I finished Avadon as it has a lot of cool tactical combat. What drew me here was I LOVE party based combat like avadon. But moreso, I happen to like it when the combat is favored towards ranged weapons like in Avadon. Melee can work but nothing beats it like a bow/gun/throwing knife etc.

1-The obvious question is how many men do you have to travel with?

2-Can you choose who goes with your group so maybe take a group of 3 along?

3-Is this game ridiculously hard or is it just a mild learning curve?

Thanks to anyone who can help as I have 5 days to get the cash to buy this :)

1. 1-6
2. Yes.
3. Easy really IMO but fun.

Games I recommend for you:

Silent Storm
Silent Storm Sentinels
Jagged Alliance 2
Temple of Elemental Evil
Fallout
Fallout 2

Excellent, very good taste!

Fallout 1 I completed twice and it was great. Fallout 2 is next :) My only thing about fallout was I wish Tactics had a sequel, lol. I never completed Tactics but it was fun for the beginning. With the new info I have, I will definitely go for it.

Temple of Elemental Evil is ranged powered? Thats news to me and awesome. I like it when ranged is more powerful.

Jagged Alliance I tried to get into but the problem was it was a bit too tedious for me. I thought that while realistic, healing party members again and again is just frustrating.

I thought that TOEE was a melee based game but if its possible to make a powerful ranged character that would be epic. I usually do a party of 1 tank, 1 ranger, and 1 priest or spell caster combo. Thanks guys~!

Yes ranged can be quite powerful in ToEE, particularly with rogues who get sneak attack bonuses at short range.

It's a flawed game in many ways, but the combat is top notch.

Well, it has it's flaws. But - disregard that. The game is totally awesome in terms of combat and destructible environment - there really are a lot of ways to fight each battle and there's also a lot of emergent gameplay going on.

If you want to make SS2 harder, there are two mods that can make it so. I am not a good player, so the current difficulty levels are good enough for me :), but you can increase the challenge if you wish to. The mods are found on the strategycore.co.uk website.