What are you playing?

[Jonas]

Heroes of Might and Magic V. Mostly for research purposes.

It really is a lot like HOMM III, but in 3D, which I'm sad to say is exactly the way I want it to be (I thought HOMM ÌV was all right, but it couldn't hold a candle to its predecessor).

I wish you could name your heroes, a propos of nothing. I don't remember if you could do that in III, but I think it'd be fun.

Finally, I miss the hexes

Squares just aren't the same.

[EER]

Hmm, that is probably the best argument I've heard to get HOMM V.

[Jaedar]

You guys never played HoMMV? ARAGDFJKGSGS

It's cool. I might even say that Tribes of the East is better than HommIII, in fact, I will say that. Loss of hexes sucks, this is true but imo, the following features outweigh it:

Caravans
Two upgrade paths for every creature
expanded RPG elements
More strategic decisions in city building(ie, you don't just rush capitol any more)
Active time battle system(which is still turn based, deceptively enough)


there's also simultaneous turns duel mode, but the shitty network code negates that.

In intruigely related news, I am playing MnM: clash of heroes.
Surprisingly compelling for a casual game ported from iOS (iirc).

[Jonas]

You guys never played HoMMV? ARAGDFJKGSGS

I'm sure there were more important games to play when it came out, or something. I'm not made of time, you know

It's cool. I might even say that Tribes of the East is better than HommIII, in fact, I will say that.

Good thing I got the bundle with both the expansions then (hooray for GoG).

[Hassat Hunter]

I've never played HOMM III or HOMM V.

[gamer0004]

I played HoMMV, found it very dull, stopped playing after a few hours and never touched it again.

[Jonas]

HOMM II was the first game I ever modded. It had a really good and easy to use scenario editor.

[bobby 55]

I've never played HOMM III or HOMM V.

Me neither.

Anyhoo, umpteenth playing of DX, but only the second with Shifter....done. I hope to be playing ME 3 this week-end but I'm not counting my chickens.

[AEmer]

Played a significant amount of HOMMV.

I Can recommend it, but it's not as good as HOMM3 or HOMM2, and here's why:

The late game balance sucks. I understand why the late game balance sucks; there's too many creatures and factions, too many spells, to make balancing it easy. In other words, there's a lot of good things in there that have the unfortunate side effect of ruining the best part of the game.

In a sense, it's like civilisation 5. It's absolutely awesome during the first 500 turns, but after a certain point the AI has so many holes in its programming that it's bound to lose.

So why don't you simply up the difficulty level to the max, you ask? Surely if you start off poor and the AI starts off rich, the game will be interesting.

Well...no. It still gets determined by the same thing: How good you are at killing monsters on the adventure map without losing forces. If I up the difficulty level to its highest, I'll lose maybe a week or two in terms of army strength, but once I've conquered my first additional castle, that won't matter anymore. I'll have basically won by that point. I'm not a brilliant player so sure, the first additional castle will actually be difficult to get at that level....and I can't destroy every random adventure map monster with a measely army, so if I get unlucky, there might be no way for me to win.

But I'll never ever run into a situation where I'm up against a large enemy with 10 castles once I reach the mid game and I have 3. This would happen in the 3rd one, and you'd have to employ some seriously sneaky tactics to keep your own castles and kill your enemies.

And of course, killing adventure map mobs was also amenable in the third one...but I never killed the equivalent of 50 lava dragons with only a little magic and 3 red ones, and the fact that you couldn't leave troops out of combat generally incurred a loss for your army during those early stages.

[Jaedar]

It's not the lategame balance that sucks, it's kinda the AI. Thankfully, there's an AI mod seeking to redeem that, though I have not tried it myself. http://www.bonddisc.com/ref/h5/

And I still find the ai much better at combat in HommV than it was in Heroes3.

[nerdenstein]

Having never played any of these games, I can't comment.
I feel like I am missing something actually.

However, after finishing Assassin's Creed Revelations, I've been playing the multiplayer a fair bit. It's quite fun actually and I get really competitive about it.
I like that it's completely unique and original (I mean, aside from it practically being a clone of Brotherhood's MP with an added sub story) and fairly engaging. You really have to think about what you're doing to find your target, or get stabbed trying.

One of my better moments occurred when playing a game mode called 'Steal the Artefact' which is essentially a free for all Capture the Flag type game but with 2 or 3 'flags' going on at once. The person who had held the flag for the longest by the end of the round wins. I was stood in the group of 4-5 NPC's, one of them looking exactly like my chosen Avatar. I had the Artefact, and an opponent ran up and stabbed the NPC that happened to look like me, obviously thinking it was me (your targets character portrait appears at the top of the screen so using AI lookalikes is key to not getting killed) so I smoke bombed the area and stunned him. Making a run for it, two other people chased me over rooftops until I was able to use my disguise. I hid near another lookalike and used my disguise, they attacked the NPC, I used another smoke bomb and took them both out.
When situations like that work out really well, the Multiplayer is super satisfying.

The only other thing I am 'playing' at the moment is Microsoft Access 2010. What a crap piece of software. They've made it so difficult just to do the simplest of tasks. I've spent the last few nights up late just trying to get it to work so that it is up to standard for my College IT Course grade but VBA code is just shit, so I am having to find alternate solutions. I am no closer to understanding the code nor will I even try too.

[bobby 55]

Hahaha! Well done with the Holy Doppleganger Decoy Destruction, Batman.

I won't be able to play ME 3 for a couple of days until my limit is reset. I wouldn't be able to set up Origin let alone play online with this 64Kps. I'm patiently waiting for my visitors and the 'puter and then I'll play a Paragon John (Vanguard) save I've got. ME 2 is downloaded on that PC, and at least I can play it in offline mode.

[AEmer]

It's not the lategame balance that sucks, it's kinda the AI. Thankfully, there's an AI mod seeking to redeem that, though I have not tried it myself. http://www.bonddisc.com/ref/h5/

And I still find the ai much better at combat in HommV than it was in Heroes3.

The combat AI is great. It's a lot of fun to play against, and it has a lot of cool strategies. The one in HOMM3 is good with advancing troops, and it uses information about the enemys movement radius and waiting to advance it's troops as efficiently as possible, but overall, I prefer the one in Homm5...

...when I'm fighting enemy heroes. There's such a ridiculous number of special abilities on units, and such a ridiculous number of ways of engaging the enemy that, coupled with the hero basic attacks, makes life really hard for the neutral mobs. Basically, beating the neutral mobs gives you experience and artefacts, but very rarely does it lower your overall army strength significantly. There's usually no real price to pay.

What's worse, beating those neutral mobs...gets really boring. Sure, it's kindof interesting during the first 3 weeks where you only have maybe a couple of tier 6 units at worst, but after week 3, you should have unlocked your level 7 unit, and from then on all level 6 and below neutral mobs should be yours for the taking, and you shouldn't lose any army strength to them at all. So then you just kindof parade your hero around, levelling him up as fast as possible doing combat that really feels more like puzzle games than strategy games (because coming up with and applying winning strategies with no losses is not just possible for a few mob types, it's possible for almost all of them, almost all the time)...

All of this would be OK if it lead up to an interesting late mid and late game...but it doesn't. It's not just that the AI sucks, it's that things will have spiraled out of control one way or the other based on just how good you were at the first part of the game. Either you will have fucked up, and you'll get killed, or you'll have done well, and you'll kill them without any sweat off your brow.

This is my experience from just 5 games, mind you...

Maybe an AI patch could make up for it, but I don't think so. The part of the game that's most interesting - clashing with enemy factions, beating their armies of various units, trying to survive their magic barrages - isn't interesting at all because it's an anticlimactic 2-3 battles where one side is overpowering and then the game is over.

In my oppinion, the game simply isn't balanced in such a fashion that this part will ever be big and interesting. Maybe multiplayer would be more interesting, but I honestly can't tell.

On my favorite HOMM2 map, I could conquer 2 enemy towns within the first two weeks if I was lucky, or at least get 1 neutral and one enemy town. By the 4 week I'd have 4 heroes running around, all around level 7, each with their own little army, acting defensively, shuttling troops around, and hopefully I'd be growing those 3 towns and maybe getting a 4th.

That's not HOMM5, and that's what's wrong with it, in a nutshell.

[bobby 55]

Good grief! I can't play ME 2 in offline mode coz Steam won't work with a super slow internet. So, I decided to install Crysis and play it unpatched, it'd take 'til Tuesday to download the 350 plus megabyte patch.

I've just spent an hour applying cheats to fine-tuning the config file.

[DaveW]

Good grief! I can't play ME 2 in offline mode coz Steam won't work with a super slow internet. So, I decided to install Crysis and play it unpatched, it'd take 'til Tuesday to download the 350 plus megabyte patch.

I've just spent an hour applying cheats to fine-tuning the config file.

Ah, the days when patches were only a few MB big*. Modern game developers seem to have forgotten how to make small patches.

*(Far Cry's were actually massive, too, so that's just Crytek being crap. Although the Far Cry patches did add a lot.)