Nonsense! The game is not weak at all!
In my experience, there are only two "guaranteed" ways to have a quick and good start: through machines or through a good mage, like Minasli. Well, there is also a third way, through storm arrows for the Orcs. Everything else is demonstrably worse. There seems to be variety, but it's somehow "weak."
If you believe the reviews, you can conclude that the most important things in the game are the Campaigns and the animation of the intro cinematic.
I would play it with pleasure if they fixed the bugs and made it so that the online Random Map Generator generates maps of size 300x300.