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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted November 30, 2011 03:51 PM |
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Ah, ok.
Then here is a well-meant advice. Since for whatever reason you don't want to play on hard difficulty yourself, until patch 1.2 will fix a couple of silly bugs with the AI set up one of the following games:
a) pick one of the following maps:
Feuding duchies
Silence of the Ancestors
Fortress of Honor
Wheel of Hate
Isles of Judgement
Brave New World
b) Pick Normal Hero development; under Difficulty, click the cogwheel for custom difficulty. Take convenient medium levels, but make sure you pick AGGRESSIVE AI.
c) When setting up the map, make sure to pick HARD AI (!!!!) for the computer players!!!!!
And as a last thing to keep in mind, if you do NOT want to play on the first player position, you will have to let player position one play the same town type than you; there is some silly bug (?) that, after you switch player position, will make outside dwellings be of the faction player position 1 has (in the end it's no problem, but it means you would need an extra 5W/5O for conversion).
Anyway. Try that. Then come and talk again.
A last remark. Of course you can play all maps this way, but those are the maps I yed some more until now.
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Momo
Promising
Famous Hero
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posted November 30, 2011 05:23 PM |
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Quote:
So what is strategic then? Having them all available to wherever you are, right there and then? That's just for kids, if you ask me...
The creature dwellings and the weekly bonus buildings that you had to visit, added more depth to the gameplay. You needed to recruit secondary heroes to run these tasks and if they were in grey areas or behind enemy lines, you had to consider giving them a part of your army and items too to be able to protect themselves and even chase away the enemy's scouts if need be. More decisions, more thought required, more strategy.
Now you just recruit them all in one city, teleport your hero back and there you have it. Is this what you call Strategy?
See? I knew someone would someday point this out.
I think the ruling principle of this HoMM is a lot less inspired to strategy games and much more to something else that is quite close to Pokemon. It's pratically ALL about knowing your creatures and exploiting their special powers. Pretty much every other aspect has been reduced.
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kodial79
Promising
Supreme Hero
How'd Phi's Lov't
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posted November 30, 2011 06:36 PM |
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@Momo
Agreed. They did not mess up, they did it on purpose. I don't like it though. I like it very much better the way it used to be.
@JollyJoker
I already said, I'm playing the biggest map (It's 'Rise to Power' after all) on skirmish in the hard difficulty. I always play aggressive AI too. I have not tried the maps you suggested, just Rise to Power, A Bridge too Far and Broken Alliance so far.
I think that somewhere I read someone saying that Broken Alliance was the best map or something? I can't be sure but that's why I picked it up first. Anyway, ofcourse I'm going to play on all maps in the end of it.
____________
Signature? I don't need no stinking signature!
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Mike80D
Famous Hero
Map Maker
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posted November 30, 2011 07:32 PM |
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Quote:
So what is strategic then? Having them all available to wherever you are, right there and then? That's just for kids, if you ask me...
What is strategic is controlling the dwelling, taking over someone else's dwelling, and deciding if you want to spend the resources to convert it.
Having multiple spare heroes just to go to each dwelling every week is tedious micromanagement (as someone pointed out). It is NOT strategic. Strategic involves making a decision. There is no decision with Homm3 dwelling micromanagement... you go to the dwelling each week, and that is it.
And every creature isn't exactly available in each castle btw. Often times you can't afford to build the upgraded building in each castle. In multiplayer this is very crucial.
At least now I know when my opponent is taking 10 minutes on a turn that it is not because he is moving 8 different spare heroes around each week to pick up dwelling creatures.. a move that requires 0 decision.
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted November 30, 2011 07:51 PM |
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I still fail to see what strategic "choice" do you have in Heroes VI given that everything is served to you on a silver plate. Whether you should convert a dwelling or not? Try harder, no sane person will leave an external dwelling unconverted.
As for how the previous system was better than the current one... actually forget it.
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Dave_Jame
Promising
Legendary Hero
I'm Faceless, not Brainless.
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posted November 30, 2011 08:01 PM |
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Quote:
I think that somewhere I read someone saying that Broken Alliance was the best map or something? I can't be sure but that's why I picked it up first. Anyway, ofcourse I'm going to play on all maps in the end of it.
The worst map my freind the worst map.
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kodial79
Promising
Supreme Hero
How'd Phi's Lov't
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posted November 30, 2011 08:10 PM |
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Edited by kodial79 at 20:15, 30 Nov 2011.
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Quote:
Quote:
So what is strategic then? Having them all available to wherever you are, right there and then? That's just for kids, if you ask me...
What is strategic is controlling the dwelling, taking over someone else's dwelling, and deciding if you want to spend the resources to convert it.
Having multiple spare heroes just to go to each dwelling every week is tedious micromanagement (as someone pointed out). It is NOT strategic. Strategic involves making a decision. There is no decision with Homm3 dwelling micromanagement... you go to the dwelling each week, and that is it.
And every creature isn't exactly available in each castle btw. Often times you can't afford to build the upgraded building in each castle. In multiplayer this is very crucial.
At least now I know when my opponent is taking 10 minutes on a turn that it is not because he is moving 8 different spare heroes around each week to pick up dwelling creatures.. a move that requires 0 decision.
There is no decision in risking paid Heroes and troops to run through hostile territories to give you more resources and creatures?
There is no decision in trying to organize an army that doesn't spawn in only a single point, and how to employ that army more efficiently?
On the contrary, they were decisions of the gravest importance. You either had to risk them and not only that but organize them as efficiently as possible to go and bring you new resources and troops where exactly you needed them best or you would be lagging behind the enemy in terms of military strength and wealth.
It's now that there is no decision. You capture the fort and it's all over. You only need to teleport there to defend it, if it gets threatened. And all of your troops are gathering at your whim whenever and wherever you need them. You don't need to make any decisions, everything has been taken care of already.
And spare me the details about what's available and not. You've got to be kidding me that you would have more troubles in a game with only one rare resource to build what you need than in a game with more.
You only need to worry about where to find Blood Crystals and how to spend them. And well, that's not much of a worry anyway. In the previous games you had to take great care which resources to go after cause you could not possibly have them all. More decision making here.
You're caught in Ubisoft's propaganda about what they called "micromanagement" and you're totting it here and there. There is no such a thing as micromanagement. That was Ubisoft's excuse to make the game as noob friendly as possible. To streamline and over-simplify everything and killing the essence of the game.
Tedious, it wasn't either. You can't expect to wage war with little to no preparation, just make a wish and be granted an army. Half the war, is preparing for it. The other half is fighting out. The gathering of armies, exchanging the troops as it serves you best, advancing carefully not just rushing in, that's Strategy. To me that was not tedious, it was the best part.
Next time, they might as well ditch the adventure map and get us straight to the battles...
@Dave_Jame
I liked the Broken Alliance map. It was a nice touch to have that Town in the middle, which controled the entire traffic. The map was good by itself, it's the AI that sucks and the devastating Town Portals which are killing the gameplay by making everything so easy.
____________
Signature? I don't need no stinking signature!
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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted November 30, 2011 08:32 PM |
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Quote:
Quote:
The creature dwellings and the weekly bonus buildings that you had to visit, added more depth to the gameplay. You needed to recruit secondary heroes to run these tasks
Ok, you just lost the last vestiges of credibility. If that's your idea of depth of gameplay...
I think the truth lies somewhere between what the two of you say. I can deffinitely see where JJ comes from, because I think the examples you mention - weekly bonus dwellings and ressource structures - were some of the most tedious examples of pointless micromanagement I've ever seen in a game. Having to visit the site week after week after week in order to get the benefit ... yawn. In this regard, I think H4 hit the mark much better with flaggable Windmills etc.
On the other hand, I agree that the creature pools in towns, while it might look like a good idea from a reducing-management POW, kills too much of the strategic management of the game - here, we're not just talking micromanagement, but a central part of the game. I think the option to cut off some of the enemies troops by taking some of his castles and blocking roads between them was a good part of the game, whereas the new creature-pool system seems to flatten the game too much by always letting you recruite whatever forces you have available whereever you need them.
____________
What will happen now?
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xerox
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
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posted November 30, 2011 09:06 PM |
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Yeah, the next Heroes game or expansion needs to find a fine line between all that.
____________
Over himself, over his own
body and
mind, the individual is
sovereign.
- John Stuart Mill
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Aosaw
Promising
Famous Hero
Author of Nonreal Fiction
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posted November 30, 2011 11:10 PM |
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It's a pretty easy fix, in my mind:
1) External dwellings give you a one-time allotment of free creatures. You visit the Peasant Hut, and you get 20 peasants immediately at no cost. You don't gain any additional benefit from visiting the dwelling each week. (The same thing could probably done with mines, actually; you capture the mine, and you get a small number of resources immediately). You only gain this initial benefit if the dwelling was previously neutral.
2) Creature Pools don't exist anymore. If you want to combine your creatures from multiple towns, you have to do it the hard way. With Town Portal, this isn't even that time-consuming, but it requires a resource - whether that resource is mana or turns depends on your particular strategy.
3) External dwellings grant a small (+1 or +2) bonus to the creature growth of a specific tier in all towns. So if you have five Haven towns, and you flag a Peasant Hut, you get +2 Peasants each week in each Haven town. If we're using areas of control, the bonus can be limited to the town in that dwelling's AoC.
There; fixed.
Not interesting enough? How about this:
3a) External dwellings grant a small (+1 or +2) cumulative bonus to one or more attributes of that creature type within your army. For example, a Pikemen dwelling grants +1 to all your pikemen's defense. If you have five pikemen dwellings, your pikemen get +5 Defense.
Or:
3b) External dwellings create a secondary upgrade for the selected creature within the controlling town. This secondary upgrade is slightly better than the upgraded version of the creature, but costs no additional resources beyond the cost of the first upgrade. (Example: A Paladin's Training Grounds, or whatever it's called, creates a second upgrade for the Paladin, called "Dragon Knight"; the Dragon Knight is essentially the same as the Paladin but with improved stats and maybe a bonus special ability to make the unit more interesting. The Dragon Knight is not game-breakingly good, but it's good enough that the Haven player will notice a difference.)
Any one of those ideas would solve the problem of external creature dwellings; and the same principle can be easily applied to other adventure map locations as well.
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feluniozbunio
Promising
Supreme Hero
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posted December 01, 2011 12:05 AM |
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Im happy that they "oversiplified" the game because now i can play multiplayer matches in the same time i could in h5 with sim turns. I just cant wait till actual sim turns come out, then ill be able play twice as many games. Of course those who play one game vs "stupid AI" for weeks will complain that they are bored because Ubi cut their running around doing redundant tasks in half.(moving troops from town to town is not central part of the game lol, every good player chained them and it was tiring thing that you had to do in order to stay competitive) Good that for once developers took multiplayer gamers side.
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted December 01, 2011 12:19 AM |
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Uh, right. Like now you can't chain if you want to. And you will.
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feluniozbunio
Promising
Supreme Hero
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posted December 01, 2011 12:30 AM |
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I can, i do, but its reduced in 90%.
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Aosaw
Promising
Famous Hero
Author of Nonreal Fiction
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posted December 01, 2011 12:32 AM |
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Bah.
Online play has killed multiplayer gaming for me. Like, just because some players exploited a gameplay mechanic (chaining) during competitive play, they make the entire mechanic of creature recruitment totally unrealistic - which, by the way, doesn't remove the problem that chaining created; it simply makes chaining easier.
Meanwhile, those of us who never played online and were pretty well content with the games we played hot seat with a few friends lose an element of management that we kind of enjoyed.
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted December 01, 2011 12:36 AM |
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Edited by Zenofex at 00:45, 01 Dec 2011.
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Yeah, because the game holds your hand by providing you with your entire population everywhere you can buy it. The chains are at least susceptible to attacks. Now you can save the population from towns 1, 2, 3 and 4 by buying it in town 5 - or any of these towns for that matter - so whatever the opponent is attacking, you are pretty safe. Niiice.
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odium
Known Hero
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posted December 01, 2011 12:50 AM |
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Edited by odium at 00:51, 01 Dec 2011.
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Quote:
Uh, right. Like now you can't chain if you want to. And you will.
That's not the point but the fact that chaining has been drastically reduced.
On the lack of "strategical depth", in competitive mp this is a non-issue since the maps are usually symmetrical and closed thus phrases like "There is no decision in risking paid Heroes and troops to run through hostile territories to give you more resources and creatures?" are bogus.
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Pontifex
Tavern Dweller
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posted December 01, 2011 01:20 AM |
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Quote:
On the lack of "strategical depth", in competitive mp this is a non-issue since the maps are usually symmetrical and closed thus phrases like "There is no decision in risking paid Heroes and troops to run through hostile territories to give you more resources and creatures?" are bogus.
In that case I'd say competitive mp in itself is a non-issue when discussing the subject at hand...
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Miru
Supreme Hero
A leaf in the river of time
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posted December 01, 2011 01:55 AM |
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Before you could not defend mines. If you split your army into enough pieces to be on each mine, then they would be too small to do anything. Now you actually can defend your stuff and splitting your army takes more decision than before. You still can hire extra heroes to harass an enemies money supply, but now you do it by having them sit on a mine rather than run in circles flagging the mine. Because the resources are so much tighter in heroes 6 controlling one mine by sitting on it or using the mine control abilities is as effective, but without any of the tedious micro. There is ALL of the old strategy, an actual ability to defend and reason to split armies, and a lot less babysitting off heroes.
____________
I wish I were employed by a stupendous paragraph, with capitalized English words and expressions.
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Coconut
Hired Hero
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posted December 01, 2011 03:41 AM |
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Quote:
You're caught in Ubisoft's propaganda about what they called "micromanagement" and you're totting it here and there. There is no such a thing as micromanagement. That was Ubisoft's excuse to make the game as noob friendly as possible. To streamline and over-simplify everything and killing the essence of the game.
Tedious, it wasn't either. You can't expect to wage war with little to no preparation, just make a wish and be granted an army. Half the war, is preparing for it. The other half is fighting out. The gathering of armies, exchanging the troops as it serves you best, advancing carefully not just rushing in, that's Strategy. To me that was not tedious, it was the best part.
Kodial79, I take full responsibility with coming up with the term 'tedious micromanagement', as it was me, but that's not what I meant with it. I was purely talking about going around your creature dwellings every week to pick up your troops.
To have a player send a unit from A to B and back in a never ending cycle to pick up a fixed reward should be in any top 10 of things to avoid for game developers.
For a player to set up such a cycle, deciding tasks between heroes, pondering over whether to recruit another one and such, that's strategy, everybody is okay with that. It's having to do the same thing over and over again that's the problem.
To make a real life comparison; applying for a job in the factory is okay, meeting your new colleagues for the first time is okay, it's just when your shift behind the conveyor belt starts that the problem comes; the boredom of doing a mindless chore. That's what we are experiencing with visiting creature dwellings week after week.
But I am a fan of the early Heroes games, and these dwellings are really not such a problem for me. It's a detail. Looking at myself, if I start a map and I notice already 10 creature dwellings or so around my starting castle, then yes, I will quit the map. If there are just a few I have no problem.
There's a responsibility for the map maker here. I don't find the design of the creature dwellings a master stroke from the game makers of the time, but I'm not prepared to throw mud at the game because of it, it's just not that big a deal.
What's going on in Heroes VI I don't know yet, I just picked up the demo a few days ago and I came here to listen what the community are saying. That's why I'm here, asking questions, trying to pick up your opinions.
Probably I'm slightly disappointed in that respect; on these pages I find more petty arguments between forum members than people trying to formulate a comprehensive view of the game.
I'm sceptical about teleport systems, that can easily kill the strategic concept of distance.
In the only Heroes III map I ever made I made the spell "Town Portal" extremely hard to get. That spell could end the game on its own. I think there were a couple more spells or artifacts that I banned from the game on the advice of play testers. I have some idea about how the community thinks. Some things can kill the game, and the experienced players are more concerned than the casual ones.
From what I'm reading on these pages, I'm starting to get worried about Heroes VI...
Does the editor at leat give some opportunity to the map maker to organise things the way they want it, or also not?
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Dave_Jame
Promising
Legendary Hero
I'm Faceless, not Brainless.
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posted December 01, 2011 08:46 AM |
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I Have a very symple purposle to finde the balance between the curent system of recruitment and I think it is more or less easy.
Change creature Pool: Eache Area of Controle has its own personal Creature pool, the common pool does not exist any more. All unites from all dwellings and the Town can be recruited in the town, but only in the town and nowhere else. This would reduce the Micro. Man. in comparison to the older games. But Still manage to avoid the Curent situation.
Also
Inovate the Forts: There is no reason that the forts can not have their buildings. For start they can have for example only 2 levels of forrtification, a Hall of heroes and rank 2 special structure. No dwellings, no Bonuses to Creature growth Just some a little biger use for them.
Limit the nuber od Town portal Level 2: Give it a status similar to that of teh Capitol, and alow only 1 per player.
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