I can answer the first question. The main resources are wood and ore. Each castle has its own needs; for example, Elves need a lot of wood, and Humans need ore, etc. First, you need to know which resource is more important for your castle and build your development strategy based on that. Let's say you are an Elf (this is not an advertisement or propaganda :)) and you need a LOT of wood to build up your city. Here's what we do: we buy a second hero in the tavern, either a very strong one of a different race (Deleb, for example, is very good at the beginning with her ballista for capturing key resources) or a hero of your own race (well, since we're playing as the Sylvans, we take another Ranger) and give all of his army to the main hero. In addition, you can build a Pixie or Dancer cottage – this depends on the level of the city we were given and the number of starting resources (this depends on the difficulty; on "Hero," there are very few of these resources). As a result, we have a hero with a small army capable of defending a lumber mill (or a mine), which is what we need to do on the first turn (if he can reach it right away) or, at worst, on the second. The lumber mill and the mine are guarded by level 1 creatures; the higher the difficulty, the more neutral creatures there are. Even on "Hero," the battle is won on auto-battle :) but the computer really likes unnecessary losses, so if the losses are very large, you can try to replay it manually. The lumber mill is successfully captured on the 1st or 2nd day :) Hooray! :) What do we do next? If the losses in the first battle were minimal and the mine is guarded by not the strongest level 1 creatures (like peasants, for example), then on the next turn, you can go and capture the mine :) but due to the new building prices, ore is now needed in much smaller quantities by the Elves, so you don't need to rush to capture it and can wait a little, building up your army. On the "Hero" difficulty, you still need to try to take both of these main resources as quickly as possible, but wood comes first. As for the mines with rare resources (gems, mercury, etc.), it is better not to touch them in the first week, and you won't be able to capture every mine in the second week either; I usually don't start taking them until the beginning of the third week. And while there is no normal army, the second hero (the one whose army we took) runs around the map and collects freebies (everyone knows what this is – unguarded resources). The first hero also doesn't sit still – he explores the map, looks for neutral creatures that can be defeated with minimal losses, etc. A serious clearing of the map begins in the third week :) That's basically it :) This is just my IMHO :) because everyone has their own development options and their own favorite races