katakis: I respectfully disagree. If you can't handle that and need to approach several times, then you simply are likely just bad at this kind of TBS games. In my experience, knowing maps or CPU moves beforehand is not needed (indeed, complaining about the need to know that is silly); what's necessary is simply being familiar with the system and playing it smart.
Also, heavens forbid you play HoMM3, 2 or any other PC classic.
I'm necroing my OP a bit because I just picked up Shadow Magic again and am having a similar experience as before. I'm playing on Easy just because I remembered how random and frustrating it could be. I can probably win the first map of the elf campaign if I play again, having lost it once and having some idea of where things are now, but some of the issues I have are the same as before.
The gold upkeeps are a bit brutal when you start the game with no resources and no real means of maintaining resources. I just hired all the cheap friendly neutrals that I could because it seemed like a generally good idea and it wasn't a lot of gold and I could get ambushed at any moment as far as I knew, but then a dozen turns pass with no combat, and those two windmills just aren't paying the wages. I eventually get attacked from the West by a small party, but not nearly enough friendly units die. While scouting elsewhere on the map, I find a city guarded by recruitable neutrals, but by then I don't have enough gold to hire them, so now I just don't have a city.
Eventually I go through a cave and get to a city in the snowy part of the map. Some drake rider asks if I know his friend the yeti. Unforuntately, he's way off on the other side of the map guarding mills, but I presume that if he were present, then I wouldn't have to pay 900 gold to hire these neutrals and gain, what, the third city I could have gained if I had known where everything was in advance and hadn't drained my economy on units I didn't have any way of knowing that I didn't need yet? So I send the Yeti on the long trek out to this remote city, but halfway there he deserts because my gold has been negative for a long time now. After my windmill troops all desert, I lose my windmills and I'm just really far behind.
Maybe I didn't read the initial prompt closely enough, but then again, there isn't a convenient way to review these things. But I didn't specifically know that I would need to save up money for bribes and that picking up a couple cheap troops for immediate self-defense was going to strangle my gold economy for the rest of the game.
I guess the lesson is that you can't get cities in the campaign without bribes, so don't hire neutrals?
But for all I know, the next map won't have any cities at all and I'll die because I didn't hire enough neutrals to fend off attacks.
These campaigns would be a lot less frustrating and random if you had knowledge of the initial layout (with land explored, but not actively visible, and maybe some rough idea of where the enemies are coming from). The type and extent of the asymmetry of the initial setup is anyone's guess as far as I can tell, unless it's the sort of thing where there's a secret handshake and if you've played HoMM enough then you already know exactly how the sequence tends to go or something. I just know that I hired a lot of troops because I thought I would have to survive fights and that I wasn't going to need to save bribe money, and exactly the opposite happened. From the very little information I was given, it was quite conceivable that the situation could have been such that my approach would have been appropriate: I could have gotten ambushed in the woods and barely survived, and then a couple turns later found a friendly city which was prepared to join me for free.
Replaying campaign maps is such a significant advantage - to the extent that I really don't see how you're supposed to have a comprehensive strategy taking all possibilities into account. I can see how playing a non-campaign battle map could be all strategy with reasonable use of fog of war, but the campaign maps are so random and disorienting that it's too discouraging to replay such a micromanaging sort of game over from the beginning of the map, taking hours to replay the map just because of random things of the type "clearly if I had known X was just around the corner I would have done Y instead of Z".
At least it looks like the non-campaign mode is a pretty intelligent and non-random game where, even if I'm bad at it, the missing information will be applied in a symmetric, controlled, and totally fair way, and the strategy will be more innate to mechanics of the game rather than centered around some campaign map design metagame intuition or whatever.
