King's Bounty: The Legend

• Prioritize doing the main questline at least until you get the Chest of Rage. Aside from dramatically increasing your effectiveness, its skills level up the more you use them.

• The difficulty goes Mage < Paladin < Warrior, from easiest to hardest. However, Mages have the hardest time in the beginning, since you don't have many good spells and you don't have a lot of troops. Usually by the time you get to the Freedom Isles, the mage starts growing exponentially. Beeline for Higher Magic if you play mage.

• The Mind skill "Reserve" is important for all classes, letting you bring reserve troops with you for convenience and easier reinforcing, to the point that it was made a default feature in later games.

• Doing missions for people usually puts new stuff in their shop, or at least adds reinforcements to their populations. Doing story missions makes troops available in your main castle, sometimes at unlimited population.

• Don't have kids. They are usually worse than loot, but you can't discard them without divorcing your wife.

• Quicksave before any endeavor, especially as there are some big difficulty spikes here and there such as the Magic Range.

• You can find/earn new scrolls beyond your limit but you can't buy any until you clear them out. Attack spell scrolls aside from Trap tend to be weak, spells not reliant on ranks like some buffs more worthwhile.

• Leadership is the most important stat because it determines how many creatures you can recruit and that's 90% of the game right there. If you level up and leadership is one of the rewards, choose it to the exclusion of everything else.

• Creatures that summon other creatures are very useful as the AI does prioritize the summons, eating up enemy turns and retaliations without any permanent losses. Ranged units are another high AI priority.

• Snakes and Royal Snakes make for strong early game troops particularly if you luck upon the +1 snake Speed item. There's also a companion that doubles their attack. In general the artifacts you find go a long way in dictating which types of units are the most useful, and which ones are readily available varies from game to game. Much of the fun is in finding great item/unit/spell combinations so go wild and experiment.

• The humble "Trap" spell is useful even for a non-Mage as they're invisible to the AI and instantly end a unit's turn, delaying melee units a great deal. Also Snakes for example can strike at someone over a trap which will then stop the enemy as they try to attack them back.

• Some spells work a bit differently from what you might at first imagine. "Sacrifice" gives permanent bonus units. "Fear" prevents the use of many Talents even if the unit has valid targets to attack. "Kamikaze" can be cast on enemy units. "Divine Armor" doesn't give a flat Resistance boost but sets them to the designated value if they're lower (but not negative).