Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - online thread!

Anyway, does anyone want to play right now? If so, I'm hosting on the lobby. Game: user game. Password: 8ch.

holy shit that sounds great. what mod?

read the OP

also, I found a game with some russian, but if you want to play later with me, post here

you didn't specify which mod does this in the op.
I assume you mean Horn of the Abyss? I don't remember the HD mod having it

Fuck, it's hard to find a game. People leave or come up with some stupid rules.

New World Computing died over a decade ago along with 3DO, Ubikike just shitted out a couple of releases after buying the license then stopped.

It's not ubisoft's fault its zenimax's.
you can kinda tell that dishonored was supposed to be the next logical step after dark messiah but Bethesda/Zenimax fucked with it in order to deprive them of cash, so they could buy Arkane.
it worked too. Dishonored got cut down into a mediocre stealth game. Arkane then went on to make nu-prey + super pozed dishonored sequels staring strong black womyn killing god and brave lesbian.
ain't life grand?

I swear Zenimax/bethesda is equally if not more evil than EA or activision.

God Ashan's lore is so fucking boring compared to the previous lore, but I guess they just feared raping M&M corpse and decided to make it pure fantasy when making V. I still love H5 and Dark Messiah

Theres nothing wrong with that user
HOMM3, Dark Messiah and HOMM5 are the best games in the franchise

Thanks for the links, OP!

Anyone interested in setting up a game right now?

Missed the post. Can play right now if you're still here.

Anyway, here's what I've learned in my few days of playing on the online lobby:

Lots of people play with dumb rules like no Dimension Door, no Fly, or no "double build" which means you can't recruit creatures of a castle from the same type.

Many people are leavers, just quitting when they are losing (because they don't lose rating points then).

Most random maps suck. It's just two months of gathering resources, army and experience and then you can finally meet your opponent. But by then I'm bored.

Actually nevermind, the server doesn't work. Maybe tomorrow then.

yeah, tomorrow will do.

Up for a game now.

Are you available in 1-2 hours? I got some work that I need to attend to first.

One day

Yes I am.

Just do it faggot.

ok I'm ready for when you two
can play

Set it up, and let's do this.

three*
I'm up for a game too.

OK, I've made a game. Name: user game. Password: 8ch.

Did it work or it closed the game for everyone?

It closed the game.

Oh. Well you guys already decided the entire match r-right?
I lost all my units against neutrals because auto combat is trash. I didnt want to keep skipping turns but I didnt think it'd close the entire thing, sorry

Is this accurate?

you can refuse the result of autocombat and fight yourself, you know

Now I feel even more stupid. I'll try to not fuck everything up next time

We're setting up another game. Post here if you are in or message me on the lobby (bighax).

I just watched it, it's more of a memefest than a review, but it is correct.
Surprisingly, there is no mention of the HD mod.

If you never played it, give it a shot. I'd suggest starting with the queen campaign of Restoration.

Does anyone want to play now?

Server is up again. Anyone wants to play?

Downloading.

Thanks for the links, OP. Never played the game though so think I'll be trying single player for now.

Is this game better than Age of Wonders 1? Fucking loved AOW1.

Anyone up for a game?

Hope you'll join us sometime!

Was going to dispute this but then I realized the video mentioned the HD Edition, not the mod. Kudos to the video for appropriately warning about the lack of expansions and the fact that the "HD" sprites were upscale from originals (presumably by unpaid interns)

Can't help it.

Me too.

This is now a Might and Magic RPG thread.

Btw can someone please recommend me an experienced Homm 3 player playing Homm 6 or 7 or reviewing it?
I think that would be kinda entertaining to see how someone like that would criticize the game.

Sorry for the triple post, but it's your fault for being so slow.

Every single fucking time.

I know the feeling
here's a bump

"Oh, jeez. user posted… ehh, I'm gonna head off."

To be fair, a game will often last very long, and some of us only really have time during weekends.

who are you talking to?

...

That depends heavily on the map. Medium sized randoms can last 2 to 5 weeks, small randoms even one week or less.

it's compounded online, as you have to wait for the other players.

No mate, the mod has a simultaneous turns option.

BTW I'm up for a game now.

Bump so that this doesn't die. Anyone wants to play?

I'd be game in 7 or 8 hours I guess, heading off to sleep here, didn't notice the thread before but I'd love to try some HoMM3 MP.

Just had a XL game against some guy + 6 computers. Got diplomacy and just destroyed him, lol. Had 170 pirates from diplo (and upgraded them, since I had Cove), as well as 250 basilisks + 40 unicorns, which I also upgraded. He had no chance despite much better stats.

Bump

We haven't arranged a game in a long time. I thought that when we got 4 people in a game once, this could actually be a regular occurence. Doesn't seem so.

Anyway I'm up for a game now.

ok, got everything mention in OP. What else to get?

I realised I am shit at homm and decided to wait to getmore practice offline

we should make a game, even just for practicing. cause playing with those other tards is unbearable

Oh shit it's that faggot again. I'm bailing, we can play heroes some other time guys.

I see a few people posted. Is anyone coming? If so, I will make a game.

Just had a game with a guy who left the castle empty and I took it like right before month 1 ends. He then claimed I "don't know how to play heroes", that everyone hates me and why am I eliminating him so fast, lol. In the end he said "fuck u" but at least took the loss.

This is why I want to play with you guys.

i play homm3 right now but not online, sorry user. Overall it would nice to see more activity in this thread not just because of online matches.

Still looking for some must have mods.

What are you looking for? The base game is great as it is. The mods are really only for online IMO.

i took so far everything from OP, bug fixes and the HD mod. Lurking a few homm boards to find other, maybe cool stuff. I don't know what to look for, maybe maps (?)

Horn of the Abyss is the only must have mod.

Well, the maps that come with the game are great and are enough for months of gameplay, as well as the campaigns.

But if I can shill my map ^_^ - maps4heroes.com/forum/opinions.php?map_id=1143&game=3. I've made it years ago. It has stories and shit in it. It has rating 10 out of 10, so people liked it…

Guys, where should I look for H3 mods? I want to spice up the gameplay a bit and new maps don't do it anymore for me.

Anyone else did this?
I also liked how some monster from Might and Magic 7 were ripped straight out of Homm3.

Nani the fuck ? They were among the strongest skellingtons. Ranged too.

Play online.

Like with me now.

And as I said female Undead are kinda creepy to me. That's why I don't like the Lich Queen mission of the Dark Mod.

Can anyone please recommend me a Let's play of a Might and Magic 3, 4 or 5 veteran playing through 6 or 7?
I would really like to see something like that. I want to hear him talk about indepth knowledge, while playing these games.

You know, if this poster was for a modern game, you guys would be complaining about muh diversity and muh feminism:
But back then, we didn't care, because it was only natural, and not shoved down our gullets.

but than he answerd his own statment correct

the thing is, (at least for me) i do not complain about diversity, i complain about theshoved down our gullets

Exactly. The reason we complain now is because diversity is shoehorned in. If HoMM3 was released today we wouldn't complain about the diversity because of the fact it's not shoved in our faces.

Man, I have not played HoMM 3 in ages. These days I just fuck around with AoW 3 and Eador: Genesis. Might have to check it out again. How good is HoMM 3 online?

There's a difference between good diversity and SJW pandering diversity. The latter produces some fucking awful character design and writing with a warning saying "And if you don't like it, you're a racist/sexist pig!" which deserves to get shat on while the former is perfectly acceptable.

bump

found a site with maps n sheit
celestialheavens.com

I just so happen to be replaying HoMM3 campaigns right now.

It's great now with the lobby since you don't have to fuck around with gameranger and such to find matches. But finding decent people to play with can be hard, thus this thread…

...

bump

Can I play Necropolis >:3

So anyone wants to play?

I can play, if you're still here.

Made a game "user game". Password: 8ch.

The autoupdate doesn't work, give me a moment.

bump?

ok lets do this again, anyone up for a game? Dont expect a challenge though

Make a game and I will join.

ok, it's fungame pass vee. 1v1 or you want to wait for more people?

Have you guys started already? I can't see the game.

We're looking for another guy to join us.

probably because it's full, I'll remake it for 3 players same name and all

I-I thought this was a friendly fun homm game

I have no idea how you guys found yourselves. I barely found my ore pit lol.

How'd it go? Spill the details.

Anyone wants to play?

How to git gud at HOMM?

Be efficient with your turns. Know where you're going, only fight stacks that you'll take minimal losses from and are guarding useful shit. Anything else is a waste of time and resources. If you have to double back more than twice you definitely fucked it up somewhere. The rest is knowing how to fight and use spells properly, which can get complicated.

Some of the things I've learned from online play:

- If using a might hero (no spell book), build Mage Guild day 1. You don't wanna come back to your castle just to buy a spellbook. In fact, don't come back to your castle at all. Other heroes should carry army to your main hero.
- After building MG, go for shooters always. Orcs, Elves and Liches can be built day 2. With Tower, upgrade gremlins. With Castle, upgrade archers.
- Day 3 on every town has a different build order. Fortress and Inferno should go for Wyverns and Efreets as early as possible. Often, you can beat some weaker shooters with just two split Wyverns / Efreets and a cure spell. Wyverns can even be built Day 2. Efreets day 3 if you built Demon Gate day 2. With other towns, you can go for Town Hall now. At the end of first week, try to have at least four levels of monsters + Citadel. Week 2 go for City Hall as early as possible. You can build level 5 and 6 at the end of the week.
- Be adaptable. Don't rush building Unicorns and such if you don't have the money. There's no point in having all that army sit in your castle. Better recruit what you have and give it to your main hero so he can fight stronger monsters. I've won games where I did not even go for the Unicorn building when playing Rampart. Because I could recruit all my army and it was strong enough. If you feel that a Level 2 MG will be a better investment than more army, don't be afraid to build it instead. Don't rush Level 7 - unupgraded are not that great and will prevent you from buying your other army.
- Know what to upgrade. Resources are scarce and many upgrades are not worth building. Most important ones are PIT LORDS, vampires, dwarves (3 speed becomes 5 speed) archers, elves, serpent flies, griffins, air/water elementals (since they become shooters).
- Hero speed on land is determined by the slowest soldier he has. So a hero with an unupgraded dwarf will have very little movement. Use other heroes to take army from the main one at the end of the turn and leave him with just dragonflies and such. Other heroes, if they aren't fighting, should also be equipped with just dragonflies or whatever fastest army you have.
- If there's a +350 gold hero in tavern, always recruit him. He will pay you back in a week. Same with +1 resource heroes.
- For hero skills, having a magic on expert as early as possible is the most important. In a fight against another player, the guy without expert magic is heavily disadvantaged. In fact, he might as well just wave the white flag. Other skills to aim for are Logistics and Tactics.
- Magic heroes are underrated. Enemy hiding his shooters? Pop a Lightning Bolt of 300 damage. Boom, shooter is gone, enemy now has to approach…
- If using a Might hero, find a +knowledge building as early as possible and use it. You just can't manage with only 10 mana. Same with spell power of 1. A spell lasting 1 turn is just useless.
- Best spells: Generally, any spell that affects all troops. L1 - Expert Haste, Slow, Bless and Curse. L2 - Expert Weakness. Lightning Bolt is a necessity. L3 - Expert Forgetfulness - one of the best spells in the game. Kills any shooter guarding strategy. Teleport. Expert Earthquake for sieges. L4 - Most of them are good. Clone, Expert Prayer. Meteor Shower for damage. Expert Town Portal to move between towns easily. L5 - Implosion! As you can see, there's quite a lot of Water Magic spells in there. It's the most underrated skill, having a great spell at every level except 5. In reality, I've rarely been able to even get to L5 MG in an online game, or even L4 MG. Use spell research mechanic to get the spells you want, especially from the level 1 if you don't have them.

- Find a resource trade spot on the map. Use it to dump all unneeded resources for gold, since the value is much better than in a marketplace.
- Scout around for artifacts in your area. Try to prioritize getting them since they will make you stronger for other battles. Best ones to get early are +knowledge, +spell power ones for your Barbarians and such.
- Roads always lead to towns. Go along the road to find another town as early as possible, since that's another +500 gold, or +1000 if you build town hall.
- Use chests to boost your experience if it's +1000 or especially +1500. Don't listen to the people that say you should always take gold. As I said, getting Expert magic early is invaluable, or even boosting your Logistics. But be sensible - if there's no gold, then take gold.
- If there's water on the map, get on a ship as early as possible and pick up all the chests and shit.
- Rampart strategy: Instead of going for Unicorns and such, build Treasury first week and dump all resources for gold. That will kill your gold troubles. You can do that every week then.
- You don't need all the army from your main town. In fact, if there's a lot of Dragonfly Hives, Wolf Raider pickets or Griffin Conservatories around, it might be a better idea to make a slot for Wyverns, Cyclops or Angels.

- On day 1, recruit the two heroes with army and give it to the main hero so he can fight more early.
- Some hero classes are better than others. If you got a Druid at the beginning, and you get a Beastmaster in the Tavern, make the Beastmaster your main hero. Skills are more important than stats, and some hero classes have bonus chances to get skills like Tactics and Logistics (Overlords for example).
- Use your other heroes to scout Crypts and Dwarven Treasuries. If the Crypt doesn't contain vampires, for example, you can take it early without losses.
- Use your other heroes to claim Windmills and such every week. In fact, if a hero has nothing to do, you can just leave him sitting in the windmill and press space every week.
- Generally, use your main hero only for fighting. Pick resources and such with your secondary heroes.

I died

We can write our own little War and Peace if we keep this up. I'm so disappointed I missed the game. last week was merciless for me. If you anons want, I can host another servers later at 19:00 CET (that's 13:00 for you burgers in the east coast.).

I enjoyed homm 4 more than 5 due to how lame they made Ashan. Only redeeming moment was when the elves get called tree-shagging pixies.

You there mate? Let's play.

Anybody online?

Me.

You up for a game? Otherwise I'll find some russian to play with, heh.

BTW, I just had a game where we both randomly got Rampart. The guy rushed unicorns while I patiently went for gold first and used only troops up to Dendroids (got Dendroids week 3). In the end, I was able to buy my whole army with gold left to spend while he attacked me with one Unicorn and much less of the other army than he should have at that point (23 dwarfs vs 38). Moral of the story - better be able to buy all your army up to level 4 than have a level 6 sit in your castle…

Are any of the others even worth checking out?

Homm4 makes some pretty radical changes and you should at least give it a look, if nothing else the campaigns are nice. Homm5 ugly as sin and has nothing to do with the previous homm worlds which really robs it of character and you really wouldn't be missing much if you passed it. Homm6 is an abomination, do not tread here.

Had another cool game, guy attacked me and again had level 6s while I didn't. At the beginning I thought I'd be surely losing, but I had 60 something battle dwarves and they ended up being MVPs. He surrounded them but they just killed all his elementals one by one, lol.

Battle dwarves are a lot meaner than their tier would make you think, compensation for being immobile.

Don't they also have crazy magic resistance? I haven't played the game in a while, but I know that a fat stack of battle dwarves will slap your shit and magic won't save you.

They do have magic resistance and it is hilarious when someone tries to curse them or what not and do nothing but wiff their turns.

anyone online ?

What maps contain the artifacts needed to assemble it?

Is it only available in campaign?

"Dimension Door" and "Fly" are sort of game breaking almost on the level of "Town Portal". However, there is a point where the custom rules autism takes over to resemble shit like "Friendly Heavies" in TF2, where they will kick you for disturbing the autism.

For strategy games or other games that span a lot of time and investment, it's the better choice to play with people you already know. For drop in - drop out kind of games with no consequences or loss of investment, it's not nearly as bad to have the game ruined.

In the majority of games you won't even get to use DD or Fly.

Sounds like scrub shit, kinda like the age of empires games these days where they set absurd rules for a peaceful build-up phase because they couldn't stand getting rushed or even harassed early in the game.

Yes that's the way almost any "competitive" community is. But I'm still able to find games with no rules.

It's luck of the draw in the mages guild levels 4 and 5. The probability is quite high and only increases the more players there are. The higher level mages guilds have less spells in the randomized pool, and an even higher chance for Tower and Conflux.

I'll be honest and admit I've gotten butthurt the few times I played AoE2 online with random people. Most of the people who play it are veterans who stuck around since release, so if you're casual like me you're better off gathering friends of the same skill level for a relaxed vs game or a comp stomp.

That's the thing about competitive communities. You have to keep up to date on the strategies, exploits and trends, otherwise you are minced meat. Starcraft is the ultimate example of how crazy it gets where everybody turns into mindless computers executing muscle memory.

It's a necessary investment most people are not willing to make. So if you just want to kick back and relax, it's best to assemble a group of like minded people.

...

Why didn't anyone tell me Horn of the Abyss updated?

Now if only I could actually git gud at this game.

No, I meant games end before you get LV 5 MG.

Wow, Necropolis is truly the shittiest town now. You rely on 3 liches to fight neutrals and if you lose even one, you are fucked. Just forget about fighting any shooters early.

Somewhat off-topic:
What's the point of neutral creatures? One-time rewards or dwellings, I don't remember a single time I got to use them. They always ended up on some resource gathering hero or dismissed, because by the time you get any of them, they are most likely too few to be of value

If you have Rogues in your army you can see the amount of enemy creatures. That's extremely useful.

Dwelling can add up early on, though they made them better in homm4 with the caravan system letting you order the troops from home without needinga hero. Neutrals are pretty much in the same boat if you can get some early on it gives you some extra meat you don't need to care about. One time rewards are situational and I've gotten use out of them when im critically low on resources.

You can also see if they are willing to fight, or join you to if your close enough.

I wish they would implement the auto-combat prompt from Heroes 4 when a neutral stack is heavily outnumbered. Once your hero reaches a certain level, you'd want the experience points from thrash mobs, but don't want to manually battle each and every one. The alternative is to manually enable auto-combat prior to every encounter, or to let them run and lose out on the potential experience.

This is one of the most important features they should add. It's elementary once games reach a certain point, especially for larger maps like XL, and beyond, which has now been implemented.

That feature is actually in the HD Mod (not the official release, the mod). You can automatically skip any fight, and if you don't like the results, you can manually go in and do it yourself. Helps a lot since the AI is still a bit retarded when it comes to utilizing your spells and archer units, but most of the time you can clear small wandering stacks without any losses. You can even restart a fight after it's over, as many times as you like - but obviously people will hate you if you do it in multiplayer.

You can also enter the fight, cast a spell, and press "Q" so that autocombat finishes the fight with your intelligently cast spell. Handy as fuck.

I've never played HoMM 3 against humans before and got roasted on my first try. Are there any newbies here to play against?
I've created a game with description "8ch", password "nigger"

Been a very very long time since I played homm3. All I ever had were the Tarnum's story stand alone campaigns and the base one with gem. Started picking away at complete edition, and I don't remember the swamp faction at all. It is like they took the rejected monsters who couldn't hack it in dungeon and kicked their sorry asses into the bog but they banded together to try and make it on their own.

Since when does Sseth make videos again? And since when is he such a fucking memelord

who wants to play?

You'd find Fortress guys to be pretty good, overall. They aren't top tier, but the Gorgons are deadly and wyverns are super cheap, with hydra situationally useful. Too slow for my liking, especially when dealing with other tier 7s.

How do I activate this? It doesn't prompt by default.

If you mean the auto-combat feature that can be enabled in the settings, that one has been there since the beginning. That's not the one I'm talking about, because if you activate that, auto-combat will be initiated on every encounter without first asking. Some times you want to battle manually when there is potential for loss, but with vanilla auto-combat, you have to go deactivate it in the settings prior to attacking that stack of units.

In Heroes IV you could attack it, and if they were outnumbered you could click "let them run", an option to battle them manually, and also "auto-combat". If THIS is what you are talking about, please explain how to activate that!

I lol'd.

Mostly for the fact that it is objectively one of the worst factions. Inferno is by far the worst, with Fortress barely better due to weak units. Apparently, they have tampered with the necromancy skill in HotA. I don't know if they have the option for vanilla necromancy anymore. In that case, necro is no longer the fun game-breaking faction it used to be but the bottom of the barrell together with the two aforementioned factions.

As

mentioned, Gorgons(upgraded) are freaking unstoppable and should all be dumped on your main hero. Hydras are only good if you have the teleport spell since they are slow and weak, so you want to teleport them between the enemy shooters and the adjacent unit so you can disable the shooter and take advantage of the ability to attack multiple adjacent cells without fear of retaliation.

But if you don't luck out and get Teleport, Hydras are pretty useless. Fortress is a cool town though, if you can live with the fact that almost all the heroes are furries and lizard people. Of course, if you know what you're doing you pick Tazar to avoid that and get the Armor speciality.

Shilling Rampart x Culture Shock mashup, I love it:
youtube.com/watch?v=MgUS5EcuDB0

IMO Necro is the worst. The start determines everything and Necro has a bad start (well, maybe on a XL map, this can be mitigated). It has only one shooter at level 5 and you can have only 3 of them in week 1. It's easy to fuck up and lose one or two, and then you can't beat neutrals. ALL other castles can have 20+ shooters in week 1, and even if you lose a few of them you can still beat neutrals.

First picture shows you which option to select in the menu. Second picture shows you what happens when you walk up to a neutral stack (or even NPC hero, which states who won/retreated). You can either take the result it gives you, or choose to manually enter the battle. Third pic is after the battle ends, shows that I only lost 1 pikeman instead of multiple. If I wanted to, I could play the battle as many times as I wanted by clicking the bottom left button.

Can't play HoMM3 multiplayer without inhouse rules.

DD, Fly, TP, Logistic specialists and that one Diplomacy chick from Tower are usually the most sensible and common rules. The travel spells usually are game breaking if one side gets them and the other doesn't and Logistic/Diplomacy create unstoppable snowballs. It's even worse when the game isn't played on the higher difficulties, where you can do retarded shit like take out T7 stacks because a horde of gremlins joined on day 1 which caused a horde of T3 units to join which caused a horde of T4 to join, etc, etc.

Flagged dwellings increase the owner's pop generation if they have a town with a matching creature building built. AKA if you're Tower and tag a Gremlin dwelling, EVERY TOWER TOWN YOU OWN will spawn +1 Gremlin per week. Can also be abused by that one portal building I forget the name of. Just tag a single creature dwelling and every week will give you the same creature at the portal, so if you tag a Red Dragon dwelling, you get +1 Red/Black Dragon from having the dwelling and +1 from the portal.

Hydras are absolutely terrifying with Frenzy.

A tip for newbies: Bless and Curse effectiveness varies greatly depending on the unit. Best example of this is Harpy/Harpy Hags. They do 1-4 damage, for an average of 2.5 damage. Curse reduces their damage to down 1, or cuts down their damage by a whooping 60%. On the flip side, creatures with low damage variance like Demons (7-9) will have their damage output modified by a greater amount through Bloodlust or Weakness.

Really? I've never had that happen. Most of the time, a one or two stacks will join for the whole game, and that's not very significant. Also, I was almost never able to get expert Diplomacy, because it didn't appear in the level up…

That's useful, thanks.

Stacks joining is greatly affected by the Diplomacy skill and having more troops than what you're attacking. Diplomacy also makes stacks offer to join you for a small portion of the creature's cost. Go try a playing a few weeks with Cyra (Tower Wizard) on whatever map and see what Diplomacy does.

I didn't know about the growth bonus, but it doesn't matter anyway, since I already get plenty of use out of dwellings of my own faction. Knowledge of that +1 bonus changes nothing.
I was talking about golden golems, one-time wyvern rewards, that sort of crap.
What should I pick given the choice between attack and defense? 40 defense against 20 attack is 50% decrease, so half damage taken. 40 attack over 20 defense is 100% increase, double damage. Looks like the same damn thing to me.

Generally speaking, Offense is a better choice than Defense simply because of how Neutrals and retaliation works. The "soft cap" for getting Offense over Defense should be when your tier 1 creatures can reach the damage bonus cap against tier 7 creatures. In other words, always go Offense.

The only exceptions would be if your main hero is an Armorer specialist or if you're playing Ramparts against someone you know has a Magic hero as his main.

I can see how Attack is more useful against neutrals, but the retaliation part doesn't make sense. More defense -> more creatures survive -> similar retaliation damage. Well, I guess attack is at least as good as defense, so might as well stop thinking about it and go full attack

...

That's pretty good.
Does anybody have any other good mashups to share?

More Offense > more creatures die > less retal damage. But less creatures means less chance of the surviving neutrals killing your weaker armies. Offense is also generally far more beneficial for ranged stack, against AI heroes and when attacking towns.

And here's why Diplomacy should always be banned.

Really? Because some zombies joined? lol. Week 1 Rampart army probably wipes this Cyra out.

Well, I guess the Liches are kind of dangerous, if I want to protect my elves. But now your Gremlins will have bad morale. Also, Cyra is not doing much damage with those stats. My Ranger will have stats of like 3 attack and 6 defense + good skills like Archery and Armorer, which the Wizard has low chances of getting.

...

I got 21 Obsidian Gargoyles, 12 air elementals, 46 zombies, 14 beholders and 8 liches. For free. I still had everything left to recruit in my castle except for Gremlins. This means I can throw useless cannon fodder like zombies at neutrals and not waste my precious troops. And Cyra's specialty is Haste, enjoy your turbo golems. Or zombies in this case.

Okay, I've just tested diplomacy and it's really not that good. Got expert diplomacy as fast as possible. All that joined me in week 1 was 30 Oceanids. I couldn't get anything else to join and was stuck with shitty Adela as main.

You have to know where and when to use it. Diplomacy has it's drawbacks, but is super powerful when abused. Look up a guide for diplomacy, and also using visions will help to see if the monsters are likely to join or not. Some stacks will never join though.

Also depends heavily on the maps. Some maps have a lot of neutrals set to never join. Go try it on Realm of Chaos and you'll be able to take out your neighbors by week 2.

Keep in mind as well, I think diplomacy was heavily nerfed in HotA, as well as adjustments to the map creator resulting in even fewer neutral stacks willing to join you. In vanilla it's absurdly broken as long as you don't mind seeing negative morale - but if you use it in conjunction with tactics and archer units, you can use every free stack to screen for your archers to blast your way through any otherwise impossible encounters.

Thanks! I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, but launching HotA through the HD Launcher and not just running the HotA executable solved this for me.

How does HotA compare to VCMI? AFAIK the difference is HotA is programmed through hex-editing, which makes it slower and more cumbersome to implement new stuff whereas VCMI is basically Heroes 3 coded from scratch. The drawback to that of course, is that nobody has the source code, so they have to analyze the game and interpret the AI, which according to some, has not yet yielded satisfactory results. Apparently the AI in VCMI is quite dumb.

VCMI has a new faction made for it, Oasis, which besides the Cove from HotA is the only custom faction that blends properly with the art style in heroes. A standardized environment would be the best, since that would focus the efforts from programmers to balance the new factions perfectly. Already in HotA there are some irritating liberties taken with "re-balancing" the gameplay according to multiplayer conventions. However, some old time players who just like to play with the AI or a couple friends don't mind the alleged imbalances as they are what adds the risk, charm and peculiarities to the game.

This IMO is the greatest challenge for the future development of HOMM3. VCMI has full customization since it is recreated from scratch, but HotA has some amazing new features like the Cove as well as the Random Map Template Editor, which adds incredible replayability.

VCMI has nothing so far, other than AI that is worse than original. HotA has awesome multiplayer lobby and needed balance changes, what's there to compare exactly?

The source code is somewhere out there surely. Whoever has it should just release it. I mean it's a dead game. Modders keep it alive. It's not gonna generate anymore income.

If you mostly play multiplayer, then that's great. The problem is that there are no options to disable or revert the changes they did to the gameplay. On the forums they discussed changing hero specialities, which is impossible for the user unless using hex-editing. And in that case, to distribute a map would require distributing the modified exe, which becomes obsolete and require a new edit once an update is out. Imagine the headache!

For the purposes stated by this thread, multiplayer lobbies, HotA is probably excellent. I wouldn't know, because I don't have the guts to go get my ass kicked by Russians or Poles who play the game religiously. For me, the prospect of VCMI is more appealing, if one could only weed out the dross. That is, a dozen user created factions that don't mesh well with the graphics style. That's the problem with WoG. They added a bunch of new stuff that sticks out like a sore thumb.

For the casuals like myself, who never will become more than average skilled despite having played the game since release, a fully fleshed out VCMI(or equivalently customizable HotA) will suit our needs.

By the way, HotA also got a Random Map Template Editor that looks promising. The new built-in templates are already excellent, making much more beautiful maps as the vanilla generator would put subterranean objects in the desert and other ugly combinations.

I expect to see some nice templates once the community gets their head around the somewhat cryptic interface of that editor. IMO a lot of replayability is added with random maps.

next time on: retarded enemy hero used fly, drained all his mana, and is stuck in the middle of these mountains

One of the few situations when Mysticism isn't a garbage skill.

That's a pretty dubious feature imo. Shit feels like cheating to me. And why the hell is it available in multiplayer?

I didn't even know this exists. But yeah, it's pretty much cheating.

Most multiplayer games have time limits - one time limit for movement on the overworld, and another for battles, so you still might not be able to actually replay a single fight repeatedly, or you'll time out. And I don't know if it's possible to do it in PVP, but you certainly can for neutral stacks. I'd imagine you'll get put on shit lists for abusing it though.

We haven't arranged a game in a long time.

On one hand I'm super excited we'll finally get a truly proper Forge Town. But on the other I worry about how long it'll take.

where did you read this?

Homm3 complete does not come with Tarnum's story expansions sadly, how many here enjoyed those? I had better access to them than the 'main' campaigns of homm.

Anyway, I've played some more online and changed my opinion on some of the skills.

All four magics are in God, because those are the only ones that decide games. If you have a magic on expert level and the opponent doesn't, you win, it's that simple.

Tactics moved down from God to High. What was I thinking? It has nothing on Logistics or the magics. Often used to protect shooters, but you can do that without it most of the time. Still a good skill though.

Wisdom up to Top. Essential in any longer game where you need Town Portal and such. I've also had games where the opponent had two times bigger army than me and I was like "lol, Implosion".

Diplomacy in mid - gamebreaker if it works, but often simply nothing joins, and you're stuck with a shit skill.

Necromancy - nerfed, does not provide that much skeletons anymore, especially on smaller maps. Most of your skeletons will come from the transformer.

Artillery down to bad - ballista is just weak, and cannon is nice but only available in one town.

Pathfinding down to bad - I've realized it's just better to make a hero native to the hostile terrain, than try to plow your way through with your main.

Scholar up to high! It's just an amazing skill in multiplayer. I ALWAYS choose it when it appears on a secondary hero, or even main hero sometimes. Simply, some spells are essential like Curse, Slow, Bless and Haste, and if you don't get them at first, you can use HotA's spell research mechanic to obtain them later. But your hero is now away, and doesn't want to come back just to learn some spells. In comes Scholar. Also can be used to share spells from shrines.

Luck up from Bad to Mid. I've had it decide games when I did double damage a few times.

Navigation up to High - it's just as essential on water maps as Logistics on land maps.

I liked Castle for marksman spam but I usually get wrekt late and also the cost is really high. I like Conflux but it's sometimes banned on smaller templates. Liked Tower for a while, naga/genie is fantastic and I like spellcasting, but Rampart (? Avlee town) was pretty solid early/mid, just make careful upgrades and spam archers and upgrade mage tower while letting gold interest builld up.

Diplomacy fucked me again. All that joined through the whole game was 43 fucking Seamen.

Anyway we should arrange a game. One on one is pretty fucking boring.

What's the point? You're done after one fight anyway.

Not really if we had 8 players. Or even 4.

BTW, I've just had a LEGENDARY game. We've met already in week 2 and I was really close to beating him, but two heroes with strong Magic Arrows saved him. Then he got the advantage since I knew I couldn't attack him. I picked the resources around his castle but eventually he attacked me, and even though my army was much bigger I had to surrender since his spells would doom me. I had a lot of army in castle but couldn't recruit since I had no gold. Eventually he came to attack. I knew he'd win so I left my secondary hero in town with some shit troops and the main guy fucked off to underground.

Then the dreaded message appears "You have 7 days to get a town or you get kicked out of these lands". I'm thinking what do I do now? Can't take my town back. Can't take his either since it's too far and protected. So I'm seeking some other town (and I didn't even know if there is one on the map). 5 days…4…3…ok, found a STRONGHOLD (same as my starting town) in some secluded place. I thought "this guy will attack at any moment, gotta build up fast". OK let's go.

There just happened to be two Behemoth dwellings around. I thought "ok, THIS is my opportunity". Tavern. Town Hall. Cliff Nest. Behemoth Crag. Citadel. Castle. Now I have five Behemoths per week. He didn't come yet - he's really close to the portal leading to me, but he's taking Dwarf Treasuries and such instead. He will come soon though. Gotta act fast.

There were some Dragonfly Hives around. I ended up collecting 42 (!) wyverns from them. Then got back to underground to collect some artifacts. OK, he's coming out of the portal, but I was away, and couldn't prevent him from taking town. Again the dreaded message "Get a town or get out". OK, I had no more choice. His town was too far for 7 days. Had to attack his main hero in my town.

His army wasn't that great, but we know the defender has huge advantage. Fortunately I had two stacks of Cyclops. And 11 Behemoths. Attack the gate I thought. Wyverns fly and kill the Ice Elementals. Expert Resistance saves my Cyclops from his Lightning Bolt. Gate is smashed, Behemoths enter. Then Black Knights I got from the underground earlier. Boom, his army is destroyed…but wait, he fucking flees. I forgot there is the possibility of Escape Tunnel, and he took it.

Whatever, I now have the advantage. Dumped all army except Wyverns and 15 Ancient Behemoths into castle. Charged him Took Dragon Utopia on the way. Smashed main hero. Took his castles. It's over. GG.

H3 can be exciting as you can see, if you get a good map and a good player.

Do you guys just generate random maps, or do you use the tourneyfag ones that came with the game? Personally I like the 2sm2c template, but I modified it to re-enable Necropolis and Conflux (they removed it from that map because it's 2strong for the smaller map size). Otherwise, the slightly larger maps take too long to play in my opinion.

Anyways, I always seem to stall out mid game, around the end of week 2. My opening is usually to grab upgraded ranged units or a magic guild on 111, depending, and have a total of 2 or 3 heroes to explore, with one having a dedicated army to push aggressively for a second town. On 112, I upgrade my town hall, and on 113, I usually grab a marketplace or something to build towards the next tier, but depending on the castle, if it's has a good, easy progression to strong units, then I just grab those

Always random maps (because no one wants to play on the ones included with the game, but they are much, much better).

yeah, I have the same problem. Great start, then I fuck up.

So what do you do and where do you think you fuck up?

I think my gold tends to run out if I try to increase both cities too fast. Instead, I think it's better to focus on your main and only get a few supplemental buildings (eg horde buildings if you're Necro w/ transformer, or marketplaces/silos in general, maybe a lv1 Mage Guild for recharge).

Usually after clearing the second zone, I don't have enough power to break meaningfully into the third zone. I can kill a few mobs, but then my army's steam starts to run out. Usually I have my main pushing with magic and tier 1-3 ranged units as best as I can, and then a secondary comes with T121 reinforcements and ends up having more oomph than my main does - regardless of who I choose. I also don't know what stats to stack properly.

Like, I can pick goblins and start with a 4 power hero, even got him up to 10 power, and but then the rest of the critters are so shitty my guys just melt to any archers. I will say that expert earth with archers is fucking disgusting and makes you win fights no problem, so maybe I just don't have the right magic to support my stuff

In any game you need to strike a balance between spending on buildings or army, and I go way too far into the buildings side. Not noticeable early when I just use Centaurs and Elves, but eventually I have 5 levels of unit recruiting buildings and the units are all sitting in the castle, because I can't buy them.

I do fights early and well so that's not a problem. But even if I earn a bunch of gold from crypts and such, I just spend it all on new buildings. As in, "gotta get these tier 6 units week 1, so I can buy more of them next week " (and it never happens). And if I do manage to get the level 6 buildings, it's immediately "gotta get Citadel so I have more Efreets next week".

I just have to calm down and, I guess, force myself to buy all my army before building anything new. Swing to the other side, you know. Maybe then I'll be able to strike a balance.

I've had games where I only built up to level 4 in week 1, and that can really be enough if you buy all of them. A lot of those games I've won, even if the opponent had tier 6 in final fight and I didn't. But old habits always come back.

What's your build order, mate? Mine is usually Mage Guild day 1, then Town Hall, then unit recruiters up to level 4, then Citadel. But it varies by town and map.

what
Jesus, this is one of the worst skill guides I've seen. Skill selection will depend a lot on your specific situation and strategy, but even disregarding that this selection has massive flaws.
Your opinion is still changing from game to game and you also think there's a fucking cannon in the game. You really have no job making guides for it (particularly with the two decades of expert players making and collecting the guides on forums).

nigga what no what are you doing

What's wrong with MG Day 1? My main might be away for a long time and needs a spell book (if its a might hero).

Halls and particularly dwellings are a much greater priority in the first week. MG on the other hand is a relatively expensive gamble for some mildly useful spells (~two weak ones per battle if the hero is might class).

Fantastic, I'm glad I'm not the only one falling into this trap. (though lategame, I did this to rush dragons and went from +1 to +3 for doing so, so it was a net gain in that case).

Having played a good 4 or more games since my post, and actually looking at it in depth, I think the early tempo you get for having a strong army now completely outweighs the economic gain over ~3-5 turns you'd get for rushing buildings sooner. Shit like imp caches and graveyards and stockpiles are worth a good chunk of change and XP, plus sometimes have a treasure. It's basically a super treasure chest, and being able to clear them consistently feels good.

As far as faction goes, I am in love with dungeon. The HoMM3 wiki (heroes.thelazy.net) made it sound like the units were shitty so I avoided them as much as Inferno. Turns out, I can find a use for every fucking tier of unit. I'm an asshole and picked the Gunnar the minotaur who has speciality logistics and tactics, and just snowballed so hard.

My games with him usually open with upgraded harpies, and try to soft rush to minotaur kings. Because of hit and return, they're basically archers, which also get supported by beholders, which function in melee or range (and if enemies do get too close, a stack of trogs can usually kill ~10 enemies in one go). Dungeon also is weighted towards earth magic and can't natively learn water magic unless via events, so that means you get a soft guarantee on expert slow, too. Insane.

You should get used to playing Shakti as well, he's one of the best starting heroes in the game. Dungeon is all-around great at safe map clearing for obvious reasons, but they fall off hard if they can't get going. There's no such thing as a low-resource game with them.

What about him is good in particular? I tend to use trogs as support units, rather than main damage. It seems like he'd get wrecked by archers pretty easily.

Do you still get the experience if monsters scatter, or do you have to fight them?

I'll join in. Dungeon and Tower are objectively the best factions because they both have several shooters. Dungeon has Beholders and Medusas, Tower has Master Gremlins, mages and is the only town with a level 7 unit(Titan) that is a shooter, which makes for THREE shooters for that town!

The downside of both is that they are expensive. You want to upgrade your Giants, you will suffer for it. Same with Dungeons Black Dragons. The Labyrinth is also costly on gems as well, and I usually seem to stall there. The upside is that both are magic-oriented, have heroes with great specialties and, as one of you mentioned, have no objectively "useless" creatures unless you count the gremlins before the upgrade.

Yes, the Master Gremlins get slaughtered and drop like flies, but you should always barricade your shooters anyway.

Deemer, with Meteor Shower speciality(like Aislinn in Necropolis) is also a great choice. That spell can wreak massive havoc.

I love how they made Titans and Black Dragons hate each other. That really makes for fun games when those factions are pitted against each other.

I really, REALLY hope the HotA team didn't screw with those factions. It's bad enough that they nerfed Necro, Diplomacy and a lot of other things.

Shakti has tactics, so you put your trogs as close as possible to them to get to the shooters right off the bat. Unless you're against shooters that have no melee penalty, they'll be minced meat in early game and will make for a good start, as most shooters have terrible melee penalty.

Tower is buffed in HotA, their build-up is much easier. Some argue it's the best town in that mod since it was the only one to get truly significant buffs.

>As far as faction goes, I am in love with dungeon. The HoMM3 wiki (heroes.thelazy.net) made it sound like the units were shitty so I avoided them as much as Inferno.

Inferno is actually my favorite (both thematically and to play with). The first game I ever won online, I won decisively by drowning the opponent in demons. If you are able to get it going, Demon Farming is like necromancy on steroids. Now every secondary castle is a potential demon farm. You'd be surprised about the numbers you can get from something like Pikemen that you've been ignoring for 2 weeks. Also, you can attack monsters that you'd be scared of attacking with any other town. Lost some Gogs? Cool, just sacrifice the whole stack then. Losses turned into gains.

Also here's a pair of pdfs I found while learning shit. The first is actually useful, the second is a technical mapgen document

Working on a map, maybe.

Wow disregard. Even though I tried to make things conservative, I had way too much shit coming in, I hit level 7 and had 10k by the end of the 10th turn and I didn't even hit the underground yet

Haha, you guys won't believe what kind of game I just had. M Map, we've played for like 3 hours or more. I started better but as usual opponent's advantage progressed with time. He had 80 wyverns from hives and I only 30, as well as 40 cyclops vs 20. I was desperately trying to find other hives and pandora's boxes and a few days before the endgame the gift from God got sent to me "Monere learns spells! …Armageddon…".

As fate seemingly wanted, he kept running after me and eventually stood one square from my castle while I was hiding there. I attacked him with one Phoenix, armageddoned and surrendered. Did that four times until finally attacking him properly, heh. He fucked off right then.

Then he kept messaging me in private, but it was in Russian so I didn't understand shit. Fucking funny. War knows no rules.

That's actually one of the online server rules, "no hit and run"

Yeah but I made sure to specify "NO RULES" in the game description.

Well then I guess he can only blame himself

Feels bad man

Hey shit I actually won (also I see you can't open mirror maps in editor - is this a safety feature for tourneyfags?)

Anyways, using logic, I was able to deduce where his main was, and where his towns were, based on my revealed map, and his path of clearing the neutral mobs. I had about 8 marketplaces by the end of it, and just kept attritioning his smaller heroes and capping his towns he left with 4 units. Eventually, because I had a resource advantage, I won.

Those were my mains, being continually re-summoned and re-equipped at the expense of nearly all my income per turn

How do you build your towns, guys? I'm especially interested in Necropolis. Is rushing Vampire Lords the right strat?

Really? In Age of Wonders 3 games it's a perfectly valid strategy to hit with one unit, Hellfire, and run. In fact the Partisan specialization exists for hit and run shenanigans.

>Those were my mains, plural
That's why I kept doing it. I knew that your income was limited because of how aggressively I captured my own towns. Every time I did it, it was 2500g that wasnt going towards creatures I had to fight.

I can't remember where I saw it, either the server rules (that comes bundled w/ the HOTA expansion), or the wiki, or something. Obviously, in a no rules game or between friends it doesn't matter, but ranked or playing with randoms, it might be an issue; basically don't use it as a crutch, but it's possible to win.

WHICH REMINDS ME, against , there was a rule also where if there is no ranged units left, you can't keep moving out of range to make a fight into a stalemate to waste turn time. Which is fine. However, we had a siege situation and we had two midsize armies, me on defense. It was down to like, 4 air elementals and 30 zombies. His hero had 30 mp left. Every turn they'd run away, Magic Arrow. Run away, magic arrow. I lost the town such a disgustingly small margin.

Note that he didn't break any rules (nor were we playing with said rules). It was just so depressing to lose a distant town by that much.

Bump

Any recommended templates for 1v1?

It's amazing just looking at how the probability for spells to appear in the mage guild reflects the alignment of the town and the strengths and weaknesses of the units, i.e necro gets highest probability for haste to compensate for the slowest early units, the zombie, but also has no probability to get the cure spell, since the undead are diseased by nature and logically, "cure" would kill them.

As opposed to Castle, which has cure and also the highest chance for bless, and Rampart, which is a nature town.

So not only are the alignments and lore taken into account, but also the usage of units and how spells can compensate for weaknesses.

This kind of attention to important details is not found in modern games, partly due to laziness, but also because the bigger games are streamlined since most of them are not constructed from scratch, but built from commercial engines which makes them very samey and makes it cumbersome to create intricate mechanics, which are most intuitively implemented from scratch instead of something you try to fit into a pre-existing framework.

This is just one aspect of the depth of this game. It doesn't even take into account how primary and secondary skills affect it, specialties, what faction you play against etcetra.

So how did I manage this guys?

...

That isn't actually how I did it, though I didn't know that was also an option.

Maybe you won with only summons left?

There's a cannon in Horn of the Abyss.

I was trying to split a unit of one in the city and when I cancelled out of it it had moved the single unit from the hero into the city. The enemy hero there had 5 iron golems and a ballista on him but was out of mana and I was just spamming heroes to slow him down and desperately wanted to fire a hero but keep the unit.

I never realized conflux existed because they do not appear in the main campaign or Tarnum's quests. What a weird faction, anyone care to share their thoughts on them? I've started an ai skirmish with them and started with the psychic elemental guy who gets offense and logistics which feels absolutely fantastic.

My least favorite town, but really good in MP if you know how to use it. Units are expensive as fuck, so you shouldn't rush them first week like you do with all the other towns. Instead, get as many Storm Elementals as early as possible, with which you will be able to beat most walkers easily. Try to get a bless spell since the range of Storms is 2-8. When you get enough money build Water Elementals, and then immediately upgrade them. Ignore levels 4 and 5, they're pretty useless, unless you're swimming in gold. Spend the money on the shooters which will help you clear the map. Only buy the next units if you can afford to buy out all the shooters with gold to spare.

Actually, I just won a game with it by using the outlined strategy. Only Storm and Ice Elements for the whole game. Opponent had 8 Nixes, I still won the game.

BTW, here are my favorite strats for each town (Conflux was already mentioned).

Tower: Upgrade Gremlins day 1. Make another hero, take his gremlins. Leave Golems in town, they will slow your hero down. Split Gargoyles into 3 stacks and block the gremlins. 100+ Gremlins can beat a lot. Tower has a hard time with shooters. You will always lose gremlins against them. Upgrade Gargoyles to block shooters in two turns. But mostly avoid fighting shooters if possible. Don't rush Genies or Nagas - too expensive.

Castle - Upgrade Archers day 1. Next unit requires Blacksmith, so skip it for now. Build Mage Guild day 2, buy book, and get out with your main and a bunch of marksmen. Try to get Cavaliers before end of week 1 (Blacksmith > Barracks > Stables > Training Grounds), give them to another hero and use to beat shooters. Forget Monastery week 1.

Fortress - Wyverns day 1, give them to one hero and the other army to another hero. 2 Wyverns alone can beat a lot if you're smart, especially shooters. Archers, Gogs, Orcs sometimes…Get a tent. Forget Basilisks and Gorgons for now. You're fighting with Wyverns, Gnolls and Lizardmen. Upgrade Wyverns for safer map cleanup.

Inferno - This one has many ways. You can try to get Efreets day 3. Two Efreets beats most shooters. Or get Pit Lords in week 1 to get started with demon farming faster, since that's what makes Inferno. Sack Imps for demons. Forget Hell Hounds too. Demon food. Later you can sack gogs as well, but that's up to you if you think you need shooters. Magogs are great for fighting neutrals BTW, so upgrading them early is another possibility. I've won games with just a fat stack of Demons smashing everything.

Stronghold - Tough town. Orcs are weak. Try to get Cyclops as fast as possible, so you can actually beat walkers. Forget fighting with two heroes, Stronghold's army is just too weak. Rushing behemoths doesn't really work either. I consider this the weakest town.

Dungeon - has two shooters so get those early. Forget higher levels, you will go bankrupt (and Manticores suck). Build Portal of summoning in week 1 to get more army, especially if you've found a Beholder dwelling. Upgrade Harpies and give them to your secondary heroes. Don't go beyond Level 4 in week 1.

Necropolis - Another tough town. Mage Guild day 1 and rely on hasting skeletons, but you will still have losses. Absolutely terrible against shooters, or all neutrals really. Your best bet is actually Mage Guild level 2 and Death Ripple + a few Wights. Since the AI will split their units into 7 stacks if it considers your army weak, you can deal more damage with Death Ripple. You can fight with two heroes that way, which will help you be a little faster. This all changes when you get VLs, which can beat any live neutral easily without losses. You should then have a hero with just VLs. Liches day 2 is another possibility, but I don't like it. Again, tough town early on.

Rampart - strongest town early, I guess. Leave Dwarves in town. Day 1 is Elves, day 2 Upgraded Elves and you clean up. Then upgrade Dwarves so you can take them with your main. Centaurs, Dwarves and Elves will beat even very strong walkers. Pegasi suck, ignore them if you don't have money. Buy all the other army instead. This has similar situation as Conflux, where focusing on first 3 levels is better than rushing higher tier units.

Cove - Pirates require Blacksmith so buy Mage Guild day 1 and use the pirates you already have from heroes. Generally, pirates are the bread and butter of Cove and you can clean up the map with just them. Be careful not to lose any pirates.

Why have i never done this before?
Normally i just race to upgrade townhall at the start

Do you have strats for more or less comfortable starts on shitshow: the difficulty?

Conflux is a bit of an eyesore, but it has some good units. The shooters are nice, the Psy/magic elementals have a Hydra/Cerberus kind of attack(attacking all surrounding units) and the Phoenixes will resurrect a certain number when a stack dies. They're fairly weak though so it's more like a lore gimmick than an actual compensation for a pretty bland 7th level unit.

Magic University is expensive, but it allows you to purchase any of the magic schools for secondary skills, which are objectively the best secondary skills. Brissa has Haste as specialty. Now your Magic Elementals can decimate an army completely.

It's a fun faction to play once in a while. I'm not good with it, but I have the aforementioned aspects in mind when I do play it.

Sure. Keep in mind I'm not so experienced at 200% though.

Pick gold bonus before the game if you're picking. Now look carefully around the area you can see and try to map out the path that will allow you to pick the most gold in turn 1. If that requires beating some Pikemen, Gnolls or whatever, this is fine even with heavy losses. It is important to get 2500 gold day 1. Now make another hero and go the other way. Again concentrate on picking gold. If you have enough for Town Hall, buy it day 1. This is rare. Otherwise, buy it day 2.

Now start going along the road. Join your armies if needed. Find the second town, capture it immediately, don't worry about losses. You have another 500 gold per day. Build Tavern there, and in your main town Marketplace.

Next day, build Town Hall in the second town, and Blacksmith in main town. You have 2K gold per day now, that's significant. Keep picking gold with your heroes. You need City Hall ASAP. Next day is Mage Guild, and next City Hall if gold allows it. Don't buy any dwellings before you have City Hall. No gold? Dump everything for gold in the Marketplace.

The only other thing you should spend money on besides rushing City Hall is buying the third hero that has army with him, since he will be able to do some fights to pick up more gold. Of course ignore things like Schools of Magic and such for now.

If you have City Hall before week 2? You're set, and play starts as usual. At the start of week 2, buy all the level 1 and 2 troops from your towns. Start fighting the stronger monsters like you usually do. Buy the fourth hero, give army to main. Go for your tier 3 and 4 dwellings. Do in week 2 what you usually do in week 1 on other difficulties.

Worst towns for 200%? Necropolis and Conflux! Necro has no available shooters by default, and the walkers are quite weak. You will have a lot of problems fighting neutrals. Conflux the same - Upgraded Air dwelling requires gems, mercury and wood + 1500 gold. Insurmountable on 200%.

I have archery, offense, armorer, wisdom, water magic, logistics, leadership. Almost a perfect hero but I have room for one more skill I can't decide which school of magic to take though since my selection is spells is garbage. 6 towns and still no slow.

Necro needs a little more finesse in its first week than other towns, yes mostly because it lacks shooters. Wights are decent to get initiative and to bait enemies across obstacles to waste movement, but it doesn't work very long. The best thing I've found was to just get a good stack of skeletons to OHKO a neutral stack. Do people ever get zombies? They seem useless.
Vampires are great because they can life drain later.

Also, Conflux isn't too bad. I don't ever see anyone talk about Cove towns though.

Conflux seems to be balanced around a strong midgame. Pixies don't trigger retaliation, so it's nice to pick T1-2 stacks off. Heroes start with elemental magic, so you're guaranteed to get expert spells very quickly. Upgraded air/water elementals act as shooters, and fire/earth elementals are trash. Psychics are okay I guess? Firebirds/phoenixes don't seem that good, other than having amazing speed (which works very well with expert magic)

Is it better to haste or slow on turn one?

Turn the difficulty level up son and if not necroing ur dead stack (also lich aoe ff) ur doing it wrong. A neat tricks also not upgrading skeles so you can perma neck 1 stack deathball… I don't even play undead but my bro does

Haste if it's on for eg dungeon minotaurs to get max map movement, basically whatever gives you the most turn adv, saving one of yours, or adding more to their critical stack.

A man of true taste. All the years of nonposting have been worth it.

Why is inferno so bad? I know their grail structure week of the imp shit is awful.

I dislike zombies because fights tend to be over before they get involved. Even if I defend/wait turns, then skeletons are usually bullied first. Not good if you're trying to get a deathball.

Zombies are SLOW. Skeletons have a speed of 4, versus 3 for zombies. This translates to a difference of 60 movement per turn on your hero, or a difference of a half tile per turn. It adds up. One month is 28 turns, so that's extra 17(!) tiles of movement you're losing out on, just to keep a marginally useless stack around.

When I play Dungeon, I give my scouting hero a single Harpy Hag. That's 9 speed, or 1900 movement. That's a difference of 4 tiles per turn, or an extra 112 tiles of movement in a month, compared to keeping around a speed 3 unit.

Sseth went a long way from making reviews of assfaggot champions to reviewing games such as Heroes of Might and Magic III.

Turn the difficulty up you are shit.

I've only started playing on 130% and I tend to play academy most, should I just take the plunge of 200% or work my way up?

200% until your ego can't take getting crushed no more then lower it to the second hardest, if you can't beat that like 50-95% of time then go theory craft some more outside of actual game time. Can help playing against real humans too. Better if hotseat

Good luck playing Tower with this much resources on start.

Why does difficulty matter? I play against friends at 160% and absolutely crush them every time

Higher value on resource allocation and decision-choices if there is less room for error. You can then magnify this practice when times are good.

I did pick gold starting bonus, 600 is basically the same as zero though it did let me get a day one city hall. 200% really is cranking the vice on my balls though. Losing my capitol when an enemy tower attacked with giants really hurt but I got it back and am hanging in there.

What difficulty do competitive players use? 200%? 160%? Having less resources makes it more skill-based though

I managed to dig my old disks out, but I'm having trouble with Shadow of Death.
It won't install because it says I need "Service Pack 4"- and installing it did nothing.
And it has no audio when I run it from the disk.

You might want to consider just pirating GOG's version of Heroes 3 Complete. Especially if you want to give some of the mods a shot.

What the fuck is this shit?

Alright, my first 200% game went pretty alright. I struggled really hard early on and lost my main city a few times. Rather than try to reclaim it against the AI main hero I just ran to the AI's main tower city which was already fully upgraded AND had the grail structure which completely turned the tide in my favor.

Mine is going just fine

scenario or random map? The map I generated had no goddamn creature dwellings anywhere nearby. Not that it would have mattered with 0 fucking resources.

What? One of the included random templates. 2sm4d I think

Finally cleaned up the last enemy, theyhad some threatening forces but nothing could stop the Solymyr train.

Fun fact for those who didn't play homm4, solymyr has his own campaign.

Had a good game on h3dm1 with a friend. 2h, Fort v Fort, strong monsters and 200%.

I went with wyverns and then upgraded lizards, but was late to take second town. For some reason I was very on top of effectively clearing treasuries and even got a dwarven one fairly early plus some nice artifacts. We had no gold because of 200%, but Haart spawned in my tavern and estates made the game way easier. Main was lizard spec hero and I got logistics and expert water pretty fast, and cure spam won the day.

We ended up monoliths at about the same time but i had +1 town and a slight gold advantage so I ended up with a solid win. I was lv 12 vs his 7. My wyverns were A/D 21/24 vs his 17/24 so i had a slight edge

Fair enough.
Solved one of the issues at least.
This toaster is a hand-me-down, turns out the last person to have it had all the audio options muted.
:/

At least HoMM 3 should run fine on a toaster.

Oh it does. It runs perfectly on my craptop that has issues running most flash games. Homm 1 to 4 are all spec non-existent, mainly because they use sprite graphics and not ebin 3D models.
****

FUGG

so we gonna have some Holla Forums matches anymore or not?

If it's that bad you might as well install Gentoo linux. Any playable games for your laptop would have to be so old they'd run fine on WINE and Linux isn't filled with bloatware like Windows is, so you'd have a faster and more responsive rig that way. And yes, Gentoo is a serious recommendation. It's a Linux distribution geared towards running fast. That's why it's called "Gentoo" - because those are the fastest swimming penguins.

It might take some time to set it up but it'll be worth it for a laptop that doesn't run like ass.

So is 200% supposed to be hard? I can usually win no problem

Had a shitty game yesterday. Guards were tough but I was an opportunity in a Portal of Glory near my castle. Unfortunately, it was blocked by Lots of Zealots, which I tried to attack twice, and failed. Second time I had cavaliers and royal griffins - they still shot me down.

That came out funny. Saw* an opportunity of course.

Well it's so ancient and broken I don't use it for anything else other than reading mangas and homm 3. Not really worth the hassle.

It's 80% starting location, 20% managing early game. Even on the easiest setting the game can be hard if you get dumped into a shooter stack heavy area with no resources.

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Haha, that's my old chart. I don't really believe in it anymore.

Better than the one above.

I play on mirrored maps, though.

The two expansion campaigns for homm3 seem like they had a lot less put into them than the first.

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I don't get this game. I tried playing it a few years back and it didn't grab me. Holla Forums is usually on the ball about this kind of shit but I don't know. The combat seemed kind of stale and directionless.

You'd think so, and on paper, I hated the stack system, but it's actually pretty deep strategically. I also played HoMM a few years ago and felt the same way (though it was HoMM6 and used the ubishit launcher)

Anyways, you have 5 or 6 different resources, and fight neutral mob camps to capture more resources and mines and towns. You only get new creatures every week, so it becomes a balance of macro management (developing towns, exploring certain areas) and micro management (how combat plays out)

Different races have different strengths in combat. For example, ranged units are very desireable because they can destroy units from afar (making it easier to clear mob camps without losing units). Thus, you want a fast unit or a tanky unit to stop them. You can also augment your battles with spells, to cover your weaknesses. Every race has different spell weighting, so if you have a weakness or a strength, your spell choices are going to improve those issues.

For example, Necropolis is difficult to play early, since you'll likely lose many units because you won't have ranged units until Tier 4. Most other races have them at Tier 1-2. However, they have tricks like harming all non-undead units, or constantly replacing their skeletons every battle. If you know what you're doing, you can micro your units very hard and win some real weird battles.

I will admit I am not the most savvy strategy guy. I got a kick out of the King's bounty games but those were more PVE adventures with crazy boss fights.

Jesus fucking christ I am dying

A tragedy to rival the fall of Rome

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"player choice"

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Also this was my first exposure to the series. I picked it up from my local Walmart's bargain bin for $5 back in 2005, 2006 or something. Fantastic.

How good's the actual story ie lore behind M&M anyway?

As in is it well-crafted etc or fanfic-tier garbage?

I'd say it's generic mid-high medieval fantasy, but it embraces it and does it well. It doesn't have the crazy setting lore that TES has (as far as I know), but it does have some sci-fi elements which were present in the earlier games, and the RPGs.

I believe that Xeen(?) was this giant artificial world that existed on a rectangular metal plate (sort of like Halo), and the devils that invaded Enroth were from this world. This was sort of the plot of MM7, and while it looked medieval on the surface, you had to eventually recover items from a downed spacecraft. I can't remember all the details, it's been a while since I played it.

Anyone think there could be any appeal to an RTS that plays like a heroes game?

I've seen a few different RTS's with gimmicks. Terrain deformation and physics are sometimes used. I saw one user suggest a game where orders are relayed through a chain of command, so there is up to say, a 10 second delay between when you issue an order and when the individual footsoldiers hear it, because it has to go through commanders and generals and officers first.

I saw one that dealt with time:

Warlords battlecry son.

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How viable is rushing combo artifacts?

Not very since you don't know what you will find. But if you lack one part, you can try to hunt for it in the black markets and such.

one of you niggers needs to stream your online matches

So I did some research and cost analysis. Dragon Father has too many pieces and Angelic Alliance has a lot of top-tier artifacts to make, for example.

Elixir of Life, Wizard's Well, Ring of the Magi, and Armor of the Damned seem to be the most reliable to rush into.

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But only Armor of the Damned would provide enough benefit in final battle I think.

Depends what you're playing. Elixir of Life would work great with Demon memes, for example, or Wizard's Well would let you aggressively clear mobs by lightning bolting them every turn. The resource ones and legion aren't very good in my opinion, being a sort of a "win more" deal.

Personally I play on low resource 1v1 maps that can be finished in a month.

Any way to disable victory conditions?

By the way, I pre-emptively made a new thread over on /vg/.

>>>/vg/28902
>>>/vg/28902
>>>/vg/28902

Or record them and upload the best bits as webms.

Any of you faggots wanna start a 1v1 unranked game in the next hour or two?

Either Nine Day Wonder or h3dm1, 200%, no water, strong monsters

Jesus what a garbage list

Make a better one then. But will it be backed by online experience?

I thought the Forge town was something they scrapped. Anyway, I've had the opinion that the Forge is something that should really affect the game on a much deeper level than just being a new town, but neat.

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Your icons don't entirely match the text on your list.

One last bump