i feel that the problem with king's bounty games is that they are too open ended, which just means more grinding, rather then challenging fights. If you would have less land to explore, i think it would lead to more tactical play, and less grinding
That's part of the tactical play. Choose your fights.
There is no real choice. The basic formula for each of the new KB games looks like this:
1) Clean up your starting area. Level up, return for reinforcements. Clean up more.
2) Proceed to the next island. Notice that every group there is "deadly" or "very strong".
3) Pick weaker groups first, level up, reinforce, collect goodies, take on others.
4) Alternate between choosing to clean up this area or going to another one to pick up some goodies to make cleaning the current one easier.
5) Rinse and repeat for about 950 battles.
That's why with previous KB games I always got burnt out around the third or fourth area you explore, and it was no different in WoTN. I've reached Arlania, uncovered a couple of other locales, checked them all out and all I've seen were the same baddies, just with inflated numbers. Also, in this one there's just too much fucking undead and spiders and battles with these get really monotonous. I think that for the last 50-60 battles my recipe for flawless victories on hard was to summon a phoenix and pelt the enemy with hard-to-kill ranged units and debilitating spells like slow. It's a major design flaw if I can stick to a really simple and primitive 'tactic' like that for such a long time and just kill everything because no group of enemies I met so far was able to challenge me. Yes, I realise that demons are fire-resistant and supposedly there's an area full of them, but I'd probably find another gimmick against the demonic opponents just as quickly.
There's just not enough variation. The RPG elements are not strong enough to keep you occupied between battles, the story is often funny but doesn't treat itself seriously to the point where the player can't treat it seriously as well (they should aim more for something a la Divinity 2). So all you've got there are basically sets of battles with similar enemies of increasing numbers (undead set, nature set, viking set etc etc) and an overland map which will most of the time serve you to reach the nearest recruitment point.
The game copies HoMM-style combat really well, but the issue is that HoMM had less battles, and there was more strategic gameplay in between them. Where to move your heroes, which mines to flag, how to develop your cities. When the battles did happen, they more often than not were something important that meant a leap forward for your scenario - by defeating some enemies you fulfilled one of the crucial goals, like providing resources, retrieving your artifact that gave you an important edge over your enemies or clearing an important path. This is also the thing that WoTN got wrong. Here battles are, just like Bratislav said: grinding, plain and simple. It's like an MMO in some aspects, where you kill mobs to get gold and XP so that you can kill more powerful mobs and see larger numbers on the screen and that's all there is.
