I also used to try to understand the structures of generated maps to better recognize the terrain, but it didn't lead to anything... thankfully, I've at least learned how to find guards between spawn points.
Of course, no one caught anyone red-handed, but I noticed a lot of suspicious things about this opponent – and here (a rush with Gnol in the swamp without prior scouting with Scouts).
As one Heroes 3 expert told me, it would have been logical to take a Pandora and go crush the Dwarf faction... and that the player's desire to go there is due to the availability of a low-tier resource (the only one that can be taken without problems with the available forces), and this is despite the fact that this resource is in the dark, while the one he ran past on turn 1-1-4 or 1-1-5 wasn't even scouted by the second week, even though the hero and two Scouts ran past it.
I brought up the second duel for the sake of showing that it wasn't an isolated incident, but rather the most obvious absurdity.
And by the way, I didn't quite understand the point about why scout with heroes if you're revealing the map... but what about chains, and ultimately, to cover your tracks?
And regarding me, of course, I didn't take any gold, as I was running along the road, and turning onto the snow with Basilisks and Skeletons is not very practical... especially since the further the road went, the more I wanted to reach the secondary resource.
P.S. In any case, thank you for your opinion... I will take it into account ;)