There's a sale on Heroes of Might and Magic 1-5 on GOG and I've never played any of them. So what is the best HoMM game?
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There's a sale on Heroes of Might and Magic 1-5 on GOG and I've never played any of them.
>There's a sale on Heroes of Might and Magic 1-5 on GOG
I love Tim Curry. He made a career out of playing himself in every single role and somehow it always works.
5>3>4>1>2
This except switch the last two.
Yeah, HoMM 2 elaborated upon the first game to the point where nearly every city has the same contents as the first title, with the exception of the two cities that the game added. Saying that 2 is worse than 1 is like saying that 1 is the worst one yet.
This except switch the first two cause frick you 5 aged like milk.
Rancid dogshit > 1
HOMM1 is really good, I don’t know why it so underrated.
2 is basically an improved 1 though
HOMM1 is still really worth playing.
3 is hands down the best.
sometimes you find oldgays who prefer 2 because of nostalgia.
4 lets you do some shenanigans with parties of 3+ heroes with few (or even no) units. my brothers had a lot of fun doing that, but I'm not sure if they actually liked 4 more than 3.
>4 lets you do some shenanigans with parties of 3+ heroes with few (or even no) units.
4 had some interesting concepts, but my biggest gripe was that AI had no capacity for using game's features to the point where overworld would be littered with the graves of their heroes because they just couldn't retrieve the corpse for resurrection with another hero.
Even when played on the highest difficulty, scenarios felt like elaborate tutorials due to AI being so shit at what they did.
>AI had no capacity for using game's features
The AI is utterly incapable of using leaderless creatures. Not even Equilibris manages to fix this, because the AI files are a jumbled mess of spaghetti code.
You can spam level 1 single unit stacks to scout and grab gold/resource piles. Especially effective with Nature or Chaos (sprites have good movement and rogues have stealth, so they can sneak past neutral guardians).
>and rogues have stealth
For a while, it was a fun gimmick to use stealth heroes in order to grab resources. Since doing so behing the enemy's back awarded experience, you could - with initial investment of gold into xp - jumpstart a thief capable of scouring an entire map of resources, mines and artifacts. But doing so always felt like cheating, despite being the proper manner of using game's features.
Play might and magic 6 instead it has real dungeons
Why do dungeons make a difference?
1 is rough and 2 was massive improvment
2 balance is all over the place but it has that msdos soul not found anywhere else
3 is the closest to perfection, and it has lots of mod support like hdmod, hota and about a million custom maps or random map generators
4 I haven't really played but it was unfinished due to budget problems, very few people like it
5 isn't even heroes anymore
>5 isn't even heroes anymore
Nah, anon.
5 is 3 ported to the Etherlords engine, with some of 4's stuff added (ex. hero specializations, caravans).
>the turn times seemed to take forever as well
There are mods for that. Ex. Quantomas or 5.5.
Though I remember reading in an older thread that 5.5 adds a bunch of 'rebalancing' stuff, which changes the gameplay quite a lot for some factions/heroes.
You might want to look for one of the 'pure' fixmods, rather than an overhaul.
I didn't enjoy 5.5 too much although it has been a while and I cannot really specify why that was anymore. I'll try out the other mod, anon, thanks!
3>5>2>1>4
All of them are great though, and I only rate 5 as high as I do because it makes for really fun multiplayer. They fricked the (admittedly already broken in favour of necromancy) balance up with the dwarf expansion, so good luck if you want to turn the world to skellingtons.
But even so, and especially with community maps and mods, you’ll have a blast with any HoMM game except 6+
five had that ugly early 2000's 3d, that was a pretty big reason why i never liked it.
the turn times seemed to take forever as well
I didn't hate it that much but I do prefer 4 over 5
3 is simply the most fun and the one I spent most of my time playing LAN or hotseat
Everyone usually refers to 3 as their go-to and while it's really good I also enjoyed 2 when it was ported to Android phones as my go-to phone game. If you do get the game though, don't join public multiplayer lobbies unless you expect to get stomped. The people still playing HoMM multiplayer have been doing it for 20 years, they're on another level.
The first one gave me nightmares - if you're stupid like me and take a couple too many turns to finish it, enemies will just reach the guaranteed suicidal AoE spell and just perform Allahu Ackbar attacks against your forces.
1 really had the most soulful graphics.
3=5>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>4
Haven't played 1 or 2. Idk if they're on sale too, but if you like 3 you should buy the pack of hero's chronicles. There's a ton of different scenarios to play.
Here's some more recommendations, if you already like HoMM.
Songs of conquest is pretty cool too
Isn't that one still in early access?
Endless Legend is sort of a crossbreed between HoMM and Civilisation, too
Age of Wonders Shadow Magic is probably best game in this genre. At least in terms of features. Closest i ever touched to Master of Magic.
>We could have had the kind of Armageddon's Blade that reached out to M&M magitech roots
>But no, a couple of 'm-muh medievalesque fantasy!' purists shat their pants in a fit of anger and began to bombard the NWC devs and their 3D0 handlers with death threats, to the point where morons at 3D0 decided that a handful of angry shitposts is too much of a bad press to continue the project
If you ever whine about HoM&M 4 being the shittiest title, think this: 4 was brought into existence because older autists were scared of technology in their fantasy genre, so NWC was forced to come up with a new endgame in a hurry at a time when they no longer had the funds.
wow that's shit I hope the purists were put in their place
Why do people always rush to death threats? You can express anger and disappointment without going that far.
"muh death threats" is just the easy dismissal for having incensed criticism against you, because even if it's pure hyperbole any example you can dredge up is clearly vitriolic (because anger inherently is)
This was a terrible idea and we were saved by those original autists who sent them angry letters
t. Contrarian
Might & Magic's universe was initially shaped by divinely advanced species who were capable of linking entirety of existence with wormhole network, as well as building energy weapons and shaping artificial worlds. That tech is still around, but likened to artifacts due to knowledge regarding their creation process and inner workings being long last:
>t. Contrarian
You are the contrarian, you fricking moronic inbred homosexual. The series had no attachment to future technology garbage whatsoever. Trying to force that cringy bullshit was nothing more than pandering to what is evidently the troony audience.
>The series had no attachment to future technology garbage whatsoever.
Yep, you're a contrarian.
>Trying to force that cringy bullshit was nothing more than pandering to what is evidently the troony audience.
And a /misc/tard, to boot.
Thank god for the purists.
"I want guns in my fantasy!" homosexuals are the fricking worst and that looks absolutely shit.
This is what the creators of M&M and HoM&M had always intended, so feel free to seethe some more: https://youtu.be/R_klw9pW1-Y
Somebody got le filterino.
Wizardry and M&M had a Clarke-esque "any sufficiently advanced technology" undertone from the very beginning.
*All Fantasy must be stuck in a permanent medieval stasis with no technological advancement what so ever*
Not even purists, the scifi was in m&m since first game. They were heroes secondaries
And Ultima had Sci-Fi shit and spaceships in the first one too.
But no Ultima purist wants that crap on their actual games because it's garbage and mixing guns into fantasy settings is stupid.
I do
reminder that 3do was owned by people that didn't play videogames at all and were trying to push the M&M franchise to become the next (fantasy) FIFA with its yearly same-as-previous sports game model releases which is why h4 was rushed (and also why chronicles is a thing), but that only resulted in nwc and 3do downfall as a whole
>source: h3's director
now, who /fst/ here
It was an incredibly moronic idea, and game quality suffered immensely. M&M 6 to 8 are pretty much the same game, minus some gimmicks in 8.
And, if you go look at their production schedules, it totally figures (they were yearly releases).
3DO was a shit company that should've died during the development of M2. This way somebody else could've picked up the project for cheap and hopefully continued it to fruition (i.e. sale as a console), rather than being passed around like a roofied highschooler at a frat party, eventually ending up as an ATM/vendomat.
What the frick was the point of chronicles anyway? I mean who was even the intended audience? I played those recently and they were piss easy and really not all that fun, I've read online that they were supposed to appeal to newcomers to the series but I just can't imagine someone playing chronicles before any full game previously.
Chronicles aren't terrible but I feel it has identity crisis of appealing to exactly nobody.
the IDEA behind it was a lightweight serial series that you didn't need previous heroes experience to pick up that would both lead into heroes 4 and encourage the curious to go back and pick up heroes 3
not saying it did that well, but did have somebody thinking it would be a bold strategy
Weren't the designs and concepts for some of the Forge units kinda shit anyway?
they were
There's a reason M&M died a miserable death with not a single good game in the entire series.
4 was a good fricking game so whatever. Also HoMM is fricking DEAD because 3DO imploded, not because of this or that.
OP, every game is good. 1 and 2 are "rougher" because they were the earliest but would recommend if you like the rest. 5 was made by completely different people but still good enough.
3 > 4 >= 2 > 5 > 1.
The purists were right. Nothing worse than bringing high tech into medieval fantasy world. You can make it work but it's not worth it.
>another secondary who doesn't know it was always in the setting
>I-it's not worth it because... IT JUST ISN'T, O-OKAY??!!
i like 3
>Start playing HoMM3 for the first time some months ago
>Get my shit kicked in against bots
>Need to savescum bad plays on fricking easy mode if I want to clear the mission
>Last game I played took 6-7 hours to finish
I stopped playing after I got busy with other stuff by I want to get into the game again, any tips on how not to suck ass because holy shit.
>Sylvia with the Admiral's Hat on a massive water map
Wtf is that thing between the armor and the pipes?
one of the reasons I was only ever average at best in homm3 was that I didn't really use spells too often.
thanks for the cheat sheet, is there any way to get specific spells or is it all bound to chance?
You get them from towns with mage's guilds and from temples sometimes. As far as I know, it's totally random.
It's a skill from HOTA, which is a fan made add-on. I recommend it if you're a fan of the main game.
1 is really dated, 2 still holds up visually and is fun, 3 is very fun if you do anything other than play 1v1 on Jebus Cross, 4 is fun for hero jank strategies, and despite supposedly being a solid game I could never get into 5
3 = 2 > 1 > 4 > 5
Is this a bad idea? I'm not much of a pirate these days.
Take off might and magic 9. I'm iffy on HoMM 1 and 2, but I haven't played them so it's not for me to say.
>Take off might and magic 9
>M&M9 is the only truly bad one of the bunch
While M&M9 is a bad Might & Magic game, it's still a Might & Magic game by New World Computing.
Similar to HoMMIV, while it's riddled with flaws, it's still unique, soulful, and deeply experimental.
It's definitely a game worth experiencing at least once.
Even near their demise, NWC was desperately trying to make great innovative games. Even their worst is still entertaining.
It does have some amusing interactions, like the local priest demanding you pay for all the windows you've shot out in his church. Or, "Presenting, Nikolai!", heh.
But it's still a mess.
M&M9 is the only truly bad one of the bunch, and HoM&M1 might be too dated, but the rest are solid to good.
>buying digital games
Just burn them on a disc anon
if only the AI for 4 was fixable
At that point in their history as a team, New World Computing was practically doing a volunteer work to try and get that mess off the ground.
3DO screwed them something fierce, but bit the dust itself as well:
>While remaining chairman and CEO of the company, Hawkins took on the additional role of creative director. Hawkins decided to make branding a focus and 6–to–9–month production timetables for games. As a result, quality suffered as did sales.
>After struggling for several years, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2003. Employees were laid off without pay.
Better yet, the chief 3DO moron continued to just flail (and fail) around:
>In late 2003, Hawkins launched a new video game development company called Digital Chocolate. The company focused on developing games for handheld devices. He stepped down from the CEO position at Digital Chocolate in May, 2012.
>The developer was officially stopped in 2014. It has sold its games to RockYou, and its website was shut down.
> only the 3 remake of the classics is on steam
Maybe I want the fricking originals (properly running of course) steam.
Just get them off of gog
What are your thoughts on Horn of the Abyss?
I like it. Haven't had any bugs from it, the new artifacts are cool, and it's great in multiplayer.
I disagree with some of the changes to the skills, and haspids should have one or two less speed.
Everything else is excellent and revived the game many years later.
3 and 5 are the best. I prefer 3 when playing random scenarios or multiplayer, but the fifth game's campaign is pretty good. The story isn't anything special but I like that there is an actual overaching story and lots of dialogue to keep you interested, while in 3 most of the campaigns don't feel very relevant to the overall story and are often just three random scenarios, and pretty sure you need to play the might and magic 6-8 games to have a clue what the frick is going on anyway.
1 > 3 > 2 = 5 > 4
Where would King's Bounty fit on these rankings?
It was basically proto-HoMM, with the same developer.
Was king's bounty 2 any good? It's supposed to have come out by now, but it fell off my radar bc when I checked, it had "mixed" reviews.
No
Legend and Armored Princess/Crossworlds are worthy additions to the might and magic-esque pantheon.
Everything after is the video game equivalent of straight to dvd schlock.
That sucks, I was looking forward to it.
why not just go to gog-games?
https://gog-games.com/search/heroes%20of%20might
Any thoughts on Hero's Hour? I want to get it, but I'm waiting for a sale.
HoMM3 is honestly, legitimately overrated. The aesthetics are 10/10 obviously, but the gameplay is so horrifically balanced that you essentially abuse shit every single game. In order to play a 'balanced' pvp match you need 20 fricking house rules.
Heroes 5.5 is the best.
Songs of conquest is a hom like that's pretty fun too.
3>2>the rest
i checked homm5 on youtube and graphic looks horrible, everything looks so small compared to homm3, is there remake version everyone is talking about ?
3>songs of conquest> everything else
HOMM 3 + In the Wake of Gods mod
runner up is HOMM2
no i do not give a single frick about horn of the abyss
>In the Wake of Gods mod
I've seen people parade it as the second coming of HoMM Jesus, but it seems to be made out of props taken from, among other things, HoMM 4, as well as recoloured unit sprites to create 'unique' new units.
I hate 1 the most, 2 has improved it any every aspect
it was treated like this before hota, as the script work made it seem that it has lots of potential
but in the end it's just bloated mess
Worst than 5,6 or 7? Why hate it so much. HOMM1 is still really good.
my only problem with 5 is that it's 3D and new setting
6 was bad too, but ended up playing it more than 1
didn't play 7 but I've heard it's better than 6
>people parade it as the second coming of HoMM Jesus,
what? dont make shit up anon, everyone makes fun of the mod for being a juvenile overbloated, unbalanced clusterfrick. i haven't seen a single Ganker or /vr/ post say anything positive about it ever.
i like these kind of mods personally, where no attempt at balancing is made and shit just gets added because 'its cool'. aeod for doom is a similar guilty pleasure for me
it's made by slavs, but it's got some great HOMM-tier features, like ghosts who are more overpowered vampire lords: individually weak, but they leech life upon attacking. however, ghosts will increase their numbers beyond their original when they leech life, so you can get some big fricking ghost doomstacks going if you protect them when they are weak. that's just one unit, if you manage to get one of the special WOG artifacts, all your units gain an extra attack, so now your ghosts are double-leeching. get an emissary of war (very rare) you get 1-3 attack per week if you keep it alive, so your ghosts will spiral out of control. it might be a janky russian mod but there's plenty of ways to have fun with it. i would never play WOG multiplayer though
>like ghosts who are more overpowered vampire lords: individually weak, but they leech life upon attacking. however, ghosts will increase their numbers beyond their original when they leech life, so you can get some big fricking ghost doomstacks going if you protect them when they are weak.
That was already in HoMM 1 & 2 - and it had been discontinued for a reason.
Okay, it isn't but it could have been.
How is it?? I liked the demo, but I haven't bought the game.
>great gameplay: huge unit variety, faction mechanics variety, MEANINGFUL spells, QoL
>no lore
>no campaign
>no VA
>no soul
I still have 120+ hours on it and still playing.
Do the towns look cool?
There's going to be an expansion soon that adds a 13th faction and will change how every town looks.
3>4=2>5>1
dont even bother with the newer games. Also it is worth it to download Horn of the Abyss xpac for 3
Best opinion in this thread.
I'm not goin to pretend that 4 is shit, they wanted to go in a new direction knowing that 3's formula peaked, and they came short just due to budget and time.
Still, the many QoL improvements, every unit having multiple special effects and the hero combat were an absolute blast.
Also HoMM has the best soundtrack
?t=8
?t=9
Also wog and any other mod other than HotA really, feel like mugen or some shit, they're such a bloated mess with no direction, focus, or finesse, but a hodge podge of random assets ideas and mechanics with no semblance of cohesion, theming or balance.
Not that HoMM is balanced in ANY way, but it's got its charm. Wog is just insane bullshit nonsensical balls to the walls mechanics to the oompth degree.
5 with the 2 expansions
they are all very good games, i prefer 2 due to the graphics that make me nut, just don't expect balanced multiplayer
after youre done with homm, go play disciples 1 and 2
>those tanks
C&C that shall not be named vibes
The other forge mod is better
You could always get the HoMM 1 & 2 GBC roms
Heroes 2? What? I mean, Heroes 1 isn't some performance beast, and could probably work on the smart microwave CPU in the GBC (albeit with massive downgrades), but 2?
The GBC version of heroes 2 isn't even based on heroes 2 but based on 3 IIRC.
>HoMM3 Fan Question: Hello, may I ask you are there actually magic in Might and Magic universe or is it all technology?
>This is really a question for Jon Van Caneghem or Paul Rattner. Jon created the M&M universe, and Paul basically took over lore duties when Jon took a back seat after Might and Magic 5. As for myself, to the best of my understanding, there is no ‘actual magic in the Might and Magic universe’. For example, if a Wizard casts a Fireball spell... what actually happens? In my mind, the Wizard’s mental, verbal, or physical ritual invokes the capabilities of technological machines, deep within a world, causing the machines to create the Fireball and its resulting behavior. This is a pure guess on my part, but I suspect JVC was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke and his famous quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Magicbros...
Ha! Called it:
Comfy. Do you have more gifs?
Factory out yet?
Get MM 8 and dowload World of Enroth mod to enjoy MM 6,7 and 8 at the same time.
make way
The fifth and sixth games are the best because Inferno is actually a viable faction unlike the third game
>Ubishit had to be kicked in the nads to add actual city screens, as it was their 'innovation' to take them away along with a variety of resources
>Heroes of Might & Magic 7 has city screens by default, but it also looks like a fricking internet browser game
Your reply has nothing to do with my point
Inferno is okay in 5. You need to spam gates (IIRC they nerfed them in 5.5), but it's nowhere near as shit as 3.
Heroes of Might and Magic 2 is the best.
>The Seas (Sea Theme)
I could not guess
3 is the only one that still matters