Struggling

[o z m o n d o]

Im new to this style of game as I have only just tried HOMM3 for the first time early this year. I want to play this for the QOL improvements but I am struggling with the campaign. I am stuck on 1-3, trying to keep buying enough units to explore but it seems like every battle wipes out the majority of my troops leaving me to start over. I even tried to upgrade them at the blacksmith but it has so far made little difference. What gives? Why bother with the second tier of the units when they still die just as fast?

[Jack Blaze]

My first suggestion would be to have a look at the game's Codex. If it's what I think it is, it will be explained pretty well in there

If you still don't understand what the issue is, you'll have a better general grasp of the game and we can go from there on explaining the exact issue

[o z m o n d o]

Originally posted by Jack Blaze:

My first suggestion would be to have a look at the game's Codex. If it's what I think it is, it will be explained pretty well in there

If you still don't understand what the issue is, you'll have a better general grasp of the game and we can go from there on explaining the exact issue

I'm not sure if this is condescending or actual advice

[Jack Blaze]

Originally posted by o z m o n d o:

I'm not sure if this is condescending or actual advice

I'd be a lot more blatantly dunking on you than however much you think I am with that post if I was being condescending

Anyways, it's genuine advice. I've noticed over time as I keep seeing the same questions and resulting discussions over and over again that a lot of people seem to have not figured out some of the basic mechanics of the game like they should have during the first campaign

The snowbally nature of this game being what it is, you're going to end up getting punished for not knowing those well enough even if the AI isn't playing that well

And from what I've looked through in it the few times I felt the need to do so, the Codex does a pretty good job of explaining those mechanics along with a bit more of the advanced stuff

[o z m o n d o]

Originally posted by Jack Blaze:

Originally posted by o z m o n d o:

I'm not sure if this is condescending or actual advice

I'd be a lot more blatantly dunking on you than however much you think I am with that post if I was being condescending

Anyways, it's genuine advice. I've noticed over time as I keep seeing the same questions and resulting discussions over and over again that a lot of people seem to have not figured out some of the basic mechanics of the game like they should have during the first campaign

The snowbally nature of this game being what it is, you're going to end up getting punished for not knowing those well enough even if the AI isn't playing that well

And from what I've looked through in it the few times I felt the need to do so, the Codex does a pretty good job of explaining those mechanics along with a bit more of the advanced stuff

Sorry I guess I misread the original message.
Okay I'll check the codex

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Second tier units are a lot better than the first. Like, if you compare Footmen and Shields of Order, the upgrade almost doubles their health and damage.

Fundamentally, games like this are about learning to take clean fights, because the advantage snowballs. If you win a fight with minimal casualties, you can get levels and gear for your Wielder, and grow more troops than you lose, so you can take harder fights more cleanly, so you get more levels and better gear and can afford stronger troops and upgrades so you can take harder fights cleanly, until you win.

This means that it is very easy to win early fights, but have that victory by so pyrrhic that it puts you in a bad position going forwards. You take significant casualties, so you don't have the troops to take the next fight cleanly, so you keep taking heavy casualties. If every battle you fight is wiping out most of your troops, you need to stop, start over, and pay attention to what went wrong when that happens the first time. It's not an unrecoverable failure if it happens, but it's something you should avoid if at all possible, even if it means not taking a fight at all.

That said, it's also worth understanding that the campaigns are structured to try and teach you certain abstract gameplay concepts. 1-3, for instance, is ultimately a gauntlet of four fights against enemy Wielders on a timetable; it is not a mission for sitting in your settlement slowly growing, it wants you to learn how to expand aggressively without taking too many losses, so that you can grow strong enough to deal with each Wielder battle in turn. You don't need a perfectly capable doomstack, just an army that's good enough to win the challenge ahead.

[o z m o n d o]

Originally posted by Ddraig Lleuad:

Second tier units are a lot better than the first. Like, if you compare Footmen and Shields of Order, the upgrade almost doubles their health and damage.

Fundamentally, games like this are about learning to take clean fights, because the advantage snowballs. If you win a fight with minimal casualties, you can get levels and gear for your Wielder, and grow more troops than you lose, so you can take harder fights more cleanly, so you get more levels and better gear and can afford stronger troops and upgrades so you can take harder fights cleanly, until you win.

This means that it is very easy to win early fights, but have that victory by so pyrrhic that it puts you in a bad position going forwards. You take significant casualties, so you don't have the troops to take the next fight cleanly, so you keep taking heavy casualties. If every battle you fight is wiping out most of your troops, you need to stop, start over, and pay attention to what went wrong when that happens the first time. It's not an unrecoverable failure if it happens, but it's something you should avoid if at all possible, even if it means not taking a fight at all.

That said, it's also worth understanding that the campaigns are structured to try and teach you certain abstract gameplay concepts. 1-3, for instance, is ultimately a gauntlet of four fights against enemy Wielders on a timetable; it is not a mission for sitting in your settlement slowly growing, it wants you to learn how to expand aggressively without taking too many losses, so that you can grow strong enough to deal with each Wielder battle in turn. You don't need a perfectly capable doomstack, just an army that's good enough to win the challenge ahead.

I guess I'm mainly struggling with walking away from fights clean. Seems like anything in the yellow range really knocks down my numbers even with the limited spells I'm trying to use.
On my second restart I figured out how go get my economy up to buy more dudes quickly but how do I keep that up while also exploring?
Should I be fighting enemy welders from inside my forts or head on? Should I focus on expanding how many troops I can carry or my spell and stat increases?

[Ddraig Lleuad]

Ultimately, there's no one answer. It's all very contextual, and learning which is the right move when, when to take a fight because you can win cleanly, when to avoid it because it'll cost too many casualties, when to circle back to a settlement to take on fresh troops at the expense of flagging mines and clearing mobs, when to focus on economy, when to burn economy for troop production, when to go on the offensive, when to huddle in your walls... I mean, that's The Game, y'know? If it didn't have enough moving parts to make it a hard question to answer, it probably wouldn't have enough going on to hold people's attention.

[o z m o n d o]

Originally posted by Ddraig Lleuad:

Ultimately, there's no one answer. It's all very contextual, and learning which is the right move when, when to take a fight because you can win cleanly, when to avoid it because it'll cost too many casualties, when to circle back to a settlement to take on fresh troops at the expense of flagging mines and clearing mobs, when to focus on economy, when to burn economy for troop production, when to go on the offensive, when to huddle in your walls... I mean, that's The Game, y'know? If it didn't have enough moving parts to make it a hard question to answer, it probably wouldn't have enough going on to hold people's attention.

Non-answer, I cast "watery stool" on you

[Gin Kenshin98]

Adding to what the others said about snowballing, this comes back to what you did in the previous missions too. Like if you explored everything and gotten equipment, visited the locations that give perma stat buffs, and picked the appropriate skills when levelling.

Each faction has 3 essences that they focus on, for Arleon the main 2 are blue and yellow. From my experience, it’s good to max out the blue/order essence skill for Cecilia since that gives you t3 Rally which is a big help. Getting the t3 spells can really be a game changer. This is besides focusing on other skills depending on what build you wanna run with and who the wielder in question is.

And yes the upgraded units make a world of difference. The archers are a prime example thanks to the skill they unlock.

Map knowledge is also important. Since you mentioned you restarted the mission, you should make a mind map of where the resource generating locations like mines are, and beeline them depending on what buildings or units you want. There’s also some optional areas which might be good to ignore, get the important resource locations and then circle back to them. I know this particular mission doesn’t give you enough time to explore which sucks, but you can trap or block the enemy wielders with you 2nd general and let Cecilia explore and gain the perma stat buffs, then do the same with the 2nd general of you like. The enemies only focus on Cecilia btw. Only do this if you wanna min max.

Also if/when you get the essence generating skills for your wielders, a good strategy to use against normal enemies and creeps is turtling, basically sending your units to the left-most side of the battlefield and letting the enemy approach you instead. Press Alt to see the enemy movement ranges, and keep an eye out for ranged enemies’ firing ranges and their movement number. Even if ranged enemies hit you, they’ll have -50% less dmg because they moved, and this gurgling method can give you 1-2 turns of essence generation from your wielder and units. For that same reason, it’s good to split non-essential units up if you have the unit slots. For example, the minstrels. 2 units of 5 minstrels each is better than 1 unit of 10 minstrels, since you can buff 2 times instead of 1 time, and you get double the essence. This is good advice for future factions too since they’ll have better buff/debuff units and more dedicated essence generation units.

[Samseng Yik]

The point of units are to deal damage and help you survive longer.
The more unit you have, the more "HP you stay alive in combat" you have.
Unit die, this is war.
Maybe certain neutral creeping you can clear without loss by using overwhelming force.
But early game, you need secure long term advantage, which will quickly pay off the cost of unit death.

Not saying unit death shall not be mitigated, but unit death in war is just a number and step toward victory

[Ail]

Neutral-fights require a bit of a cost-benefit calculation. Not every fight is worth taking immediately.
There's a balance to be found between attacking neutrals too early where you'd suffer heavy losses or too late where you miss out on all the pickups that help you snowball.

Then it's also very important how you fight. I think by this mission I definitely had Order-Magic Level 3. So I primarily focused on Footmen and then Shields of Order, once I had what I needed to upgrade the barracks, in order to maximize the generation of order-essence.

I mostly used the spell "pacify" in these combats to cripple the damage-output of the most threatening enemy-stack. This way I could heavily cut my losses and finish most fight with no losses whatsoever.

[TheSHEEEP]

I'm reposting this from the Act 1, mission 4 thread, because I think all of the following applies in general:

Most new people seem struggle too hard, while most experienced people (either by lots of HoMM mileage or playing EA before) think the difficulty is fine.

That seems to point to both a pacing issue in the first campaign and a failure to properly tutorialize and explain what you are supposed to do.

What I did from HoMM experience was:
Focus almost all fights on one hero.
Make sure that one stack has as good/many units as possible.
Make sure that one stack gets as many bonuses as possible from map locations.
All other heroes are pretty much exclusively ferrying troops around and getting some map resources/bonuses - until late game when they, too, can act as defenders for some locations with their own troops and your main stack can start relying on those "buy units from anywhere" buildings.
Be efficient with hero movement - if you do a lot of back-and-forth with your main hero, you WILL lose.
Forward bases get as many defenders as possible to either deter enemy heroes or weaken them for your other stacks to deal with them after.
Snowball hard: don't build stuff in early game that doesn't help you snowball (eg don't build towers early on, destroy buildings you don't need to replace them, etc.).

That approach carried me through the first campaign on Hard (whatever the second difficulty is named, @devs: please don't use custom names for difficulties, nobody can remember that stuff), without needing a single restart.

Now, the thing is - the game doesn't explain any of this to new players.
It took me until the last mission of the first campaign to even notice those "click this to get a tutorial on this UI menu" buttons.
The game basically only explains its mechanics to the player, but not really how to play it properly.
And the HoMM way of "how to play best" isn't intuitive at all.

[Vollo]

When I first played Songs of Conquest I mainly leveled Command... Which is a beginner trap. I thought "Hey if I have more units, I should become stronger right?". While this is somewhat correct, it also means you are extremely weak if all those slots aren't filled up.

So my most important advice is this: Essence is really strong. If you have a couple of units in mind that you would like to use, leveling up the essence tier that correspond to those units will be HUGE.

An example: I want to use Horsemen, Bards and Archers and therefore I level up Order and Creation to Tier 3.

In the Order tree, this gives me access to Tier 3 pacify and rally which are both super strong. Even just casting Protection or Quicken is in itself insanely helpful. Especially Quicken as it direcly makes my horsemen stronger.

The Creation tree gives me access to Tier 3 insect swarm which lowers the targets initiative by 20, super helpful! Acid Cloud also becomes really strong, especially if combined with Swap which uses 4 creation and 4 chaos essence to cast. Thankfully my Horsemen and my Bards give me chaos essence.

Horsemen gives 2 Order and 1 Chaos essence
Archers give 1 Order and 1 Creation essence
Bards give 2 creation and 1 chaos essence

As you can see, this covers three essence types and I focus on two of them mainly. Order for tankiness and creation for damage/utility.

People have already written great responses here and I hope that my example helped clear some things up when it comes to team composition and leveling

[Vollo]

@theSHEEEP what a great post!
When it comes to tutorials, we try to be as helpful yet unintrusive as we can
A lot of in-depth rules are listed in the Tutorials & Codex section. When I first played SoC, I read through all of these and felt that it helped me through the early game. The rest I learned through trial and error

When it comes to difficulties we chose the names "Fair", "Worthy" and "Overwhelming" not as an alternative to "Easy", "Medium" and "Hard" but as an indication as to what you can expect going into it.

Fair is meant to be... well, Fair! Not too easy but certainly not too hard.
Worthy is a test of skill against an evenly matched opponent.
Overwhelming is a test of everything you have learned, meant to test your game knowledge and push you to the limit!

Using "Easy", "Medium" and "Hard" as an indicator simply doesn't give you enough to go by

[TheSHEEEP]

Originally posted by Vollo (Lavapotion):

@theSHEEEP what a great post!
When it comes to tutorials, we try to be as helpful yet unintrusive as we can
A lot of in-depth rules are listed in the Tutorials & Codex section. When I first played SoC, I read through all of these and felt that it helped me through the early game. The rest I learned through trial and error :gnomechild:

I get that, but learning through trial and error WILL piss some people off. Much more so than a more intrusive tutorial would. After all, an intrusive tutorial could just be made skippable or turned off.
IMO In game design, you sometimes have to gently force especially new players into how they should play, because otherwise you'll just lose them forever.

Originally posted by Vollo (Lavapotion):

When it comes to difficulties we chose the names "Fair", "Worthy" and "Overwhelming" not as an alternative to "Easy", "Medium" and "Hard" but as an indication as to what you can expect going into it.

I get that, too, and I do like that it mirrors the comparative combat difficulties.
But standards in gaming are important for a reason, it gives people of different knowledge levels an even playing field to talk about things without having to learn new terms for every game.
The terms fair, worthy and overwhelming could mean everything and nothing to a new player (except overwhelming, that one's pretty clear). Even your descriptions of them could still mean a lot of different things.
I'd just rename them to something like "Fair (Normal)", "Worthy (Hard)", "Overwhelming (Very Hard)".
That would also make it clear that there is no "easy" difficulty, and new players will likely struggle a bit even on the first one.
For example, I picked Worthy, thinking it would be this game's Normal, as games usually go Easy/Normal/Hard (+more even harder ones). Only few games omit the easy one, so that's not my base assumption.

Originally posted by Vollo (Lavapotion):

Using "Easy", "Medium" and "Hard" as an indicator simply doesn't give you enough to go by :lunar2020ratinablanket:

I'd say it does, or it wouldn't be a standard in gaming for 40 years now ;)
It doesn't give you specifics, of course, but no term will ever do that. For that we'd need some kind popup or UI element to say exactly what a difficulty does.