[Agema]

HoMMIV was a bit of a disaster if you ask me. The new creation of heroes being in the battle was gruesomely misimplemented. It led to all sorts of problems.

HoMMV got rid of it, more of a rollback to HoMMIII. However, it still had several problems. Firstly, there are missions which send you all the way across the map, then you get a new mission which sends to back to another side of the map, and, well, let's just say spending turns doing nothing but traipsing an army from one side of them to another is frustrating.

The AI is crummy. It chucks a lot of units at you by way of compensation, but it's just slightly disappointing. Also, the game tends to devolve into going backwards and forwards until one massive battle between your biggest army and the enemy's decides the whole thing. Usually, considering the slightly cheaty AI, this means chucking small armies to grab castles whilst dodging his massive monlithic army(-ies). Eventually, you'll cause enough disruption to his troop building that you can build a huge army bigger than his. But to a large extent this means you've done nothing but spend hours - literally hours - running around not doing very much. All in all, the various level design weaknesses and gameplay problems make finishing every level seem like a chore that must be endured to get onto the next tedious task, rather than a satisfying attempt to fulfil an objective.

HoMM's problem is that ever since 2 they've been obsolete; the gameplay ancient, the AI effectively nonexistent. This can also be said of Age of Wonders, but AoW had a much better system - it's hard to justify HoMM4/5 in the light of what AoW achieved.