Materials and textures.

By the way, I saw your signature and read about the changes.
The idea with the size seems very, very questionable and, frankly, unsuccessful. Firstly, regarding the value of the battle arena, as the developers wrote in their diaries, the arena becomes more valuable when it is smaller, not larger.
Think about it a little, and you'll understand that this is quite logical. For example, with those large creatures. The fact that it may be inconvenient for you as a player to deploy them and that there is more area available for the opponent to attack them seems like something bad, but in reality, it forces you to find a way out of the situation. If this is not the case, the game becomes easier and, most importantly, monotonous.
The moral of the story is that the game shouldn't be convenient in every way; there should be pre-created problems that you will solve as a player. If everything is simplified, you'll end up with 4 resources, convertible cities, and all the bonuses from all buildings being recruitable in any of the forts, in short, like in Heroes 6.
Secondly, in my opinion, +1 to speed does not compensate for the reduction because (I'm not sure about this, but I think it's like this) when a large creature calculates its movement, it counts 4 squares as one step. If someone knows better, please correct me if I'm wrong.

In general, maybe I don't understand the idea; what's the point of reducing the size of the creatures?
If it's just to have more space, then it only sounds good at first glance.
Think about it yourself: if you hypothetically increase the size of the arena, what would change? Battles would become longer and more tedious; attacking units would lose at least one turn moving before attacking, and ranged units would become more valuable and need to be rebalanced. Plus, considering that there is more space, it becomes more difficult to make a mistake, and it becomes more difficult to execute some tactical maneuver using the proximity of units. That's all. I don't think this is "better"; at best, it's just "different," and most likely, it will even be "worse."


Well, I had this vision, I tried it, and I liked it. It definitely didn't get worse. But of course, this is just my opinion. I think we can discuss this in a separate thread sometime when I create it =)
P.S. You can, of course, complain about liches and centaurs... But in terms of gameplay, if I'm honest, in this situation, I think unicorns and hellhounds won. You really feel fear when they are nearby; they squeeze through and deal a lot of damage.