Why would anyone play HoMM

[adddeed]

They are pretty damn great actually. If you liked Kings Bounty you'll love them.

 

[tuluse]

Sorry, should've been more clear. Like Infinitron pointed out, I meant dividing armies between different heroes.

I just seem to remember that, towards the end when fighting only the AI in HoMM3, it made absolutely no sense to have more than one army. If split in two, it became useless because you'd run into a concentrated force and lose due to inferior numbers. There was no clever way of using tactics in order to defeat a larger army, it was, like Slenkar said, merely a numbers game.

That's how I remember it being anyhow. Very one dimensional in that sense. I do, however, love both HoMM3 and 4 due to nostalgia, visuals and their amazing soundtracks.

Early in the game you want to grab things as quickly as possible. If you have more than one castle, you need more heroes for logistics reasons. You could use multiple armies to threaten your opponent in multiple locations. Use army A to get them to defend base A, while you attack base B with army B (while withdrawing army A). You could also launch suicide attacks with small armies and use spells to reduce their numbers before you took them on with the bulk of your army.

Also, if you couldn't defeat larger AI armies, you are bad at the game.

 

[Johannes]

It really depends on the map how you want to split your forces. When it's an economy game, of course you have to move around to grab those multiple buildings and mines from your enemy, and prevent him from doing the same. And if there's more than 1 castle per side then those too obviously. If the enemy comes at you with a huge, concentrated army, sure that is tough to defeat usually - but you still have the defenders advantage of getting new recruits to defend from that sooner, you've got castle walls possibly to help in a battle, and if he doesn't win he's lost since you grabbed all the econ buildings he couldn't defend. And when you see that coming you do have some time to gather your forces together for defense, or, send a force towards his castle for a trade.

Multiple heroes is of course a given only even to send reinforcements to the main army, but having them go out and do stuff with some units on them, makes perfect sense too. Usually you'll have 2 or 3 heroes who are properly suited for combat.

 

[groke]

...as tedious as Master of Magic...

I am *squeezing* the *juice*!!!!!

 

[adddeed]

Currently at the Hall of Heroes map, man there are so many different strategies possible, and so many ways to either win or get your ass kicked, it's great. Every single move and decision you make counts. Good stuff.

Really loving the art style too. Especially those little creature sprites.

Uninstalling HoMM games, since no one convinced me they are worth keeping.

Maybe i'll keep HoMM4, seems to be a bit different than the rest.

 

[Cadmus]

HoMM4 is by far the best of them, mechanically. It has the most advanced hero/leveling system, combat and magic system of all Heroes games. V and VI are just fucking bland overproduced, oversimplified, streamlined and boring pieces of goat cum, I hate them for being so goddamn bland. HoMM 3 and 4 are as good as this type of game gets. There's lots of differences between them though and I could go on forever about that.

The problem with all these games, Disciples, Heroes, AoW is that the late game is invariably boring, sluggish and not rewarding. Heroes IV gets around this by having awesome game systems in place for you to play with and experiment, Disciples solves this problem but a WORKING quick resolve for the combat (it mostly works due to the PC not having too much to fuck up due to the simple combat system) and AoW is kinda fucked because the hero development is too simple and the risk in the battles is too great. It also lacks city screens and is more zoomed out than the other games, making look not as good although the art direction is great, just a little behind Disciples. Heroes are also the best polished games of them all with sleaker interfaces (albeit this doesn't say much as there's barely any standard in the genre), better ratio of playing/waiting and so on.

Another thing is that all of the games are the most fun to play at different points or in different modes, Homam is possibly the only game where you can fully enjoy the hero development in just a skirmish map. Homam has some very balanced and varied units, Disciples 2 too but they don't get play that much different, they just look incredibly pretty. In AoW I just ended up buying tons of the most expensive units or sometimes a special one to counter a specific enemy. The artifact forge and some other stuff gave me the impression the game is not really balanced vs. the AI and just makes you feel good raping the enemy. I admit though that I've played this one the least. I still like it but the shit late game doesn't reward me with enough interesting stuff compared to the other two games, so I think that's mainly the answer to your idiotic question in the OP.

 

[adddeed]

Interesting stuff. Though why are you complaining about the late game. This is not a 4x game where you micromanage a thousand things. It's a scenario based game, with relatively few cities, and your only goal is to kill. Same with HoMM.

What interesting stuff does Heroes reward you with in the late game exactly?

 

[Cadmus]

Interesting stuff. Though why are you complaining about the late game. This is not a 4x game where you micromanage a thousand things. It's a scenario based game, with relatively few cities, and your only goal is to kill. Same with HoMM.

What interesting stuff does Heroes reward you with in the late game exactly?

Speaking of bigger maps mostly but this applies to Disciples 2, Homam 3,4 and AoWSM.
I'm complaining about the late game because:
- generally, resources don't matter anymore
- you are required to perform many moves with many different heroes to defend/attack different points of interest but at the same time, they hardly matter much as you have your own PWN army ready to rick-roll anything that comes its way
- all the fights take longer because of advanced technology and more units (Disciples 2 exception)
- the stakes are low for anything else than your main army so you don't care
- the map has been cleared up and therefore most of the turns you spend trying to get from A to B with nothing in between ->no immediate gratification
- the computer AI in ALL of these games was programmed by a sadistic asshole so while the AI is easy to defeat in combat, it doesn't have your puny human stamina and therefore uses logically the best strategy of spamming tons and tons of useless heroes and capturing all the mines/cities/dwellings you are too lazy to defend, and it usually gets so annoying you have to do something about it but it doesn't matter neither to you or the PC because ultimately, you have already won if only you manage to catch the last fucker with a big enough army to call it the main one

So the only reason to have fun in the late game is:
Disciples 2: pretty units, in campaign leveling your hero, but the perks kinda suck
Homam 3: leveling your hero and seeing how strong your army is, because homams have the advantage of being able to infinately match your army with a bigger army, it is possible to always have a big enough challenge with big enough reward
Homam 4: the same as 3 plus you get to play with the magic system and hero system, I've talked about this in my stupid blog so allow me to quote myself:

Spoiler

Firstly, the hero can learn up to 5 primary skills, each with 2 secondary skills and 1 tertiary skill (which can be leveled up separately after you’ve learned the primary skill but the secondary skills are prerequisites for learning a new level of the primary skill) with and all of them having 5 levels! The primary skills have also been changed from a global attack bonus to hero-specific attack, ranged attack, attack damage, def. against melee, def. against arrows, speed and initiative (because heroes are now like regular units, more on why that is awesome later).

There are many more academies where you can learn skills, there are special buildings that improve skills you already have, and there are special buildings that improve your hero’s statistics. Put all this together and you can build a hero almost exactly the way you want! What does it matter you ask? Wouldn’t I want the same skills every time like in H3 thus eliminating all the diversity from the character builds? Well, I’m glad you asked!

The reason why you will be interested in choosing different skills for different games is this:

ALL THE FUCKING SKILLS ARE FUCKING OVERPOWERED.

Let’s take the Tactics skill.

In H3, it was ok. It allowed you to reposition your troops before the battle and maybe move them a bit more to the front thus allowing a surprise attack of your 500 Royal Griffins on the enemy archers in the 1st turn.

In H4 , Grandmaster Tactics does this: +5 speed, + 3 movement to all units. Along with the expanded formations option in the hero screen, this is already better than the H3 skill. As any Heroes player knows, movement points on the battlefield can be the most powerful and game-changing thing. Basically, your slow-but-powerful units become fucking –fast-and-powerful-units.

That’s pretty nice you say, but it doesn’t sound so overpowered! But wait, there’s more!

By learning Tactics, you are guaranteed (unlike in H3) to learn the following skills: Offense, Defence and Leadership (because learning the primary skill means you’ll be offered its related secondary and tertiary skills on the level up instead of a fucking Eagle Eye). These give you 50% bonus to damage (both ranged and melee) 50% defence and 5 morale and luck.

Now compare what you’d have to do in Heroes III to get this (you can’t, those numbers are just too high but you’d have to be so lucky as to get all those skills on random level-ups or in random buildings).

A hero with Grandmaster Tactics has an incredible tactical and power advantage against a hero without it. Such a skill would be totally game-breaking in Heroes III (all the unit statistics are very similar so it’s not unfair to compare the skills between the games).

This makes leveling up so more fun and important than in Heroes III and actually provides you in turn with more tactical and strategic options.

But, shit, you say, that only means the game is broken with such a powerful skill available to every hero on whim!

Yeah, not so much! Almost every other skill is like that.

Look at Scouting: one of the most useless skills in Heroes III (or maybe every other game, the game designers just don’t know what to do with it).

+5 scouting radius, shows enemy numbers and town screens (!!!) and reveals enemies with Grandmaster stealth. With all skills : + 200% (oh yeah!) sea movement, +50% land movement, + the hero with Grandmaster stealth becomes fucking invisible – this means you can go around the map, pass the stack of 30 black dragons and pick up the loot they have been guarding for thousands of years.

This is something so cool and potentially game-breaking I just love the fact they had the balls put it in the game.

Primary skill: Grandmaster Combat: Increases the hero’s defenses to 60. Do you know how much does a Black Dragon have? 40!

My point is, all of the skills DO SOMETHING. They are incredibly powerful and balanced only by everything else being powerful. That does not mean that in the end, everything is the same. It only means that if you take Combat, your hero can mop the floor with anything and if you do it right you can use the hero alone and clear the map with him.

From this we get to …

The Magic and Combat

Now that we have built a magically focused hero, not just a guy who by chance managed to find some spell power bonuses, we can fucking destroy the enemy.

Spells in Heroes IV are very similar to the skills, FUCKING OVERPOWERED.

First and foremost I must mention that you can take multiple heroes and give them all different abilities, thus replacing the weakest of your castle’s units for example.

Do you remember how we had to learn Earth magic in H3 in order to be able to select what town to port to? Well, now we can learn Order Magic and fucking townportal our army in the middle of the combat. In H3 you could level up Air magic and if you had lots and I mean really lots of spell power, you could Hypnotize maybe 5 enemy Behemoths to join you (but you were not allowed to attack them).

In H4 you can learn the Order Magic and Hypnotize any unit for 3 rounds! Doesn’t matter if it’s the enemy’s most precious stack of 60 Archangels, you can just take them for 3 rounds and wipe out the enemy army. Are you seeing the pattern here? Everything is overpowered.

You can learn Teleport and not only teleport your own units but also the enemy units!

The direct damage spells now get their power from your magic school’s secondary skill, therefore not depending on blind luck (maybe I’ll find some Spell power bonus) but they scale directly with your hero’s level and the skill’s level. It takes a really long time (compared to H3) before the direct damage spells become obsolete, thus allowing you to support your Asylum hero with Disintegration while he is kicking everyone’s ass with Grandmaster Combat.

Each school has some amazing spells, just look:

Mass misfortune – + 50% more damage to all enemies, Disintegration – shittons of damage and removes the body, preventing it from being resurected, Cat Reflexes – unit attacks twice (for the duration of the whole combat), Dragon Strength – +100% HP and 100% damage (and this STACKS with Giant Strength + 25% HP and dmg), Sanctuary – protects all friendly units from spells and attacks.. I could go on.

This of course means, you are given an incredible range of options and valid tactics, from teleporting the enemy archers next to your crusaders to buffing your strongest unit or hero with every possible defense and attack buff until they are so strong they can kill the whole enemy army. It’s absolutely exhilarating thinking of some cool way to fuck up the enemy even when your army is 3 times weaker and defeating them. Oh yeah and I almost forgot that summons are now also very strong and you can stack them one on top of another as long as you have mana, so good luck to that lone Chaos hero with Grandmaster Combat if you summon 30 phoenixes, give them twice the HP and damage and watch them burn everything to the ground.

You can weaken the enemy army by firstly killing the enemy hero with the Tactics skill, causing them to lose the bonuses.

There are almost no limits to what you can do. All the buffs and debuffs stack , heroes can kill the enemy and can be killed, it’s amazing.

Basically, it boils down to having lots of shit to level up and experiment with plus there can always be that stack of 50 black dragons guarding some interesting loot and it takes forever to build up army strong enough to defeat them. So Homam4 rewards you with some things that still matter in the late game and more challenges

AoW kinda fails there in my opinion, you don't get to see new units like in Disciples 2, the combat is good but simple and hero skills and perks are meh. I never care about story in these games so I might be losing out on something.

 

[Johannes]

If it's a situation where capturing mines or cities doesn't matter anymore you've already won. Why keep playing at that point?

 

[Cadmus]

Yes, why..
As I said, some games KINDA reward you for it and sometimes you have to because it's a campaign map and it might be required to win but you encounter no resistance, just minor annoyances.
But most of the time I ask myself that question, why the fuck am I still playing this, it's over!
And that might also result in a reluctance to even start the game as I KNOW I won't be finishing it cuz it WILL get fucking boring.

 

[catfood]

Yes, why..
As I said, some games KINDA reward you for it and sometimes you have to because it's a campaign map and it might be required to win but you encounter no resistance, just minor annoyances.
But most of the time I ask myself that question, why the fuck am I still playing this, it's over!
And that might also result in a reluctance to even start the game as I KNOW I won't be finishing it cuz it WILL get fucking boring.

The thing is this can be solved by adding various victory conditions. For instance by keeping track of a gaming score and having the game end after a certain amount of turns. The player with the most points wins. Or having other winning conditions like be the first player to level a hero up to a certain point, or capture one town, or gather a certain amount of resources (these last two are more common). HOMM does a decent job in offering a variety of victory conditions. Totally conquering the map is extremely boring especially on larger maps. It's just the way these games work.


EDIT: Walrords (3 DLR) also does a good job of offering a wide variety of map types and ways of winning

EDIT2: also regarding Warlords (an incredibly underrated TBS series), once you've hit a certain level of power, by capturing a large number of cities, all the other AI players would concede the game to you. I thought that was a smart way of eliminating end game grind.

 

[Cadmus]

HOMM does a decent job in offering a variety of victory conditions. Totally conquering the map is extremely boring especially on larger maps. It's just the way these games work.

Well, in HOMM you play against yourself, the AI in most cases is so extremely retarded that there's only a brief window where it can overpower you by raw force and then it's almost over. Also the AI doesn't mostly doesn't seem to understand the objective, therefore most of the win conditions except for time limit are sort of "whenever you want to end this, just take this town". Sometimes it works, though.
The way Warlords did it sounds pretty good! I haven't heard of this game.

 

[Angthoron]

Interesting stuff. Though why are you complaining about the late game. This is not a 4x game where you micromanage a thousand things. It's a scenario based game, with relatively few cities, and your only goal is to kill. Same with HoMM.

What interesting stuff does Heroes reward you with in the late game exactly?

Speaking of bigger maps mostly but this applies to Disciples 2, Homam 3,4 and AoWSM.
I'm complaining about the late game because:
- generally, resources don't matter anymore
- you are required to perform many moves with many different heroes to defend/attack different points of interest but at the same time, they hardly matter much as you have your own PWN army ready to rick-roll anything that comes its way
- all the fights take longer because of advanced technology and more units (Disciples 2 exception)
- the stakes are low for anything else than your main army so you don't care
- the map has been cleared up and therefore most of the turns you spend trying to get from A to B with nothing in between ->no immediate gratification
- the computer AI in ALL of these games was programmed by a sadistic asshole so while the AI is easy to defeat in combat, it doesn't have your puny human stamina and therefore uses logically the best strategy of spamming tons and tons of useless heroes and capturing all the mines/cities/dwellings you are too lazy to defend, and it usually gets so annoying you have to do something about it but it doesn't matter neither to you or the PC because ultimately, you have already won if only you manage to catch the last fucker with a big enough army to call it the main one

So the only reason to have fun in the late game is:
Disciples 2: pretty units, in campaign leveling your hero, but the perks kinda suck
Homam 3: leveling your hero and seeing how strong your army is, because homams have the advantage of being able to infinately match your army with a bigger army, it is possible to always have a big enough challenge with big enough reward
Homam 4: the same as 3 plus you get to play with the magic system and hero system, I've talked about this in my stupid blog so allow me to quote myself:

Spoiler

Firstly, the hero can learn up to 5 primary skills, each with 2 secondary skills and 1 tertiary skill (which can be leveled up separately after you’ve learned the primary skill but the secondary skills are prerequisites for learning a new level of the primary skill) with and all of them having 5 levels! The primary skills have also been changed from a global attack bonus to hero-specific attack, ranged attack, attack damage, def. against melee, def. against arrows, speed and initiative (because heroes are now like regular units, more on why that is awesome later).

There are many more academies where you can learn skills, there are special buildings that improve skills you already have, and there are special buildings that improve your hero’s statistics. Put all this together and you can build a hero almost exactly the way you want! What does it matter you ask? Wouldn’t I want the same skills every time like in H3 thus eliminating all the diversity from the character builds? Well, I’m glad you asked!

The reason why you will be interested in choosing different skills for different games is this:

ALL THE FUCKING SKILLS ARE FUCKING OVERPOWERED.

Let’s take the Tactics skill.

In H3, it was ok. It allowed you to reposition your troops before the battle and maybe move them a bit more to the front thus allowing a surprise attack of your 500 Royal Griffins on the enemy archers in the 1st turn.

In H4 , Grandmaster Tactics does this: +5 speed, + 3 movement to all units. Along with the expanded formations option in the hero screen, this is already better than the H3 skill. As any Heroes player knows, movement points on the battlefield can be the most powerful and game-changing thing. Basically, your slow-but-powerful units become fucking –fast-and-powerful-units.

That’s pretty nice you say, but it doesn’t sound so overpowered! But wait, there’s more!

By learning Tactics, you are guaranteed (unlike in H3) to learn the following skills: Offense, Defence and Leadership (because learning the primary skill means you’ll be offered its related secondary and tertiary skills on the level up instead of a fucking Eagle Eye). These give you 50% bonus to damage (both ranged and melee) 50% defence and 5 morale and luck.

Now compare what you’d have to do in Heroes III to get this (you can’t, those numbers are just too high but you’d have to be so lucky as to get all those skills on random level-ups or in random buildings).

A hero with Grandmaster Tactics has an incredible tactical and power advantage against a hero without it. Such a skill would be totally game-breaking in Heroes III (all the unit statistics are very similar so it’s not unfair to compare the skills between the games).

This makes leveling up so more fun and important than in Heroes III and actually provides you in turn with more tactical and strategic options.

But, shit, you say, that only means the game is broken with such a powerful skill available to every hero on whim!

Yeah, not so much! Almost every other skill is like that.

Look at Scouting: one of the most useless skills in Heroes III (or maybe every other game, the game designers just don’t know what to do with it).

+5 scouting radius, shows enemy numbers and town screens (!!!) and reveals enemies with Grandmaster stealth. With all skills : + 200% (oh yeah!) sea movement, +50% land movement, + the hero with Grandmaster stealth becomes fucking invisible – this means you can go around the map, pass the stack of 30 black dragons and pick up the loot they have been guarding for thousands of years.

This is something so cool and potentially game-breaking I just love the fact they had the balls put it in the game.

Primary skill: Grandmaster Combat: Increases the hero’s defenses to 60. Do you know how much does a Black Dragon have? 40!

My point is, all of the skills DO SOMETHING. They are incredibly powerful and balanced only by everything else being powerful. That does not mean that in the end, everything is the same. It only means that if you take Combat, your hero can mop the floor with anything and if you do it right you can use the hero alone and clear the map with him.

From this we get to …

The Magic and Combat

Now that we have built a magically focused hero, not just a guy who by chance managed to find some spell power bonuses, we can fucking destroy the enemy.

Spells in Heroes IV are very similar to the skills, FUCKING OVERPOWERED.

First and foremost I must mention that you can take multiple heroes and give them all different abilities, thus replacing the weakest of your castle’s units for example.

Do you remember how we had to learn Earth magic in H3 in order to be able to select what town to port to? Well, now we can learn Order Magic and fucking townportal our army in the middle of the combat. In H3 you could level up Air magic and if you had lots and I mean really lots of spell power, you could Hypnotize maybe 5 enemy Behemoths to join you (but you were not allowed to attack them).

In H4 you can learn the Order Magic and Hypnotize any unit for 3 rounds! Doesn’t matter if it’s the enemy’s most precious stack of 60 Archangels, you can just take them for 3 rounds and wipe out the enemy army. Are you seeing the pattern here? Everything is overpowered.

You can learn Teleport and not only teleport your own units but also the enemy units!

The direct damage spells now get their power from your magic school’s secondary skill, therefore not depending on blind luck (maybe I’ll find some Spell power bonus) but they scale directly with your hero’s level and the skill’s level. It takes a really long time (compared to H3) before the direct damage spells become obsolete, thus allowing you to support your Asylum hero with Disintegration while he is kicking everyone’s ass with Grandmaster Combat.

Each school has some amazing spells, just look:

Mass misfortune – + 50% more damage to all enemies, Disintegration – shittons of damage and removes the body, preventing it from being resurected, Cat Reflexes – unit attacks twice (for the duration of the whole combat), Dragon Strength – +100% HP and 100% damage (and this STACKS with Giant Strength + 25% HP and dmg), Sanctuary – protects all friendly units from spells and attacks.. I could go on.

This of course means, you are given an incredible range of options and valid tactics, from teleporting the enemy archers next to your crusaders to buffing your strongest unit or hero with every possible defense and attack buff until they are so strong they can kill the whole enemy army. It’s absolutely exhilarating thinking of some cool way to fuck up the enemy even when your army is 3 times weaker and defeating them. Oh yeah and I almost forgot that summons are now also very strong and you can stack them one on top of another as long as you have mana, so good luck to that lone Chaos hero with Grandmaster Combat if you summon 30 phoenixes, give them twice the HP and damage and watch them burn everything to the ground.

You can weaken the enemy army by firstly killing the enemy hero with the Tactics skill, causing them to lose the bonuses.

There are almost no limits to what you can do. All the buffs and debuffs stack , heroes can kill the enemy and can be killed, it’s amazing.

Basically, it boils down to having lots of shit to level up and experiment with plus there can always be that stack of 50 black dragons guarding some interesting loot and it takes forever to build up army strong enough to defeat them. So Homam4 rewards you with some things that still matter in the late game and more challenges

AoW kinda fails there in my opinion, you don't get to see new units like in Disciples 2, the combat is good but simple and hero skills and perks are meh. I never care about story in these games so I might be losing out on something.

Well damn, this post has just made me want to replay Homams 4. I know a lot of people say it's decline, and in many ways it definitely is, but I still enjoy it, for exactly the reasons listed. Plus the class system, it's pretty neat that skill choices bring about additional synergy buffs.

 

[Cadmus]

Well damn, this post has just made me want to replay Homams 4. I know a lot of people say it's decline, and in many ways it definitely is, but I still enjoy it, for exactly the reasons listed. Plus the class system, it's pretty neat that skill choices bring about additional synergy buffs.

I don't think it's decline at all, I think it was necessary to change the formula. Heroes 3 was almost perfect as it had been building up on the previous games. There wasn't much else they could have done with Heroes 4. The only thing I think that could have been better was the art direction and AI, otherwise the game was great.

 

[tuluse]

The biggest problem with HoMM4 to me is that the factions and units are just way more boring than 3.


I always liked playing Fortress and larping the alliance of various fantasy creatures

 

[Abelian]

One thing I didn't like about MoMM4 was how there were only four unit tiers. However, I did like the skill system and class combinations.

Another complaint I have is the simultaneous retaliation for both melee and ranged attacks. It removed much of the tactical element in figuring out how to minimize losses or even achieve flawless victory. However, I did like the unit spell books, since they increased tactical options.

The one degree of separation in alignment was interesting (such as Life-aligned player could only recruit Nature and Order heroes) but I didn't feel it added anything to the game.

While I don't dislike HoMM4, it would have benefited from six extra months of development time.

 

[Cadmus]

One thing I didn't like about MoMM4 was how there were only four unit tiers. However, I did like the skill system and class combinations.

Another complaint I have is the simultaneous retaliation for both melee and ranged attacks. It removed much of the tactical element in figuring out how to minimize losses or even achieve flawless victory. However, I did like the unit spell books, since they increased tactical options.

The one degree of separation in alignment was interesting (such as Life-aligned player could only recruit Nature and Order heroes) but I didn't feel it added anything to the game.

While I don't dislike HoMM4, it would have benefited from six extra months of development time.

Yes, it would have.
For the retaliation - I don't know, you still have the option of First strike buff/items/skills, therefore it takes more effort to have that advantage and makes it harder to blitzfuck the enemy's most important stack in the first round with no drawback. Adding the simultaneous ranged retaliation factually increased the tactical options - before you had: A) attack B) don't attack (defend) C) don't attack (wait), now you have: A) attack with retalation (hits the attacker) B) attack with retalation (hits a meatshield including the possibility to hide behind bullshit units like summoned leprachaun) C) attack without retalation (wait for the enemy to deplete the retalation on something else) D) wait till the enemy is effectively blocked to not be able to retaliate, (thus attacking again with no retalation but under different conditions). You need to pay closer attention to the game and adjust your tactics more than before based on the state of the fight.

 

[Kane]

When there is Age of Wonders?

I've got HoMM2 - 4 installed, but haven't touched them since i started Age of Wonders 1. Strategically, and tactically, it's the superior game.

And the map is not a clusterfuk like that of the heroes series which were full of resources and pick ups and all kind of stupid crap. Not to mention the tons of trash mobs guarding said stupid crap.

YOU TALK LIKE A WOMAN
SHOW ME YOUR HONOR

 

[adddeed]

Speaking of bigger maps mostly but this applies to Disciples 2, Homam 3,4 and AoWSM.
I'm complaining about the late game because:
- generally, resources don't matter anymore
Well there is upkeep in AoW. Even if you have 1000 gold, if some of your mines get taken, you start losing money. Your units can then rebel and leave you.

- you are required to perform many moves with many different heroes to defend/attack different points of interest but at the same time, they hardly matter much as you have your own PWN army ready to rick-roll anything that comes its way
I am in the middle of the AoW campaign. I have never had more than 4 or 5 unit stacks to move around.


- all the fights take longer because of advanced technology and more units (Disciples 2 exception)
I usually play with auto resolve, except during really key battles, or battles which are even.

- the stakes are low for anything else than your main army so you don't care
I care in AoW, losing a stack means losing a castle, or a mine and then wasting turns trying to get it back.

- the map has been cleared up and therefore most of the turns you spend trying to get from A to B with nothing in between ->no immediate gratification
True.

- the computer AI in ALL of these games was programmed by a sadistic asshole so while the AI is easy to defeat in combat, it doesn't have your puny human stamina and therefore uses logically the best strategy of spamming tons and tons of useless heroes and capturing all the mines/cities/dwellings you are too lazy to defend, and it usually gets so annoying you have to do something about it but it doesn't matter neither to you or the PC because ultimately, you have already won if only you manage to catch the last fucker with a big enough army to call it the main one
Also true.


AoW kinda fails there in my opinion, you don't get to see new units like in Disciples 2, the combat is good but simple and hero skills and perks are meh. I never care about story in these games so I might be losing out on something.
The combat is not simple, it is more deep and tactical than either Disciples 2 or HoMM. And yes the campaign is pretty good.

After AoW i will give HoMM4 a go.

 

[Cadmus]

Speaking of bigger maps mostly but this applies to Disciples 2, Homam 3,4 and AoWSM.
I'm complaining about the late game because:
- generally, resources don't matter anymore
Well there is upkeep in AoW. Even if you have 1000 gold, if some of your mines get taken, you start losing money. Your units can then rebel and leave you.

- you are required to perform many moves with many different heroes to defend/attack different points of interest but at the same time, they hardly matter much as you have your own PWN army ready to rick-roll anything that comes its way
I am in the middle of the AoW campaign. I have never had more than 4 or 5 unit stacks to move around.


- all the fights take longer because of advanced technology and more units (Disciples 2 exception)
I usually play with auto resolve, except during really key battles, or battles which are even.

I care in AoW, losing a stack means losing a castle, or a mine and then wasting turns trying to get it back.

The combat is not simple, it is more deep and tactical than either Disciples 2 or HoMM. And yes the campaign is pretty good.

After AoW i will give HoMM4 a go.

1) Ah yeah ok, I forgot about that. On the other hand, I also don't really remember not having enough money, it just kinda feels like busywork at the point when you have 2-3 armies of iron maidens who can destroy practically anything and you have to constantly worry about the stupid AI overrunning you with low tier armies. But I concede this point, I'm no expert on AoW and I really liked it, just got bored with it too quickly.

2) That's entirely too many for me. I guess if you don't mind having to manage 5 armies each round with no results and knowing 4 of them don't have the hero to be transfered to the next map and in the case you lose a battle you just buy a new army, that's fine. For me it feels like busywork in any of these games, that's why I hate the AI strategy that forces me to do this.

3) I remember not trusting autoresolve in AoW because the combat was too complex and I knew I could have done so much better. Dunno.
4) The combat is not more tactical and deeper than Homm4 imo, I think Homm4 provides better and more significant tools for you to tackle the encounter with. The magic system is most definitely better, the units have technically more HP so that you have more time to play around with your options, there's no random hit chance and the hero skills influence the combat much more. The Homam4 sieges might be even more interesting than AoW (but I just loved the possibility to siege the town from more sides with more armies, that was awesome). Also there's less opportunity for cheesy tactics such as wearing down the enemy with expendable units or (and I'm not sure if I remember it correctly) buttfucking the enemy army with overland spells, all of which the AI doesn't seem to take the proper advantage of.

Mind you, I'm absolutely not saying that AoW is bad, I'm just trying to point out how underappreciated Homam4 is.

 

[adddeed]

Yeah i'll definitely try HoMM4 after this one. The only thing is that the maps in AoW are so clean visually, those in HoMM4 are completely the opposite and full of, stuff.

 

[baturinsky]

HoMM has just too much micromanagement. Especially when it's a campaign where you can take several heroes to next mission, so you obsessively send each of them to each +stat place.
So, I like KB and KB-like HoMM campaigns (such of Shadow of Death) more.

 

[octavius]

HoMM has just too much micromanagement. Especially when it's a campaign where you can take several heroes to next mission, so you obsessively send each of them to each +stat place.

Why do you need those maxed out characters? It just makes the next scenario too easy. Besides you get a better score by completing the campaign in fewer turns. For a more fun, challenging game try to complete it in as few turns as possible.

 

[Cadmus]

The thing is, the score does so much of nothing it's really hard to force oneself to care about it. They really should show you all sorts of stats from the game at the very least. I don't even know what it's exactly compiled from. Time/something..? It's too arbitrary.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

Not to mention some abilities are either worthless or random instant wins.

That's fun.
Exaggeration with instant wins, though.

Heroes 3 is the most unbalanced in this way. Heroes 4 is the least. Did not play 5-6.

I've not played 4 or 6, but of the rest 5 definitely has the best skills and character development.

Play 4. It tops 5 in term of character development. It works very much like an RPG. 4 had some damn great ideas and artistic/story direction. Fucking bankruptcy.

I don't think the question is as retarded as you guys make it out to be. Badly worded, but we could discuss the merit of AoW's approach vs that of HoMM, as they are very much the same style of games. We compare RPGs that are far more distinct sometimes.