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## Heroes of Might and Magic VI is a War Crime

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Username17
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### Heroes of Might and Magic VI is a War Crime

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Post by Username17 » Sun Jul 21, 2013 6:43 am

Heroes of Might and Magic is a venerable franchise that has been driven into the ground and then shat upon by its current owners: Ubisoft. Heroes of Might and Magic VI is demonstrably a worse game than the original King's Bounty, a game that was released in 1990 and had support for CGA and EGA color graphics.
Heroes of Might and Magic VI has a number of "innovations" and is in the peculiar position that literally all of them make the game shittier. It's such a litany of terrible design choices, poor programming, and half-assed implementation that it is in a way amazing. In order to detail how craptacular this game is, we have to go piece by piece.
The DRM
Holy shit! Ubisoft unveiled their most intrusive, most astounding, most game destroying DRM yet for this game. User usability wasn't a consideration at any level, and it shows. Your saved games are stored on your computer, but they are "validated" on their servers, which means that the game takes forever to load, and you have a sharply limited number of save games, but simultaneously gives you no advantages of server access. You can't play your game on multiple computers. You can't recover saves when they crash (and they will crash). In fact, sometimes the server connection will fuck up your save, and then it's just a giant "Fuck You" because there is no way to get it back.
You have the ability to play the game "online" or "offline". But if you play offline, you can't access any of your games that ever were online, and nothing you do unlocks any content or advances your dynasty weapons and shit. Indeed, if you play offline, you can't even access your dynasty shit or your unlocked content, meaning your characters can't even use weapons (which are all dynasty shenanigans). So if you even try to play offline, you're basically playing with crippleware, and you can't even switch back and forth between the two - if you want to go from cripple version to non or vice versa, you have to go back to the beginning of the game.
But let's say you do try to play the game in its non-crippled version: the DRM fucks you there too. If the server so much as gets distracted by clouds or butterflies, you get kicked out of your whole game, with no chance to save. So if the last time you saved was a long time ago (remembering that there can sometimes be many battles in a single turn), you're out quite a bit of time.
So to recap: if you can't maintain a stable internet connection, you either play a crippled version of the game that doesn't save your progress or you get kicked out of the game at random and it doesn't save your progress. Now for the cherry on top: it's not just you who needs a stable internet connection, because it also goes down if Ubisoft doesn't have a stable internet connection. Their internet connection is not stable. Not only does it crash regularly during "peak usage", but they also have uncheduled server downtimes that sometimes last for days. And during that whole period, you can't progress or save your progress in the single player game. Also you can't play multiplayer duals or anything of course, but I can't stress this enough: you can't play your single player maps with the saves that are on your hard drive while their servers are down, and they don't even have the graciousness to warn you in advance or compensate you in any way.
Fuck Ubisoft. Fuck them so hard.
Moving on the Map
The first thing you notice is that when your hero moves on the map, it is very slow. Some of this is because the aforementioned DRM sometimes causes your game to hang for seconds or even minutes at a time. But most of it is because the game has an internal multiplier set for the overland movement multiplier and it very slow. But hey, that's stored as an integer, so if you bust open the program with an editor you can jack up the walk speed and you'll solve that particular problem. Why this is not accessible from in-game preferences and why the default settings are so teeth grindingly frustrating I do not know.
But now let's try to walk our hero to a distant part of the map. We run into two problems. The first problem you'll notice is that it will take you more than one day to walk to the target, but the game does not tell you how many days that actually is going to be. It doesn't even hazard a guess, there's just a bunch of red step arrows ahead of you and you're on your own guessing how many days it'll take. This is especially frustrating, because predicting how many days a multiple day trip is going to take is something that Heroes of Might and Magic games have been doing since Clinton was president.
But if you actually click a second time to actually start off on this journey that it can't be fucked to tell you how long it's going to take, you take a couple of steps and... stop. See, while the path predicter is capable of showing you the path your hero is supposed to take, the actual movement function gets confused by intervening objects. Your hero is literally incapable of simply walking along the path the computer already fucking calculated and you just clicked to accept. So you have to walk your hero in a series of baby steps, and I'm sure you end up losing some movement points to minor detours and shit. Fuck!
Resources
Heroes VI got rid of most of the special resources. Gems? Gone. Sulfur? Gone. Mercury? Gone. You get Wood, Ore, and Crystal, Final Destination. And looking at that, you might say that that could be enough. And perhaps it could, if hypothetically you didn't require every single resource to field every single creature type for every single faction. Which you do. If you didn't have any Crystal, or Ore, or Wood, you wouldn't be shunted to one creature type over another, you'd simply be stymied and unable to build. There's no strategy at all. No choices. No trade offs.
But it's actually worse than that. See, they made Marketplaces give a better exchange rate than in previous versions, and more importantly made that exchange rate progress all the way to a 1:1 "no loss" rate with only a handful of marketplaces in your empire. Also, Marketplaces actually generate money, and quite a bit of it compared to their cost to build, meaning that every city you have or conquer will in fact have a marketplace in it. So by the time your empire is even big enough to start worrying about "build strategies" or whatever, it simply doesn't even matter. All resources are totally exactly the same as money. You can sell all your secondary resources and then buy the secondary resources you need for whatever you intend to build each turn with no loss at all.
And if you were at all concerned with the slight variations in resource focuses earlier in the game making any difference - fear not. While the Sanctuary takes slightly more wood and slightly less ore than average, you can actually simply buy starting messenger heroes who make wood just for being alive, negating even that much give-a-fuck you might have for the game's entire economy minigame.
Fundamentally, any mine or lumberyard is just worth an amount of gold. Gold mines are slightly bigger than the other mines and no fucks are given.
Recruiting Your Army
There are basically no choices anywhere. First of all, you can (and therefore do) convert any castles or external dwellings you control to your faction. Secondly, the number of units your faction makes is exactly the same as the number of units you can have in your army. Third, the buildings that convert your units to the upgraded version also increase the number of creatures that grow each week. Fourth, there are no limits to how many troops you can have in a single stack. Fifth, you can teleport your main hero with your entire army to any city you own no matter what class or faction you have. Sixth, you can recruit all the creatures made by your entire empire from any city you happen to be in.
What this means is that if you are playing a faction, your army will be all seven creatures of that faction, in their upgraded forms, and you will put all of them into a single army led by your big hero and you will use essentially the same tactics every time. If you play that faction again, your army will be exactly the same.
On release, there were only 5 factions, and with the no mix-n-match realities of the way everything else in the game shakes out, that means that there are seriously less available end-game armies than in any edition of the game. Including the original King's Bounty that came out on the Sega Genesis. And just to shit in your hand even more, there's a for-money expansion that adds one faction, bringing the total number of armies from 5 to 6, which is the number of factions that Heroes 2 was released with, but less actual actual armies than have been delivered by literally any game in the series.
Combat
Just as the outside walking speed is inexplicably slowed down to a snail's pace, the combat animations are also defaulted to a painfully slow rate. You can again hack the game to have goblins walk across the screen at a reasonable pace, but such a choice should be accessible from in the game.
The attack and defense calculation is somewhat complex, with the base damage of the attacker multiplied by a number that is raised to an exponent based on the total Might or Magic Attack of the creature and the Hero, and then the defender negates a percentage of that damage that is itself raised to an exponent based on the total Might or Magic Defense of the creature and the Hero. This all sounds difficult to calculate, and it is, but it is also important that all of this involves no breakpoints or choices at all. Getting +2 Might Attack adds the same relative amount of damage to your Might Units no matter what they are, no matter how much Might Attack you already have, no matter what you are fighting, and no matter how much Might Defense the enemy hero brings to the table. Getting Moar Might and Magic Attack and Defense are always good, but they are always good to precisely the same degree. This means that there is no strategic thinking that is even possible with regards to choosing which bonuses to invest in. The same choice that is correct for one game as the Stronghold (take Might Attack) will always and forever be the correct choice for every game as the Stronghold no matter what your enemies are or do.
The combat map has a lot of squares on it, units move pretty fast. Even a slow unit crosses the board in 3 turns. And very importantly, they can cross the board and attack in 3 turns even if there are a bunch of enemies between them and the target. Because units have no zones of control, and units can and will simply walk around intervening enemies. There are eight squares you can attack an enemy from, and an army is only 7 units. While you can in fact protect a unit with a box formation in the corner, that's seriously it. No other arrangement of troops is likely to make any difference because the enemy can and will simply walk around your melee troops to attack your archers. Creatures simply don't have zones of control, and despite the large number of things on the battle map, basically none of it counts for shit. It's like 4th edition D&D except you don't even get Attacks of Opportunity. Placing a melee unit in the way really seriously just denies that one square, and enemies can and will walk around. The only think that makes combat even look like there are tactics if you squint is the fact that the computer is incredibly stupid and may get distracted and attack powerful melee units if the choice is waiting to attack the next turn.
There is in fact only one way to play any of the fights. And that is to take no losses in anything but the final battle. Remember how your final army is composed of literally every unit you've ever built? If you take any losses in any battle before the final battle, that directly and irrevocably reduces the size of your final army. Barring a few edge cases such as capturing a city right before the week clicks over so you get the week's production instead of not, it's just not worth it to fight any battle under any circumstances where you lose even a single troop. To that end, healing is incredibly powerful. The game doesn't distinguish between healing and resurrection, so Heal, Regeneration, and Life Stealing bring troops back from the dead. And they bring a lot of troops back from the dead.
Lest you think that this will cause all battles to be an extremely boring affair where you find your favorite healing spell and spam it every round until you run out of enemies or have all your troops, never fear. It's slightly less bad than that. You have skill points, which can be invested in individual spells, war cries (which are activated abilities that don't cost any mana that you use instead of casting a spell), and passive abilities. And each of the spells and warcries has a couple of turns of cool down after it has been used. So you don't just spam healing, you have a couple of spells and warcries and you cycle them. Of course, you also get 30 skill points over the course of the game, and you only need 3-7 use activated abilities, so the vast majority of your skill points go into the passive abilities. This means that you're going to see most of the same passives on almost every character. But don't worry, most of those are just raw number buffs, so you won't even notice!
The Bugs
Not content with actually being a game that has no tactics or strategy to speak of that runs at a glacially slow pace and has no replayability because of a lack of meaningful choices, the game also doesn't actually work. Like, at all. Crash bugs are common, even after the expansion, even after numerous patches.
To give you an idea of how shoddy the programming is, let's consider some of the "special weeks". Every week there is a modest chance of there being some kind of special effect in play for the duration. Mostly, these are fairly minor, but for now we are concentrating on the weeks that increase or decrease the cost of spells for their duration. For reasons no one can adequately explain, these weeks were programmed in as an effect that applies a multiplier to the cost of every spell every character in the world knows, and then at the end of the week applies a different multiplier that cancels that out. So if you're in a campaign and one of these special weeks goes off on the first or last week of one of the missions, your main character will experience the beginning but not the end of the week (or vice versa), and go the entire rest of the campaign with permanently modified mana costs on all their spells. WTF!
This sort of sloppy programming permeates the entire game. Special abilities are constantly going off twice or not at all, special attacks doing wildly more or less damage than they are supposed to, and so on. The game was released in a state where critical hits did zero damage. Seriously, I'm not even making that up. There is, by the way, an entire faction dedicated to luck effects, so the fact that they did absolutely nothing when the game was released was extremely obvious.
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K
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Post by K » Sun Jul 21, 2013 1:56 pm

I liked HoMM XI. It's not a particularly deep or good strategy game, but for Steam sale of $14.99 I wasn't expecting much. In fact, I expected far less than the 56 hours that I've gotten out of it so far.
It suffers from the flaw of most strategy games where you want to win as fast as possible because the game gets more unplayable the longer you turtle. In the case of HoMM XI, the unplayable bits are high-level heroes having enough points to get all the good abilities and unit stacks rendering most hero abilities meaningless.
I mean, I've been on a strategy game bender these last few months on Steam, and HoMM XI comes out favorably against similar strategy games like Eador or Warlock.
Last edited by K on Sun Jul 21, 2013 2:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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name_here
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Post by name_here » Sun Jul 21, 2013 5:28 pm

Personally, I had the top half of the screen be solid black when launched. I might have stuck through to see if it fixed itself on reaching the main menu and clicking on stuff, but the opening screens are super-long and unskippable.

> DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.

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Post by K » Sun Jul 21, 2013 5:55 pm

> name_here wrote:Personally, I had the top half of the screen be solid black when launched. I might have stuck through to see if it fixed itself on reaching the main menu and clicking on stuff, but the opening screens are super-long and unskippable.

That only happens on the opening movie. It can be skipped.
Apparently, it's caused by a recent Windows update. I looked it up because it was happening to me too, but I'm not uninstalling an update to watch a skippable movie that I would skip every time I played the game.
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Dominicius
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Post by Dominicius » Sun Jul 21, 2013 10:07 pm

Frank, have you played any of the recent King's Bounty games? What is your opinion on them?
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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch » Sun Jul 21, 2013 10:26 pm

I've played 'em before and while they're hardly perfect and have a considerably different focus--there is no town building mini-game, for example, and army stack size is determined by your leadership stat, so the entire game boils down to army preservation, threat assessment and locating good recruitment spots--I am comfortable calling them better than HoMMVI. For one thing, the games actually work, which is a plus.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Sun Jul 21, 2013 10:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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### Re: Heroes of Might and Magic VI is a War Crime

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Post by Koumei » Mon Jul 22, 2013 1:45 am

I'm so glad I asked ahead of time and grabbed 5 rather than 6. I mean...

> FrankTrollman wrote:you can't play your single player maps with the saves that are on your hard drive while their servers are down, and they don't even have the graciousness to warn you in advance or compensate you in any way.

I live in a land with the Internet of North Korea (and the censorship to boot!), so that's bad. But even if that weren't the case, that should be a crime punishable by having to walk the streets with a sign and ringing a bell so people avoid you.

> Heroes VI got rid of most of the special resources. Gems? Gone. Sulfur? Gone. Mercury? Gone. You get Wood, Ore, and Crystal, Final Destination.

That's really bad as well. I loved the variety of different resources, and how sometimes you actually had to make do with some other unit choice or take bad exchange rates in the market, and how exploration was rewarded with "having access to the resources you want". Logistics & Dragons was seriously one of my favourite parts, because I'm a nerd even by the standards of turn-based strategy games.
I'm definitely going to give 5 a fair try, and apparently my sister loved the hell out of it after the first campaign, which she admitted was boring as fuck. If Steam had Dominions 3 I'd grab that, despite PL's instructions to the contrary there, but I might look at the game's site and see what the price is and all that anyway. What I'd really like is to play Warlords 2 again, but that's probably just nostalgia - when I first played a demo of it, we didn't have the Internet and so the art of half the units in that was close to porn. Never mind that the game itself was fun at the time.

> Count Arioch the 28th wrote:There is NOTHING better than lesbians. Lesbians make everything better.

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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules » Mon Jul 22, 2013 3:48 am

You should probably wait on trying Dominions 3 anyways. The sequel promises to be a straight improvement, and it comes out in a little over a month.
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Post by Chamomile » Mon Jul 22, 2013 5:33 am

Why does K refer to it as HoMM XI? I looked up the series on Wikipedia but have been unable to discover where these other five installments might be coming from. There are far more than five of both spin-offs and expansions.
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name_here
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Post by name_here » Mon Jul 22, 2013 5:41 am

Probably confusion with the related Might and Magic RPG series, which I'm pretty sure has at least that many installments.

> DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.

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Chamomile
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Post by Chamomile » Mon Jul 22, 2013 6:07 am

Might and Magic was on IX last I checked.
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Post by Username17 » Mon Jul 22, 2013 8:05 am

> Dominicius wrote:Frank, have you played any of the recent King's Bounty games? What is your opinion on them?

Katauri's King's Bounty offerings are indeed the true successor to Heroes of Might and Magic. The problems are as follows:
1. Single Player Only.
2. Limited Replayability due to lack of random map.
3. Inability to choose your faction until late in the game.
4. Kind of stupid character advancement system.
All of that is totally true. But... the units are interesting tactically, there are a fuck tonne more of them than there are in any Ubisoft offering, you can and will mix and match armies out of different factions, the Leadership mechanic gives solid reasons to field armies that are a mix of levels rather than just "all starring" like you did in Heroes 3.
There's just a lot more depth in that game. Now, it's certainly a problem that if you're playing Warriors of the North you necessarily start with Vikings and in Crossworlds you start with Castle forces and in neither case will you be allowed to switch to Elves or Orcs or whatever until you've explored several islands. But the game is so much better in every other way that it's hard to compare.
Really, I just want to throw money at Katauri until they can give me a King's Bounty game with random islands where I can choose to start with demon troops available by taking the Heretic Class or dungeon forces by taking the Overlord class (and so on for Rangers, Knights, Necromancers, and so on). Katauri already has more interesting factions than Ubisoft has factions total (Castle, Viking, Undead, Cavern, Lizards, Orcs, Demons, Elves, Orcs, Dwarves). And you can get Crossworlds for like five Euros or whatever.

> Chamomile wrote:Might and Magic was on IX last I checked.

Ubisoft came out with a Might and Magic X, but it's Ubisoft, so fuck those guys.
K is getting his Xs and Vs mixed up I think.
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Post by Istred » Mon Jul 22, 2013 12:10 pm

While I agree that Kautari's games are great, WotN was quite buggy on release (though they've fixed most of the problems) and it shows that some things got cut in the development (half of Demonis is inaccessible - though the map shows there are shops in that area). Still, compared to the issues the HoMM series has right now, it is a shining example of how to make a game.
And if one isn't afraid to cheat (just a bit) you could easily do a playthrough with almost any faction (neutral and undead are out) you want - just console in the box that sells most of the available units (you pay triple the price though)
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Post by K » Mon Jul 22, 2013 1:02 pm

Is there anything else out there that's still being played and is not showing it's age? I mean, I think Alpha Centauri is a great turn-based strategy game, but it looks and plays like a game from fifteen years ago and no one plays it any more because they got their fill in the late 90s..
If you are going to trash HoMM VI and not sound like a grognard, I think you have to concede that the whole genre of "turn-based fantasy armies with RPG elements" games are pretty shitty in general.
Of the games that are being supported right now, their flaws are:
HoMM VI: Boring from a tactics standpoint, no real meaningful customization, horrible DRM, slightly buggy, poor replayability, cringe-worthy voice acting.
Eador: Master of the Broken World: Impossible to finish even a single-player campaign, incredibly buggy, deeply repetitive.
Dominions 3: Poor AI, crap graphics that look like they are from 1993, learning curve measured in years of play, no diplomacy mechanics despite diplomacy being the deciding factor in MP, hidden mechanics.
Warlock: Master of the Arcane: Slightly buggy, poor AI, repetitive tactics, no meaningful customization, hidden mechanics.
Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes: Too early to say since I just bought it, but it looks pretty low on customization and replayability.
Of course, we could focus on the things that are admirable about these games:
HoMM VI: Hundreds of hours of campaign play.
Eador: Master of the Broken World: Unique campaign play style. High tactical play.
Dominions 3: High degree of custom play and replayability. High tactical play.
Warlock: Master of the Arcane: Unique tactical play in regards to map alteration and Neutral-AI monsters. Decent city-customization.
Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes: Unique city and single-player play in non-campaign play.
Last edited by K on Mon Jul 22, 2013 1:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Dominicius » Mon Jul 22, 2013 1:27 pm

I quite like warlock actually. I am currently trying to beat the Armaggedon campaign on impossible difficulty. The problem is that the AI tends to build poorly defended cities that get captured by the dremer which makes the whole scenario quickly spiral out of control. The dremer mages are the biggest offenders here since they can one shot about 80% of the units you make.
But once I do beat it I'll probobly put it away. Like it was said before, its not that complex with the random maps being the most interesting aspect as they tend to dictate your strategy.
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Post by Istred » Mon Jul 22, 2013 1:29 pm

"Hundreds of hours of gameplay" isn't that admirable when the gameplay itself is boring, repetitive and even tedious.
Anyone here had any contact with the newest version of Disciples III (Rebirth)? I know the base game was about the level of HVI (though without a DRM as bad IIRC), the expansion was supposed to be slightly better (played this one a bit - and went back to DII), but I'm hearing different things about this release (as much as a release it was - what, one or two english sites sell the game).
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Post by K » Mon Jul 22, 2013 2:32 pm

> Dominicius wrote:I quite like warlock actually. I am currently trying to beat the Armaggedon campaign on impossible difficulty. The problem is that the AI tends to build poorly defended cities that get captured by the dremer which makes the whole scenario quickly spiral out of control. The dremer mages are the biggest offenders here since they can one shot about 80% of the units you make.
> But once I do beat it I'll probably put it away. Like it was said before, its not that complex with the random maps being the most interesting aspect as they tend to dictate your strategy.

It took me 60 hours to get bored of Warlock, and so I can't say that I didn't get the value of the $14.99 that I dropped for it. I think I'd get a lot more out of it if I understood how you get a god's favor because you could customize playthroughs a bit with that, but mostly the numbers seem to move randomly.
HoMM VI has me 60 hours in and only done with the Tutorial and almost done with the Undead Campaign, and I fully expect to do at least one more campaign. Total cost: $14.99 because I didn't get Shades of Darkness for another $14.99.
Eador has me in for 206 hours at $9.99 before the bugs just took too much of a toll on my sanity. I'll wait for another major update before I go back to it.
Dominions 3 can't even be estimated. I paid full price like five years ago and have played the shit out of it. I easily have a Master's degree in Dominions 3 if we went by the work-hours and research hours.
Fallen Enchantress is new for me and I'm only six hours in, and so time will have to tell.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin » Mon Jul 22, 2013 3:00 pm

> Istred wrote:"Hundreds of hours of gameplay" isn't that admirable when the gameplay itself is boring, repetitive and even tedious.

And the road is a million miles long. And the hammer is made of wank.
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Post by Dominicius » Mon Jul 22, 2013 3:07 pm

> K wrote:HoMM VI has me 60 hours in and only done with the Tutorial and almost done with the Undead Campaign, and I fully expect to do at least one more campaign. Total cost: $14.99 because I didn't get Shades of Darkness for another $14.99.

Is the story at least any good? I could still see myself getting the game if the writting is excellent. It is kinda the reason why I to this stay still hold HoMM IV as the second best HoMM game since it had the best storyline in the series for me.
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Post by Username17 » Mon Jul 22, 2013 4:51 pm

> Dominicius wrote:

> > K wrote:HoMM VI has me 60 hours in and only done with the Tutorial and almost done with the Undead Campaign, and I fully expect to do at least one more campaign. Total cost: $14.99 because I didn't get Shades of Darkness for another $14.99.

> Is the story at least any good? I could still see myself getting the game if the writting is excellent. It is kinda the reason why I to this stay still hold HoMM IV as the second best HoMM game since it had the best storyline in the series for me.

The story isn't good. It's marred by bad voice acting of course, but the big problem is that it's a prequel to Heroes V. And Heroes V already had a bad story. So you're stuck not only with a fairly stupid set of countries, but you already know how it turns out because it's all backstory to a game that already came out.
The story itself is about five siblings splitting up and joining five different countries and still loving each other even though one of them is a fucking demon lord. Progression of the plot requires everyone to hold the idiot ball in both hands all the time.
I would dispute K's assertion that he got 60 hours of entertainment out of it. The game defaults to running at 1/3rd speed, and also sits around picking its ass for several minutes deciding whether or not the DRM will let you play the game from time to time. K's claim that this is 60 hours of entertainment is like unto the claim that watching an episode of Buffy is an hour of entertainment. While an hour has passed, I don't think you should count the commercial breaks as "entertainment". So just as I would classify an episode of Buffy as like 43 minutes of entertainment, I would say that K has probably gotten like 15 to 20 hours out of HoMM VI. And yes, the ratio is really that bad.
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Post by K » Mon Jul 22, 2013 7:31 pm

> FrankTrollman wrote:
> I would dispute K's assertion that he got 60 hours of entertainment out of it. The game defaults to running at 1/3rd speed, and also sits around picking its ass for several minutes deciding whether or not the DRM will let you play the game from time to time. K's claim that this is 60 hours of entertainment is like unto the claim that watching an episode of Buffy is an hour of entertainment. While an hour has passed, I don't think you should count the commercial breaks as "entertainment". So just as I would classify an episode of Buffy as like 43 minutes of entertainment, I would say that K has probably gotten like 15 to 20 hours out of HoMM VI. And yes, the ratio is really that bad.
> -Username17

I've never had to wait for the game to do anything even once. Either they patched the issue before I bought it and after you played it, or my internet is just much cooler than yours. I also don't get dropped out of a game without a save, don't get freezes of any sort, and have played continuously and at my pleasure. (The opening movie is cut in half for me, but that's not an issue because I don't watch it since you can skip it about four seconds in.)
So yes, I've literally played for 60 hours. Steam records that shit. I'll probably get at least 40 more hours in because I want to see what kind of storytelling gymnastics they do to make the Infernal campaign even slightly sympathetic.
I also very rarely get the pathing problem. Literally, it happens in maybe one or two spots on each map and I can just click a few extra times to get it to right itself each time I hit that spot.
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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch » Mon Jul 22, 2013 9:18 pm

It wasn't just frank, trust me. That game was a flaming pile of unreliable shit for about two months after release. It started to become vaguely playable after the second or third patch--I forget which--but I'm afraid it was one of those games where they released patch notes that said amusingly blunt crap like "AI now defends its secondary towns" and "Huge speed increases and optimization, AI now thinks three times faster." So I can certainly believe that they were able to greatly improve that game, but that's a backhanded compliment given that I also believe that the game shipped in a half-baked state, so the bar there was pretty low.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Mon Jul 22, 2013 9:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
bears fall, everyone dies
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Username17
  Serious Badass
  Posts: 29894
  Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

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Post by Username17 » Tue Jul 23, 2013 5:57 am

Yeah, I can nitpick shit in King's Bounty like sometimes when you're talking to someone they have little bits of code in their dialog box like a hanging "/s" or whatever. Or that the fact that skills all have prerequisites of each other mean that you're going to end up taking the same skills every game. Or the fact that it's disappointing that you don't get to field a demon army until the game is practically over. These are all problems.
But compared to Heroes VI? It's not even a fair comparison. You can only field 5 different armies in the whole game (6 with the expansion), and the Demon army is laughably weak while the Necromancer army is shit on your face powerful. Glitches of the game ending variety are common (for example: if you attack a neutral town while you have music playing in another program, the game crashes, if you cast Feign Death and take damage before you attack, the game crashes, and so on). Abilities are messed up all over the place (Tactics doesn't let you rearrange large creatures, the ability cool-down timer doesn't always increment, etc.). But the bottom line is that even if they managed to wrangle all the spaghetti code tomorrow and have everything working the way it's supposed to, the design of the game is still incredibly shitty.
-Username17
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shadzar
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### Re: Heroes of Might and Magic VI is a War Crime

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Post by shadzar » Tue Jul 23, 2013 8:17 am

> FrankTrollman wrote:Heroes VI got rid of most of the special resources. Gems? Gone. Sulfur? Gone. Mercury? Gone. You get Wood, Ore, and Crystal

anybody got Wood for Crystal?
[/catan]
sorry. good thread, don't know the game, but i return you back to it now.
Play the game, not the rules.

> Swordslinger wrote:Or fuck it... I'm just going to get weapon specialization in my cock and whip people to death with it. Given all the enemies are total pussies, it seems like the appropriate thing to do.

> Lewis Black wrote:If the people of New Zealand want to be part of our world, I believe they should hop off their islands, and push 'em closer.

good read (Note to self Maxus sucks a barrel of cocks.)
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Zinegata
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  Posts: 4071
  Joined: Mon Aug 17, 2009 7:33 am

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Post by Zinegata » Tue Jul 23, 2013 8:23 am

> FrankTrollman wrote:1. Single Player Only.
> 2. Limited Replayability due to lack of random map.
> 3. Inability to choose your faction until late in the game.
> 4. Kind of stupid character advancement system.

Crossworlds has a couple of extra campaigns where you aren't pidgeon-holed into playing the Princess; and it has an editor.
That said I haven't really seen anyone work magic on that editor yet to create a demon-based campaign...
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