Their dev team worked on HOMM5 and other good TB I think, no idea why they couldn’t replicate that type of quality
actually now that I couldn't sleep cause of
autistic artistic personal things, I want to add, that it's not about quality, or that you can't do it; but that HOMM fights as mechanism is a flawed way to represent designers goal of fighting armies.
HOMM fights aren't very tactical, the truth is that any simple wargame with hexes would beat em up p easily. Morale, stamina, flanking and envelopment, terrain advantage - even something non-expensive and modern like say nu-Fantasy Generals can do it. The idea behind HOMM fights, is that they are used to resolve economic and map exploration decisions in a efficient and very prutty way (HOMM II being pruttiest). It's not about who outmaneuvres who by casting mass haste first, but about making sure that enemies decision to buy sexy new expensive stack just set them back in the game. Add to this HOMM maps that can be sprawling labyrinths of shiny crystals and teleporters with terrain changing hero movement, and even scripts with quest chains, well, basically, Art, and you will quickly see that even if you try to turn combats into puzzles about how to kill 11000 lazure dragons with 3 peasants and 1 angel it still would be not using the whole thing to its real potential.
It would be much more effective to, for example, break whole WOTR map into hexes, make Party a 1 unit, and your units and demons other units, and go exploring for crystal mines n stuff.
But thats if you managed to persuade me to do this instead of, well, making the real fucking combat of the game better, and the realz systems. Like, tuning encounters so stealth would actually be useful everywhere. Or making sure Divination actually does something, close to what it could do in PnP. And classes roleplay more like what they're supposed to roleplay. That sort of thing.
And you really wouldn't be able to, cause I dont want minigamez in my baldrus gates.