HoMM3: Complete (GOG version) with the HD-mod. I think it's better to be acquainted with the iconic base version before getting into mods like Horn of the Abyss.
HoMM3: Complete (GOG version) with the HD-mod. I think it's better to be acquainted with the iconic base version before getting into mods like Horn of the Abyss.
>HoMM3: Complete (GOG version)
That's all you need.
Never play inferno, even if it's really cool
>try the campaign >strong womyn who needs no man shows up >joined by another strong womyn who needs no man even harder
and all my interest was gone
nice eternal early access by the way
The question is if the stronk women are sexy or not. If they're flat chested men then pass. If they're booba and sexy then who cares. The problem is when they make women into lame men.
>goygoygoy slopslopslposlpop
You're ruined your life with your mentally ill obsession about politics and there is no saving it, beyond that you have achieved nothing
HoMM3 is easily the most popular version, followed up by 2 and 5. And with that in mind the answer is none: GOG-version of HoMM3: Complete is what you want (also available for pirates) with the HD mod (https://sites.google.com/site/heroes3hd/) is what you want.
The HoMM 3 "HD Edition" available on Steam doesn't have the expansions, doesn't have the quality-of-life features and bugfixes of the mod, doesn't have mods available to it in general, nobody plays it in MP, and the "HD graphics" are basically just Photoshop smooth tool smeared over the original sprites and it looks worse to boot.
Nope, it's just Restoration of Erathia, apparently they lost the source code or something. So you basically get 1/3rds of the campaigns and maps available in Complete.
>original game - normal sprites which age like wine >developer pretend original art was pixel vomit which age like milk >OP game is pixel vomit which already look like shit
Indie dev scene which pursue pixel vomit art is beyond my comprehension
Now that I think about it, I think those low-res sprites are actually from the game... they are how the units appear in overhead map (where they of course perfectly fine since they appear smaller than in battles)! Which in a sense even worse, since the "remastered" graphics with the Photoshop smear tool now have the wrong perspective and they pop out.
>original game - normal sprites which age like wine >developer pretend original art was pixel vomit which age like milk >OP game is pixel vomit which already look like shit
Indie dev scene which pursue pixel vomit art is beyond my comprehension
Unironically homm 4 is like a cult classic. Might not be cool enough to be in the homm mainstream, but its got some charm and really nice campaigns. The undead campaign specifically is probably my favourite homm campaign ever.
>The undead campaign specifically is probably my favourite homm campaign ever.
definitely. people also forget the company was burning down around the team while heroes 4 was being developed. it's kind of amazing it even got released.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/297000/Heroes_of_Might__Magic_III__HD_Edition/
This is the only one you can get and it's good enough for a beginner but there have been some discrepancies and a few things broken, but if you never played it, I think this is good enough. The "Homm:3 Complete GOG" with the hd-mod does everything better than the steam release, it looks better and has no afromentioned discrepancies and weird glitches that account certain things wrongly. Over all it's not the end of the world if you never played it and you're a lazy bones. If it grows on you and you finish it and will be craving for more you will end up with HoMM3: Complete version + HD mod eitherway because it's required for massive overhaul mods that majority of playerbase plays in 2023. These overhaul mods, like the less popular, mostly played by russians, Wake of Gods includes a shit ton of new gameplay elements and is wild, the "e-sport" and the western go to mod, Horn of the Abyss, adds only more content and balances some OP things from vanilla without adding more mechanics on top of the game.
3 and 5 are great. 5 has a more story-focused campaign that can make the game more palatable at first. The campaign missions in 3 aren't usually all that interesting.
For the record, you don't have to play the campaigns. I probably have 2k something hours clocked in HoMM3 and I haven't completed a single one, I just don't like the gameplay style of campaigns. The scenarios tend to have some kind of fluff or story content anyway.
the only games I can think of that are kind of similar are disciples, maybe age of wonders sort of, and heroes hour sort of, and the game OP posted, it's somewhat unique but you'd get a lot of replayability out of HoMM3 anyway if you enjoy the genre, 5 is ok too but I personally don't like the 3d graphics
the only games I can think of that are kind of similar are disciples, maybe age of wonders sort of, and heroes hour sort of, and the game OP posted, it's somewhat unique but you'd get a lot of replayability out of HoMM3 anyway if you enjoy the genre, 5 is ok too but I personally don't like the 3d graphics
wrong anon meant to reply to
extremely new in this homm shit but i really like how this game looks, i assume it plays similar to brigandine. any other games like this?
In terms of gameplay it's about as different as turn-based strategy/tactics games with separate campaign map and battle modes can be (coming from the wargaming tradition), but Dominions ticks a lot of the same boxes in terms of providing a wide selection of diverse fantasy races and monsters, powerful magic, and pre-eminent necromacy mechanics.
For the record, if it piques your interest, each version has been "the previous, but with more stuff" and Dominions 6 is poised to release soon, almost certainly rendering Dom5 obsolete, so don't get it yet. Maybe pirate - it's not good for multiplayer since the game gets fairly frequent updates and there's CD-key check so you'd be fucked if two pirates join the same game, but you can of course get acquainted with SP
it's pretty good but not as good as HoMM3, not sure what value this offers besides being on steam, the HoMM3 on steam sucks but that's probably all I can think of
yes, because sadly it's shit
I would really, really LOVE to say it's good, we have waited for a good Heroes-style game since Heroes 5 Tribes of the east from 2007, but this game is not it:
-shitty abilities that only give x% more of X thing, large portion of spells is also just that, there are some major and more interesting abilities at levels 8, 16 and 24 but it's too little too late
-unit size limit, there is a reason almost nobody remembers kings bounty but even normies talk about heroes 3; you don't really feel powerful at the end of a mission/campaign because you just have 50 guys with swords and shields rather than 20 guys with swords; fights are basically bashing your head against the wall because there is no wait or defend option available universally for all units, fights with 0 losses are almost unseen unless you're 10x stronger or have access to OP spells (there isn't a lot of these anyway, spells are bland af), which means you need to constantly reinforce your main army
-the AI just simply cheats, you destroy 5 full armies in a row and another 2 appear out of nowhere, apparently this is fixed in the new update tho
-i like the artstyle but visibility is worse than in h5 and you never know what is a pickup and what is a decoration because FUCKING EVERYTHING GLOWS
-devs are constantly jacking off to how they listen to the community but the community is just HoMM 3 fans complaining about the game devs ruining the game with their oRiGiNaL changes to the formula
tldr; it's worth picking up when it will go on a massive -80% sale in a year or two to play with a friend, avoid until then
Why would they just make homm3 2.0 instead of something original? If you want to stack 999 dragons and powertrip through the game with spells then you should play homm3, I really don't understand this sentiment. It's not like homm3 suffers from technical limitations that prevent it from running on modern Windows.
>-i like the artstyle but visibility is worse than in h5 and you never know what is a pickup and what is a decoration because FUCKING EVERYTHING GLOWS
I haven't played since like back in March, but I remember reading a patch note that said they improved on this. Is it still not better or have you not played the game after that patch either?
>-shitty abilities that only give x% more of X thing, large portion of spells is also just that, there are some major and more interesting abilities at levels 8, 16 and 24 but it's too little too late
I think the way essence allows you to combine different spells makes it fun. It's not magic like in HoMM which makes this point pretty fun >but the community is just HoMM 3 fans complaining about the game devs ruining the game with their oRiGiNaL changes to the formula
lmao
Just like with 2 and 4 the critique from HoMM3 fans always boils down to "it's not HoMM3"
>The undead campaign specifically is probably my favourite homm campaign ever.
definitely. people also forget the company was burning down around the team while heroes 4 was being developed. it's kind of amazing it even got released.
The addon campaign is where the story becomes some weird mess
I don't know why the AI even needs to cheat in a HOMM game. We're at the point where neural networks are good enough that you can essentially teach the AI how to composition, the rest, resource management, building armies, attacking the player, are all relatively simple tasks. Difficulty is really just how much of a min/maxxing dick the AI is especially in combat.
I think you are severely underestimating the difficulty. Sure, a competent programmer familiar with machine learning could write a neural network based Chess engine using Monte Carlo tree search, knowing little more than the core architecture that was used in AlphaZero (which, and I want to mention this because this is a common misconception, is shit: today it would be like #5 engine if that) and some decades-old basics of how it makes sense to represent the game internally (bitboards and stuff), train the net on his personal computer, and achieve superhuman performance, which admittedly is a pretty low bar due to how amenable Chess is to computer play. Lots of these engines in qualifying engine tournaments.
But on the other hand, OpenAI Five and AlphaStar required lots of work by some of the brilliant AI-developers in the field, training runs costing tens of millions, and what they achieved was top-level human performance with some obvious weaknesses and strengths largely exploiting superhuman mechanics that, when fixed in Alphastar, maintained high-level human play but far from top professionals. I strongly suspect the difficulty of making HoMM-like NN-AI would be "somewhere in between".
I think the best approach is how you tend to approach GOFAI if you want to make it good, as seen in e.g. Age of Empires 2 remaster and most AI mods: you hand code human knowledge like known efficient build orders and known counters and get them to do that. Yes, this will lead to meta builds (but then, so would "actually good" NN AI), and this leaves even more exploitable weaknesses than sufficiently well-trained NN, but as demonstrated by numerous mods that increase AI's proficiency by a large factor without as much as access to the source code, there tends to be HUGE quantities of low-hanging fruit in almost all games, and picking that will get you an AI that is "good enough".
I'm suggesting a hybrid AI, I think some decision trees can be effectively done with q-learning such as optimal army compositions (and what's great about this is you can stop training early which will essentially give you different difficulty tiers) but you still have traditional AI for battles and tactics. What's interesting is the composition AI could be queried by the traditional AI whose suggestions could influence research trees, buildings purchased, special resources to acquire, etc.
Ah, right, I can see a hybrid approach being far easier to implement, but then, I think humans are actually pretty good at coming up with build orders and army compositions (it is the tactical understanding that makes the AI not so exploitable that's difficult) so if you take the task seriously (it does require the devs to do their homework), the handcrafted builds nicked from human expert plays would do as well. Although I guess machine learning might be able to work in a degree of reactivity much better, and getting non-artificial difficulty settings "for free" is definitely a bonus. It would be nice to see such an approach working in practice.
I have no idea if this game is good or not but why does it look like SHIT in 2023. This pixel art is vomit inducing, what the fuck are indie devs doing.
I thought it was going to be a replacement for homm for me. >town building is akward >no wait option in battle >limited stacks >hero levels dictate amount of units carried >spell casting is just awkward between useless and absolutely broken
Its still a fine game, but not hitting the homm itch. I'll just wait for silence of the siren to release, they are thank god absolutely shameless about ripping off homm 3. Since they know where the series peaked, while still adding a few nice mechanics. I just hope they will be able to stick to their own release timeline.
I got this gifted a while ago and it stutters horribly. Like, it's fucking impossible to play. Anytime you do anything the game stutters like crazy and I have no idea why, my pc should move this at 2 million fps.
I played a HoMM game like 20 years ago and I don't remember anything about it
Where do I start?
HoMM3: Complete (GOG version) with the HD-mod. I think it's better to be acquainted with the iconic base version before getting into mods like Horn of the Abyss.
>HoMM3: Complete (GOG version)
That's all you need.
Never play inferno, even if it's really cool
>inferno
>really cool
That's tower
>try the campaign
>strong womyn who needs no man shows up
>joined by another strong womyn who needs no man even harder
and all my interest was gone
nice eternal early access by the way
>strong womyn who needs no man shows up
?
The question is if the stronk women are sexy or not. If they're flat chested men then pass. If they're booba and sexy then who cares. The problem is when they make women into lame men.
they look atrocious https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RT4-UA_Rh0
>androgenous ugly female
pass
>Early Access
he didn't fly so good
fly is banned dumbo
Jesus christ i thought he threw him out of a fucking plane.
>no townscreens, no buy
simple as
This, for some reason I thought "well of course it has town screens" but it didn't
>NOOOOO WHY DONT YOU TALK ABOUT [DERIVATIVE/COPY&PASTE GÖYSLOP] !!!!
Fuck off and die, you total waste of oxygen.
>goygoygoy slopslopslposlpop
You're ruined your life with your mentally ill obsession about politics and there is no saving it, beyond that you have achieved nothing
Never played HOMM before but it looks like an interesting genre. I'll try OP games but what is the best HOMM to purchase on steam atm?
HoMM3 is easily the most popular version, followed up by 2 and 5. And with that in mind the answer is none: GOG-version of HoMM3: Complete is what you want (also available for pirates) with the HD mod (https://sites.google.com/site/heroes3hd/) is what you want.
The HoMM 3 "HD Edition" available on Steam doesn't have the expansions, doesn't have the quality-of-life features and bugfixes of the mod, doesn't have mods available to it in general, nobody plays it in MP, and the "HD graphics" are basically just Photoshop smooth tool smeared over the original sprites and it looks worse to boot.
Holy fuck, it doesn't have expansions? I didn't know it's that bad
Nope, it's just Restoration of Erathia, apparently they lost the source code or something. So you basically get 1/3rds of the campaigns and maps available in Complete.
Now that I think about it, I think those low-res sprites are actually from the game... they are how the units appear in overhead map (where they of course perfectly fine since they appear smaller than in battles)! Which in a sense even worse, since the "remastered" graphics with the Photoshop smear tool now have the wrong perspective and they pop out.
>original game - normal sprites which age like wine
>developer pretend original art was pixel vomit which age like milk
>OP game is pixel vomit which already look like shit
Indie dev scene which pursue pixel vomit art is beyond my comprehension
Heroes 3 was the peak.
I'm inclined to agree, but Disciples 2 always sat better with me for some reason.
well, they are different games. disciples 2 had outstanding art direction
Unironically homm 4 is like a cult classic. Might not be cool enough to be in the homm mainstream, but its got some charm and really nice campaigns. The undead campaign specifically is probably my favourite homm campaign ever.
>The undead campaign specifically is probably my favourite homm campaign ever.
definitely. people also forget the company was burning down around the team while heroes 4 was being developed. it's kind of amazing it even got released.
Yea, from what I heard it was basically company death either way, so they just released what they had, even if it was still unfinished.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/297000/Heroes_of_Might__Magic_III__HD_Edition/
This is the only one you can get and it's good enough for a beginner but there have been some discrepancies and a few things broken, but if you never played it, I think this is good enough. The "Homm:3 Complete GOG" with the hd-mod does everything better than the steam release, it looks better and has no afromentioned discrepancies and weird glitches that account certain things wrongly. Over all it's not the end of the world if you never played it and you're a lazy bones. If it grows on you and you finish it and will be craving for more you will end up with HoMM3: Complete version + HD mod eitherway because it's required for massive overhaul mods that majority of playerbase plays in 2023. These overhaul mods, like the less popular, mostly played by russians, Wake of Gods includes a shit ton of new gameplay elements and is wild, the "e-sport" and the western go to mod, Horn of the Abyss, adds only more content and balances some OP things from vanilla without adding more mechanics on top of the game.
Never suggest anyone to play a fucking Ubisoft version, you absolute rotten cunt. Complete Edition is on GOG.
3 and 5 are great. 5 has a more story-focused campaign that can make the game more palatable at first. The campaign missions in 3 aren't usually all that interesting.
For the record, you don't have to play the campaigns. I probably have 2k something hours clocked in HoMM3 and I haven't completed a single one, I just don't like the gameplay style of campaigns. The scenarios tend to have some kind of fluff or story content anyway.
H5 plays cumbersomely because of the jump to 3D.
Oh...HOMM
I heard that another game is as good as homm...disciples i think
Can't member
Thanks OP for reminding me this game exists, I need something like this to play right now.
extremely new in this homm shit but i really like how this game looks, i assume it plays similar to brigandine. any other games like this?
>any other games like this?
Kings Bounbty, specifically KB the Legend and KB Armored Princess
the only games I can think of that are kind of similar are disciples, maybe age of wonders sort of, and heroes hour sort of, and the game OP posted, it's somewhat unique but you'd get a lot of replayability out of HoMM3 anyway if you enjoy the genre, 5 is ok too but I personally don't like the 3d graphics
wrong anon meant to reply to
thx anon, im about to buy songs of conquest, hommV and armored princess
In terms of gameplay it's about as different as turn-based strategy/tactics games with separate campaign map and battle modes can be (coming from the wargaming tradition), but Dominions ticks a lot of the same boxes in terms of providing a wide selection of diverse fantasy races and monsters, powerful magic, and pre-eminent necromacy mechanics.
For the record, if it piques your interest, each version has been "the previous, but with more stuff" and Dominions 6 is poised to release soon, almost certainly rendering Dom5 obsolete, so don't get it yet. Maybe pirate - it's not good for multiplayer since the game gets fairly frequent updates and there's CD-key check so you'd be fucked if two pirates join the same game, but you can of course get acquainted with SP
I'd buy Song of Conquest but I'm still playing Realm of Chaos in HoMM3.
it's pretty good but not as good as HoMM3, not sure what value this offers besides being on steam, the HoMM3 on steam sucks but that's probably all I can think of
> you can't accumulate trillions of thousands of units
meh
>comically woke SJW garbage
>messy pixelshit art style with gradients
into the trash
yes, because sadly it's shit
I would really, really LOVE to say it's good, we have waited for a good Heroes-style game since Heroes 5 Tribes of the east from 2007, but this game is not it:
-shitty abilities that only give x% more of X thing, large portion of spells is also just that, there are some major and more interesting abilities at levels 8, 16 and 24 but it's too little too late
-unit size limit, there is a reason almost nobody remembers kings bounty but even normies talk about heroes 3; you don't really feel powerful at the end of a mission/campaign because you just have 50 guys with swords and shields rather than 20 guys with swords; fights are basically bashing your head against the wall because there is no wait or defend option available universally for all units, fights with 0 losses are almost unseen unless you're 10x stronger or have access to OP spells (there isn't a lot of these anyway, spells are bland af), which means you need to constantly reinforce your main army
-the AI just simply cheats, you destroy 5 full armies in a row and another 2 appear out of nowhere, apparently this is fixed in the new update tho
-i like the artstyle but visibility is worse than in h5 and you never know what is a pickup and what is a decoration because FUCKING EVERYTHING GLOWS
-devs are constantly jacking off to how they listen to the community but the community is just HoMM 3 fans complaining about the game devs ruining the game with their oRiGiNaL changes to the formula
tldr; it's worth picking up when it will go on a massive -80% sale in a year or two to play with a friend, avoid until then
Why would they just make homm3 2.0 instead of something original? If you want to stack 999 dragons and powertrip through the game with spells then you should play homm3, I really don't understand this sentiment. It's not like homm3 suffers from technical limitations that prevent it from running on modern Windows.
>-i like the artstyle but visibility is worse than in h5 and you never know what is a pickup and what is a decoration because FUCKING EVERYTHING GLOWS
I haven't played since like back in March, but I remember reading a patch note that said they improved on this. Is it still not better or have you not played the game after that patch either?
>-shitty abilities that only give x% more of X thing, large portion of spells is also just that, there are some major and more interesting abilities at levels 8, 16 and 24 but it's too little too late
I think the way essence allows you to combine different spells makes it fun. It's not magic like in HoMM which makes this point pretty fun
>but the community is just HoMM 3 fans complaining about the game devs ruining the game with their oRiGiNaL changes to the formula
lmao
Just like with 2 and 4 the critique from HoMM3 fans always boils down to "it's not HoMM3"
The addon campaign is where the story becomes some weird mess
I don't know why the AI even needs to cheat in a HOMM game. We're at the point where neural networks are good enough that you can essentially teach the AI how to composition, the rest, resource management, building armies, attacking the player, are all relatively simple tasks. Difficulty is really just how much of a min/maxxing dick the AI is especially in combat.
I think you are severely underestimating the difficulty. Sure, a competent programmer familiar with machine learning could write a neural network based Chess engine using Monte Carlo tree search, knowing little more than the core architecture that was used in AlphaZero (which, and I want to mention this because this is a common misconception, is shit: today it would be like #5 engine if that) and some decades-old basics of how it makes sense to represent the game internally (bitboards and stuff), train the net on his personal computer, and achieve superhuman performance, which admittedly is a pretty low bar due to how amenable Chess is to computer play. Lots of these engines in qualifying engine tournaments.
But on the other hand, OpenAI Five and AlphaStar required lots of work by some of the brilliant AI-developers in the field, training runs costing tens of millions, and what they achieved was top-level human performance with some obvious weaknesses and strengths largely exploiting superhuman mechanics that, when fixed in Alphastar, maintained high-level human play but far from top professionals. I strongly suspect the difficulty of making HoMM-like NN-AI would be "somewhere in between".
I think the best approach is how you tend to approach GOFAI if you want to make it good, as seen in e.g. Age of Empires 2 remaster and most AI mods: you hand code human knowledge like known efficient build orders and known counters and get them to do that. Yes, this will lead to meta builds (but then, so would "actually good" NN AI), and this leaves even more exploitable weaknesses than sufficiently well-trained NN, but as demonstrated by numerous mods that increase AI's proficiency by a large factor without as much as access to the source code, there tends to be HUGE quantities of low-hanging fruit in almost all games, and picking that will get you an AI that is "good enough".
I'm suggesting a hybrid AI, I think some decision trees can be effectively done with q-learning such as optimal army compositions (and what's great about this is you can stop training early which will essentially give you different difficulty tiers) but you still have traditional AI for battles and tactics. What's interesting is the composition AI could be queried by the traditional AI whose suggestions could influence research trees, buildings purchased, special resources to acquire, etc.
Ah, right, I can see a hybrid approach being far easier to implement, but then, I think humans are actually pretty good at coming up with build orders and army compositions (it is the tactical understanding that makes the AI not so exploitable that's difficult) so if you take the task seriously (it does require the devs to do their homework), the handcrafted builds nicked from human expert plays would do as well. Although I guess machine learning might be able to work in a degree of reactivity much better, and getting non-artificial difficulty settings "for free" is definitely a bonus. It would be nice to see such an approach working in practice.
>even normies talk about heroes 3
You are so lost if you think normies have any clue about this game.
quick question, do i buy armored princess or crossworlds? are they different? the steam trailer is the same
Crossworlds. It has all the base stuff of armored princess and some more
I have no idea if this game is good or not but why does it look like SHIT in 2023. This pixel art is vomit inducing, what the fuck are indie devs doing.
>fake fun
>fake "retro graphix"
pass.
I thought it was going to be a replacement for homm for me.
>town building is akward
>no wait option in battle
>limited stacks
>hero levels dictate amount of units carried
>spell casting is just awkward between useless and absolutely broken
Its still a fine game, but not hitting the homm itch. I'll just wait for silence of the siren to release, they are thank god absolutely shameless about ripping off homm 3. Since they know where the series peaked, while still adding a few nice mechanics. I just hope they will be able to stick to their own release timeline.
>Heroes of Might & Magic
>Age of Wonders
>Disciples
Which do I go with?
HoMM 3
all three. they're distinct enough.
Listen to
They all scratch a slightly different itch. All are great.
Specifically, AoW 1 and Shadow Magic. 3 and 4 are more like modern Civ hybrids. I won't say that they're bad games but 1 and 2 are much better.
>still in EA
wake me up when it's done
>poor man's homm
meh, i'd rather just replay homm3 or king's bounty again
>early access and massive sale
can't think off a bigger red flag
I'd rather just keep playing homm3
I got this gifted a while ago and it stutters horribly. Like, it's fucking impossible to play. Anytime you do anything the game stutters like crazy and I have no idea why, my pc should move this at 2 million fps.