How is it comparing to HoMM 3?

[Friends with Benedicts]

UPDATE: Bought it. Liked it. It is indeed a different take on HoMM 3. I need to play more to draw more conclusions, but def not going to refund.

Title! Long time HoMM3 Fan, would love to play something similar and modern.

[Biff]

Originally posted by Quillithe:

Originally posted by Biff:

Well I guess we disagree. However I don't want this game to be a clone of HoMM3. We already have that. I appreciate that you specialize in and upgrade specific towns as it keeps things streamlined and less convoluted. I can't possibly be the only one who dislikes late game HoMM3 games and the annoyance of managing different town types and their units. Also it leads to balance issues if one player finds multiple of the same town which leads to doomstacks. This game relies on actual strategy rather than RNG.

Also you're really going to act like Homm3 has spell combos comparable to this game? In heroes you can only cast 1 per round. Here not only do the spells have way more utility but you can cast multiple on the same turn.

I do kinda wish you could mix unit types or pick up independent units.

It's not really true that heroes are limited to specific spells though, they just have specialty spells and harder to spam spells. You can easily get any magic type by learning the spell skill (or all at once potentially).

True good point about the essence. However you aren't really getting considerable essence sources outside of your initial 3 until fairly late in the match and it's not even a guarantee either. You're still essentially (no pun intended) specialised in specific types, which I like as it gives faction diversity.

I actually find the matches play out more like the civilisation games or even RTS games like age of empires in the sense that you're expanding your kingdom and actually have the potential to specialise in specific units and builds. I find the army compositions pretty varied within factions so I can't personally say I miss the faction mixing. I appreciate how streamlined and focused everything is.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Biff:

Originally posted by Quillithe:

I do kinda wish you could mix unit types or pick up independent units.

It's not really true that heroes are limited to specific spells though, they just have specialty spells and harder to spam spells. You can easily get any magic type by learning the spell skill (or all at once potentially).

True good point about the essence. However you aren't really getting considerable essence sources outside of your initial 3 until fairly late in the match and it's not even a guarantee either. You're still essentially (no pun intended) specialised in specific types, which I like as it gives faction diversity.

I actually find the matches play out more like the civilisation games or even RTS games like age of empires in the sense that you're expanding your kingdom and actually have the potential to specialise in specific units and builds. I find the army compositions pretty varied within factions so I can't personally say I miss the faction mixing. I appreciate how streamlined and focused everything is.

Neutral troops give kinda an exploration feel when you go find a new unit type and work it into your army - that's the main thing I miss from it. Not a big deal though.

There's certainly a lot more ability to use different armies by default which helps, vs HoMM which would just be 'one stack of each unit type except one' without neutrals or different types. Although it's usually 'all the high level units you can find' with them.

I agree that you're specialized in general, which is also like HoMM where certain towns had certain magic specializations - finding neutral spells in HoMM would be more like finding some of the sources of other essence that can be around. Though there's a few other things - Essence Burst or Essence Leech can let you cast some specific off-town spells. And of course Attuned later on.

And it also feels like there's so much more complexity in the magic system with all the spells you have access to. I'm pretty new to this and just got to experience the absurdity of the Turtle magic squad you can get going in the Rana campaign where entire enemy armies don't get to attack before they die in the acid clouds coating the entire map (and if they get close you shove them back through the cloud). Blocking them with walls, immobilizing them for multiple turns, etc.

I take back the lack of as much magic damage scaling as a negative.

[Friends with Benedicts]

Opinions were way divisive, I had to buy the game to check it for myself.

[pi73r]

It lacks content but it's different enough to try it I think. Hopefully they add more factions and campaigns asap.
I haven't tried serious online play but it also looks like there are some faction/heroes imbalances with magic focused heroes being superior.

[Ashrak]

I think this game is a rough yewel. It needs a lot of polishing and adding more content. But I see huge potential. And you can feel the love and passion the developers put into the game. I have had a lot of fun with it already.

Maybe the only thing I'm not enjoying is that once you reach certain point of the game all is decided with one battle. If you win, you will stomp your enemies from there on, if you lose, you won't be able to recover as hard as you try.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Ashrak:

Maybe the only thing I'm not enjoying is that once you reach certain point of the game all is decided with one battle. If you win, you will stomp your enemies from there on, if you lose, you won't be able to recover as hard as you try.

Honestly this has always been a problem with the HoMM-like games. At least here there are stack caps so you are less likely to be killing or losing every single unit you have from every town.


Personally I kinda wish they didn't have the stack cap research so it was a bit more restrictive. Or research in general, I'm not sure having a non-creature resource sink adds to the experience - it encourages a single big stack and doing the research with spare money instead of working on a second army.

[pi73r]

Originally posted by Ashrak:

I
Maybe the only thing I'm not enjoying is that once you reach certain point of the game all is decided with one battle. If you win, you will stomp your enemies from there on, if you lose, you won't be able to recover as hard as you try.

That's exactly how it works in homm and any other similar game though.

[MilfordTheBunny (DarkZenith)]

Might be an option for you to buy the game, setup a timer for 1hr45m and have at. If you don't like it after that then return it. The graphics do take some getting used to as they are 2d sprites in a 3d playfield with sprite layering for depth on the map. It looks odd at first but you can get accustomed to it. It is different from the 2.5d style of Octopath Traveller and such though.

[Chompski]

cant wait for full game, it is amazing but ai is dumb as a rock

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Chompski:

cant wait for full game, it is amazing but ai is dumb as a rock

I think the AI doesn't cheat, which is honestly kinda a mistake.

Obviously a better AI would be better, but all the HoMM games gave in and just gave them cheat bonuses on high difficulties in order to make them actually hard, and that'd be better than nothing.

[pi73r]

Originally posted by Quillithe:

Originally posted by Chompski:

cant wait for full game, it is amazing but ai is dumb as a rock

I think the AI doesn't cheat, which is honestly kinda a mistake.

Obviously a better AI would be better, but all the HoMM games gave in and just gave them cheat bonuses on high difficulties in order to make them actually hard, and that'd be better than nothing.

Yea but ai in homm was worse so even on highest difficulty it was too easy on skirmish and even so so players could 1vx on highest.
But yea, we won't mind higher difficulties.

[Vision]

Originally posted by Chompski:

cant wait for full game, it is amazing but ai is dumb as a rock

This is the main problem of homm3. His AI is really really bad and even if i never tried homm 5.5 AI i can say that h5.5 have probably the best AI. It s difficult to do worst.

I like homm style more than myself but i would prefer a 4X heroes just because of AI. It s easier to code an AI for a 4X than for an heroes like game. And if you put aside the interface, and transform regions as hexagons, you get a 4X. I m a big fan of heroes but with a bit rational, you can t deny that 4X have more ambitious, from an AI consideration and from a multiplayer consideration. So my wishes are to see a SoC 2.0 with hex but i played SoC campaigns and it s cool.. Just wondering how good would have been a 4X version.

[Quillithe]

I wonder if part of the issue with AI in HoMM- like games is how much they reward snowballing, no-loss combat, and a single decisive battle.

Just gonna think for a second if there are reasonable ways around this:

Snowballing - always kinda a thing in strategy games, being ahead makes it easier to get further ahead. Kinda tough to do much without making the game weird. Obviously not having a broken necromancy skill helps (looking at the ones that let you raise vampires)

No-loss combat: Hero's Hour has a thing for this, there's a building that has some portion of losses return to town after a few days. Something like this can help AI a bit since they're more likely to lose 30% of their army on neutrals - and if you're running around beating them all up with like, 5 minstrels and no losses it means they're at a huge disadvantage when your armies meet.

Single Decisive Battle: Honestly the above mechanic combined with good city defenses can help with that. Unfortunately Songs has some...poor city defenses IMO. You can't really even try to defend a city before a wall since they can just pillage the whole place, and late enough in the game for walls guard towers just don't feel like enough units. The combat map in towns is sometimes a bit of a bonus for defenders from archer high ground, but overall less strong than most HoMM games.

There is another mechanic that kinda resists this, but an annoying one - hero magic bombs where you drop in with minimal troops and spam damage spells and then repeat.
I guess they're a good reason to not make city defenses too strong.

Songs also resists decisive battle with unit stack size caps, though they're big enough that it generally feels hard to get a second army up if you lose a full army, unless you get to the very late game - and even then research to raise cap sizes makes it hard.

[Friends with Benedicts]

Id be fine with anti snow balling toggles, like ai being able to resurrect in the event of a wipe out of their armies, either with extra money or something like that. Ever increasing level of difficulty that does not mirrors a real situation. Id be totally fin with that. Total war does something similar.

For sieges, maybe a time limit for a siege to happen, but i dunno how that would play with the game balancing

[watcherzero]

Yeah the HOMM games its closest too are probably the Heroes Chronicles games with Tarnum. They had reasonable maps but you tended to end up with one or two super powerful heroes that just marched through the map. Other HOMMs games tended to have more of a back and forth. The only exception so far (and I dont know if it was glitched) but the final battle of the final campaign in-game at moment the undead at the bottom of the map steamrollered the neutral nomads in the middle and the Human faction in the top right within only a few turns and it became a serious war of attrition where I had to hit and run their armies and towns to weaken them before I could take them head on.