<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>For whatever strategy fan out there, Heroes of Might and Magic 4 is a big waste of money. The gameplay is unbelievably imbalanced. It runs very sluggish in general and has memory leak up the wazoos. The game difficulty goes from laughably easy to impossible depending on what you set it on. The first time I left it on default for the first campiagn (The True Blade), and basically blitzed through the campaign with overpowered heroes. If you thought it was bad enough how the rank in Heroes 2/3 didn't remotely reflect what you did, I got like Pikeman (level 1 unit) rank even though I beat the first campiagn on default setting way faster than I should (events that happened at the end hasn't been triggered, time-wise, when I beat the last couple of scenarios).
So I decided to try Champion mode and if you're doing campaign where you don't start with a town which is like over half of them, you're not going to be able to take over your first town until about 1 month or so, and by then the neutral monsters will have got out of control. I was playing Emilia Nighthaven's campaign on Champion and after spending 2 weeks to just conquer the very first town, I eventually got my army and wiped out everything only to find that the path between me and my next enemy is blocked by impossible to kill netural stacks. Even the cheating computer was getting wiped out by neutral stacks as gravestones litter all over the place. I was observing the first computer player with a Stealthed hero in the Pirate Campaign and they weren't able to take the sawmill next to them even 2 months into the game. Of course, computer cheats and gets resources for free, but neutral stacks vastly outgrow the rate you get new monsters, and that's true for computer as well, and you can't possibly win against them on attrition.
Locks are incredibly easy to get in Heroes 4, unlike Heroes 3/2 where you at least have to have some kind of unit advantage (or at least stack advantage). Life does not have locks but usually you just pump up your main hero and have everyone else heal him. Oh yeah, fighting Medusas that instant kill your hero in a scenario will you automatically lose if you lose your main hero totally sucks too. Almost every caster or archer stack can kill your hero in one hit at the beginning (and Medusas can always instant kill your hero regardless) and if that happens you automatically lose the game unless you can resurrect (Life only).</div>
So I decided to try Champion mode and if you're doing campaign where you don't start with a town which is like over half of them, you're not going to be able to take over your first town until about 1 month or so, and by then the neutral monsters will have got out of control. I was playing Emilia Nighthaven's campaign on Champion and after spending 2 weeks to just conquer the very first town, I eventually got my army and wiped out everything only to find that the path between me and my next enemy is blocked by impossible to kill netural stacks. Even the cheating computer was getting wiped out by neutral stacks as gravestones litter all over the place. I was observing the first computer player with a Stealthed hero in the Pirate Campaign and they weren't able to take the sawmill next to them even 2 months into the game. Of course, computer cheats and gets resources for free, but neutral stacks vastly outgrow the rate you get new monsters, and that's true for computer as well, and you can't possibly win against them on attrition.
Locks are incredibly easy to get in Heroes 4, unlike Heroes 3/2 where you at least have to have some kind of unit advantage (or at least stack advantage). Life does not have locks but usually you just pump up your main hero and have everyone else heal him. Oh yeah, fighting Medusas that instant kill your hero in a scenario will you automatically lose if you lose your main hero totally sucks too. Almost every caster or archer stack can kill your hero in one hit at the beginning (and Medusas can always instant kill your hero regardless) and if that happens you automatically lose the game unless you can resurrect (Life only).</div>
