I've played the game for a couple weeks while staying with a friend, and wanted to gather my thoughts on things that I feel are holding the game back. I can sometimes beat the Deadly AI 1v1 (and always beat anything below that level), did hotseat with him several times, and have watched several PVP games on youtube, so I won't pretend I'm a master at the game but I feel I understand the mechanics well enough. I should also add I've played HoMM3 since I was a kid.

1. NEVER STOP MOVING: This game has a very high level of movement compared with vision. Wielders generally have only 7-8 vision to start, and 12-13 movement. However, for some incredibly bizarre reason, the deadly ai has an extra 4 to both. As well, the ai is certain to find at least +2 movement boots, dirt/roads increase movement by 25/50%, and many map items increase movement by 2-5 points.

Functionally this means that the ai is FAST. They often will kill the border mobs, kill your scout wielder, and then continue on to kill your main wielder before you can even react because they're functionally moving 35+ points per turn. The fog of war makes this a much worse problem because unlike in HOMM3, you can't just scout ahead and know that you won't be surprised; unless you have a weilder sitting on the border you're screwed (and of course weilders are much more expensive and necessary than HoMM3 where you can hire a throwaway hero for 2500 gold and keep his troops). Even if the ai juuuust misses your main wielder, you can't possibly get away because, again, the ai has a very stupid movement bonus and will go straight for them next turn.

Solution: The game needs to find a better way to balance vision vs movement. Given the alpha-strike nature of the game (which I'll talk about next), there is zero reason the ai should get to zoom around the map so much faster. Removing this bonus isn't good enough though; there need to be far better supports for vision in the game so that you aren't just having wielders bumbling into each other. I hate that the developers added a fog-of-war feature (which HoMM3 didn't have) without thinking of the implications of it. It isn't the least bit realistic for what it's worth either; historical armies didn't just bumble into each other!

2. ONE FIGHT AND IT'S OVER: I will admit that Heroes 3 has this problem as well, but it's bizarre that a game released 20 years later has it MUCH MUCH WORSE!

Essentially, 95% of the time once your main wielder fights the enemy, the winner of that fight wins the game. Even if the fight happens in your home base, there is no recovery. A few reasons why:

a. You lose ALL your artifacts. I have no idea what the developer was thinking in making that happen. Heroes 3 lets you retreat at any time and keep your artifacts, but in SoC once you lose you forfeit all your equipment and thus make the enemy hero even stronger.

b. Buying your hero back is very expensive. I understand you can wait several turns, but compares to HoMM3 the cost for a high level hero is super high; several thousand gold and rare resources (and you have to wait at least 1 turn as well). The opportunity cost of waiting 3+ turns to lower it is completely untenable as well; in that time the enemy has already won.

c. Experience gain. In SoC the difference a few levels makes can be HUGE. In 3 levels you can take your magic resistance from 0 to 75%, for example, or give all your troops +25 attack/defence with cunning. So the fact that the losing hero gains no xp from their defeat while the winning one goes up several levels makes it so you are never catching up.

d. Momentum AKA win-more mechanic. This means that if you're outnumbered and you start losing stacks, ALL enemy units gain even more attack and defence and kill you even faster. So if you're outnumbered by 50% you might kill 20% of the enemy army, since as you lose stacks you lose essence AND you boost your opponent. Seriously what were you thinking with this? I guess it punishes players for having very small stacks, but the end result is you've ruined the longevity of the game.

All these factors mean once you lose one fight (often from an enemy bullrushing your hero from OVER FOUR TIMES outside your vision range), it's over. This is incredibly unsatisfying and I'm just flabbergasted that 20 years later you can make a game that fixes none of the issues around this and in fact makes them so much worse.

Solution: Some of these are very simple to fix. Give the losing hero experience on defeat, let them keep their artefacts, remove momentum completely, and possibly allow them to retreat and keep some of their units (maybe next turn their movement doubles but they can't attack and need to end movement in/near a friendly town? Many ways to do this).

3. NEXT-FIGHT BONUSES. The game has several structures that give incredibly high bonuses to the next fight. Things like stone alter (10 attack, 10 defence, 2 TROOP MOVEMENT!), Essence Anomaly (+1 of each essence per round), shrine of Aurelia (+1 troop movement, +5 initiative), and all of these stack.

The average space between opposing stacks on the battlefield is maybe 6-9 squares, and unit movement is usually 3-5. So these bonuses, especially to troop movement, are absolutely insane. Homm3 had a few structures that give morale and luck (and it was VERY hard to get more movement, only a few artifacts did), but the equivalent of all your troops having permanent high-level haste is completely ridiculous. The enemy troops will literally all be on top of you on turn 1, especially with factions like Rana that already have high movement and initiative.

Solution: Just remove them. Having so many structures with one-time bonuses are just obnoxious and unfun. The fact that it's an optimal strategy to suicide a crappy Weilder into the enemy first just to remove any of these bonuses is really dumb and unintuitive. It should take a very powerful spell to double all your troop movement, not visiting a stone alter and a big mushroom.

4. MANY SMALL THINGS. The three I listed are the major factors that make me uninterested in buying the game and continuing to play it, but there's a list of more minor quibbles that detract from quality of life:

a. Upgrading a building means you can't buy the unupgraded troop anymore. This is especially egregious with units like the Arleon knights, where the upgraded version costs Cerulean ore that you might have no way to retrieve. HoMM3 just lets you buy either version and it worked fine, I hate that upgrading my castle can many times be a bad decision because the next node might have no ore to pick up. Just let me train regular knights if I get bad RNG and no ore please?

b. You can still trade troops between weilders in a daisy chain, just like HoMM3 does it 20 years ago. This makes alpha strikes worse obviously, because with such high movement (and the rally building) one daisy chain lets you carry all your troops across the map to kill the enemy hero.

It's easy to fix too. If you trade troops from a hero with 3 movement left to a hero with 30 movement left, the recieving hero should go down to 3 movement too. The troops just walked for 8 hours, why are they suddenly able to walk again just because they changed heroes? This also slows the game down and means you have a chance to recover without letting the enemy daisy-chain reinforcements to the front lines instantly. Again letting the game have a natural back-and-forth seems obviously more fun than having the first fight end the game with the player just resigning.

c. Kiting and magic generation (vs ai mostly). One of the worst aspects of fighting neutrals is that the most efficient way to win is often with extreme kiting/stalling combined with magic. Here is an example of the worst offender:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrlerRtW3ok

I don't know how to fix this exactly; maybe after several rounds vs neutral mobs essence generation stops? It should never be optimal to take 1 fairy, or 1 burrower, and move around the map for 50 turns spamming boiling blood or fireball or whatever. It slows the game to a crawl and feels like an exploit. And since in multiplayer you need to wait for the opponent before you go, its an awful experience.

d. Defences suck. Towers and walls are lousy and offer very little advantage for their cost; you're much better off buying more troops or economic buildings with your money. HoMM3 made it quite painful to attack a castle; you couldn't just knock down the gate with a hit from two stacks (seriously why are gates so weak in SoC?!), you had to catapult it down while the arrow towers could kill a behemoth or pheonix in one turn. And castles increased your unit growth, so you have incentive to build them.

In SoC you get a few stacks of low-level troops and (at the precious cost of rare resources) a single ballista. Thus defensive play when you're on the backfoot is rarely feasible, adding to the one-fight-and-done gameplay.

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Ok, I'm done and I feel much better having written that all out :) . I've seen these kinds of things mentioned several times here on steam, on reddit, and on discord, so I have no illusion that anyone is going to fix any of this. But I'm disheartened seeing the team working on DLC and talking about how they want to focus on PVE more, when the PVE experience is fairly terrible against high-level AI, and the game is extremely flawed in its core design.