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Tell that to the hardcore SoD players. They'll throw manure at you. Starting with 10 Gnolls is their idea of a good time and a way to control territory – no matter how skilled the opponent, they can be forced into such a situation.

There’s no denying that. Skillful play can reduce variance. But unfortunately, this isn't always the case.

I can easily come up with examples where morale cannot be avoided, and one must take action. A typical example is an Angel external dwelling on Jebel. It shouldn't be left for the second week, but even one unlucky morale check (not necessarily in the first round) can destroy an army.

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

Exactly. This randomness directly depends on skill. If your aim is true, the ball will go in every time. Players strive for this during training.

Morale, however, is something like a gate on a basketball hoop that randomly opens and closes. In other words, it's an external factor independent of the player's actions. Such factors are usually eliminated in sports.

And only Heroes players praise these things, finding some deep meaning in them. There is no such meaning; it’s a typical RPG gimmick geared towards single-player games. If Heroes were originally designed for competitive play between players, none of the developers would have mentioned morale.

An example from another area: when Warcraft 3 was released, tons of criticism was directed at 1) unit damage variance and 2) random item drops from neutral creatures. And yet, uncontrolled randomness causes far less disruption than morale in Heroes. Because people had already learned their lesson from Starcraft and understood what a real esports game is and what level of randomness is acceptable.

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

That was a jab at SoD players who stand around aimlessly and hypocritically argue. If you're interested in classic gameplay and don't care about balance, there are unrestricted rules. If you're interested in balance and competitiveness, there's Warlords Tournament (WT), which has already implemented most of the needs of Heroes players and provides open mechanisms for further development and improvement. You can even enable morale with a single checkbox if that's your desire.

But somehow, even SoD players turn off morale when playing WT. From this, I conclude that SoD players themselves don't really need morale; they use it as an ideological weapon in arguments with WT players, saying something like "we have this nice feature, but you don't." It's similar to the well-known phrase by a black person, "but we have such a beautiful moon."

So, "ХВ rules" are some kind of Frankenstein creation, with all these multi-volume rulebooks and restrictions, with tons of additional software and configuration files. And yet, it’s still terribly flawed and unbalanced. Once upon a time, TE was criticized for its difficult installation; now, installing and configuring SoD in tournament mode is much more complex than WT.

Go consult Rebel. He will tell you clearly what he thinks about attempts to improve SoD and where your place is.

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

Then it would be easier to just remove WTminuses from WT. Discussions on this topic are currently underway.