Rock of Grimheim

But the element of randomness is still significant: the calculations rely on AI making poor decisions, but sometimes it can act intelligently. There's nothing you can do about that. After all, Heroic difficulty is meant to be challenging.

I don't know, I had the idea that maybe these battles aren't designed to be won simply by overwhelming the enemy with troops and stats, but you seem to be suggesting that the player should come up with some kind of tactical solution. Like the authors of chess problems require you to find several non-obvious moves. Although in Heroes, you can't really organize something like that in its pure form, because randomness in battles plays a big role. You yourself admit that some luck is needed here, but that's part of the game. I'm more interested in this topic as a map maker, because I often have doubts about balance (how to properly account for randomness) when I'm creating maps.

Example

On my map, Ravenna comes to the player on a certain day, and you need to defeat her. While working on making the scenario more difficult, I decided to test how much I could strengthen Ravenna (each time adding more and more troops to her through the console) so that the battle could still be won. The problem is that at some point, the outcome of the battle was determined by luck and the defense of the creatures. And I had a question: how correct is it to make such a difficulty increase? In the end, I decided that "we're playing Heroes, not casino" and left the option where the battle can simply be won normally, and the player is only asked to think about how to avoid large losses (Ravenna has Chaos magic, the battle takes place on the fifth week). On the one hand, you could say that I did the right thing. On the other hand, for strong players, the map remained practically without the risk of losing...