Looking for a good fantasy strategy game

[econ21]

I find HommV to be at least as much entertaining as HoMMIII used to be, if no more (though yeah, the AI is weak, so are the skirmish maps)

Maybe - I got bored quickly. It was the slow pace that got me. With Homm3, you can rip through even a very large map in a (very long) evening. The 3D graphics or something of both HommIV and HommV seem to slow things down to a crawl. I don't think I ever finished a map either solo or with my son. (Yes, I know there are some fast combat options, but even with those, it seems slower.)

I actually like a lot of the innovations in HommIV - specifically, having your general fight, the more balanced magic, the character development system, the nice writing of the campaigns etc. It was getting close to a good strategy game/RPG hybrid (strange no one has really cracked that market). I could have put up with the slow pace for that. Shame the AI was brain dead on the strategic map.

HommV has better strategic AI than HommIV but also largely lacked most of its attractive innovations. The cut scenes and voices etc were excruciatingly bad, losing a lot of immersion from that.

[FactionHeir]

Ahhhh someone brought up HoMM. A game where I have played each and every one in the quintilogy (more if you count the extra campaign releases etc).

My personal favorite is 4, most people out there like 3. The main criticism people had with 4 is the somewhat silly AI that was for a change not cheating as it was in 3 and 5. A cheating AI makes a lot of a difference afterall. I found it was more realistic really, with the AI running around a bunch of trees to evade your pursuing strong force forevermore if required and ambushing you out of nowhere, only when it came to AI vs AI battles, it would fare horribly against creeps, as you could tell from the hero gravestones littered around those.

My main criticism of 5 is that the AI cheats too much. It fights creeps and other AI armies in autocalc with absolutely no losses at all. If it fights creeps, those join their army 90% of the time, and if they do "fight", the AI loses nothing and gains full experience. Then of course the AI on higher difficulty levels gets more troops a week as well, which is the most annoying "innovation" that was not mentioned in 5.

If you want to have a good game of HoMM, play 4. 1 and 2 are rusty in terms of graphics, but quite immersive as well, with 1 and 2 having extensive storylines that were well written. Indeed with 2, you had multiple campaign paths too.