The Adventure Window
You see the surrounding of your heroes, your castles and the places your heroes have
been to. You can scroll this window around. For an overview of all areas, use the world map at
the upper right corner. You use your adventure window to move your heroes around to fight
others and explore the unknown territories. There really isn't much strategy to talk about in this
part. All you need to know is in the manual. :) Yeah right, what manual?! The main objective in
the adventure window is to move you heroes on to as many mines and obelisks as possible,
they can ONLY help you. Every turn, before you do anything, right click on all castles, yours
and especially enemy's. You look around your castles for potential dangers, like some sneaky
enemy heroes. If you do see one right click to find out its troop strength. If you think your
defenders of the castle are stronger than the enemy troops, then just leave him alone there. But
beware, if you don't have a hero in your castle you still may lose even if your troops are
stronger. Because heroes have several advantages. First, heroes have spells. If you don't have
any hero to counter cast spells, chances are half of your troops can't even attack before they got
all killed. Second, heroes have artifacts to help them, to increase attack power, defense skill and
luck and morale. I won't go too much into it right now, I will save the goodies for later, the
combat. Last but not the least, heroes adds bonus skills to all the troop he/she is leading. The
bonus depends on the level of the heroes, and hero's class. You can't tell any of the above
without 'identify hero' spell. So you can't just look at the enemy troops and say 'They are weak!'
as long as the power is close to yours especially if the enemy has one of the four most powerful
troops (Paladin, Cyclops, dragon, phoenix-- look into troops section to see why they are
powerful) take extreme caution. Since your castle is your most precious property, defend it
carefully. If you do think you will lose the fight and you don't have any hero of yours close
enough to save you, you don't have to loose all your troops in your castle. If you have lots of
money and all your dwellings in that castle can still give you more troops, then get everyone of
them, even if all of your troops added together can't save the castle. Why, you ask? So after
your enemy take over the castle, he can't recruit any more troops and you know exactly how
many troops he has, and probably within a week, you can get an army strong enough to get the
castle back and preferably kill that enemy hero(well heroes never die, but if you defeat them in
the combat they disappear). Now that you have emptied your castle, it's time to flee. Yes flee. If
you are positively sure that you can't win that battle, you flee to save your troops won't you?
You go hire a hero and let that hero lead all the troops you got and flee out of the castle. If you
have more than 5 types of troops, leave the weakest in castle and, no choice, you have to let
them die. Normally, computer's first objective is to capture your castle. So its hero will totally
ignore the hero fled out of the castle and still go ahead and attack the castle. The computer also
use this strategy when it sees that your troops is going to attack its castle and it can't defend it.
So if this happen to you, do what I do, go attack the fleeing hero first and kill all the troops, the
castle is empty for the week anyway, you have plenty of time to capture it later. There is an
interesting effect caused by this strategy used by computer. When one computer player attack
another computer player, the defender flee ask I describe above, so the attacker take the castle
then it will leave without put any troops for defense. So the fleeing hero go back and take the
castle back and also leave without defense, since none of them can get more troops from the
castle. So those two heroes will keep capturing and leaving the castle for ever, without attacking
each other. Now, you have checked all your castles and make sure they are safe. It's time to
check enemy's castles. When you right click on enemy castles you will see the defenders. If it's
weak then you find a good opportunity to get yourself a brand new castle. Right click on enemy
heroes to find out their strength. After knowing what you have and what your enemies have,
you can start planning, and move your heroes around accordingly. Also, recruit as many troops
as you can afford. After all, get a large army is the ultimate goal you have to achieve for this
game. Be careful where you are stepping though, there are scattered creatures all around the
map. They don't belong to any lord, but they will defend their properties if you invade their
privacy. Each such creature has the control over the adjacent squares. You can walk pass them
in those adjacent squares without pissing them off, but if you stop in those squares, you'd better
ready to kill them all, for if you don't they will kill you. If you stop right on those creatures,
which means you are attacking them intentionally, two things might happen. Do you want hear
the good one first or the bad one? OK, bad one first. You have to fight until one dies. Now the
good news, the creature may offer to join you, and you will gladly accept that offer, I hope? The
surrender generally happens when your army is way to powerful for them to handle. But, it's all
random. I forgot what happens if they offer to surrender and you don't have any space left in
your army to hold them. Or maybe they don't surround under that condition? Anyway this don't
happen much. Normally, those creatures are guarding something. Maybe a mine, an artifact, a
road to other parts of the map. Whatever it is, if you want to go through, you must try your luck.
However, you don't always have to fight them. If you don't desperately need that mine or
whatever, you can wait until other heroes kill the creature, and you can capture the mine later.
Of course if it's an artifact then you can't get it. Sometimes, when the creatures are guarding an
road, they are actually acting as a defense line for you to keep other lords' heroes away, at least
for a while. So my advise is this: do not fight them unless it is necessary, they usually fight instead
of surrender so don't think you can always get free troops.
Another thing you can do, in advanture window is walk to another friendly hero, then a
trade window come up and you can trade troops and/or artifacts between two heroes. This is a
way to deliver troops and/or artifacts to a hero who, for some reason, can't get back to a castle.
You trade troops and artifacts by click the ones to be traded then the according arrow sign. Or
if you want to exchange things, just click once on one then click once on the other. Note, spells
books and cursed (bad) artifacts can't be transferred. You have to leave at least one group of
troops for a hero.
