Can you answer me two questions please ?

1. Sometimes units seem to attack two adjacent stacks at once. I observed this with the shark guards but my friend playing haven did not observe this for his Sentinels. Are there rules/abilities for this to happen ?
2. What is the Pagoda of the Great Challenger doing ? The help text does not make sense to me.

1. Yes, there are some units with the ability to attack several stacks at once, e.g. cerberi. I am not aware that the shark guards or wanizami have such an ability but I might be mistaken. The pretorians (upgraded sentinels) have a passive ability that they join a retaliation strike of an allied unit when they are adjacent to both the attacked unit of their group and the attacker. But this doed not explain your observations. Maybe try to reproduce 'em, might have been still bugs (althoug I have never experienced those).
2. Can't help with that question, sorry, I haven't been playing around with the racial sprecial building so far. Maybe you can copy the building description here?

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In addition, the Haven grunts have the ability to support adjacent units by sucking up half or part of the damage the attacked unit is dealt.
That's probably what you have been observing, shark guards attacking a unit which was adjacent to and protected by a sentinel/pretorian leading to the "illusion" that the shark guards attack several units at once. It's a special unique feat/ability of the sentinels/pretorians.
You can right-click on the units in the battle screen to bring up comprehensive information about the units and their abilities.

You can run game in offline mode with /offline switch.

Works with release patched to latest 1.1

So is HOMMVI out yet? I haven't heard anything about it in a long while. Is it better than HOMMV?

Yes it's out since October and has received a few very necessary patches already (still some bugs in there).
I liked it a lot, it's definitely different from the previous HoMM due to the design changes discussed earlier. Can't really say whether it is better than H5 since personal taste plays obviously a big role when it comes to Heroes and its iterations.
There should be a demo out there somewhere, it's probably best to try it out to see whether you like the design changes as they seem to divide people's opinions, some love them some hate them.

Thanks for the info. Glad that its being patched and I think I will check out the demo.

Anyone know if you can disable shadows or tweak them some config file like in D3?

There is an option to modify the quality of the shadows in H6 IIRC.

Well yes but to my knowledge you can only go so far as "low" quality.
It's the same with D3 but here you can change shadow settings in "user.ini" from 512, 1024 or whatever to 2 and with that no more shadows. (thank God for that!!)

I am asking if there is a similar way to do it in H6. All I see in config file are the same options as ingame: low, high etc.
Why would they leave horrible low quality shadows and no option to turn them off, which is way better then low IMHO, I just can't understand.
It's like having a size 38 shoe and they won't let you take if off -_-'