OT: HOMM V

[Agrajag]

Here are my musings on HoMMV, I'm somewhat if an HoMM fanboy, so I'm biased, but also should have enough experience to talk with some authority

Starting with random things people wrote:
1) Game is too random.
Ha!
a) Risk management.
b) It's about as random as Dom3. Maybe even less, since no slinger could ever kill that SC with an uber lucky oe roll.
2) The game is made by damn russians (:P)
Have you played HoMMIII? Did you install WoG? WoG was made by russian fans
For people that don't know what I'm talking about, in the Wake of Gods is a fanmade expansion pack for HoMMIII (complete) that adds a lot of content and makes the game a whole lot more fun to play. It is what really makes HoMMIII in my opinion. It is also the reason I still enjoy playing HoMMIII from time to time.
3) Skillz.
I'm not really that great of an HoMM player, because I enjoy playing for fun more than to win, but let me tell you this, the really awesome players play nothing like "we" do, it's definitely not about one hero or one city for them.
At least that applies for HoMMIII where I was somewhat interested in MP, I'm not that familiar with HoMMV MP, but since it was made to be quite similar I can only guess that the same thing applies to HoMMV.
4) Critical Mass.
Applies only to neutrals, and isn't always the best strategy.
And even with critical mass, there will be hard fights (against neutrals), and there will be battles that you just can't win without losses.

So here are my disorganized thoughts on HoMMV:
* I haven't bothered with MP, since when the game came out MP was completely unplayable. Some responses here seem to indicate that MP is still broken. I would certainly be surprised if I found it wasn't broken, because when I played it was horribly broken.
* Luckily, the best kind of MP, the Hot-Seat definitely works great
* If you buy the game, get the gold edition with both expansions. The Tribes of the East expansion really adds lots of cool stuff.
* The game is really fun in Hot-Seat, just yesterday me and my friend played ~8 hours of almost none-stop Hot-Seat.
* It seems as if Tribes of the East has increased system requirements It definitely works worse than the original version on the same hardware.
* One of the reasons people seem to think that HoMMV sucks without knowing why, is that it runs slowly (both graphically and AI-thinking-ly). I remember not having much fun with HoMMIII when it came out, but changing my mind once I could run it quickly.
Of course, this means that slowness might impair your enjoyment of the game. Do you have a weak PC?
* There's definite tactical thinking involved in this game. Sometimes it's hard to see, but sometimes you'll come up with some brilliant that will put an ear-to-ear smile on your face. (Even if all it "does" is reduce your casualties from "few" to "none" when fighting against neutrals.)
* A lot of people talk about the game building up to one epic battle to decide the game. Like I said previously this isn't all that true for the really great players, but even for "you", those epic battles are seriously awesomely fun, especially when fought against the AI.
* I still say that HoMMII was the awesomest of the bunch I really liked how it sacrificed balance for making factions more thematic.
* HoMMIV was nice, but too many things were ruined in it
* HoMMV was designed to recreate the success of HoMMIII, so if you liked III there's a nice chance you'll enjoy V.
* Let me say it again, I really like the Hot-Seat mode (as I did in previous HoMMs)


I think the best way to get a good impression of the game is to hop on over to a friend who has the game (preferably with both expansion packs and fully patched) and play some co-op Hot-Seat, if you won't enjoy that then you probably won't enjoy the game. If you do enjoy it, then you probably will enjoy the game

[B0rsuk]

I like Age of Wonders 2: Shadow Magic much more than Homm5 .

Homm1 was revolution.
Homm2 was revolution.
Homm3 was evolution. It was good, but not spectacular for me. Homm2 added and improved much more than Homm3.
Homm4 I have a lot of sympathy for. It has many very interesting features and changes, but it's clearly rushed and unfinished. 3DO was going bankrupt at the time H4 was being made, and it shows. At the release there were UGLY memory leaks and performance issues. Prior to Heroes4, there was a saying that you don't need a strong machine to run a Homm game. H4 broke that rule and H5 continues it. I value H4 a lot because it tried many new things, and many of them were, in my opinion, Good (like changes to combat system, simultaneous retaliation, reliable and consistent magic although it was MTG clone, castle walls, obstacles, unit choices, units that aren't piles of stats...)

I would love H5 if it wa H4 done right - with proper resources and polish. Instead, it's a bland clone of H3 with Warcraft graphics. I considered H3 good, but somewhat uninspired. In some ways, H5 is a regression compared to H3 - for instance stats and hero system, map size, editor, magic, number of spells.

I've found my H4 done right. It's AoW2: SM. Age of Wonders2: Shadow Magic plays like a cross of Homm and Master of Magic. Strong Master of Magic influences include: magic domains, global spells, summonable units with upkeep, castle sieges, and more.
Too bad AoW2: SM is aging and few people play it anymore.

[DonCorazon]

Thanks for the feedback. For me, most old games seem like they were much more fun than newer games. I don't know if that is because older games were truly better, or just newer/innovative at the time, or if I have just become jaded and cranky with 30+ years of age.

But if you go to a website like Gamespot and look at Game rankings, most of the highest ranked games are from the late 90s. I remember playing the first Might and Magic and having a blast, and not that long ago I got one of the Might and Magic RPGs I had missed (I think 7 or 8) and thought it was a lot more enjoyable than Neverwinter Nights, despite the polish and graphics. The older HOMMs seemed better too than my experience with the HOMM5 demo anyway.

I often judge a game by the amount of fan-based activity and content, which was what eventually led me to Dom3 - when I saw the Wiki. Some games just come out and die almost immediately - not even an FAQ on the web to herald their passing. While I had some fun with AoW2:SM, I don't see much of a community around that game, maybe I am just not looking in the right spot.

Also, though not much of a real-time strategy game player (too much stress in real-life; no need to supplement it with frantic clicking and scrolling around) - I did find Warlords Battlecry 2 to be a game that stayed on my hard drive for a long time. It had that touch of old school humor often missing in newer games (the voices for the quasits come to mind)...

[Agrajag]

Maybe you'd enjoy Warlords: Battlecry 3 then
I had a lot of fun with both 2 and 3, but ultimately I'm just not an RTS guy, so I stopped having fun with them

[Hoplosternum]

B0rsuk - I agree with you about HOMM4. there were some really nice ideas in there. But I think 3DO was dieing at the time and there was hardly an AI at all. In single player skirmish while HOMM3 AIs would at least expand and fight the HOMM4 AI was completely passive. I haven't got in to HOMM5 but it seems similar to HOMM3 but far more demanding systemwise. My pc struggles to play it at any sort of pace.

I really liked M&M 6 & 7 and still play them occasionally. I agree that they are much more fun than NWN despite the graphics. But I think for me that is because I like the party system. I liked the Balders Gate games, especially the first.

Age of Wonders iteslf was a great game. I stopped playing pbem mp a few years ago, but it had a decent community going many years after it was released. AoW2 just never really grabbed me at all. Even when both were 'out' AoW seemed to have more dedicated fans.

[Zeldor]

Hoplosternum:

In HOMM5 AI just gets money and resources. It isn't playing the same game as you are at all. You get into enemy territory and see monsters killed but treasure left. It simply does not need it.

They also decided to make that kitchy approach: good elves, dark elves, humans, dwarves. Good thing they couldn't invent whole castle of hobbits.

For most series fans HOMM3 Wake of Gods was the best version of the game ever [though you could argue that some things in WoG went too far]. What all hoped for was that game in 3d settings. And instead they created an abomination that couldn't run smoothly on new computers.

[Agrajag]

Zeldor said:
[though you could argue that some things in WoG went too far]

No you can't () because pretty much everything can be turned off

[Edi]

HoMM4 became a good game once they got both expansions out and patched it to version 3.0, but at release it was an unplayable piece of crap that tried and failed spectacularly to steal a lot of features from Age of Wonders 1. Get the H3 & H4 Complete DVD. The experience with the new HoMM4 is light years removed from the first release crapware. I can vouch for that from experience.

HoMM5 has the biggest problem with the AI being slow and the graphics engine being slow. The AI is probably because the damn thing sees the entire map and evaluates everything on it before making moves, whether it can reach stuff or not. Load up an impossible sized Tribes of the East map and you can't play them with AI on, because turn resolution takes 20+ minutes.

The skill system in HoMM5 is pretty revolutionary compared to the old ones in the series, with much more choices. The problem with the original release was that you only had certain limited must-have choices and you only had one or two viable heroes for most factions. Tribes of the East revamped the skill system and enriched it a lot.

H5 does still have the same old killer stack and critical mass problems of earlier Heroes games, but they're not necessarily as bad anymore. A well designed hero, especially with the right spells if a caster, can wreak absolute havoc on even a large enemy army. I've gotten wiped out several times against the AI that way when I had the edge numerically and ran into something that had just the right things stacked on it.

[Agema]

HoMMIV was a bit of a disaster if you ask me. The new creation of heroes being in the battle was gruesomely misimplemented. It led to all sorts of problems.

HoMMV got rid of it, more of a rollback to HoMMIII. However, it still had several problems. Firstly, there are missions which send you all the way across the map, then you get a new mission which sends to back to another side of the map, and, well, let's just say spending turns doing nothing but traipsing an army from one side of them to another is frustrating.

The AI is crummy. It chucks a lot of units at you by way of compensation, but it's just slightly disappointing. Also, the game tends to devolve into going backwards and forwards until one massive battle between your biggest army and the enemy's decides the whole thing. Usually, considering the slightly cheaty AI, this means chucking small armies to grab castles whilst dodging his massive monlithic army(-ies). Eventually, you'll cause enough disruption to his troop building that you can build a huge army bigger than his. But to a large extent this means you've done nothing but spend hours - literally hours - running around not doing very much. All in all, the various level design weaknesses and gameplay problems make finishing every level seem like a chore that must be endured to get onto the next tedious task, rather than a satisfying attempt to fulfil an objective.

HoMM's problem is that ever since 2 they've been obsolete; the gameplay ancient, the AI effectively nonexistent. This can also be said of Age of Wonders, but AoW had a much better system - it's hard to justify HoMM4/5 in the light of what AoW achieved.

[Edi]

No disagreement there, but turn-based fantasy strategy is such a niche game market that often you take what you can get. As I said, H4 sucked out of the box. The Complete version is a good game, but still not as good as the original AoW in my opinion, especially considering how late it was done. But as with all of these, your mileage may vary depending on what you're looking for and your playstyle.

AoW2 and AoW:SM I never liked due to certain key features being removed that were present in the first one.