Was away for some time and mainly on mobile, so sorry for the late reply.
Grargar: Both the standard and the deluxe edition are now on sale:
https://www.gog.com/promo/20180714_daily_deal_lords_of_xulima Thanks for the heads up! Appreciate it. Bought while on sale.
ZFR: I've put all RPGs on hold few years ago, because I wanted to finish all Might and Magic games from 1 till everything released before HoMM5. Now that I'm about to finish Dark Messiah, the last of the bunch, I'm ready to start them again.
Gede: Wow! That is hardcore!
So... you finished them all, one after the other? How long did it take you? How much fun was it? Did you struggle with the interfaces? Did you use a walk-through? Were the games difficult?
Looks like I started MM1 in 2011. 7 years now. Wow...
https://www.gog.com/forum/might_and_magic_series/might_and_magic_1_questions In this time I finished all the Might and Magic universe games (MM1-9, HoMM4 + expansions, HoMM5, King's Bounty, Crusaders, Dark Messiah). All in release order. HoMM1-3 I finished before so I didn't replay them. Dark Messiah is the last one I finished (this week). Only thing left are the 2 expansions for HoMM5. After that I don't think I'll be continuing any longer since I don't like the way the franchise went.
I took breaks between games though. If I played all non-stop would have been much faster.
I did not go the hardcore way of drawing my own maps for MM1. I used maps that had very little, if any, spoilers. The ones in the guidebook that comes with the game are good in that regard. You have the map, but no direct spoilers. I used fully annotated maps only to some crazy areas in MM1 which were annoying otherwise.
Used a bit of guides and lots of help on the games' GOG forums. But no direct hand-holding walkthroughs.
No problems with interfaces. You get used to them very quickly. Very very quickly. MM6's pseudo 3D engine game me a tiny bit of motion sickness for the first hour or 2 of playing but that quickly went away too.
The only interface "help" that I used was assigning the "Heal" spell keys to my keyboard's macro for MM1 and MM2. Since you use that spell a lot.
It was *extremely* fun. You just need slight adjustment to your style if you're used to modern RPG games with scaling difficulty. In MM1-8 all areas and dungeons are open from the start so you can end up with dungeons that are way beyond your level 1 party. Basically don't be afraid to go everywhere and if it's too difficult just go back and come back later.
The only game in the series which might be too difficult is
Heroes of Might and Magic 1. It also doesn't add much story-wise so if anyone wants to skip one game, this would be it. Definitely worth trying out first though...