Speed factor.

Dirty_Player, thanks for the clarification! Yes, it's true, when playing for speed, things are a bit different. :) Well, what I think about it is something everyone has known for a long time from my signature. :) I'm just not a very athletic person, so I find it more interesting to explore the map, capture and build cities, etc. And if you finish the game too quickly, there will be too many "blank spots" left on the map (or rather, black ones:)), and there could be so much interesting stuff there! :) As for the strength of the AI, experienced players consider it to be stupid; I'm not that good, and sometimes I have to sweat in a battle with it. :) Although, I've also had cases where the AI, knowing valuable spells, for some reason didn't cast them, and was therefore defeated. In general, this is a rare case where our views on the game differ so much: almost always your opinion is very important to me. It's even surprising... :) I hope you don't think what I said is rude? :) If you really want to, you can take two armies, for example, a Castle and a Fortress, the monthly growth of fully built cities, two heroes of equal strength, and pit them against each other. Who would win? I would bet on the Castle. By the way, you still haven't answered who you prefer to play as. Or, for example, take the "Longest Journey" that I recently completed: I defeated the swamp creatures without much difficulty; the only serious obstacle in the swamp was... an antimagic garrison with hundreds of powerful gorgons, trolls, and minotaur kings. I thought about the scorpius back then, but I couldn't call them "cats." There's a well-known historical anecdote where the compiler of an encyclopedia suggested the following description of a crab: "it is a small red fish that walks backwards." His colleague politely corrected him: a crab is not a fish, it is not red, and it does not walk backwards... but otherwise, everything is correct! :D