I'd recommend getting King's Bounty: The Legend instead. In terms of gameplay, Crossworlds is the same just with fewer and less rough rough edges. But the fluff - the story and exploration stuff - is a large part of the attraction. CW isn't bad at all, don't get me wrong. They're both funny and charming with a tendency towards the absurd. But CW isn't likely to make you laugh and go WFT?! out loud. TL, on the other hand, almost certainly will with some frequency.
Whether you go for TL, AP or CW, though, I'd suggest you install the GUI mod and otherwise make your first playthrough as blind as possible.
Once you've learnt what not to do, and then learnt how to exploit the system, then you can start worrying about world-gen. But these are some of those rare few games where getting to that point is entertaining in itself. So don't deprive yourself of that experience. More, while it is absolutely possible to get screwed by world-gen in various ways (if I'm not mistaken, you can even be screwed out of a couple of side quests), as far as I'm aware world-gen can't screw you out of a no-loss run on max difficulty. Which - to me - is all the more reason to stay away from on-line resources until you've actually done that.
And, of course, the extension of what I just said is that you should absolutely not believe the near-universal claim of game reviewers that TL and AP/CW have highly uneven difficulty curves. If you hit a brick wall, there's ways around it. Ways, plural. Figuring out what they are on your own is part of what makes the games so satisfying.
reviews here at the Codex so I hope some of you bros plan on playing this.
