Disciples 3 - Review @ Worthplaying

Worthplaying has kicked up a late review of Disciples III but the extra time hasn't improved their view.  The score is 5.5/10 and here's a sample:

In a bit of a shift, the game — when it works as intended — is closer to the Heroes of Might & Magic series than it is to previous Disciples games, mostly because of the changes to combat. Unlike its predecessors, Disciples III features a full hex-based battlefield in which units can move around, and particular hexes grant bonuses to different types of attack damage. It's a nice dynamic, forcing you to consider movement ranges and positioning. If you have soldiers near a melee damage hex, there's a good chance that a fast-moving opponent could get onto it and cause serious damage. Likewise, moving a unit off a bonus hex — even if there are no enemies nearby — could cause trouble later.

This is the idea, anyway, but the AI prevents it from working as intended. The computer is ludicrously easy to exploit; the most you can say for it is that it will take advantage of the bonus hexes if the opportunity presents itself. Beyond that, it'll never notice if it needs to focus fire, or if it should keep a unit out of movement range of your troops, or, worst of all, what it needs to kill first. This is most obvious when enemies attack your Guardian Nodes, which are the defenses that sit on top of your resources. Most Guardian Nodes, after leveling a little, gain a combat ability that lets them endlessly summon reinforcements. The AI will always go for the reinforcements first, as they're normally the closest targets to them. If they can't kill your summons in one combat round, then you'll eventually win by sheer attrition. Harder difficulties don't appear to change up the combat AI, either, only serving to make the AI on the overworld map more aggressive. It's difficult to argue that the change to hex-based combat is a positive one.