If you finished the tutorial and are on your second shard, you can hire new heroes in you citadel screen. It's one of the buttons in the lower margin

You don't have to bother with it : A new hero just has one point in a skill you MIGHT not like. On the lower difficulty settings, that's not crippling at all.
I think a big part of Eador is dealing with the hand you're dealt : Character advances,adventure sites, events, ressources, mercenaries, scrolls, type of province around your capital, allies, there are many, many random elements in this game. The game can get very frustrating if you try to control them all to apply some "perfect plan". Finding out how to use all those elements to get to victory can be a big part of the fun .

Well,, i just spent two hours turning the game inside out looking for how to hire a new hero. .... Needless to say i do wish someone had mentioned this earlier!!! lol (I'm on the tutorial)

I suggest to start hotseat for 2(or more) players and (optionally)skip turns for second player. You would be able to learn without any pressure.

Tutorial is the first mission in the campaign. So if you are looking for campaing you are on the right track, personally I just go with custom maps :)

I was wondering if there is any benefit to sticking around in the first (tutorial) campaign mission?

I can continue finding new explorations which slowly give some equipment and experience and meanwhile money grows.

What comes with me to the next mission if anything?

Oh and since yesterday my whole party got killed again even though i made sure to avoid spiders and slugs because no one mentioned Ogres which easily crushed my leader whom can supposedly defeat everything on his own (except spiders and slugs).

1. You can learn which enemies can crush you without pressure from AI. Again, I would recommend hotseat game for this - you will have all buildings unlocked.
2. Carries on only "glory" - you can search forum for detailed use of it.
3. Basically, there is no unbeatable enemy in the game. You can be unprepared, and that's all. You can download manual for Eador:MOTBW or google translate http://www.eador.com/en/index.html and get rough idea about strength of the monsters.

The tutorial deliberately leaves you with a baseline suite of stuff (other than Glory, which is variable) when you complete it, so it's mainly useful for training purposes. Since you never need to worry about enemy lords, you can spend as much time as you like getting used to the game mechanics.

This is usually also the case in other shards - Glory carries forward, and new facilities/units/etc are available if you win - but there are a few plot-specific things that might only be found in a particular place. (You can still win the game even if you miss these, but missing them closes off specific endings.)

thanks for replies.

I noticed there are equipment 'sets' in the game, dunno what is the point if you can't keep building up the collection over multiple campaign missions?? weird. but then again, i have only ever played one other game that had sets and didn't work in that game either.... Dungeonsiege 2, reason - by the time you make the set, it is outdated,, funny shit!

Sets are useful on big shards or big custom maps. Also you might get lucky and have a couple of items from a set on a small shard and that would certainly help. The difficulty of enemies on small shards is lower, so there is no need for sets on them.

Heroes are complete idiots when judging enemy strength. They say, "enemy is doomed" but it takes some time to learn that an army of slingers and spearman cannot beat dwarfs+elves or even a single executioner.

So I'm in the early stage and every victory is hard to get (I'm playing one level above beginner). Which is fair and more enjoyable then automatically conquering lots of provinces. When do I find out if I'm progressing too slow? I don't want to play hours only to be swiped by an enemy who was ahead of me since the beginning.

It's easy so switch off iron man mode, it's just takes a ctrl+alt+del and reloading. Less than a minute. I guess the game will be still challenging enough.

If you are in the single player mode - create maps with disabled "exploration" - this should have been translated as "Fog of war".
You would be able to see what kind of provinces your opponent conquer.

I recommend to start hotseat game for 2 players, and skip turns for second player - you would be able to learn units and tactics without worrying about racing against your opponent.

It takes a little more than that. If the game is force-exited then it counts that as a reversion, equivalent to having used "Into the Past" and applies that to your score.

Oh man... It was my first game, I was doing well conquering and fighting the enemy armies but I had 2 armies in total and the border consisted of like 6 provinces. So the whole game became a deadlock, the enemy conquering an unprotected province of mine (beating the guards) and then me taking it back. And again and again. Then somehow an enemy army got behind my two armies and that moment, the game is immediately lost because there's no way you can catch up with them. It conquered my unprotected capital when my main army was just in the neighboring province. And if I leave an army back to defend the inner provinces, there's no chance of protecting the borders.

So all the work I had done before was for nothing. Very frustrating and I don't have an idea how I'm supposed to manage this. Going back in time is not a help either, because when I noticed I was losing, it made no difference to go back one turn.

Practice make perfect man. When I started playing Eador I lost like more than 30 times, just to figure out things. What you should do is find a good guards, there are good and expensive guards that can stop the enemies.

I can't advise you with specifics because it has been a long time since I played the original Genesis.

That's what outposts and garrisons are for. :)

I also learned it the hard way. Keep one unit in your capital garrison so if a army manages to get past your defences it'll take him some turns to besiege your capital. Then your army has enough time to catch up.

Outposts are also helpful because afaik the besieging army can't retreat from a army trying to lift the siege. That means you can shred him to peaces and he'll have one hero less for some turns which gives you time to breath.
Recently i've let the opponent besiege my outposts. Defeated his heroes with mine and then assaulted his capital.