Continuing with HoMM 3: The Shadow of Death and the Unholy Alliance campaign.
Having all the heroes from the previous campaigns reset their skills was a major bummer. Especially Gelu got shafted with no magic skills, Tactics or Logistics, but Learning and Intelligence instead, making him rather useless.
The maps are definitely more difficult than in previous campaigns.
Search for a Killer with Gelu was rather frustrating, with Gelu having no mobility, and the Necro towns spawning darkness.
You are supposed to invade via the underground, through a border gate, but that leaves your home area vulnerable from the sea, since the necros have access to shipyards. So since the underground is blocked from enemy attack I decided to invade by ship instead.
Nice strategic map, but lack of mobility is very frustrating. I came very close to restarting to get better skills.
Final Peace with Gem and Clancy was rather unbalanced. Rather weak enemies you can crush quickly, and then the final castle has a super stack of 87 Black Knights. And you can't use the block-the-portcullis dirty trick either since the hero has Expert Teleport. Disrupting Ray turned the tide in this very difficult battle. I'd rather try 20 times with different tactics, then play the wait-and-build game.
Secrets Revealed with Yog and Hack was supposed to be hard, but turned out be too easy, thanks to the two main heroes decimating their armies against lots of Black Knights and Cyclops Kings respectively, and then one of them appeared in the Tavern the next week. There's lots of gold and resources to be found, so I was able to build up two complete Strongholds even before I found the four caches of 50,000 gold each.
Agents of Vengeance was rather like Final Peace. Gem and Gelu are safe behind strong garrisons against rather weak enemies, and the garrison to the final castle is extremely strong with 100 Ghost Dragons supported by Liches and Vampires. Gelu was rather useless except to train Sharpshooters and lead diversity squads (since unlike Gem he has Leadership), while Gem with Logistics, Tactics and three magic skills did all the work.