I have read the forum with interest, and honestly having played the game and lately RTL several times with 2 fellow expert gamers, both i and my team simply don't understand why some many players see the OL being able to match and even exceed the Heroes in XP, because our overall conclusion is the following:
Focusing on fatique and focusing on using fatique for movement is severly gamebreaking, allowing the heroes to cover the relative small dungeons/encounters in a single round, effectively preventing the OL from spawning new monsters, and effectively managing to keep enough distance so the heroes can decide when to engage in melee combat or keeping distance to ranged monsted, keeping the overlord from engaging the heroes and dealing any serious damage.
Lieutenants are only scary to the Heroes at the beginning at each campaign level. As soon as the heroes begin bulking up on treasure and skills/dice for the level they can dispatch the lieutantant within 2-3 rounds of an encounter, provided they have focused on fatique for movement. This basicly means that unless the Lieutenants have monsters who are upgraded, he must hide with the OL until next campaign lvl.
The overlord must focus all his points on gaining an monster upgrade as FAST as posible, ignoring all other upgrades until that goal is achieved, because very quickly these monsters will be the only monsters who can threaten the heroes and who do not get one shoot killed. This means when the RTL campaign shift lvl, the OL must have enough XP to as his first action upgrade a monster group to a lvl above the campaign level, i.e a silver on copper, a gold in silver etc.
But basicly after trying many tactics and many encounters, our overall conclusion is that there is something gamebreaking in the use af fatique for movement and something must be done, to allow the game to be balanced. To all the heroes out there who get their butt kicked by the OL, forget focusing on damage, focus on movement and that means favoring fatique, items and skills cards that grant movement, Do NOT move around slowly in the dungeons/encounters move fast and quickly through a dungeon, who cares how powerfull the monsters are if they can't reach you, but you can reach them and kill them before they get to damage you. Who cares if the OL have ranged monsters if he in the small dungeons can't get them far away enough to prevent your fast moving heroes to stay out of reach and still move in for the kill.
Worst scenario we played was a lieutenant encounter where all monsters was placed to form the best posible baricade to stop the heroes and the lieutenant was placed to be able to run away in the first round. This scenario played out in the end of the copper lvl.
Round 1 (Heroes) - Melee and Ranged heroes clean house with the closest monsters.
Round 2 (OL) - Remaning monsters attempt to take out weakest hero and then move to baricade again. Lieutenant opt to stay but out of reach. Hoping to bring in a silver monster using his treachery card (monster), His "bonus" was 15 threats, so he plays reinforcement with a Lone Master Troll (Silver)
Round 3 (Heroes) - Ranged heroes take out the baricade so the melee heroes can close in on the lieutenat and decimate him, encounter ends in hero victory.