I was wondering if anyone has beat it by conquest and if you have to play it in an unintuitive way to make it in time?
[spoiler]as in, rush towards the last area with a sorceress and time stop, get dragons and archmages and then own the earlier areas while cloning your troops[/spoiler]

I beat it on normal today with the knight, but ran out of time for a conquest win. I kinda screwed up a couple of times and lost most of my army to upkeep though, and lost a battle once early on.

Also, has anyone tried those russian unofficial games in-between this and the 2007 reboot? They were mentioned in a YT video but aren't on wikipedia.

The main difference in the MD version (besides smooth scrolling and movement) seems to be that you have to use time stop to avoid certain encounters since there's no prompt letting you choose not to fight. You also can't eyeball their strength, just see the biggest stack in the field view.

My brother was an expert at this game back in the day... from memory, the best strategy was to memorize the location of the "free" treasures that you can reach without needing to kill any monsters (and always choose Leadership). There are a few movement tricks you can use to dodge a lot of fights too, like luring them away in your ship, moving out to sea to get out of sight of them, then return back to the treasure they were previously guarding.

Travel around and collect the free treasures first without fighting anything. When you find the map to Forestria, go there and repeat. At some point you are likely to find a flying creature to join you, you can then fly around the maps and pick up all the other great treasures inland. When you reach Saharia, you can start recruiting a couple of dragons and just incinerate all the enemies from the first few maps.

King's Bounty the Legend on impossible no loss entire game was no Problem for me with any characters either Knight, Paladin or mage so this makes me an expert ? I guess so ..

The OP was talking about the original King's Bounty game released in 1990, I believe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Bounty