Uninvited guests.

I tried playing as Rupert with a warrior. Well, it's just ridiculous. Absolutely useless race, in my opinion, with its counterattack; on this map, the specialization is useless. What second specialization are we talking about? The ballista, yes, 3 shots are great! In the very first game, a demon won on the 3rd week; he had upgraded machines that immediately destroyed the gates, and his ballista buried half of my army; now that's what I call a specialization! I even lasted longer playing as dwarves. When I played as barbarians, there were no attacks at all; they didn't even dare.

Something didn't work out with Rupert. Specialization - ballista.

I also decided to try playing as humans, since there are so many complaints about them; my hero is "hero."
After about three months, it became boring - the hero is already level 27, and no one dares to attack the castle because the danger has long been medium and lower, even for the generals. I also don't bother them unnecessarily because I know they will return with an even larger army, but they won't give me artifacts. They occasionally wander past the castle and sometimes have skirmishes with each other.
Support heroes appear rarely; I try to catch them as much as possible, which is very difficult because the hero has become ridiculously strong - he has become a dull, rich, and lucky fighter who doesn't know how to run :(
No matter how hard I tried :smile35:, I couldn't give him dark (or at least summoning, or, at worst, chaos) magic and logistics; all the time, "light," "defense," and stupid human specializations appeared.
Due to the above, I had to hire two "runners," Vitka and Aksya (I wanted to find Rutgar, but he didn't appear either). I use them to intercept the enemy's army near Rupert and catch up with them, destroy them, and loot them in case support heroes appear. And in case of trouble, they can escape to a safe place or run to a tavern; fortunately, Aksya can now use a portal. It's a pity that there are simply not enough nearby monsters to fully level up these heroes.
Now, I just need to wait until I have enough strength to take outposts without significant losses and start eliminating players. There is also the option of going to Hotabych (the monsters guarding him no longer pose a significant threat) and retraining Rupert so that he is developed "according to the rules," but it clearly won't yield good results in terms of time, so I don't want to continue.
In general, it was much easier to play than with the Afroknights; if I had to constantly fight "on the verge of defeat" with the risk of being defeated, then here there were no particularly dangerous moments.