This game is unbalanced as hell, and I hope it stays that way.

[Solmyr]

One of the things I always loved about Homm3 is how sometimes you would just manage to make an OP hero, teleporting around the place with expert air magic, owning the board with fire spells or snowballing with 3/3 necro set and create arch liches instead of skellie warriors with necromancy.

This game allows us to once again make some insane heroes. I just played a game on HC, started as Arcane, figgured I would try max archery + legion. My secondary base was from Delirium, a faction I played heavily since release since their new "watcher" spell seemed OP, which it is. First hero at the Tavern is Seth of the sleep, my main with that faction.

Now Seth and my initial Arcane faction choice was a match made in heaven, with Arcane u get a building which fills your mana pool each time u visit the town, this allowed me to have perma full mana between battles by having a Delirium shadow clone stationed at my Arcane town, resulting in Seth + additional clones just going full wololooooo on any enemy stack, basically unstopable conversion train.

Today these games are few and far between, in a time where most genres has to be made for Esports and competitive play, there is hardly room for Unbalanced games. This is a rare gem, and I sincerely hope it stays completely bonkers.

[BaulCuxx]

Yes

[Boron]

Exactly, this game does this even better then the old HoMM games, i really hope it stays this way.
Maybe some optional game settings trying to make it a bit more balanced don't hurt as well, but the main game should stay like it is and just continue to fix bugs and add new units/nations/spells etc. imho.

[TaKtLo$$]

But you cant put many Dragons into a fight :( i have the best perks.... carry 20 Red Dragons and can only put 5 into a Fight with lvl 25 Hero :( thats not OP.

[i_nive]

Originally posted by TaKtLo$$:

But you cant put many Dragons into a fight :( i have the best perks.... carry 20 Red Dragons and can only put 5 into a Fight with lvl 25 Hero :( thats not OP.

No loss, Dragons are overrated in this game. I considered them the ultimate weapon (as in any other one); sadly they're not.

[TaKtLo$$]

rly? my Dragons are overpowered :D but i play on easy because i suck hard :(

[TaKtLo$$]

ok your right, Dragons sucks hell :) All you need is element mage and spam elements... ♥♥♥♥ is that op :)

[Gymnorhinus]

If they want to balance it fine, but there should be at least another gamemode where everything is unballanced

[Gymnorhinus]

Originally posted by TaKtLo$$:

ok your right, Dragons sucks hell :) All you need is element mage and spam elements... ♥♥♥♥ is that op :)

Try playing as a stronghold faction with hero who has a archery bonus, make as many trolls as you can, lvl up, and watch your trolls snipe armies from across the map xD

[happyscrub]

Originally posted by TaKtLo$$:

rly? my Dragons are overpowered :D but i play on easy because i suck hard :(

Midas Touch says hi

[happyscrub]

I hate unbalanced games. Should be a tag for games: Unbalanced or balanced

[taosaur]

I only have 8 hours in, all of them yesterday, but Delirium seems OP in general. I don't remember all the power names, but a hero that can berserk the enemy, turn some of them, and evolve his own troops to elites after the battle, while his units are breaking the enemies minds, spawning endless creeps, and lobbing beholder artillery - it's a snowball of madness rolling downhill.

And yes, it's fun as hell.

My current run I'm Pillars and trying to clean up a snowballed Delirium AI, and I'm doing it, but man it's rough being on the other side of those fights, watching your units spend half their time fleeing and only clearing the field after the 2nd or 3rd round of reinforcements. Thank the Immortals for trog hovels.

[LANid]

There are actually more reasons than personal preference for Ben to benefit from in your suggestion, Solmyr!

A lesson companies have yet to learn from their SaaS approach to video games is the incessant over balancing and meta changes. You can keep a game fresh, people interested, profit from microtransactions and in many ways still follow standard business practices which earn a lot of money, but the key here is I wish they'd provide a vastly more enjoyable and rewarding experience for players by rewarding talent, skill and thus creating an experience which has a higher high skill cap, and therefore also much higher rewards and high stakes gameplay. This creates a much more adventurous and exciting experience for players overall in my opinion, and if that just would cut too many of the more casual gamers out of the loop, it would just be a matter of creating alternate game modes that are centered around fun, don't focus so much on skill and perhaps allow players a bit more control over who they match or play against.

As long as everyone has equal chance of getting it (a good example is the AWP in CS - if you play well, you earn more, you can buy it easily) OP items and skills, skill trees or complex progression paths CAN still be balanced as in the AWP example simply by keeping access to it non-random.

Instead we see so many game publishers resorting to development for the common denominator, which simply homogenizes the experience the game provides. It seems they build games entire player experience around just grinding and incentivizing long hours of monotonous gameplay towards some shiny worthless object rather than focusing on the mechanics and providing an exhilirating and/or relaxing (or even 'magical') experience! It's so frustrating! They even seem to ignore the fact that they're forcing casual gamers who simply do not have a ton of time to manage small groups of 4 players or grind long hours in order to be able to play with people, so they actually LOSE hours and players that they'd otherwise keep if they just kept the entry and learning curve simple, but not too simple (as in games like CS or mobas whose meta does not change often, oh wait that doesn't exist).

Anywho - I find that the more competitive/hard core ones to play together using what are essentially competitive-based queues, which makes no sense and further divides their own communities. CS even took a nice dump on it's community/casual aspect of the game many years ago when they essentially put custom maps behind packaged DLCs and created these abominations for "casual" servers where there were no admins, no sense of community or comraderie or loyalty, no server stats, etc...

So yeah I mean I know I sound probably nuts writing so much but I've been thinking about this for a while now, and have a good deal of experience with this kind of thing so I thought I'd chime in and try to validate what I believe is a great idea! Thanks for sharing :D

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Solmyr:

One of the things I always loved about Homm3 is how sometimes you would just manage to make an OP hero, teleporting around the place with expert air magic, owning the board with fire spells or snowballing with 3/3 necro set and create arch liches instead of skellie warriors with necromancy.

Crazy thing is HoMM 3 tried to balance some of that stuff. In HoMM2 anyone could learn town portal to teleport to any town and you could just dimension door all you wanted.

Not to mention in HoMM 1 before spell points where you just got a number of charges of the spell equal to your wisdom so you could cast 10 dimension doors in a row and then follow it up with all the armageddons you wanted.

I agree too - the focus on balance is very strong in modern games, but you also get homogenization to cause that balance. I'd gladly have the risk of unbalanced exploits if it means I get to do cool stuff in a game.

My only objection is when one option is strictly better than another and not just different and better. But I don't think that's a huge issue here - maybe for some of the free unit abilities? Necromancy and mastery feel maybe less inspiring than the rest and could possibly get a bonus? Or maybe I'm just bad at using them, dunno.

[EXEC_PAJA_/.]

+1 to the idea of not trying to overbalance everything. You can't have a game with perfect balance and when games do it they have a tendency of overdoing it, making the game incredibly more difficult or incredibly easy.

That being said, it's never going to be easy with balance. If you have a spell that's labeled "ultimate" then it's supposed to be a ultimate spell, it's meant to be incredibly powerful and badass. If it's a dragon, it's meant to be an overpowered badass unit, things like that. If you keep balancing things around, it's not gonna be that fun in the end. Songs of conquest, another good game (not great currently), suffers too much from that. If it's meant to be an "ultimate" unit or spell, then that's the end of it.

Another game, Sacrifice, has ultimate spells that once cast, covers a huge area of the battlefield. In this day and age, people would be screaming at the screen for "balance", but if you were to balance things that are meant to be incredibly powerful, you'll suck the fun right off of you being a powerful warrior or spellcaster. There's a line, i think, that you gotta be careful not crossing too much, one side or the other.

If you absolutely have to try your hardest to please the "I like difficulty!" and "I like being powerful!" crowds, program in a customizable slider that multiplies by a % the damage of things, like the advanced settings in map generation. Let each player decide how they want their own experience be.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Doctor Bright:

Another game, Sacrifice, has ultimate spells that once cast, covers a huge area of the battlefield. In this day and age, people would be screaming at the screen for "balance", but if you were to balance things that are meant to be incredibly powerful, you'll suck the fun right off of you being a powerful warrior or spellcaster. There's a line, i think, that you gotta be careful not crossing too much, one side or the other.

This reminds me of another old fantasy strategy game, Master of Magic.

A bunch of games have done things vaguely similar, but one thing they all lack in my eyes is that their endgame magic spells are generally...less awe-inspiring? Age of Wonders did a decent job at time, but nothing ever got as crazy as stuff like Zombie Mastery (all dead non-magic units come back as zombies for you), Armageddon, or Time Stop (you get to keep taking turns until you run out of mana basically)

Was this stuff balanced? Not really (though maybe now with the Caster of Magic mod). But it was really cool.