This is a cool game with cool graphics and sound and a promising foundation, but the winning strategy here isn't very obvious to me. I did manage to complete the demo with one life left, but I lost my first three battles; the second I lost without killing a single unit, because I was completely overpowered by the enemy's ranged fighters.
I am familiar with HoMM/KB-style combat, but I am not an expert at it - so, while I understood most of the gameplay without a tutorial (except for the guard option, which I never quite figured out), there may be specific skills and strategies expected here that I am not aware of. The problems I had were:
- As far as I can tell, the reward for each battle depends on how many units you kill, so the more outmatched you are, the more outmatched you'll be in the remaining rounds.
- In every round, the enemy army seems to be consistently stronger than the player's, always including heavy ranged firepower that can quickly cut down your units, and they tend to target your ranged units first.
- Most units just don't pull their weight, even the epic ones. You of course need to stack as many units as possible to make them more effective, but every combat is guaranteed to inflict heavy casualties. You get refunded for these casualties (note: this doesn't work if you retreat), but because unit supply is still limited and which units are available is random, this doesn't really help with building up an effective force. Buying a dozen each of 3-4 mediocre units every round to replace the ones I lost just means I had to continue struggling with a pitiful army of mostly cannon fodder. I felt like it didn't matter what I spent my gold on, because any given stack felt just as useless as another.
- What I would have done is try to soften up enemy melee units at ranged before chopping them down with my own melee units to try to minimize the damage I take, but since I lose a lot of ranged units in every combat, I never build up enough of them for this strategy to work very well. Even arbalesters often can't deal enough damage to kill even one figure in any of the enemy stacks. Whether I focus on killing ranged or melee units first, the result is the same, which is that I can't match the damage output from the stronger enemy army.
So, how did I manage to win? I just had to buy as many archmages as I could and let them carry every round. These are not only the strongest unit by an absolutely gigantic margin, but were essentially my only effective fighters at all. Of course, since the enemy had just as many archmages as me, every round was basically just me trying to burn down the enemy archmages before they killed all of mine, with the rest of my units being mostly just a distraction until the archmages could kill everything.
I did a little better on a second attempt because I managed to hold onto some early units a bit longer, but still ended up in the same predicament. I don't know - a HoMM expert might find this easy, but I don't really know where I'm going wrong.
Other than all of the above gripes about the difficulty, I do like the game. My only other complaints are that I would like an option to speed up combat, as well as a downloadable version of the game.