Heroes of Might and Magic

Yeah, I know, I was just having some technical problems yesterday. Found an old install on my external hard drive with the HD mod in it, but the HD executable kept instantly crashing back to desktop with no error message beyond the Windows event log, no matter the compatibility settings. Tried to downgrade the resolution from 1600x900 but the setup app offered no non-widescreen resolutions, so I manually wrote 1024x768 into the config file. That not only got it working, but must've jolted something else because when I set it back to 1600x900, it continued to work.

Weird, but I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

That point I made about how good +350 gold Heroes should be emphasized. In any scenario if you have the good fortune to have a +350 gold Hero in your tavern from the very beginning, you've got a massive advantage over anyone who didn't have that.

After all, you're going to need a second Hero anyway to help grab stuff on the map. If your Hero literally pays for itself in a few days and keeps adding to your income then you're just getting free gold. In games like this that advantage snowballs quickly. Sure, their specialty is useless in a fight but you're not going to be using them for fighting anyway.

And if you somehow got two +350 Gold Heroes in your tavern on the first day...well.

Relatedly (HOTA shilling time), Lord Haart might not be as busted as Sir Mullich (who's been removed from the basic hero pool), but he has a unique specialty in Estates - 5% bonus per level. On top of that, Estates were buffed from 125/250/500 gold/day per skill level to 250/500/1000, so you can imagine the dosh you'll be raking up before long, as opposed to +350 Gold heroes being an early game boost.

Edited by FergardStratoavis on May 8th 2022 at 10:54:20 AM

I just looked at the H3 subreddit again, and I suddenly see a lot of quality fanart. I mean, I'm happy but also kinda confused.

I usually prefer the +1 resource heroes to the +350 gold ones. They aren't as immediately useful but in the long run resources tend to become extremely valuable to build your mages guild or some annoying buildings. And you've got like a 1/4 chance to get the one resource your town needs the most.

The +350 Gold Heroes make it easier to get the Capitol in your town asap which makes it easier to recruit more troops later. And those troops make it easier to grab resource mines on the map.

If I do pick up a resource Hero it's only after I already have a +350 Gold Hero and only if the resource is needed to recruit my main town type's seventh level unit.

Resource Heroes can also be valuable if the map you're playing on doesn't have that many random resources on it and the special (ie not wood and ore) mines are not easy to reach.

Edited by M84 on May 8th 2022 at 10:13:54 PM

Also, as conflicted as I am about HOTA, I'm glad they buffed the Estates skill, because maxing it out is only slightly better than that 350 bonus on SOD.

Edited by AoeAbility on May 8th 2022 at 8:24:04 AM

The best thing of course is to give one of those +350 Gold Heroes Estates on top of that. Granted, this isn't always viable since that means actually training said Heroes as opposed to just using them for scouting and resource looting.

On a bit of an unrelated note, I always wondered if anyone noticed that in H4, factions are uncannily similar to the Magic: The Gathering Color Pie. It's a revelation that really stuck with me for some reason.

That said, if it was an intentional homage, the creators kinda missed the point.

For all the issues with HOMM IV, it did a couple things right. The caravan system was very convenient. And the alternate tech branches added another layer of strategy.

I, of all people, actually prefer H4, despite H3 being better in practically every way. Must be Nostalgia Filter, but I dunno.

Still, I was kinda surprised about the MTG parallels when I discovered them, and I'm surprised few actually talk about it.

The Ho Ma M 4 campaigns might genuinely have some of the best stories I've ever read in a videogame. Shame about the balancing though, with the unbalanced hetoes making the first chapter of each campaign by far the hardest, with special mention to the first Chaos mission.

Chaos campaign was kind of a letdown, imo. Unlike literally every other campaign, it explained nothing about the lore of its faction. Granted, Tawnia was a mostly-compelling protagonist, but what I wanted out of that storyline is to have it pick up on what happened to Nighon, and how did Tawnia employ its former armies for her conquest.

Also, it makes me beyond mad that Chaos has the only straight-up villain out of all the campaigns as their protagonist. EVEN DEATH had a sort of Anti-Hero/Anti-Villain with an interesting personality.

Edited by AoeAbility on May 11th 2022 at 2:06:12 AM

Chaos campaign was the best of them all imo. Easily the most touching ending and interesting character moments. The death campaign would be the runner-up. I'd say the worst is the Might campaign, with its complete WTF ending, that apparently makes sense if you've played this one campaign from some Heroes 3 expansion?

My favorite was actually the Order campaign, because it had pretty good characters, an actually interesting villain, it significantly expanded upon the faction as a whole in a way that makes canonical sense, and showed both positive and negative aspect of the faction in question in believable ways.

With every other campaign, I can pinpoint at least one major flaw. Life campaign was pretty generic, and didn't do much of anything that wasn't done in other, better stories (though it has the most satisfying conclusion out of all of the other campaigns). Might had an incredibly contrived main conflict which was rather unsatisfyingly resolved. Nature was a colossal missed opportunity, and happens to be my personal least favorite due to the fact that it focuses on a romance between two characters who don't exactly have much chemistry, rather than expanding upon the world that H4 creates. Death has an amazing protagonist, but 70% of the plot was essentially the hero helping the main villain achieve his goal, and I knew from the beginning that he was going to betray him, leaving me rather uninvested. And of course Chaos has the most well-developed protagonist, but her backstory is much more interesting than the campaign itself, even if it has some amazing character-building moments. That plus its immense avoidance of mentioning any of the parts of Nighon that were carried over to Chaos.

I also think the lore should have utilized more of its nods to MTG, but that's just a nitpick at this point.

Edited by AoeAbility on May 11th 2022 at 7:28:28 AM

I've been lately wondering what your favorite specific techniques are in H3. Some I can name include Skeleton farming (Necropolis) Demon farming (Inferno) Behemoth rushing (Stronghold), and Dragogeddon (Dungeon and Conflux).

Necropolis skellies and Conflux Armageddon (as it can carry four units as opposed to just the dragons) are my favourites.

Edited by Adannor on Jun 1st 2022 at 1:31:06 PM

Same here tbh. It's a shame HOTA had to ban Galthran, AKA the best hero for that first technique. I particularly liked pairing him with Isra, so that she gathers skellies while Galthran uses them.

I preferred Thant anyway. Having Animate Dead from the start is just too useful.

Yup. He also has one of the coolest portraits among Necropolis heroes, so I used him a lot in various custom maps I made. While he is a Nosferatu-like vampire, he also looks like the goblins and orcs in Heroes 3, so I used Thant for magic-using goblinoids.

So there's a kickstarter for a Ho MM 3 board game, and I have to admit, I'm intrigued.

This looks like it could be fun. I don't kickstart a lot of things, but this is quite tempting.

Reinstalled HOMM 5 and currently goign through the Dark Elf campaign, i'm at the second mission.

It does look interesting. I usually buy board games only for the miniatures inside, but the gameplay of Ho MM 3 seems like it could be easily converted for tabletop use.

Finally utilized the Demon Farming technique, and wow, my opinion on Inferno just did a full 180.

Just kidding. Inferno is still a D-tier faction overall. Nonetheless, wow, this strategy is good, actually. Like, I can actually get a decent Demon powerstack on week 3 with just Marius and a couple Pit Lords.

Edited by AoeAbility on Feb 9th 2023 at 12:01:14 PM

In my case, my most-used technique is...just Marksmen in the early game, actually.

Sometimes you don't need to get fancy.