Heroes of Might & Magic 7

[theSavant]

The Quick Combat feature is almost too good. Especially for battles with neutral armies I found myself skipping combat most of the time and using Quick Combat instead. Not sure if this is good. I remember that these smaller battles made up part of the Heroes feeling: you win small battles, get stronger, and for each victory the army felt more personal. However with the Quick Combat it kinda detaches you from the army. It's as if not *you* won the battle, but the computer (which is actually true).

So the only battles you actively take part in are the ones against other factions. Basically - when you have 2 opponents you'll have 2 battles and the session is done (mostly the opponent has lost when you killed their largest army). While I can see a much faster gameplay (especially in multiplayer) it still makes me scratch the head.

 

[Eirikur]

HOMM2 had a peculiar faction balance, with two factions being most powerful in the early game, two in the mid-game, and two in the late game (on average), IIRC.

Any impression on faction balance in HOMM7 so far? Are Colossi and Shadow Dragons OP? Is Haven terrible in late game?

I haven't followed the beta so far, and realize it might be too early to ask.

 

[Zeriel]

It's way too early to say (multiplayer is still buggy, and multiplayer is where real balance is figured out), but I'd say it's a safe bet that the imbalances will be more in skills than units.

 

[Bubbles]

People are tweeting the beta code sites now, so we might as well post them publicly for the poor lurkers:

http://betacode.ubi.com/3969659e
http://betacode.ubi.com/d5ede80b
http://betacode.ubi.com/f6dec2c8

 

[Suicidal]

Very much agreed on this one. The 2D HoMM games always had the problem of the Speed stat, which made faster units move farther and sooner. Even leaving aside the tendency of the strongest units being very fast, making them tactical nuke stacks, acting first means you can cast spells first, so whoever had higher-level creatures in a mage battle had a huge upper hand. Also, clearing Dragon Fly mobs is a major pain in the ass if you're going for a ranged army.

H5 fixed this problem by decoupling Speed (how far you move) from Initiative (how soon you move), so now you can have stacks with more tacticool mobility but without letting them fuck your backline on turn 1 (like Imps), or archers that can shoot first without implicitly being able to kite your whole army, and you can have units that take a while to act but can walk up to you and whoop you when they do (like upgraded Rakshasas).

Not stopping there, the devs decided to adapt the combat phase and build it around this new system, eschewing the idea of combat turns altogether, so Initiative wasn't just how soon you acted, but how often you acted as well. Creatures with very high initiative can act twice, even thrice before other creatures can act at all, with that proportion continuing for the rest of the combat. Then, heroes were simply given their own Initiative score to act on, so spellcasting (or bitchslapping) wasn't tied to once per some arbitrary round anymore.

Mah nigga, you speak the truths. This is one of the reasons I think HoMM 5 (and when I say HoMM 5 I mean Tribes) is among the best HoMM games and is pretty close to 3. Sure there are lot of things that annoy me in that game, but it's not like the other HoMMs are some sort of flawless holy grail of TBS. That's why I cringe whenever someone claims that the game is absolute shit with no redeeming factors because he doesn't like how the skeletons' dicks look or something.

 

[Jaedar]

I played a bit more of this, and the balance seems all kinds out of whack. I am not sure the higher tier units feel as good as they should be, but I don't think I've played enough to say for sure. The bigger issue is the skills and talents.

Some of them seem simply worthless. Take for example the defence and offence trees. In previous heroes games, they've provided +10/+20/+30% or similar to creature damage done/taken . In this, they provide +1/+2/+3 might/defence. The first level is especially pathetic. But that's not useless, but there is far worse. Like a skill that provides a damage shield of between 2-20 damage. Which is not a lot the first week, and absolutely nothing after the first month. And sadly, it feels like a lot of the stuff falls into this, because they provide a flat amount of bonus. I guess there might be a hidden scaling, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Then there are the heroes, which also seem a bit weird. Like the fire specialized one, that can't actually get the highest tier of fire spells, because that level of fire magic isn't available (don't worry, she can supermaster prime magic instead!). Or the dude who starts with one tier 6 troop in his army. It feels like they are half-baked.

 

[tindrli]

there are no dual upgrade for units?

 

[Bubbles]

No, would've been too complex.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

No, would've been too complex.

haha holy shit are you paraphrasing what they told you or actually believing?

 

[Bubbles]

A bit of both. You'll be able to interpret their words for yourself soon enough!

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

Adding alternate upgrades is minimal work in this game. What this helps evidence is that they are obviously inefficient and working on a shoestring budget. I would be surprised if Ubisoft thew more than 2 million at Erwan's face. Which explains why they can't afford QA and released an early access which features less than 50% of the game's content value. This was probably part of their deal, ''give us only a pity budget, we'll figure out how to get the rest before launch''.

Hear me, soon they will have the audacity to throw a kickstarter

 

[theSavant]

there are no dual upgrade for units?

No, would've been too complex.

haha holy shit are you paraphrasing what they told you or actually believing?

Actually they might be right. In fact I experienced that dual upgrades totally fucked up the AI in Heroes 4. If you were playing against AI the AI made dumb decisions to build his army, made different upgrades from the same creature, or mixed armies with upgraded and non-upgraded creatures.

They fixed that shit in Heroes 5 though, but I hardly played vanilla. Then the expansion "Heroes 5 - Hammers of Fate" was released: it only offered single upgrades - but behold it was the strongest AI I ever experienced. It was almost on par with Heroes 3. The AI always made strong armies with fully upgraded creatures. However with "Heroes 5 - Tribes of the East", they re-invented dual upgrades and tha AI once again became more stupid. The AI mostly behaves "good" in ToTE, but I still remember it stronger in Hammers of Fate. One weird behaviour I saw in ToTE was, that the AI always had 1 slot free in his army, or again mixed upgraded with nonupgraded creatures, which automatically made him weaker.
"Hammers of Fate" however never had these mistakes, the AI always created a full featured upgraded army.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

I fail to see how this has anything to do with alternate upgrades. Heroes 4 was made on a budget almost as pitiful as the current heroes, no wonder the AI was retarded. So did TotE, who probably had to deal with a lot of technical debt. I'm not even sure if anyone reasonably expected a Heroes 6 after TotE.

 

[Jaedar]

there are no dual upgrade for units?

I don't think its reasonable to expect this from a base heroes game tbh. It's a lot of extra modeling, designing, balancing and such.

A bit of both. You'll be able to interpret their words for yourself soon enough!

Looking forward to it!

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

I don't think its reasonable to expect this from a base heroes game tbh. It's a lot of extra modeling, designing, balancing and such.

Looking forward to it!

Define : a lot.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Define : a lot.

much

 

[Jaedar]

Define : a lot.

33% more. But that's at a minimum, since when there's only one upgrade, its fine if it is kinda soulless ++ stats. All heroes game have had that kinda of upgrades, and often in majority. But having dual upgrades where the only difference is +1attack/+1defence is not a lot of fun. So you need to figure out some interesting difference between the two upgrades.

So in terms of design and balancing, its probably as much extra work as the base designs/upgrades.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

35 alternate reskins of the first upgrade would be the content value of a single room in a corridor FPS. The balancing in a non competitive game with a system and battleground that simple is child's play. They never tried to get it right anyway.

 

[theSavant]

One does not simply "plug in" new creatures and it's done. That said I wonder if they ever rewrote the game code from scratch. It has been rumored in the past that the code was often re-used from very old versions, despite it being a bloody mess.

 

[Archibald]

Problem with Heroes 4 is that while it was a pretty good game, it ended up feeling and playing like a worse version of Age of Wonders. In a vacuum it's pretty decent, but considering how it's going to be inevitably in the shadow of two superior games (AoW 1 and HoMM 3) it's probably never going to be all that highly regarded.

Interesting, I played AoW and HoMM4 a lot but never really made the connection. Why do you find them similar?

Even years later this puzzles me. If the leak is true, which it likely is, then why purposely run a franchise to the ground while still publishing it. This doesn't look like incompetence, it seems deliberate.

I think they are simply milking it. They probably didn't pay much for the franchise and every little profit they make is "good enough" in their book. Turn based strategy games aren't very hip at the moment so they probably do not expect this franchise to be big money maker anyway.

Very much agreed on this one. The 2D HoMM games always had the problem of the Speed stat, which made faster units move farther and sooner. Even leaving aside the tendency of the strongest units being very fast, making them tactical nuke stacks, acting first means you can cast spells first, so whoever had higher-level creatures in a mage battle had a huge upper hand. Also, clearing Dragon Fly mobs is a major pain in the ass if you're going for a ranged army.

H5 fixed this problem by decoupling Speed (how far you move) from Initiative (how soon you move), so now you can have stacks with more tacticool mobility but without letting them fuck your backline on turn 1 (like Imps), or archers that can shoot first without implicitly being able to kite your whole army, and you can have units that take a while to act but can walk up to you and whoop you when they do (like upgraded Rakshasas).

Never saw a problem with speed stat. Sure, more detailed stats are nice thing to have, but HoMM is not ToEE, you are operating at higher level and some level of abstraction is both necessary and understandable.

Either way it was already "fixed" in HoMM4 where units had separate speed and movement stats. As for HoMM5, I think that initiative system fucked up retaliations where with aid of haste spells units were constantly getting free attacks on their slower opponents. Being able to act first is very important in turn based games, being able to act twice before opponent gets to do anything is really problematic.

 

[curry]

Played the beta for a few hours and sure feels like a lot like HoMM 3.

 

[Cnaiur]

You can't just drop that hype bomb here and not inform your beloved comrades on the how and why.

 

[Zeriel]

He's trolling, or just had really low expectations of Heroes 7. It's not a good game, not anything like 3, but I guess if you used 6 as a benchmark it might lead you to say something like that.

 

[Jaedar]

He's trolling, or just had really low expectations of Heroes 7. It's not a good game, not anything like 3, but I guess if you used 6 as a benchmark it might led you to say something like that.

Yeah. It might be a good entry in the series if it gets an expansion or two.

Although from the way Bubbles is talking, I'm sensing that's highly unlikely.

 

[Archibald]

Yeah, it feels like we might get couple of patches to iron out some bigger bugs and thats that.