Might & Magic 1
Slowly catching up to my previous party, this time with much better stats. The early game was much easier, but I'm now noticing how brutal the level scaling is.
I actually starting exploring C2 immediately after I finished exploring Sorpigal, so my characters were a mix of level 1 and level 2, since I didn't grind at all. I had no problems at all with C2, and even was able to walk over to Erliquin and back without issue.
After that, I returned back to Sorpigal, cleared the dungeon there, did some more exploring, and did the first courier quest from Sorpigal to Erliquin. This left me with everyone at level 3 or 4.
Now I'm lucky if I can even walk to Erliquin in one piece lol. It seems every other random encounter (even on "roads") has some mix of clerics, sprites, minor devils, or swarms—and unlike when I was around level 2, the game never lets me run from encounters now. So, any encounter with any of those enemies is basically a party wipe.
I think level 3-5 is pretty rough in this game because the random encounters scale up to enemies with devastating special abilities (clerics: paralyze, swarms+minor devils: AOE attacks, sprites: curse), while you are still basically forced to rely on physical damage since you won't have access to AOE spells until your sorcerer reaches level 6. Sleep is a massive help around party level 1-3, but most of the scaled up enemies are partially or completely resistant to sleep, so that sucks.
I'm trying to avoid just walking around popping fixed encounters to grind levels, so I guess I'm gonna check out the wilderness area south of Erliquin and see if it's not more level-appropriate. I might have to go back to my early game strategy of exploring, fighting/winning one battle, then rushing back to a town to save... at least until I get fireball and things get a lot easier.
[Edit] "I might have to go back to my early game strategy of exploring, fighting/winning one battle, then rushing back to a town to save..."
^ This is working well. The area south of Erliquin is not bad, and I was able to explore a bit and get some nice equipment in chests. Meanwhile, I've started marking fixed encounters so I can tell at a glance if I defeated them or need to come back later on.