Heroes of Might and Magic III

- Get your capital as soon as possible. Getting that 4000 gold a day is much more important than being able to buy 2nd or 3rd level creatures right away.

- Get as many skill boosters for your hero as possible. It's called heroes for a reason, once you get your attack/defense/magic power/knowledge above 10 it helps soooo much. So stop at all those places that give you +1 skills. Also go out of your way to pick up the artifacts, some will boost your skills a ton. Learn which artifacts do what as well, as far as I'm aware, there aren't any artifacts that directly hurt you, there is no Hideous Mask for those Heroes II players.

- In the beginning, I'd take the gold whenever you pick up a treasure chest, but once you have enough money where you are able to buy out your creatures on day one, start taking the experience.

- If you take over another town, get it up to a City hall, the more money you make the better.

- Magic is very important, use it a lot.

- Get Expert Wisdom(Lets you cast level 5 spells), Knowledge(gives you double spell points), Air Magic, and Earth Magic. In my mind those are the four most important skills.

- Town Portal, and Dimension door are the two spells that will allow you to move far away from your castle, and be able to return any day you need to protect it from enemy heroes. Get those, and use them to your advantage.

- As far as choosing your town, I think they are all good, except I'm not a huge fan of Rampart(kind of weak), Tower(really expensive), Inferno, and Fortress. All the others, I find quite workable.

- Turn on movement shadow and movement grid and all those other things in the battle options. Right clicking will tell you how far a unit can move(speed), it helps to know how far your enemies troops can move, so you know what's going to get attacked. Remember, you always want to get the first attack in if you can, if you have 20 units against 20 units, say that first attack kills 5, then they are only retaliating with 15 guys, instead of 20.

- The above is limited to the regular games/random maps, NOT the campaigns. - Gold is the only resource you'll worry about late game. Get as much as you can as often as you can - it's almost always worth sacrificing a bunch of troops for gold mine.

- Might heroes are usually better than magic heroes. A 2k damage implosion looks pretty cool, but a high level might hero can have troops 2 to 3 times as good as a high level magic hero.

- The best hero skill is logistics, hands down. Move more, capture more resources, kill more bad guys, get more experience - and run down enemy heroes before they can get back to town.

- A hero with leadership, luck, archery, resistance, offense and armorer is hilarious. Expert archery increases ranged damage by 50%, expert luck will double damage like a quarter of the time.

- The aim of any battle is to win with the least casualties, or lose with the most enemy casualties - every unit counts. Meatshields backed by ranged units is always a good idea. Leave stacks you don't like back home (eg. pikemen), cos that stack of 1000 will save your castle some day.

- Shooting units are way overpowered. Marksmen and Grand Elves attack twice, and will probably get two goes before the enemy closes, so its like you're hitting four times for free. The best army is all ranged (archangels and archdevils pretty much count because they can move anywhere).

- Combat speed is important and hard to increase. The cape of velocity artifact (there's some hand one as well i think) is awesome. First turn haste or slow is pretty much the best spell you can cast for most of the game.

- The Castle town is the easiest, the Fortress is the hardest. The rest are much of a muchness. Some towns don't get 5th level mage guilds, so if you want to play a magic hero, try Tower first (they also get a 1st and 7th level ranged troop, so they can get pretty broken).

- The unofficial WoG expansion is cool once you're used to the game, but most of the options make the game a lot easier, so play up a couple difficulty levels.

- Money, money, money.

- It's best to have ONE hero, preferably with Logistics, to do all or most of your fighting.

- I forget the name, but there's one hero who appears as a blue genie. He begins knowing Chain Lightning. Get him early and you can dominate the map.

- Black Dragons + Armageddon = teh win.