From HOMM 3 to Songs

[Jovial Chemist]

So, I've played about a billion hours of HOMM 3 in my day, both back when it first came out and still sporadically to this day. This game is absolutely the spiritual successor to that game and could be amazing. My short-and-dirty summary is that this game has very strong fundamentals, but in its current state has some tuning/balance issues. An overview of my thoughts are below:

1) The Normal AI does cheat, and not just a little. It makes no logical sense where they get the sheer number of troops they do on such short notice. This even happens in Skirmishes where I know my opponents start with the same resources as me. The "Normal" AI is a lot more like what "Hard" should be. I expect the Hard AI to cheat, but Normal should be a "level playing field" dynamic.

2) I like max troop stacks as a concept a lot. In fact, this is the number one thing that I prefer in this game vs. HOMM. My main complaint with HOMM is the best way to win longer games was to giga-stack giant armies into one hero and then zerg everything. The max troops stacks helps address that concern and overall leads to shorter combats, which is nice. However, I don't like that it forces you to prioritize Command over any other upgrade when your hero levels. If Command stopped at 8 or even 6 stacks that would help address the issues here I think.

3) I like the town structuring and building dynamic.

4) Resource availability seems fine overall. What resources you have access to affects your strategy, as it should.

5) I like the ranged effective range/max range/reduced effectiveness after moving dynamic quite a bit.

6) The rats are easily the most badly-tuned enemy in the game. I stopped playing Stoutheart 4 and Rana 2 because giant "easy" rat stacks owned my Wielders right at the beginning of each map. Yes, I know I can cheese it by doing 1-unit stacks, but I really shouldn't have to.

7) On their default setting, neutral stacks grow a bit too fast compared to how quickly your own troop growth can be.

8) The magic system in HOMM 3 wasn't super balanced, and this one is no better or worse. It's too confused/jumbled. I never know exactly what spells I'm going to have access to on a given turn.


This game is absolutely playable right now. I play Skirmishes, and every feature I can tune down I do. Specifically, easy AI with a max number of wielders to ameliorate the cheating. No growth on neutral stacks, mainly (though not entirely) b/c of rats. It makes things work without being too frustrating.

As I said the game has very strong fundamentals, it just has a heck of a lot of balance issues right now. That's about what I'd expect in an Early Access, and I hope the devs work on tuning everything to get this game to what it could be.

[Chixdiggit]

Nice post.

Originally posted by Jovial Chemist:

1) The Normal AI does cheat, and not just a little. It makes no logical sense where they get the sheer number of troops they do on such short notice.
8) The magic system It's too confused/jumbled. I never know exactly what spells I'm going to have access to on a given turn.

For me, the above two are my main complaints. It's Early access and I would expect this to change for the better.
Still great game that I am really enjoying.

[DDD]

As a billion hour Homm, Kings Bounty, Age of Wonders player myself I agree with everything you said. I'm going to add some things as well

1). Regarding the Rat stacks the reason they're so broken is the default stack unit limit seems to be way too high. With their initiative, movement range and stupid stack limit they end up being the most dangerous early game unit almost guaranteed to kill an entire stack of units unless you can nuke them with ranged units. ie A stack of 200 is doing a minimum 200 damage which is almost as much as a max stacked tier 8 unit can do. The early game max unit cap should be 50-75 like every other tier 1 unit. Also the tier one should not have berserking.

2) Wielder spam is absolutely ridiculous. The cooldown for a wielder dying is waaaaay too short. If the minimum time to reclaim a large settlement is 5 turns that should be the minimum time it takes to respawn a wielder but right now its like 2 turn which encourages spamming heroes to cap as much resources and raze settlements as possible because other than losing artifacts there's no consequence which goes to my next point.

3) Defensive options in this game are absolutely terrible which also encourages the hero spam. Build a tower and you get a whopping 4 tier 1 defensive units and a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ballistae that dies to a single spell. In Homm building up your walls. And literally leaving one decent stack of units was enough to handle a hero who didn't have decent archers or magic because the towers and moat could decimate them. It made it actually worth it to leave units in the base. The amount of money, units and a full wielder to hold a decent defence to stop invaders makes investing in defence a waste of time when your better off spamming wielders.

I might add to this comment but im off to kill Marjeretta for the 18th time.

[FreezeZ]

AI doesn't cheat. It has small eco buffs to offset its current weak state.

[Ciuy]

You are on point, and you put it up nicely, unlike me :D

1. yes, Ai cheats all the time. Wielders go amok in a pesky suicidal way.

2. max troops is nice, but totally wrong way to go about it.
Why hold 20 Knights with speed 5 when I could have 200 RATS also speed 5 + BONUS SPEED buff.
Who is faster: Rat > horse. Now we need Rat Riders.
6. This is Ratsilvania, rats OP.

Defensive battles are lol, no gate castles :D. Yea nah
Fact that you can build Castles etc. in small villages...(Maybe re-brand it to "STABLES"?) totally takes away from importance of big cities. I just spam Castles for ex in map 4 7x
But I`ll take 9x rat stacks over anything else & Powers that add speed.

8) magic totally broken & random. Easy to abuse in the right hands.

Everything else is really enjoyable. Combat is lacking around the Speed/stack area + magic. I would do an overhaul of stats.

Originally posted by DDD:

I might add to this comment but im off to kill Marjeretta for the 18th time.

This sums up the whole combat system cycle.

[Jovial Chemist]

Originally posted by FreezeZ:

AI doesn't cheat. It has small eco buffs to offset its current weak state.

That is frankly BS. Let's put it this way. On a Skirmish map I did every possible thing I could to pump up the number of troops I could recruit from turn 1. On turn 8, I go to fight the AI. I run into an AI Wielder who had an army that was similar to mine in size. Fine, that makes sense. Next turn that sane Wielder comes back with almost the same army. A "small econ buff" does not lead to being able to pump out twice as many troops as a player in such a short time frame. It's more like a "the AI has an infinite troop pool" buff.

Beyond that the one addition that I've seen here which I completely agree with is the lack of defensive options. It frankly doesn't even occur to me to stay on defense because this game rewards aggressive play. HOMM 3 did too, albeit it was not quite as incentivized there and the built-in advantages were strong enough for the defenders that they actually made a difference.

[FreezeZ]

What can I tell you? This is what devs said and I have never seen AI getting units out of thin air. It has more gold and produces more units. Of course it will be able to replace few armies.

[Shockwave 006]

Yes its cheating at this time, even with growth rate.

"Q: Is the AI cheating?"

"A: Not that much actually. Contrary to what many believe, the AI has no “instant respawn” and it does not receive free doomstacks as soon as it respawns. But the AI is not yet as smart as we aim for it to be, and therefore it currently has a slight advantage in its income from resource buildings and troop buildings as well as its xp gain.

If you do not like the AI’s advantages you can turn it off by selecting Easy as difficulty, which can be done in the lobby for any skirmish map. It may soon be available in the campaign as well."

"Advantage in income and troop buildings"

[Maloney]

I see the AI is cheating comment a lot and i'm not feeling it. If there's dwellings on the map its really easy to come up with big stacks fast and you can double build unit dwellings unlike Homm3 to build specific stacks faster. The AI does this all the time and taking this out would be a terrible move because combining fast troop recovery with a stack size limit means a player doesnt just lose 1 battle and the game is over. The AI can recover, so can you. This is a distinct difference and a great improvement to Homm titles.

Also the magic system is lit AF. If you dont feel it yet spend time playing a dedicated magic caster and you'll come around.

[Shockwave 006]

Originally posted by Maloney:

I see the AI is cheating comment a lot and i'm not feeling it. If there's dwellings on the map its really easy to come up with big stacks fast and you can double build unit dwellings unlike Homm3 to build specific stacks faster. The AI does this all the time and taking this out would be a terrible move because combining fast troop recovery with a stack size limit means a player doesnt just lose 1 battle and the game is over. The AI can recover, so can you. This is a distinct difference and a great improvement to Homm titles.

Also the magic system is lit AF. If you dont feel it yet spend time playing a dedicated magic caster and you'll come around.

You may not feel it but the Devs are talking about it on Discord, They DO cheat and its fine for now.. Discord yesterday.

"Marvious Fleksnes — Yesterday at 3:17 AM
Hi folks!
Just to re-iterate what has been mentioned in other channels here about AI advantages. Yes, the AI has advantages normal players do not. This is something we put in place to mitigate the fact that the AI is not as good as we want it to be yet.
For me, these advantages work as crutches and the idea has always been that as the AI evolves and improves, we can lower - and in the end remove - those advantages from the normal AI difficulties and instead push them to the highest difficulties. Another option in the future could be that they are not part of the general difficulty setting at all, but instead additional parameters the players can set to make the AI be the challenge that they want.

The advantages are as follows:
- Earns more wielder XP
- Higher troop generation in dwellings
- Earns more resources
- Can always trade "

Medium AI advantages:
- Earns 10% more XP
- Gets +1 troop generation in dwellings
- Earns 10% more resources
- Can always trade

Easy AI advantages (after next patch):
- Can always trade

Easy AI advantages (future patch):
- <nothing>

[Lord Gorchnik]

Since I'm not on the Discord could I get more elaboration on their thought process behind the AI benefits? Especially on medium difficulty? If the AI by default has every benefit and can do every action the player can why do they need 10% more exp, additional troop generation (especially when we are constrained by a limit) and more resource income, in addition to always have no trade issues?

If they were didnt have any of these that would be what a "default/normal" difficulty seems like to me. This seems like maybe a devs "core rules" or "normal+ (hard)" rather than normal?

Normal should be just that, 100% even playing field, no advantages or disadvantages.
So any further elaboration on their design process would be very informative.

[Shockwave 006]

Its not right now, but their plan is to get it to so normal is 100% even playing field. The AI is a work in progress and they don't feel its "smart" enough yet to play without those bonuses.

Right now the easy AI is a (mostly) fair fight, it plays withe the same AI as normal but without all those buffs. As it says the only advantage the EASY AI has right now is it "Can always trade" so its like it starts with a behind the scenes market place.

[FreezeZ]

Originally posted by Shockwave:

Originally posted by Maloney:

I see the AI is cheating comment a lot and i'm not feeling it. If there's dwellings on the map its really easy to come up with big stacks fast and you can double build unit dwellings unlike Homm3 to build specific stacks faster. The AI does this all the time and taking this out would be a terrible move because combining fast troop recovery with a stack size limit means a player doesnt just lose 1 battle and the game is over. The AI can recover, so can you. This is a distinct difference and a great improvement to Homm titles.

Also the magic system is lit AF. If you dont feel it yet spend time playing a dedicated magic caster and you'll come around.

You may not feel it but the Devs are talking about it on Discord, They DO cheat and its fine for now.. Discord yesterday.

"Marvious Fleksnes — Yesterday at 3:17 AM
Hi folks!
Just to re-iterate what has been mentioned in other channels here about AI advantages. Yes, the AI has advantages normal players do not. This is something we put in place to mitigate the fact that the AI is not as good as we want it to be yet.
For me, these advantages work as crutches and the idea has always been that as the AI evolves and improves, we can lower - and in the end remove - those advantages from the normal AI difficulties and instead push them to the highest difficulties. Another option in the future could be that they are not part of the general difficulty setting at all, but instead additional parameters the players can set to make the AI be the challenge that they want.

The advantages are as follows:
- Earns more wielder XP
- Higher troop generation in dwellings
- Earns more resources
- Can always trade "

Medium AI advantages:
- Earns 10% more XP
- Gets +1 troop generation in dwellings
- Earns 10% more resources
- Can always trade

Easy AI advantages (after next patch):
- Can always trade

Easy AI advantages (future patch):
- <nothing>

If you consider those small eco buffs cheating than yes it "cheats". Like every other AI in strategy games.

In the end it plays within the same rules as player. Learn the game. AI quickly stops being a threat after few matches.

[Shockwave 006]

I'm not saying its hard, I already won a skirmish a few times on normal, and beat mission 1-4, whats wrong with asking for better AI?

Heroes of might and magic 3 AI from 23 years ago did not get any eco boosts on Easy, Normal or Hard. it only did on Expert and Impossible.

See the Resource chart on the bottom.

https://heroes.thelazy.net/index.php/Difficulty_level

Try to compare that to a strategy game these days, not getting any eco boosts on hard!

I trust the devs will get it up to par, they sound like they can. They said its going to be a work in progress so lets see how it turns out, If they can get its "cheats" running like heroes 3, would be happy with it.

[TGHoly]

I'm not HoMM veteran but I didn't think AI is hard but map guardian in this game just so brutal it's so often even Easy mob can take like 25% of my armies while I rarely lost my troop to low mob in HoMM even the Ai themselves not even dare to fight some of them...

[A.J]

OP you describe doomstacking which is still important in this game. Right now you can get away with not doing it that much because the AI is bad. They have weak armies on every wielder and thus can't do much. If there's a medium-difficulty monster blocking the path to a wealthy center area of the map they never get around to killing it due to how weak their wielders' armies are.