age of wonders 3 campaign can i group up heros?

The 2nd level has an absolutely horrible layout. There's way too much gear being dropped for my heroes which ruins the sense of value for the weapons, makes forming their strategies and choosing attacks extremely tedious. It's tedious trying to keep track of them and decide which out of the 10 combat spells I want to use every turn, if any. It becomes tedious trying to keep them all alive in the same battle and I'm almost better off just using expendable units instead. I just end up with 1 big army with 4 heroes who I mostly just try to prevent from dying, and I can't even come close to using all their spells in a single fight. And there's really no need for them anyway because of the way this map was designed. Nor do I know what upgrades are worth buying because I have hardly any experience with them, but I'm forced to upgrade them several times already. I don't feel attached to them and I'm only just starting to form an attachment to my first 2. The first 2 make sense but the second 2 just feel needless, even though they are cool, but the map isn't well designed for having 4 heroes. They give me 4 heroes early on without any real reason for having them gameplay-wise or story-wise. I have no idea if I'm supposed to clear them all out, if doing so or not doing so will make me either too weak or too OP later on.

Plus you have to delay defeating the enemy in order to clear them all out.

Getting them all would require tons of backtracking and breaks immersion. So I'm on the 2nd campaign mission with the dragon eggs and here are my list of bad things so farĭevelopers put resources and dungeons everywhere but the campaign seems designed to be somewhat rushed.

Age of wonders 3 campaign can i group up heros?