Yea single player is fun. There's a huge amount of lore to explore in all the different eras. You can probably get 100s of hours of entertainment out of just trying to see everything there is to see in the game. In a few months there'll probably be a ton of mods as well, so another thing to look forward to

Yeah, it plays just fine in single player. CoE basically plays like Heroes of Might and Magic. you have commanders, they have troops, they go around the world conquering things that produce more resources so you can do more spells, units, some upgrades, etc. The main difference is you have no control over battles taking out the human element of min-maxing battle strategy entirely.

I'm hardly a veteran (only 10 hours) but I think the key to the game is to play relatively slow. Keep your defenses pretty high, figure out the specific faction's winning abilities/goal and go from there. Neutral's are a big pain in the ass and will just wander into your things. Some defenses will prevent you from having to go play wack a mole every couple of turns.

If you do get CoE 4 I highly recommend the Better Homeland Security mod. It just makes it so every faction starts with unmovable troops in their capital and gives certain commanders the ability to raise 2-6 militia in towns/cities. It's not enough to keep them being taken over by serious threats but it keeps say a single snake from wandering into everything you got taking them.

For instance, I'm playing as a Druid. My basic troops are fine but hardly stand out. My goal is to get special summons and critters to help me out. For my spells I need Herbs which I get from select tiles like forests and swamps. So my goal is to take as much of that as I can and keep it. As I go I plant forest defenders and raise millitia in forest towns to protect my stuff. I do summons in forests/swamps that let me summon hordes of rats and other things to fight for me. Gold isn't really that important for me so I don't really need towns as much as other factions. Eventually I found an Ancient Tree which allowed me to do cooler stuff like summon Wyverns and enchant those Ancient Forests to randomly gather other animals and make the trees sentient to protect themselves from invaders. So I'm slowly gathering territory, summoning and protecting as I go. It might not pan out, the AI might absolutely destroy me eventually but hey. I'm learning.

CoE 5 just came out, I haven't gotten it yet so you may wanna look into that first but AFAIK CoE 5 is more of an incremental upgrade to 4. So if you can get CoE 4 cheap somewhere it's not a bad pick up.

Yes its awesome single player but CoE5 has just released so buy that not 4!

15% discount till 20 something of August.

No. Overrated game. Comparing this game to HOMM is like comparing a Mercedes to a Kia just because both of them have a steering wheel.