First, I'm a strategy lover. I'm good at playing chess and I played a lot on all of HOMM 1-5 and reasearched a lot on the strategy of these 5 versions. If you talk about strategic and game balance, HOMM5 is the best among 1 to 5. A lot of people insist that 3 is their childhood memory and so it's the best. I'll say 3 is vary classical, indeed, but it have too many defects on the rules of the game. For example, the Dimention Door spell in 3 can make your heroes move wherever you want on the map as long as you have enough mana, or other unballanced things like this makes it unfair when you play against other human players. However, in 5, all these defects have been fixed in a reasonablly way. 5 is good.