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| Thread: [Official Thread] HoMM 3: Horn of the Abyss - Announcements, Questions, Features |  This Super Thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 ... 110 220 330 440 ... 547 548 549 550 551 · «PREV |
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FirePaladin
Legendary Hero
DoR Modder
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posted April 30, 2024 11:56 PM |
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Tevye said:
FirePaladin said:
Pretty cute, except for one thing: what has the cat seen to stare like that? 
He has once wandered under Bertram's desk. Seen some things there. And whatever goes on below Bertram's desk stays below Bertram's desk.
For lack of a better idea right now (on my part) =P
Funnily enough, I just got Bertram attacking one of my towns in my last PvP match.
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Enshackling time itself, heralds of the Ancients among their heat-depleted land.... Who could they be, who could rally the beings of the East and the North and control the mortals' fate?
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culgil
Adventuring Hero
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posted May 13, 2024 12:51 AM |
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gatecrasher said:
The interview speaks volumes regarding your dedication and enthusiasm.
Thanks to the crew for this wonderful update, gatecrasher found the right words for it! The future development is in good hands!
You gave many interesting little bits of information, e.g. your thoughts about the balance of the game and your future plans. Most intriguing for me were these:
1) "we want to make all magic schools playable, which will require changes to the number and, possibly, quality of map control spells."
2) Factory remains neutrally aligned
3) cloudy, evasive answers about potential new towns
1) I like that you already changed the stats of some combat spells step-by-step (Protection from..., Armageddon, Fire Wall, Summon Elementals, Expert Slow). Ideas to change the number of map control spells get me wondering. We all know Town Portal, DD and Fly are way too good and there is no fire map control spell. As I assume you don't plan to cut an existing spell (or are Airships the preparation to cut DD or Fly??), this would mean adding a completely new map control spell. I am looking forward to seeing what you are up to!
2) I am glad that Factory remains neutrally aligned. Technology in principle is always ethically neutral and depends on how it is utilized. And suicide robots hardly fit to a good alignment 
If any existing faction should be changed to Good, isn’t Conflux the most fitting choice? It’s a long time when I played the Armageddon’s Blade campaign, but as I remember, the elementals and Elementalists of Conflux helped the good factions against the Kreegan invasion (Conflux being a tool of the Ancients). And the Elementalist hero races correspond nicely to those of the 3 good factions (humans, elves, genies, 1 dwarf). Finally, even the colourful, bright atmosphere and grassy terrain fit nicely to a benevolent faction.
3) It makes perfect sense to not communicate a potential new town when it still takes a lot of time to create it, or in particular when it's not certain yet and thus might never be released. As your answers do not exclude new towns, I am mildly surprised. I had not expected new towns beyond Factory to be in any way realistic. And honestly, I don't know if I should hope for it. I love so many aspects in the design of Factory, although it departs from classic towns in some ways (in particular having two lvl 7 units). With amalgamating Jules Verne steampunk, Wild West and Heroes II Wizard town into Factory, you managed to reconcile me with modern weaponry in Heroes III. And that is a huge achievement: I was and still am completely against the Forge, with laser weapons and all that.
At the same time, there are some aspects in HotA, both Cove and Factory, which I am rather sceptical about and don't want to see more of. I think, it was emphasised already, it's too many human units (SoD towns besides Castle have none, with the Mage in Tower being the only exception) and no patterns in hero races and secondary skills (while 66 of 72 regular might heroes in SoD follow clear patterns, Cove and Factory might heroes' skills unfortunately don't follow any clear regularities and are also excessively human). For example, when it became clear that Factory has a hobbit hero, I hoped there would be 2-3 hobbit might heroes, all with one common starting secondary skill (e.g. Luck). Even Giselle doesn't correspond to the pattern for rangers (as dwarven rangers start with Resistance / Interference and human rangers with Leaderships).
While I don't know what your ideas for potential future towns are, I just hope and wish they will have no human units and return to the clear pattern in conceptualising might heroes with other intelligible races besides humans and secondary skills associated to those.
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FirePaladin
Legendary Hero
DoR Modder
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posted May 13, 2024 02:30 AM |
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@culgil
I don't mean to be bothersome, but the Conflux is 99% not a tool of the Ancients. There are more faces to this, but essentially, the Conflux is more or less an alliance of natural forces defending the planet of Enroth from destruction. In that sense, they basically defend it against both the Kreegans, who want to scorch it, and the Ancients, who possibly wiped out many of Enroth's original inhabitants when the VARNs landed, as it happened on Terra (and other places), and who would do the same thing the Kreegans do, in case the Kreegans take a hold of the planet (aka burn it all). There's generally very little to nothing that would point at the Ancients having anything to do with the Conflux, especially because the Ancients' way of dealing with Kreegans on cutoff worlds is by literally just letting Escaton do his thing. Furthermore, Gregory Fulton, the man behind the faction's design, also said that they are natural defenders:
Quote:
My conception of the Conflux was relatively straightforward.
Conflux Heroes and the associated Elemental troops were defenders of the natural world. When there is a threat to its continued existence, they make their presence known, assert themselves, and attempt to eliminate the threat. They have no allegiance to anyone or anything, other than the preservation of the world.
Anything beyond this was developed after I departed NWC.
On top of that, if the Ancients really controlled the Conflux, there would have been no need to call Escaton: the Conflux would have reported to the Ancients that the Kreegans were no longer a threat. And this did not happen.
Otherwise, as sci-fi as the Might and Magic world is, we should not forget that it does indeed have a lot of this "natural", fantasy aspect, too: the elementals themselves and their faction (talking globally/universally here, and not really about the Conflux itself) are proof of that, and they oppose the Ancients (as do the Creators, another natural faction - albeit they are more eldritch in their nature).
Lastly, at least lore-wise, the faction fits the True Neutral alignment. If humans or another race or faction was a real threat towards the nature (flora, fauna, elementals, other spirits) found on Enroth, they would have aimed to wipe them out too, without hesitation, just like they did with the Kreegans. Even during the story, the Conflux was quite distant, despite the common goal. And this just falls in line with the general trope of natural elements and spirits, too. For example, pixies are depicted as being both benevolent or evil, depending on the context, but they generally tend to nature's balance at the end of the day, anyway. I won't overextend myself on this idea.
P.S. Xeron ran after the components of Armageddon's Blade months before the Conflux actually started fighting the Kreegans, so it is also simply possible that the Conflux got triggered to intervene because he clearly aimed to assemble the powerful artifact.
I do agree with you on HotA's heroes, it is virtually the only aspect which bothers me at HotA. There is an overabundance of humans, and it vaguely respects NWC's trends regarding skills (such as town/class/race skills - Offense seems to be the Captain's class skill, but it's still vague). Well, one could argue that Cove is meant to be a pirate (human) town, but let's not forget that towns in HoMM3 are also meant to be flexible story-wise.
Otherwise, I too agree with Factory's alignment being Neutral (for similar reasons as those stated by the Crew, especially in regards to heroes like Agar - furthermore, it even has "outlaws" from Good factions, like Ziph), and it's really nice that spell balance will finally be tackled. 
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Enshackling time itself, heralds of the Ancients among their heat-depleted land.... Who could they be, who could rally the beings of the East and the North and control the mortals' fate?
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weilan
Known Hero
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posted May 19, 2024 01:26 PM |
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I don't know much about the lore of M&M outside of HoMM3 and I never bothered to learn, but there should be more non-human factions that can be made into a town. I also don't know why HoTA made two towns that were composed mostly from humans when they could have added something entirely different. I like pirates and Steampunk, I have no complaints about it, but they could have taken a different path.
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culgil
Adventuring Hero
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posted May 20, 2024 01:43 AM |
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Edited by culgil at 01:49, 20 May 2024.
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@FirePaladin:
Thank you for enlightening me about the lore of Conflux! I didn't play M&M RPGs, just Heroes games. Nature's balance fits indeed as their theme, with their heroes being balanced in regard to gender and race (different elementals and races from good factions), even an equal number starting with each elemental magic.
By the way, if Conflux really were to kill anyone who threatens Enroth, why didn't they prevent the Reckoning? Well, it's just a fantasy game, I guess... 
As there now is a shortage of good and evil towns, I am happy that you might tackle this with DoR and hope Palace will be of good alignment
About too many human units and design of HotA heroes:
Lorewise, it makes sense that Cove has multiple human units, Regna seems to be mainly human in M&M. Nonetheless, their hero races could have been more mixed, e.g. with 2-3 Nix might heroes (with Armorer as their racial skill, see Tark) and even 2-3 Nymph heroes (perhaps with Tactics? Would be boring if they also have Offense). The human Captains could then feature Offense as their trait.
But that's not how it is. Of 7 regular human Captains, 4 start with Offense (+ Bidley as campaign hero), but 3 without. So Captains have neither a class skill (irrespective of race, e.g. Offense for all Captains) nor a class+race pattern.
Then, there is only one Nymph and one Elf, completely uncommon for SoD towns, except for the nice twist with Yog the Genie Barbarian (by the way, I like Ziph a lot, she fits the same way like Yog does, being a rare exception with a lot of character). The Elf, Illor, does not fit to any Elven feature (while Wynona the Dark Elf does): no Archery, no Luck, and Armorer clearly does not fit for an Elf (no former Elf starts with Armorer or Tactics). Basically, if Illor was a Nix instead, it would fit better.
With Factory heroes, it is similar: too many humans, several races with only one hero (why not more Dark Elves? Or Hobbits?) and no pattern for might heroes (at least Tavin could also start with Luck as a hobbit trait). So the SoD pattern of the first skill being determined by town/class/class & race and the second being individual is unfortunately absent.
As I write this, I don't want to be rude or anything, I really love HotA, it's by far the best Heroes III mod out there (and there are many). Like FirePaladin, I think the overabundance of humans and the non-correspondence of hero skills are not fitting. On the other hand, the individual heroes have great traits, from really strong might heroes (Corkes, Anabel, Dury) to very welcome new spell specialists (Eovacius, Ziph, Wrathmont, Victoria).
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Hourglass
Supreme Hero
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posted May 21, 2024 02:10 PM |
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culgil said:
So the SoD pattern of the first skill being determined by town/class/class & race and the second being individual is unfortunately absent.
Personally I feel the dedicion of having skills depended on class was a bad call in the original game to be honest. The system of giving a hero two secondary skills, and forcing one them being tied for class makes most heroes very (too) similar for each other, which imo somewhat downgrades the gameplay experience. After all, even in the original game the number of heroes is exremely high in my opinion, but for example the Knights end up being very similar to each other due the "forced" Leadership. Why not just give Leadership for some of them, and have others learn it at a high rate? (which they actually do now, it's just visible under normal circumstances) Similarly, since basically every magic hero is set to start with Wisdom, we end up having many, many heroes with Wisdom-sorcery/EE/mysticism/intelligence/such combination. Not really interesing if you ask me.
The situation where 'traits' highly set how the heroes start brewing, we end up in the situation where two non-wisdom magic skills are never being paired, and even some other "obvious" skill pairs are not being used: where are the Artillery + Archery combo? Why is Resistance never paired with Offence? Pathfinding and Logistics, hello? Luck skill being used twice for the original game, really?
I believe the system should have been that the trait is given by a high chance through level ups, rather than just being there in the first place. This would've also made some needed difference between all might heroes and all magic heroes, now they're quite similiar to each other.
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culgil
Adventuring Hero
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posted May 22, 2024 01:00 AM |
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Thanks, Hourglass, for emphasizing the gameplay aspect of hero design.
I completely agree with you that having all magic heroes (except Necros) start with Wisdom was a very bad decision by the original devs, reducing skill combinations and hero diversity. Funnily, I thought about exactly that while writing my last post.
At the same time, I believe associating those fantasy races with different starting skills is very important to create a fitting atmosphere for such a fictional world. If all heroes irrespective of town, class or race had individual skill combinations, then what is left as identity of being an elf, dwarf, troglodyte etc.? The fantasy stereotypes of elves being excellent archers, dwarves craving gold, genies fulfilling wishes etc. are one of the core components of the game and contribute to the appeal of the game. Without such racial traits, what would make them different from humans?
And yes, heroes would still differ in probabilities for skills, but that's not the same. It would still look like arbitrary combinations of skills, only bound together by the individual bio (which many players don't read, except perhaps in the campaigns).
I think both should (and could) be achieved: a coherent, plausible fantasy world by town, class or racial traits and great gameplay by strong and diverse starting skill combinations (strong and diverse also contradict each other to a noticeable degree).
The heroes' uniqueness is also not only determined by their starting skills, but also by their primary skills and their specialty (and starting spell, if any). E.g. while Dury and Alkin both start with Offense and Armorer, they are quite different due to Dury's powerful specialty. This means the number of possible combinations for heroes are huge, even with patterns for starting skills in place. The only completely identical heroes (gameplay-wise) are Thunar and Erdamon, which is really awful design (I would favor Erdamon losing Tactics for another starting skill - making Estates Earth elementals' only racial skill).
Still, you are right that many of the 405 (!) combinations of two from 28 skills (incl. choosing one twice -> Advanced) are not yet in the game. In an ideal world, when we could redesign Heroes III, I would greatly welcome class or class&race patterns for the magic heroes as well, enabling two non-wisdom magic starting skills. E.g. Heretics could start with Mysticism, Elementalists with their respective Elemental Magic, while Wizards keep Wisdom (or human Wizards keep it and genie Wizards start with Scholar) and Witches start with Eagle Eye, etc.
This brings us to the next problem leading to a reduced diversity in starting skills: imbalanced skills. I guess the devs knew well that Wisdom is important (esp. on big maps / long games) and thus it became the standard starting skill of magic heroes. They even added an artificial rule automatically offering Wisdom every nth level up (another clear sign of bad design). When adding new factions, stronger skills were used more frequently as starting skills to design strong heroes (which are also more fun to play). Conflux heroes start with Tactics, Offense or Wisdom + Elemental Magic, although Tactics and Offense were already widely used by Barbarians and Overlords. Unfortunately, HotA continued this trend, spreading Offense even more while missing the opportunity to add a decent number of heroes from new races which could be associated with some underused skills (e.g. halflings and Luck). That 6 Demoniacs show no clear pattern although having a probability of 10 for Logistics (demonic speed) could also be the case because the devs might have found it too strong if all of them or all demon Demoniacs started with Logistics. With rebalanced Logistics, this is less of a problem.
So, the combinations you mentioned might still appear in the future, e.g. an Elf or Dark Elf (-> Archery) could also start with Artillery and Pathfinding could become a class or class&race skill (as suggested by FirePaladin and me) creating new combinations. Offense + Resistance is already existing: Krellion.
Sorry for the wall of text. We could also continue these discussions in the HotA suggestion thread if it is considered unfitting here.
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Hourglass
Supreme Hero
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posted May 22, 2024 05:41 PM |
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culgil said:
At the same time, I believe associating those fantasy races with different starting skills is very important to create a fitting atmosphere for such a fictional world. If all heroes irrespective of town, class or race had individual skill combinations, then what is left as identity of being an elf, dwarf, troglodyte etc.? The fantasy stereotypes of elves being excellent archers, dwarves craving gold, genies fulfilling wishes etc. are one of the core components of the game and contribute to the appeal of the game.
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I think both should (and could) be achieved: a coherent, plausible fantasy world by town, class or racial traits and great gameplay by strong and diverse starting skill combinations (strong and diverse also contradict each other to a noticeable degree).
You make good points here, and I agree with the worldbuilding aspect.
However, I must say that when this idea is transfered to the game in the scale as it is with around 150 heroes and 9 original factions, the problems kinda crawl into the surface. If there would be more secondary skills handed in the first place (say 3, 1 from town "spesific" and 2 "individual" skills) then there wouldn't be such a problem here. The thing is, that having 1 spesific skill coming from town alligment alone is a big deal, as the heroes don't really differentiate from each other by their class or specialty (I will talk about this more in a second) Basically, having only 1 skill that makes difference between same alligment isn't very much, and imo it doesn't really make sense in a game where amount of heroes is this high. Whereas the game is loaded with replayability, I wish certain towns would have bit different setups between heroes, so there would be even more to strategize with.
Some setups as starting skills are not really in the player's interest. Dwarfs come with Resistance/Interference, which isn't ideal for starting purposes. Partly due this, Clancy and Ufretin are among the weakest might heroes in general. Likewise, Scholar, which is pretty neat skill, is mostly on just exluded to genies, therefore being mostly present in Inferno and especially Tower, which is kinda bummer, since working hero roster only really benefits from a single hero with Scholar.
culgil said:
Without such racial traits, what would make them different from humans?
And yes, heroes would still differ in probabilities for skills, but that's not the same. It would still look like arbitrary combinations of skills, only bound together by the individual bio (which many players don't read, except perhaps in the campaigns).
Well, this is kinda where I disgaree the most.
I personally think the game's class system suffers by having these trait skills being handed over. From the top of my head, I cannot describe the main, big differences between something like a Planeswalker and Demoniac, same going for Witches and Clerics. This could obviously be just me having bad memory, but I believe the matter of fact is that there the difference between all might heroes and all magic heroes isn't that big to begin with. For example, after giving all the Knights their Leadership, there just isn't much of 'Knight' to be discovered further - by looking at their skill probabilites, they just look like basically any other might hero.
It's kinda saddening and hopefully even a wrong way of looking at it, but when I tried making a ranking between all the classes, I realized that I was mostly comparing their chances of learning the best skill in the game - Earth magic.
Now, if the trait skill would rather have high probability, there would be more meat beside the bones, not just simple slighty altering the numbers between different classes.
I also don't know about reading the bios part. Not sure if it's just me, but to tell the truth, I didn't notice the assocation of certain skills among spesific hero races until after truly revisiting the game, which translates around 10-15 years being in the dark. On the other hand, I've sure read all the bios along the way many times.
culgil said:
The heroes' uniqueness is also not only determined by their starting skills, but also by their primary skills and their specialty (and starting spell, if any). E.g. while Dury and Alkin both start with Offense and Armorer, they are quite different due to Dury's powerful specialty. This means the number of possible combinations for heroes are huge, even with patterns for starting skills in place. The only completely identical heroes (gameplay-wise) are Thunar and Erdamon, which is really awful design (I would favor Erdamon losing Tactics for another starting skill - making Estates Earth elementals' only racial skill).
Whereas it's true that the specialties and starting spell seemingly add uniqueness, from gameplay perspective it's not necessary as different as it would seem at first: Excluding the heroes that give some sort of resource, it's really the top heroes (Tazar, Crag Hack, Galthran, Eovacius) that really benefit out of their specialty in a meaningful, let's say a game impactful way. Starting from "above average" heroes (Fiur, Krellion, Nymus, Aenain, Tancred, such), their success is more or less entirely based on their starting secondary skills. And when you start going downwards the list, the less and less the specialty actually comes into play. A rough, quick estimate is that for around 50-60% of heroes benefit only a little bit, or don't benefit at all of their specialty.
Primary stats don't really change things, unless we're especially talking about something like Barbarians or Warlocks, since they have a clear focus in that area. Likewise, the Heretics and Battle mages come as horrendous classes due both only having 1 knowledge. In my experience thou, the end game heroes that have acquired approximately same amount of exp don't really look that different from another when it comes to primary stats.
So, for long story short, despite there being a lot of things that seemingly make differences between heroes, in a normal gameplay loop the starting secondary skills are the most vital thing for majority of heroes.
culgil said:
This brings us to the next problem leading to a reduced diversity in starting skills: imbalanced skills. I guess the devs knew well that Wisdom is important (esp. on big maps / long games) and thus it became the standard starting skill of magic heroes. They even added an artificial rule automatically offering Wisdom every nth level up (another clear sign of bad design). When adding new factions, stronger skills were used more frequently as starting skills to design strong heroes (which are also more fun to play). Conflux heroes start with Tactics, Offense or Wisdom + Elemental Magic, although Tactics and Offense were already widely used by Barbarians and Overlords. Unfortunately, HotA continued this trend, spreading Offense even more while missing the opportunity to add a decent number of heroes from new races which could be associated with some underused skills (e.g. halflings and Luck).
I agree there could have been few more Halfling heroes, and they could totally have had Luck skill. However, for Cove I'm not sure. According to everything we knew about Regna, it seems like a human town for me, if I'm not mistaken they we're even repsented by Castle units in the original campaigns. The nymphs and nixies seem mostly like allying troops, rather than directly Regna-related creatures.
So, I think the strong human presentation there is justifiable. And here I have to say that imo the Hota team made the right call and didn't follow the so-called set path, which to be honest isn't even consistent in the original game (humans in inferno). Now every Captain especially can be considered useful in their own right, Cove even offers multiple efficient starting styles.
culgil said:
Offense + Resistance is already existing: Krellion.
Good catch, my bad. Resistance is not paired with a bunch of skills, thou.
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zeppo
Tavern Dweller
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posted May 23, 2024 08:20 PM |
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Hota 1.7.1 multiplayer
When i play with usual group; whenever someone is eliminated from the game, the entire game crashes on transmitting data to the next player. Same thing happens if a player leaves the game before a winner is declared.
Has anyone had the same problem, and can point us in a general direction?
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