Over time, and by time I really mean some immense time, of playing LH, I have discovered a giant list of bugs, annoying items, things that should work but don't, things that shouldn't work, but do, and things that just make absolutely no sense to me. As a disclaimer, I do not play the game the way it was designed. I play the game with the intention to win. What I mean by this, is that there are some things that I do that nobody else would probably do because the system is flawed. I do not mean I reload when something goes bad (besides a crash,) but that I know some things people may consider exploits. Some other things people will consider bad design. Inherently, there's actually a lot of design choices made in the game that have obscenely useful outcomes for the player despite them being intended to be negative against the player.
That last item is what I'm presenting here - the "WTF" list:
1) You gain more experience for defeating weak monsters (like the common bandit+wolf combo) than you do some immensely difficult fights against the AI (like your sovereign solo against 6 company units of the AI.) Obviously a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
2) The easiest way to gain power for your sovereign is through gear. The easiest way to gain gear is by researching (or buying from another faction) mounted warfare and buying a horse. Then going solo into an "event" area, waiting for monsters to move off their little treasure piles, and then taking free gear accordingly. I think I've seen level 7 required gear, but nothing too far above that. I can get level 7 in about 10 minutes.
2a) You can simulate this with decalon/arcane monolith on any portion of the map.
2b) If you have the escape skill, you can sit in front of a monster and use escape after they attack. Then move away and they will move the next turn. Pick up your winnings when you swing back around.
3) Insane monster level + any enemy AI level is easier to play than any other combination. Why? Because, similar to item 1, you gain much more experience. And if you sit there for, say, 100 turns or more, and just build a small army from one city, you get even more powerful faster. Monsters overrun the world? Not so much. More like experience bonanza.
4) AI ... Oh, Pariden *looks* like they love peace, but once your army that destroys half the world is deemed too weak by them, they hate you. They then go to war, and refuse to accept peace offerings from you unless you provide absurds amount of incentives (gold, crystal, etc.) That holds true from turn 1 of the war, as it is to turn 4 in the war when you've wiped all but their last settlement out. Turn 10+, yeah, they'll begin to offer peace finally. Doesn't matter what you did.
5) Speaking of war.... wars are started by power level. This is purely ridiculous. Why? Because the power level doesn't make sense either. Let's put this into perspective: My sovereign just kills a level 15 dragon. Solo. I haven't built an army, because I don't need an army (more on this in a second). Meanwhile, Magnar declares war because his power rating is 300 and mine is 80. I proceed to destroy him with my non-existent army. Point of this is the AI should be smarter on when to start and stop a war. Power rating just isn't calculated correctly for it.
5a) Now that's an assumption, but I see no other reason why an AI would start a war. They don't care about getting slaughtered, only that this single number says they should be winning. It's almost never true.
6) And again, on the army front, why is this based that way anyhow? I don't get this.... Let's say you have a single town. At around the point where any faction meets you, and they have a power rating of say 5x what you have (25 to 115+ or so) they all proceed to go to war. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's not worry about the most powerful, but instead start a war against the weakest. That single solitary town in the corner of the map with really no resources is seriously hampering our ability to conquer the world!
7) The opposite... why doesn't the AI gang up on the most powerful? If I'm sitting at power level 1,000, and everyone else is around 800, they're too busy offering tribute and fighting amongst themselves to do anything else about it.
8) Dragons... the fire breathing kind.. pretty epic fights! Right up until you have protection from fire and a decent sovereign/champion that can solo the whole fight.
9) Ranged weapons are great for units, terrible for champions. In fact, balancing between champions and units, as seems to be the case with some items, is a bad idea.
10) Skeletons ... like number 1 above, they don't provide much experience but are pretty hard to defeat. When a battle takes 2 minutes, and you get less experience than a battle that takes 10 seconds, something is wrong.
11) Life is more powerful than death magic if you're taking care of armies. Death is only more powerful when you don't have an army.
12) Death and Life magic summons are near identical. Unless you have a specific race/sovereign build, death magic is far weaker than life when it comes to summons. I saw some people say the lightbringer is weak. It's not. Really not. Makes a great tank against dragons when going at it with a solo mage, but a more distinct issue is raise skeleton horde in the early game against butchermen, wolves, shrills, crag spawns, some spider spawns, and ... oh wait. Let's narrow this down - it's bad against anything not bandits or low level spiders.
13) Summoning crag spawns, by the time you get them, isn't worth the mana. They're too weak in comparison at that point. I'm not sure about other people, but at level 7 or so, I'm fighting things way higher than the crag spawn is useful for. Stinking mud is great, but it would need to cover more area before I would actually use it.
14) Some other summons don't make sense, but has been discussed before. I'm actually a little sad there's not bigger differences between empire and kingdom summons. It also saddens me because I know life is more powerful over all than death, which inherently means kingdom is more powerful than empire when it comes to magic. The key to this statement lies in the early levels.
14a) You also get compassion for kingdom which increases the power of healing. You get no trait for empire, but get horrific wail. That would be good, but it doesn't do enough damage in the early game, whereas compassion is infinitely more helpful for the first few levels. It's a trade off for power in the early game vs the late game, but remember that this game has a snowball effect. You only need the advantage in the early game, because by the time you hit the late game (when horrific wail gets good) you're already winning.
14b) Taking death worship is almost compulsory with death magic, just because of infection/graveseal. It works with others, but you almost need it without healing if you're planning on going at it with a small/no army.
15) Damage spells confuse me ... mostly because lightning bolt is really good when you're low on shards, and other spells that take far more effort. It's good that there's one that scales with level. It's bad because it just shows how dependent on shards you are for other spells. It's further sad when you have the shards, but can't afford the time in battle cast (lightning bolt takes no time.) You also can get this earlier in the game without having to worry about whether you want blizzard or fire damage.
16) City unrest based on empire size doesn't make sense. People have said it before, but I might as well reiterate. Granted, there's a way around it by way of fortresses.
17) ... I forgot how many of these I had written down so let's just end it there.
