How does it make the confrontation with an opponent harder? It depends on the situation; sometimes it complicates things, sometimes it simplifies them. But as for the confrontation with the map, it really simplifies it. morale doesn't simplify anything, IMHO.

There is this interesting observation that the more balanced a game is, the harder it is to play. Because there is no minor luck or bad luck; everything depends only on you. In a fully balanced game, you have to strain all your brain resources to win—one small mistake and you've fallen behind. And conversely, more complex games are usually more balanced than simple ones; these factors correlate strongly.

An example is the mirror match. Sometimes I find it hard to force myself to play it for fun, simply because I understand that you can't just cruise through it relaxed; you'll have to sweat. And sometimes you just want a low-stress run of some mm6, catch some freebies, and if you lose, blame the generator (at least to yourself).

Another example is fixes. Playing them is much harder than randoms. For the same reason—much less one-off luck, practically a pure confrontation of intellect and home-prepared strategies.

One more example—the 2 hardest games I've played in Heroes were 2 matches against Cobra on Jebus Cross. Because we played with native secondaries, and I played as Stronghold. Hard because with 3 behemoth nests and practically inevitable behemoth caches, any ГО is easily crushed on 121. But!—this must be executed. That is, build all those behemoth nests, find money somewhere for buying/grading, not fall behind in tempo, build the most complex chains, all so that "papa" is already standing before the ГО by 117 and preparing to receive the army for a breakthrough into the center. And the price of an error is high: one day's delay—and the opponent with 45 vamps (Kober played Necro) will push through the center. Moreover, they'll practically certainly push through; unlike on a regular Jebus Cross where you can reach 122-123 and still manage to do something, here it's either 121 or "so-so".

But at the same time—purely formally, native secondaries simplify the game, simply because it's easier to break everything with hordes of behemoths, and you end up with significantly more wolves.

This is the effect I'm talking about—"papa features" are those that simplify mastering the map but complicate achieving victory.

So experience does exactly this—beating the map with it is easier, but because the opponent also has experience, you have to put in effort not just to clear the map, but to level up your troops more than the opponent. You can't just buy everything there is; you still need to boost them somewhere, which significantly complicates both the general strategy and chain management.

That's why playing with experience is harder, it's harder to evaluate the army's potential, harder to choose the right leveling strategy, harder to prioritize money/leveling/tempo—all this makes experience a "papa feature".

For the same reason scripts for new cons were made—to increase the game's difficulty. Although at first glance the game even simplifies in some ways—various horses, despite their smaller number, look much more powerful than wyverns; by the 3rd week (and often by the 2nd), with proper activity, any guard (including Dragon Utopia) is wiped out by a "loser" on quick. But to assemble this army, to do it faster than the opponent and with fewer losses than him, requires a lot of skill and hard work.

That's essentially why I have such a dismissive attitude toward true SoD players and those wt-players who try to simplify their lives by disabling "papa features". Because this isn't making the game harder; on the contrary, it's simplifying it.

Let's take an average spherical Heroist in a vacuum. By what rules would it be easier for him to win against someone like Alex? On sod-sm with all these morales, 10 gnolls and other nonsense? Or on a "all inclusive" mirror match? Naturally, on sod-sm; there is a non-zero probability of driving Alex into the dirt or waiting for him to fail due to morale. But on a mirror match, the score will be strictly N-0 for any N.

That's why sod-sm is simpler; it's the most accurate criterion for game simplicity/complexity. And all these arguments about "playing with morale is freaking hard" are nothing more than excuses (censored). Sorry if I offended anyone.