Nargott
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Recently, after a long break, I played Heroes 4.
Impressions: the combat is the worst in the series. It's not even so much about simultaneous attacks (you can get used to that) or the presence of heroes on the battlefield (easy prey), but rather the grid-based movement. It's the grid that really sets Heroes 4 apart from the rest of the series. Instead of simple and clear calculations of who can reach where, you have to assess the situation and distances literally by eye. Will there be enough movement points to reach a target without exposing yourself? Or will a unit fall short by just a millimeter and miss its attack? Or will it be able to squeeze between bushes? Can it be blocked by a single unit, or will it have enough movement points to go around? Has the unit's retaliation been removed, and when will it be restored? Has the unit already moved this round? With this grid system, it's not always possible to determine if a unit has moved. You could read about waiting or defending in the log, but there wasn't even a log to be found. There are many complicating nuances, but they are more technical than tactical.
The units are quite uniform in their physical stats and are tailored to a 1:5 template (damage:health). With this ratio, the dynamics of combat are too low, and more time is needed to assess the turn "by eye." As a result, battles are drawn out.
The strength of the first and last tiers is related as 1:8, which is a huge difference, and the first tier becomes obsolete too quickly. As a result, the game is mainly played with tiers 3 and 4, plus tier 2 when external dwellings are available.
The neutral creatures on the map are unbalanced. In reality, you can only progress normally on "apprentice" difficulty (the second difficulty out of five); everything else leads to huge losses in starting troops or wasted time waiting for reinforcements.
Heroes level up extremely slowly. It takes about 4 battles to go from level 1 to level 2 (with a standard start of 2 heroes).
Even the economy suggests: we're not in a hurry. Income-generating buildings pay for themselves in 10 days, and that's just in gold. So, we have an extremely drawn-out game, oriented more towards role-playing and leisurely playthroughs than dynamic Multiplayer.
I played the version enhanced with Equilibris 3.51. But despite all those balance improvements, the new fairy growth rate caused, to put it mildly, bewilderment. With identical stats, the growth rate for imps is 28, while for fairies it has become 16 (it was 23). Why cut a perfectly adequate old growth rate? The lack of retaliation is far from the strongest perk. It doesn't weaken tricky units like fairy-zombies (it just slows them down), but it does turn combat fairy stacks into some kind of meaningless flies. With imps, you can deal much more damage by throwing a couple of units at removing retaliation, and at the same time, you have a chance of survival if you get hit. Moreover, since elves will still have to somehow remove retaliation to ensure that wolves can bite twice without taking damage. And the most interesting thing is that, for some reason, nowhere in these "tournament" mods do they write the reasons why they made one or another change.