daluggage: It should be possible to max out most stats later in the game. It's more a matter of deciding which abilities Shawn will train first.
I think the time limit is quite gentle. There are a limited amount of actions you can do on a day, but here are a lot of days. There is enough time to explore everything. There are certain events that must be handled before a certain day, but the game gives you more than time enough to act and lots of hints that a deadline is approaching (it's a bit like dealing with the elementals in Quest for Glory 2; you need to deal with them when they are in Shapeir but get time enough to do so). And if you still do not perform the action in time, then the game continues, but you might get a different ending.
Cavalary: Still bad.
As for time limits being gentle and sufficient, heh, you don't know me do you? :)) Pretty sure I'd blow through pretty much any limit if not struggling to meet it, and get stressed out in the process anyway. (Yeah, the elementals thing was the frustrating part of QfG2, as much as I liked it otherwise. But remember that if you were out in the desert when the city would be destroyed, it wouldn't happen, elemental would just vanish and you could go on. Game would be broken since you need that elemental captured for later, but I banged my head against that enough to figure out a momentary way around it before getting to the proper solution.)
And maxing out means maxing out. Sure liked the QfG system, train through use, can just sit somewhere and practice plenty of things and soon enough you'll have 100% (100xgame#) and kick ass. All the nights spent on the twisty streets of Shapeir practicing every spell I could, all the desert fights carefully done so I'd get the most practice out of them, then finally see stats at max, say ok, now go and actually play.
Fair enough, we have different tastes I guess.
The point of Hero-U (and Quest for Glory/Heroes Quest) is that the player acts like a hero. And do to that, at some point the player need to act when the time is right (or the need is high) and make good use of the limited time that is available. After all, heroes are supposed to arrive when the house is still burning to rescue everyone inside, not when the house is burned down to the ground and there are only ashes inside.
There are several scenes in Hero-U that are not optional (like the rogue classes and some dinnertime conversations) and they are used to inform the player repeatedly that something needs to be done. So it is not possible to be wandering around exploring (like in the desert of QfG2) without knowing something urgent is going on.
The game balance should allow you to play a game and increase your stats by playing. If you are forced to grind /max stats before actually playing the game's story, that would annoy me very much. And if you have 100% stats before actually playing, a lot of the actual gameplay would be boring for me (fights to easy, not enough challenge).
