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hahakocka
Known Hero
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posted February 03, 2015 11:50 PM |
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My brother wants to buy a new laptop. So this laptop will be the choice thanks!
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GenyaArikado
Bad-mannered
Supreme Hero
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posted February 04, 2015 01:31 AM |
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Marzhin said:
Sandro400 said:
@Marzhin Oooh, I want more of these portraits 
Lucretia looks like she's already a Vampire =P Already pale and already with green eyes.
Some people are predestined 
Her very first portrait looked much younger and was eventually used as the basis for Zakera in Shades of Darkness.
*coughcoughRELEASETHATONETOOPLScoughcough*
I guess that explains Zakera fabulous hair
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Avirosb
Promising
Legendary Hero
No longer on vacation
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posted February 04, 2015 08:34 AM |
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Looked her up, and she can burn for all I care 
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VieuxSinge
Hired Hero
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posted February 04, 2015 01:28 PM |
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If we MUST have a vampire lord with a sword to be consistent with Asha's lore, can we at least get some more badass (and less bling bling shiny) vampire?
Something like this (kain from Soul Reaver, by Prohibe on deviantart) :
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Avirosb
Promising
Legendary Hero
No longer on vacation
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posted February 04, 2015 01:57 PM |
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Let's be rational here.
Are most people going to boycott the game unless certain model tweaks are implemented? Very unlikely.
Is there thus a reason to implement tweaks if people will buy the regardless? Not really.
Ubisoft seem to thrive in spite of constant negative press.
They get away with releasing unfinished games with questionable decisions all the time.
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Dave_Jame
Promising
Legendary Hero
I'm Faceless, not Brainless.
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posted February 04, 2015 02:15 PM |
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@VieuxSinge: The problem with a "badass" vampire is, that the word Badass is very subjective.
I thinkk that what a 15YO sees as badass is not the same thing I in my late 20s would see. Like what you posted. My idea of a badass vampire, even if the art is nice, is not a teen ripped half naked boy in tight pants. When compared, the spider-armor covered arthus we have now, is in my eyes more "badass".
Sure I'm all for a redisigne, anything that gets rid of that parody of a sword and makes them more intimidating, But Do not misunderstood "Badass" whit what a 12YO would see as cool.
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kiryu133
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Highly illogical
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posted February 04, 2015 02:18 PM |
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VieuxSinge said:
If we MUST have a vampire lord with a sword to be consistent with Asha's lore, can we at least get some more badass (and less bling bling shiny) vampire?
this plus Ornella and we'd have the sexiest heroes ever
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Rakshasa92
Supreme Hero
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posted February 04, 2015 02:27 PM |
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That isn't a vampire, that is a Dokkalfar, or norse Dark elf.
THe vampire should look like the ones from HOMM3, BEst vampires ever made.
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VieuxSinge
Hired Hero
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posted February 04, 2015 02:29 PM |
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Dave_Jame said:
@VieuxSinge: The problem with a "badass" vampire is, that the word Badass is very subjective.
I thinkk that what a 15YO sees as badass is not the same thing I in my late 20s would see. Like what you posted. My idea of a badass vampire, even if the art is nice, is not a teen ripped half naked boy in tight pants. When compared, the spider-armor covered arthus we have now, is in my eyes more "badass".
Sure I'm all for a redisigne, anything that gets rid of that parody of a sword and makes them more intimidating, But Do not misunderstood "Badass" whit what a 12YO would see as cool.
I think the term badass is actually misleading; The problem with the proposed vampires is that they look fragile/emo and not at all intimidating. Maybe "more manly/intimidating" instead of "badass" would have been a better wording;
I'm 26 y/o btw ;-)
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Dave_Jame
Promising
Legendary Hero
I'm Faceless, not Brainless.
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posted February 04, 2015 02:30 PM |
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Exactly what Rakshasa posted.. this is not a vampire in my Book.. this is a Darkelf. a Drow.. call what you want.
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RMZ1989
Supreme Hero
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posted February 04, 2015 02:34 PM |
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Vampires are probably the only thing I liked in H6 Necro lineup(and Fate Spinners, but they aren't in H7 so it doesn't matter).
So I am fine with them staying the same for H7, to me they don't look like some shiny emo Vampires, they actually look like Vampire Knights, exactly what they are.
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Give a man a mask, and he'll
become his true self.
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VieuxSinge
Hired Hero
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posted February 04, 2015 02:34 PM |
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@Rakshasa92+dave Go say that to the artist that made the art.
Maybe he should draw some long and visible canines just so you can be satisfied ;-)
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Dave_Jame
Promising
Legendary Hero
I'm Faceless, not Brainless.
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posted February 04, 2015 02:40 PM |
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VieuxSinge said:
@Rakshasa92+dave Go say that to the artist that made the art.
Maybe he should draw some long and visible canines just so you can be satisfied ;-)
Well you're the one who posted it as an exmple of a Vampire :-Pnot him ;-)
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Avirosb
Promising
Legendary Hero
No longer on vacation
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posted February 04, 2015 02:45 PM |
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Norse Dark Elves are swarthy, not pale.
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted February 04, 2015 02:49 PM |
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Dave_Jame said:
Exactly what Rakshasa posted.. this is not a vampire in my Book.. this is a Darkelf. a Drow.. call what you want.
I do like the general idea of a lightly armoured vampire that utilizes its natural speed and agility in a fight. But bare-chested is plain silly.
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H5 is still alive and kicking, join us in the Duel Map discord server!
Map also hosted on Moddb
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Maurice
Hero of Order
Part of the furniture
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posted February 04, 2015 02:52 PM |
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Edited by Maurice at 15:34, 04 Feb 2015.
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fuChris said:
JollyJoker said:
not only Capitol DOES make a difference, as opposed to having an UNCERTAIN number of income sources that have to be explored and flagged
But no selfrespecting mapmaker will leave you without an income source(since we don't take RMG into account) and thus there will always be s CERTAIN income(except maybe challenge maps) just from a different source.
Let me start by using Heroes3 as an example (I know that game best out of the 7 Heroes games so far and it's also the most popular). One of the statements is that a town with a capitol is able to buy out its weekly production purely by its own income, but no clear figures were ever presented. Taken for granted, perhaps? In any case, a town with Capitol will generate 28,000 gold over the period of a week, a town without it will generate at most 14,000 gold.
Assuming a fully developed town (Capitol, Castle, all creature dwellings upgraded, Market with Resource Silo), we get the following table, cost wise when buying out the weekly production of creatures:
Tower: 30,160 gold + 4 gems
Haven: 28,860 gold + 6 gems
Conflux: 27,800 gold + 4 mercury
Inferno: 26,860 gold + 4 mercury
Dungeon: 26,750 gold + 4 sulfur
Necropolis: 26,500 gold + 2 mercury
Fortress: 26,250 gold + 2 sulfur
Rampart: 25,170 gold + 4 crystal
Stronghold: 24,130 gold + 2 crystal
As can be seen, only Tower and Haven lack enough gold each week, the rest is sufficient. But as is obvious, Tier-7 creatures all require a special resource besides gold. Haven, Stronghold, Fortress and Necropolis have Resource Silos that produce Wood & Ore (7 of each, each week), which mis-matches with the rare resource needed for their Tier-7. Especially for Haven this is painful, as they need 6 gems to buy their 2 ArchAngels each week.
Of course, towns can sell the excess resources they get from their Silos, but if we consider just one town, the yield isn't very high: +350 gold for Wood and Ore (25 gold for each, 14 total per week), +150 for the rare resources (50 gold for each, with 3 in excess of what's needed). Buying the rare resource they need costs an additional 30,000 gold for 6 and 10,000 for 2. If we assume no external factors (like mines) and purely look at the town itself, we get the following adjusted costs:
Weekly balance (income - expenses):
Haven: -30,510 gold (!)
Necropolis: -8,150 gold
Fortress: -7,900 gold
Stronghold: -5,780 gold
Tower: -2,010 gold
Conflux: +350 gold
Inferno: +1,290 gold
Dungeon: +1,400 gold
Rampart: +2,980 gold*
Haven's case is a special one, in so far that Haven requires a whopping total of 6 gems for their Tier-7 creatures each week, while the Resource Silo produces Wood & Ore. This makes Haven strongly dependent on having a Gem Pond to support their income, a dependency on an external mine which is far stronger than any of the other factions. No Gem Pond essentially means it's getting crippled with respect to other factions.
Note that Rampart's case is also a special one. They have the Mystic Pond, which produces a random amount of a random resource each week. Furthermore, they have the Dwarven Treasury, which increases the amount of gold at the start of each week by 10%. Neither has been considered in the total weekly balance, but will even further increase the rather large income of Rampart over other factions.
Of course, this is a very black-and-white consideration; it totally ignores the expenditure made to build up the various towns from the ground on up to the maximum possible, including the Capitol. I haven't done the numbers, but it might very well be that Rampart is extremely expensive, relative to the other towns.
In any case, this only considers one town, with the Capitol built. As soon as you add a second town, the weekly income goes up by only 14,000 gold (and whatever resource is getting produced by the town in question), while the expenses will double. So, the more towns a player owns (and let's assume for argument sake that they belong to the same faction), the more external resources a player is going to need to afford all his creatures every week.
Furthermore, it completely foregoes any external Dwellings. Not only do they add +1 to growth in each town of the corresponding faction of that particular Tier, but the external Dwelling itself also has a weekly growth of its own (even though it doesn't accumulate). And in the case of Dungeon, through its Portal of Summoning, the costs increase even further. As such, the more external Dwellings a player has access to, the further the costs increase - even for creatures purely hired from towns.
Now, as for the argument that a town needs to be connected to the map through external resources, besides the argument I provided above that it happens naturally already when you have more than one town to consider, how does this have to work out? As Chris indicated, map makers will then be pretty much required to provide those external resource providers, making them mandatory instead of being optional. Not providing them means you cripple players, which in turn leads to a slower game pace instead of a faster one.
Also, those external sources will need to be relatively close to each town, otherwise it is going to take too long to acquire them, crippling your economy. But if you place them too close to the town, it becomes a trivial matter to defend them from raiding Heroes (i.e. Heroes without a powerful army, purely intended to make hit-and-run attacks on undefended mines and dwellings). But if they're easy to defend, it makes virtually no difference if they're outside your town, or integrated as a part of it. So the best place would probably be some intermediate distance? That means defending against raiding Heroes isn't trivial, but something that will likely be a cat-and-mouse game, where ownership of the mines keeps changing every few turns, without the Heroes catching up to one another, since flagging a mine doesn't cost significant movement. At the same time, this cat-and-mouse game is a micromanagement aspect, which slows the pace of the game down and which in reality is a chore instead of fun. Forts change this aspect with their zone-of-control concept, but that basically reverts to the old situation of having those resource providers close to a base of power.
Another aspect is the expenses made. Building the Capitol costs 10,000 gold, which is a significant investment, besides getting the prerequisites in place (Town Hall, Castle, Marketplace, Blacksmith, Magic Guild level 1). That in and of itself is a serious drawback, which is reason enough people are reluctant to shoot for the Capitol from the start. A Gold Mine outside town requires no investment at all; you only need to defeat the guards protecting it. Defeating those guards is something you do when you consider the risk vs. reward good enough. It's my experience that the turnover point in the power difference between your army and the guards at the Gold mine(s) is relatively small; a few creatures extra in your army can already really swing the outcome in your favor, from a certain defeat to relatively few losses. Nobody is going to attack guards when the outcome is questionable, with a possibility of a pyrrhic victory - you'd cripple yourself that way. But after the guards are defeated, there is no further drawback whatsoever.
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Stevie
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 04, 2015 03:02 PM |
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Edited by Stevie at 15:08, 04 Feb 2015.
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JollyJoker said:
Seeing people coming round to your view is really a gratifying thing. Power of conversion or something - might let you see the inquisition in a whole new light... 
Power of conversion, lol. No dude, you got it wrong. If anything you just made it worse at the time. Your scenario made it feel like you were taking away something from the game, and thus from my experience. And I think that's what Zombi and Fuchris are feeling as well.
Nope, the only thing that made me see it this way is just me giving it more thought under a slightly different scenario. Of course, the end result is just the same, but the nuance is different. While you were taking away from the game in terms of economy, I just added in terms of dwellings. The discrepancy between income and recruitment results in both cases, but I think mine is better mainly because it emphasizes town building and decision making a lot better and spells for more rewarding gameplay overall.
In Heroes 2 you had economical restrictions but no decision making, not that relevant at least. If you got past being economically restricted, you would've taken the best tiers most of the time, unless they were utterly outnumbered by lower ones. Let alone Knights where leaving Peasants wasn't ever a decision.
In Heroes 4 they wanted to change that. So they gave you some power to decide which dwellings you wanted to build. Apart from the first two of them, the other ones came with two choices, but they were exclusive. You built one, the other one became unavailable. That to me was a flaw that accomplished nothing. Furthermore it just made it easier on the hero to support an entire town's recruitment since there were 5 creatures to recruit (6 sometimes) and 7 army slots. Again, a no-brainer to take the entire army with one hero (excluding scouting units).
Now Heroes 7 does the same mistakes: following the economy models in the Ubi era, Capitol will most likely support a week's worth of recruitment just by itself. Add to that that there will be 7 army slots, exactly as there are creatures to be recruited. Patterns so streamlined that there no decision involved.
My model is arguing for the inclusion of more dwellings that can all be built at one time. That's it. Restrictions would be economical only. Capitol is not even a issue no more, since you won't be able to sustain recruitment above a certain point with only that. This is roughly what I have in mind at the moment:
- 6 Core, 4 Elite and 2 Champion dwellings for each faction, for a total of 12.
- Capitol will give you 4000 gold, being able to sustain weekly recruitment of 3 Cores, 2 Elites and 1 Champion;
- Heroes will have 7 army slots;
____________
Guide to a Great Heroes Game
The Young Traveler
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Maurice
Hero of Order
Part of the furniture
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posted February 04, 2015 03:20 PM |
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Edited by Maurice at 15:23, 04 Feb 2015.
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JollyJoker said:
HoMM 1 and 2 gave you SIX creatures to build, but Heroes had only 5 army slots.
It has been argued that getting more creatures in your town than you can fit in your army, would be good for diversity. That you will discard your least used creature (as was often the case in Heroes2) was considered not something that happened much.
I don't know about you, but that wasn't how my games turned out. You wouldn't stop developing your towns once you had as many creature dwellings as you had army slots - that would mean that you'd likely ignore the Champion tier building. As such, you would continue building and eventually have access to the full range of creatures. It's fairly natural to gravitate to the bigger and stronger creatures when you're hiring additional forces from your towns. Coupled with limits in the amount of resources - which is usually the case when you've just reached Champion tier - the creatures that are getting the short end of the stick when it comes down to hiring, are the weakest ones.
And this is a self-reinforcing situation. Players will not buy them because their survivability is lower than that of higher Tier creatures, so they're not as attractive to hire. But also, because their survivability is lower, they die a lot more than other creatures. This is compounded by the fact that the AI favors attacking lower Tier creatures, to maximise the number of casualties and effectuate the quickest power reduction of the player's army.
Higher growth rates don't remedy this (unless you get H6-esque effects where Cores were even dominating over Champions through sheer numbers).
So, their numbers dwindle, while they're not getting replenished quite as good as the higher Tiers. With limited army slots, they'll soon drop off the duty roster and become redundant for the rest of the game. Maybe at most as cannon fodder on secondary Heroes.
There's nothing tactical or strategical about it; the weakest link will simply drop like a rock once a player has to decide which link to drop from the chain - and the weakest link just happens to be the lowest Tier. Having external reinforcements (neutrals joining, excessive amount of external dwellings) are simply mechanical solutions to this situation, artifically reinforcing the weakest link by generating a superior number of them. But if you need to do that to make them a valid alternative even later in the game, you're already in a rather skewed situation, which in and of itself should be incentive enough to reconsider the whole concept of forcing the player to choose between the Tiers on which one to drop from the battle lines.
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Steyn
Supreme Hero
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posted February 04, 2015 03:25 PM |
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Edited by Steyn at 15:26, 04 Feb 2015.
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I suggest to give Maurice a QP for his latest post.
Edit: the one before that, as he posted while I wrote this post
Stevie said:
In Heroes 4 they wanted to change that. So they gave you some power to decide which dwellings you wanted to build. Apart from the first two of them, the other ones came with two choices, but they were exclusive. You built one, the other one became unavailable. That to me was a flaw that accomplished nothing. Furthermore it just made it easier on the hero to support an entire town's recruitment since there were 5 creatures to recruit (6 sometimes) and 7 army slots. Again, a no-brainer to take the entire army with one hero (excluding scouting units).
Actually, after the early phase of the game, the lvl 1 creatures became pretty much useless for your main army. Also, there are much more things to consider than only the amount of unit slots. By the time I manage to get a few lvl 4's, I would generally only carry the fast units around in my main, wile the slower units are part of a secondary army or town defence. When you get multiple towns you get even more units to choose from. Basically a H4 faction provides 8 units in addition to the heroes which take also army slots.
____________
Can you make a faction including these units?
Join the Finding Harmony competition 2.0!
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Maurice
Hero of Order
Part of the furniture
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posted February 04, 2015 03:31 PM |
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Stevie said:
- 6 Core, 4 Elite and 2 Champion dwellings for each faction, for a total of 12.
- Capitol will give you 4000 gold, being able to sustain weekly recruitment of 3 Cores, 2 Elites and 1 Champion;
- Heroes will have 7 army slots;
Do you mean to say that a fully developed town actually has 12 different creatures available for hiring?
Like I argued in my post above, you are bound to gravitate to creatures that don't die as easily. When you have enough money to buy 1 creature with 100 Hitpoints versus 10 creatures of 10 Hitpoints, which are otherwise equal in strength, you will buy the single one with 100 Hitpoints. After all, assuming the stack survives the battle, any attack that deals 90 damage would reduce the latter stack to one creature of 10 hitpoints for the rest of the game (reducing it to 1/10th of its power), while the stack with the one creature of 100 Hitpoints will remain and be at 100 Hitpoints for the next battle.
Surviving through any game means you have to reduce the number of casualties as much as you can.
And the 4000 Gold in your example is based off of the previous installments. Since we know very little of the economy (income and expenditure, the latter in both building cost and creature cost) in the coming Heroes title, stating any specific amount is rather pointless to begin with.
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This MEGA THREAD is pages long: 
