I agree that this is a difficult game. After having a hard time on the tutorial, I opted to go for the sandbox play -- I created custom scenarios. That almost always lets you find the best part of a really good game. No artificial restrictions or weird triggers to worry about; you can just be resourceful in any direction YOU like and play the game as it was meant to be played.

So far I'm on my third sandbox game and having a blast. First game I let the computer pick Archons for me at random; second I picked the familiar, to branch out from there: humans. Played with air magic and now with earth magic, with the constructor trait both times so I can more fairly judge one school against the other.

So far it seemed air was pretty easy to play, but pretty hard to play against. When I played Archons, I think I had Cosmos magic, and that was pretty good.

What I've noticed is that expansion is key. A lot of the difficulty that can arise later in a game like this one is because of not expanding aggressively enough earlier. You're just going to have to take some chances and roll out a pioneer to make a new city early in the game.

Every extra city provides a lot more income, and as it grows, much more still. I noticed the same thing in HOMM3 -- each new city you have will provide enough income to pay for the troops you need to buy from your main cities. This keeps expansion an ongoing process, as you'll need more troops to defend your new city too.

What really helps boost the process is when your outposts grow to villages, then towns, then cities. After dozens of turns in which money comes in at a trickle, one or two towns (or whatever) upgrading suddenly turns on a torrent of money.

You have to give them time to do it, though. Instead of buying all the buildings you fancy and in the process slowing growth and being unable to buy anything new for a long time, put your outposts on population growth as long as possible before putting some troops in them and probably a wall around them. This works fine in single-player for me so far. When I bought what I wanted as I needed it (you ALWAYS need something, right?), my growth, income, and expansion stagnated, and I became a punk to the opposition.

Anyway, the game is difficult, but far from impossibly so. The campaign I can't vouch so much for, but I rarely care for campaigns anyway, finding them usually dull and restrictive, and sometimes unnecessarily difficult to boot. So if you're patient and stick with it for just a little while, you'll be winning your sandbox games in no time and having one heck of a lot of fun doing it.

This is the liveliest 4x game I've played -- the game seems more vibrant to me than the others. And the fact that the combat part doesn't play like an embarrassingly amateurish afterthought like it does in some of the others is such a relief that it shouldn't feel so uncommon to the genre. The "one more turn" syndrome on this one doesn't eventually feel burdensome or make me feel like I'm making a big mistake.