RMG is coming during EA, fwiw.
Excellent news!
I sure should play about 30 games I haven’t touched before trying the EA version of this, but I bought my first computer to play HoMM and as a longtime fan, I don’t think I can hold out. :)
Thanks for your and everyone’s impressions thus far.
I’m happy to say that playing as a caster faction is much, much more interesting and fun than playing as the pure melee faction. Lots of cool spells. I like it.
The AI is much better than in the old HoMM games as well.
I think it’s interesting the way troops gas up the magic and that it’s not a permanent resource, so you can cast spells as you like. It encourages the use of ‘weaker’ troop types as they sometimes provide the magic you want.
What is RMG?
Random Map Generator, i presume.
Correct - I guess it’s a term I’ve associated with Heroes games for 20+ years so it didn’t occur to me newcomers might not intuit it - sorry!
Thanks bro my brain wasn’t working this morning.
Reading the description on the Steam page, it seems the game will have 4 factions. Even more, it seems to me they have chosen fairly vanilla factions. Humans, lizardmen, undead and other humans? What’s the theme of the fourth faction?
What I’d like the most on the HoMM games is how high fantasy they were. Factions like Tower with titans, genies and nagas. Or the Inferno faction with all the devils and demons. Or Dungeon with Dragons, Manticores, Minotaurs, etc.
So I hope later they also go that route.
I am mystified by troop placement at the start of battle.
While I am not crazy about being limited to a handful of specific striped hexes, at least I get it. I assume that the AI is prepared to respond appropriately to those specific spots.
But when I go to actually place my troops, sometimes I can place troops on those hexes, and sometimes they just bounce back to their initial placement. Why? There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.
That sounds like a bug - I’ve been able to place units on the shaded hexes without any issues.
Thanks, I’ll post it as a possible bug and see what they say.
Troop placement is a matter of pointing the mouse cursor at the hex itself. If your eyes are watching the floating unit graphic instead of where the mouse cursor is you tend to click the hex ABOVE/BELOW the location you are intending. Similar issues happen when targeting flying enemies since their graphic hovers over the terrain which makes it LOOK like they occupy the hex above their actual location.
Yep, this! It’s a case of bad UX.
Has anyone found a way to increase the troop stack sizes? Maybe via research?
Edit: According to the devs, this can be increased via research, I just need to find it.
Plus Max Troop size is researched in the Academy.
I’m playing as Barony of Loth and they don’t have the Academy but I think I’ve found the equivalent.
I’m on the 4th map of the first campaign and, after playing the game a lot, I’m happy to say that the initial issues and questions I had about it have all been resolved by learning the ins and outs of the game. It’s actually a really good game and I’m enjoying it a lot. For a EA game, it’s really polished.
I’ve had zero crashes and no major issues at all with it. All it needs now it a little more polish and more content. I need to check out the map editor next to see what shape that’s in. Hopefully, they add in the ability to create campaigns and the random map generator fairly soon. If they do, I think this one will be around for a long time.
I’m on my second try of campaign 1, mission 3: the first time I didnt build up fast enough and got wiped by an enemy stack. They havent shown up yet this time, but between map knowledge and playing better Im optimistic.
The way leveling up magic skills goes is pretty different and interesting: if you have order level n then you can cast an order spell n times for the same flat mama cost. and some of them can be cast several times on the same unit! Ive been using that to get my archers initiative hogh enough to shoot first.
Question: there are a number of spells that use a combination of mana types, how do you get upgraded versions of those?