How difficult is this game?

[KissBlade]

Marignon is quite easy to learn basics with. In the beginning pick a Wyrm or a Dragon. A Dragon can solo most indie provinces by just scripting fire x5 + attack (anything really).
Wyrms can solo with dom 9 or 10 (I prefer 10, magicless but 9 is almost as good too) Without high dom, take either astral or earth and sit him at home researching buffs till he can lead a small force of indies to start conquering himself. Once you get the right buffs for him, he should break off into soloing and let an indie commander to conquer stuff with the troops your wyrm was leading.
Regarding solo pretenders, avoid: Lizardmen, Barbarians (unless you have awe which really kills Barbs), Xbows, Heavy Cavalry/Knights <= though this last batch is pretty tough to deal with with standard troops even. Prepare a big line of militias to soak up the lances), and Amazons.
Your first army should pick up the first turn of troops (prophetize the commander), script him to fantacisim, smite, smite, smite, smite, cast spells.
You want to keep your pikemen on guard commander formation and put your commander right on front of your archer block.
Now the crucial thing to learn from all this is decoying. Always keep one (or two) seperate troops on front and a bit to the side on "hold and attack". These will soak up the first two volleys of archers and bad stuff. Constantly replace these decoys with your guys with battle wound, prioritizing battle fright (MAKE SURE THESE ARE NEVER IN YOUR MAIN GROUP) and diseased (they're going to die anyway).
Anyway, for the most part of the game, always make tons of archers + xbows. They are by far the most effective troops and your heavy infantries should mainly be there to soak up the extra resources you're not using. Learn to love your ranged guys when it comes to nations with standardized human troops. Also, always make pure mages from your fort provinces. Never recruit nation commanders and scouts since you can grab them from indies. Marignon can set up a secondary fort for spies so you might consider one just for that. Learn to love falling fires with marignon and look towards seraphs eventually. Another thing, when designing scales, ALWAYS take Order x3. (Unless you're LA Ermor ...), misfortune 1 is pretty safe and for the most part, so is Sloth 3 since you mainly need one or two mountain/forest neighboring provinces to conquer to give you all the resources you need. A point of cold/heat isn't bad either since the income penalty is effectively only 2.5% for the first point due to the changing temperature per season. I always take magic 3 as well but drain 2 is fairly common. GL =)