I haven't made it over the "hump" yet. By that I mean I haven't been able to put together a coherent empire before I got frustrated with things and restarted. Total time spent on the learning curve so far is about 4 hrs. The jury is still out, but so far I'm a little less than impressed enough to buy the full game. I think it will take a little more playing time before I have a clue what is really going on. Thanks Deccan for that info. I have gone thru the "walkthru" and read some of the write-ups but still have yet to put it all together.
Some of my complete unknowns (who, what, when, where, how, why):
- placement of troops for battle,
- "scripting" - I'm guessing this is a term referring to what you want your little warriors to do in battle vis-a-vis SE4 strategies
- what to apply my research to. I'm thinking this is a combination of discovering what my empire is good at, reading the spell lists and applying the research to get the best spells for my empire. I have done neither of these yet.
- and probably about a year's worth of other things that I don't even know about yet.
I guess I should start posting in the D2 forum, but I trust you guys here a little more for now. BTW, who are the gurus in the D2 forum? I'm thinking I could search for Posts by them.
I started lurking here almost a year before I registered in April '02 and I noticed that SJ was most knowledgeable and helpful to newbies so I searched for and read hundreds of his Posts. I never thanked you for that, SJ

, but you really turned me on to SE4 unknowingly by answering other people's questions. Those where the same questions I had, of course.
Slick.