of the reach of the enemy, the enemy will get killed after several turns by the arrows. One note though, if the enemy has a fast moving unit there is a chance that it will catch you. It happened to me once. :( This does not always work but worth a try if you are desperate.