Heroes of Might & Magic 4 Defense Thread

[visions]

Magic works per Mage Guild visit.

 

[Maculo]

Finished Might, ends with your hero against a full army. Came down to spamming potion of Immortality.

On the Order/Academy campaign, I am trying to avoid healing/resurrection because it made the Might campaign borderline easy. I find Order slow to start, but once you build a steady stack of Genie and Magi you can mass debuff/buff and spam clone.

 

[Lacrymas]

I find Order the fastest to start, depending on the amount of resources available. I think you can get genies by day 3 and then it's gg. Don't know how it is in Equilibris, though.

 

[Maculo]

Genies are fantastic, especially when you get enough to cast mass slow and illusion/clone (at a certain stack count, slow becomes mass slow).

I must be slow finding the gems for the building then.

 

[Lacrymas]

I use them mostly for Ice Bolt, that thing is ridiculously OP when you get a good stack of genies going. I remember completing one map of the campaign with nothing but genies. They are also flyers, so they allow your hero move a lot in a single turn.

 

[Maculo]

Icebolt is great, but I usually clone Titans or some other unit to start off. I find I minimalize casualties better, especially in sieges.

In Order mission 3, you change perspective to a new character, and I miss when each hero had a special bonus, such as stronger monster types or boosted magic.

 

[Sceptic]

I decided to start my epic playthrough of this series (at least to 4) as a side thing and am starting from 1. Started as Ironfist (human), who is canonically the winner of the campaign, but then I realized all the races/lords have the same campaign, they just start from different places on the map, so I'll restart it as Alamar (warlock) and go from there. The first map can very easily be rushed in like 10ish minutes anyway. The map heavily favors Ironfist, though, with peasant huts strewn throughout it. The game is pretty primitive, at least compared to the later entries, but it still has its charms.

Rushing is a good strategy for most maps, even moreso than in later games IMO. It's not so much that they amass creatures, but after a (not-that-long) while they have simply beeline to you and wipe your armies off the map. I think Ironfist might be one of the harder ones to win with, and the game is badly balanced compared to 2-3, but it does have quite a bit of charm.

 

[Lacrymas]

Warlock is the strongest far as I can see. Only the centaurs are weak, but you only have 5 slots in the army and 6 tiers of creatures. In the end I even dropped the hydras because they were slowing me down and went with only minotaurs, dragons, gargoyles and griffins. It's interesting to note that griffins are a warlock creature, not a human one, in this game. Sorceress is maybe the weirdest in a bad way, it has a mishmash of creatures that feel like the designers threw together because they didn't know where else to put them. I don't think balance was a priority at all, lol.

 

[Lacrymas]

Turns out you can split stacks in 1. Hold shift while transferring units across heroes or from heroes to towns and voila! Pretty nifty.

 

[FeelTheRads]

interesting to note that griffins are a warlock creature, not a human one,

Turns out you can split stacks in 1. Hold shift while transferring units across heroes or from heroes to towns and voila! Pretty nifty.

That's how these are in Heroes 2 too.

 

[visions]

It's not quite the same. In HoMM1 you can't have two different stacks of the same creature type in one army (If you move creatures of a type you already have in that army into whichever slot, they'll be automatically combined with the creatures of the same type you already have). In HoMM 2 you can split troops of the same unit type into different stacks within one army.

 

[Lacrymas]

Yeah, you can't, it automatically puts them in one stack. It's not really that much of an issue, but at least I now know how to have 1 gargoyle in my exploration/caravan heroes to speed up everything. I'm on the third mission, where you have to dig up the Ultimate Artifact, but it's a small map so everything goes by fast, I even annihilated one of the lords in the second week. Minotaurs are OP.

 

[Lacrymas]

When I "demo'd" HoMM7 when it came out, I thought it was like a combination of 5 and 6, but mostly a retread of 5, so I didn't bother even finishing the first mission. I might try it again in some distant future with all the patches. Some more thoughts on my ongoing HoMM1 playthrough - the ghosts everyone are complaining about are indeed very overpowered if you don't know what you are doing. They like to beeline your weakest units (usually ranged ones) and absorb them in their own stacks, creating an avalanche effect. What I found advantageous is encircling your weakest unit with your other stacks, preferably on the very first round using movement and Teleport. The enemy lords split their armies a lot and they are usually very easy to take down even with modest-to-weak armies. Even though the system is primitive, I can see why it got popular and exploded the way it did. I'm glad they didn't stick to the fairy tale aesthetic for 2 to 4.

 

[Citizen]

I'm glad they didn't stick to the fairy tale aesthetic for 2 to 4.

Aesthetic-wise the first one is much better than HoMM4. Prerendered sprites look stylish in HoMM3, but in the fourth game they are just horrid.

Gives me Xeen vibes.

 

[Revenant]

I'm glad they didn't stick to the fairy tale aesthetic for 2 to 4.

Wut? 2 has p. much the same aesthetic as 1, even some hero portraits are the same. Only 3 had a more gritty artstyle of the bunch, 4 returned to the fairy tale style almost completely.

 

[cvv]

I'm glad they didn't stick to the fairy tale aesthetic for 2 to 4.

Wut? 2 has p. much the same aesthetic as 1, even some hero portraits are the same. Only 3 had a more gritty artstyle of the bunch, 4 returned to the fairy tale style almost completely.

This, I remember being disappointed with the more humdrum fantasy-stock 3 art style when it came out, after the wonderful fairytale/whimsy/funny 2. Also the music was a serious decline after the epic operatic score of 2. To this day I'm one of the few Homam fans who prefer 2 to 3.

I forget, did they drop dynasty weapons for Heroes 7? Those were some goddamn shenanigans tied into always-online in 6.

They dropped it - unfortunately. It was one of the best ideas of VI - legendary weapons that level up too. I didn't even mind it was tied to uPlay, since you have to launch uPlay to play the game anyway. I understand Limbic got rid of it because of the backlash against DRM but I wish they kept it without the online component.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

4 returned to the fairy tale style almost completely.

It did look like shit though, laughably so.

 

[Lacrymas]

Maybe "fairy tale aesthetic" wasn't the right choice of words. I meant the style of drawing, it's like a talented 8-year-old painted them. Sure, it has its charms, but it's not for me. Heroes 2 isn't so ...basic, I guess? The sprites have more details and are more elaborate in general. Also, behead those who insult Heroes IV.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

It does look like shit tho , should have given sprites one last hurrah

 

[Rahdulan]

4 returned to the fairy tale style almost completely.

It did look like shit though, laughably so.

My impression from Heroes 4 was how all assets seemed to lack that final pass required in pre-rendering. Like everything was too flat or something.

Was it art style or did devs genuinely run out of time considering the state they were in at the time? Who knows at this point.

 

[Lacrymas]

There's definitely something up with HoMM4's art style, but I don't think it's necessarily in a bad way.

 

[Cyberarmy]

While I couldn't bear HoMM 4 s art style, it was both sides attacking at the same time bothered me most. I only completed its main campaign because I really liked the campaign and OP heroes killing armies.

 

[Lacrymas]

So, I kinda started enjoying HoMM 1 in a not-retro way. The minimalist (compared to later entries) design and the almost complete lack of unnecessary features (the only weird thing I see is that Paralyze and Blind are basically the same spell, at least I don't see a difference) make for a very focused and tight gameplay. I just finished dealing with Castle Ironfist, I actually failed the first time because I didn't have a big enough army or enough good spells to defeat the last castle. That's because I tried to do it in a manipulative way, by leaving his other castles standing and rushing for the objective, but it didn't work due to lack of army and spells. It can be done this way, but it requires hoping for luck with the mage guilds.

After I reloaded a very early save of that map, I managed to capture all 5 of his extra castles with a comparatively small army by splitting their units between their castles and their heroes. The map is always skewed towards the enemy (they start with 5 castles in very close proximity to each other), so if the AI was smarter there probably wouldn't be a way to beat them. I won the last battle fair and square, i.e. no lone dragon Berzerk + Armageddon spam, retreating and rinse and repeat.

I might do a retrospective review of HoMM1 when I'm finished, it teaches a lot about design and I think it's worth it.

 

[Lujo]

HOMM1 had a more symbolic aesthetic which I happen to preffer to 2 (and all the other games in the series). Also, it had smaller, tighter battlefields. After so many years, replaying HOMM II after replaying HOMM I had me feeling like II was just bloated in too many directions and had units swimming in the overly large battlefield. HOMM III also felt really bloated afterwards. I ended up having the most appreciation for 1 of the early installments. I tas it's flaws, sure, but it's a better game than either II or III.

Also, inovation died and overly conservative fanbase won when they couldn't handle Heroes IV. HOMM 1-3 are really simple games, there's more complex indies on Steam out there, and II and III can kind of be seen as decline on the tightness of HOMM 1. Heroes III drew a humongous, enromous crowd of people who are, when you get down to it, really casual. It's probably the most played game when it comes to girls from a time no other game was really marketed to girls, so for many girls it was really the only game they played. What III had was graphics which made it look, to the casual crowd, as a "seirous" game, what with the "realism" and all, tacked onto a game which was really, really simple. This is what makes Heroes III so much more popular with huge seas of people to this day - it makes them feel like they're good at a "serious" game, while secretly being a casual phone game with a specific kind of graphics. No joke. I played it a lot, so did literally everyone around me, but I calls them like I sees them.

Add simultanous retaliation to it, so that it's not just a game of who strikes first, and the suddenly added depth simply chases most of the fanbase off. More people were put off by sensible development of the system than there were people put off by by the actual screwups of Heroes IV. Heroes IV tried to innovate and this was met with so much backlash that noone really dared develop the game in other ways than graphics, more or less, ever. So it kinda stayed a phone game with ever more, well, "realistic" graphics, so to speak. Heroes V was painful to play, the graphics got more boring, the specc demands for what's basically a phone game went through the roof, and the gameplay went backwards, so if you got hooked on IV it felt like you had something aimed at kids in your hands and it just wasn't as stimulating as it was when you were a kid.

Kings Bounty didn't innovate in that particular direction but I liked it a lot better than anything after IV, because it at least shook things up properly. Or rather, it went back to King's Bounty, also a game I played a lot, which was kind of deeper and more interesting than HoMM games. HoMM was more like a really simplified deathmatch / multiplayer for KB, and that's not really all that KB was.

 

[Lujo]

I've feeling that IV would not have failed if they weren't trying to overinnovate. If there wasn't an incentive to try to outdo III in "graphics" and they stayed 2d and avoided all the ways that particular aspect alienated folks, the series would have turned out much different afterwards. They'd have more resources to do a better overall job, and the backlash would not necessarily have been so huge. But "better graphics" were such a huge part of Heroes III success that I can see how they ended up thinking they need to have "even better graphics". Turns out what the public wanted was not "3d at any cost", if that ends up making the game look "less serious".