Suggestion 2: Play Eador.
Evil choices in this game are nearly always profitable in the short term. Not only they bring you more money and magic crystals, they also move you closer to the evil side, which has some really good (effectiveness-for-cost wise) units. Good side not only has a much bigger problem actually acquiring stuff, but it also has really costly units that only start to pay off if you micromanage all your battles to ensure that your units all survive to really high levels, where they get pretty strong... but can still die in a random battle if you're not micromanaging every battle. Meanwhile the bad side continues to use his absolutely expendable 1st level bandits to act as meatshields to your heroes, who because of that can grow up much faster and start kicking ass.
In short, evil side absolutely rules in this game, mechanics-wise. The only downside to it is it that you get more random bad stuff happening to you after a while because of all the bad karma you've acquired, but who cares about that?
It's a shame that this game is incredibly slow, incredibly hard and incredibly long on top of being slow, because it has a lot of customization for a turn-based game. And by "a lot" I mean "on par with Master of Magic".