I have now played both Disciples I and II and, I must say, both titles give a bad name to turn-based strategy games.
To start off, I would like to note that turn-based strategy happens to be my favorite genre. Additionally, I would like to note that I have been playing said games since the mid-1990's.
In my opinion, both Disciple games are near the bottom of the barrel.
Why do I say this? I'm glad you asked. It seems to me that a turn-based strategy game needs but two things: it needs to be turn-based, and it needs to have an element of strategy to it. Simple, yes?
Well, Disciples clearly has the turn-based part down pat: you and your enemies take turns playing. Case closed.
Unfortunately, there is absolutely no strategy involved here. Your only real choices are limited to:
(1) Choosing one of four nearly identical races.
(2) Choosing a few nearly identical units to deploy.
And that is the extent of the strategy. Once your units are deployed, they must follow a linear path preordained by the developers. On this path, you will fight predetermined enemies of a predetermined level at a predetermined time. Forget terrain factors. Forget tactical maneuvers. Forget surprise attacks. As far as the developers are concerned, you will play this linear game in a purely linear fashion, and you will like it.
Ultimately, the game comes down to banal level-grinding. If you have sought out and needlessly annihilated every living thing in your path, you will be of a high enough level to beat the stage. If not, you will die. No strategy required.
Others may like this simplistic gameplay; I do not. I am done with the Disciples series for good.

Seems more like a review for the gamepage than a thread, but ok.
Sorry you don't like the game, I understand but can personally enjoy it just for the mood/music.
Here's my 0.02
I don't think the Disciples series features great strategic depth, but there's more to it than just the table screen. You can choose to powerhouse 1 party and go stomp on things, that'd be the most obvious strategy sure, but it's indeed very tedious. You could also try and manage multiple parties, this is way more effective and saves a lot of running around.

Strategic considerations:
* Party composition.
* Item allocation.
* Spell usage (appropriate time; mana conservation).
* Controlling terrain (Tricky, in particular. The guys that can pull and drop rods are weak and hard to defend).
* Which hero type to use for which purpose.
* How you want to upgrade your units.
* Taking down enemy units that are significantly strong than you (hugely. Grinding doesn't help. You have a lot of options here).

The Disciples games aren't bad, but they're trumped by the Heroes Of... series imo.

To be fair, Disciples 2 ramped up the "strategy" element of the game by including more things that your units could do in combat, but overall I would agree. The Disciples series in general tends to substitute "patience" for "foresight and planning" as far as directing your army is concerned. Without resource caps, troop caps, more randomness and tactical options in combat, and a map system that generally favors overwhelming everyone with a single maxed-out party, Disciples misses out on the complexity possessed by games like, say, the X-com series.
Then again, the X-com series was FREAKING HARD. Disciples is a lot more forgiving for beginners, and the story, at least, is passably interesting.

I agree. The whole necessity of levelling up your party is what got old to me. And if you lost a levelled up party you might as well start over.
And trying to level up more than two parties is just ridiculous. At that point you've killed all the weak fodder to level up the other two parties and your third party gets slaughtered.
I also think the experience required to level is a bit absurd.
That's my two cents.

I find it quite telling that most games based on this concept provide an auto-fight option by default. Some are harder and a little bit more complex than others, but they seem to be basically about the mood, as AvatarOfLight suggested, and exploration and some management. The Total War series seems to be designed to combine this gameplay with complex RTS battles.

To each their own. I like Disciples 2 more than HOMM series, although at one time i probably sunk more hours into HOMM 3 than i did into sleeping. It has far superior music and it's art design is simply stunning. Also, if you're saying it has no strategy to it you are plain wrong. Different lords, races and hero types all handle very differently. You can beat enemies many times your level if you plan ahead and you can get your arse handed to you if you're not careful.

I just bought it because I love it.....I know this is not a creative spot on product but I love it though.There is something with it that can make me sit for some hours and and feel good in a way that (for me) is "it" and only"it".

Agreed, you're spot on with your analysis. I am a huge HOMM 2 fan and I agree 100%, there is very little strategy in Disciples. But I still love it. Why?
1-Art is beautiful
2-I enjoy levelling up. For me the big goal was always, "How am I going to utilize every resource on this map / every unit in my race in order to defeat all the enemy capital guardians?" Plus as an RPG fan, and one of those dreaded RPG fans who always chooses "Fighter"...I just enjoy watching my party grow in power over time and eventually eat bunches of dragons like candy.

So I guess I approached Disciples as an RPG and not as a strategy game.

As an old hand at games like these, I do have to say that I find the game... well, simplistic. I'm now four levels in to the Empire campaign, and I've come across a couple problems, gameplay-wise.
* First of all, the fact that I can only carry one leader (and no army) forward from level to level makes it pretty certain that I'm only going to work with one (main) leader, with a clean-up crew hanging out in the backfield once my territory gets too big for a one-group patrol. Which then brings up a subtler problem with the campaign level design, at least so far - chokepoints on the map have assured that I don't need more than the one lead and one backup. Of course, that's just a campaign issue, not so much for gameplay, and I'm only four levels in to one campaign; that may differ later, or while playing the other races.
* The unit tree makes for some interesting decisions; unfortunately, at least with the Empire, the branches aren't different enough, or the choice is plainly obvious - not that one choice should always be favoured over another, but given the option between a sixty-point, one-unit-only healer and a forty-point all-party healer, I don't see much reason to take the first over the second, especially since the main thorn in my side has been enemy units with full-party attacks. And the difference between the two fighter-based upgrades is minimal at best; the left-hand branch has immunity to mind-effects, the right-hand branch has more hitpoints and goes one level higher. Hopefully this changes with the other races, but experience thus far suggests that it doesn't.
* Unit creation is always a fun time for me in these games. I can refer myself back to games like Ultima III or Ogre Battle for some ideas. As such, the limit in the variety of units - one fighter, one archer (fighter sub-type with fewer hitpoints and the ability to hit any enemy on the field), one mage, one healer, one giant (another fighter-type) - is restrictive, as is the fact that units don't do different things from different positions (in Ogre Battle, the game I know which this system most closely resembles, units have different attacks from the back row than they do from the front) As it is, I now design my units with one of two purposes: damage to the entire enemy line versus high damage to single targets. Not having a time/turn limit on fights renders heavy defence and healing units mostly obsolete, and the high rate of damage trumps the rather pathetic defensive bolsters and healing abilities later in the levels.
* Special abilities gained at levels, by and large, relate to found items. Yes, there are a few that are innate, but - well, why does a fighting leader need lessons to manage a sword-type artifact? Why can't my Archangel read a ruddy book? And is there any reason that I shouldn't grab Leadership every time it comes up so that I can travel with a decent-sized army?
* The biggie for me: taking over enemy towns doesn't give me access to enemy unit types. Mixing and matching would have added to the variety of the gameplay and the overall replayability. The magic list feels similarly restrictive - although, and I say this as someone who loves the tactical possibilities of magic in games like this, the burdensome costs of the spells makes resource management a vital skill, a big plus to my mind. Why not let us research all the spells, and penalize (via higher research costs, maybe?) the spells out of our own normal range? Or limit the number of spells we can research per level, à la Final Fantasy? Basically, this whole point is about being forced into a particular paradigm - set of units, set of spells - whenever you play a certain racial group. Maybe enemy leader-types shouldn't be accessible, but I'd have loved to have a few Possessed in place of my basic Fighters.

I do enjoy the game - there isn't a pearl in my collection without its flaws - and I intend to keep playing. I am having a good time. It's just that, even as an admittedly old hand at these games, a good game of this nature should have me dealing in concepts and strategies for days before I get a handle on it, not hours, and new ideas should be constantly arriving on my mental doorstep. I don't predict that this one will vex me terribly; there seems to be one workable concept with few significant variations.

EDIT - experimentation has shown that there is, in fact, a time limit of sorts on combat. I think it was ten rounds (a fairly lengthy fight, to be sure) and after that, the attacking party auto-retreated, with the defenders getting a full round. So that makes a heavy bastion a viable defensive strategy, anyway.

I had the opposite experience -- I needed ADDITIONAL heroes to handle certain things -- for instance, a rod planter, or at least one backup dude to take care of stuff elsewhere -- and it got kind of problematic because I had to grind to get my units/heroes to a decent level, which got kind of tedious.

There's a LOT of stuff I liked about the game -- it's deep as hell in a lot of ways, and the campaign missions tend to be really well designed -- but the limit to only transferring one hero between missions, or no way to fast-level your units as you get farther along, creates some tedium that prevented me from ever doing more than one mission without needing a bit of a break.

* I seem to recall that new units start at higher ranks as you go along but I don't really remember. I also seem to recall every new thing starting at level 1. I have the crappiest memory on earth.