[Hiro_Antagonist]

I haven't played it in a while, but from what I recall, there are a few things you can do to help a lot:

1) Move your starting Apprentice to the gold mine in the upper-right of the screen and leave it there. You'll need the money.

2) Put cheap units on the enemy cities. You can't take those cities over, but you can prevent the enemy from building there. If you can plug up all 3 cities, the computer won't be able to build any more units at all!

3) The Living Statue Archers are tough. You can either take them out with brute force or you can just take over the city while taking fire. If you do this, try to use an Archmage with another Archmage giving him Stone Skin. If you do this, the Archers can each only do 2 pts of damage each turn. Since you can take over the city in 2 turns, that should be fine. Another option is to take an Initiate along to heal your Archmage.

4) Don't forget, if the computer makes a sniper, damage the sniper. A damaged sniper can often be so ineffective that it can be ignored entirely. Killing other units should be a higher priority than killing damaged snipers.

5) Initiates are great units for plugging up enemy cities (once they're not under threat of dying) or even for hanging back and giving newly-produced units levitation to quickly fly into the mountains for defensive bonuses.