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| Thread: H8 concept document |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 · «PREV |
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted October 22, 2019 10:35 AM |
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I still think that 3 rare resources would be just right. Only one turned out a little boring, despite the balance advantages on poor and rich maps. Also the gold mine should become more prominent, on the same level with rare resources.
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MattII
Legendary Hero
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posted October 22, 2019 10:59 PM |
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I'd be happy rejiging the system to make 'rare' resources less rare. Up the production levels of all non-gold resources by 5, and all the existing costs by the same. A daily production of 10/5 from each mine offers a lot more options than daily production of 2/1.
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Galaad
Hero of Order
Li mort as morz, li vif as vis
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posted October 22, 2019 11:31 PM |
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Elvin said:
I still think that 3 rare resources would be just right.
Meh. Nah. I mean it only seems right that each faction has its own prominent rare resource.
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Alon
Known Hero
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posted October 23, 2019 11:04 AM |
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Edited by Alon at 11:30, 23 Oct 2019.
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Galaad said:
Elvin said:
I still think that 3 rare resources would be just right.
Meh. Nah. I mean it only seems right that each faction has its own prominent rare resource.
This is interesting in the specific context of maps that let you take towns of different factions and produce from them. If you start with a Castle and take a neutral Rampart, you need to make sure to get enough crystals and not just gems. The problems with this as a mechanic:
1. This is better in single-player than in 1v1. 1v1 has to have mines for all rare resources so that players can choose which town to play. In general, there's a good case for throwing away the mechanic of capturing neutral towns and replacing it with expansions.
2. This only applies to level 7 units. Common buildings cost the same for every faction, and dwellings up to level 6 rarely specialize to the same resource as the level 7 unit and mostly don't even cost rare resources.
3. The map design for forcing players to specialize to one rare resource is too constrained. For example, there could be a difficult garrison guarding a cluster of mines of one resource. But then seizing these mines from opposing players isn't so hard - garrisons don't have defender's advantage.
4. There are already better mechanics for discouraging mixing and matching units from different factions: morale, hero specialty, the 7 stacks per hero cap. Further discouragement for running around with a party of dragons, titans, and archangels can come from designing unit stats to produce coherent unit counters.
EDIT: by the way, I'm going to get yelled about this again, but Starcraft has good mechanics for preventing the race with the mind control spell (Protoss in SC 1, Zerg in SC 2) from being imbalanced, ones that port to a turn-based setting well: the concept of a tech tree that's not attached to a specific base. In Civ this is the tech tree, and in SC it's unit upgrades. In SC the unit upgrades also force you to commit to a specific unit combo - if you switch mid-game you have to research upgrades for your new combo.
So instead of making people build upgraded dwellings per town, and spend money to upgrade units, you could put upgrades in the tech tree, with 2-3 upgrades per unit. As soon as you finish the upgrade, all of your units of that type immediately benefit. More same-faction towns are great, because you can build more upgrades in parallel and all units benefit. Towns from new factions aren't, because you have to climb up an entirely new tech tree.
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted October 23, 2019 12:36 PM |
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Edited by Elvin at 12:39, 23 Oct 2019.
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I love my upgrades. They give you something to do when all dwellings are built and also the option to upgrade existing over building new basic ones if you need an urgent boost. If you ask me, the game should be set up so that might classes focus on unit upgrades while magic heroes on mage guild and special buildings. Or a mix if your stats/resources are more balanced. Differentiating resources for either would help with that.
Plus.. The meh factor. H4 lacked upgrades and it was meh.
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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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Galaad
Hero of Order
Li mort as morz, li vif as vis
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posted October 23, 2019 01:23 PM |
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This is better in single-player than in 1v1.
If you want a "fair" game I guess... Different players like different things. I like my games to not always be the same, I like to adapt, it is also part of strategy. You want to conquer the most possible in the map anyway, if you only need too few resources and that they’re all around you... Boring IMO.
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This only applies to level 7 units. Common buildings cost the same for every faction, and dwellings up to level 6 rarely specialize to the same resource as the level 7 unit and mostly don't even cost rare resources.
That is not exactly true. Level 7 units asks for a prominent resource yes but lower buildings also ask for other types of resources. You usually need a bit of everything on top of your lvl7 one (it varies depending on the towns but still).
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The map design for forcing players to specialize to one rare resource is too constrained.
Again I disagree, I think this is what makes diversity in matches. "Guarantee" is not giving me enough excitement. 
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There are already better mechanics for discouraging mixing and matching units from different factions
I love mixed armies! Why do you want to discourage them 
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I'm going to get yelled about this again, but Starcraft has good mechanics
Starcraft is an awesome game but it has nothing to do with the Might and Magic series.
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Alon
Known Hero
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posted October 23, 2019 02:58 PM |
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Elvin said:
I love my upgrades. They give you something to do when all dwellings are built and also the option to upgrade existing over building new basic ones if you need an urgent boost. If you ask me, the game should be set up so that might classes focus on unit upgrades while magic heroes on mage guild and special buildings. Or a mix if your stats/resources are more balanced. Differentiating resources for either would help with that.
Yes!
But the resource system I'm proposing can work well with that. If you just get money and forget about secondary resources, it works for spamming tons of low-level units. If you get money and ore and forget about magic, it works for upgrading your defenses and your low- and mid-tier units. If you get magic, it works for high-tier units and for spells.
And all of this can be scouted, so that I have some idea what you're building and can prepare accordingly.
Galaad said:
If you want a "fair" game I guess... Different players like different things. I like my games to not always be the same, I like to adapt, it is also part of strategy.
Yes, and this is something Heroes already does really well in one key way: there are many different factions, and they play differently from one another, this isn't Warcraft 2 or even Red Alert. If, moreover, the macro is set up in a way that encourages players to pick a unit combo and run with it, then it further forces the player to be able to adapt to not only 6-8 opponent factions but also 2-3 playing style per faction.
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Starcraft is an awesome game but it has nothing to do with the Might and Magic series.
No, but it has mechanics that might be worth emulating elsewhere. This kind of emulation happens in the genre all the time, even between bitter competitors (C&C 2 introduced production queuing as in Starcraft) or between RTS and TBS (Age of Empires uses 4X mechanics, Endless Space/Legend uses RTS-inspired combat mechanics, Total War and Paragon's games are RTS/TBS hybrids).
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Maurice
Hero of Order
Part of the furniture
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posted October 23, 2019 04:19 PM |
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Alon said:
Yes!
But the resource system I'm proposing can work well with that. If you just get money and forget about secondary resources, it works for spamming tons of low-level units. If you get money and ore and forget about magic, it works for upgrading your defenses and your low- and mid-tier units. If you get magic, it works for high-tier units and for spells.
Once again, such a system was implemented in H7. It was very poorly received by the community, as it felt like a dumbing down of the strategic element. Galaad already elaborated a bit on this. Reducing the amount of resources means you reduce the game to something that's no longer Heroes of Might & Magic.
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The last Reasonable Steward of Good Game Design and a Responsible Hero of HC. - Verriker
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Alon
Known Hero
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posted October 23, 2019 04:59 PM |
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H6 and H7 were poorly received for a number of reasons. I think it's telling that Endless Legend, designed by people who had left Ubi out of dissatisfaction with how H6 turned out, consolidates resources down to five, producing a resource system a lot more like Civ's than like H3's.
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MattII
Legendary Hero
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posted October 23, 2019 08:03 PM |
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H6 and H7 were poorly received because Ubisoft 'over-innovated', and ruined a ton of core mechanics. One of those mechanics they screwed with was the resources system. You want to be taken seriously here? Go play some Heroes, try to get a feel for the game before say things like "this needs to go, that needs to go, etc.".
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Galaad
Hero of Order
Li mort as morz, li vif as vis
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posted October 24, 2019 03:28 AM |
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Alon said:
Yes, and this is something Heroes already does really well in one key way: there are many different factions, and they play differently from one another
Isn’t that a strict minimum? I mean thank god different factions play differently. 
By making common rare resources between them you are actually removing some of the variety. With a good variety of resources, you need to scout and locate what you need to capture in priority, secure it, anticipate, etc. Sometimes depending on the map or RNG you can get lucky, or not, and that is part of the game the way I see it. In my opinion, this, among many other aspects, takes part in a whole that used to make this series so entertaining, and one key way is the unpredictability of the matches, which contributes to the high replayability.
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No, but it has mechanics that might be worth emulating elsewhere
Like what? Starcraft literally is a speed game, what is the average actions per second in competitive environment again? Yes it is strategic, but the timing matters in a fashion that’s simply inexistent in a TBS game.
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Also wanted to mention, originally I did not want to argue much it is pretty clear we disagree on some core things about the game, I was just replying to Elvin, being a bit surprised by his 3 resources proposal.
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Alon
Known Hero
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posted October 24, 2019 12:26 PM |
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Galaad said:
Like what? Starcraft literally is a speed game, what is the average actions per second in competitive environment again? Yes it is strategic, but the timing matters in a fashion that’s simply inexistent in a TBS game.
For one, the concept of unit combos. H3 doesn't really have that concept, and I don't think Civ 2 does; Alpha Centauri does, but it was released a year after SC 1. For two, unit counters. Obviously you're not going to emulate real-time mechanics like stutter-stepping or APM taxing in a TBS, but there are a lot of common macro techniques, like build orders, which is why mixed games like Total War exist.
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