I am a huge fan of HOMM2 and HOMM3, and both are in the top five of my most-played games. I've pumped an obscene number of hours into them.

Now I find myself doing the same with AOW: Shadow Magic.

I find the HOMM series more relaxing. I may change my thinking at some point, but at this point I also find it a bit less challenging. Those two things can go together, and that's not always a bad thing.

AOW:SM surprises me more with interesting combinations of troops or uses for them. Playing the heck out of one faction, I have often thought I had developed a strong feel for it only to find out there were opportunities to do things a good bit differently and still be equally pleased with the results.

The same thing with schools of magic. You do not always start with the same first free "gimme" spell in your wizard's spellbook. Sometimes it's a quite useless one (as a poster above noted about the random number generator) and sometimes just what you need. A wizard without a beginning destruction spell, for example, has a tougher road, with more delays in it, than one who starts out luckier. Nor do you always end up with the grand ones you'd like getting.

There are also ways of developing your wizard's broadest powers, including troop movement allowance, research power, and economy. Choosing a different route gets you different places. If your territory is quite spread out and you are forever chasing after the troops that are stealing your mines, you can research the "explorer" skill to give you 20% more movement points. This works in battle, too, so if you have slow strong troops, you might find that skill especially useful too. Other times, economy gets priority. Or you want to rush to summoned bone dragons and so you get "scholar" to make research faster and maybe even summoner to make researching summons faster and casting them cheaper. Then you rush through all the spells that stand in your way first. Things change. In interesting and significant ways.

I find with HOMM I always go for Earth and Air magic on my heroes, to very particular ends: I want Town Portal (earth) and Resurrection (earth) and Haste (Air) and Slow (Earth). I want to cast them unlimited numbers of time per turn (Town Portal), to keep the troops permanently instead of just for the battle (Resurrection) and to haste all troops, not just some (Haste/Slow). So expert in those two schools every time. It works and I like it, but find it very predictable. The alternate choices do not seem to me remotely comparable. Fewer surprises.

A poster above is correct that most early troops are no good, because they are weak and have a high maintenance cost. I would make an exception for ranged shooters in castle defense. If you lock them behind stone walls, they become hard for enemies to hit, so they last a long time and do a lot of damage. And they're dirt cheap to purchase, at least. It's no use having great melee troops tucked behind castle walls if you have to leave your castle to use them. You need ranged shooters, and the cheap ones do just fine.

An exception I have found so far is the bottom unit in the Frostlings. Their ranged attack freezes, which is of huge value and can cripple attackers, especially from the safety of a castle. A castle with a good clutch of those is a formidable thing indeed.

Interestingly, heroes are among your most powerful troops in AOW:SM and have no maintenance cost. They are also relatively quite cheap. As they level they become much more powerful and can easily turn a battle around. I sometimes travel around with up to four of them out of the allotted eight spaces per stack in a "monster stack of doom." The abilities they get on level-ups are a lot of fun to play with -- for instance, you might get the chance to give a caster the ability to shoot fire bolts as well as cast spells, keeping him powerful even when out of mana while presenting questions as to how best to manage his more complex attack. Or you might give a character abilities to paralyze a character or even turn him over to your side. Will that be better than attacking him outright? Well, that's for you to decide, and in AOW:SM, those decisions are fun.

There is a lot of micromanaging of towns in AOW:SM, and that slows down the game a bit. I find you can click fairly mindlessly through some options because they merely confirm what you have already decided. Kinda like: YourTown has a War Hall to build in your queue next ... is that okay? Just click yes; you already decided to put it there. yes yes yes yes yes etc and you're done. So once you get used to it all, it's not that big a deal.

Anyway, I've gone on long enough for now. I'll just say that both HOMM and AOW:SM are immensely fun and playable, and I'm sure I'll be playing both (way too much) for years and years. Maybe HOMM when I'm a bit more into something with a relaxing charm, and AOW:SM when I'm feeling more up for a game that puts more choices in front of you and feels overall a little darker and grittier.