So, felt we've derailed that other thread enough and HoL will get nuked soon it seems so here we are.

I've decided to pick up IV, out of nostalgia but also due to our discussion, some thoughts:

Medusa are OP as fuck! I have the feeling they can stand up to Phoenixes 1 on 1 and win due to Petrifying Gaze and other skills (tier 2 vs tier 4).
Also Cyclops WTH, they are insane too. Put a dozen of them on your towers and laugh as the guy's entire army dies in a few shots. They are so good I am beginning to wonder if the version I got has them bugged, nothing should do that much damage in AoE D:
Black Dragons... just no comment. I felt like I needed a comfort shower after they were through with my army.

Chaos in general seems crazy as fuck, Medusa, Black Dragons, Effreet and Nightmares... total rape.

And I still think the Heroes fight decision is bad, especially in the campaign where you are limited by levels and your fighting heroes are total clusterfucks while the caster heroes might as well be invulnerable because all they do is cast anyway. Though I do recall my custom map where I put up alot of creeps, gave them many months to get crazy numbers and then fought them with my OP heroes (huge level, super gear), that was fun so there may be hope yet.

And even though it might not seem the case I am actually having quite a bit of fun playing, more fun then I've had playing a game in a long time actually.

Heroes III WOG and Heroes IV are the kind of games that have just so much stuff that they suck you in by the need to explore it all! The Russian community has produced a lot of awesome maps and campaigns for both (as well as more NEW mods for Heroes III!), so I got hooked into different sort of gamestyles: it's sorta like Warcraft III - there is the whole overaching strategy gamestyle, but in reality, with the awesome editor one can also make a Single RPG, a hero-party RPG, a funky quest, a chess-like game, even the Olympic Games!

As for the units, I think Chaos was overpowered in previous games too - that is, overpowered but pricey. Wait until your Might hero gets stronger and try to go to the Might Colosseum - you'll have to beat Black Dragons for super-extra EXP!

But as far as magic goes, I was always a noob using almost exclusively nuke-like Chaos spells (INFERNO! CHAIN LIGHTING! DISINTEGRATION! MUAHAHA!), but now I think a lucky Order mage is much more dangerous: Ice Bolt is a light menace already, but stuff like Hypnosis and especially Berserk can be devastating.

I think it's not the Cyclops' that are overpowered, but rather the towers themselves. A unit on the tower gets tremendous bonuses to attack and defense - magic is probably the only thing that can help to effectively beat tower-defended units. There is a reason the Order school has a specific Pushing spell!

I'm not surprised the Phoenixes are weak - all Nature units were light-armored, as far as I remember. But they are all fast and quite numerous - especially in a druid army. For all intents and purposes, an experienced druid specialized in Summoning and with a lot of mana can break the game (thouhg that could be said about a lot of hero combinations):

That's no bug, that's a feature!

Heroes 4 was fun because of how heroes could fight, but I felt it was pretty unbalanced.

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There is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a truly just man.

Personally, I think any faction could become game-breaking if played right.

The only "pure might" faction is, well, Might. No funky magic tricks, you just had to gather more troops, train your Barbarian fast (especially Magic Defense!( and try to rush your enemies while they are underdeveloped.

Life rewarded army tactics. Order - patient leveling and tricky magic. Chaos - good economic structure to sustain the costly troops. Death - just survive until you get the vampires.

My buddy at Ubisoft was responsible for the recent (or second most recent?) reboot of the lore. I think I should get around to playing it some time but I got HOMM... 3, I think, and I couldn't get into it.

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There has been only one lore reboot as of now.

III is usually considered "the best", so the series may not be your style.

I was introuduced to the series with Heroes 4. I really-really liked the stories, especially the Necromancers Half-Dead one. When I tried Heroes 3 and I could not use heroes seperately, my face went like this.

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Someday I will finish this...

But chain lightning is so good, right besides blind.

I prefer berserk to blind.

Don't they have a facebook game that has nothing to do with the rest of the series?

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I've played every game in the series except 4 and 6. I have fond memories of it, though at this point I'm not willing to spend much money on the series (I got HoMM 5 + expansions as a cheap bundle).

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See WoW in a way you've never imagined it.

"He came to Ahn'qiraj for the strife... instead, he found a wife! She's my qiraji love-bride, next on Sick Sad World of Warcraft!"

I like Heroes series, but I completely suck at it

I have no idea.

Well, if you don't have the actual discs... There is always the Dark Side

That being said, I wouldn't advise ANYONE to buy V with all expansions. It's a cheap money trick. Just buy the last one ("Tribes of the East", I think) and download a mod that lets you play all campaigns (all of them are stashed within every version, but sly money-grabbers wouldn't let you know), plus the correct soundfiles for them.

Ahh, that would explain it.

It also explains why the Cyclops I raised weren't half as strong (though still crazy) when I used them.

Actually I made a mistake, the units I was using were Thunderbirds not Phoenixes, and since Thunders are Might I imagine they are not supposed to be as squishy as Phoenixes.

Now, true Chaos is quite expensive but I have the feeling that when I play the Chaos campaign I will be indestructible!

That's so true. Just combining the various abilities of heroes to see what kind of specialization you can get is extremely engaging.

I'm currently on mission 3 of the Academy campaign, and I've decided to make Solmyr a caster/figher combo, I'll see how it works out.

Though I have to say loosing all your gear between one campaign mission and the next is really annoying. But I imagine that would make your hero even more OP then s/he otherwise is if that were the case.
My Emilia is already a one woman army (using Berserk, Song of Peace, Blind and such spells to control the enemy is so sick).


PS. The torrent I download the game from was really good, it had the original game and both expansions on a very simple and straightforward installation, didn't even need to crack it! If someone would like to know which one it was, feel free to PM me (talking about Heroes IV here).

Losing all of you gear (except for campaign-relevant) has always been a rather sad point in Heroes, though, indeed, balancing. If it's still possible, I'd invest into Combat and Magic Defense skills for Emilia, so that she's not killed on the sight in the final level.

As for the Battle Mage spec, I think it's better for first levels, when Magic Fist (or something) is still a viable weapon.

Oh, and the Chaos campaign is hard, and more adventurous. It still has a lot of castle sieges and some "boss fights", though I was a little disappointed that I had to follow a pirate-related plotline, rather then something similar to Emilia's campaign, like gathering the remnants of Nighon and Tatalian survivors (although there are some references to that throughout the campaign).

As someone who played and enjoyed Heroes V I will say ''Haters gonna hate''. Now can someone tell me if Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is related to the messiah the kept talking about in V?

Yep!

Long story short, the Dark Messiah was born. Basically, "Tribes of the East" is mostly a prequel to the Dark Messiah, centered around cleaning Biara's mess.

Although satyrical, this one blog is handy in summarizing Heroes V plotlines.

I couldn't beat the campaigns but from what I got Isabel did get preggers, Biara impersonated her while he was birthed or something and Dark Messiah happens

Gonna play Dark Messiah next, then I'll continue with Heroes III and IV. I couldn't find the first two, a shame since the gameplay looked pretty fun.

I got a pirated copy of Heroes 3 from a friend shortly after it came out, loved it. If it hadn't been for Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2 that probably would have been the game series I spent the most time in before WoW. Then I bought a copy from GoG.com a few years ago and since then I've hosted a hot seat game with some college friends from time to time. Good times.

I barely know anything about the lore though, are the newer games' campaigns worth doing? I was pretty disappointed with combat in 5.

Too late for that I'm afraid, already decked her out as a caster/leader (plus scouting for the movement boost of pathfinding).
But yeah I can see how keeping her alive from a huge stack of fast flying doom will be problematic without combat's damage reduction. Hopefully I'll be able to chain chug Immortality Potions or something to keep her alive.

Though it kinda sucks that you auto lose if she dies, I mean okay that you lose if she is captured by the enemy but I'd make it okay for her (or other heroes) to die IF you win the battle regardless. Because then she will get rezzed, who cares if she spent some time with Arthas ?

Fuck yeah.

I can't see how someone can hate it, when it looks amazing, plays amazing, has even more options (what with cross-skill mixing) than Heroes IV and has multiple unit upgrade options! I always wanted that!

Not to mention that on top of all of that it brings back the spirit of Heroes III.

I mean damn, it is so good it could have only been better if it came with a first-class hooker.

V onwards the old lore was abandoned and the games were set in the rebooted world of Ashan.

And V's combat was pretty much similar to III.

I would rather say "mechanics" then "spirit", but yeah - aside from the lore and style overhaul, it was in many ways a "Heroes III HD".

Cross-specialization extra skills actually made me frustrated more than once when the game was trying to shove "the wrong" new skills in the level menu.

But my favorite part of Heroes V is alternate upgrades, introduced in "Tribes". But, said upgrades are also usable if you are playing the old campaigns mod I described earlier: you could give Isabel the Red Army from the start! (Which also means a great deal in the last Necromancer mission, where Isabel's troops run away - the Red Army did not exist back when those scripts were made, so you can just transform your paladins into champions and what not - AND THAT TOO MAKES SENSE - because you transform your army into a bunch of Isabel's fanatics, who stay with her no matter how far into the darkness she goes!)

that red army actually got introduced in Hammers of Fate, but you make a nice point. Too bad Isabel flopped hard being Catherine Ironfirst


From what I have heard, HV vanilla was a capital M-E-S-S. They fixed most by the time of TotE but well, that doesn't change the fact that the original product was buggy, unbalanced and stuff.

I don't know, elves were kinda crappy in V and dungeon (dark elves) was OP as usual but besides that I wouldn't say Vanilla HV was bad by any stretch of the imagination.

I even had the pleasure of playing it with friends in a hotseat game and we all had fun, I went crazy spell power Warlock, another had a inspire his troops Knight while the last picked a Wizard. There was this really cool major battle but the guy with the Knight got so unlucky, for one it was the week of Balance which negated his impressive luck and morale bonuses. Even then he was winning against the Wizard player but then the Wiz started repairing his Titans with his Gremlins, the Knight must have taken out the Titans several times but they just kept getting repaired (which would rez the dead).
I guess that must have been kinda OP because in latter games they changed Titans from mechanical to living units (so they can't be repaired by grems) with the bullshit rationalization that they are so lifelike machines they might as well be alive. I personally don't think it was OP, but it is worth mentioning.

Well the above was hardly a professional review but I had fun with it, my noob friends had fun with it. So I say it was good

Yup, but one could only use them in the campaign, while "Tribes" made them playable at all times. They got nerfed, though.