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It's funny that speedruns of Heroes on such complex maps take months of real time, while a leisurely playthrough, a couple of hours after work, takes much less.
And, in my opinion, maps like Xiedu wouldn't be popular in this genre because there's a lot of randomness.
It's a different matter to create a map where you immobilize all the computer's heroes, lock them in castles (you can, in extreme cases, allow some characters to move, but along a clear route, and plan everything down to the smallest detail. Also, place all units manually). And then there would be room for creativity, in terms of how to scatter artifacts across the map, what bonuses to set. For example, give a tower with a grail at the start and lock the hero in the center of the map with 99 cold resistance and one leadership skill. So that the hero can see the map, knows the exact size of the army. Let the player think for himself what, where, why, and how. You can plan logistics, realistically assess your strength in battle. And then it would be interesting to see who would complete such a map in the shortest time. Some might need an extra week to capture the Azure faction, while others could complete it without them. If you spend as much time on it as on Paragon or Xiedu (+ the author is Rins or Season), you could create a pretty good map.
