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With army dispersion, the problem is solvable.

Tell that to the SoD players. They'll throw manure at you. Starting with 10 gnolls is their kamasutra, and the territory factor – no matter how skilled the opponent, you can force them into such a situation.

But knowing how to deal with external moral factors is also an indicator of skill.

There's no arguing that. Skillful actions can reduce variance. But, unfortunately, not in all cases.

I can easily come up with examples where you can't be safe from morale, and you have to take the risk. A typical example is an angel ambush on Jeb. You can't leave it for the second week, and one unlucky morale check (not even necessarily in the first round) can destroy the army.

These are the kinds of situations that don't appeal to those who prefer to win through skill. If I have an army capable of taking that ambush, then that ambush should fall, regardless of the whims of the random number generator. That's the essence of the sport.

In all games in the world, whether it's football, hockey (especially noticeable in team games), volleyball, basketball, there is a factor of luck, and it cannot be eliminated. Let's say a basketball player, in a very difficult situation in the center of the court, throws the ball into the basket, and it bounces off the rim, sits there for a while, and then goes in. What will most people say? If you reason it out, it means that the player didn't have enough skills to make that shot in that particular situation, they haven't practiced enough, etc.

Exactly. It's a randomness that is directly related to skill. If the hand is accurate, the ball will go in. That's what players strive for during training.

Morale, on the other hand, is something like a latch on a basketball hoop that randomly opens and closes. That is, an external factor that does not depend on the player's actions. Such factors in sports are tried to be eliminated.

And only Heroes players praise such things, finding some deep meaning in them. There is no meaning there; it's a typical RPG gimmick, geared towards single-player. If Heroes were originally made for players to compete against each other, none of the developers would have even mentioned morale.

An example from another area – when Warcraft 3 was released, tons of criticism was directed at 1) the spread of unit damage and 2) the random drop of items from neutral creatures. Even though this uncontrolled randomness brings in far less than morale in Heroes. Because people have already learned from Starcraft and understood what a real esports game is, and what level of randomness is acceptable in it.

In short, it's a tired argument, and the opinion of the advanced part of the Heroes community is quite clear: morale is an anti-sports factor, so it should be strictly banned.

By the way, I really don't understand why you dismiss morale and GS so much, because earlier in another thread you wrote about getting free wins, taking castles without a fight, well, in general, moments in which there is a bit of luck, deservedly earned through cunning, ingenuity, and intelligence....

That was a jab at the SoD players, who stand around and hypocritically argue. If you're interested in the classics, fun, and don't care about balance, there are unrestricted rules. If you're interested in balance and sportsmanship, there's Warlords, where most of the needs of Heroes players have already been implemented, and there are open mechanisms for further development and improvement. You can even enable morale with a single checkbox if you want.

But even SoD players turn off morale when playing Warlords. From this, I conclude that SoD players don't really need morale themselves; they use it as an ideological weapon in arguments with Warlords players, saying that they have this nice thing, and you don't. It's similar to the well-known phrase of a black man, "but at least we have a beautiful moon."

So, "HotA rules" is some kind of Frankenstein's creation, with all these multi-volume rules and restrictions, with a bunch of additional software and configuration files. And yet, it's terribly flawed and unbalanced. Once, TE was criticized for the difficulty of installation; now, installing and configuring SoD in a tournament configuration is much more difficult than Warlords.

I think Heroes players will unite if HotA is improved.

Go consult with Rebel. He will tell you in clear terms what he thinks about attempts to improve SoD, and where your place is.

There is also a political factor here: SoD promotes the immutability of the gameplay. Any attempt to change it will lead to a split in the ranks of the SoD players. In addition, the modified SoD will immediately lose the right to be called a classic and will compete with Warlords for players in the same category, where it will lose miserably on all fronts.

and get rid of some Warlords drawbacks, it's already clear that both have drawbacks, so you need to combine the best.

Then it's easier to just remove the Warlords drawbacks from Warlords. Discussions on this topic are currently underway.