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As for the Heroes 5 - the state it was in initially could easily be better than 4 because it was just cloning 3. Really, it was, I had people telling me exactly that quite enthusiastically.
Which is completely untrue, as 5 built its skill system based on 4. It also used theme schools of magic from 4 and not elemental from 3. But neither of these stood out as something alien to the game, so these things probably weren't noticed. Which is also confirms, that many problems people had with 4 weren't because thy oppose the whole ideas introduced there, but rather their unfinished implementation, even if this fact wasn't properly realized by said people.
As for the Heroes 5 - the state it was in initially could easily be better than 4 because it was just cloning 3. Really, it was, I had people telling me exactly that quite enthusiastically.
It was quite meh to be honest. That's what I'm talking about "they were trying to get clever". Felt like 3 after having played 4. But that "they're trying to get clever" thing in qoutes is me quoting a guy I know. To me it was a minor gimmick because I've played significantly differing towns in 4, to you basic purist it was suspicious.
Which is completely untrue, as 5 built its skill system based on 4. It also used theme schools of magic from 4 and not elemental from 3. But neither of these stood out as something alien to the game, so these things probably weren't noticed. Which is also confirms, that many problems people had with 4 weren't because thy oppose the whole ideas introduced there, but rather their unfinished implementation, even if this fact wasn't properly realized by said people.
It's not untrue, and that building the skill system based on 4 is a bit of an illusion. As I said, once you revert the combat back to hex counting and mass auto-first strike, the skill wheel can't do enough to change things, which made it feel just as pointless / full of bloat as Heroes 3 skill tree was, while 4's felt better because the spells it allowed actually made a difference in gameplay and the combat allowed for more interesting stuff to happen as a result of those spells. So it didn't even look like 4 was any influence at all, it just felt like they added extra hit-and-miss levels to the skills from 3.
And the hype was completely real. Folks were righteously and triumphantly stoked about Heroes 5 setting out to prove that that HORRIBLE HORRIBLE GAME (which made them feel stupid) was WRONG!!!11!1!! I whish I was making it up. :D
But polish and a terrible interface / visual scheeme did have to do with it, as I sad I have my own grievances with heroes 4. I could list those out if anyone wants :D
EDIT: And a completely personal taste thing - I love Heroes 3 music. I generally turn music off in every game I play and Heroes III is the only exception (I'm kinda partial to some of the Planescape Torment music, sparse and repetitive as it is). I'm not blindly hating on HOMM3, I just spent a great deal of time thinking about that game because almost everybody played it over here and the whole HOMM3-HOMM4 non-transition fiasco was huge drama I got to see play out irl with the most unlikely sorts of folks. It was a thing you had an opinon on, and so did everybody you knew, more or less :D
It's not an illusion as it was basically the same idea of choosing the skill, which unlock additional abilities to pick, which further specialized the heroes. The main change in 5 was that additional abilities were unlocked based on your hero class and other skills and abilities, while 4 just changed hero class based on skills selected, but in principle it was the same mechanic. Arguing that implementation of skills in 4 didn't influence implementation of skills in 5 is the same as arguing that further additions of alternative units and caravans have nothing to do with the exact same features in 4, which is stupid.
I see your point, but there are 2 things about that. They really had no choice, for the same reason 4 needed to change things, because the way things worked in 3 was the low point of the series. A particularly troublesome low point because it was not seen as such by Joe Average (the sailor guy was called Frankie the Terminator, don't ask, and whenever I think of Joe Average HOMM3 fan his face and name just float before me), who loved his system warping crap and all the great victories it allowed him to blunder into. So in a sense it's not heroes 4 that inspired it, it was heroes 3 screwing things up quite a bit which inspired it.
And the bigger point is that it didn't have the necessary impact because changing the skills to the wheel doesn't do much if you revert combat to hex counting. He combat system is just too shallow. It doesn't feel like it's continuing the solutions from 4, it just feels like it's banging it's head against the systemic wall 4 actually managed to climb over. It doesn't feel like skill trees from 4 (they had their own faults), it just feels like extra levels and a few constrictions on the Heroes 3 skills and that doesn't solve the problem.
This is why it's impossible to talk about heroes 4 properly without angering Heores 3 fans, because a lot of what drove heroes 4 decisions was that heroes 3 (and to a degree 2) were a hot mess.
I don't mind discussing this, it's quite therapeutic for me, but I sadly can't right away now, because of RL things. I'm quite interested in explaining this in more detail.
Man, it's so obvious that you're a completely casual HoMM player with some of the absolutely ridiculous shit you're writing Like how picking Solmyr is supposed to be some ultimate trick, when Tower is generally a high risk-usually low reward pick for random map/impossible and even when you want to do it there is at least one clearly superior pick for a main.
First of all, blabbering about "casual", "hardcore" and whatever all the time, especially in context of a popular strategy series from, mainly, nineties instantly pinpoints as some sort of a weird try hard for anyone who actually played a lot of games in that time, but carry on. Though I have to admit - it's kinda amusing how you fluently jump from jabbering about how this is a game for casuals then about huge portion being hardkoor sirius playas and then again filthy casuals and so on. Clearly, you yourself aren't particularly sure what's going on there and reading your posts god knows I don't blame you.
Anyway, back to the reality and the main point of this discussion. Yes, HoMM was always a "casual", accessible game series. Parts I-III had tight, well designed mechanics that were steadily developed/introduced/improved, with community fluently progressing from one game to another because it was the obvious choice. Together with great atmosphere and perfectly implemented hot seat mode it made a career as being pretty much the multiplayer turn based strategy. There's nothing wrong about it, since it was also a typical game that's easy to learn, but not so easy to master as you could always painfully learn when playing with a more experienced player. IV was the first game to break that chain, and unfortunately it never recovered. It did not change anything about the series being for "filthy casuals hurr", in fact it made it, any many other things worse and despite many revolutionary changes (though many of them were only revolutionary for the series itself and in a broader context just made IV a game like many others) it was overall a pretty big step back.
1. It was the first game to feature a trend of decreasing the number of factions instead of increasing them. Even worse, the factions were castrated with few units, mostly the same neutered spells all the time. There was no new faction and very few new units. And don't even remind me of the obvious shitty retcons like merging inferno with necro because the didn't /couldn't bother with properly developing both.
2. Most diverse, unorthodox, high risk strategies were completely gone, streamlining vast majority of matches into similar paths.
3. Despite the above, the game had horrible, horrible balance problems. Clearly showing that no one even tried playing it much before release and almost throwing the series back to the dark ages of II in that regard.
4. Yes, there were a lot of new ideas, but apart from a few kinda cool, but not very impactful ones (like being able to flag random resource structures) they were underdeveloped and not well thought-out at best, and completely broken at worst.
5. Adding to the above point, the game was generally a broken mess on release, and despite being patched a bit it never got addons that would properly (or at all) develop it, prompting the community to shit at it from great heights.
And it's not me being mean and picking on great game HoMM IV - these are all facts. I don't feel the need to go into details such as chugging immortality potions like it was water or someone being actually stupid enough to try introducing a fog of war with how strategic map and movement worked - this was all discussed to death and is pretty much a settled affair.
You also seem to be a person that appreciates the changes that took away from the unique character of HoMM and changed it more into a strategy game like any other like that is the way the game was meant to be played. That's your right, although personally I don't understand it and you shouldn't be surprised that majority of the community doesn't either.
Yes, and it's all because of graphics and women (though not clear whether adults or minors, but I'm sure we'll find out soon). I really love how you completely ignored me explaining that II is commonly considered superior in the production values aspect, obviously not for :itisamystery: reasons you didn't even know about it until today when I told you. Despite this being quite ridiculous, let me bear with you for just one simple question with an equally simple follow up: Do you agree that HoMM are hugely multiplayer games? If yes, do you sustain and support your claim that III did not improve on II?
Again, it's pretty clear you have very little idea about playing III, so I'm not gonna be mean and pick on you. I'll only dwell on the magic system a bit, since you devoted so much space to it.
1. A system where a single numerical value governs how many times you can cast any spell, regardless of whether it's a lvl 0 fart spell or lvl 67 ultimate Armageddon, allowing you to do it at will and without any supporting mechanics as restriction is broken at the very core and you failing to instantly notice and recognize it is... bad. It's also pretty much the simplest system one could come up with, the only way to go down would be to just allow casting any spell at will, so I'm not sure how it fits into your retarded "deep and hardkorr" rhetoric.
2. Me saying about 1 level spells being all powerful was a bit of a bait that you, of course, took. Everyone knows that levels 1 and 4 are where it's at and level 5 is very good too, though often only for specific builds.
3. Speaking of builds, again love how you try to claim like having actual differences between heroes is something inferior to every hero being exactly the same like in I and II. Who would like stuff like choice and planning, right. I know, casuals.
4. Magic skills that give lots of different effects and modifications to basic spells allowing the player to think and plan about which school he wants to focus on (cause picking more than two was usually over-investment) is clearly superior and cooler to I, II and IV's systems. Claiming that a mechanic in which each non-dmg spell acts exactly the same regardless of who casts it and there's stuff like level one spell and then exactly the same spell on level 3 or 4 but working en masse is better is.. bad.
Honestly, I just skimmed through it, since it was done to death and many of your points, like "free market", "turns spent on building magic guild are a good trade off" is a void talk that doesn't really mean anything. However...
Yeah, thank god for IV replacing 7 upgradable units per castle with 5 unupgradeable ones. And goddamn V for casualization and giving access to 7 units with branching upgrades that were actually viable depending on a tactical or strategic situation in a match.
And this, yet again, shows complete lack of consistency in your arguments. Talking about depth, choice, strategy and what not all the time and then suddenly clearly shallower system is suddenly better just to support non-point you're desperately trying to make, riiiiiight.
Can't believe this shit HoMM would've been fpp if not for the lack of technology!
Anyway, there are of course some legit points there (spell books for creatures, caravans), which again were pinpointed both many times and long ago, though they are not able to tip the scales in IV's favor, since they're nowhere near as important as what the game got wrong.
So an extremely unsuccessful dodge about one of the things I wrote about and another rant about graphics. And yet what I wrote remains and V is deemed clearly superior for a good reason.
Get a life. Heroes IV was developed to the point it needed to be developed. A lot of modifications for Heroes III are ports of Heroes IV stuff that could reasonably be ported. Also, Heroes III has a huge casual fanbase, and it's much easier to be a competent coder + casual gamer than a competent coder + competent gamer. Both of those things are just too time consuming. So there is a larger number of people who have the technical aptitude needed to do something with Heroes 3 (or even 2) who're willing to bother than there is people who'd both be able to and actually do the same for heroes 4. As with most gaming, the kind of person who'd know what needs to be done to improve Heroes IV is not the kind of person with any ammount of technical knowhow, and the kind of person with the technical knowhow generally wouldn't be able to follow the conversation.
Wtf am I reading here, that's some serious reverie. I get that you're trying real hard to make a career as a sophist, but you need to up your game considerably. HD and HoA have completely nothing to do with IV and yet another "casual" rant in regards to the crown achievement of HoMM III community confirms without any doubt that you have zero, let me rephrase: absolutely zero idea what you're writing about. The only thing left for me is to recommend installing HoA, booting up the elemental invasion scenario on impossible difficulty (you can pick the version that gives you an ally for added casualness and try out the new faction - it's better implemented and way more distinct than any of the IV's factions). Have fun, and report on your first, let's say three, trials.
Magic skills that give lots of different effects and modifications to basic spells allowing the player to think and plan about which school he wants to focus on (cause picking more than two was usually over-investment) is clearly superior and cooler to I, II and IV's systems.
If anything, IV's magic system is superior to that of III with each school offering a completely different feel and gameplay.
And it's a bit hard to speak of builds in III when you have skills given to you more or less randomly. Please tell me about how to plan to get that earth+water or whatever every time.
In IV you can actually consider builds with skills having synergies, no buildings that force skills on you and well, more useful skills overall.
It's back to I and II with faction restrictions added, I'm not a big fan personally and prefer III and V everyday, since there being skilled at magic actually gave you more than flat dmg increase.
I always thought that randomness of skills was the biggest con of III, already wrote it here a couple of times. Changing it is pretty much the only thing I liked in VI. That said, yeah, you usually will get the skills you like, though sometimes you need to wait for them and sometimes you'll get screwed, which is shit in any game. And it also makes introducing different heroes with different skills and specials a very important thing, which is good.
And again, like what I wrote above, IV just took the choice away and forced you into exact same paths every time. Need the same magic school every time, need combat every time or you'll get one shot and so on. Pretty meh overall.
Based Lujo.
I would like to hear what those horrible unfinished h4 features are since people keep repeating it like a fact. I dont mean bugs.
H4 magic system is one of the best systems, or maybe the best spell collections I can think of. Its also the reason the Ai gets so easily rekt because it lets you do crazy shit the Ai just cant work with in any game.
The skill system is also the best in the series with the biggest impact on the combat and almost all skills being actually useful. No fucking eagle eye scholarship heroes anywhere, thank god.
For the specific faction you pick, yes, true. Not much variety there to speak of. Thing is, you can mix and match your main one with other skills.
I'm not a master H3 player, though, so I don't really know how much different magic choices for different factions mattered.
need combat every time or you'll get one shot and so on
That is crap, true. I liked the idea of heroes taking part in the combat, but the implementation was half good half crap.
But hey, considering how some skills in H3 were utterly useless, you can say the others were as necessary as combat is in H4.
There really aren't that many options in skill selection in H3, unless I'm completely oblivious.
Oh yeah, and personal anecdote, in H4 I managed to get an human's opponent castle with a stealth hero right from under his nose. If only for that thing and H4 is well worth playing.
What was finished in IV, apart from small and mostly insignificant things?
1. Less of everything, no new factions, factions just mixed in a nonsensical manner, probably cause the budget run out, sorry lol. Horrible thing for a sequel, and supposedly a good one at that? Every 3d part of HoMM gets a shitload of flak for that, and rightfully so.
2. No fucking balance captain, almost back to II in how bad it was. Considering how big the multiplayer thing is in the series, having broken shit around every corner is kind of a bummer.
3. Did that game even have rmg? Honest question, I don't remember.
4. Cause it sure as hell didn't have an AI. And you're acting just the way that hardkorrr mudafukka does, which I guess is symptomatic. Trying to spin obvious flaw like it's supposed to be cool - don't act retarded, retards aren't winners.
5. Stripping upgrades away completely, and still people act like it's cool - just how?
6. Instead giving possibly the worst branching unit tree in history. When supposedly horribly declined russian devs show you how it's done then you know you're in trouble.
7. Major, major change in the series - heroes acting as combat units, literally implemented in a "Let's make heroes participate in combat! Consider its impact and perhaps devote some time so that it would, you know, work? Hurrr, no, why." way. Either invest in combat skills and literally not need an army cause you kill everything barehanded, or don't leave home without a shitload of immortality potions cause you'll get one shot.
8. Changing into effectively 4 levels of units was bad, flattened the power curve and paved the way directly for the even more horrible decline of three tiers in VI.
9. Guards just having a stroll and attacking you when you're going to a completely different place. What was that even for? I guess they had some idea for it and then simply forgot? At least it's a toggle.
10. Trying to implement a fog of war when it just didn't work with your goddamn game, often changing path, then changing it again, then changing again to the same as you encountered another guard. Solution? Just move step by step, cool, right?
I just don't want to go on, like I said, it was said and done so many times...
Calm down, your butt is getting red. I only said those features are not much worse than they are in H3 and that I prefer the H4 magic system.
I'm quite aware of H4's problems, though. I'm definitely not saying it's all cool and everything is better than H3. But some things are.
Magic schools not as much. There's just a simple distinction of earth being always good, fire mostly good for evil factions, water for good factions and air being situational. However, heroes having spells as specials and the way skills influence those spells gives quite a lot to consider and also means that magic heroes aren't as bad as many people claim. For example Loynis is a really strong choice for Castle despite starting with learning or Thant is good for Necro despite this faction generally having many great heroes (although it might also have something to do with the fact that many of them were often banned in multiplayer:p).
Well, there are some, but it's true that many skills in III are a must take compared to all others. Again, I never claimed that the skill system in III is perfect, in fact I always identified it as a main point for improvement. But we're discussing II=>III=>IV relation here and claims that III didn't improve anything on II. It's obviously wrong, the improvement in skill system was significant compared to II.
And don't get defensive, my previous post was a reply to Cadmus.
Man, it's so obvious that you're a completely casual HoMM player with some of the absolutely ridiculous shit you're writing Like how picking Solmyr is supposed to be some ultimate trick, when Tower is generally a high risk-usually low reward pick for random map/impossible and even when you want to do it there is at least one clearly superior pick for a main.
You didn't even read that paragraph to the end did you? I did mistakenly write the word "that" isntead of the word "what" in the last sentence, english is not my first language:
- - - For a lot of people "being an expert" at Heroes 3 meant "knowing that you have to start with the chain lightning genie guy" or rather knowing what the name of that guy IS, and a huge fault of H4 was "you couldn't start with the chain lightning genie guy". I actually had this explained to me IRL by more than one person. I tried to lie to myself that folks I was talking to weren't just stupid by telling myself that what they were really complaining about was that H4 heroes were too indistinct and blank slate when you recruit them, but eh...(Don't confuse this with what being an expert at Heroes 3 actually is for a hardcore gamer)
Sorry if it somehow confused you. The point of this was that this is how most people who are great fans of Heroes 3 look at things. Heroes 3 is that game where you can take the genie with the lightning. The others suck because you can't. You ask them what their favourite ever game is - "Heroes 3". Which heroes game is the best - "Heroes 3".
Nineties instantly pinpoints as some sort of a weird try hard for anyone who actually played a lot of games in that time, but carry on. Though I have to admit - it's kinda amusing how you fluently jump from jabbering about how this is a game for casuals then about huge portion being hardkoor sirius playas and then again filthy casuals and so on. Clearly, you yourself aren't particularly sure what's going on there and reading your posts god knows I don't blame you.
See people, this man has not been to Eastern Europe. Once PC's were available in Eastern Europe, if you understood english well enough you could play everything, because everything was pirated. I played bascially anything because I could. In the nineties, bad neighbourhood, parents preffered me playing videogames to being outside where there was heroin and all sorts of other crap, and games cost nothing because noone could afford to buy them for inflated foreign import prices, so everyone pirated everything. In highschool I had a lot of free time because I found it easy to get decent grades, videogames were the cheapest way to kill time because they cost nothing, so I played a lot of stuff. In college - still the cheapest way to kill time. I'm not advocating piracy, but it was a fact of life. These days I gladly pay for games on steam. If it wasn't for it i'd never have played anything. Neither would most people here, but then there wouldn't be such an enormous Kings Bounty - Heroes fandom in Russia. Or the Dota fandoms in Russia and Asia.
I never said about a huge portion of anyone being serious hardcore players. Guys who stuck to only one game like many people did with Heroes were casual, they had their favourite game and despite the fact that games were effectively free and available they only ever played their one favourite game. Most heroes 3 fans were like that, maybe one or two other games to take a break. Often times they didn't even know anything about the game other than what they worked out themselves or what their neighbours (in case of HOMM) did. They often spent a ton of hours on it and think they're very good at it (sometimes they are), but hardcore gamers they're not, it's just a hobby for them.
Parts I-III had tight, well designed mechanics that were steadily developed/introduced/improved, with community fluently progressing from one game to another because it was the obvious choice.
Er, not really, and notice how this isn't exactly the general opinion. The first game was tight and flawed in many ways, but at least it was actually tight. The second game had baggage, didn't fix some obvious things, possibly long-term messed some other things up, and didn't actually introduce all that much. It basically improved the interface an the AI a bit, and expanded on the skills in way which are not a clear-cut obvious improvement. It had more complex castle seiges but even that warranted a larger battlefield which wasn't necessarily an improvement as 4 out of 6 factions didn't change enough from the time the battlefield was smaller. The third game is arguably quite bloated.
I read the rest of your post. You were an ideal target for the cashgrab that II and III were, and more people should ignore you in general. I'd say it's a matter of taste, but I'd be lying. At best it's a matter of personality. You also have way too many posts for an idiot.
I've recently replayed the campaign in dosbox version. I suppose that one's the easiest to get going.
Anyone who goes and tries to play HOMM1, please note:
- It's a very simple game, and the following games have improved upon little things which will annoy you.
- There actually ARE skills in the game, they are just not noted. The Knight has Leadership, the Barbarian has Pathfinding, the Sorceress has Navigation and the Warlock has Scouting. You can't boost them, but they're impactful.
- There also ARE creature abilities - Elf shoots twice, Griffin retaliates more, Hydras have no retaliation to them and multi-attack...
- Magic works completely differently, but certain high level spells are still silly.
- Enchantments cancel the previous one, making a lot of things function as dispell magic, keep this in mind
- The battlefield is smaller than you're used to, and it's impossible to go out of the castle when you're defending if the other guy doesn't bust the wall
- Might guys have a better ballistics stat then the magic guys
- No wait button, and old fliers
- No creature upgrades, but monster composition same as in II
- All scenarios have 4 players to them.
- The AI is somewhat poor.
Otherwise it's a lot like Heroes 2 but with zanier graphics (I much preffer them) and almost no fat to trim. Great little game.
Well, for one thing the balance was somewhat off because of a lack of playtesting. Semi-official equilibris mod kind of does good work in this department. I'll write it up later.
H4 magic system is one of the best systems, or maybe the best spell collections I can think of. Its also the reason the Ai gets so easily rekt because it lets you do crazy shit the Ai just cant work with in any game.
It's the best becuase it has the best basic combat system of all the games to make them work in. This is what stumps guys like the loony fanboy up there, they're used to the gryphin being a low level creature and get apoplectic when they see it as a high up creature and scream bloody murder like that actually means anything. Put first strike on the griffin in the H4 system though...
The skill system is also the best in the series with the biggest impact on the combat and almost all skills being actually useful. No fucking eagle eye scholarship heroes anywhere, thank god.
I'm a bit neither here or there about some aspects of the h4 system, but it really does leave everything else in the dust. And what's more there just seems to be more things to do around the map than in any other heroes game AND developing heros feels quite fun.
The system is a bit exploitable and could've used more testing, though. I'll write it up tomorrow.
What was finished in IV, apart from small and mostly insignificant things?
1. Less of everything, no new factions, factions just mixed in a nonsensical manner, probably cause the budget run out, sorry lol. Horrible thing for a sequel, and supposedly a good one at that? Every 3d part of HoMM gets a shitload of flak for that, and rightfully so.
Yeah ok but i dont see how thats unfinished as opposed to a bad design decision. Disagree here.
2. No fucking balance captain, almost back to II in how bad it was. Considering how big the multiplayer thing is in the series, having broken shit around every corner is kind of a bummer.
Dunno what those things are since i dont give a shit about mp but i concede this point. I asdume then other games were better balanced? I read theres fuckton of houserules to make those playable in mp tho
3. Did that game even have rmg? Honest question, I don't remember.
It didnt on launch for sure. Same as hot seat, lol. Dunno if it was added later, think not. Concede here. Never cared fot rmg to be honest, i like some theme in my maps.
4. Cause it sure as hell didn't have an AI. And you're acting just the way that hardkorrr mudafukka does, which I guess is symptomatic. Trying to spin obvious flaw like it's supposed to be cool - don't act retarded, retards aren't winners.
This is bs. The ai sucks worse than h3 but at the same time the challenge is greater for the ai. I read they used some placeholder ai for final release so concede here. Its the only valid point imo.
5. Stripping upgrades away completely, and still people act like it's cool - just how?
Its not great but tbh fuck the upgrades, they were flavour. The units became far more diverse at the same time and i consider that a net plus. Disagree.
6. Instead giving possibly the worst branching unit tree in history. When supposedly horribly declined russian devs show you how it's done then you know you're in trouble.
Dunno watchu saying. Guess youve had the debate 30 times already so you dont care to explain anything but then get fucked. I dont think its always one sided choice so tell me why its the worst in history. Its also imo not a replacement for uprgrades, unit diversity is. Its also not an unfinished feature in any way I can think of. Disagree.
7. Major, major change in the series - heroes acting as combat units, literally implemented in a "Let's make heroes participate in combat! Consider its impact and perhaps devote some time so that it would, you know, work? Hurrr, no, why." way. Either invest in combat skills and literally not need an army cause you kill everything barehanded, or don't leave home without a shitload of immortality potions cause you'll get one shot.
Get a skill not to die? What a decline. I also always pump my learning and eagle eye in heroes 3 because i love that freedom of choice. This is a bullshit h3 fanboy point i disagree with completely. Also remember i asked about unfinished features, not about how you dislike having to learn a skill or drink a potion or uh hide your hero behind a unit or uh take him out of the army if you want or anything. You dislike this change because its a change. Disagree.
8. Changing into effectively 4 levels of units was bad, flattened the power curve and paved the way directly for the even more horrible decline of three tiers in VI.
Again not unfinished in any way. Its flattenned but its a far cry from the shit in 3d heroes. Never minded it the way they did it here because you are given width of options with units instead of getting useless shit tier units ehich is the real change at this stage. They fucked it upin the later games. Paved the way is not an argument against the game. Disagree.
9. Guards just having a stroll and attacking you when you're going to a completely different place. What was that even for? I guess they had some idea for it and then simply forgot? At least it's a toggle.
What? Its a thing that happens. I dont understand your problem with it at all. Its unfinished because what? It doesnt do enough or what? Wtf
10. Trying to implement a fog of war when it just didn't work with your goddamn game, often changing path, then changing it again, then changing again to the same as you encountered another guard. Solution? Just move step by step, cool, right?
What? Thats how fow works everywhere. Not unfinished you just dont like it.
I just don't want to go on, like I said, it was said and done so many times...
What was finished in IV, apart from small and mostly insignificant things?
1. Less of everything, no new factions, factions just mixed in a nonsensical manner, probably cause the budget run out, sorry lol. Horrible thing for a sequel, and supposedly a good one at that? Every 3d part of HoMM gets a shitload of flak for that, and rightfully so.
So less factions means that game was not finished?
2. No fucking balance captain, almost back to II in how bad it was. Considering how big the multiplayer thing is in the series, having broken shit around every corner is kind of a bummer.
6. Instead giving possibly the worst branching unit tree in history. When supposedly horribly declined russian devs show you how it's done then you know you're in trouble.
So you don't like HOMM4's branching tree, thats cool, but how that makes it unfinished?
7. Major, major change in the series - heroes acting as combat units, literally implemented in a "Let's make heroes participate in combat! Consider its impact and perhaps devote some time so that it would, you know, work? Hurrr, no, why." way. Either invest in combat skills and literally not need an army cause you kill everything barehanded, or don't leave home without a shitload of immortality potions cause you'll get one shot.
So it is unfinished because you have to pick combat skills and immortality potions?
8. Changing into effectively 4 levels of units was bad, flattened the power curve and paved the way directly for the even more horrible decline of three tiers in VI.
Looks like you have weird definition for "not finished", just like you did for "cash grab".
What you really have problem is game's balance which is valid criticism and most likely casualty of troubled development. Unit branching has problems because not all units are well balanced, but as a feature "unit branching" is functioning 100% as intended. Well and general design choices, which is also valid criticism, but again, not having anything to do with some specific feature being unfinished.
Really, my biggest gripe with 4 is combat. There's no grid, no hexes, and I don't know if it's the perspective or the way they designed the obstacles but I can't tell at a glance where I can and can't pass or where to stand to create a chokepoint. This alone is a giant fuck up but there's more. Simultaneous strike in melee was probably a good change but counterattacks in ranged combat not so much, it just makes you target melee units who can't counter. Sieges are a clusterfuck with no siege engines and the gate that always takes the same amount of damage from 50 bandits and 50 behemoths. Heroes in combat don't belong in HoMM, if I wanted that I have plenty of other games to choose from, it's the same when they changed the combat in Disciples 3 to be more like HoMM with free movement and a grid, a case of abandoning what makes your system unique either because you feel you have to innovate or because other games are doing it. I could maybe grow to like it if it was well done but it wasn't. It doesn't mean combat in 1-3 is perfect because it's far from it but I can overlook the flaws and play it just fine while HoMM 4 made me want to throw the monitor out the window each time I got into combat, and I played it a lot when it came out (easily 100+ hours, maybe much more than that, I don't remember it that well) and I still couldn't get used to it.
And you can talk about the art style change between 2 and 3 all you want, but in 4 the battlefield is horribly ugly, units have weird, stiff animations and worst of all it's nowhere near as easy to read as in every other game in the series. I actually sort of liked the look of the world map and towns (in most cases) but portraits and the combat screen are terrible. Do I dislike 4 just because it's ugly? No, but it doesn't help, I mean look at this shit:
Get a skill not to die? What a decline. I also always pump my learning and eagle eye in heroes 3 because i love that freedom of choice. This is a bullshit h3 fanboy point i disagree with completely. Also remember i asked about unfinished features, not about how you dislike having to learn a skill or drink a potion or uh hide your hero behind a unit or uh take him out of the army if you want or anything. You dislike this change because its a change. Disagree.
I don't think it's an unfinished feature but heroes were never combat units in HoMM, a change this drastic requires good implementation and it was anything but well implemented. What if I want a wizard or a general type hero who overlooks the battle from afar like in every other HoMM game? That's right, they die a lot (especially at early levels) and drink immortality potions. Can't leave home without buying a box of immortality potions for my general who shouldn't even be in battle, what joy. If you start every fight with "make sure your hero doesn't get randomly taken out" something has gone terribly wrong. Not to mention heroes are resurrected for free at your castle so high level heroes (especially combat oriented ones) are reusable free muscle, while early game they drop like files, in the late game heroes are the most broken and abusable thing in the game because regular units cost money, lose numbers and don't get resurrected for free or next to nothing, it devalues regular units and forces you into weird "4 heroes and 3 best unit stacks" end game army compositions because it's so effective and easy to abuse. I dislike it because it's a change from the previous games, obviously, but also because it's horribly implemented.
And H4 improved a lot of things from 3 mind you. Hero skills, magic system, caravans, not having to walk to windmills and outside creature dwellings every week, taking enemy heroes prisoner, spellbooks for units, some of the combat stuff (in theory at least). Hell, in retrospect I even think removing unit upgrades might have been the right call because in 99% of cases they are just "regular basilisk > slightly better basilisk +1" and mess up your army when you have to go back to upgrade or have neutral units join you. The ugly graphics, merging of necro and inferno, fog of war, neutral units attacking you because you looked funny at them I can all live with, the godawful combat alone breaks the game for me.
Really, my biggest gripe with 4 is combat. There's no grid, no hexes, and I don't know if it's the perspective or the way they designed the obstacles but I can't tell at a glance where I can and can't pass or where to stand to create a chokepoint.
This was the biggest gripe in general. The hexes thing. And this was the best thing about 4. But I think what they were looking to do could have been done while keeping hexes in, except I can immagine it simply never occuring to them that people would actually want the hexes.
Simultaneous strike in melee was probably a good change but counterattacks in ranged combat not so much, it just makes you target melee units who can't counter.
Yes, but it did several things. You could pay attention to the army placement to put the meatshields in front, or you could manouver them in front to the best of your ability. It also made ground troops actually more important, because for the first time they could actually cover the archers (or the hero).
Also, ranged guys were kings of "tag you're dead" in previous games. Their turn comes, they shoot at whatever. With penalty, yes, but they still do. And most of them are glass cannons by design, likely to be "tagged" by the other guy before they can do anything. Ranged retaliation helped with this, in the least case made them incur some lossess on your front row when you sniped at them.
What it also created is something very rare in heroes games and that's the sense of attrition. You actually lost troops by design. This is also behind the weekly growth not coming in at the end of the week, and one of the reasons why they made units move, so that you can reinforce, because you were meant to lose units in combat instead of cheezing hexes. It's also why a bunch of secondary skills involve getting troops in one way or another.
I'm not sure they had to get rid of the actual hexes, though. I think it wasn't just a whim, I think it's because they didn't like the troop placement options on the traditional grid. Making it big enough to make troop placement options they wanted (two rows, with the front providing cover for the back, and with space in the back for enemy flier to fly behind) would make the battlefield even bigger, and they didn't seem to want the battlefield even as big as it used to be. That's because obstacles were mostly lost on the battlefield ever since Heroes 2 (the first one to increase the size), and they wanted obstacles to provide cover and force you to walk around them (rather than provide random choke points in one in X battles).
Yeah, seiges were quite badly done. The battlefield was orignally expanded from Heroes1 to Heroes2 to change city seiges. In 4 they were quite a mess as you couldn't really tell where your dude is supposed to stand to be able to attack the guys outside, and you had to rely on your dudes to be seige towers and it had all sorts of problems.
I think what they wanted was to get rid of the old castle siege thing because it created actual balancing problems. Always did. It creates a disconnect between how well you're doing as a player and how difficult it is to take a castle away from you. A common random noob situation in Heroes3 is trying to take an enemy castle as Inferno, or generally without ballistics. It goes ways back.
A bit of history and a bit of mechanics, and also for anyone mad enough to give H1 a ride (and understand a few more things about H2 and H3):
In kings bounty, you just bought siege engines (this allowed you to fight in castles who were all basically glorified enemy camps) and had a fight with breached wall as mostly decoration (they just made the battlefield smaller, and the fight layout a bit different, but there were no obstacles). When they made HOMM1 (aka streamlined KB deathmatch with no leadership stat), they added a wall and tower (but no way to go out) and this was the main reason for why the troops and abilities between the original 4 castles and heroes are the way they are.
The knight was given no fliers and only one shooter, because he had the inherently busted leadership morale boost and focused defense (and in 1 and 2 attack and deffense primaries are about double as powerful than in 3). Since the castle had no gate, the only way he could get out was if the other guy broke the wall, which the magic guys had trouble with and pelted him with spells instead. This meant that the knight was better off havin his defesive fights in the field. His troops are also the toughest due to his abilities, and he has balistics, so he's not actually bad at sieging. If they gave him a flier or more shooters he'd be nuts.
The Barbarian has huge offense and a non-combat special, but he has shooters and guys to defend from enemy fliers. The troll (rock thrower) also forces the other guy to have the fight in the field rather than at the castle, becuase the troll can regenerate tower damage and will just beat on you while you're stuck behind the wall.
The Sorceress is all shooters, fliers and guys to protect them, and the Warlock is all fat fliers and naturally fat stuff (so much so that Warlock troops led by a knight are broken). They can't break down walls but are expected to not have to and to be able to pelt stuff with magic.
But all of those are balanced, tested and whatnot with sieges where you can't go out of the castle. Then Heroes 2 expanded the battlefield to expand the seige and gave almost everyone opportunity to learn Balistics and Leadership, but left the troops mostly as they were. It tried to balance things with creature upgrades (or in the case of the Dragon, downgrades) but that didn't actually help all that much and created new problems. (With ferrying troops, bigger time and resource costs to get to full power... creature upgrades were always a clunky compromise for not altering the core system more in the transition from 1 to 2.)
Heroes 3 just went f**k it, spammed samey stuff, everything gets an upgrade regardless of whether this achieves or means anything. Really, folks, upgrades were the result of the castle siege mechanic and the upgradeable (and acquireable) skills mechanic upsetting the balance (such as there was) between the factions. If you give everything an upgrade, you might as well not give anyone an upgrade. In fact, that would actually be better even if the path was completely linear, I think this can be proven by science.
What does this have to do with castle sieges? What they wanted to do with the sieges in heroes 4 was get rid of the whole "some guys are much better than other guys in sieges" situation and move the balancing elsewhere. The point of the history lesson here is that castle sieging was the biggest balancing consideration in the first game, and can be looked at as a fairly controversial thing. The original kings bounty didn't have castle sieging (as such), they could have made heroes 1 (and every other one) completely without it, too.
Heroes in combat don't belong in HoMM, if I wanted that I have plenty of other games to choose from, it's the same when they changed the combat in Disciples 3 to be more like HoMM with free movement and a grid, a case of abandoning what makes your system unique either because you feel you have to innovate or because other games are doing it. I could maybe grow to like it if it was well done but it wasn't. It doesn't mean combat in 1-3 is perfect because it's far from it but I can overlook the flaws and play it just fine while HoMM 4 made me want to throw the monitor out the window each time I got into combat, and I played it a lot when it came out (easily 100+ hours, maybe much more than that, I don't remember it that well) and I still couldn't get used to it.
I get you here. Well, I think you're overstating some things, combat in 4 is not that terrible, and once you get into it properly instead of just trying to cheeze stuff, it's more interesting than the older one, but it wasn't done nearly as well as it could have (and probably should have) been.
I don't think they were trying to innovate for the sake of innovating. It was that, when you got down to it, heroes in heroes just didn't do all that much. Which meant that Heroes on the world map didn't have all that much to do. Heroes in combat was done, and this is apparently not obvious, because they wanted more reasons/ways/branches to develop the heroes through the world map. More stuff to do. Opening up the Heroes 3 editor is completely depressing after you've got used to 4 because there is just so little to do with it.
Heroes in combat meant that a hero had his individual stats to develop, and that you needed to develop more heroes to combine their abilities and combo stuff. You had gear which affected only the hero rather than being constriced to "gear" which affects his whole army passively, like the games before (and after) had. You had one-shot potions which meant that if you wanted your hero to be able to do something you didn't have to have the hero be able to do it all the time. If you wanted the hero to do some damge, you didn't need to tie it to mage guild levels and spell availability and god knows what else, he could just shoot something (or hit something). When they added this option in 5, it was still tied to the minimalist hero development which the game was more or less stuck with since H1, so it didn't really mean anything and looked like it was done for the sake of being done. It left the world map as boring as it always was.
And another thing was that having 2 different heroes in the same fightmeant that you could combine their abilities. The idea here was most likely that cool spells which combo off in a certain way (or which just need more than one cast to be useful) are not necessarily worth spending a turn casting if you only have one hero, but being able to combo them makes it worth it. I dont think you can make a spell system as nice as the one in 4 with just one guy spellcasting once per turn (or so).
And you can talk about the art style change between 2 and 3 all you want, but in 4 the battlefield is horribly ugly, units have weird, stiff animations and worst of all it's nowhere near as easy to read as in every other game in the series. I actually sort of liked the look of the world map and towns (in most cases) but portraits and the combat screen are terrible. Do I dislike 4 just because it's ugly? No, but it doesn't help, I mean look at this shit:
I'm with you there, Heroes IV looks like ass and it goes further than that, I think they really screwed up things which shouldn't really matter but for many people do. Leprechaun just made too many people go "wtf is this doing in my heroes game". Made me think that, too. Mechanically it's better than you'd think, but it's completely out of place visually and aestethically.
The art/flavor department dropped the ball the most.
I don't think it's an unfinished feature but heroes were never combat units in HoMM, a change this drastic requires good implementation and it was anything but well implemented. What if I want a wizard or a general type hero who overlooks the battle from afar like in every other HoMM game? That's right, they die a lot (especially at early levels) and drink immortality potions.
Actually they don't die as much (or really, at all) early on as people complain about if they're in the back and you don't rush into stupid fights. And they especially don't die if you don't try to play it in the "tag youre it" was of Heroes 3 where you're not supposed to ever lose a single uint. The problem was that people couldn't tell what a stupid fight was because of all the other changes and that people were at a loss as to what to do without a hex grid.
The problem was that lategame was unbalanced because in late game heroes got to be a liablitiy. A fat enemy stack (or Medusas) could just drop them turn after turn making them just tanks who had to spend turns chugging immortality. Still, they made fine (if expensive) tanks.
Can't leave home without buying a box of immortality potions for my general who shouldn't even be in battle, what joy. If you start every fight with "make sure your hero doesn't get randomly taken out" something has gone terribly wrong.
You are overstating it. You can go through entire campaigns without a single immortality potion on any hero. I do get the frustration, and once monster stacks get fat enough heroes become a problem.
Not to mention heroes are resurrected for free at your castle so high level heroes (especially combat oriented ones) are reusable free muscle, while early game they drop like files, in the late game heroes are the most broken and abusable thing in the game because regular units cost money, lose numbers and don't get resurrected for free or next to nothing, it devalues regular units and forces you into weird "4 heroes and 3 best unit stacks" end game army compositions because it's so effective and easy to abuse. I dislike it because it's a change from the previous games, obviously, but also because it's horribly implemented.
You are also overstating this a bit. They don't "die like flies" early on at all, it takes picking your battles stupidly for that to happen. And they don't devastate as much later on because it's not that difficult or impossible to drop them.
But yes, I see the whole immortality potion as a problem in the same way that I see spell point wells as a problem, they are a ham-fisted non-solution to a problematic feature.
And H4 improved a lot of things from 3 mind you. Hero skills, magic system, caravans, not having to walk to windmills and outside creature dwellings every week, taking enemy heroes prisoner, spellbooks for units, some of the combat stuff (in theory at least). Hell, in retrospect I even think removing unit upgrades might have been the right call because in 99% of cases they are just "regular basilisk > slightly better basilisk +1" and mess up your army when you have to go back to upgrade or have neutral units join you. The ugly graphics, merging of necro and inferno, fog of war, neutral units attacking you because you looked funny at them I can all live with, the godawful combat alone breaks the game for me.
In this case I actually mind the ugly graphics and the flaws with the interface more than you. Also, the creature choice direction pissed me off but since this was pulled a couple of times:
Lephrecauns were just a terrible idea, they had no place in a Heroes game. Mechanically a unit which gives luck (Heroes 4 luck) was a great idea and basically necessary, but dear god it should not have been the damned leprechaun.
Merging Inferno and Necro - meh, if you started form Kings Bounty you seen stuff move around, but it pissed me off for different and more practical reasons. The problem why it didn't work was that Inferno just didn't have enough iconic units which did anything worthwhile (or were distinct in flavor) to begin with, and that the creatures distribution made certain things very clear cut choices, and this was more of a problem for Death than other towns.
The one thing they didn't get away from was the relation between units and overland map movement, and this made Ghosts simply more appealing than the cerberi. Then you had Vampires who had one of the very few actually distinct abilities in the older games compete with what was just a slow moving single target shooter. And the shooter didn't look like an inferno unit (because inferno units in H3 besides the imp and the cerberus were... indistinct small humanoid deamon shooter, indistinct somewhat burlier deamon called Deamon walker, indistinct slimmer deamon with a whip, red geenie, devil. Meh.) The faction needed a shooter and couldn't have an undead shooter so it ended up with that unsatisfying thing. The devil just looked too goofy, too.
EDIT: Folks were too used to the whole "Necro doesn't play well with others" thing from previous games, and that was actualyl a rather arbitrary and stupid thing because little about any undead really warranted the automatic morale (1-3) hit on everybody else and it all made the faction stand out like a sort thumb (a cool looking sore thumb, but a very stupid one). The reason there was the whole morale penalty to begin with was flavor and the fact that the original Ghosts were more than a little stupid conceptually. Which was because in Kings Bounty they could go out of control if their numbers grew, but in H1 they ditcthed the stat wich kept them in check but kept the ghosts. But apart from Ghosts, having Necro cordoned off from the other kids and dubiously "special" was just plain stupid and H4 was the first game where you actually could effectively use undead alongside other guys, which was a huge improvement all in all.
Honestly, all the castles feel like there is one branching tier of units too few, like there should have been 6 levels instead of 5, and that if there was one more there could have been fewer seemigly "clear cut" choices between dwellings.
I think Lujo completely fails to see the point/attractiveness of HoMM.
The thing is, HoMM always was more on the casual side of strategy games.
Doesn't make it a casual game of any kind, it just means there is less complexity and skill involved than in other games in the genre.
And honestly, whoever denies this just has no idea about game mechanics.
But: Where is this a negative thing?
Not every game has to be super complex and if you want complexity in a game of similar genre, pretty much everybody will point you to Age Of Wonders, and for good reason.
For many, HoMM is a "baby's first strategy" game, which is nice and the game is easy enough to get into without thinking too much about deep optimizations of strategies and tactics.
Another thing to consider is that for a relatively simple game like the HoMM games it's easier to write a competent AI than for the more complex AoW games, or the Civ games. There's little point in a single player game being a complex game for grown ups, if the AI plays it like it was an infant. Then it may be better to play a "child's game" like HoMM 3 with a more competent AI that (unlike the AoW games) can do the same things the human player can do.
Oh and one thing that can't be overstated - the reason the AI is "better" in the earlier installments is that they have very low tactical depth and very low relevant variance between creatures (H3 more than the earlier 2). Making that AI work passably well is trivial compared to making a competent Heroes IV AI.
Hah that is actually spot on, in my experience. I can now remember my sister being absolutely addicted to HoMM3 and was always playing the game. We are from eastern europe too. Funny how i had forgotten her HoMM addiction. Got me hooked on the game as well.
Another thing to consider is that for a relatively simple game like the HoMM games it's easier to write a competent AI than for the more complex AoW games, or the Civ games. There's little point in a single player game being a complex game for grown ups, if the AI plays it like it was an infant. Then it may be better to play a "child's game" like HoMM 3 with a more competent AI that (unlike the AoW games) can do the same things the human player can do.
I agree, but a great number of things from Heroes IV didn't make it into the rest of the series, but easily could have and would have improved the games. And they didn't make it in mostly on "loony fanboy reaction". This accounts for actual decline in the post NWC installments, it's not so much proper decline as much as stagnation at a point which was originally popular for funky reasons. IV did things that basically should and could have been done in heroes 2.
In a sense this IS a discussion about Heroes VII. It's about why the series as a whole is stuck. Mostly because the wrong things have been insited on for the wrong reasons, while right moves have been condemned for the wrong reasons.
Like how picking Solmyr is supposed to be some ultimate trick, when Tower is generally a high risk-usually low reward pick for random map/impossible and even when you want to do it there is at least one clearly superior pick for a main.
