Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

TBS Wake of Gods, the grandmaster of TBS incline - Strategy tips and script discussion

luj1

You're all shills
Vatnik
Joined
Jan 2, 2016
Messages
12,877
Location
Eastern block
2014-03-01_21.01.57.png



Picked up WoG again for the n time, just as I do every summer. So much fun to play alone or with some buddies. Definitely this is how you do an expansion pack, you *expand* on each and every aspect of gameplay. Anyway, been playing with the options so I will share my setup, and give some of my own HoMM/WoG general tips.


Firstly, some useful links,
 

luj1

You're all shills
Vatnik
Joined
Jan 2, 2016
Messages
12,877
Location
Eastern block
wog_options.gif



Now WoG has many scripts which greatly enhance gameplay.
Scripts I never play without,

Extended creature upgrade - some creatures can be upgraded three times (example, Monks > Zealots > War Zealots)
Universal creature upgrade - allows upgrading creatures of other towns if the appropriate dwelling has been built
Creature stacks gain experience - units gain experience in the same way as the Hero and gain new abilities. A great addition which adds a totally new dimension of gameplay (example, an experienced Hobgoblin attacks twice)
Heroes' upgraded level 7 units become level 8 - the core functionality of WoG is that it adds 8th level units
Heroes get 10 skills - two in addition to the normal 8
Commanders - Type of a henchman which gains experience, improves, and learns special abilities parallel to the Hero. Adds another dimension to gameplay, makes early battles easier and late-game battles more fun and unpredictable
Skill Enhancements - Everything except Warfare and Resistance II (too OP)
Warlord's Banner - adds more abilities to your stacks


Also I instantly ban,

Berserker flies - too fucking OP
Summon/Scuttle Boat - tiresome to defend against weak scouting heroes
Reduce Phoenix weekly growth - OP
Sorcery II
Resistance II
Faerie Dragons
 
Last edited:

luj1

You're all shills
Vatnik
Joined
Jan 2, 2016
Messages
12,877
Location
Eastern block
Master of Magic is 4X, Heroes isn't necessarily 4X. Dominions is too new and questionable to stand the test of time. Nice try, lowly peasant
 

luj1

You're all shills
Vatnik
Joined
Jan 2, 2016
Messages
12,877
Location
Eastern block
Some WoG strategy from the other day,


  • get Vokial, rush Vampire lords, get the commander with Counterstrike. Cast counterstrike on Vampire Lords or use Warlord's Banner to grant them extra retaliations. Watch enemies melt.
  • Loyniss' Learning makes Castle Commander improve insanely fast and stomp everything
  • Gurnisson + Stronghold Commander = EZ early game
  • Thorgrim + dwarves + split your unicorns into stacks = nearly magic immune army
  • Orris with the new Eagle Eye specialty + get magic resistance = MR resists hostile spells, Eagle Eye counters enemies' spellcasting
 
Last edited:

luj1

You're all shills
Vatnik
Joined
Jan 2, 2016
Messages
12,877
Location
Eastern block
Some general Heroes 3 tips,


  • Might Heroes develop their primary attributes better than Magic Heroes
  • Every town has a "crucial" unit for clearing the surroundings
  • Its key to raise your primary attributes
  • Until you get Town Portal, you need a second hero to defend
  • Know your town strengths and weaknesses (example, Stronghold is cheapest, Rampart has highest average HP etc.)
  • Prioritize most precious resource (castle - gems, fortress - sulfur etc)
  • Don't necessarily built Capitol or level 7 dwellings as that is too expensive, let the AI capture the town and do it for you
  • High population doesn't mean jack if you cant afford to buy troops
  • On Impossible difficulty don't go for City Hall right away, instead get your key units and start getting exp
 
Last edited:

coldcrow

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2009
Messages
1,650
Master of Magic is 4X, Heroes isn't necessarily 4X. Dominions is too new and questionable to stand the test of time. Nice try, lowly peasant

Care to elaborate? I get that they focus on different things, but as far as fantasy TBS goes, Dominions (4) is the bestest of them all.
 

luj1

You're all shills
Vatnik
Joined
Jan 2, 2016
Messages
12,877
Location
Eastern block
I think it's a promising scripting platform. I use VCMI mainly as a better widescreen alternative to the HD mod.

ERA should be compatible with almost everything, personally I use ERA (comes with WoG + Yona) + VCMI or HD mod + cherry pick mods from this thread

To freshen up your gameplay I can recommend Improved hero meeting screen, Spells uncovered, new music pack, new sounds pack, new terrains, Morn battlefields and Random skins
 
Last edited:

McPlusle

Savant
Joined
May 11, 2017
Messages
319
Anything from MoM to Dominions, lady.
Is Master of Magic that great? I enjoyed MoO2 (the only game in the series I've played) but people seem to really, really favorably reflect upon Master of Orion 1 and Master of Magic.
 

Lagi

Savant
Joined
Jul 19, 2015
Messages
726
Location
Desert
Anything from MoM to Dominions, lady.
Is Master of Magic that great? I enjoyed MoO2 (the only game in the series I've played) but people seem to really, really favorably reflect upon Master of Orion 1 and Master of Magic.
Since no one answer yet, I only touch MoM, but I was thrilled (didnt start cause still have other game to play/finish). The base building is similar to MoO2 (you raise individual structure instead adjusting slider). Combat is very plausible, fast and with squads of men per unit (like it more than Age of Wonders 1, AoW3). Only the pixel unit are hard recognizable at first, and top-view, square grid of main map looks ehh.. "vintage".

I dont understand Dominion admiration. Step aside visuals and UI, Dominion didnt really have any interesting in execution mechanics, only tons of content. I play this game for 47 hour (according to steam) but most "play" time I recruit unit, adjust squads and move it to next province, rest of the "idle" time I spend reading unit lore and manual (and comparing stats in Inspector :)). After spending that much time with a game, one may expect that you understand some advantage strategy, unfortunately I have no clue about any decent gambit in this game.:MHmm... must check later what was so captivating in this abomination.
:updatedmytxt:
 

coldcrow

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2009
Messages
1,650
Lagi Concerning dominions 3 and 4: I was like that, too. These games are really MP games at heart, mostly because writing proper AI code for them would be very time consuming and out of scope for the 2 man team. I think at its base is the magic system and the race for threats, counters and counter-counters. Once I started to know some basic strategies and also that I had to learn to lose provinces in a war - it became much more interesting.
If you know the game "Sacrifice", compare it to that. The scripted campaign aside, Sac has an atrocious AI, because it also would be really hard to write AI code, thus it became a MP game and a good one at that. I was one of the best for a time and we perfected raiding to an art - the AI can't do that.
For SP dominions you can LARP perfectly - set your fantasy empire conditions (undead menace, righteous paladins whatever) and then play vs master or impossible AI.
 

SkeleTony

Augur
Joined
Aug 17, 2006
Messages
938
Wog is a 'duct tape and chicken wire' fan-made atrocity for HoMM III. Just crap. Horn of the Abyss at least appears professionally done and does not include hundreds of worthless, teenager idea options achieved through shoddy scripting.


I have been a huge HoMM III fan for what seems like 20 years now but it is not even close to being the best turn based fantasy strategy game ever released. It is a very light strategy game (which is fine) with similarly light RPG elements. Many of the units and upgrades do not make any sense for a generic fantasy themed game (which to be fair occurs in many fantasy strats ; even the better ones like Warlords III: Darklords Rising but in that one you can easily change everything to be more sensible). The music is very good (though Heroes II had better) and regardless of the many flaws it is still one of the most addictive 'one more turn' games ever made.
 

Reject_666_6

Arcane
Joined
Oct 30, 2008
Messages
2,465
Location
Transylvania
Wog is a 'duct tape and chicken wire' fan-made atrocity for HoMM III. Just crap. Horn of the Abyss at least appears professionally done and does not include hundreds of worthless, teenager idea options achieved through shoddy scripting.

Not really, WoG was pretty much the JA2 1.13 of HoMM3. Tons of options, all of which can be turned off individually, and even with everything turned off it's still more enjoyable than vanilla SoD due to animated tree sprites. And that's underselling it because a few of its settings fix some big complaints with the game, like lowering Phoenix growth rates for Conflux towns, Necro nerfs and options for banning certain spells like Fly or Dimension Door without getting shafted when they appear in your Mage Guild or having to edit them out of maps yourself. Then there are the innocent UI improvement options like being able to rename towns - oh, the horror!

Of course nowadays we have HotA, which has all those basic upgrades along with some more tastefully done new artifacts and creatures. If you just want to play some H3 with more stuff and logical additions like negative luck, there's no need to go full WoG when HotA exists. But WoG came out ages ago, it was a big deal back then and the pioneer of all these tweaks, that and the backbone of the H3 modding scene.

That said, WoG is still the king of wacko map mutators. Try maxing out AI stack experience gain, with half price 7th day creatures and free artifacts on level-up: the game becomes a mad race to recruit the most heroes, cast them into the wilderness to level up on whatever they can survive, army be damned, ambush enemy scouts for their shit, then fetch their bounty back to your main hero and brainstorm some permutation of what you got so as to survive the incoming riptide of AI armies from hell.
 

SkeleTony

Augur
Joined
Aug 17, 2006
Messages
938
Wog is a 'duct tape and chicken wire' fan-made atrocity for HoMM III. Just crap. Horn of the Abyss at least appears professionally done and does not include hundreds of worthless, teenager idea options achieved through shoddy scripting.

Not really, WoG was pretty much the JA2 1.13 of HoMM3. Tons of options, all of which can be turned off individually, and even with everything turned off it's still more enjoyable than vanilla SoD due to animated tree sprites. And that's underselling it because a few of its settings fix some big complaints with the game, like lowering Phoenix growth rates for Conflux towns, Necro nerfs and options for banning certain spells like Fly or Dimension Door without getting shafted when they appear in your Mage Guild or having to edit them out of maps yourself. Then there are the innocent UI improvement options like being able to rename towns - oh, the horror!

Of course nowadays we have HotA, which has all those basic upgrades along with some more tastefully done new artifacts and creatures. If you just want to play some H3 with more stuff and logical additions like negative luck, there's no need to go full WoG when HotA exists. But WoG came out ages ago, it was a big deal back then and the pioneer of all these tweaks, that and the backbone of the H3 modding scene.

That said, WoG is still the king of wacko map mutators. Try maxing out AI stack experience gain, with half price 7th day creatures and free artifacts on level-up: the game becomes a mad race to recruit the most heroes, cast them into the wilderness to level up on whatever they can survive, army be damned, ambush enemy scouts for their shit, then fetch their bounty back to your main hero and brainstorm some permutation of what you got so as to survive the incoming riptide of AI armies from hell.


The last time I tried WoG was probably 6 or 7 years ago but at least then all of that add-on's options were duct tape and chicken wire. Like adding a new car stereo by using gauze tape to attach a walkman to the dashboard.

HotA is WAY superior on all counts.

Also, while it is an oft-parroted assertion that all of WoG's options can be turned off without screwing you this was not true. There was a lot of annoying crap that could only be done away with by completely uninstalling Heroes III, removing the old folder and then re-installing without any WoG crap. But I am not about to re-try WoG again to recall what all that shit was so...

And so many of the WoG options are just plain stupid and have zero reason to exist (like "commanders" and the crappy '8th level units' that are not really 8th level units you can recruit from towns anyway and were universally stupid (re: "Ghost behemoths" and those vampire dragons or whatever.)).
 

Reject_666_6

Arcane
Joined
Oct 30, 2008
Messages
2,465
Location
Transylvania
I don't think you understand what I'm telling you, Tony.

I'm not saying the WoG isn't duct tape and chicken wire. It is, but it came during the epoch where every other mod was scotch tape and cat gut. I started playing WoG in 2002 and there was nothing that could touch it for years to come. By 2010 there were a few mods built from the WoG blueprints, like Hero of Light and the HD mod, it took until 2013 for the Succession Wars mod to come out (thought I didn't touch that until the dev dude started posting about it on the codex) and they didn't even bother posting English beta verisons of HotA until 2014.

I'm also not saying that it's better than HotA at the moment. Once upon a time (2014-2015), it was objectively better than HotA since HotA was barely a twinkle in some gopnik's eye, but it got surpassed for a couple of years now for most (not all) intents and purposes.

I'm also not saying that I give a shit about what options are stupid, I only care about the good and fun ones since they can be enabled irrespective of commanders, 8th level units or whatever else you wasted your time listing. I should also mention that I don't always play the game with mods (besides the HD one), but I always drop a WoG installation in the game folder anyway just for the sprite animations and I haven't experienced any problems playing from the vanilla h3.exe.
 

SkeleTony

Augur
Joined
Aug 17, 2006
Messages
938
I don't think you understand what I'm telling you, Tony.

I'm not saying the WoG isn't duct tape and chicken wire. It is, but it came during the epoch where every other mod was scotch tape and cat gut. I started playing WoG in 2002 and there was nothing that could touch it for years to come. By 2010 there were a few mods built from the WoG blueprints, like Hero of Light and the HD mod, it took until 2013 for the Succession Wars mod to come out (thought I didn't touch that until the dev dude started posting about it on the codex) and they didn't even bother posting English beta verisons of HotA until 2014.

I'm also not saying that it's better than HotA at the moment. Once upon a time (2014-2015), it was objectively better than HotA since HotA was barely a twinkle in some gopnik's eye, but it got surpassed for a couple of years now for most (not all) intents and purposes.

I'm also not saying that I give a shit about what options are stupid, I only care about the good and fun ones since they can be enabled irrespective of commanders, 8th level units or whatever else you wasted your time listing. I should also mention that I don't always play the game with mods (besides the HD one), but I always drop a WoG installation in the game folder anyway just for the sprite animations and I haven't experienced any problems playing from the vanilla h3.exe.


When I tried WoG there was no HotA or any other mods I was aware of and I still thought it sucked for the very reasons I have already stated. Of course my opinions are just that...opinions.
 

luj1

You're all shills
Vatnik
Joined
Jan 2, 2016
Messages
12,877
Location
Eastern block
Not really, WoG was pretty much the JA2 1.13 of HoMM3. Tons of options, all of which can be turned off individually, and even with everything turned off it's still more enjoyable than vanilla SoD due to animated tree sprites. And that's underselling it because a few of its settings fix some big complaints with the game, like lowering Phoenix growth rates for Conflux towns, Necro nerfs and options for banning certain spells like Fly or Dimension Door without getting shafted when they appear in your Mage Guild or having to edit them out of maps yourself. Then there are the innocent UI improvement options like being able to rename towns - oh, the horror!

Of course nowadays we have HotA, which has all those basic upgrades along with some more tastefully done new artifacts and creatures. If you just want to play some H3 with more stuff and logical additions like negative luck, there's no need to go full WoG when HotA exists. But WoG came out ages ago, it was a big deal back then and the pioneer of all these tweaks, that and the backbone of the H3 modding scene.

That said, WoG is still the king of wacko map mutators. Try maxing out AI stack experience gain, with half price 7th day creatures and free artifacts on level-up: the game becomes a mad race to recruit the most heroes, cast them into the wilderness to level up on whatever they can survive, army be damned, ambush enemy scouts for their shit, then fetch their bounty back to your main hero and brainstorm some permutation of what you got so as to survive the incoming riptide of AI armies from hell.



:bravo::whatho:
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom