[Turin]

I disagree about Homm3 being more fun . I actually like it that you don´t know the inside rules for routing etc.

Let´s consider two games:
In one game(1) we know all the rules, in the other(2) we only know generally how things work.

So imagine you have to decide if you want to attack another guys army.
This is what happens in a competitive multiplayer game 1 :
you fire up your handy battle calculator, which tells you the results. You get favourable results, you attack, the next turn comes as no surprise, since the calc is good. Next turn happens and you have to enter the math again, you get bored and quit.

This is what happens in game 2:
You think about the battle, recollect your past experiences with battles under similar circumstances, make a lot of guesswork and decide to attack. The next turn hosts and you see that you either failed, or you get that very nice feeling, that everything really worked out like you planned.

For me game 2 is far more exciting and interesting and luckily dominions 2 is such a game.
HoMM3 on the other hand is pretty and a nice waste of time, but not really challenging, once you know the rules. That means that HoMM3 became boring for me pretty fast.

For the comparison between dom2 and chess, that´s pretty much apples and oranges. dom2 has lots of random elements, which alter the game drastically and a good deal of the fun in dom2 is surprising your opponent with spells/tactics, so dom2 is so radically different, so comparing those two isn´t very helpful.