Quote Originally Posted by Ja'chyra
I've got Civ IV and it plays quite well on the laptop but I was looking for something that is more city orientated than world and that you can fight the battles.
Hmm, how about the old UFO X-COM 1 & 2 ? No problem with specs there, and you do get base management (not that much, but still - there's a ton of research to do, designing bases specialized for research/manufacturing/engineering), and of course there's the battles.

There was also Seven Kingdoms, IIRC, or Knights & Merchants (I think there's K&M 2 out there, but never played it, only the first one), both of which have some city management and there's the battles of course.

About the HOMM series.
The fans are kinda divided into 2 camps: some that think homm3 was too cheesy/obsolete, and the (considerable) changes that homm4 brought were great, and some who think homm3 is the core of the series, and homm4 is completely messed up.
There's some people in between the two extremes, but not that many. It all comes down to personal taste, in the end.

You WILL be able to play homm5 on your laptop. I've played it on a desktop with a P4/1.8GHz, 512 RAM and a GF4 MX440/64 megs. It's not smooth or great, and I don't remember the settings (they were either on high, or medium, I can't recall, but it looked more than decent. I *think* they were on high.) It played absolutely fine, sometimes it'd choke up for half a second while dragging the minimap around too much, but very much playable.
Now whether you'll like it or not, that's a completely different ball game. Homm5 was developed by Nival/Ubisoft, after NWC (who developed the rest of the franchise) went belly up. So you may notice that the game is ... different from the rest of them.

Personally, I think that homm3 is excellent, and I think that *some* of the things that homm4 brought are very good - but not all. homm3 probably has some of the best campaigns in the series (at least to my taste), but the homm4 ones are pretty good too.

One more thing - since you got the homm games, check out celestialheavens, they have a lot of fan-made maps/campaigns, some of which are very, very good. But I'd start with the campaigns first, if you haven't played the series before; then, when you get bored, you can play the fan-made maps, they are usually much better than the scenarios that come with the games.