Uninvited guests.

I also decided to try playing as Humans, since there are so many complaints about them; my hero is "Hero."
After about three months, it became boring – the hero is already level 27, and no one dares to attack the Castle anymore, because the danger has long been medium and even lower, even for the commanders. I also don't bother them unnecessarily, because I know they will return with an even larger army, but they won't give me any artifacts. They occasionally wander past the Castle and sometimes have skirmishes among themselves.
Support heroes appear rarely; I try to catch them as much as possible, which is very difficult because the hero has become ridiculously overpowered – he's become a dull, rich, and lucky brute who can't run :(
No matter how hard I tried :smile35:, I couldn't give him dark (or at least summoning, or, at worst, chaos) magic and logistics; all the time, "light," "defense," and stupid human specializations kept appearing.
Due to the above, I had to hire two "runners," Vitka and Aksya (I wanted to find Ruthgar, but he didn't appear either). I use them to intercept the enemy's army near Rupert when support heroes appear, chase them down, destroy them, and loot them. And in case of trouble, they can retreat to a safe place or escape to a tavern; fortunately, Aksya can now use portals. It's a pity that there aren't enough nearby monsters to fully level up these heroes.
Now, I just need to wait until I have enough strength to take the outposts without significant losses and start eliminating the players. There is also the option of going to Hotabych (the monsters guarding him no longer pose a significant threat) and retraining Rupert so that he is developed "according to the rules," but it clearly won't yield good results in terms of time, so I don't want to continue.
Overall, it was much easier to play as Humans than as the Afroknights; if I had to constantly fight "on the verge of defeat" with the risk of being eliminated, here there were no particularly dangerous moments.