I stopped the Campaign halfway, as I didn't like the story at all - less and less as it progressed.
The story is indeed appallingly bad, it's no joke that a 10 year old could have come up with something more appropriate. It's lucky the story only forms 0.1% of your game time.
The opening narrative to one of the missions was to "kill Vorsair" or was it Phobius? Not entirely sure, but anyway, so… progressed the mission and got a very long way in, so far in that one of the AIs, the frost wizard, had almost achieved total domination. I didn't mind as I was at peace with them, all I wanted was Vorsair's head. Leaving all my castles virtually defenceless I launched an all out assault on Vorsair and killed him good an' proper. The mission did not end. Turns out I had to do an Allied Victory, not just kill Vorsair… well thanks for that 'story writers'… needless to say I started it again and did what I should have been told to do at the start, what with it being a 'strategy' game and all.
The half-way point in the game is marked by a really stupid mission, possibly where both you and Hastar stopped. The mission dialogue asks you to kill 6 enemy heroes for victory. Sounds ok. You start the map and you're in an impossible position. Without knowing exactly where the enemy heroes are you cannot win, you'll just get overrun in about 20/30 turns or less. I restarted the game about 10 times before going on-line to find out where the heroes were. As soon as I knew this info the mission only took a few turns to finish. It's a classic case of either (as close as it's possible to be) impossible or piss easy, the only determinant being map-knowledge.
It's mostly just enjoyable turn-based strategy combat of the very enjoyable variety which happens to base it's structure on traditional fantasy, to which the variety of units available is a joy to behold.
No idea, it's been ages. I do remember that I spent a lot of time on the initial missions of every campaign to build up my heroes (perfect crafted gear, completed all research etc), so the rest of the missions was generally a breeze. Cheesy, I know.
I think that's what you're supposed to do. Once I got the hang of what everything does that's exactly what I did. However, I suddenly got stuck on the second of the last set of three missions, I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. Then I remembered I'd forgotten to fully milk the previous level for artifacts, which is why my heroes kept dying so easily. I went back and spent 100/150 turns pressing end-turn while my artifacts got made and then had no real trouble in the next mission.
The last mission, however, is a standalone mission, there's no means to prepare for it like that, which is why it's more complicated than all the others. You have to find a way to defeat established huge armies of Tier 10 (or whatever the max tier is) monsters from a position of virtually nothing. I restarted it four or five times before I found something that worked. I was close to giving up, especially as the on-line walkthrough just kept bleating on about Gold Dragons, something I didn't even have, need or used.