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Notes -
A month late, but what the hey, I'm an M&M fan.
I don't think HoMM is a great example for this, particularly because in hindsight I believe 4 has had quite a positive reappraisal. 4 was very different to 3, which provoked a backlash and a lot of hate, but now that there have been many more games afterwards, including 5 (which was a very traditional return to the formula of 2 and 3), there's much less reason to hate 4. As a result, today 4 has a real fanbase of its own.
5 was then, as you say, a great success. Generally I believe 2, 3, and 5 are considered 'the good ones' of the HoMM series, and of those 2 is often overlooked because frankly everything 2 does well is done better in 3. In general it's 3 and 5. Those are the highest.
6 is another 4, in that it's an attempt to push the envelope and do something quite different. I'd argue that 6 has its merits, but in general it's thought of quite poorly, especially due to a truly dire attempt at online functionality that just does not work. Still, 6 experiments with a lot of interesting ideas (a persistent metagame system, hero alignment, specialist classes return from 4, town conversion, and an attempt to privilege factional unit synergies over just picking the strongest units of every faction along with buffing low-tier units), but they don't all work out (in particular the latter issue often led to cookie-cutter armies that made the game feel repetitive). In a better world, 6's good ideas would have been iterated on and refined for the future, while the bad ideas left out.
Unfortunately, 7 was a mess. 7 was at least conceptually an attempt at something like 5 - previous game experiment a bit much, let's go back to the formula. 7 is basically a straight-down-the-line imitation of 3 and 5. Unfortunately, 7 is also a low-budget affair that didn't have enough development time, so it reuses lots of graphical assets from 6, and it's slow and buggy and has horribly broken AI. You can look at 7 and see a bunch of neat ideas or things that would work if the game were not a dog's breakfast in terms of polish, but unfortunately, it is.
And it seems, tragically, that 7 killed the mainline HoMM series. There might have been a comeback, except Ubisoft didn't greenlight another one. Considering what a low-budget affair 7 was, and how else Ubisoft tried to exploit the IP with cheap spin-offs (with the notable exception of Clash of Heroes, which is fantastic), my guess is that turn-based strategy games just don't sell well enough for Ubisoft to consider them worth funding properly.
Except...
Now they're making Olden Era.
Now Olden Era looks like an indie-style game, closer to Songs of Conquest than to HoMM 6 or 7, and maybe that's a good sign. Maybe Unfrozen have the time and money to make a polished, high-quality release, and not chasing a triple-A style release will help it. I very much hope that's the case.
On the other hand... Ubisoft do not have a good record here, and their ability to screw up HoMM development is impressive, so a very high level of caution is warranted.
Meanwhile the Russian guys behind Horn of the Abyss are continuing to put out excellent, professional-level updates for the third game for free, so that is a strong consolation.
It was my understanding that, at least among more casual strategy gamers, it's always been specifically III that's considered the stone-cold classic and the definitive entry in HoMM series, no? Olden Era seems to specifically harken to HoMM III.
To answer the original question, while not completely the same, Civ III tends to be considered one of the weaker iterations of Civilization, with Civ IV better appraised.
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