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| Thread: Heroes Chronicles: Tipping the Balance |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 · «PREV |
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NimoStar
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Modding the Unmoddable
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posted June 26, 2021 03:51 PM |
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Edited by NimoStar at 15:57, 26 Jun 2021.
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Single hero vs neutrals IS exactly the case in my example, so in that case it would 'tip the balance' so to speak ;D
Or Un-balance the game, so to speak? Oh well. :v
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But I find it kinda hard to do an allround balance that wouldn't at some point clash with eg a mod. Atleast if you set up specifict terms for a battle. That could be 1 hero vs xx bandits. Huge difference between 1 stack or 3 stacks. A hero accompanied by Elves vs. xx Wolves. If the battle has been adjusted so that skills, spells and artifacts would require certain tactics against their first strike/doubble attack, changing the wolves ability could cause serious balance issues.
Just don't design the battles around an X defined number of stacks. The original game has like 18 campaigns with all expansions. There is over 100 maps. And they didn't need to.
Most people belive the original H4 campaigns are fine at least as far as gameplay and story concerns, so it's neither impossible or hard to do. Those campaigns with practically no change are playable with Greatest Mod which doesn't even respect creature tier, factions, or magic groups.
And having a single creature (necro, summoning, charm, diplomacy; or the four artifacts that give those skills) already allows you to change your stacks. Your plan is to disable all that? Seems rather effort to forbid the player to have creatures. And then say it can't be regulated... it is a decision.
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As for the unreleased H4 campaigns, you could
take a look at these treads.. I could happen to know just a tiny bit about them..
Just looked at those threads, seems like a halted long ago project then? There is absolutely no download that I could find. I find those campaigns are pretty key to explain H4. Maybe if they would have been done by NWC, people would have whimpered less about H3 lore being forgotten 
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iliveinabox05
Honorable
Famous Hero
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posted June 26, 2021 04:00 PM |
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NimoStar said:
Also, speaking of campaigns , there were two missing H4 campaigns made for Heroes VII
https://www.celestialheavens.com/forum/22/15725
Since heroes VII sucks, and these campaigns were meant to bridge H3 with H4 (one of them is about ending "fire, earth, air and water" magic, the other is about Dogwoggle and Kilgor), it would be good rather to have them in H4. Is your own campaigns related to this or do you have any additional knowledge about this?
As Michael posted, we have a couple threads here, and some more over on CelestialHeavens.
We started planning for the Unity campaign a while back, but like so much else, life got in the way for a while.
I've been working on those maps again, which is one of my current projects I switch between. The writing for the first map is complete and the map is scripted / playable. It just needs some balance testing / suggestions for battle compositions.
The writing for the second map is complete, and most scripting is in place, but I haven't gotten around to testing it out yet. Haven't done any balancing either.
I've started working on ideas for spells and texts for the third map, but not much else there.
For Unity we had big plans for finishing up the incomplete notes Terry Ray left for those maps. we finished the planning phase, but fell apart during the implementation. I'm going to make sure it sees the light of day (with Michael's help!) 
VIP said:
 Nice! I thinked next version chapters with Tarnum about "Tarnum Pirate" .
A pirate Tarnum! I'm not sure where on the H3 timeline this could fit, but it could certainly fit in Axeoth after Tarnum leaves Waerjak.
I haven't thought too much about what all Tarnum is doing immediately after the H4 Barbarian campaign, but those additional classes could certainly give us some ideas
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karmakeld
Responsible
Supreme Hero
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posted June 26, 2021 04:48 PM |
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NimoStar said:
Quote:
Single hero vs neutrals IS exactly the case in my example, so in that case it would 'tip the balance' so to speak ;D
Or Un-balance the game, so to speak? Oh well. :v
Quote:
But I find it kinda hard to do an allround balance that wouldn't at some point clash with eg a mod. Atleast if you set up specifict terms for a battle. That could be 1 hero vs xx bandits. Huge difference between 1 stack or 3 stacks. A hero accompanied by Elves vs. xx Wolves. If the battle has been adjusted so that skills, spells and artifacts would require certain tactics against their first strike/doubble attack, changing the wolves ability could cause serious balance issues.
Just don't design the battles around an X defined number of stacks. The original game has like 18 campaigns with all expansions. There is over 100 maps. And they didn't need to.
Most people belive the original H4 campaigns are fine at least as far as gameplay and story concerns, so it's neither impossible or hard to do. Those campaigns with practically no change are playable with Greatest Mod which doesn't even respect creature tier, factions, or magic groups.
And having a single creature (necro, summoning, charm, diplomacy; or the four artifacts that give those skills) already allows you to change your stacks. Your plan is to disable all that? Seems rather effort to forbid the player to have creatures. And then say it can't be regulated... it is a decision.
Quote:
As for the unreleased H4 campaigns, you could
take a look at these treads.. I could happen to know just a tiny bit about them..
Just looked at those threads, seems like a halted long ago project then? There is absolutely no download that I could find. I find those campaigns are pretty key to explain H4. Maybe if they would have been done by NWC, people would have whimpered less about H3 lore being forgotten
'Tip the balance' was a refference to the name of this tread 
I guess you've missed out on all of the 'the game is poorly balanced for champion difficulty' treads that's beeb around. It's known to most players that AI sometimes struggle more on champion level than on novice, and when you as a mapmaker go in and try to adjust each difficulty setting to meet the expectations of experienced players who'd like a real challenge, that's when things get very specific and tweaking just a minor thing could break the balance. Just to clarify, what I'm refering to here is largely my own Mudgeon campaign, which I had testers spend countless hours of helping balance specific battles.
I agree that the official campaign likely wont become imcompleteable, but there's a lot of custom made campaigns which contains much more designed battles and other gameplay challenges which the nwc campaigns doesn't. Just it's a bit of a silly advice to give to map makers, "just don't design anything extraordinary". True while the original campaigns and maps don't rely on specific strategies and such, there's also not one of them that truly shows the full potential of the map editor, which is why fans started doing RPG styled maps and much more. Alot of fans wanted diversity in the gameplay and you can clearly see this by the amount of downloads and ratings of fan based maps.
NWC did the campaigns but they played poorly. I read that in some interview, hence they were discarded, but it would've explained alot and we can only guess the difference it would have made.
Well we havent posted news in quite a while, as things did get halted, for various reasons. As iLive also says, the project isn't dead, but the project lacked decicated team-members that could actually deliver progress and knows how to work with map making. We have plenty of work done, we got the original scripts and I recall basically all maps are more or less planned out, some details might be missing, but it's the actual mapmaking and testing thats the current obstacle.
And I guess to some degree modding got in the way or atleast distracted us.. and you're partly to blame for that Nimo lol
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NimoStar
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Modding the Unmoddable
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posted June 26, 2021 04:56 PM |
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Edited by NimoStar at 16:59, 26 Jun 2021.
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Blame? You mean credit
And I am telling that if your campaigns/maps were balanced for the default game they would still probably be balanced for Ultimate. Equilibris is a mod, most H4 custom maps aren't made for equilibris but for vanilla.
Champion difficulty has problems but they aren't related to stack splitting or not.
Just what I say is that, as long as you have 1-3 creatures, even if they are peasants, you can face split enemies. That change would be sufficient to play every Heroes 4 version.
Actually, I find the dynamic splitting to match your army is better and more strategic than equilibris "always 3 enemy stacks". You yourself are admitting that much when you say that fights with 1 stack may not be winnable. So that equilibris change is actually nerfing the AI.
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Baronus
Legendary Hero
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posted July 02, 2021 08:45 PM |
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Main target is gameplay second story so if can be splitted we can have more good gamplay and more fun! If story is good harm to have only some maps.
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iliveinabox05
Honorable
Famous Hero
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posted July 02, 2021 08:53 PM |
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Baronus said:
Main target is gameplay second story so if can be splitted we can have more good gamplay and more fun! If story is good harm to have only some maps.
Well like I said, the story can definitely be split back apart into pieces for a campaign.
There would just need to be someone to create the maps, since I don't have the time for it right now.
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karmakeld
Responsible
Supreme Hero
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posted July 06, 2021 12:07 AM |
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NimoStar said:
Blame? You mean credit
And I am telling that if your campaigns/maps were balanced for the default game they would still probably be balanced for Ultimate. Equilibris is a mod, most H4 custom maps aren't made for equilibris but for vanilla.
Champion difficulty has problems but they aren't related to stack splitting or not.
Just what I say is that, as long as you have 1-3 creatures, even if they are peasants, you can face split enemies. That change would be sufficient to play every Heroes 4 version.
Actually, I find the dynamic splitting to match your army is better and more strategic than equilibris "always 3 enemy stacks". You yourself are admitting that much when you say that fights with 1 stack may not be winnable. So that equilibris change is actually nerfing the AI.
You misunderstood me, if you though I was relating splitting and Champion difficulty, 2 separate issues.
As for the splitting itself, to some degree I agree with you that having the option to match the enemy is somewhat left out when stacks always splits, but I do believe they did it to generally help the AI survive better.
If you have 1 hero against 1 stack of 50 bandits that stack will hit you hard and you'll only do little damage in return. Same goes for your round. If the 50 bandits are split in 3, you get to kill a larger percentage of the first stack and you could reduce a second stack in your turn. This makes a big difference.
But if you were to fight 3 stacks of beholders (or another ranged troop), they'd likely kill you before you could reach them, and even if you reach them, you could only block 2 stacks from using their ranged ability. With beholders you'd be hit by 3 random spells vs only 1 pr turn.
Now do the same setup but you have your hero and 1 or 2 stack of creatures. Things will change depending on your army setup, so yeah in some cases it doesnt benefit the AI to have stacks splits, but in others it might. So I dont find it to be true in all cases that it made things worse for the AI.
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