What's the appeal of games like these?

[JoSputnik]

Hi,
I bought the game despite I've never gotten into Heroes of Might and Magic (which is maybe stupid^^) but I totally like the grafix and, on paper, the concept also.

My problem is, that I just don't seem to "get" those kind of games. Let me explain how it feels to me (and correct me what I'm doing wrong. Since the thread is not to trash the game but rather to help me enjoing it, if possible ;-))

• Ok. I start. I klick on random things that give me random buffs/money.
  
• I walk around, checking if I'm strong enough to kill certain enemies.
  
• When I have enough troops, I kill said enemies, I get more random stuff.
  
• I walk around, klicking on random things that give me random stuff/money.
  
• I don't even engage in fights I can't win. It seems, that always the hero with more troops wins. No strategy there (?).
  
• Some enemies wipe half of my army. Hence I walk around klicking on random stuff...
  
• Until my army has grown again.
  
• Aha! I meet a strong enemy army: Two outcomes, either he has more troops or I do, the one with more troops wins.
  
• If I win, I walk around trying to improve my army again, turn after turn.
  
• I know there is base building. I do that also. But it's tedious to always walk where your troop's gathering point is, also I seem to always have to wait a few turns to get enough troops anyways.
  
• How long do I wait in my settlement? When do I have enough troops? I don't know! So I wait unitl I have all maxxed out (why would I leave sooner?) And get out to try to get some buffs.
  
• I ask myself if I can attack enemy settlements. I attack. I didn't have enough troops and loose. I re-load (since building your amry from scratch is not fun and game over anyways).
  
• I walk around, buffing, then attacking again.
  
• I win because I had more buffed troops.
  
• I yawn.

Where's the strategy at? Sure, I need to build my town in a certain way but does it really matter? Is the point that I need to perfectly use my turn for improving my army/char? But how? I have zero controll of where stuff is, it's pure luck to get money or XP or see some wood laying around. Do you plan your walking path down to every step?

It was the same with HoMM and is the same here. Of course I simplify a great deal but as far as my experience go with those kind of games I don't see where's the strategy?

What IS fun though is to build your char and improving it, the feeling of getting mightier and wealthier. But there's so much random stuff around that it seems to make no difference what I do, all it comes down to is that you wait untill you have more troops than he does and then rince and repeat.

Please sell the game to me since I want to have fun with it^^ Love the grafix and the units and the music but I just don't get the gameplay loop. And since HoMM has such a big fan base and is considered a true classic it seems that this is a me problem.

Thanks and cheers,
Sputnik

[Quillithe]

The answer is basically that you need to fight early - being able to strategically take early fights with very limited losses (and knowing which ones you can) will give you a snowballing advantage.

Although there's some uncertainty where things are the structure of maps is usually designed to hint - roads will lead to towns, early mines will be close by you, etc.

Also the hero with more troops definitely doesn't win, clever use of magic can demolish much much stronger armies - as can having the correct counter for your opponent.

[JoSputnik]

Hmm ok maybe for me it comes down to this question:

There's a strong enemy that guards a river crossing I need to cross. The battle preview says "risky" for the fight.

Why would I not gather all the stuff I can on my side of the river untill everything is empty. Then go to my town waiting for maxxing all of my troops. Then go to the river crossing, now the preview says "easy". Then I kill the enemy.
Zero strategy involved.

Now you say that it matters that I engage early, when the fight is "risky" that is - but why would I do that? I would lose 90% of my army and also miss all the ressources on my side of the river.
This would set me back more than to wait, no? And if no, does this only matter for the end game? Because so far I didn't see any negatives in just taking my time.

What is the downside of waiting/gathering everything I can?

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by JG4_Sputnik:

Hmm ok maybe for me it comes down to this question:

There's a strong enemy that guards a river crossing I need to cross. The battle preview says "risky" for the fight.

Why would I not gather all the stuff I can on my side of the river untill everything is empty. Then go to my town waiting for maxxing all of my troops. Then go to the river crossing, now the preview says "easy". Then I kill the enemy.
Zero strategy involved.

Now you say that it matters that I engage early, when the fight is "risky" that is - but why would I do that? I would lose 90% of my army and also miss all the ressources on my side of the river.
This would set me back more than to wait, no? And if no, does this only matter for the end game? Because so far I didn't see any negatives in just taking my time.

What is the downside of waiting/gathering everything I can?

There are always choices to weigh - if you can get another town over there it could double your growth and let you get another hero to grab the loot.

Maybe you can get some mines to upgrade more and get better troops, maybe you can get levels for your hero which can help a lot. Maybe you can manipulate the fight with some magic so the 'risky' fight only had minor losses.

There's a lot of strategy for when to fight what - you want to make sure you're getting returns worth the losses, but if you are and the other side isn't fighting at all you're going to snowball and crush them.

But you definitely don't want to just fight everything blindly.

[JoSputnik]

Originally posted by Quillithe:

There are always choices to weigh - if you can get another town over there it could double your growth and let you get another hero to grab the loot.

Maybe you can get some mines to upgrade more and get better troops, maybe you can get levels for your hero which can help a lot. Maybe you can manipulate the fight with some magic so the 'risky' fight only had minor losses.

Hmm ok but how do I know that? That there *might* be a town? Maybe there isn't? It's pure luck itsn't it? It seems to me that it's always safer to just wait and collect. Althought I've never made it to the late game, but imho there should be a challenge in the beginning also.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by JG4_Sputnik:

Originally posted by Quillithe:

There are always choices to weigh - if you can get another town over there it could double your growth and let you get another hero to grab the loot.

Maybe you can get some mines to upgrade more and get better troops, maybe you can get levels for your hero which can help a lot. Maybe you can manipulate the fight with some magic so the 'risky' fight only had minor losses.

Hmm ok but how do I know that? That there *might* be a town? Maybe there isn't? It's pure luck itsn't it? It seems to me that it's always safer to just wait and collect. Althought I've never made it to the late game, but imho there should be a challenge in the beginning also.

Sometimes you can learn the map, sometimes you can guess based on the size of a map, sometimes you can get vision range and see it.

It's safer to wait and collect but it will lose against a successful more aggressive strategy (and beat someone losing all their troops for nothing). It's a decision for sure.

[Ail]

I would say the game is pretty much an optimization-puzzle.
You are probably playing on one of the lower difficulty-levels, so you don't see much need of optimization and can eventually win by dowing whatever.

Every decision you make has pros and cons and the more experienced you are, the better you get at correctly weighing them against one another.

You'll want to optimize your walking-path to gobble up everything useful quickly enough.
Some pickups simply aren't worth to take a detour for. You lose too much precious time.

Fighting usually has different rewards. At the very least you'll get XP for your wielder for it. Higher level wielders of course are a lot stronger. In most cases you also get access to new pickups or even new areas with a lot of loot that you previously couldn't get.

So what you lose by waiting in your town until your army is as big as possible is access to all the stuff your enemies pick up in the meantime.

And yes, on lower-difficulty-levels you might not lose anything because your opponent can be just as slow as you.

You say "the bigger army wins" and ask "where's the strategy in that?". Well the strategy is all the small decisions you made along the way that ensured that you are the one with the bigger army.

You try to out-optimize your opponents so that when you eventually meet, you are the one who has the advantage.

In order to beat the AI on "Worthy"-difficulty, I think you need to have a pretty good grasp of the game-mechanics and the value of the different pickups already.

[Slowpork]

OP, lower difficulties do not require much to win. Here's your problem.

In skirmish, the fun starts at Worthy and above.

In campaign, even on Fair some missions can be brutal if you don't understand basic mechanics.

[Estranged]

Seems like you are not aware of the fact that you are basically "racing against time" because AI gets stronger the more time you "waste", so everything you do on your turn has to be optimized to achieve the maximum progress to not be left behind. That is the strategy in the game.

If you waste time doing random ♥♥♥♥ and waiting for stuff you may discover later that the AI players are already too strong for you to possibly beat because they used their turns better and got a lot stronger than you. Of course it depends on difficulty level.

[LexGeneralis]

Also me assuming you play on lowest difficulty. The more you go up, the more you realize you're not picking up "random stuff".
And it's for sure not about the bigger army wins; not even close. You have no idea how much spells and skills matter. Suddenly it also comes down to unit choice, positioning and getting to said units.
Suddenly the base bulding aspect kicks in to reach what you want to go for.

Maybe even try to fight mobs more difficult than you did before - manually. Something tells me you also use auto fight only.

[Purromi]

i can agree about song of conquest is to "random" and it's to less tactical. Every single race is barely the same. Humans, Humans from desert, Humans with few necro units and frogs. But difference is mostly visual.. when you play with hero for magic - you will play the same on any faction which doesn't happen in other games of this type.
check hero's hour. it's minimalist game but with many castles and many ways to play with one faction. gameplay is a looot of deeper than in songs of conquest.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Purromi:

i can agree about song of conquest is to "random" and it's to less tactical. Every single race is barely the same. Humans, Humans from desert, Humans with few necro units and frogs. But difference is mostly visual.. when you play with hero for magic - you will play the same on any faction which doesn't happen in other games of this type.
check hero's hour. it's minimalist game but with many castles and many ways to play with one faction. gameplay is a looot of deeper than in songs of conquest.

I wouldn't say you play the same with any faction - the differences are substantial. Heck each faction has a different list of spells (technically you can get essence outside of the three tied to your faction, but...not much)

I will say Hero's Hour has more distinct factions, but I wouldn't necessarily call it 'deeper'. It's a lot more unbalanced and certain skills and strategies are incredibly dominant so you don't really need to think but you just attack everything because you get free dragons after combat or the like. It's absolutely another fun game to play though.

[JoSputnik]

Thanks guys fo all your explenations!
So I will try another run with all the tips in mind and higher difficulty. Maybe this will help me to enjoy the game more :)
THanks and cheers

[Almalexia]

Originally posted by JoSputnik:

Hi,

Please sell the game to me since I want to have fun with it^^ Love the grafix and the units and the music but I just don't get the gameplay loop. And since HoMM has such a big fan base and is considered a true classic it seems that this is a me problem.

Thanks and cheers,
Sputnik

Put it on a harder difficulty when you start a new game. Also, have you been playing the campaigns? Don't know how you can find the horrible graphix nice- and I am a dedicated HOMM fan who played hundreds of hours of HOMM 1-3 back in the day when all we had was sadly pixelated. Now that I have decent technology at my disposal, why still the horrible pixelated look, seriously?

[easytarget]

Originally posted by JoSputnik:

Thanks guys fo all your explenations!
So I will try another run with all the tips in mind and higher difficulty. Maybe this will help me to enjoy the game more :)
THanks and cheers

Anyone telling you you're playing the game wrong is yanking your chain. Anyone telling you the way to enjoy a game is raising the difficulty is yanking your chain even harder.

So, want to experience a game that's rally rather bland graphically yet provides more tactical and strategic challenge than you can handle, play AI War 2.

[Kain]

so this is what i was running into when i started. then i upped the difficulty to at least worthy though now i play brutal.

Its a totally different experience. I found that i wanted to get better and win and the game became a lot of fun.

I think this game does itself no favors by starting players out on low difficulty i get why they do it but for some people low difficulty is incredibly boring.

Simply increase the difficulty by the time you are winning on higher difficulty you will likely see that the game is fun, or its just not for you.