Total noob to these old school M&M games. I'm playing World of Xeen and I venture out into the wilderness. Some monsters I clean up in a few hits, and then monsters like the Wizard or Orc Grunts and Shaman just annihilate my party and the game is over.

1. How do I beat these foes at the start of the game?
2. How am I supposed to know which enemies I can defeat, and which are too much for my low level party?

It's been a long time since I played, but the main thing to remember is that the game is completely open, so you can wander wherever you want, but some areas will have enemies that are too tough for you. If you travel too far from Vertigo, you'll run into monsters that you can't handle.

At the start, make sure you thoroughly explore Vertigo itself before you venture outside. Remember that as your party gains experience, you need to visit the training grounds in order to actually level them up. Make sure to do this, because higher levels help a lot when facing tougher enemies. And try to get some ranged weapons for your party. This helps a lot, because you can take potshots at distant enemies while they creep closer to you, and by the time they reach you they can be finished off easily.

Once you venture outside the town, you can try to take out the orc huts if you can, since that will stop the orcs from spawning. But if they're giving you trouble then the Red Dwarf Mines should be your next stop. There's a tent outside the town where an herbalist offers a quest to fetch some herbs, but that's too tough to try until you have gained some levels. Exploring the Red Dwarf Mines will earn you a lot of experience, gold and treasure, which you'll need before you start exploring the rest of the world. You will probably need to make many trips back and forth between the Red Dwarf Mines and Vertigo so you can heal up and train for levels. Donating money to the temple (you may have to do it several times?) can get you some nice blessings, but be sure to save some money for training too.

Hopefully that helps, others here may have clearer memories of the starting area and more specific advice. Good luck, it's a really fun game once you get into the swing of things!

EDIT: I forgot to mention: there's a pyramid outside of Vertigo that will transport you to Darkside, but that's not recommended yet. Darkside is designed to be played after you've finished Clouds of Xeen, and if you head to Darkside early then you'll earn huge amounts of experience that will make the rest of Clouds trivial and boring. Just stick to Vertigo and the Red Dwarf Mines (with maybe a stop over at the orc huts once you think you're ready for them) and that should get you going.

If I recall correctly, the strength of the Temple's blessing and the number of donations required are both functions of the in-game day-of-week when you visit. You need to donate a number of times equal to the current day-of-week, and in return you get a blessing that scales with the day-of-week. A blessing on twosday is better than on onesday, and threesday is better than twosday, etc. A blessing issued on tensday is therefore the most expensive and most powerful.

If you know what you are doing and are careful, you can get by without blessings. However, a blessed party may be able to force its way through encounters that would require an unblessed party to retreat, heal up, and return.

Or, even better, you can make use of fountains to get some nice temporary boosts. You could, for example, boost your level (temporarily), then cast Day of Protection/Sorcery. The bonuses for doing so are significantly better than what the blessings would give you, and you don't even need to pay money to get them.

There is, however, the small problem of locating those fountains.

With a combination of those fountains and the use of high-end spells (which there are ways to get early), I've even been able to explore a certain late-game dungeon early on, get over 20 million XP for the party, and get access to a *very* powerful fountain well before the developers intended.

(Tricks like this can also be done in MM3, though there's one particular fountain you'll want to use that costs a fair amount of money to do so.)

Thanks a lot for the advice guys, I will use it going forward. I also have more questions:

1. Why did developers never include in game tutorial tips in these old games? I swear out of so many old games there are no tutorials, why is that?
2. How did people learn to play these old games before we could chat like this on forums? I would be lost with so many games if I couldn't ask for help online, so many things are not obvious, unlike today's games

Technical limitations, I guess. Also, most gamers back then were nerds who loved to read the manual.

You learnt to play by just trying things out in addition to devouring the manual, and occasionally getting help from the Adventure/RPG help columns in magazines. Back then there was not a bazillion games to choose from either, so you could sink more time into one game.

World of Xeen is an excellent game to learn to play old CRPGs, since it quite easy and with a very good UI.
For experienced gamers who had already played the previous M&M games it was rather too easy and simplistic. At least it was for me, while other veterans still hold as WoX as the pinnacle of the M&M games.

Except that I'm not a guy. How would they find space to put the tutorials? When games are distributed on floppies (or 32k cartridges, like the original Mario), you don't have space for such luxuries.

Also, game design was still in its infancy at this point.

Ahh ok, I understand now. So the content that could be put into early games was severely limited due to limitations of the technology at the time (low processing power, hard drive speeds/sizes and memory). And players had to scour manuals to learn to play due to this, and also had the time to do it because we didn't have platforms like GoG and Steam that contained millions of games that people could use to switch titles every five minutes. Makes a lot of sense now, thanks for answering that guys :)

You're welcome, excepth that I'm not a guy.

Also, there were some games that used the manual as copy protection. Thing is, floppies could be copied easily, but physical books could not.

... and your friends from school. And if you found out somthing yourself that no one knew and shared with them, you'd be the cool guy of the week.

Nowdays if you find some easter egg or cool trick yourself, you can bet everyone knows it already from the net.

By the way, the manual is included with the game from GOG. It should be in PDF format in the game's install directory. Reading through it can be quite helpful, not only does it cover all the controls and interface details but it also explains all the character classes, spells, etc. There's also a cluebook full of spoilers and solutions to everything in the game, but I recommend not looking at that unless you get really stuck somewhere. It's downloaded separately as part of the extras pack from GOG, I believe. One thing the cluebook can be useful for, however, is looking up weapon and armor stats, which are not always clear in game.

I also remembered one more thing that might help at the start: if you have a Robber in your party (Ninjas can also maybe do this?), you can try stealing from the display cases in the shop in Vertigo. Make sure to have your Robber make the attempt. That can give some decent starting equipment to help with the early part of the game.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the game! I have fond memories of it, and plan to replay it sometime soon.