I got the game a shortly after my last post. Tried two games. Getting my lower-end handed to me the first game I played. It was a four-people map, we were all at war. They all zoomed towards my capital. I saw big stacks of 3 different colors ignore each others and zooming onto me. Well that was that. Here goes a wasted hour and a half of apparently poor play. Kind of frustrating, wasting 90 minutes doing something wrong. I always have a problem gauging how quickly I'm supposed to explore or develop things, in many strategy games. I can't quite grasp the pace of a game until I've spent like 10 hours playing it.
Anyway, back on topic, my second game seems to be going a little better. But maybe it's because of the map. I'm underground and the main way to move around is through a network of underground rivers. I tried to capture as many mines and whatnot as possible, but I keep getting them annoyingly stolen by units of the AI. So I have a few towns and not enough army to defend them, yet I'm almost losing money.
I seem to never be making enough money to have a decent army, despite doing my best to hold on to income buildings and growing up my town. I have enough money to either turtle there and defend my position and achieve nothing, or go out and explore and see a random hero come from nowhere and steal my town 'cause my army was trying to achieve something. This is one of the reasons I never was a huge fan of multi-layer maps. It's one of the things that probably make me wanna play HoMM2 more than HoMM3, the underground world.
I guess I'll figure things out.
