Your experience matches mine. KB:TL starts out easy, gets more difficult in the middle (about the time I get to the dwarves), then easier later in the game. I will say that while I found a few fights at the end very tough, the final battle was surprisingly easy.
My biggest complaint about Legend is that it becomes a slog. The continents tend to be large, with large additional areas, such as undergrounds. If one plays to clear out everything, it can become tedious.
I'm thinking my next game I'll attempt to push forward as quickly as possible just to see how far I can get before the fights become impossible to beat (at which time I'll have to backtrack and pick up extra XP). My score will suffer, but I'm not much for tracking such things anyway.
KB:AP, in my opinion, is better balanced, but more importantly, rarely bogs down. Usually just as I'm getting bored of an area, it's clear and it's time to move on to another island. The quests also seem to have a bit more variety to them, though that may just be my imagination.
In my first game of AP, I agree that the play balance seemed just right, with the first few fights in a new area being a bit of a challenge, but by the time the area was cleared, I was ready for the next.
That said, later games have been much easier. Partly this is due to knowing what to expect. Partly it's just using better tactics. I can understand why experienced players like to challenge themselves by playing on Hard or Impossible. I've stayed with normal, but instead try to limit myself to certain units, such as only demons, or only humans. If nothing else, it forces me to adapt my tactics and makes the game a bit different.
All in all, these are my favorite games since HOMM 3, and just as addictive.
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