Dressup party
It even has unit stacking.
Sandro turns fallen units into skeletons and zombies until the end of the battle. Gem instead raises them as low-HP copies of themselves (fun when you just killed a bunch of devils, glitchy when it includes your corpse as you can control the resurrected character with the keyboard but you're still the flying deathcam and simultaneously control it too), Crag Hack is OP in melee, and some end-tier units have special abilities too (e.g. vampires transform into very fast bats, devils teleport around the battlefield and backstab units).
Destructible gate in one of the resource sites that spawn around the map.
Gate gone.
On one hand, sieges with destructible gates prevent some defender cheese, but then you get situations like this one as an attacker (the defenders that aren't mounted will stand there waiting to be pincushioned, and the archers on walls don't have a clear view of the front gate).
Towns and castles can be upgraded with dwellings from which you can purchase upgraded units and skip a bit of experience grind, but tier 7 units are a separate "tree" and can only be gotten from attacking their dwellings on world map (single-visit) and on rare occasions from rescued prisoners.
Angel Feather Arrows stronk.
There are a few stat-raising map sites that are rather abusable (INT/CHA arena only has a bunch of frail mages with no one to defend them, library of enlightenment's angels can be cheesed, and only STR/AGI arena is harder in the early game because melee units there hit hard enough to kill some of your units).
Avlee starts with lots of towns and has no bandits harassing them, but their territory is too spaced out and their elite cavalry dies like flies because of AI not knowing how to handle it. Tatalia has wimpy serpent flies and gnolls for bandits, and lots of densely-packed forts, but their units seem weak. Eofol has some elementals for bandits (disappointingly weak) and control few places, but their hell hounds and devils, backed up by magogs, are a quite powerful, harrassing-heavy combintaion on the battlefield. Krewlod and Nighon have stronger bandits that can be sometimes found with prisoners from defeated lord parties. Krewlod units seem weak except for cyclops (their rocks can one-hit-kill lots of things), Nighon's are better and they're in a very good strategic position. Bracada has strong-ish bandits (their capture power isn't much better but they have giants with them, which are hard to kill in the early game), and relatively good units. Deyja has big bands of undead wandering around and capturing lots of stuff, and powerful units (liches, armored knights, vampires, bone dragons - which I also prefer over the red/black ones because you can see through them and their effectiveness is the same). Erathia starts with lots of territory but getting gang-raped by everyone, and has tutorial-mode bandits that don't achieve anything. Erathian zealots are a good ranged unit but it takes a while to upgrade to them, and their cavalry is very good and sturdy - the angels are disappointing, though (they're human-sized so that's a plus logistics-wise, the upgraded ones have armor and a shield, and they can pack a punch, but you'll only ever see the upgrades ones in allied/enemy armies, and they lack AoE of big units)
The transracial upgrade trees are jarring and take a while to get used to.
A few artifacts get spammed as random world map locations, a few weak ones can be found in crypts, weak summoning scrolls can be found in pyramids (and all scrolls are also available from weapon merchants in towns), this bunch is in a fixed inventory of one wandering merchant, and the most powerful ones are a random reward from dragon utopias. Recruitable heroes sometimes come with unique equipment, and some special artifacts seem to be awarded for siding with claimants.
Hardly any non-vanilla dialogues present, and the ones for Sandro and "Minion" companions are peak cringe (I assume it's because of the whole plot part of it being unfinished, and what's in being a case of programmer writing).
Big units and quadripedals have AoE attacks. As an aside, Imp Cache has some tremendous initial lag, which makes me ignore it for the most part.
Potato.
Different races and species are furry larpers; lots of that stuff can be bought in shops (undead armors replacing limbs with bones, gnoll and lizardman suits with tails, various heads as helmets, etc.), though some seem to be set to never drop on death and can't be bought. Animals like hell hounds are mounts with invisible riders (and are scripted to die on rider loss, which includes being ordered to dismount).
Underground tunnel to reach Nighon (looks a tiny bit better when viewed from above).
You can use spells, such as summoning elementals, during tournaments...
... but the game doesn't like the number of combatants changing. There are lots of loadout errors for these fights, too, but they don't seem to matter (both you and your opponents start with armor and weapons, with a few possible variants, and different for each town type).
Beholder's tentacle.
The same tentacle.
Over 9000 inches.
Some villages in Bracada are bugged and have some placeholder or wrong unit ID for the elder (and so you can't get any quests from him). Similarly, some taverns are missing the tavern keeper (which breaks goods delivery guildmaster quests if they end up targetting such tavern). On the plus side, the guildmasters in towns are easy to find (they all hang around either the town hall or the mage's guild).
This here spy is very easy to track due to monster NPCs in towns, but there's a scripting error back when accepting the quest that results in no secret code option being correct. All towns and castles also appear to have wrong IDs for "walk around the place" doors, which includes the prison door and as such the rescue quest is broken too (the prison door leads to "arena" test location, and the actual "this door is locked" dungeon entrance is used in place of "go outside" doors inside the castle and the prison, but you lose prison keys on any area transition so trying to bypass it by entering the castle after killing the guard takes away the keys from you). In addition to leading to some failed quests if you don't save before asking for/accepting them, it also makes the world feel emptier, with nothing to do at times (among the working quests, the cattle/caravan ones appear to be the most common in towns, many villages do not need anything, and lords tend to only ask for lending them Crag Hack, which may be an indirect result of the shape of the world map leading to less raiding).
Your mana is reset to 0 on town/village ambush (likely to make it more lethal/annoying, but it may also interfere with collecting lots of mana for fighting lord stacks of doom).
Horses can navigate some dungeons just fine, big units like dragons won't fit through most passageways with low ceilings (Dragon Utopia should be called Dragon Prison), and giants may not even be able to go through the gates during sieges. For this reason, it's advisable to put all the biggies in a separate battle commands group.
Tier 7 units take forever to upgrade. Gold golems are also very demanding but less so.
Despite all the lack of polish, plot, and balancing, the Heroes theme makes it strangely addicting - and fun to alternate between this and playthroughs of HoM&M3 - and makes you wish for the devs to resurrect and finish it.
The special effects for most spells and some units and missiles appear to be tied to the hdr/bloom/shader/etc. stuff, but it's playable without them so I haven't checked which settings need to be turned on to make them show. Graphicswhorism and showcase videos are available
on mod's moddb page. I'm also not ruling out some of the bugs being due to Warband version differences/incompatibilities, but I haven't found any mentions of suggested versions - and if I recall correctly, that'd instead make the mod crash on startup?
By the way, the other HoM&M mod
is kaputt.