Surviving Expert Random Freestyle

[Reality]

I want to mess around with this but it's being really brutal.

Is the most consistent way to win is still gnome hovel>blacksmith>rouges>market>1-2 inn>palace lv2>temple to kypta right? I practiced on the manual settings (new settlement, 10000 gold), and it can force its way through basically all of the expert settings except winter behemoths.

I did notice on dragon's reach and serpent assault, you kind of also need to place the temples of kypta toward the center of the map and wither became more neccesary to spam.

Most of the wandering monsters are survivable, but shadow beasts isn't. If it turns out as monstrous horde (or some of the advanced monsters+swarmy stuff on main forces like serpents/goblins), then placing the marketplace and temple to krypta in a lucky postion (or trying to box them in with inns) is neccesary. Frozen Wrath can occasionally be surivived the same way, but it's extremely stressful.

Finally, most of the random events(random NEVER gives the good ones) are totally ignorable, except for the witch king one, which I think requires prebuilt buildings to survive. At least, the random Wither/Plauge one never made enough difference the few times I saw it.

[Peach Jelly]

Each type of monster type on the map requires a different strategy, so while Priestesses are awesome, they might not do the job for everything. Take advantage of all of the hero types' strengths.

[Reality]

Well I don't consider what happens after day 6 to be all that hard, but I think the strength of priestesses is that they are capable of stalling against the enemy forces that they are only average against long enough for you to recruit some warriors of discord or solari in addition to single handedly winning against things dragons.

There are many forces that barbarians, monks or wizards would be technically better against, but since you don't get to know which ones you can get, they end up being either "awesome" or terrible, while the priestess ends up either "okay" or awesome.

I mean you could even argue for rangers + a magic bazaar for your first 10000 gold., but it would backfire spectacularly if you didn't get something like ravenous as your random setting.

[Dorgath]

Except for the aforenoted Frozen Wrath and Winter Assault (is that the one with the Yetis and Ice Dragons?), I always went Rangers-Barbs-Elves-Outpost-destroy Barbs-Agrela/Dauros and Warriors were in there somewhere and survived. Krypta was too expensive for too fragile heros, I found.