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[Pex]

I recently bought a copy of this game but only got a chance to play it this weekend, so I tought to share my first impressions with you guys. As with all sequels, the best way to discribe it is to compare it to the previous games in the series.

The first thing to notice is that the developers decided to change the name from Heroes of Might & Magic to Might & Magic: Heroes. Obviously the idea is to show belonging to one brand (M&M) for all different games in the franchise. To a traditional nitpicker as myself the idea is stupid, but that's ok.

The second thing, following trend from some other games (especially console ones) is to implement on-line attribute to the game. So, even when playing single campaign, you are still on-line and you get points for your achievements and can use them "buy" things like portraits, dynasty abilities, weapons and similar. It's probably a sort of copyright protection I guess, although you can play the game off line as well. The trick is that you can load your off-line games in on-line mode and vice versa. The most annoying thing about being on-line is that if your internet connection drops out (which happens to me from time to time with wireless), your game gets you into main menu and you lose any unsaved progress. Although game automatically saves at the beginning of each turn, if you just won a difficult battle with minimal losses, you would hate having to do it all over again.

And now to the game. The graphics remind mostly of HoM&MV, with 3D perspective, animated objects, etc. Towns change their look on the main map depending on building you build/upgrade. Saying all that, I still believe graphics are a bit simplified compared to the number V, which I don't particulary mind considering I haven't upgraded my graphic card a few years.

There are five available factions at this stage (they'll probably introduce others in the expansion). Lots of new creatures or some old with new abilities. Heroes development structure suffered the most change and I haven't looked too thoroughly into it to be able to describe them all. But shortly, upon gaining a level you can choose to develop you might abilities or your magic abilities and both are divided into five different categores. All in all, to much to decide if you ask me and probably some branches/abilities that you'd never choose. But I'll wait till I play some more before I make my final judgement.

Battles are similar number V, with the field divided in squares (rather than hexes) and creatures acting in the initiative order. Your hero can act once per turn (with one turn meaning that all creatures acted once) when your stack of creaturs is about to act. Your heroes can use their might abilities (direct damage or augument type enchantments) or their magic abilities or spells. The first ones don't cost any mana. Like in HoM&MV, your or enemy heroes can't be attacked.

Sieges are again similar to number V, but the big difference is that units can attack gates and walls, making it easier to penetrate defences (especially with random catapult shots). It's bit 'unrealistic' though, since a stack of one will inflict same damage as sack of 100.

All actions your hero does follow path of tears (compassion), neutral path or path of blood (agression) and using different actions give you points in one of these two paths. That will influence what actions are available to you - for example if you lean on tears side, when facing decision to negotiate or attack, only option to negotiate will be available to you.

The main change in the resources scheme is that you only have four resources now - wood, stone, crystals and gold. It makes life much easier although I guess it limitted developers choices in making certain maps tactically challenging by putting some important resource deep into enemy territory. The other big change is that cerain resources productions and troop boosting structures that you can tag belong to the town, city or fort they are closest to. So if you capture a mine, it won't stay yours unless you either capture the city (fort) it belongs to or leave your hero on the mine to control it. And that happens even if the structure was neutral before you captured it - as soon as you abandon it it will go to the city that owns it. On another hand, when you capture a city, all it's mines become yours automatically (unless they were neutral - you still need to conquer them). I guess the good thing about it is that you won't have to worry about playing 'tag a mine' with oponents when you are defending and having to leave the city you defend to do it.

That's all that comes up my mind now - I still need to play more to decide whether or not I like it more or less than previous games in the series.

[Pex]

Ok, I got a chance to play the game a bit more and there are a few more things I need to add.

One is recruiting process - all your towns add to your weekly production of troops as usual and depending on the structures you have in them, but now you can do recruitment of all troops in any town or fort you own, as long as it has the right buildings in it. In other words, you don't have to go visit each town to recrut the troops it produced if you have those building in some other town you're in. It saves from having to have 'chains' of low level heroes transporting troops to you from your starting town once you are half a map away.

But it doesn't end there, you can even do recruitment of one faction troops that you produced somewhere in another faction town (like haven troops in stronghold town) if there are barracks for that type of troops on the other faction town's territory of control (like have barracks building on stronghold town's territory). Barracks are map located buildings that boost troops production in the city they belong to, but unlike in some previous HoM&M games, you don't recruit additional troops there - they all go to the town/fort.

But it doesn't end there either - now you have an option to convert any town, fort and even barracks into your faction - in towns and forts you would lose special type buildings unique to it's original faction, but the rest would convert - like production building for skeletons (necropolis core) will become production building for sentinels (haven core). I do like this change since it saves you for having an odd town producing some lame troops that you'd never get to use since they come in such small number compared to ones you have. At the same time, you have to be careful if your strategy is based on mixing troops from different factions to ge the best of both worlds, because once you do conversion, there's no going back.

So far I finished tutorial campaign which had a couple of missions and it was quite linear and not much challenging. But it did it's purpose, although now that I understand game mechanics, replaying it would've made me finish it even more fast. Now I'm playing with necropolis faction and the first mission is again quite linear and not very challenging, but hopefully it will change as I progress.

There are lot's of quests involved, usually one or a few main and some side ones that you don't have to do but you get nice rewards in exp, resources and/or items. Main quests often have stages and once you finish one stage it reveals to you next one.

As mentioned before, upgrading your heroes once they reach next level suffered the biggest change. You get an ability point that you can literally spend on any trait available to your level and hero type. There are no levels in abilities (like beginner, advanced and expert), but there are skills that you can learn when you are min level 1, min level 5 and min level 15, so some level 1 skills are required to have to be able to learn some level 5 one and so on. Still, all your heroes can now learn logistics and pathfinding and pretty much spells from any magic school they want. It's just that their faction bonuses won't apply to some skills or spells you choose and that magic orientated heroes can't learn level 15 might orientated skills and vice versa.

Which brings us to the spells - their number decreased and they became skills now. You don't build magic guild in your city anymore or visit shrines. You learn them as skills, by spending your ability point on it. There are five different magic paths - fire, air, earth, light and dark (I'm pretty sure there is no water, but I can double check that) and you can spend your ability point to lear a spell or magic skill that increases your power with that magic path. I'm not sure how I feel about this. Part of me hopes that there are guilds and shrines but I haven't find them yet, but you would expect at least a shrine in tutorial. I also haven't found an equivalent to the Witch Hut from the previous sequels, where you get a certain skill once you visit it. Probability is that there is none, since all skills are available to choose from. Maybe there is a structure that gives you an ability point, but I'm yet to find it.

So, this is the latest update - I'll write more if I find something else interesting to share.

[twillight]

Originally Posted by Pex

Ok, I got a chance to play the game a bit more and there are a few more things I need to add.

One is recruiting process - all your towns add to your weekly production of troops as usual and depending on the structures you have in them, but now you can do recruitment of all troops in any town or fort you own, as long as it has the right buildings in it. In other words, you don't have to go visit each town to recrut the troops it produced if you have those building in some other town you're in. It saves from having to have 'chains' of low level heroes transporting troops to you from your starting town once you are half a map away.

But this means if you can win just ONE battle against certain opponent, you basically won against named opponent (except if all troops are on a hero).
Dubious design-decision if you ask me.

[DarthHelmet86]

How? I don't get your argument here at all. Winning one battle never means you are going to win all the battles, what if the first battle was against a weaker hero? Or a heavily undefended city?

I like the idea, one of the most annoying things about Heroes was having to chain your units to your battle lines from across the map. Letting you recruit them in from which ever city you want sounds like a lot more fun to me.

[twillight]

Originally Posted by DarthHelmet86

How? I don't get your argument here at all. Winning one battle never means you are going to win all the battles, what if the first battle was against a weaker hero? Or a heavily undefended city?

City-defense is 90% made by hired creatures. As creature-transport is not implemented, but in all city you can hire all creatures avaiable in your kingdom, when one city falls, all units of the kingdom falls with it, except those what are on a wandering hero.
So if the majority of the forces are not on some hero (I entioned this possibility in my previous post), defeating 1 city means defeating ALL cities of the party in question.

The described changes seem to result in this gameplay:
1 highlevel hero with all troops to attack other towns, and the rest being lowlevel heroes roaming the cities' territory flagging mines and such (basically you'll have a lord in war and peasants at home working on the field. No more heroes).

[DarthHelmet86]

Are you suggesting that all of the units of one army would be in one city that was about to be attacked...cause that is what it sounds like. From what was explained you can create a unit in any town with the right building...but once it is there it has to be moved around as normal. And the game-play you just described sounds more like how the older Heroes games played, a few high level heroes with big armies attacking the other side and some low level ones moving troops around and grabbing close resources.

[twillight]

Well Darth, let me show a comparsion:

Old: you had 2 big heroes and the rest delivered armies between the two (and probably a middle-level one clearing mines and other resources).
New: you have 1 big hero and the rest delivers army between the hero and the border-cities when not capturing mines (and probably a middle-level one clearing mines and other resources).

Old: you divided troops between your heroes and cities.
New: you have one immense transported army and a central creature-pool.

Old: you could attack the town, OR hunger out the opponent.
New: you can only attack towns.
With the new creature-pool system the one with more cities will be the victor (if that side simply sits back can never be destroyed if (s)he buys army only just before being attacked).
Or hear the thought of the new player: "Oh, in next round i'll buy that 1000 archangels, as I'll conquer that other town with all of its mines, and THAT will be an incrise in sallary."

Old: each side had to overwatch a kingdom.
New: you just have to keep one eye on the cities.

Old: conquering a town ment SOME rise in produce and armies.
New: conquering a town means IMMENS rise in your produces (and a lot taken away from the opponent), and cuts out the chance to gather spare-troops from war-camps while hurring back to re-capture.

[DarthHelmet86]

I don't see it man, all this has let you do is make units at one city rather then having to make them over 10 cities and shuttle them around. You still need all the cities to be able to make that many units, and you need the right buildings to make the units you need all the same resources. Not enough has changed to drasticly alter the game play from that one small thing.

Having one main hero is still a bad idea and you will still need other heroes to shuttle units to your main attacking heroes and heroes to capture resource buildings. Capturing one city only removes that one cities production bonus from the entire stack just as it would have before. You still need to defend all your cities and should be dividing your units between attacking and defending. Remember once they are made the units move normally, so storing them all in one city leads to needing to transport them to the city being attacked.

If you see someone spawning a bunch of units in one city they expect you to attack you go and take another one where they haven't prepared for the attack. You can even park a big army in front of it then use another hero to go start cleaning up their less defended cities since they spammed units into one city for too long and with your big army in the way they just can't get out, or would lose too many of their troops opening them up to a counter attack.

[Eagle of Fire]

The described changes seem to result in this gameplay:
1 highlevel hero with all troops to attack other towns, and the rest being lowlevel heroes roaming the cities' territory flagging mines and such (basically you'll have a lord in war and peasants at home working on the field. No more heroes).

Well, that's exactly what I already did in the past iterations. Except that the low level heroes actually had something to do by recruiting units in other town instead now of only having to flag mines and be entirely disposable.

The big difference here is that you can do flash defense very easily now: simply never recruit units unless you really need it and when you notice a threat to a single town (as it is almost always the case), simply recruit everything there with a new hero and wait for them. Or recruit everything with the high level hero instead...

[Pex]

Ok, just to clear a few things up in case my previous post caused some confusion.

Creatures are now treated as resources - you produce them in the cities and they go into your creature pool and from there you can recruit them from any city or fort that has the structure that produces those creatures (in case of fort a nearby barracks are required). There are a few things to notice:
- your number of creatures increases only at the beginning of the week, unlike resources that increase daily
- although they go into pool you still have to pay to recruit your creatures (while resources become yours to use as soon as you produce them)
- once you recruit them they enter the play and are gone from the pool - you can't put them back
- like resources, even if you lose all your cities, you don't lose creatures that weren't recruited (this is the main difference from the previous games in the series)

Although the idea of keeping creatures in the pool and waiting for the approach of the enemy to see which city are they going to attack sound good, this far in the game (which I admit is not very far) I found that I just had to recruit all the creatures available, because I needed them for the mission.

As for the game forcing you to have one main hero, that is a consequnce of being able to move your hero to the next map in campaign. So HoM&M3 introduced the concept, although they allowed you more than one hero, but parts 4 and 5 were very 'single hero' orientated, two at the most. It puts you in situation when you don't want to waste experiance from battles or chests on heroes that you won't be able to bring to the next mission.

Whather that's good or bad, I don't know, but it didn't start with this game.