meant M&M... some reason I keep flipping them in my head naming convention wise

Hell yes. What you want is King's Bounty: The Legend (on steam and other digital delivery services). Its a little awkward at times in the english translation but the game is a gem. Absolutely beautiful artwork through the entire game and completely addictive gameplay. If you're after old school there's always the original King's Bounty series...
I love SRPGs on my DS (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Luminous Arc, Fire Emblem) , King's Bounty The Legend is what I play on my PC. I won't go into detail about how its played, there's sites for that and most agree its a wonderful game, the metacritic score sits around 80 and I think that's criminally low, even with its slight flaws.
The expansion/new story is due for english release October 30 (King's Bounty: Armored Princess), and it adds a whole new adventure, new mechanic (pet dragon that grows with you) as well as some more refined tweaking of the original King's Bounty The Legend (changes to the 3 classes skill trees etc).
Offsite links:
http://www.kings-bounty.com/
http://www.kings-bounty.com/eng/

Thank you very much for this!

Hell yeah King's Bounty is AWESOMENESS.
And M&M 4+5 (World of Xeen) is great too, I'm currently playing it again atm. Must... Beat... Game...
BTW someone mentioned on this thread that they'd played the latest HoMM - honestly, I have to say that out of all five + expansions, HoMM 3 beats them all hands down.

If there was a way to switch off the annoying "underground" game mechanic, I'd be inclined to agree. As it is, I'll stick with HoMM2.

Oh man, I love these games too. I really gotta pick up King's Bounty some time.
I've barely started, but X-COM might be of huge interest as well. As is Laser Squad Nemesis, made by the same guy. Unforunately X-COM isn't on GOG, but it is $5 for the first 6 games (I hear the last couple are...less than stellar though) on D2D right now. X-COM is hailed as quite a landmark of early turn-based strategy RPGs. Huge community behind it too.

ZOMG soooooooo true. You can play randomly generated maps with underground off you know... And I tend to play the campaign with auto combat on, it gives an interesting new view on the skill trees - because you don't really need so much luck or magic. It's more about stats that way and you can focus on actually completing the maps - I have never been able to complete a full campaign yet, but recently found this lovely auto combat way, so I'm gunna try to finish it that way.
But still, yes, the underground sux. Although the one thing I HATED about HoMM2 was that you had to give up one army teir as you can't fit them all in! Blah.