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Firstly, to fix the ridiculous Initiative system.


I’m tired of the nonsense where mass haste, leadership and divine guidance (or some other equivalent such as Order of the Chief) allows an army to take infinite actions.


I can accept that hasted blood furies can make 4-8 attacks before slowed hydras and zombies make a move. What I can’t accept, is that they can make 50 attacks when the enemy makes 5. There is such a thing as stamina. There is such a thing as running out of juice.


Anyone served in the military before? I’m sure you understand this concept. It is no big deal to run a klick in ten minutes with your rifle and battle webbing/ magazines. Run to the next position, take cover and shoot. Any 19 year old can do that.


Try doing the same ten times in the next 2 hours. Your speed gets progressively slower.


Try doing the same another forty times throughout the day. Whoever can do that, automatically qualifies for special forces. Most people can’t do this, which is why most infantry officers won’t ask their soldiers to fight like this. Or the battlefront would shift 50 kilometers in a day.


Now try this another fifty times throughout the night. Watch as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarznegger, The Rock and every action hero collapse in exhaustion.


Realistically, your super blood furies can never keep up their attacks for long. Not only do they run out of stamina – but their knives get blunted and must be sharpened. Similarly, Cerberi claws and teeth get worn down. I can see them launching 5 attacks for the first two that their enemies make. But a lenghty battle where they attack 50 times against an enemy?


Real wars run out of juice. World War 1 would have stalmated in the trenches if not for a massive resource and manpower boost from the United States entering the war. Three major wars in our lifetimes, the Iran-Iraq war, the China-Vietnam war and the Ethiopia-Eritrea war, also stalmated in the trenches because neither side had the resources to launch an attack sufficient to overcome the other.


I remember one Akira Kurosawa film that was thought to handle realism very well: Stray Dog. It was set, and indeed shot, during a humid summer heatwave. The main characters visibly got more exhausted as time went by, and far from being heroic and dramatic, the climax was more exhausting and desperate. But despite the lack of cool effects and dramatic heroism, I could not but help think: yup, this is how a real police chase between two real people in extreme heat + humidity looks like.


Troops should not be able to keep up high initiative throughout a lengthy battle. That’s nonsense. Even mechanical troops will slow down if given enough time. For instance: the Iranian air force in the Iran-Iraq war. It started very strong, but deteriorated over the years of the war due to poor maintenance and inability to source parts from the United States. So Iranian air attacks on Iraq decreased in frequency and intensity over time, while their accuracy fell off and casualties rose.


So another way of handling initiative to prevent overpowering, is to consider stamina as a modifier. Low initiative troops could be assumed to have high stamina instead. Initiative for living troops drops by 1 with every 2 attack or defend or cast spell actions, while it falls by 1 with every 8 actions if you are undead or mechanical. That would be very reasonable. After 20 actions, a hasted battle griffin’s initiative drops from 20 to 10. If battle continues another 8 rounds, battle griffin will have initiative of 6 even when hasted. In contrast, when the hasted Griffin makes 28 actions, the slowed Zombie or Golem would have made only 3-4 actions, so they are still at initiative 6. After this point the Griffins can no longer take more actions than the Zombie even if it was hasted while the Zombie was slowed.


Furthermore heroes are living things. Their initiative also slows. We’re not going to see a repeat of the H3 abusive nonsense where a Sprite can fly all over the battlefield, repeatedly attacking the enemy ad infinitium. Your exhausted Griffins cannot fly in circles to avoid the Zombie while your hero attacks, because your hero’s initiative has also fallen. Now everyone is tired and barely able to keep ahead of the plodding zombies. Does this make sense?


In contrast, undead, elemental (summoned, but not gated) and mechanical units should lose initiative very slowly. Such as my 1 for 8 actions suggestion above.



Secondly, to fix the no-supplies needed nonsense


All Heroes games are predicated on the notion that supply is unnecessary. You don’t need to supply food, fresh clothing, ammo, etc to your troops.


Playing as a kid I can accept this. As an older man, I can’t. And I won’t play any war game where basic notions like logistics and resupply are missing.


Blizzard did it very well in Warcraft 3. At low troop levels you get no tax, modest troop levels you get 30% tax on income, high troop levels you get 60% tax on income. Sure, it is artificial, but at least they demonstrate understanding of this concept. Their taxation system is not perfect but it is a big step towards reality.


Let me suggest some supply and resupply notions. They might be implementable in Heroes 7 because the area of control system is already hard coded. Or they could be implemented in other Heroes versions using AI calculations of Hero distance from nearest town, probably the same code that calculates the nearest town for Town Portal/ Town Gate purposes.


Your army should drain gold at the rate of (number of days from nearest town) x (1xtier 1 + 2xtier2 + 3xtier3... 7xtier7). IE tier 7 troops are assumed to need more resources to feed and maintain, and the further you are from an owned town the more it will cost to ferry fresh supplies to you.


A consideration like this won’t affect a relatively small and mobile army of, say, 40 tier 4 units 3 days from your home castle. That’s 360 gold, a fraction of town income.


However, it would make a difference to people who accumulate legions of troops. Wanna campaign with 1000 soldiers averaging tier 3 in the middle of the desert 10 days away from nearest castle? You gotta have an income of 30,000 gold or troops start deserting.



When your hero is on board a ship, assume that all supplies are automatically stored on board. Typically boats can store a lot of supplies, and most heroes aren’t going to stay on a ship for months anyway, so we can dispense with this calculation. The same way you can’t teleport to any town when you are in a boat.


I really hope some modder out there agrees with me. Troop upkeep makes sense. It is extremely significant in real life considerations. As my example of General Zuo Zhongtang’s Xinjiang campaign shows, a general needs to keep his troop supply in mind in order to win. General Zuo knew he was going to campaign in the desert, so he organized a modest sized army, billeted his troops in separate settlements to avoid overtaxing local resources, set up supply depots at many places before he began his campaign. And even in his campaign, most engagements were fought with a small fraction of his total force so as to conserve resources.


Another example of economic considerations for troop upkeep is the Opium War. Many people do not understand what went on behind this war that led to an unexpected British victory. During this period, it was not as if the Chinese government was unaware of the British threat. And China had 10x the GDP of Britain proper. But the Chinese lost on home ground because of economic considerations:


1) the British raised money for this war via war bonds. (Of course they were able to pay for this war because they extorted lots of silver from China after winning)


2) the Chinese had poor revenue gathering at this point. China did not have an income tax. The Chinese system was still reliant on regressive taxes like tax on salt, which means that while the Chinese economy had grown a lot since the early days of the Manchu empire, the revenues had grown moderately only.


3) the Manchus were unable to spend money on a navy, because they already had substantial upkeep considerations. As foreigners in China, they were concerned about local rebellions. So they kept a standing army of 600,000 garrisoned in cities all over China. These were lifelong soldiers and their families, and their upkeep was a huge expense. They could not be withdrawn to fight elsewhere, let alone retrained as sailors, out of the same fear of uprisings. As the Chinese economy grew prosperous, these urban troops and their families required higher upkeep – paid for by the same regressive taxes on salt that didn’t grow as much as the cost of living.


Just think about how costly it would be for the United States Army if their troops were billeted in NYC and LA to discourage riots, rather than in rural Texas and South Carolina. Salaries would have to triple when moving between rural Texas and NYC, and funds would be diverted from the US Navy. And if USA had no income tax but relied on sugar and Coca-Cola taxes to fund its military...


4) the Ottoman Empire also had a substantial problem with upkeeping their troops the Janissaries. It was a parallel problem to the Manchu-Chinese problem, because when the UK navy started harassing the Ottoman Empire, the Turks did not have resources to spend on strengthening their navy.


Thirdly, to fix the Logarithmic Growth nonsense



I’ve always been annoyed that challenge in Heroes means fighting boss heroes with Legions of Tier 7. Realistically most historical antagonists were never that ridiculously numerous. You have supply problems, the boss enemy also has supply problems. Even Kha Beleth needs to eat. You can’t feed legions of archdevils if all you own is one castle in the middle of nowhere.


Genghis Khan was often outnumbered by his opponents, for instance. Napoleon’s Grand Armee was outnumbered by the Russians, both regular and irregular. What made Genghis win and Napoleon lose, was logistics. The entire Mongol nation followed Genghis Khan and was used to camping on the steppe, so he always had a supply of meat, milk, hides and blacksmiths. The Chinese, Indians, Persians, Russians, Arabs, Turks and Tibetans who outnumbered Genghis Khan didn't have resources mobilized to support a moving army.

Napoleon’s forces were dressed for summer and had not prepared supply trains of food and clothing thinking they could get them from urban Russia, so even though Russians considered the winter of 1812 ‘relatively mild’, 90% of French casualties died of cold and starvation.


I would like to see boss heroes calibrated more smartly, rather than by sticking an extra zero to the end of his troop stack numbers. Everyone should get morale penalties, terrain speed penalties, health penalties, when operating far from home. That way when you are confronting the Boss Enemy, you have -2 morale, -2 luck, -20% health, -2 speed, -20% initiative. If the mapmaker did not already design a battlefield intended to be as challenging to you as possible, a script could read your troop strength when you are within a day’s march of his castle, and the enemy would be randomly allocated troop strength on par with yours. Then how you beat the AI would be through overcoming your disadvantages.


Real life challenge: taking the Panjshir valley. The Soviets tried NINE times. They outnumbered the Mujahidin, they had all the armour, they had total air superiority, they had far more financial and technical resources. And they still could not take Panjshir. Even trucking in supplies was so risky, that they were making truck drivers Heroes of the Soviet Union for a successful supply run. Soviet generals started with education, technical expertise and battlefield experience, so they had Expert Leadership. The Mujahidin started as farmhands and religious students, not genius warriors. But thanks to other factors, Soviet morale was always low, they were on non native terrain, they had lowered health due to the altitude, etc.


Four: no more crazy numbers and crazy growth


I suggest that we end the system of automatic log growth. 1 dragon guarding a narrow mountain pass turns into a legion after a year? Come on. The mountain can’t hold enough food to supply a legion of dragons. There isn’t enough space for them to roost. This is not bacteria in a petri dish that we’re talking about.


There are different ways to make this more challenging. For instance, the dragons could be changed to assassins, and listed as an ambush unit. IE you know that there are assassins in the vicinity and can see them on the adventure map, but you don’t know exactly where they are on the battlefield. When battle starts they are not always facing you in a line. Sometimes they pop up behind your lines and are able to poison your troops at close range. Sometimes they have even cast landmines/ fire traps/ quicksand in advance, and you only know when you are hit.


You must fight the assassins to advance through the mountain pass. So fine, your army is bigger anyway. You WILL make it through. But here’s the real life challenge – minimizing casualties. The British, the Soviets and the US all had this problem in Afghanistan.


If the assassins are an ambush unit, they start with 2x their normal initiative. This guarantees casualties on your side. It’s going to take everything you have as a leader, to minimize casualties. Now this is honest, real to life challenge that real generals face. No more theoretical 17th century chivalric warfare where people line up nicely in brightly coloured uniforms to shoot at each other across an open field. Why should the dark elf dungeon faction line up obligingly for Sylvan hunters?


Normal boring battles with the enemy standing in a line, gives you x experience.

Ambushes should give 2-3x as much experience, since they are designed to give you casualties.


I don’t want to see boss enemies boosted by Legions and Zillions of units anymore. It’s childish and crude gamemaking. The Taliban isn’t numerous, it isn’t rich, it isn’t educated and it has no access to US technology and information capabilities. But after 15 years the United States hasn’t been able to beat them. This is one real-life awesome boss enemy.


Five: more dynamic battlefields


Heroes of Might and Magic is over 20 years old by now. And we still have no dynamic battlefield? Come on, if it’s raining, battleground turns to slush. If North Wind is blowing in winter, people freeze. If you cast meteor shower, ground is covered in craters. If you’re crossing a frozen river, ice breaks after many people step on it. Things change because of actions.


I don’t think we can change the current H1-7 battlegrounds, because they are probably hard coded. But I notice H5.5 was able to create a few new battlegrounds. I think there is a potential for temporary obstacles. Maybe battleground obstacles such as blade barriers and arcane crystals and hives can be cast, as part of the simulated natural obstacles? After all, realistic battles have been interrupted before when one side runs into a barbed wire fence, or encounters concertina wire, or hits a beehive.


I wish we could do away with the artificial Heroes battlefield lineup. I no longer want to play that, because it is so unnatural. When the Taliban, or ISIS, or Syrian rebels, or Chechen rebels, or South Sudanese warring factions, or Colombian FARC, or Philippine Mindanao insurgents, or Pakistan-supported anti-India insurgents, or Kurdish PKK separatists, or Armenian irregulars in Nargono Karabakh, or Russian little green men in Donetsk, or any of the current conflict belligerents on this planet actually line up and fight, I may change my mind. But realistically conflict should happen anywhere, on irregular battlefields, and with the enemy holding varied positions not in a straight line.


It would be too hard to script insurgents and IEDs on the adventure map, but at least we could create mods where you open the battle screen with the enemy positioned at different points on the battlefield? The gravestone in the middle of the screen (a feature from H3 WoG) could spawn zombies unexpectedly. Chaos hydras could emerge from a pond near you. Elves could shoot from the cover of a nearby forest, enjoying no ranged penalty while your forces return fire with 1/2 accuracy.


By having battlefields like that, we can fight challenging battles against opponents who do not outnumber us to ridiculous degrees. I no longer want to go back to Heroes 3, and blind/ mass slow 10000 chaos hydras, teleporting them back occasionally, while my forces shoot nonstop with ammo cart support, until I have destroyed the hydras and gotten a dozen level ups that I never deserved. I think it would be much more challenging for a general to deal with a battle where 3 Chaos Hydras popped up suddenly and charged into the midst of his army, inflicting casualties and chaos, buying time for the rest of the enemy to march across the battlefield.

Now this is the kind of leveling up United States army officers had to do in Iraq. Your troops can be passing a bazaar, and suddenly the lead humvee is blown up. Next a couple of suicide cars ram your troop column at the middle and back and blow up, after which a dozen militants fire from different directions and your troops, separated into 2 segments with loss of commanding officer, have to fire back. You don't get promoted fast after battles like this, but it is still way more challenging than bombing fixed Iraqi army positions.



In conclusion, let me bring up the fact that I recently downloaded and played the H5.5 mod. It is a good mod, no doubt about it. I recommend it to everyone. But I also totally deinstalled it and Heroes V yesterday.


Ultimately I am a man on the wrong side of forty. While playing Heroes, I realize that I can no longer accept childish standards in my gaming. As good as it was, the H5.5 mod reinforced my understanding that this is all a game. The theoretical intellectual challenge has worn thin because the theory is insufficient. I played Heroes of Might and Magic for half my life, from H1 to H7, and now the time has come to either grow out of this game, or to suggest (and persuade) modders to make this a better game.

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Realistically...

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And I won’t play any war game where basic notions like logistics and resupply are missing.

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frostymuaddib said:

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That moment when H7 thread turns into OS discussion thread

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Brukernavn said:

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I think upkeep would be an interesting concept in heroes. It would be a way to make resources useful even after you've built everything in your town.

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JollyJoker said:

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Guys, you are realizing that upkeep in connection with automatic creature growth doesn't make sense, right?

Look, the way the game is set up and played you are in constant need of money and resources to build creature dwellings and other stuff, but a main gameplay element is to buy only a minimum of troops necessary for creeping in order to have the resources to build better dwellings.

Upkeep doesn't change that, on the contrary.

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Elvin said:

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Aow has unit hp that carries over from battle to battle and slowly heals everyday. It has upkeep for regular as well as summoned troops. It has more realistic exploration with abilities like forestry and mountaineering. It has camouflage. It features battles where nearby armies are drawn in combat and sieges where you can attack a town from different directions at the same time. I think cjlee's taste is shifting towards that kind of gameplay and away from heroes and that's fine. But I don't see why heroes should become a micromanagement game. Heroes gameplay is supposed to be smooth and fast with a bit of everything.

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yogi - class: monk | status: healthy

Brukernavn said:

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I think upkeep would be an interesting concept in heroes. It would be a way to make resources useful even after you've built everything in your town.

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Brukernavn said:

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Anyway, it's not like this is the one thing Heroes is in most need of, but I wouldn't disregard it completely.

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