King's Bounty Vs Heroes V

[jwallstone]

I agree with Warmonger. The leadership system makes a big difference. In HOMM V, stacks grow without limit, so the game becomes a race to accumulate tons and tons of units, and typically you want to concentrate all the troops on one "super-hero" rather than spread them out, even though the game theoretically is designed for people to utilize multiple heroes strategically. The reason for this is that with huge stacks, a huge part of winning is simply hitting first. If two equal stacks fight, and the first one to hit kills over half of the other stack, then even with retaliation, that small battle is already won. It becomes annoying because in the late game, it's no longer fun anymore to see half or all of one of your stacks wiped out in one hit. The entire game becomes accumating units, avoiding major battles with your main opponent, going after neutral stacks until you build up your hero and a large army, and then one large "super" battle at the end where the built-up armies decimate each other and whoever happens to come out on top wins (i.e. whoever manages to get some good first hits). You could try to play more strategically, with multiple heroes engaging in medium-sized skirmishes, but the game will punish you for that compared to the person that just builds up a single large army. The economies of scale from large armies is just too powerful.

The leadership system I think goes a long way to solving this. By controlling the increase in power for heroes, it prevents this runaway arms race to simply accumulate units. I imagine if HOMM V had leadership caps for heroes, it'd become a much more strategically rich game, involving managing a number of decent armies across the map to control resources, towns, chokepoints, etc, but where even an opponent who's already behind in army strength due to bad luck or a lost battle can still recover with good strategy and tactics.