I quickly look at the fan guide to get an overview and homm5 seems a lot about management, how to manage heroes, troops and cities to build more powerful armies.
My grin when looking at the rules is they made a confusion with the number of rules and game quality, no no this isn't linked.
The complexity remind me how complex had become AD&D classes, at the end it's more confusion than more cool features.
For the battles I noticed different things:
- For all snapshots I saw, no obstacles or pointless in battle fields. Obstacles add a lot to battles finesses.
- And I could not found spells like target, time back, slow, invisibility, sleep, skills of cannon fooder summon, walls, field armor like the glot armor, some complexity like damages linked to movements like for Leena Ball or Horsemen, enemy teleporting and so on. Ie all the fun is missing.
- Units seems not have so many special talents and most if not all are purely based on fire power long range or close range. The only exception is perhaps some stuff linked with necromancy.
I haven't played yet homm5 but my feeling is that there are many strategy elements from resources, improvements, heroes choices, managing armies and movements and so on. But on the battlefield it seems a bit too much like brutal encounters.
I'll still try the game but I think that it's from strategical elements that I'll take the fun not from tactics in battle field like in KBTL.