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| Thread: unfun aspects of HoMM and how to fix them | |
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted May 20, 2020 06:57 AM |
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unfun aspects of HoMM and how to fix them
HoMM is a great series - otherwise, why would we be talking about a dead franchise years later - but I expect that most people have some aspect of the gameplay that annoys them or feels tedious. In this thread, I suggest we list the things we don't like, and propose solutions.
Keep in mind that what one player finds annoying, another may like as a core part of gameplay, so these conflicts could be irresolvable, but there may be a compromise that can satisfy both.
stuff I don't like:
- Creature upgrades interfere with the unupgraded version of the creature joining your army through Diplomacy or from an external dwelling - you don't have the army slots. My proposed solution: creature experience instead of upgrades.
- Splitting stacks to absorb retaliation is tedious.
- Too many heroes and towns on the map leads to too much chasing around. You go after one and another comes in and takes your town, even though you're much stronger and are getting ready to finish the other player off. Of course, if you're ahead, you'll eventually gather enough secondary armies that the enemy heroes are no longer a threat. But once it's clear you're going to win, it's annoying to have to wait. My proposed solution: heroes get more expensive with every hire. Maybe the first one is free, the second one is 1000, the third is 2000, etc.
- Bad exchange rates at the Marketplace. I just need a few more gems to build my level 7 dwelling, and I have more of the resources, but they'll take all the ore I have and only give me 1 gem. I get that it'd be overpowered if the resources traded 1-for-1 or 2-for-1, but the 10->1 and 20->1 rates of HoMM 3 are so bad that they're nearly useless.
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Eccentric Opinion
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dj
Promising
Supreme Hero
Always loyal to HC
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posted May 20, 2020 09:52 AM |
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Quote:
- Creature upgrades interfere with the unupgraded version of the creature joining your army through Diplomacy or from an external dwelling - you don't have the army slots. My proposed solution: creature experience instead of upgrades.
The mobile app of Ubisoft, Era of Chaos, presented a nice idea where creatures are automatically upgraded if they join the army of a specifc hero. It would work good with a tech tree.
For example, if Ryland is level 20 and uses a skill point in upgrading dendroids guards, all dendroids in his army will be upgraded (automatically or with a cost) to dendroid soldiers.
[qupte]
- Too many heroes and towns on the map leads to too much chasing around. You go after one and another comes in and takes your town, even though you're much stronger and are getting ready to finish the other player off. Of course, if you're ahead, you'll eventually gather enough secondary armies that the enemy heroes are no longer a threat. But once it's clear you're going to win, it's annoying to have to wait. My proposed solution: heroes get more expensive with every hire. Maybe the first one is free, the second one is 1000, the third is 2000, etc.
That is why i proposed in another thread the existence of at least 3 main heroes. One to defend the city and level up based on actions takes inside the castle (building, recruiting, defending in siege) and be permanently defending the city. A hero that has proficiency on healing spells, buff spells and has access to a tanky line-up.
Or make all spell schools have the same spells with slight differences, like Town Portal, so all heroes have access to it.
Town Portal in Water Magic consumes less mana and Town Portal in Earth Magic consumes more movement points.
Or make the castle feature more complex. Divide the castle type into two subtypes: Castle and Settlement.
Castle - the main base which wins you the game if you conquer it; unique to each player
Settlement - all other 'castles' found throughout the map. Supplied by Heroes 4 caravans; they are key points to your kingdom. Buildings are so common that any hero that conquers it, regardless of its class, can start recruiting his own creatures on the next week, and creatures don accumulate etc etc
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Hourglass
Supreme Hero
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posted May 20, 2020 10:21 AM |
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mvassilev said:
- Splitting stacks to absorb retaliation is tedious.
Well, if it the so called one-stacks couldn't be used for this purpose, players could only fight armies that are relatively close their own army in power level. When me and my friends played Homm series back in the day when were kids, we didn't even thought about splitting the army. All creatures were used as a one big stack, and eventually this lead into bleeding your creartures to the point where only very simple battles could be done before getting reinforcements from your town. In other words, if splitting isn't allowed, then the pool of usable tactics becomes very slim.
mvassilev said:
- Bad exchange rates at the Marketplace. I just need a few more gems to build my level 7 dwelling, and I have more of the resources, but they'll take all the ore I have and only give me 1 gem. I get that it'd be overpowered if the resources traded 1-for-1 or 2-for-1, but the 10->1 and 20->1 rates of HoMM 3 are so bad that they're nearly useless.
I understand this can feel frustrating, but imo the resources are already not much worth of anything. Usually it's not even worth to grab any mines other than wood/ore. In Homm3 atleast you could get better exchange rates by having multiple marketplaces. If exchange rates would drastically be better, then there's even less purpose to go after resources in the overworld map.
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FirePaladin
Legendary Hero
DoR Modder
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posted May 20, 2020 11:28 AM |
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It depends with mines. On scarce maps, mines are awesome (played some of them, I was thrilled to find a Sulfur Dune as Cove).
Tbh, I'm not really annoyed by these. They are simply parts of the game. It's as if the AI attacking my towns would be totally unfun. If I want, I can make a town protecting hero, an explorer, etc. (which I usually do)
Splitting is part of the game too. Tower week 1 tactic, for example. It's necessary to surround your Master Gremlins with gargoyles (in upper or lower corner, as to have bigger gargoyle stacks), at least until week 2 when you have ~4+/- Nagas (Queens).
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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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FirePaladin
Legendary Hero
DoR Modder
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posted May 20, 2020 11:40 AM |
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5. 5 marketplaces' worth.
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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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Hourglass
Supreme Hero
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posted May 20, 2020 12:07 PM |
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mvassilev said:
- Too many heroes and towns on the map leads to too much chasing around. You go after one and another comes in and takes your town, even though you're much stronger and are getting ready to finish the other player off. Of course, if you're ahead, you'll eventually gather enough secondary armies that the enemy heroes are no longer a threat. But once it's clear you're going to win, it's annoying to have to wait. My proposed solution: heroes get more expensive with every hire. Maybe the first one is free, the second one is 1000, the third is 2000, etc.
I have to agree that this is quite irritaing. However, I feel something this could be solved by allowing the AI to accept it's loss, and to make it to be able to ask if it could surrender if it really didn't have any kind out way to victory anymore. Ofc the player could deny if he felt so.
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Baronus
Legendary Hero
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posted May 20, 2020 12:41 PM |
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All fixes was done in practic. Cumulative resource and creartures growth. Caravans. Creature exp you have in WoG but its mechanics change not fix! Upgrade is another way not a bug!
Heroes equipment and creatures oneclick trading is in HD mod and Era. Oneclick recruitment was done in H4.
Last thing is spell learnig. If you play on XL map and if you built Mage Guild lvl 5 back tracking through all map to your start city, learning spells and next second backtracking is really horrible. It can be easy done by eagle eye which is failed but in this case if you learn all your 3,4,5 spells the all cities from distance would be precious skill.
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Homm has really a small pocket unfun aspects. Rather we can tell how to make fun elements more fun. :0)) Best games all times!
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Alon
Known Hero
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posted May 20, 2020 06:25 PM |
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dj said:
Or make the castle feature more complex. Divide the castle type into two subtypes: Castle and Settlement.
Castle - the main base which wins you the game if you conquer it; unique to each player
Settlement - all other 'castles' found throughout the map. Supplied by Heroes 4 caravans; they are key points to your kingdom. Buildings are so common that any hero that conquers it, regardless of its class, can start recruiting his own creatures on the next week, and creatures don accumulate etc etc
The writeup I'm working on does this, with fortresses and cities. Cities are fixed on the map, start out as neutral, can be conquered but not destroyed, and have non-unit-producing buildings like city halls, marketplaces, mage guilds, blacksmiths, stables, and taverns. Fortresses can be built anywhere at a cost, can be destroyed but not conquered, and have unit-producing buildings; a fortress may also be built inside a city and adds to the city's defense, in which case it's called a citadel, and if the city is conquered the citadel is destroyed.
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted May 20, 2020 09:06 PM |
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mvassilev said:
- Splitting stacks to absorb retaliation is tedious.
Proposed solution: Instead of only being able to retaliate once, a stack uses up part of its "retaliation budget" every time it retaliates. The simplest way would be for it to be equal to the stack's total damage. So, for example:
3 stacks of peasants vs 1 Azure Dragon (damage 70-80, so it has a retaliation budget of 80 damage)
- First stack, 20 Peasants, attacks stack of 1 Azure Dragon
- Azure Dragon retaliates, dealing 20 damage, killing the Peasants (Azure Dragon now has 60 retaliation damage left this turn)
- Second stack, 100 Peasants, attacks the Azure Dragon
- Azure Dragon retaliates for remaining 60 damage, killing 60 peasants (Azure Dragon now has 0 retaliation damage left this turn)
- Third stack, 1 Peasant, attacks the Azure Dragon
- Azure Dragon has expended its retaliation damage for the turn, and doesn't retaliate
This would make stack splitting much less useful.
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Eccentric Opinion
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FirePaladin
Legendary Hero
DoR Modder
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posted June 12, 2020 12:46 AM |
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Crashes in lobby matches.
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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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Jiriki9
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Altar Dweller
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posted July 06, 2020 10:44 AM |
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I wonder that noone has it in their list, but maybe H6 and 7 do not have it anymore, but:
-unnecessary long waiting until its your turn again. I now the HD version of H3 has a way to fix that by simultaneous turn, but that's more of a workaround. I always found it strange, that, no matter how old that game was in comparison to my pc, it usually still took a looong time to wait afer you'd end turn. Especially in H5.
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FirePaladin
Legendary Hero
DoR Modder
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posted July 06, 2020 10:49 AM |
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That's because of AI's turn.
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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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Jiriki9
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Altar Dweller
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posted July 06, 2020 11:35 AM |
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Yes, of course. And I know that it's somewhat necessary in any turn based strategy game.
BUT: I sometimes foundit really long. Especially as it does not seem that a faster pc makes the turns faster. and THAT I can hardly understand, because after all they are just calculated, from the pcs pov.
AND: in many HoMM games I could literally do NOTHING in this time. In some Civ games, for example, you can use this time to look around your realm, and thus, to plan ahead.
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Galaad
Hero of Order
Li mort as morz, li vif as vis
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posted July 06, 2020 02:50 PM |
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mvassilev said:
stuff I don't like:
- Creature upgrades interfere with the unupgraded version of the creature joining your army through Diplomacy or from an external dwelling - you don't have the army slots. My proposed solution: creature experience instead of upgrades.
While I do like the idea of creatures gaining experience and enjoyed it a lot in wog, I do think it's a core change in game mechanics. Imo a more simple solution would be to create a new skill that would take care of that: if the hero has that skill, he could train unupgraded creatures he got through diplomacy vs a fee, and the fee would decrease as he gets more specialized in that skill.
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Jiriki9
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Altar Dweller
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posted July 07, 2020 09:42 AM |
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Galaad said:
While I do like the idea of creatures gaining experience and enjoyed it a lot in wog, I do think it's a core change in game mechanics. Imo a more simple solution would be to create a new skill that would take care of that: if the hero has that skill, he could train unupgraded creatures he got through diplomacy vs a fee, and the fee would decrease as he gets more specialized in that skill.
I agree.
And I like the skill idea.
Another way to tie it away from the towns would be to have some kind of player-wide "Techs" like proposed in this thread by Alon.
Both solutions tackle the problem with unit upgrades without taking them out. (Which indeed would be a shame as they are very typical of HoMM. Just remember all the hate H4 got alone for leaving those out!)
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Dj
Promising
Supreme Hero
Always loyal to HC
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posted July 07, 2020 10:05 AM |
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there are workarounds for this:
1. remove the random weekly creature spawns and code the creatures you place in the map editor to respawn (or not) and when to respawn
2. each hero will have a spec of his own and depending on how leveled up he is he can automatically (or for a cost) upgrade any creature wihtout being in a town
3. creature caravans - send the creatures to your town or other hero on the map
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sirironfist
Known Hero
King of the ogres
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posted July 07, 2020 10:43 AM |
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I find it irritating as well how using stacks of 1 is such a useful thing.
I'd propose that retaliating to an attack of a stack that's less than, say 1% of the other stacks strength, just doesn't count as retaliation. If 1 peasant attacks 1000 azure dragons, it's enough when 1 of those dragons retaliates. That shouldn't take away the retaliation of the remaining 999 dragons (kinda like stated above).
The same principle goes for having stacks of 1 blocking the path. If it's very weak, the other stack should be able to just kill it and still continue on his way - not getting interrupted.
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