The Setup.

• Standard Priestess,
• Medium map,
• Insane Difficulty.

The initial stage.

I set the magic distribution to roughly 60% mana, 20% lore and 20% skill. The mana i use mainly to buy stuff like buildings and occasionally an unit. Firstly bought a scout for exploration and resource grabbing. Then started building (and when i had sufficient mana, buying) buildings. First the production buildings followed by the growth buildings. I will cast as many city growth spells on my main city as i have essence.

Using my standard sneak-and-strike strategy (where i only fight the fights i am certain to win, and avoid everything else) i get some additional units from quests. I split the units in my armies according to their movement speed, even if that makes the individual armies weak. When i get or craft items that increase movement speed i rearrange my forces to maximize that.

When i find suitable location i immediately get a settler there for either a city or an outpost. In the beginning i do not build marginal cities.

Then i beeline for the rider (stables). And start to fill out my main army with them, and when needed will kick the initial units that are too slow out of it. Once the main army is made up out of heroes and riders i start building the buildings that boost the units/armies like the blacksmith but foremost the 'Order Of The Mare'.

The cities beside my army creation / main city are the ones that build the logistics buildings; not only because it cost build time, but also because they take food and therefore diminish your growth. Quite often my main city is also the army creation city, because of the essence found there.

The main army will be beefed to the gills with movement and initiative boost. Normally i go for at least +3 movement (for the slowest heroes) and at least +15 initiative, resulting in a 10 movement speed for the army. Because the more movement you have, the more ground you can travel, and the more battles per turn you can fight. And this result in more xp. The reason for initiative should be clear to everyone.

By now my main army can handle most things on the map. Urxen that could found cities can now also be killed. The SK does not seem to react to losing them.

The middle game.
Normally for me around turn 45.

So my main army is roving around and doing quests (getting the minors). Once the expensive buildings are in place i start to build toward the paladin, only then do i replace city growth spells with spells that boost units build there. The (beefed up) paladins are sent to my main army and the riders (who were build without any city enhancements) are delegated to a secondary army, possibly with the weaker heroes. To be honest of the minor heroes only the Swamp Giant and the Imperium hero are worth keeping with your main army.

Now it is time to start running around and killing the stronger monsters and doing the harder quest. This is simply the phase of getting xp to beef up the heroes and paladins.

The end game.
Normally around turn 70 for me. 

Starting to destroy garrisons, but i try to keep the relation with the SK relatively peaceful by not giving him the finger during the dialogs. When i run into the LTs and i think i can handle them at that moment i will kill them.

Around turn 100 it is normally time for me to go and finish the SK.

And now -- finally -- my observations.

When i killed the SK at turn 98 i scored a 'gigantic' 1050 points.

But i know that higher score are possible (because i have had absurd scores in the past). So i decided to reload the game before the final battle.

This time i broke up my main army in five two unit armies (a hero plus a paladin). And started to kill all the weak SK armies still running around. In the mean time i went ballistic with settler spam and started founding cities at marginal locations. Bought the growth buildings and then put the cities on food production.

With the sovereign skills i beelined for the Tower of Mastery and started to build it. From that moment on, the SK got between 20 and 60 extra units per turn (and those were just the ones that i could see). And those were not just darklings, but also the big boys like the umberdroth and colossus. So i started to build a ring road with outposts around the SK castle, brought in my secondary army and also broke that up in 3 smaller ones. The SK got army stacks like you would not believe.

I was killing more than 50 SK armies every turn, but he started to outbreed me with his massive unit spam (and just pressing boatload of times on the auto resolve button get boring really fast). Therefor i decided to end it and kill the SK. It was now turn 150 and killing the SK was a piece of cake. The final battle reached barely into combat round 2 and he had been unable to even seriously damage even a single unit of my army.

The resulting end score: 187000. So for doing next to nothing (strategic-wise) for 50 turns resulted in a 178-fold increase of my score.

My conclusions

People who can finish the game in record time are not rewarded.

The SK gets a hell of lot of units when you go the Tower of Mastery way.

Screen shot of one of my secondary armies next to one of the SK stacks (before the splitting of that army).