trademark.895: I have heard some really bad things about HoMM 6 and 7 and am wondering if they are worth getting. I know publishers buy good series to make money off of the name people have grown to love and trust by spending a pittance on development, making a poor game and slapping the name on it in order to scam players. It definitely looks like 7 falls under that category. what about 6? Right now I have HoMM 1, 2, and 3. Of all of the HoMM games, which ones are worth playing.
Heroes 2 and Heroes 3 are pretty close but I would say H3 is best with H2 being a close runner up. Heroes 4 is okay but you really need the Equilibrious mod for it to be playable/enjoyable. I still got tired of it half way through the campaign. Heroes 5: Tribes of the East was a lot better than standard H5 (I am an orc fan) but the game still does not compel me to play it for long. The rest of the Heroes games are not worth bothering with IMO.
Heroes 2 - The strengths of this one are the charming, colorful graphics, the unmatched musical score and little details like Trolls being the barbarian town's heavy missile unit (Heroes 3 replaced trolls with cyclops which does not make sense to me), necromancers having mummies instead of 'Black Knights' and all towns able to have level 5 mage guilds.
Weaknesses are that there is no ability to order units to 'wait' (they must move/attack when their turn comes or skip their entire action that turn) and heroes are limited to just 5 stacks of creatures (H3 has 7). No mods like HotA and HD+ and only 6 hero classes to choose from.
Heroes 3 - The strengths of this one are many. Each town/faction has both one 'Might' and one 'Magic' hero class so Necropolis for example have Death Knights and Necromancers, Rampart have Rangers and Druids, etc. for 10 different towns (11 with the HotA expansion). Each creature for each town (of which there are 7 from level 1 creatures such as goblins or skeletons to level 7 creatures such as behemoths and Red dragons) has an upgraded version so if you build the relevant structures Goblins can be upgraded to Hobgoblins, Bone dragons to Ghost dragons etc.
Also having separate magic skills for each of the four schools (Earth magic, Air magic etc.) makes spells cast in those schools much more effective. A slow spell cast by someone with no earth magic skill will temporarily slow an enemy unit to like half speed but cast by an Earth magic expert results in ALL enemies being slowed. Of course there are some issues with this as it makes it almost free of cost to slow down entire armies or hasten your own. And Earth magic (which nonsensically is the only realm for the uber-powerful Town portal spell) is easily the one skill every character must get with air magic being second with it's Dimension door and haste spells while fire magic and water magic are not necessary at all.
Other cosmetic weaknesses are things like cyclops in the Barbarian town, sprites in the OP Conflux, Gold dragons in the Rampart town (a nature- based town. Why would they have Gold dragons which would burn down their forests?!), and more