I don't remember having such difficulty before and even watching youtube videos of the same missions I am doing seem to be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay easier than what I am going through. For example; I'll play a mission and when I encounter the enemy hero they ALWAYS have a very large posse of troops with them, yet when I watch the youtube version from start to finish and they first encounter the enemy hero they only have maybe one or two troops with them.

Same mission, same game, same hero encounter but FAR different result.

Is this version harder than the CD version?

No. They are exactly the same. Nobody could change game because source code is lost.

Not technically true. The CD version, when you win a mission, they dance around behind the You Win! popup. In the GOG version, they and the whole scene just freeze. Of course, that could be a peculiarity of 17 Windows updates since then =D

And I thought they did make it easier with 3 Magnifriers on that one mission instead of the 4 I was used to, but then I realized you got 3 or 4 depending on which god sent you on that mission, Persephone (4) or James (3).

Game was released on 17th November 2000. 21st May 2001 3rd patch for the game was released(and it makes the stuff freeze after victory screen pops up, but for multiplayer with AI you can just play using TCP/IP option and nothing freezes at all and they still dance - btw initial question was about difficulty and i don't know if that is really making that big difference). GOG has this patch applied. So that's the obvious difference when it comes to comparing them. Some CD versions of the game also had this patch already applied and I own one. As for AI behavior there is only mentioned chasing players who are under desacration with full force. Is it really making a difference if you can just keep jumping between manaliths and altar and dumb AI will keep walking between them until ritual is stopped? The maps were not changed at all across all 3 patches. So amount of magnifryers was always the same.