Once you take a relaxed attitude to this game ("meh, I'll just chec back in the day after tomorrow, then I'll have the res to build whatever I want"), you quickly realize you may as well not be playing at all. Login, do the quick tasks, fill up building/research queues, and send your hero to the arena, then log off for the next two days again. Sure, you may not progress as fast as you could, which means you won't stand a chance against the power gamers, but who really cares? You'll get there eventually - the game pretty much plays itself. Once you're done upgrading your castle/spells, and only build troops, you may as well die of boredom, as you can defeat any monster on the map, but not the power players, and unless you want to be logged in for 5 hours a day, you never will.
so what speeds up what? does intelligence speed up schooling? or does it just determine mana points? does wisdom give mana, does it help with learning? If that's the case, are church work, fortune telling and theology the way to lay the groundworks?
My problem with this game is that I don't know what's a good or bad result, if such a thing exists. Also, some things aren't adequately explained - e.g. you have a year to become the best dragon tamer (achievement), but you're exhausted after 2 weeks on the job, and with 2/3 weeks spent working, you can not get to 100.0, only to 73.5
from a gameplay perspective, I find the player has little to no influence on performance. The steering is useless, as at high speeds you can't react to a thing. Plus, it gets boring and repetitive fast, and the ingame achievements often depend on chance (100 goombas) and time invested playing the probabilities (5hrs+). 1/5
If you consider this a ripoff of a gameboy advance game, dig deeper: Battle Isle for the Commodore Amiga 500 (1991) was one of the first turn-based strategy games of this kind, only with hexagons instead of squares.
Stuck in the tainted grotto, those 4 adventurers seem to be way above my challenge rating. Do I need to grind until I can beat them, or is there something I don't see?
Also, Mardek nominally has the Warp Skill, but can't use it in battle, what's up with that?
 "Heroes of Gaia"){kind=icon}
 "My Pet Protector"){kind=icon}
 "Toss the Turtle"){kind=icon}
 "Battalion: Nemesis"){kind=icon}
 "MARDEK RPG: Chapter 2"){kind=icon}