|
On July 02 2011 02:35 xarthaz wrote:
The capitol rush gamestyle you describe of Homm 3 having is widely known as the "noob" style of play. It is terribly inefficient. And not much fun, I agree. Good thing that it is almost never useful in actual gameplay. Instead mass hero recruiting + treasure hunting is the de facto way to get income. And Upgrading units? Cmon, that is week 3 building priority perhaps, rarely any sooner. And online games tend to end around that time anyway - week 3 and week 4.
That might very well be a noob style gameplay. I never played in any way competitively, as hotseat was my cup of tea. Still though, I don't see the wrong in going tavern > creature > creature > town hall > city hall > creature > creature into dwelling. Already this first week gives twice the income of Heroes 2 while giving a heavy pool of units for the first dwelling, which again removes some of the incentive of exploring outside of your safe pocket. This also gives your first hero double army (from tavern army swap) as well as a secondary exploration hero at day 3 with standard army of double creature structure - plenty of units to explore and reap easy resources and weak stacks untill the first dwelling while still focusing on the turtle focus of the game the increased income gives.
As far as I see it, the difference in build order is pretty much like going factory expand instead of 1 1 1 in a tvt - one gives you better economy and pays off if you can survive a short while longer. City hall and Capitol feels to me like giving a player in starcraft four times the minerals at their main, which makes expanding that much less important.
Anyhow, heroes 6 looks interesting. TB's vid showed a lot of glitches, and unfortunately I'm too jaded to attribute it all to beta flaws. How the new skill system and reduced mineral variety will work, I've got no real opinion on, as it should probably be tested extensively before being commented on. The return of linear unit progression sounds meh. The animated town video looks pretty ugly, and the back-and-forth panning annoys me, so I'm not very fond of this at all.
It seems like a step back from 5, but we'll see. I'll defiantely buy it in any case.
|
On July 06 2011 02:05 plated.rawr wrote:Show nested quote +On July 02 2011 02:35 xarthaz wrote:
The capitol rush gamestyle you describe of Homm 3 having is widely known as the "noob" style of play. It is terribly inefficient. And not much fun, I agree. Good thing that it is almost never useful in actual gameplay. Instead mass hero recruiting + treasure hunting is the de facto way to get income. And Upgrading units? Cmon, that is week 3 building priority perhaps, rarely any sooner. And online games tend to end around that time anyway - week 3 and week 4.
That might very well be a noob style gameplay. I never played in any way competitively, as hotseat was my cup of tea. Still though, I don't see the wrong in going tavern > creature > creature > town hall > city hall > creature > creature into dwelling. Already this first week gives twice the income of Heroes 2 while giving a heavy pool of units for the first dwelling, which again removes some of the incentive of exploring outside of your safe pocket. This also gives your first hero double army (from tavern army swap) as well as a secondary exploration hero at day 3 with standard army of double creature structure - plenty of units to explore and reap easy resources and weak stacks untill the first dwelling while still focusing on the turtle focus of the game the increased income gives. As far as I see it, the difference in build order is pretty much like going factory expand instead of 1 1 1 in a tvt - one gives you better economy and pays off if you can survive a short while longer. City hall and Capitol feels to me like giving a player in starcraft four times the minerals at their main, which makes expanding that much less important. Anyhow, heroes 6 looks interesting. TB's vid showed a lot of glitches, and unfortunately I'm too jaded to attribute it all to beta flaws. How the new skill system and reduced mineral variety will work, I've got no real opinion on, as it should probably be tested extensively before being commented on. The return of linear unit progression sounds meh. The animated town video looks pretty ugly, and the back-and-forth panning annoys me, so I'm not very fond of this at all. It seems like a step back from 5, but we'll see. I'll defiantely buy it in any case.
Unit skills are pretty great though, reminds me a bit of the combat of the King's Bounty games, which did combat fairly well.
|
On July 06 2011 02:05 plated.rawr wrote:Show nested quote +On July 02 2011 02:35 xarthaz wrote:
The capitol rush gamestyle you describe of Homm 3 having is widely known as the "noob" style of play. It is terribly inefficient. And not much fun, I agree. Good thing that it is almost never useful in actual gameplay. Instead mass hero recruiting + treasure hunting is the de facto way to get income. And Upgrading units? Cmon, that is week 3 building priority perhaps, rarely any sooner. And online games tend to end around that time anyway - week 3 and week 4.
That might very well be a noob style gameplay. I never played in any way competitively, as hotseat was my cup of tea. Still though, I don't see the wrong in going tavern > creature > creature > town hall > city hall > creature > creature into dwelling. Already this first week gives twice the income of Heroes 2 while giving a heavy pool of units for the first dwelling, which again removes some of the incentive of exploring outside of your safe pocket. This also gives your first hero double army (from tavern army swap) as well as a secondary exploration hero at day 3 with standard army of double creature structure - plenty of units to explore and reap easy resources and weak stacks untill the first dwelling while still focusing on the turtle focus of the game the increased income gives. As far as I see it, the difference in build order is pretty much like going factory expand instead of 1 1 1 in a tvt - one gives you better economy and pays off if you can survive a short while longer. City hall and Capitol feels to me like giving a player in starcraft four times the minerals at their main, which makes expanding that much less important. Anyhow, heroes 6 looks interesting. TB's vid showed a lot of glitches, and unfortunately I'm too jaded to attribute it all to beta flaws. How the new skill system and reduced mineral variety will work, I've got no real opinion on, as it should probably be tested extensively before being commented on. The return of linear unit progression sounds meh. The animated town video looks pretty ugly, and the back-and-forth panning annoys me, so I'm not very fond of this at all. It seems like a step back from 5, but we'll see. I'll defiantely buy it in any case. again, city hall in the first week is rarely used - perhaps in impossible difficulty or unusual maps but in regular competitive gameplay city hall and capitol are week 2-3 business. And making a lot of heroes in the first days of the game and aggressively exploring, chaining and conquering is the core of the gameplay. Turtling around starting area waiting for gold building and unit dwelling is sure way to lose game. I recommend reading the heroes community - it has a ton of knowledge on the subject.
|
I'm genuinely curious, so please explain to me why, then? Isn't getting the city hall (and its increased income) more important than getting non-creature buildings, to maximize income? Or do the competitive players follow some elaborate strategies that takes blacksmiths, level 1 mage guilds etc into consideration?
Got any competitive youtube vids, by the way? Would be interesting to see.
|
The finals in 2010 were streamed, there are vods available: http://heroescommunity.com/viewthread.php3?TID=32543&pagenumber=2
With the advent of modern micro, things are possible that once were not, similarly to starcraft. Heroes' combat ability is so good that they are efficient at getting treasure, especially with the strong creatures from home town.On July 05 2011 22:39 Kiarip wrote:Show nested quote +On July 02 2011 02:35 xarthaz wrote:On July 02 2011 02:27 Danjoh wrote:On June 29 2011 16:32 True_Spike wrote:
All the mistakes from the 5th part of te series seem to have made their way into the 6th, too. My biggest grief so far, though, are townscreens - or rather their complete absence. Towns in HOMM3 were SO gorgeous, I do not understand why it is impossible to reproduce 12 years later without making it look like garbage. What is this obsession people have with 3d graphics? Can't the townscreens at least be 2d if it makes them look FAR better?
Also, it strikes me as odd that musical scores are nowhere near as good as they ware more than a decade ago.
HOMM3 is the best in the series by far even by todays standards, in my opinion. I hope 6 will be at least half as good. What are the mistakes of the 5th you are speaking about? I thought the 5th was a great game, very similar to the 3rd, overall it felt like thesame game. The only complaint you mention, is the townscreens, wich the 5th had and were quite good in my opinion. Only played through the tutorial in the 6th so far. Town didn't seem to grow, but you could only buy 1 building in that campaign. Hero leveling seems to have changed to remove all the randomness. UI is clean and easy to grasp... Overall, liking this game alot so far =) Heroes 5 is in the same ballpark as Heroes 4, and 2(and slightly above heroes 1 and heroes chronicles). That is, it is a good game, no mistake. However it is not an excellent game, nowhere near genre culminating, like Heroes 3 is. That is, according to gamespot user rankings, which are the most objective criterion possible to establish for ranking games. On June 30 2011 09:39 Kiarip wrote:
Personally I liked the second 1 the most.
The third 1 was ok, but it seemed to add too many complications that really just slowed down the game imo. Like the Capitol upgrade path to get full income out of your first town... took really long.
Also the homogenization of units, all of them having upgrades, and no units having 2 upgrades, and etc. Kind of threw it off for me, the 2 types of heroes per castle I wasn't a big fan of either >_> honestly I think apart from having more Castles the third one didn't add anything that was that good over the second one. Yeah, good thing no one ever uses the Capitol building path  at most, one gets town hall for bonus gold, but after that its all unit buildings, all action, baby. Heroes 3 suits wonderfully for optimised gameplay. Though yes, in terms of user rankings, 3 is easily the highest ranked of the games. On December 14 2010 10:31 plated.rawr wrote:
I see a lot of people saluting Heroes 3 as the pinnacle of the series, but I really disagree. The third didn't really create anything new from the second game. Yes, it rehauled the races, yes it "upgraded" (also known as broke) necromancy, yes it added more units, but really, it was in no way superior to heroes 2, gameplay wise. More than anything, it removed racial differences as well as devalued agressive gameplay thanks to the capital income.
The negative changes from 2 to 3 includes
- Capital income
- Supercharged necromancy
- Upgrades for EVERY unit
- Terrible Magic Missile-sound!!!!
Capital income encourages turtling on your income rather than agressive expansion and exploring. Yes, you need special resources, but the map makers and random map generators always placed them within your "safe area", meaning you didn't really have to explore past your safe little center of the universe to get what you needed, and since you had 4k income + hero bonus, you'd not have to leave your pocket of perfect safety till you had your home castle pretty much fully upgraded. Stale and static.
A part about the very limited income of 1k was that if your opponent decided to be ballsy and get a gold mine outside his territorry, he'd be outproducing you insanely hard. 1k + 1k is far more significant than 4k + 1k. Lower home income and higher relative potential gain resulted in a far more dynamic and agressive game.
The low income also forces a higher awareness of your army composition. You won't be able to purchase all the dwelling each week, so you need to be very careful in what you choose. Half or more of the dwelling will be left, meaning your choice of composition will be very determinal to your game, causing for more exciting fights than "I have produced for x round, he's produced for y rounds, ergo I win"-borefests.
Supercharged necromancy - with this I mean the scaling unit return (up untill Vampire Lord I think it was?). On grandmaster necromancy you got something like 20% + hero speciality + 10% per necrospire of killed enemies returned in hitpoints as Vampire Lords, who were practically unkillable thanks to lifedrain, no retaliation and Raise Dead. Compare that to Heroes 2 base skeleton only-ressurection, and you can see what was a handy cannon fodder-production ability turned into a gamebreaking powerhouse without equal.
With upgrades available for every unit, the races lost a lot of their uniqueness. With every unit having upgrade potential, all your base unit feels like placeholders, meaning it'll encourage turtling till you've got the upgraded dwelling - "If i go out now, I'll lose 'em since they aren't upgraded to no-retal / max range / crazy defense / no retal / blood drain / face rape / etc". With some units only at one tier, they added phases in the game where one race was more suited for exploration than others. Warlock, for instance, with their centaur at tier 1 and gargoyles at tier 2, were an early agressive race. Fast archer, durable and fast support. In addition, the three upgraded tiers of Dragons really made them unique. The green dragon was good, but weak. If you managed to get your tower to red dragons, they really started to kick ass. Black dragon? Jesus, you must have been agressive to get this much sulfur! But with heroes 3, everything was standardized. "This is your base unit. This is your upgraded unit. The base unit sucks. The upgraded unit is cool. All the races work like this. Turtle some with your capital while you upgrade, kekekekeke."
Oh, and standardized upgrades also meant that whoever attacked got double the disadvantage - enemy castle defenses as well as technology disadvantage from having to move from point A to B without being able to tech the YOU HAVE TO TECH THESE-units compared to his enemy, making it pointless to move out without upgraded units, meaning anything but turtling was pretty much suicide.
Last, but most important - Magic missile? The iconic FYOIIIING sound is what made the spell so great! In heroes 3, it's replaced by some generic magical projectile crap - no whistling silver arrow of awesome anymore!
Heroes 5 is enjoyable as the leveling and skill system has gotten a very nice rework, which is great, but unfortunately, it didn't remove itself from the standardized races and turtle potential. It's unfortunately doubtful they'll return to the things that made heroes 2 so good compared to 3, but it will probably still be a great game.
What WOULD make heroes 6 smell the glory of heroes 2 would be changes such as
- Reverted low income, 250 > 500 >1k.
- Varied ammounts of upgrades for different races, spaced out intelligently to give various races strenghts at various stages of the game - tier 1 with 3 upgrades? Sure! Tier 7 with no upgrades? Awesome! A race without a tier 7 unit at all? Wicked!
as well as general changes that could improve the game, such as
- Units blocking / reducing ranged line of sight in combat. Eg, shoot past the tile of an enemy unit into a unit behind, lose 1/2 / all ranged attack power, meaning strategic placement of units more important.
The capitol rush gamestyle you describe of Homm 3 having is widely known as the "noob" style of play. It is terribly inefficient. And not much fun, I agree. Good thing that it is almost never useful in actual gameplay. Instead mass hero recruiting + treasure hunting is the de facto way to get income. And Upgrading units? Cmon, that is week 3 building priority perhaps, rarely any sooner. And online games tend to end around that time anyway - week 3 and week 4. yeah but if you make the map big enough or make the creatures strong enough that won't be the right way to play anymore. Anyways the point is that it's unnecessary, it doesn't matter people actually play game, they obviously work around it in a way that makes it more playable, but it still has some shitty features. Plus let's not forget a bunch of useless-ish secondary skills they added. Incorrect, people in competitive environment use strategies based on how efficient they are, not how playable. The fact that city hall and capital are not built in 1st week is testament to it being inefficient, regardless of valuation of playability
And secondary skills are irrelevant to your point.
|
Cheers, I'll check that out.
Edit: Wow, 6 parts of 60mins each? This is awesome. And that's just one game!
|
Ive been testing the BETA so far finding it awesome.
One thing I find annoying thou in the combat system is the seemingly random placement. It seems very hard to protect your ranged units.
|
On July 06 2011 07:23 Fulla wrote:
Ive been testing the BETA so far finding it awesome.
One thing I find annoying thou in the combat system is the seemingly random placement. It seems very hard to protect your ranged units.
isn't there a tactics skill so you can place your units?
|
On July 06 2011 05:10 xarthaz wrote:The finals in 2010 were streamed, there are vods available: http://heroescommunity.com/viewthread.php3?TID=32543&pagenumber=2With the advent of modern micro, things are possible that once were not, similarly to starcraft. Heroes' combat ability is so good that they are efficient at getting treasure, especially with the strong creatures from home town. Show nested quote +On July 05 2011 22:39 Kiarip wrote:On July 02 2011 02:35 xarthaz wrote:On July 02 2011 02:27 Danjoh wrote:On June 29 2011 16:32 True_Spike wrote:
All the mistakes from the 5th part of te series seem to have made their way into the 6th, too. My biggest grief so far, though, are townscreens - or rather their complete absence. Towns in HOMM3 were SO gorgeous, I do not understand why it is impossible to reproduce 12 years later without making it look like garbage. What is this obsession people have with 3d graphics? Can't the townscreens at least be 2d if it makes them look FAR better?
Also, it strikes me as odd that musical scores are nowhere near as good as they ware more than a decade ago.
HOMM3 is the best in the series by far even by todays standards, in my opinion. I hope 6 will be at least half as good. What are the mistakes of the 5th you are speaking about? I thought the 5th was a great game, very similar to the 3rd, overall it felt like thesame game. The only complaint you mention, is the townscreens, wich the 5th had and were quite good in my opinion. Only played through the tutorial in the 6th so far. Town didn't seem to grow, but you could only buy 1 building in that campaign. Hero leveling seems to have changed to remove all the randomness. UI is clean and easy to grasp... Overall, liking this game alot so far =) Heroes 5 is in the same ballpark as Heroes 4, and 2(and slightly above heroes 1 and heroes chronicles). That is, it is a good game, no mistake. However it is not an excellent game, nowhere near genre culminating, like Heroes 3 is. That is, according to gamespot user rankings, which are the most objective criterion possible to establish for ranking games. On June 30 2011 09:39 Kiarip wrote:
Personally I liked the second 1 the most.
The third 1 was ok, but it seemed to add too many complications that really just slowed down the game imo. Like the Capitol upgrade path to get full income out of your first town... took really long.
Also the homogenization of units, all of them having upgrades, and no units having 2 upgrades, and etc. Kind of threw it off for me, the 2 types of heroes per castle I wasn't a big fan of either >_> honestly I think apart from having more Castles the third one didn't add anything that was that good over the second one. Yeah, good thing no one ever uses the Capitol building path at most, one gets town hall for bonus gold, but after that its all unit buildings, all action, baby. Heroes 3 suits wonderfully for optimised gameplay. Though yes, in terms of user rankings, 3 is easily the highest ranked of the games. On December 14 2010 10:31 plated.rawr wrote:
I see a lot of people saluting Heroes 3 as the pinnacle of the series, but I really disagree. The third didn't really create anything new from the second game. Yes, it rehauled the races, yes it "upgraded" (also known as broke) necromancy, yes it added more units, but really, it was in no way superior to heroes 2, gameplay wise. More than anything, it removed racial differences as well as devalued agressive gameplay thanks to the capital income.
The negative changes from 2 to 3 includes
- Capital income
- Supercharged necromancy
- Upgrades for EVERY unit
- Terrible Magic Missile-sound!!!!
Capital income encourages turtling on your income rather than agressive expansion and exploring. Yes, you need special resources, but the map makers and random map generators always placed them within your "safe area", meaning you didn't really have to explore past your safe little center of the universe to get what you needed, and since you had 4k income + hero bonus, you'd not have to leave your pocket of perfect safety till you had your home castle pretty much fully upgraded. Stale and static.
A part about the very limited income of 1k was that if your opponent decided to be ballsy and get a gold mine outside his territorry, he'd be outproducing you insanely hard. 1k + 1k is far more significant than 4k + 1k. Lower home income and higher relative potential gain resulted in a far more dynamic and agressive game.
The low income also forces a higher awareness of your army composition. You won't be able to purchase all the dwelling each week, so you need to be very careful in what you choose. Half or more of the dwelling will be left, meaning your choice of composition will be very determinal to your game, causing for more exciting fights than "I have produced for x round, he's produced for y rounds, ergo I win"-borefests.
Supercharged necromancy - with this I mean the scaling unit return (up untill Vampire Lord I think it was?). On grandmaster necromancy you got something like 20% + hero speciality + 10% per necrospire of killed enemies returned in hitpoints as Vampire Lords, who were practically unkillable thanks to lifedrain, no retaliation and Raise Dead. Compare that to Heroes 2 base skeleton only-ressurection, and you can see what was a handy cannon fodder-production ability turned into a gamebreaking powerhouse without equal.
With upgrades available for every unit, the races lost a lot of their uniqueness. With every unit having upgrade potential, all your base unit feels like placeholders, meaning it'll encourage turtling till you've got the upgraded dwelling - "If i go out now, I'll lose 'em since they aren't upgraded to no-retal / max range / crazy defense / no retal / blood drain / face rape / etc". With some units only at one tier, they added phases in the game where one race was more suited for exploration than others. Warlock, for instance, with their centaur at tier 1 and gargoyles at tier 2, were an early agressive race. Fast archer, durable and fast support. In addition, the three upgraded tiers of Dragons really made them unique. The green dragon was good, but weak. If you managed to get your tower to red dragons, they really started to kick ass. Black dragon? Jesus, you must have been agressive to get this much sulfur! But with heroes 3, everything was standardized. "This is your base unit. This is your upgraded unit. The base unit sucks. The upgraded unit is cool. All the races work like this. Turtle some with your capital while you upgrade, kekekekeke."
Oh, and standardized upgrades also meant that whoever attacked got double the disadvantage - enemy castle defenses as well as technology disadvantage from having to move from point A to B without being able to tech the YOU HAVE TO TECH THESE-units compared to his enemy, making it pointless to move out without upgraded units, meaning anything but turtling was pretty much suicide.
Last, but most important - Magic missile? The iconic FYOIIIING sound is what made the spell so great! In heroes 3, it's replaced by some generic magical projectile crap - no whistling silver arrow of awesome anymore!
Heroes 5 is enjoyable as the leveling and skill system has gotten a very nice rework, which is great, but unfortunately, it didn't remove itself from the standardized races and turtle potential. It's unfortunately doubtful they'll return to the things that made heroes 2 so good compared to 3, but it will probably still be a great game.
What WOULD make heroes 6 smell the glory of heroes 2 would be changes such as
- Reverted low income, 250 > 500 >1k.
- Varied ammounts of upgrades for different races, spaced out intelligently to give various races strenghts at various stages of the game - tier 1 with 3 upgrades? Sure! Tier 7 with no upgrades? Awesome! A race without a tier 7 unit at all? Wicked!
as well as general changes that could improve the game, such as
- Units blocking / reducing ranged line of sight in combat. Eg, shoot past the tile of an enemy unit into a unit behind, lose 1/2 / all ranged attack power, meaning strategic placement of units more important.
The capitol rush gamestyle you describe of Homm 3 having is widely known as the "noob" style of play. It is terribly inefficient. And not much fun, I agree. Good thing that it is almost never useful in actual gameplay. Instead mass hero recruiting + treasure hunting is the de facto way to get income. And Upgrading units? Cmon, that is week 3 building priority perhaps, rarely any sooner. And online games tend to end around that time anyway - week 3 and week 4. yeah but if you make the map big enough or make the creatures strong enough that won't be the right way to play anymore. Anyways the point is that it's unnecessary, it doesn't matter people actually play game, they obviously work around it in a way that makes it more playable, but it still has some shitty features. Plus let's not forget a bunch of useless-ish secondary skills they added. Incorrect, people in competitive environment use strategies based on how efficient they are, not how playable. The fact that city hall and capital are not built in 1st week is testament to it being inefficient, regardless of valuation of playability And secondary skills are irrelevant to your point.
I love how in the game 3 of the videos that you linked, guy goes "gg, shit map, and was offered water 5 times"
Is that the equivalent of IdrA of the HOMM3 community?
I realize random plays a huge part in HOMM, but still, funny qq
|
Trust me, there is soooo much depth to this game that people don't realize. Like unbelievable depth that the developers likely unintentionally added. Been playing for a while and started playing with some guys from the HoMM3 forums- wow did I get schooled hard for a few months, starting to get to grips with it.
Also- camping in your town and trying to mass up will work against noobs/computer. Any competent player will literally run through you by week 3/4. Regardless of how well you teched.
Also got my self the custom map pack from the community if anyone is interested in some of the user maps. Holy shit these single player maps are difficult and fucking good fun. Anyone played Sanders folly? Must have tried that map 50 times and never succeeded, but good fun every time.
I've got like 500 custom maps- many of which are highly rated through out the HoMM3 community- give me a shout if you want the map pack and ill host it.
|
I would appreciate the map pack greatly. Sander's Folly wasn't too hard if you played aggressively enough, and the last battles are quite doable once you have a few weeks' worth of Mighty Gorgons out of 3 towns  . First time through I got absolutely mauled by the red Necro hero... definitely didn't see that one coming.
Any of you guys play WoG for Heroes 3? Setting random map rules and fiddling with some of the settings (eg buffing all of the nigh-worthless secondary skills) lead to some really fun games.
|
On July 06 2011 05:10 xarthaz wrote:The finals in 2010 were streamed, there are vods available: http://heroescommunity.com/viewthread.php3?TID=32543&pagenumber=2With the advent of modern micro, things are possible that once were not, similarly to starcraft. Heroes' combat ability is so good that they are efficient at getting treasure, especially with the strong creatures from home town.
OMG I have been trying to find HOMM3 gameplay vids forever. Thank you so much!!!.
|
Oh man! I just pre-ordered this game so that I could play the demo. The custom map throwback in the demo sold me and gave me waves upon waves of nostalgia and nerd chills. Broken Alliance? HOMM2 music? Words cannot describe how emotional this makes me. I hope they kept the music for the wintry areas...
I played HOMM 2, 3, and 5 extensively (hundreds upon hundreds of gameplay hours each), and I think my favorite was 5. This seems like a really uncommon opinion in this thread, which is shocking to me, since in many other game series my favorite is usually a release early in the series (FFVI, SNES Mario Kart, Warcraft 2, C&C Red Alert, etc.)
Some of the gripes addressed in this thread like townscreens might still be being finalized. This is a beta, after all.
|
HOMM 2 and 3 still to this day are two of my favorite games of all time. They are true classics like street fighter 2 or starcraft to me. They just did everything right and I still play HOMM 3 to this day and its just as good now as it was then. I played 4 and 5 and thought both of them sucked. HOMM 5 I just hate 3d graphics I do not know how else to put it they are slow, clunky, and awkward looking to me. I know I am in the minority but its just my opinion.
|
Can you do hotseat in the beta? If so then I might just pick this up as a preorder
|
On July 06 2011 11:40 Phaded wrote:
Can you do hotseat in the beta? If so then I might just pick this up as a preorder
Yep, hotseat is actually the only way to play multiplayer at all in this beta. It's a 6 player map, so you can do 3v3 or FFA. It's pretty awesome, with all of the 6 factions totally open and playable.
|
On July 06 2011 05:10 xarthaz wrote:The finals in 2010 were streamed, there are vods available: http://heroescommunity.com/viewthread.php3?TID=32543&pagenumber=2With the advent of modern micro, things are possible that once were not, similarly to starcraft. Heroes' combat ability is so good that they are efficient at getting treasure, especially with the strong creatures from home town. Show nested quote +On July 05 2011 22:39 Kiarip wrote:On July 02 2011 02:35 xarthaz wrote:On July 02 2011 02:27 Danjoh wrote:On June 29 2011 16:32 True_Spike wrote:
All the mistakes from the 5th part of te series seem to have made their way into the 6th, too. My biggest grief so far, though, are townscreens - or rather their complete absence. Towns in HOMM3 were SO gorgeous, I do not understand why it is impossible to reproduce 12 years later without making it look like garbage. What is this obsession people have with 3d graphics? Can't the townscreens at least be 2d if it makes them look FAR better?
Also, it strikes me as odd that musical scores are nowhere near as good as they ware more than a decade ago.
HOMM3 is the best in the series by far even by todays standards, in my opinion. I hope 6 will be at least half as good. What are the mistakes of the 5th you are speaking about? I thought the 5th was a great game, very similar to the 3rd, overall it felt like thesame game. The only complaint you mention, is the townscreens, wich the 5th had and were quite good in my opinion. Only played through the tutorial in the 6th so far. Town didn't seem to grow, but you could only buy 1 building in that campaign. Hero leveling seems to have changed to remove all the randomness. UI is clean and easy to grasp... Overall, liking this game alot so far =) Heroes 5 is in the same ballpark as Heroes 4, and 2(and slightly above heroes 1 and heroes chronicles). That is, it is a good game, no mistake. However it is not an excellent game, nowhere near genre culminating, like Heroes 3 is. That is, according to gamespot user rankings, which are the most objective criterion possible to establish for ranking games. On June 30 2011 09:39 Kiarip wrote:
Personally I liked the second 1 the most.
The third 1 was ok, but it seemed to add too many complications that really just slowed down the game imo. Like the Capitol upgrade path to get full income out of your first town... took really long.
Also the homogenization of units, all of them having upgrades, and no units having 2 upgrades, and etc. Kind of threw it off for me, the 2 types of heroes per castle I wasn't a big fan of either >_> honestly I think apart from having more Castles the third one didn't add anything that was that good over the second one. Yeah, good thing no one ever uses the Capitol building path at most, one gets town hall for bonus gold, but after that its all unit buildings, all action, baby. Heroes 3 suits wonderfully for optimised gameplay. Though yes, in terms of user rankings, 3 is easily the highest ranked of the games. On December 14 2010 10:31 plated.rawr wrote:
I see a lot of people saluting Heroes 3 as the pinnacle of the series, but I really disagree. The third didn't really create anything new from the second game. Yes, it rehauled the races, yes it "upgraded" (also known as broke) necromancy, yes it added more units, but really, it was in no way superior to heroes 2, gameplay wise. More than anything, it removed racial differences as well as devalued agressive gameplay thanks to the capital income.
The negative changes from 2 to 3 includes
- Capital income
- Supercharged necromancy
- Upgrades for EVERY unit
- Terrible Magic Missile-sound!!!!
Capital income encourages turtling on your income rather than agressive expansion and exploring. Yes, you need special resources, but the map makers and random map generators always placed them within your "safe area", meaning you didn't really have to explore past your safe little center of the universe to get what you needed, and since you had 4k income + hero bonus, you'd not have to leave your pocket of perfect safety till you had your home castle pretty much fully upgraded. Stale and static.
A part about the very limited income of 1k was that if your opponent decided to be ballsy and get a gold mine outside his territorry, he'd be outproducing you insanely hard. 1k + 1k is far more significant than 4k + 1k. Lower home income and higher relative potential gain resulted in a far more dynamic and agressive game.
The low income also forces a higher awareness of your army composition. You won't be able to purchase all the dwelling each week, so you need to be very careful in what you choose. Half or more of the dwelling will be left, meaning your choice of composition will be very determinal to your game, causing for more exciting fights than "I have produced for x round, he's produced for y rounds, ergo I win"-borefests.
Supercharged necromancy - with this I mean the scaling unit return (up untill Vampire Lord I think it was?). On grandmaster necromancy you got something like 20% + hero speciality + 10% per necrospire of killed enemies returned in hitpoints as Vampire Lords, who were practically unkillable thanks to lifedrain, no retaliation and Raise Dead. Compare that to Heroes 2 base skeleton only-ressurection, and you can see what was a handy cannon fodder-production ability turned into a gamebreaking powerhouse without equal.
With upgrades available for every unit, the races lost a lot of their uniqueness. With every unit having upgrade potential, all your base unit feels like placeholders, meaning it'll encourage turtling till you've got the upgraded dwelling - "If i go out now, I'll lose 'em since they aren't upgraded to no-retal / max range / crazy defense / no retal / blood drain / face rape / etc". With some units only at one tier, they added phases in the game where one race was more suited for exploration than others. Warlock, for instance, with their centaur at tier 1 and gargoyles at tier 2, were an early agressive race. Fast archer, durable and fast support. In addition, the three upgraded tiers of Dragons really made them unique. The green dragon was good, but weak. If you managed to get your tower to red dragons, they really started to kick ass. Black dragon? Jesus, you must have been agressive to get this much sulfur! But with heroes 3, everything was standardized. "This is your base unit. This is your upgraded unit. The base unit sucks. The upgraded unit is cool. All the races work like this. Turtle some with your capital while you upgrade, kekekekeke."
Oh, and standardized upgrades also meant that whoever attacked got double the disadvantage - enemy castle defenses as well as technology disadvantage from having to move from point A to B without being able to tech the YOU HAVE TO TECH THESE-units compared to his enemy, making it pointless to move out without upgraded units, meaning anything but turtling was pretty much suicide.
Last, but most important - Magic missile? The iconic FYOIIIING sound is what made the spell so great! In heroes 3, it's replaced by some generic magical projectile crap - no whistling silver arrow of awesome anymore!
Heroes 5 is enjoyable as the leveling and skill system has gotten a very nice rework, which is great, but unfortunately, it didn't remove itself from the standardized races and turtle potential. It's unfortunately doubtful they'll return to the things that made heroes 2 so good compared to 3, but it will probably still be a great game.
What WOULD make heroes 6 smell the glory of heroes 2 would be changes such as
- Reverted low income, 250 > 500 >1k.
- Varied ammounts of upgrades for different races, spaced out intelligently to give various races strenghts at various stages of the game - tier 1 with 3 upgrades? Sure! Tier 7 with no upgrades? Awesome! A race without a tier 7 unit at all? Wicked!
as well as general changes that could improve the game, such as
- Units blocking / reducing ranged line of sight in combat. Eg, shoot past the tile of an enemy unit into a unit behind, lose 1/2 / all ranged attack power, meaning strategic placement of units more important.
The capitol rush gamestyle you describe of Homm 3 having is widely known as the "noob" style of play. It is terribly inefficient. And not much fun, I agree. Good thing that it is almost never useful in actual gameplay. Instead mass hero recruiting + treasure hunting is the de facto way to get income. And Upgrading units? Cmon, that is week 3 building priority perhaps, rarely any sooner. And online games tend to end around that time anyway - week 3 and week 4. yeah but if you make the map big enough or make the creatures strong enough that won't be the right way to play anymore. Anyways the point is that it's unnecessary, it doesn't matter people actually play game, they obviously work around it in a way that makes it more playable, but it still has some shitty features. Plus let's not forget a bunch of useless-ish secondary skills they added. Incorrect, people in competitive environment use strategies based on how efficient they are, not how playable. The fact that city hall and capital are not built in 1st week is testament to it being inefficient, regardless of valuation of playability And secondary skills are irrelevant to your point.
Ok I guess what I meant to say is that they use the aspects of the game that are usable/good like you said in competitive play, but since there's a bunch of stuff that's left completely unused it makes it obvious that something is wrong with the game.
Plus, like I said I doubt that people would play the same style on bigger maps, people chose to play on smaller maps for playability reasons no doubt, my point here being that the game is loaded with a lot of garbage, a lot of it is pretty bad, imo the second one had a better base of a game, the only problem was it, was that it's unbalanced but balance can be fixed by messing around with some numbers which is way easier than to fix a game half of which is unusable in any type of competitive play, and also offers less faction diversity.
|
will there be liches? lich are the best units ever LOL
|
The videos are in Large or X-large maps, also maretti - the HoMM3 expert has a lot of videos on this in his channel. capitol rush offers superior kingdom over dwelling + heroes rush at no point in the game, hence map size is irrelevant to the question as map size (differentiation given other parameters of map staying same) is merely change of timing of kingdom power.
the fact that things are forgone for other things is a result of the concept of choice having meaning to the course of events. Only in a world where choice did not affect the affair of events would unused actions be unnecessary.
|
OK, I preordered it, downloading the beta right now. 20KB/s...maybe it'll finish before release. T_T
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
