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| Thread: Why are there so many bad skill speciallists? |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 · «PREV |
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kicferk
Known Hero
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posted September 29, 2014 10:47 AM |
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The main problem is that "fortune" is one of the last spells I would use in combat. There are so many more useful/reliable/battle changing spells.
And the second problem is that the speciality is still useless, because +3 to luck she has from secondary skill and +2 luck of normal fortune(and possible +x luck from other sources) are enough to reach +3 in vast majority of cases. Maybe after a pyramid, a bad fountain of fortune and fighting devils(-4 to luck in total), I would appreciate fortune speciality. But unlikely, since its results are very random :/
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8882
Tavern Dweller
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posted November 04, 2014 02:24 AM |
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The game has so many bad specialists because 3DO did not have enough time to balance it. In addition it was not played so "mathematically" or "competitively" in the past, since at that time making "a faster horse" was enough - Homm3 is basically upgraded Homm2 with better graphics and "more of everything".
Most people posting here play the game in 2014... and know what you are doing. Since you know nearly everything about the game you either play super hard maps (e.g. defeat 9999 azure dragons etc), where most of the game is not really the 3do game any more, but rather abusing bugs / spell combinations that were not even imagined by the authors , while the rest of you usually play super short multiplayer games that last 2-3 weeks of game time, with tons of gold chests lying around.
3DO simply did not envision this, when the game came out, of course there were "specialists" that could do some magic in Homm2, but they are nothing when compared to todays expert players. Also back in 1999 noone was really such an expert, internet was much less popular... even the Erathia campaign could be difficult for a newbie player.
When Homm3 came out in 1999, noone really heared about balance that much (apart from Starcraft and few other turn based games).
"Balance" is a mostly "modern" concept that resulted due to popularity of StarCraft. Homm3 was still quite well balanced for its time, especially as the game has so many fractions (although we all know that some fractions simply suck and some like inferno shine only due to completely unexpected way the game is played; I dont really think 3DO visioned demon farming), but we must really point out that at that time noone really cared about super good balance.
The game was made for the average player, who wanted to play "Titan's Winter" or some other XL map and develop their hero.
IN fact the game was made for an average playr who wanted "improved Homm2" (just like Homm2 was improved Homm1).
I think even back then everyone knew that some skills like Eagle Eye sucked.., but 3DO never had the time to change it, because first they wanted the players to get at least few skills on their heroes to defeat the AI... and for the second they never had the time to work on it - as far as I think they were mostly losing money and all the expansions and Tarnum campaigns was just a "run for money" (we all know how rushed Armageddons Blade was - thus it has very bad heroes).
In reality Homm3 was a big step in different direction than Homm2 - direct spell heroes became quite useless; of course spells are important, but not damage spells (while you could do a ton of creeping with just spells in homm2), but back in 1999 noone really saw that, sometimes even today players do not realise that from mathematical / strenght point of view "might" heroes are much better than "magic" heroes in Homm3.
To sum up: I believe that those skills were simply not balanaced properly becase
1. 3do did not focus so much at balance + did not have the resources
2. They envisioned that the game would not be played that fast, so 1-2 sucky skills would not matter
3. When people realised that some abilities suck, 3do never balanced the game since they were focusing on creating Conflux instead of Forge
By the way - this probably will be a very unpopular opinion here, but I believe that the multiplayer maps that are played now, the ones with tons of gold chests are not really the way 3DO wanted the game to be played. Of course this is done in order to make the games last 2-3 hours of real time (instead of many more), but the company never really envisioned that.
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Salamandre
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
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posted November 04, 2014 03:15 AM |
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I agree with every point you make.
However I believe that the structure of H3 was build on solid and healthy bases, thus the game editing, modding and mapmaking poured and developed in various cauldrons, which finally worked rather well and greatly contributed to its legendary success.
If today we have epic single maps, or great multiplayer templates, is because we could make them, using the available resources after decoding the original. They didn't envision it for sure, but they built the game in such way that it opened the door to interesting experiments.
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bloodsucker
Legendary Hero
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posted November 04, 2014 10:08 AM |
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8882 said:
The game has so many bad specialists because 3DO did not have enough time to balance it. In addition it was not played so "mathematically" or "competitively" in the past, since at that time making "a faster horse" was enough - Homm3 is basically upgraded Homm2 with better graphics and "more of everything".
I mostly agree with you, specially about the time prespective and how we tought we had nailed it with this or that trick in the security or our homes, until the day we started to play online and didn't survived a few turns. Cause the others had learned from each other and developed tecnics so crazy has "Poorman's TP".
I remember that 14 years ago in most custom maps Tower was Red - because people liked to play for Tower. Now ask anyone in a Twitch chat to play for Castle or Tower against you with the barbarian's...
What I don't believe is that the guys who where so "savant" to avoid computer to know how to use Berserk didn't knew Eagle Eye and Mysticism were snowy specialties. They were totally conscious of that as they were of the importance of Offense and Armourer specialists, that's why the first ones are obnouxiously frequent and the second ones rare. What I don't get is why did they did it.
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kicferk
Known Hero
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posted November 04, 2014 11:54 AM |
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I feel like eagle eye specialists are heroes that actually have more use than some other ones. I can think of a situation in which eagle eye is really useful, even in multiplayer games, and then you would use one of eagle eye specs that you recruited as a scout anyway. But a dwarf specialist, gargoyle specialist or any other specialist with no good skill tree is pretty much useless except for all uses a scout can have.
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OhforfSake
Promising
Legendary Hero
Initiate
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posted November 04, 2014 12:59 PM |
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About spell damage in Heroes 2, since Att & Def are twice as effective in HoMM 2 and new heroes keep on having several units, I'd have thought that might would be even more dominant in HoMM 2? In Heroes 3, one can use fire & run tactics against opponent armies, if allowed. E.g. One Implosion / Armageddon can remove weeks worth of creatures.
Anyway I tried to run some encounters between HoMM 2 units and HoMM 3 units, where I used their original stats, except I doubled the att & def stat of the HoMM 2 ones. For low level units, Dwarfs and Golems are amazing compared to their HoMM 3 counter parts. But when it comes to mid level units, I recall only a few of HoMM 2 units where as good as the HoMM 3 ones. For high level units, there's a big gap between the next best and the best in HoMM 2, bigger than in HoMM 3.. but when comparing the best of HoMM 2 with the best of HoMM 3 only dragons stand a chance against upgraded level 7 units and actually do rather well. Black Dragons of HoMM 2 are more powerful than their HoMM 3 counterparts, if only slightly so.. and that's in a game where there are no Angels, Behemoths, Devils, etc.
Archangels and Ancient Behemoths are still more powerful than any Dragon.. that's not above level 7.
Note: When I write most powerful I didn't take speed into account.. I'm not sure how to translate the speed of the units and it'd make for a major difference. I only directly compared how many hits each type of unit needed to defeat each other based on their HP, Damage and Att & Def, where I doubled Att & Def for HoMM 2 units.
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Salamandre
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
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posted November 04, 2014 01:58 PM |
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Speed translated, once you familiarized with battle mechanics: 20 archangels vs 20 titans is translated as 1 AA dead from retal, then full 19 AA attack. Already 20 AA attacking first 20 titans has advantage, but when splited is even worse. + add the possible morale for second stack.
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Era II mods and utilities
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BlackMagik
Adventuring Hero
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posted November 27, 2014 03:26 PM |
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Time does have a funny way of distorting a game designers intent....
That said, there were heavy imbalances inherent in the game right from the start no matter how you played it.
Attack is greatly favored over defense as evidenced by game mechanics on the battle screen: ie. results aren't figured simultaneously but a stack attacks another, and what remains gets to counter; the bonus progression for the Offense skill is 10/20/30%, while Armorer gets 5/10/15%
In the creation of the various towns, some get the short end of the stick and others get imbalancing perks: Fortress and Stronghold only get Mage level 3, while others can go all the way to 5; Tower, Conflux, and Dungeon get to build Artifact Merchants, while noone else can.
Without going into individual creature stats, it's obvious most "grunts" are underpowered, while many tier 7 creatures are overpowered.
This extends to the heroes, as well: some have useless, or near useless skills (Eagle Eye, Mysticism, Navigation, etc), while others have potential game-winning skills (Offense/Armorer, Logistics, Archery, etc).
I concur with the above poster that not enough time was put into the original due to economics/time constraints, to iron out the problems. That the game still has a large following though, speaks volumes for NWC's creativity and success despite the flaws
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kicferk
Known Hero
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posted November 27, 2014 05:15 PM |
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I feel that most of things mentioned are balanced pretty well.
Especially Offence vs Armorer, as Offense adds percentage of base damage, while armorer decreases percentage of whole damage with all bonuses.
Mage guild limitations are not so important, as usually you can find a town of different alignment and build mage guild in there.
Tier 7 creatures are supposed to be more useful and powerful than tier 1 ones, or at least thet is my impression. You need to put a lot of effort to get most of them, so if they could be easily killed by lvl 1-s that you get easily it would be frustrating.
So in general, game is quite blanced for me except some rare things. The question in subject of this thread points out that there are much more heroes with bad specialities than those with good ones. Which seems to be inconsistent with the "imbalances" you mentioned. After all, most tier 7 creatures are powerful, and most of towns have good mage guilds. So why can't most heroes be good and only some crappy? 
Cheers
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bloodsucker
Legendary Hero
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posted November 27, 2014 10:17 PM |
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BlackMagik said:
This extends to the heroes, as well: some have useless, or near useless skills (Eagle Eye, Mysticism, Navigation, etc), while others have potential game-winning skills (Offense/Armorer, Logistics, Archery, etc).
Your evaluation of Navigation is completly wrong. If scenario is islands based Navigation is at least as usefull as Logistics, if is without any water (as we condemn most RMG maps to be) is completly useless. But this depends exclusivly on the map. Is like saying Mutare and Mutare Drake are useless cause a specific scenario doesn't have any dragon dwellings or towns.
Also level 7 are so well studied that the better they get the harder to build them (except you can start acumulating giants mmuucchh before you can upgrade the cloud castle) but this is also part of the trick.
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OhforfSake
Promising
Legendary Hero
Initiate
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posted November 28, 2014 06:18 AM |
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I don't remember it very well anymore, but I've a faint memory that navigation increases water movement a lot more than logistics increase land movement.
What I remember is the difference of nearly not moving on a turn to sail across half the map on another turn with high speed units in both cases. On the other hand, logistics is great, but I don't recall ever experiencing anything similar.
Though it could also be because on land the terrain is more likely to be more convoluted and labyrinth like, while on water you can usually sail straight ahead with little, or no, obstacles in your way.
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Living time backwards
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BlackMagik
Adventuring Hero
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posted November 28, 2014 07:13 AM |
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Quote:
Mage guild limitations are not so important, as usually you can find a town of different alignment and build mage guild in there.
True, but a)why limit certain factions to begin with; b) you could have a map with few, or no, towns available that can build higher level mage guilds, which would leave factions that can at an advantage especially if they can get TP/DD/Fly...
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So why can't most heroes be good and only some crappy?
I would ask why there should be any "crappy" heroes.
Quote:
Your evaluation of Navigation is completly wrong. If scenario is islands based Navigation is at least as usefull as Logistics, if is without any water (as we condemn most RMG maps to be) is completly useless. But this depends exclusivly on the map.
There are far more maps that are land-based than island-based, and even in island scenarios Logistics is useful once you get to land. And then there's the possibility to create the Admiral's Hat...
How many skills would you choose before Navigation...even for island maps? Quite a few, I would guess
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Tier 7 creatures are supposed to be more useful and powerful than tier 1 ones
Of course they are But what I actually said was that, in general, the grunts are underpowered and the tier 7's are overpowered, IMHO.
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