If only: A manticore monster in heroes of might and magic 3

[Thomas Cardew]

This is wrong. Stronghold and Fortress are insane tempo towns with great heroes (Barbarians are probably best in the game), good curve and some other useful utilities (Fortress gets to reap insane benefits from Dragonfly Hives). These towns ramp up really fast and continue to snowball. Any Barbarian can reach Wisdom and Earth Magic on Expert, and then still picks up from a very good set of skills. Every single Barbarian hero is great, and breadwinners like Tyraxor / Gretchin / Crag Hack are exceptional.

Attack and Defense are insanely more valuable than Spell Power / Knowledge with the "mass level 1 spell" meta. Cast Expert Slow once on a hero with SP 5 ad Knowledge 5 and it lasts really long, and you can keep recasting it whenever. Often you will meet the enemy before your spellbook offers anything other than level 1 and 2 spells. It's Might heroes that take fewer losses throughout the game, too, and will continue to do so in the deciding skirmish because the impact of A/D is very noticable. Vanilla SoD also allows artifacts like Recanter's Cloak and Orb of Inhibition, in which case Wizards are horribly, utterly screwed with no available recourse if they're unlucky. And they have to keep hoping for good luck, because magic heroes keep being offered Eagle Eye / Scholar / Mysticism / Sorcery instead of Offense / Armorer / Tactics.

The weakest towns are, variably, Inferno and Tower, because they suffer from insane teching costs, poor biomes, low unit cost-efficiency and the poorest selection of heroes, both starting and main material. Tower isn't saved by being a strongly Wizard town because it suffers from weird vestiges of HoMM2 design (Mages and Giants cost hideous amounts of resources for what they provide, and their tech tree is schizophrenic), poor movement speed, crap terrain (Snow spawns very few map features that provide resources). Inferno's overall brute force strength is low, making them downright tricky in end-game fights.

By the time building up your mage guild is relevant (often enough it really is not as you win before that) the Strong/Fortress town simply builds up the guild in a more accessible town; the game isn't played in a vacuum where you only ever have your starter town.

Tome of Magic (especially Earth) makes this a non-issue, and Strong/Fortress are both really good at taking Utopias, something that provides Tomes often. (Conversely, Towers struggle with Utopias because their powerstack is often really slow and the AI loves to prey on their best units, because they're archers). Pandora Boxes also provide spells.

If you hit late game, all heroes become somewhat homogenized due to artifacts, in which case the edge is provided by specialty and secondary skills, and I'd rather fight alongside Crag Hack than Solmyr in that case. Might heroes fit the bill of a true Hero of Might & Magic much better than Magic heroes generally can.

The best case scenario for dedicated wizards is early-mid game shenanigans with a strong tempo hero of their own, like Luna, Ciele or Solmyr, where they either abuse the starting spell for huge gains or meet the enemy super early and poke him down before they even buy a spellbook (in a really open, FFA map). Either that, or if they have tons of mana and manage to starve the enemy out with Elemental spam. Otherwise, they're struggling.

Magic is great and all, but HoMM3 is horribly biased towards Might supported by a teensy bit of magic simply because of how broken level 1 mass spells are.

I second most of this. My caveats are that I always found fortress to be mediocre.

They really seem to depend on the map tileset. If there's very little swamp land their atrociously slow unit speeds are just a complete handicap on the adventure map. Swamp spawns decent materials and dragonfly hives for wyvern stacking are great, but if your opponents aren't slogging through the mud at the same speed as your snail paced units, it's easy to get left behind. Getting dragonflies early helps get around this but I still find they require a larger supply chain of back up heroes. Also, offense is king in this game and most of fortress units are slow tanky types. Compared to the alpha strike potential of some of the other towns after a mass slow/haste/prayer, I find them lackluster. Admittedly this is for vanilla 3/ SOD not HoTA. I have no idea what balance changes those guys made or how that would change things.

You are guaranteed, as a warrior-type, to be offered a Basic Magic school at level 4 at the earliest.

Magic heroes work best at close spawns in FFA when you can rush someone down with Magic Arrow or Chain Lightning, and they also do the map well early in the game, it's just that the Might heroes scale better and take overall fewer losses. This varies, but in no way would I call HoMM3 a "mage's" game. More like a Swordmage's game.

The problem is simply that it's, generally, most of the time, better to have a formidable warrior with just enough magic to get by, because the difference between someone with 15 A/D and 5 A/D is actually substantial, and warriors of all kinds get much better skills because NWC decided Wizards should get Learning and Eagle Eye while Warriors have an Offense / Armorer / Tactics / Logistics bias. The amount of scaling the Mage needs to really dominate usually comes from abusing an Intelligence specialist on some sort of an XL+U map in order to Dimension Door all over the place, and that usually happens really, really late into the game; also, Mages are prone to RNG moodswings as well simply because you can get subpar spells in your mage guild.

100% this. Even in the campaigns where your hero has to swear of magic entirely (Yog and Tarnum) and you CANT remove effects, it is comically easy to get broken fast just because of how much the hero stats help your units. The late stat growth for mages is virtually nill since it all goes into knowledge and spellpower. 1 more turn of effect or 10-20 more damage per spellpower doesn't compare to +1 attack or defense to your whole army. More knowledge and mana points are nice, but it isn't particularly hard to manage mana and no amount of reasonable amount of knowledge lets you throw out spells without having to care about managing it short of Intelligence specialist shenanigans. But even intelligence shenanigans pale in comparison to diplomacy shenanigans (can't stack mana if your already dead because I got free troops/resources/dwellings) or logistics shennigans (Kyrre and Gunnar are great heroes. Gunnar even starts with tactics which makes early mapping much easier) unless you get Dimension Door (which I find to be rare)