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| Thread: Retrospectives: A HOMM IV review |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 · «PREV |
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Lord_of_West
Tavern Dweller
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posted September 07, 2011 01:12 AM |
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A bit offtopic, but a guy named kyrub released a patch(es) for Master of Magic. In 2010. Among other improvements there's AI. Kyrub reverse-engineered the game and wrote his own patches in assembly. So much for C++. The list of improvements is several pages long. MoM is such a buggy game that all patches had pages of changelog.
Moral of the story: everything is possible.
Hmmm...are there any games out there you would recommend that are like the heroes games (fantasy not sci fi) but with better AI? My experience as a gamer has really dwindled in the last..oh 10 years or so.
My favorites in strategy were the command and conquer games and Warcraft and Starcraft..but these weren't turn based.
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PinkFlamingo
Adventuring Hero
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posted September 07, 2011 02:19 AM |
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In regards to H4, I have both the expansions and I'm wondering, has there been any success in creating MOD's to increase the AI intelligence? And is there a way to download additional maps?
I fear I already know the answers to these questions, but my hope requires me to ask anyway.
Unfortunately programming a competent AI is not easy. There have not been any mods that I am aware of that have accomplished this. On the plus side, there are many sites to download H4 maps, some very entertaining and challenging.
Just google heroes iv maps. The first link should be maps4heroes.com
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Lord_of_West
Tavern Dweller
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posted September 07, 2011 02:44 AM |
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Thanks, PF
Thank you, I'll definitely look into that!
By the way, did you know that flamingos are pink because they eat animals which contain an antioxident called astaxanthin?
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Corribus
Hero of Order
The Abyss Staring Back at You
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posted September 07, 2011 03:49 AM |
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@Lord_of_West
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Out of curiosity, why do you think Heroes on the battlefield could never be made to function properly. Out of curiosity, would you explain your above statements?
Well, for one thing, even if it could be made to function properly, I don't think the heroes on the battlefield concept makes any kind of sense given what kind of game HoMM is. HoMM is, after all, a game about armies fighting other armies, led by generals who can influence the way those armies fight. It's a top-down, forest-instead-of-trees, kingdom-level strategy game, where stacks of creatures (large numbers of creatures) take on stacks of other creatures on the other side. Heroes didn't traditionally take part in the battles (by which I mean, involve themselves in the melee) because it would make no sense - you can't have stacks of heroes, after all, and what sense does it make for a single hero to take on an entire army of dragons? or even peasants? So already, in my view, putting heroes on the battlefield is trying to find a bit of common ground before two very different kinds of game, and it just can't really work. Imagine, if you will, the absurdity of a WWII game where MacArthur was on the ground fighting the german Luftwaffe, or a division of Panzer tanks. Armies fight armies, and generals try to outwit generals. Sure, you can say that generals/heroes might fight alongside their troops, but they don't fight as their own division, all by themselves - they would fight as part of a division of soldiers. The hero on the battlefield concept in a stack-based strategy game would take the officer, and have him fighting all alone while the armies he commands fight elsewhere.
Well, I don't know if I'm making myself clear there or not. If not, I'll try again.
But the conceptual problems obviously spill into the practical and technical. If you're going to have heroes fighting whole armies, either you're going to be realistic when it comes to the relative fighting power of heroes and armies, in which case the heroes become useless liabilities (useless because a single man can't possibly expect to overcome an entire army by himself; a liability because all alone, if he dies, it's game over). Or you have to be unrealistic, and elevate the heroes to such absurd power in order to allow them to survive that it's the rest of the armies that become useless.
Which is exactly what happened in H4. Battles necessarily boil down to a contest of who can knock out the opposing army's superheroes first - which often boiled down to who struck first. Simple resurrection potions become the most powerful objects in the game, because keeping your hero alive is all that matters. At the end of the game, once heroes become sufficiently strong, carrying creatures around isn't even necessary, and then it's no longer a strategy game but a second-rate party-based RPG. In the end, it becomes an issue of balance - an impossible one to solve in my mind because again it's a game trying to be two different things simultaneously.
You have to answer the question: what are heroes? Are they generals? Then the stack-based design works. Are they RPG characters? Then the stack-based battle design doesn't make sense - creatures should be separated from stacks into individual creatures, where it makes sense that a hero can act individually on the battlefield.
@Pink Flamingo
Check your HC messages. You've had one sitting in your inbox from me for several weeks now! 
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B0rsuk
Promising
Famous Hero
DooM prophet
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posted September 07, 2011 01:30 PM |
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I'm not aware of any Heroes-like game which has nearly as good AI. This is not to say Heroes AI is brilliant - winning against AI often relies on exploiting errors it makes consistently. Simply put, other similar games have worse AI.
AI in games is a lost art. It's time-consuming, and many developers try to deceive people by saying human opponents are just as good or better. They are not. Humans are better at some things - finding proper counters, not making the same mistake over and over, trying new things. But they are bad in other areas. No human will take a role of a minor faction on a campaign map. Many players balk at the notion of playing anything other than a mirrored map, and you expect them to play the weaker side ? No way ! How about an entire campaign as the weaker side ? Similarly, in multiplayer RPG games almost no one would like to play a shopkeeper.
AI has infinite patience. AI doesn't drop connections, doesn't surrender when you've made a breakthrough and would like to reap the benefits of your newly acquired power. AI will play with you to the end. It's always at your disposal, in your timezone.
Team games are possible mostly with AI. As the number of players increases, the chance of a player disconnecting prematurely grows exponentially.
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Heroes on the battlefield - in classic Heroes, some classes are already badly balanced. In Heroes 1-3 Warlock (Spell Power) is generally the worst class. It has a narrow window of usefulness. Early on no spells, have to pay for guild. Late, can't make a dent in monster stacks.
Monster stacks tend to grow at least linearly until the final battle. Hero power, measured in levels, does not grow linearly. Generally, levels need more and more experience. Inevitably, heroes which cast direct damage spells or fight as single units become useless with time.
Two possible approaches to "fix" this if you insist on heroes on battlefield:
1) make heroes level linearly as well
2) make monster stacks grow slower or stop growing.
Heroes 4 did 2), actually. More creatures die because of simultaneous retaliation. Another way could be introducing unit upkeep costs.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo RSA Animate - Smile or die
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B0rsuk
Promising
Famous Hero
DooM prophet
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posted September 07, 2011 01:32 PM |
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One more possible "fix": make spell casting based on units, not heroes. Each faction could have one unit dedicated to spellcasting, and spell power would be proportional to the size of the caster stack.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo RSA Animate - Smile or die
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PinkFlamingo
Adventuring Hero
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posted September 08, 2011 02:21 AM |
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@Lord_of_West
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@Pink Flamingo
Check your HC messages. You've had one sitting in your inbox from me for several weeks now!
I didn't even know this message board had an inbox. Haha, well most message boards do.
Anyhow, I shall get to reading it and digesting your response asap, but in all honesty, I probably won't understand it. I've only taken basic physics courses in high school and one in university.
Edit: Also, in response to your argument that heroes are better as generals instead of elite super soldiers, I half agree. I did enjoy the change and attempt that NWC made to involve heroes onto the battlefield but as you said, it's unbalanced and once they reach a certain level they become almost unstoppable. However, that is not to say it was a bad idea to begin with. Let's face it, NWC rushed H4's development and was underfunded. Given maybe another year with enough funding, who knows what they could've done to address this issue. To me, it was a great first attempt at a new direction of the Heroes franchise. I just wished they had the time and resources to polish it. I mean if you look at Starcraft, it took Blizzard 10 years to perfect all 3 factions for online play.
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Lord_of_West
Tavern Dweller
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posted September 08, 2011 09:29 PM |
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@Lord_of_West
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Out of curiosity, why do you think Heroes on the battlefield could never be made to function properly. Out of curiosity, would you explain your above statements?
Well, for one thing, even if it could be made to function properly, I don't think the heroes on the battlefield concept makes any kind of sense given what kind of game HoMM is. HoMM is, after all, a game about armies fighting other armies, led by generals who can influence the way those armies fight. It's a top-down, forest-instead-of-trees, kingdom-level strategy game, where stacks of creatures (large numbers of creatures) take on stacks of other creatures on the other side. Heroes didn't traditionally take part in the battles (by which I mean, involve themselves in the melee) because it would make no sense - you can't have stacks of heroes, after all, and what sense does it make for a single hero to take on an entire army of dragons? or even peasants? So already, in my view, putting heroes on the battlefield is trying to find a bit of common ground before two very different kinds of game, and it just can't really work. Imagine, if you will, the absurdity of a WWII game where MacArthur was on the ground fighting the german Luftwaffe, or a division of Panzer tanks. Armies fight armies, and generals try to outwit generals. Sure, you can say that generals/heroes might fight alongside their troops, but they don't fight as their own division, all by themselves - they would fight as part of a division of soldiers. The hero on the battlefield concept in a stack-based strategy game would take the officer, and have him fighting all alone while the armies he commands fight elsewhere.
Well, I don't know if I'm making myself clear there or not. If not, I'll try again.
But the conceptual problems obviously spill into the practical and technical. If you're going to have heroes fighting whole armies, either you're going to be realistic when it comes to the relative fighting power of heroes and armies, in which case the heroes become useless liabilities (useless because a single man can't possibly expect to overcome an entire army by himself; a liability because all alone, if he dies, it's game over). Or you have to be unrealistic, and elevate the heroes to such absurd power in order to allow them to survive that it's the rest of the armies that become useless.
Which is exactly what happened in H4. Battles necessarily boil down to a contest of who can knock out the opposing army's superheroes first - which often boiled down to who struck first. Simple resurrection potions become the most powerful objects in the game, because keeping your hero alive is all that matters. At the end of the game, once heroes become sufficiently strong, carrying creatures around isn't even necessary, and then it's no longer a strategy game but a second-rate party-based RPG. In the end, it becomes an issue of balance - an impossible one to solve in my mind because again it's a game trying to be two different things simultaneously.
You have to answer the question: what are heroes? Are they generals? Then the stack-based design works. Are they RPG characters? Then the stack-based battle design doesn't make sense - creatures should be separated from stacks into individual creatures, where it makes sense that a hero can act individually on the battlefield.
@Pink Flamingo
Check your HC messages. You've had one sitting in your inbox from me for several weeks now!
I see what you mean. No, I wouldn't expect that in the real world, general Macarthur could have done much damage by his own personal fighting prowess on the battle field, like some kind of superhero, and I have to agree in the sense that later in the game if you keep using mostly the same heroes, they gain equipment, spells and abilities that can gain them almost god-like abilities on the battlefield (but this also makes the creatures they command more powerful). Realistically, I suppose it is a bit absurd to imagine a single hero slaughtering 20 black dragons lets say, in a colleseum..but at the same time it takes quite a bit of adventuring to bring a hero to that level. And most heroes on a team never gain that kind of power if playing with more than 2 or 3.
I never found personally that the heroes ever became so powerful as to negate the whole point of fighting with creatures..unless the opponent was weak (the spells, artifacts, and abilities of the heroes made the creatures in the army much stronger). Instead as the game progressed, I'd just give the higher level creatures--even if they were from different factions--to my main team and give the weaker ones to my sub-armies.
My ideal army would always have 2-3 heroes in it. Any more than that and the experience pts per battle is split so much that it prevents "super heroes". 3 is all you need to maximize your creatures abilities with spells and tactics and to throw in creature growth with the nobility skill anyway. Any more than three makes for a weaker army overall, since recruiting a lot of creatures into your army, especially when their abilities are boosted by heroes' artifacts, spells and skills, makes for a much more powerful army as well.
Yes, it does change the game play, but to me it added additional depth and a different dimension of strategy into the mix. Yes perhaps a bit more of a RPG feel in some aspects, but, honestly I liked it that way. I like the mix of both the ability to recruit various creatures and having heroes that have the potential to advance into super heroes given enough ex. pts, wise decision making in terms of skills learned, and wise choice of artifacts. And the fact that they could become superheroes with god-like battle prowess really didn't bother me personally.
As far as the AI, I know there are some simple things that the AI did that were just so retarded that they couldn't be that hard to fix. Like not protecting their heroes in battle and not retrieving their high level heroes corpses for resurrection on the adventure map when they died fighting neutral armies.
But hey, so much for reminiscing 
One day maybe they will fix the AI and Heroes IV will be funner...or not. Oh well...
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formsjaina
Tavern Dweller
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posted September 12, 2011 11:36 PM |
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i remember my last h5 game ..i was dungeon vs real life friend necropolis in hourglass tournament map ...my first spell (improved implosion) criticaly hit my opponents 400+ vampire lords dealing over 10 12k damage and killing over 300 ...my next big stack killed them all ...this happened in month 3 ...on a map with 3 towns per player with a 30 vampires per week -reachable from week 3 so theres no way he could recruited more than 220 vampires form towns ..the rest were rised with necromancy obviously...what this suggests ..well abit of luck coz i crited and killed his strongest stack (he also had hero with vampire specialty around lvl 28 =14 atack and 14 def for vampires) and some overpoweredness of the hero in some cases ...
also remember how a low stack with frenzy could kill a t6 t7 stack in heroes 3 ... just need to have a hero with big defence and atack values and expert fire magic ... pure unbalance and thats just one example of unbalanced spell . Still H3 was realy revolutionary for that time and had a huge succes compared to h4 and h5
However i like H4 alot ... its much better ballanced than H3 ..and im talking here about equilibris mode..i belive it was version 5.3b equilibris ... i was plaing this alot with mates on hotseat AND with IP. ... forgot map names  ..i was using ALWAYS 3-4 heroes ..but mostly 3for example at nature coz you could bring mantis + t2 t3 t4 and life ..where you could get t1 in army and just cast martyr on them and protect main fighter hero and then cast sanctuary so they can never atack your t1 stack ...
fighter hero=tactics+combat+ low lvl magis school usually with dispel cancelation in emergency situations ...this was most important hero in army ...with artifacts usually just doubling atack and defence of creatures and ading 5 morele 5 luck 3 movemend and 5 speed ...without items....
for those that dont know ..morale in h4 mahe you act faster ..depending on speed and gave your stack a bonus 25% atack on unit/hero that had morale for the round ... misfortune (bad morale) had a debuf on atack 20-25% less atack ...with highest value being 10 and lowes -10 ... 5 morale =50% 10morale=100% and so on
luck was reducyng damage with 33% ... ex: hero with 9 luck had 90% chance to reduce damage by 33%
that was most important hero ...i mean it was never meant to die ... if it died early game than the game was lost coz your creatures would lose at least half of its atack and defence and also morale and luck ...it hapened to me once with death ..i died to areal life friend crusader stack that hit me twice and killed me ... however ...it was non equilibris  ...and there were alot of ways to protect him
get always all def stones on the hero and highest value armor for more defence ...use guardian angel potion before battle ... AND freezing potion (was 30% chance to freeze target when u hit in melee not working on blackdragons ) ..always get at least expert/master melee...for first strike ability ...its posible 50 archangels fly to you and before they hit u hit them coz u have 1st strike and you freeze them ...or you can fear them with item ...or with hero specialty ...it was scouting+ nobility (hard to get )
...bah memories...in most games having a mas cancelation hero...almost no mater what race i was ...and also always get a hero with nobility for every town to maximize growth ...the trick with cancelation was to remove buffs on jeroes to be able to kill then with units ... if played corectry heroes were realy hard to kill ...even for late games with 20 black dragon with morale and 100 atack
ill do math ..curious to remember ...there was a map realy played alot ...starting in underground arena and then teleported to castle ...it had like 4 def stones so id have 6X4=24 more defence there and were also some trees ..could make like lvl 30 in 3 months ..that would lead to over 100 def (50 from combat 24 for stones and 30 is 1 per level ..coz u get 1 defence per hero level in equilibris ..u also get magic resistance) so over 100 def for now ..add a decent armor with 30 def (bigest was 50 but that was relic) ..for a 130 def and then a chaos wasrd (50% more def to chaos blackdragons) and we get around 200 def
considering this lategame realistic values ..100 atack for black dragon and 200 defence for hero (with chaos ward included is not listed 200 but its there if u have ward) you would take 55-110/2 from 1 dragon so around 42 average damage ...840 damage from 20 ...and 420 damage with fire protection ye black dragons do fire damage ... only around 280 damage if you include luck too ... and the values are not maxed for defending hero...if u defend + defender ability u can get like 85% bonus def ...bah...i ll get some real life dude and play some h4 i guess...till h6 is out
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formsjaina
Tavern Dweller
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posted September 12, 2011 11:39 PM |
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h4 4tw
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vicheron
Known Hero
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posted September 17, 2011 02:13 PM |
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Come on, the writing in Heroes 4 was way better than Warcraft 3. Warcraft 3 just dazzles you into thinking the writing was good by having great looking cut scenes and fully voiced dialogue.
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Osmin
Hired Hero
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posted September 19, 2011 09:26 PM |
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Come on, the writing in Heroes 4 was way better than Warcraft 3. Warcraft 3 just dazzles you into thinking the writing was good by having great looking cut scenes and fully voiced dialogue.
The writing in Heroes 4 was nothing less than impressive. Great stories all around. But I'm sure everybody here knows that.
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Dj0rel
Tavern Dweller
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posted October 15, 2011 11:18 PM |
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Well, for one thing, even if it could be made to function properly, I don't think the heroes on the battlefield concept makes any kind of sense given what kind of game HoMM is. HoMM is, after all, a game about armies fighting other armies, led by generals who can influence the way those armies fight.
Well if that's the case than "Heroes of Might and Magic" should have been called "Generals of Might and Magic" instead. From my point of view, when they started working on HoMM IV someone smart finally asked why is this game called "Heroes of Might and Magic" when all the titular Heroes do is stand in the background like a decoration and occasionally cast a spell.
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Heroes didn't traditionally take part in the battles (by which I mean, involve themselves in the melee) because it would make no sense - you can't have stacks of heroes, after all, and what sense does it make for a single hero to take on an entire army of dragons? or even peasants? So already, in my view, putting heroes on the battlefield is trying to find a bit of common ground before two very different kinds of game, and it just can't really work.
You're right, it doesn't make any sense. However there are plenty of things that didn't make any sense in previous (and following) incarnations of HoMM. For example, does it make sense that a Hero cannot function or even exist as an entity if he/she is not followed around by at least one unit. Does it make any sense that a player cannot use creatures as an army on the map without a hero despite the fact the map is littered with neutral Hero-less armies. It doesn't make sense but we accepted those things. And accepting physically overpowered Heroes isn't any harder.
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Armies fight armies, and generals try to outwit generals.
But Heroes aren't those generals that are trying to outwit each other. We are those generals.
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Or you have to be unrealistic, and elevate the heroes to such absurd power in order to allow them to survive that it's the rest of the armies that become useless.
Which is exactly what happened in H4. Battles necessarily boil down to a contest of who can knock out the opposing army's superheroes first - which often boiled down to who struck first. Simple resurrection potions become the most powerful objects in the game, because keeping your hero alive is all that matters. At the end of the game, once heroes become sufficiently strong, carrying creatures around isn't even necessary, and then it's no longer a strategy game but a second-rate party-based RPG. In the end, it becomes an issue of balance - an impossible one to solve in my mind because again it's a game trying to be two different things simultaneously.
Truth is rest of the armies never really became useless compared to Heroes. As the game progresses Heroes become incredibly strong that is true but on the other hand opposing armies become larger as well. So in the end you still will need to carry around creatures in order to protect your Heroes. That's basically what creatures in all the other HoMM games did didn't they because without creatures the Hero was nothing.
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Sure, you can say that generals/heroes might fight alongside their troops, but they don't fight as their own division, all by themselves - they would fight as part of a division of soldiers. The hero on the battlefield concept in a stack-based strategy game would take the officer, and have him fighting all alone while the armies he commands fight elsewhere.
...
You have to answer the question: what are heroes? Are they generals? Then the stack-based design works. Are they RPG characters? Then the stack-based battle design doesn't make sense - creatures should be separated from stacks into individual creatures, where it makes sense that a hero can act individually on the battlefield.
This is a good point that also offers a solution. Heroes could have been made like an universal creature that can be added to any of the monster stacks in the army with a possibility to make a stack with nothing but Heroes.
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ricky220
Tavern Dweller
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posted January 12, 2012 08:20 AM |
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In short, there's no reason that BOTH can't be important. In point of fact - in the long run, one can't happen without the other.
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Be honest every time.
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