First question:

Is anyone but me bothered that GOG does not seem to offer the original, MS-DOS King's Bounty game at all, and that's the ONLY game in the King's Bounty series they don't offer? What makes this weirder is that this game was often included as a bonus with physical copies of Heroes of Might and Magic (even my copy from the Ultimate Strategy Archives included it despite it not being advertised in the Archives' box or documentation), but GOG's version of that game doesn't include it. So why this stunning omission?

Though that being said, this leads me to the second question:

Is it just me, or are King's Bounty and HOM&M.... really not that good?

Okay, lately I've been playing HOM&M a lot, because that game is in a weird place for me. Sometimes I wonder if there's a rule I haven't learned or trick I haven't figured out that, if only I knew it, I would be making progress much faster. As I'm playing the game now, it often feels like I just have a couple of heroes running around the map, tagging mines and resources, while trying to remember each turn to build something (if possible) at one (at least) of my settlements and keep their garrisons stocked, and even then sometimes my heroes need to camp out at cities until their troops can be restocked.

Every once in awhile I feel a minor frustration when, say, all I have is Warlock-type creatures but the only heroes up for recruitment are Knights and Barbarians, but the majority of the time the game actually feels like its nothing more than mindless wandering, and when I get into combat the "strategy" seems to boil down to "whoever has the most overpowered units is definitely gonna win." Which turns things like battlefield obstacles into more a nuisance than a genuine strategy element (seriously does it matter if my 18 Hydras can't get next to those Rogues if I know said Rogues are gonna make a beeline for me anyway?)

Now, to be fair, its better than King's Bounty--that game was hampered by the "unit types" system where swordsmen and other "knight types" don't like hanging out with faeries or centaurs etc but in KB, you basically had almost no choice but to take what you could get, whereas Heroes gives you alternatives. But ultimately, I keep finding myself wondering "just, where's the depth? What exactly is supposed to be the strategy element here?"

I've heard people say HOM&M3 is the best in the series. I haven't played that one. In fact the only other HOM&M game I've played is Heroes Chronicles: Warlord of the Wasteland and.... it seemed like the same game with slightly better graphics, a redesigned (and arguably more confusing) interface, and more crap you could build in your settlement. I'm... not exactly thrilled.

So what I'm asking, then, is for someone to explain the game to me and tell me what it is I'm missing. Cuz I do feel like there's something "Fun" here (I DO keep playing it), but its not something I can understand just yet. Maybe its an early example of a casual game, like a DOS gamer's Farmville?