HOMM 3 vs HOMM4

After yet another endless debate with one of my friends, I figured I may as well start one here. What do you think of Heroes 4 compared to Heroes 3? There is no doubt that, overall, HOMM 3 is a better game but I do think that the sequel had some improvements (as well as flaws) over its predecessor. My friend is a HOMM3 freak and doesn't want to hear anything about HOMM4.
The first thing that comes to my mind right now:
different construction branches - GOOD
the fact that there are absolutely no upgrades to the units in any branch - BAD

What do you think?

 

HOMM4 = Garbage

 

True, Exitum, although I did like some of the campaigns... Like Gauldoth Half-Dead's for their ideas.

But the gameplay was indeed horrible, the units were screwed up, the battlefield... Yuck!

 

Don't forget the saxophone music.

 

The Gauldoth Necromancer campaign was awful, and contained a lot of the worst feature of HOMM4: excessive story. It depended heavily on triggering plot points in the correct order around the map. I tended to do them in the wrong order, and get a story that made no sense at all. Once I was left trawling an empty map for the last remaining plot coupon for over an hour. Leave the story out of HOMM!

 

Hard to push into this debate, since I haven't played HoMM4.
Just wanted to say HoMM3 rocked.

 

What are you talking about? ANY game is better if it has good story, IMO. It helps the immersion factor and gives the player motivation. Gouldoth Half-Dead was an interesting campaign precisely because it had a better story than the rest (that and I always liked the necromancers...). I always followed the story closely in HOMM 3 (yeah, I read all the popups that kept appearing during missions...) because when I play a game I like to know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.
I was actualy thinking at one point: what if HOMM 5 had cutscenes like Starcraft or Warcraft 3, for example?

 

Damn, Exitum. You wrapped this thread up in the second post.

 

Am I the only one who feels HOMM2 was the best of the series?

 

Yes, I think you are right. The level design was tight and polished. The stories were kept to a decent level. The atmosphere was truly fairytale. Lovely. I still recall with fondness the 'horde of skeletons' level and the one where you start out with no castle in the middle of heaps of gold.

I wouldn't say that story is essential to every game. I'm a big RPG fan, so of course I like story. However, story that takes away control from the player (as in HOMM4) is negative. I like RPGs precisely because I have choices in the story. HOMM4 offered no choices at all. Events played out in the same order no matter what you did.

That said, the little intros you get in most HOMM levels really do set the scene for me. And they are short, so they don't get in the way of the real game.

 

You're not the only one. HOMM1 had one nice Bach transcription, though. I don't remember HoMM2's music...

 

Wow, HoMM2's music was really incredible. The first one had some great music too, but for the second, the music was simply perfect. I don't remember the music for the third one, I replaced the files with the music from the second.

HoMM2 was great, HoMM3 was, I think, even better. Both are really excellent games, both are still on my hard drive today. I also like the Wake of Gods fan-made expansion/conversion for HoMM3.

HoMM4 sucks ass, with or without expansions.

 

HOMM2 had opera! As represented in the sound options menu by a fat woman singing in front of a pair of speakers.

 

Yes, HOMM2's music was awesome. I have a few of the music files on my MP3 player even.

 

It's hard for me to pick between HoMM2 and 3. I played 2 first and obviously fell in love with it, and I loved three too, but it obviously wasn't the "holy crap this is an awesome new experience" kind of adoration. More like "wow, this series keeps on rocking."

I think 2's maps are a better-designed and, overall, I think it's more aesthetically pleasing for its time. 3, however, is stronger in the gameplay department. Plus 3 has the random map generator, aka, endless enjoyment.

4 sucks. Simple as that. Heroes that could fight on the battlefield is about the only good idea in the game.

 

I liked having the heroes fight on the battlefield also. And, I did like the changed town structure. I had no problem with no upgrades to units either, many upgrades in HOMM3 I felt were added just so every unit got an upgrade, even if that upgrade was crappy.

My problems with HOMM4 though were twofold.

1) What happened to the AI? Three had good AI, fours just sucked.

2) The attacked/defense ratios were screwed up. Any game where my hero can take on 5 black dragons, and legions of other monsters all in the same fight solo and live has problems. It got to where by the 4th or 5th map of any campaign I would just take the hero solo and trash everything I came across, as he could beat anything he fought. No strategy needed whatsoever.

I can explain more on these ratios later if anyone is interested, but it is getting late here, and I am sleepy, so I will resume this tomorrow.

 

am i the only one that liked heroes 4 at least a little bit. i think it had some nice ideas. firstable the unit upgrades were useless in 3 they just felt like another reson to go back and forth to the the town, so i liked that they removed them in 4. second the RPG idea of the heroes was brilliant. it could have given a unique feel to evry game, no matter that you played with only one town. the problem was that it wasn't finished and polished, just like the rest of the game. on level up it just kept offering combat and nothing else. there was no way to play a demonologist like the guy from the campaign because it was imposible to select both nature and death magic. so i think it had nice ideas, but was unfinished.it didn,t had multi as far as i can remember on version 1.00. but if they had made it exactly like 3 i would have been more disaponted.

 

I like HOMM4. The inventory management is better than the rest of the series and the fact that creatures can go solo in HOMM4 without a hero is a huge improvement. Also, it's great that your hero can fight in the battles as opposed to just using magic.

Sure, the campaigns isn't that great but I usually just play the custom scenarios, which are excellent IMO. What's really annoying about HOMM4 though is that you can't upgrade your creatures - this is really a step backward compared to HOMM3.

@Exitium: What do you have against saxophone music?

 

Actually, I liked H4 quite nicely, though in 4 out of the 6 campaigns the story was hogwashed and absolutely unHeroes like (the only good campaingns were the Life and Order ones).

I liked most improvements so much, that after palying H4 for some time I could not swithc back to playing H3 because I there are no such convinient things like caravans, the buyall button or movable creatures, among other things.

The major problem with H4 was that the game was shipped unfinished, immeadiately after that the whole team was kicked out, and the expansion rather than fix what was not liked or add new content, were done by people that think that an expansion is just a bunch of new maps and so on.

On the other hand I must say that I completely disliked the new graphics of the series. The HMM4 engine was jsut terrible, as well as the inclusion of RTS style fog of war.

 

I too enjoyed some of my time with HOMM4, but it eventually lost it's appeal and I went back to 3. I really wanted to love the game because of the new implementations they made. Being able to use heroes in fights was really nice. It's just that the AI really sucked and eventually it just got annoying. I hope they keep all the good features from 4 in the next installment.

To me, 3 was the best, but then it's also the first one I played. I didn't start with 1 or 2. I have played them though and enjoyed them immensely. Particularly 2. Wonderful game in the series. But 3 has that special place in my heart because it was my first. Besides, I really love the map editor in 3 alot. The one in 4 was atrocious.

 

I will admit to enjoying HOMM4. I am just saying it had its share of problems, making it not the best in the series in my opinion.

That change to attack/defense ratios I mentioned earlier made very high level heroes invincible basically. I will give an example: In all HOMM games, the higher your attack is over the opponents defense, the more damage you do to them. Well, in HOMM4, the system was changed to where they do damage this way:

(your attack)/(enemy defense) * damage rolled.

So, if you had an attack of 120 (quite possible in HOMM4), and atacked someone with a defense of 10, you would do 12X normal damage. This lead to high level heroes with attacks in the 100's being able to massacre anything on the battlefield they met. See 10 black dragons? No problem, just send in the hero with the insane attack and defeat them easily. So, no strategy was needed anymore when your heroes got very high level.

Whereas, HOMM1 - 3 had the difference in attack and defense led to you gaining a % more in damage. And, HOMM2 and 3 capped the damage (I think it was maxed at 300%, or 3x normal), not sure about 1.

All these stats I got out of the manual for HOMM4, and am going by memory on HOMM2 and 3 (as I do not have my manual on me at the moment for those), so feel free to look these up and add to this.

 

I've been a heroes fan since the beggining, I've played every single one a lot including 95% of all the addons.

Heroes 1 was great
Heroes 2 was a shock, it was just so great
Heroes 3 was great.
Heroes 4 was good

IMO, heroes 4 had a shitload of bad things in it, starting from incredibly bad AI, to excessive RPG elements. But still, I'm a total Heroes whore and I basically played everything and even if something felt wrong at first, it soon became acceptable and then I even enjoyed elements that I felt were bad at first.

If anyone would point me towards Homm2 music, it would be too cool. Especially the battle music.

 

I'll have to agree with most posters here. Heroes 2 and 3 beat the crap out of 4. Picking between 2 and 3 is more tricky though... As also stated, 3 had better gameplay but the mood in 2 was superb.

How about the Disciples series? I'm a big fan of the art and many of the game features. The first time I got a Demon Lord I was like; WOW!

 

One thing I want a future HOMM to do is let me pick what skill my character gets from the full list, not just a choice of two. Being able to become a specialty class in HOMM 4 by combining certain skills was cool, but with random skill choices at level up, it was sometimes too hard to get from here to there.

Some classes were too weak also and it was lousy to end up becoming say, a firemage because you got the wrong skills for archmage. Maybe the solution is to let players pick a "target class" or something.

 

The Disciples series did have some great art, the game mechanics were flawed though.