I didn't understand what you were talking about. I guess I'm not in the loop.

I can definitely say that during the opponent's turn, the inactive player's information about the opponent's newly purchased heroes is updated, but the information about the heroes' armies is not updated. Also, heroes who arrive in the tavern with a single unit have a normal starting army at the beginning of the first turn, which is only replaced with a single unit when the hero appears in the tavern, i.e., during the first turn, the blue player sees that all of the red player's heroes have a starting army, because the information about its replacement with a single unit has not yet reached him.

From all this, we can assume that the hero with the strongest starting army is highlighted, which would be the case if it hadn't been replaced with a single unit (with a slight influence of the hero's attack and defense). This, of course, should be tested, but I don't think any other result will be obtained, especially since it is impossible to determine exactly what the army was before it was replaced with a single unit.

For online play, this is VERY IMPORTANT, it seems like a small detail.
Sometimes a great hero appears in the tavern, for example, Galtran, Gunnar, Shakti, etc., and you don't want to show him to the opponent in the early days so that he doesn't restart.
For this, you have to quickly buy him, immediately move him up, pick up the army, give him a quick single unit, and send him on a journey. So that the opponent doesn't understand anything. But it turns out that all this is in vain, because the hero is revealed not by his current army, but by his starting army, as Sav said. That is, even if you give the entire army to some weakling, and the last hero, Galtran, rides out on a skeleton, the opponent will see Galtran in the tavern. This is very bad.

All video cards (if using default settings) stretch the original 800x600 (4:3) to the required sizes, for example, for widescreen monitors 16:9, NON-proportionally to the entire screen, while the image is distorted, stretching horizontally, which is - EVIL!

He needed that evil :) )))
That's why I asked if it was possible to enable such stretching to the entire screen in HD, as in the original, or not.

---

Yes, things like possible desynchronization when updating the version must be announced, and it is even better to duplicate them in the topic, there is a lot of frustration in online games.
The same applies to incompatible passwords/saves with new versions and generally incompatibility with older versions :(

Added after 39 minutes
By the way, I have a 1680-1050 widescreen monitor on my desktop. I turn on 32-bit True (stretchable) mode with 1062x664, and everything is OK with the resolution in the game.
And if I want it to be smaller, around 800-600, then there is not even an option to choose such a resolution. (885x664 with black bars is the same as 800-600) In general, the option to choose in the menu was by default with 8xx-6xx, but it disappeared somewhere.