Duel map for Heroes of Might and Magic III.

But it's not entirely clear why the starting diplomacy was removed for the tournament. As a result, I had to spend several (on average) hours sifting through a bunch of heroes. It's like a test of endurance.

I completely agree - if the goal was to remove diplomacy from the game, it should have been banned as a secondary skill in the map settings - and that would have been clear... But as it is, a real workaround still exists, it just takes a lot of time, which is not efficient for offline play.