Start on "Hero".

Phew, someone finally responded; I thought the forum was dead.
So, instead of building up the town to get mages, it's better to focus on joining a guild as quickly as possible? But you won't get much experience from fighting with the hero, and therefore you won't gain much experience. Plus, you might not get what you need. For example, in both games I played, I didn't get any magic at the beginning (which is quite strange:eek:).

It's better to build at least a few levels of the guild quickly; otherwise, some people try to get all the units at once, and then they only focus on the guild. You can do that with some races, but mages are better at using magic, and their army isn't very impressive at the beginning. Unless you have mages and rakshasas.
But in Heroes, a lot depends on random chance, and there's no way around it. In the last few games, I didn't lose almost any units on neutral creatures when playing as Dungeon and Inferno; I was relatively lucky with them.