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Originally Posted by Zhuangzi
It's funny because the first campaign in HOMM V is just absurdly easy, even on Hard. It's so boring; you just have to slog through it.
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The original HOMM V (without the expansions) has 6 campaigns, one for each race (I assume the 2 extra races added get their own campaigns in their expansions), which are interconnected story-wise. All of the missions in the first campaign are sort of a tutorial for players who have never played the series before. You coming from the related KB:L gives you an advantage. The later campaigns do get tougher, but that said, many players have complained that the campaign itself is pretty uninspired tougher or not.
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On the other hand, the Tribes of the East campaign is a real challenge for me right now on Medium difficulty. I just played the second mission, Last Soul Standing, and I had a LOT of fun. I won by the skin of my teeth. It's a timed mission and I reached the objective on the last possible day, and then died three times trying to defeat the castle guards (I am still learning this game  ) On my fourth try I won with 2 archers and 5 zombies left. What fun I had! So I will try to forget about the HOMM V campaigns and see how far I can get with ToE. 
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Yeah! I love the battles when you just barely win against a superior army! I have not played it, but the TotE campaign, according to most players, is a huge improvement over the original campaigns. Some reviewers, however, actually marked ToTE's scores down for the game being too difficult!
In any case, the overarching difference between KB:L and HOMM (any game in the series) is that HOMM has another strategic layer, where you capture mines, cities and build up/level your cities, which then produce your units. The maximum level of units themselves is level 7, which is approximately equivalent to level 5 units in KB:L.
The skill system in HOMM V is the best in the series (much better even than in HOMM 3 - which was the 'classic' HOMM game for many, myself included) and is truly great.
There are 4 primary ability scores. Attack and Defense functions similarly to the same stats in KB:L. Spellpower is similar to Intellect in KB:L and Knowledge determines the amount of Mana the hero gets.
There are 12 basic universal skills that a hero can learn and each has three levels. Orcs in TotE, however, add sort of 4 more pseudo-skills, as they cannot learn the magic skills, but instead have 4 equivalent anti-magic skills. Your hero only has slots for 5 basic skills, however, so you have to chose carefully what skills you want to learn depending on the type of hero you are building. The probability of what skills get offered to you at level-up depends on the class of your hero (each faction's heroes belong to a different class), but in theory all heroes (except Orcs) can learn any 5 of the basic universal skills.
On top of the basic universal skills, all factions's heroes also get one racial skill (also at three levels of expertise [plus one extra {4th} level with special artifacts]). This is unique to the race in question.
The basic skills and the racial skills open up 'perks'. The perks offered depend on the combination of skills and other perks you select. There are a large number of them and not all factions' heroes can access all of them. Each hero has 3 slots for perks for each skill.
The right combination of skills and perks can open up access to an 'ultimate' ability that is really powerful and differs by race, but the hero has to be high level to get that.
On top of the above, each hero also has a unique specialty ability of his own.
The skill system can get very deep! It is really good once you get the hang of it!