All that, plus I prefer Disciples way of leveling up units rather than reqruiting more. You army ain't getting stronger sitting around waiting. You need to move, you need to fight. And how only one kind of hero, who can only have a much smaller army, can capture resources. It's a nicely different dynamic from Heroes where strong hero with a huge army can do everything.

Oh yes and the unit trees are far more interesting as well. In Homm3 each faction's units are mirrors of each other relative to where they lie on the unit tree. But in Disciples 2 the unit trees of two different factions can differ a great deal. For example the humans have very few 2x1 sized units (only 1 from what I remember) but the demon faction has many.
Also unlike Homm3, or really any other homm I believe, because of D2's leveling system it's not so easy to find yourself in an unwinnable situation without knowing it. In some of the more difficult homm3 levels it is easy to lag behind the AI with army and even potential army size. And lag behind to such a degree that victory has become impossible. Your 100 gryphons won't mean anything against 700 liches for example. Thing is you don't discover this until you meet the main enemy army for the first time which might only happen for the first time many hours in.

Not that this 'numbers game' is completely to homm3's detriment imo. It's part of the game and part of the fun. It only really becomes an annoyance late in some levels where the numbers have ballooned to such an extent (and not even always) that victory is totally assured for one party.
To be fair though, except perhaps for the few easy levels, you absolutely have to keep moving and fighting in homm3 to stand a chance. Its rare to have to wait for new units (mostly happens early in a level from what I've seen). Most of the level your main force has to be on the forefront exploring, killing neutral mobs, searching for artifacts/resources, besieging towns and hunting the enemy. Reinforcing your army is the exclusive job of other low levels heroes.

That's one of the things I like more in HoMM IV than III. You have to choose one unit out of two for every level, which for one thing adds variety, and for another allows you to sort of customise your army to fight particular enemy. It's sort of a middle ground between the Heroes I-III model and the Disciples model.

Oh that's cool I didn't know that (or I forgot :P) .That will definitely make it a lot more interesting yes. I've never tried homm4 though, but I am curious about it. It's just that the whole look of the game usually puts me off a bit. I don't think I'm a big fan of its style.

It's a mixed bag of thing better and worse than III, but I still think it's an unfairly maligned gem. Basically, the HoMM formula reached perfection in III, and innovation was the only way to go.

The art style is definately not as good as III, and siege battles are just terrible. But on the other hand the customisation of castles and greater focus on RPG elements works very well - the heroes are now units on the battlefield, you can even have an army of nothing but heroes (works really well in later levels in campaigns), there's bigger focus on the characters and story. The storylines in IV are definately the best the series ever had. If only this new formula had a chance to be polished in further games we'd have something truly amazing. Instead Ubisoft took over and pretty much ruined the series... sigh.

The thing about heroes on the battlefield that scares me a bit is what happens in Age of Wonders 1&2 : heroes become powerful to the point of silliness and the redundancy of your normal armies :\
But I'm glad to hear that there is a bigger and it sounds better focus on story and characters. That is the one area of homm3 that left a bit to be desired.

So not a fan of homm5? I often hear it being praised but I've never managed to really get into it. I suppose I'll try again one day after I somehow manage to finish homm3. By the way I played the demo for Homm6 for a bit and I was surprised to find that I really liked it. The AI was competent and put up a very good fight. And on the whole the creature models and animation I found to be excellent. So much so that homm5's comparatively primitive 3D models really put me off when I tried it after homm6. Two things I didn't like at all though were the fact that you could change towns you owned into another faction's town, and the stupid uplay integration into single player.

They sort of do in the final stages of the campaigns (no chance of that happening in a single scenario), but the stories really make it work. For example in the Gathering Storm expansion has a short campaign for every character, and then a final one for all of them together. That last one works more like an RPG, with a team of heores rather than an army, but after their individual campaigns it feels earned.


Nope, it's basically an inferior remake of V, with worse art, graphics that aged much more poorly, and not nearly as good gameplay. It's not terrible or anything but just sort of pointless. Re-playing any of the I-III will be the same only better.

At least if it's a party it can be more believable. In AoW your main hero by his/her lonesome becomes a one-man army. Also pretty late in the campaign though, but still. But with a party its more like a fellowship of the ring type deal where Aragorn, Boromir, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli and the hobbits can take on small force. A game that does this very good incidentally is The Battle for Middle-earth