I played through the game with the hero Astrid. There's a bug: if Astrid tries to create a phantom on yellow golems using her special ability, 100 archmages appear in the center, and everything freezes. Without Dark Magic, there's not much to do on the map. Without the Cloak of Sandro, it's also not very fun. There are so many undead creatures, and the opponents get an unreasonably large army, and even after a victory, they get a huge army after a few days. Artifacts are placed randomly, so if the Cloak isn't there, I think you could add it yourself, somewhere after the powerful neutral creatures, and that would be fair. Ideally, the goal is to get Spell Lore as quickly as possible and then improvise. But in reality, you end up using Dark Magic and Summoning. I started with Chaos. In the tavern, there was a hero named Nazir, and the tactic was to quickly level up Chaos and Mentoring. Nazir would mentor a "scholar" so that he could pass on the Fireball spell to Astrid – that's the plan. It's not a given that the spell will be in the guild, and you still need to build the guild, and you need to secure the necessary resources. Also, you need a portal to the city as quickly as possible. And Mentoring will be useful for Spell Lore later. Ideally, you could give the scholar to Astrid, but it takes a long time to get to the mentor, and there was a guard of 200+ Thunderbirds, which is insane