HOTА is primarily appealing due to its new Castle and the uncertainty regarding the balance.
http://vk.com/heroesiii

Yeah, the new Castle turned out to be quite nice, and I'm currently discussing the balance with the developers.

Added 50 minutes later

Well, we can all collectively ask the developers to go against their principles and slightly influence the gameplay: make an optional feature to rebuild Guild Masters - in my opinion, this is the only critical flaw in SoD. In a recent game with Mizrael: I had a Town Portal spell right away in the Tavern Library, and he had 4 built Guild Masters and a powerful Pavliashvili.

This would not be the SoD that we all love so much :cool:

Such significant changes are normal for gameplay mods (WT, Hota), but they do not align with the ideology of HDmod.

Moreover, if you're going to play a campaign on SoD, you'll have to remove all XL+U maps from the template list, as they can lead to unacceptable time delays (your games with Eddie and Scorpio are an example of this). And on L-sized maps, control is not as crucial.