Yes, I was the one that voted for HoM&M5, but I didn't want to write my reasons before someone else posts. I wanted to keep the actually 'poll' post clean of my personal opinion, while at the same time I didn't want to double post
To start with, I never played
HoM&M1. I know it's on the site and available, but I never got around to play it.
HoM&M2 was one of the first games on CD that I've ever bought and I enjoyed it very much. One of the faults about the game would be only two campaigns and what was interesting, I found the evil brother's campaign (Alaric?) quite easier that Roland's. The other fault in the game was a certain misbalance in the units available for different cities. If I remember correctly, once you got a few dozen Vampire Lords, all you needed to do was attack weak creatures and keep getting more and more VLs until no one could hurt you anymore. Also, Barbarian cities would get quite average Cyclopes comparing to Wizard Titans as their highest tier creature.
HoM&M3 was simply magnificent. It offered diversity with two different heroes that you could train in each type of the cities, more campaigns that were actually connected one way or another, possibility for your heroes to progress from one campaign to the next and a feeling of a quite an epic story going on. Faults? Well, there were quite a few missions where all you needed to do was win one main battle, where you crush the bulk of the enemy forces, and after that it was just a matter of time until your heroes reach the objectives and conquer them. Another fault was that in spite the fact that you could move some of your heroes to the next mission of the campaign, sometimes there was simply not enough experience within the mission for them to reach the top level. That often meant that you had to wait and hope that 'a year of this or that creature' would arrive and bring some more enemies for you to kill. Also, I remember often waiting in front of the last city I need to conquer (with enough forces to conquer it) while every one of my heroes goes and visit every shrine or arena or tower or whatever is it that increases abilities. Makes the end bit of the mission a bit boring. Although there were many various skills to learn, some of them were quite useless imo (like Eagle's Eye) and pretty much all my heroes were eventually learn pathfinding and logistics, one or two spell schools and the rest would've been random or more often those they were starting with anyway.
HoM&M4 was something different. It's not uncommon for companies to try and 'spice up' the series a bit in order to bring something new and not just expansion pack with better graphics and a few more options. In this case they decided to make your heroes able to participate directly in the battles, which again made it possible for you to make an army that will have heroes only in it. To be honest, I liked this option. It gave certain RPG element to the series. I also like the way the battles looked, especially sieges. But I have to admit that I felt that the idea of the HoM&M was somehow 'violated' (in the lack of better word) with that decision. That was even more pronounced by allowing common units to travel around without a hero - something that really bothered me. Another thing I didn't like was misbalance. In the first mission in the campaign, your success often depended only on luck (as in whether or not you'll encounter an enemy hero before you're strong enough). Then after a few missions and heaps of experience for your main heroes, they would turn into almost unstoppable killing machines that could defeat anyone. Yet, you could still lose one in the fight against a dozen genies for example, when they cast a spell on you, so you would just avoid that fight. I also didn't like the fact that you had to choose between two units to build for higher tiers in each city. That meant that you had to have at least two cities in order to build a versatile army, but then again, there were some units that I would never choose anyway, because the other one was always better. Like in the previous part, there were again missions with not enough experience to max up all of your heroes. They also tried to add more variety to your heroes, so depending on the skills you choose they would evolve into a new class, but again due to the fact that some of the skills were very useful while the others were useless, you would never get some classes for your heroes (unless you do it on purpose and with a desire for self punishment
)
But there were good things about the game as well. Campaigns were interesting and there were many side quests that you sometimes had to do to progress in the campaign, but at other times you could choose not to do them (though pass up on some treasure that way). But the option I liked the most was 'caravan' building which you could use to faster move troops from one city to another or recruit from 'creature building' on the map without visiting them.
HoM&M5 discarded most of the novelties that the previous part brought. Again you needed a hero to lead your armies and again you couldn't have more than one in a single army. Although they could choose direct attack instead of casting spells during the combat, it couldn't compare with the complete involvement in the combat like it the HoM&M4. Your heroes (or enemy ones for that matter) couldn't be targeted in the combat, for example. Someone said that this was the same game as HoM&M3, only with better graphics, but imo it's much more. The flaws I mentioned for number 3 still exist to a certain level, but are not as bad. Campaigns are very good, with nice variety between the missions - one may be classic 'build your city and then crush the enemy' but the next one is a race against time, then another one asks of you just to reach the other end of the map without conquering a single city or fighting a single enemy hero. There is again a lot of side quests, and some you can decide to solve one way or another. Every creature that you can recruit in a city has its upgraded version that often has very different abilities to the previous one and not just better stats. Sometimes, with the upgrade you lose something the original creature had (for example, once you upgrade your peasants to conscripts, you don't get 1gp per peasant per turn anymore). Selection of creatures and their abilities was done very well and is also well balanced, so neither city type has an obvious advantage.
Skills are also improved with many useless ones eliminated. Each class now has skills typical for that class only. Depending on your preferences you can choose different path for some high level skills. I have to admit here, though, that there are still skills that I prefer much to the other.
The only fault in this part comparing to the previous two is that again (like in part 2) you can have only one type of hero per city. I guess it's just makes it a bit less versatile.
And because of everything I've said above, I choose
HoM&M5.