Shadowmasters HoMM 8 idea
Disclaimer: Some of this material is based on/or taken from Shadowgnomes HoMM VII idea. No copyright infringement intended.

Part one, general overview
World:
Once, this was a world of magic and wonderful creatures. Of epic battles that were recalled for ages. Of a Demon Sovergein and a Warrior Queen. Now it’s filled with brimstone and “progress”. Most people call it Ashra. It’s a world were dreams and magic comes to die. Kings and Queens that had absolute rule are replaced by Emperors who leave the rule to their ministers.
The Human Empire has finally settled over its former conflicts and the various duchies have united to form a grand Empire with a Grand Emperor as it ruler. Currently they try to conquer as much territory as possible using new technology and a new, unseen means of transport called the “Train”. This expansion brings them in conflict with the Beastmen of the Pao Islands, the Orcs of the Silver Cities and the Elves of Irollan who won’t accept the hu-man rule and are against their uncontrolled expansion. They also have managed to reach overseas, were they made new colonies and cities and came in contact with new, never seen creatures; that have been made to human slaves and forced to fight for them.
The Demons, who have been locked away for centuries, have been driven crazy by their imprisonment. Having no one to battle or to conquer, they have fought and inbred among themselves creating new, monstrous abominations, of a kind that the world has never seen before. Over time, the walls of their prison have weakened and finally they have managed to reach a colony of Humans that has separated from the general rule of the Emperor and are practicing the faith in an Ancient God, but are actually praying to the Demons, while their “Prophet” plans to utilize their faith to finally release the Demons from their prison.
The Necromancers were nearly destroyed during the last Human-Necromancer war and, in desperate attempt to regain their former power and glory they have turned to books with ancient spells, and then summoned creatures from before the time of Asha. After years and years these beings have mixed with the Necromancers and changed their minds, their be-liefs, their very being. Those new monsters want to battle the Humans and finally avenge for the years of lose and pain that the Humans and the Wizards have inflicted on them.
The Wizards were driven from their Silver Cities by the Orcs, who in their turn were forced to change their place by an alliance of Beastmen, led by the ferocious Minotaur Kings, who have broken their chains and rebelled against their masters, the dark Elves of Ygg-Chall. Rejected by Humans and Elves alike, they moved to the Mountains of Grimhein and man-aged to defeat and destroy the most of the local population. The small part of the Dwarves that survived through the war has made an alliance with the Mages and provides them with technology and supplies in rule for work and safety. Now they live there, having no contact with the outside world. But the humans have moved to the mountains in search of
precious metals and Coal. Now, the Wizards will stand their ground, no matter how and no matter what the price…
The Orcs have occupied the Silver Cities and the desert surrounding it. They have learned to summon physical representations of Mother Earth and Father Sky and managed to tame the Death Worms of the Desert. Now they feel threatened by the expansion of the Human Empire and are recruiting warriors to fight the upcoming human armies, not being shy on human and Beastman mercenaries and Nomads, descendants of the Wizards who have lost their ability and skills in magic and are raiding and destroying Human and Orc villages alike.
The Elves have lost their real path in life eons ago. They have lost contact with the Humans, their only friends and real allies and have locked themselves up in their forests only praying and being slowly driven mad by the same creatures they swore to protect, due to the tainting of the ground by the Necromancers and the expanding Humans. Finally, they turned to sacrifice, not making a difference who to kill, Human or Elf. Now their genes have mixed with the tainted soil and their souls are destroyed and corrupted. The resulting mon-sters are half-elven, half-forest and neither dead or alive. The Dragons have remained with the Elves, hoping that at some point they will realize the error of their ways and descend into a higher state of being. Finally, a new Elf, pure from the inside and having the ultimate wisdom granted to him by Sylvanna rises as the new leader. But the Humans are marching up, burning the woods and destroying their home. What will this new leader do?
The Dark Elves still live in their underground caves, severely weakened by the rebellion of the Minotaurs and the multiple battles fought against firstly the Dwarfs and then the Wizards. Most of their kind has died, so they are replenishing their armies with creatures’ long dead, whose bodies have turned to stone. These beings were summoned by Malassa to serve her worshippers. The Faceless were destroyed by their former allies and are long gone, not even remaining in the shadows of this cursed Earth. They are now marching up, determined to conquer the whole Earth and reshape it in their image.
The Minotaurs have defeated the Dark Elves, subjugated the Naga and chased away the Orcs. The Beastman Kingdom reaches far and wide, controlling all of the Jade Sea, the Free Cities, the steppes of Ranaar and all the way to the Sea of Shadows .Currently, they have a trade relationship with the Human Empire and trade their fish and their exotic prod-ucts for things produced by the Empire. But, the Empire has put their sights on their giant kingdom and wants to conquer or at least to subjugate it.
Resources:
Money-Gold (The basic currency all over the Empire is Ashrians. The same currency is utilized by the Beastmen and the Orcs).
Common: Wood, Stone, Mercury
Rare: Coal, Sulfur, Mithril
Limited: Diamonds, Crystals,
All are used for buildings, and coal is used to power Trains, that can carry your army more rapidly through the landscape. Humans can have a building that transforms wood into Coal for gold. Crystals are utilized to build homes for Champion creatures and Mithril is utilized to give an extra upgrade to creatures.
Trains.
New means of transport. Is exclusive to the humans, but can be built if you have a human castle under your control. Can be utilized to transport Heroes between castles, besides resources from mines and troops.
Creatures
Similar to HoMM 5 to 7, the creatures will be divided into Core, Elite and Champion.
Some creatures have an extra upgrade (F.E-Peasant=>Peasant Rebel=>Rogue), that are unlocked for Mithril. The amount of Mithril utilized depends on which creature you want to upgrade. Several creatures can be upgraded into Neutrals in special buildings you find on the adventure map, for an amount of Crystals.
Creature stats:
HP: How much damage the top creature of a stack can take at maximum/ how much it has left over.
Attack: Raises physical damage by 10% per every point higher than enemy creature's de-fense.
Defense: Lowers physical damage by 5% per every point higher than the enemy creature's attack.
Initiative: Determines the order the creature goes in each round of battle.
Speed: Determines how far a creature can move in battle.
Shots: How many ranged attacks a creature can make per battle.
Range: Determines how effective indirect attacks will be. Indirect attacks that go over walls or half the field will deal half damage. One quarter damage will occur if the enemy is half-way across the field and behind an obstacle.
Spellpower: the converted power of all spell casting creatures in one stack. Stack power is determined by # Of creatures/Creature level (25>5>1). Max creature SP=Hero SP+5
Mana: Determines how many spells can be cast by a creature each battle.
Heroes
Heroes are the basic member of each army. They are utilized to move across the map.
They can wear artifacts and can utilize them to boost the stats of a friendly creature, lower the stats of an enemy creature or sway the tide of the battle. The stats of a Hero are added to the stats of every creature in his/her army if the Hero has more than 5 of that particular skill.
F.E: Attack: When a hero has 5 AP (attack points), each creature gets one extra point to their attack. This number grows with the doubling of the points, with other words: 5-1, 10-2, 15-3 etc.
The stats are
Attack
Defense
Spellpower: Works different from Attack and Defense. It does not add to the total spellpow-er of the stack and can only be utilized by the Hero themselves. There are indeed creatures with the special ability to take SP (or Mana, as it is called in-game) from a friendly/enemy Hero and give it back to their master.
Knowledge: Increases Mana 10 per point.

Other than their statistics, heroes also have artifacts that they can equip creatures and themselves with. These artifacts cause different bonuses for friendly creatures, negative effects for enemy creatures or allow the hero to cast certain spells (scrolls). A hero can equip an artifact to their: Head, neck, chest, back, feet, arms, left hand, right hand, left fin-ger, right finger, neck and three pocket slots. Artifacts will generally have a specified equip zone.

Heroes can purchase a spell book for 500 gold.

Last of the things about Heroes is that each one of them has a specific skill “tree”. The names of those trees are: Chaos and Order. Each skill of Order has an opposite one in the Chaos tree. The way this skill tree develops depends on the way you behave on the battle-field, whether you leave creatures to flee or attack and how merciful you are towards your enemy. Skills cover a whole range of factions, be it faster movement, farther seeing on the map or the way your creatures attack on the battlefield. Each hero starts with one basic skill and can have an ultimate number of 6, of which all can be developed. Several skills are not depended on the way your “skill tree” has developed, F.E train mastering (each train you have moves faster and farther over the map.) but most of them do. If you have, let’s say, the tree of chaos, you cannot develop the skill of upgrading the moral of your troops, but can have the skill of lowering the moral of your enemy’s troops.

Battles
Battle system: Battle occurs on a turn basis, where every creature moves at least once before the beginning of the next turn. Creatures act on a turn based system determined by the initiative of the creatures. Higher initiatives move first. In the case of a tie, creatures will randomly go based on terrain, size, faction, hero type and hero skills. Battle fields will be determined in size and structure based on passable land around the battle and terrain an-ywhere from a 10x10 field to a 22x22 field. Obstacles are randomly generated in non-siege battles. Siege battles are always on a battle field as large in dimension as the city level (minimum of 10X15), walls add an extra 5 tiles to the battle field.

Moral and luck modifiers: Moral activates on creatures randomly as battle goes on. If "good" moral activates, then the creature it activates on will gain a second action on this turn. This effect only happens once per battle. If you have a negative moral, the creature has a chance of having "bad" moral activate on it. If "bad" moral activates, then this creature will skip one turn. Moral can be increased and decreased by skills, artifacts, spells, hero specials and creature abilities. Moral is lowered as you mix creatures from different factions with double lowering if you have undead in your army (excluding if these undead are from the same fraction as the living creatures), but this can be contradicted if creature has the ability “Permanent Positive Moral.”

Luck is much like moral, but it happens only on attacks and retaliations. If good luck acti-vates, the creatures who benefit from it will deal double damage. If bad luck activates, then the creatures deal half damage. Luck is affected by skills, spells, artifacts, hero specials and creature abilities.

Both luck and moral have a 5% chance of activation per point present. Both have a maxi-mum of 5 and a minimum of -5.

Attack and defense: Creatures have both an attack value and defense value that are ef-fected by spells, artifact sets and hero statistics. The higher they are, the less or more damage creatures under a hero's command grow.

Every point a creature has over an enemy creature's defense causes the attacking creature to deal 10% more damage. Maximum of 300%. Defense works in the opposite way, caus-ing creatures to deal 5% less damage per point of defense higher than a creature's attack, culminating in a minimum of 1/3 of the attack's original damage (before applying damage absorbing skills).

Heroes:
Have no real effect on the course of the battle expect for casting spells. A hero can also utilize an artifact on a friendly creature during the battle in order to strengthen it. Are not affected by spells.

Environment: Affects battle and in some cases, slows down the Hero. Some spells are less/not effective when utilized in specific environment.
Plains: No difference.
Woods: -1 move for walkers, except if Walkers are from Sylvan.
Ship: -2 moves for Walkers and -20 % initiative for all creatures.+ 20% for all water spells.
Underground:-25% for range.+30% for all earth and fire spells. -2 move for walkers, except if Walkers from Dungeon/Inferno.
Lava. -2 initiative for all creatures, except Inferno. +40% damage for all fire spells.
Arctic: +30 % damage for all water spells. +1 for movement for Observatory (wizard faction).
Boneyard: -2 initiative for all living creatures, spells do not work at all.
Lifegarden: +3 initiative for all living creatures.
Spells: There are 40 spells for each element (water, fire, wind, earth, life, death) with:15 if you develop the Order tree, 15 if you develop the Chaos tree and 10 neutral (accessible to both skill trees). There is also such a thing as magic restriction-certain spells are inaccessi-ble for certain factions.
Artifacts: The Artifacts and the system behind them is the similar to HoMM 3 with several major differences: There are artifacts than can be equipped on a Hero, on a unit or (in) on a Castle. Each of them has a specific meaning and way to use it; there are also combinations of Artifacts that in turn create more powerful weapons or Artifacts.
Castles: There are 6 fractions(Empire, Inferno, Icetowers, Beastmen, Dungeon, Steppe) and 2 fractions in expansion (Call of Freedom and Winds of Fate):(Tents and Conflux). Each Castle has (similar to HoMM 3) his own line of protection (each line has 3 levels:The most basic wall, if you build a fort ,the moat if you upgrade the Fort and a (basic) shooter if you build a Castle). If you have conquered a Castle, you may have to rebuild it to your own fraction. This process takes one (in-game) week and at the end you are “rewarded” with the most basic elements of your fractions Castle.
Part 2:The Fractions.
Empire (Haven): “For years we have been developing, transforming, making ourselves better. Now, we are at the top of your power. Our farms produce the most products in cen-turies. Our money dominates the world. Our people are everywhere. And our goal today, gentlemen, is to make sure we stay in this position of dominance.” Minister of Economics, Elina von Hagen.
Symbol: A two headed Griffon grabbing an Imperial Spectre and a Impreal Orb. Black on Yellow.
Colors: Gray. Lots and Lots of Gray. Black.
Gods: Elrath.
Magic: None. Are dependent on Technology.
Army Make-up: Varied European soldiers, Magical creatures from European mythology.
Line-up:
Core:
Knecht-Knaap-Help
Wodewose-Lange Wapper
Kossack-Kossack Otoman
Elite:
Musketeer-Elite Musketeer
Griffin-Griffin Champion
Predikant-Hegumen
Champion:
Reichsritter-Hussar
Angel-Archangel.
Dungeon: We, trusted servants of Malassa, have been humiliated. Our homes-burned. Our families-killed. We have been defeated time over time over time. First-by the pathetic slaves. Then-by the weak and fearful wizards. But now, we have the strength and the ar-mies to stand up. To show the world what true power really is!: El-Heigha, the head priest-ess of Malassa.

Symbol: A Black Dragon swallowing a knight in golden armor.
Colors: Black and dark-red.
Gods:Malassa
Army Make-up: Dinosaurs and alike, elven, earth spirits.
Core:
Stalker-Creeper-Lurker.
Kobold-Troglodyte.
Beholder-Deranged Beholder.
Elite:
Dragon Warrior-Dragon Crusader
Medusa-Medusa Seductress
Grogul-Grogul-Rex
Champion:
Manticore-Ferocious Manticore.
Dragon-Black Dragon;