Songs of Conquest , sing for me a song of pixely glory. (Early Access)

I’ve found I like the 128x128 maps better thus far; 64x64 just feels like a rush which will be won by dire dreaths. Maybe rats could counter dire dreaths, especially with the rat focus Wielder, I might try that at some point.

I’m enjoying the community maps at the moment, haven’t even made it through most of the official maps. I never really enjoyed random maps in HoMM, I guess I prefer a more curated experience, so the community maps are where my hopes are placed as I doubt there will be enough official maps to keep me happy. So far I’ve liked 2 of the 4 I’ve tried, with another being alright, so that’s a pretty solid start.

I was planning on trying a community map next. Any recommendations?

Keep in mind that I don’t really like the small maps so if you want a faster game your tastes won’t align with mine. Hopefully I’ll stumble into a smaller map that still manages to delay first contact a bit better.

My favorite thus far is King of the Mountain, playing as one of the small tribes. It’s set up with a small tribe in each corner and a stronger central player. Haven’t tried it yet as the central empire. It’s a bigger map with quite a few settlements though so it is the longest map I’ve played thus far as well, took me about 100 turns but I was only ever a bit above average at HoMM.

The other one I liked was, I believe, called Warlords. That’s based a little more on potential though, as the computer didn’t break out to compete for the center so it was really only good in the beginning. The AI was ahead of me for a while, and if it does break out I think it’ll be a fun map. It’s not that tough a break so I’m hoping it was just bad luck. The beginning is fine either way, but it’s a boring end if there’s no competition for the middle.

Thanks! (And yeah, I prefer larger maps, too.)

So far King of the Mountain is great!

It looks like the maximum number of marketplaces for benefit will be 5, at least I assume so. At 5 markets it costs 200 to purchase a rare and you get 180 back for selling one. I’m assuming they haven’t messed up and allowed infinite resources so that must be the limit. Given that a market costs 1500 to build and can be sold for 1125 there seems to be very little reason not to build them other than spatial concerns. (Also, autocorrect just reminded me that spatial is not spelled with a c which really seems wrong.)

That feels a bit generous to me, but I suppose giving up 5 medium slots is a high cost. It does mean that if you’re ever desperate for rare resources a market is a very good investment, only requiring the purchase of 2 rare resources to pay off once you sell the market back. I find the Rana quite challenging if I don’t get some early rares as the only medium building troop they can get without rare resources is the guard which is relatively garbage so markets are a very early build for me now with them.

Really enjoying this game, except for one aspect of the interface. Once you have a bunch of towns, it becomes very difficult to keep track of where buildings need to be upgraded.

You have the Troop Information listing, where you can surmise that they are still training basic level troops, but that lists “Large Settlement” or “Fortress” as opposed to the name of the town. So you have to go clicking around for the right town.

Or you can just go across the map from town to town, but then you have to click a long string of buildings and check each, because unlike HoMM, you cannot see the information centralized into the town center.

Seems like a small point, but wow, on a large map, it is striking me as a serious deterrent to continuing.

My other quibble is that I find the spells rather uninspired. Maybe this is because I am playing Arleon? I see on the Steam forums the claim that spells are overpowered, so perhaps some other faction has better combinations of essence. But so far, spells just lack much of a fun factor in my experience.

Yeah, I think they do plan to add town names. There’s been a lot of comment and complaint on this point.

Haha, I said the exact same thing up-thread. I sure changed my mind after playing more. Spells are very powerful but there’s some work to do to get them to that point. First, there are three tiers of spells for each of the spell branches. Tier 3 spells are much more powerful (for damage spells) and last longer (for duration ones). In addition, spells that create a single battlefield obstacle or exploding mushroom at tier 1 create three of them at tier 3. It’s very useful. When your heroes level up look for the skills that increase the tier of a spell tree.

In addition to that, your heroes can increase their spell power, which also increases the effectiveness of spells. On level-up look for the skill that increases spellpower. In addition look for artifacts and gear that increases spellpower. Some wielders also specialize in spellpower.

Right now one of my heroes can cast dimension door at six hexes, which is incredibly powerful. Earlier today I was playing and one of my spellcasting heroes cast the spell that allows +1 attack on my stack of green dragons. He attacks from 2 hexes away so I flew him down between 2 enemy stacks and attacked one enemy stack and then the other enemy stack. Then I cast rejuvenate on the dragons to get another turn and he attacked again. After that, I cast dimension door on the dragons to move them back out of attack range of the enemy. Super powerful. The more I play the more I appreciate the magic in this game.

There’s a spell that gives a ranged unit +1 attacks.

There’s sort of an upgraded version that gives all ranged units +1 attacks; I don’t know if it’s tier 2 or 3. It’s amazing (in a current game I’m running castles and my main has two stacks of rangers and two stacks of fae queens).

Those +attack spells can also stack on the same troop just by repeated clicking on the same troop; multiple attacks with my stack of Fae Nobles is making short work of my current map.

Also, damage over time spells are currently bugged to not work with spellpower increases so keep that in mind when evaluating them.

It could also be different maps. The devs said one of the current problems the AI has is dealing with maps with many portals. The AI will both perform worse and take longer turns on maps with a bunch of portals.

That spell gives any unit +1 attack whether ranged or melee. The other more expensive +1 attack spell is limited to all ranged units.

i like starting with the fae hero who has a chaos specialization and +1chaos. The two times I have done this his first two level ups offered chaos 2 and chaos three, and the fourth gave channeling. At that point he could one shot easy stacks with lightning and could get though most combats with few or no attacks by troops. very different than my initial start of ranged combat troops

I’ll have to give this a try. I tend to enjoy playing the magic side of this sort of game more, and I was missing it. It’s not that adding some defense to a tank or poison-mushrooming key tiles is worthless, but I was not feeling this was all that exciting.

When he mentions MP my eyes started to glaze over. And if your “direction” is a mob vote that’s just going to be a vocal minority of MP’ers brigading I sense a wrong direction inbound on this pending roadmap.

Okay. While your eyes were glazing over, did your ears keep working? He specifically stated that what they are working on would in no way impact single player, especially given he went out of his way to state everyone on the team is single-player geared already. Besides, simultaneous turns will help single player gamers out as well (I play games such as Age of Wonders in simultaneous turns whenever possible).

Let’s just say my experience has been all over the map with how reality and these statements match up.

Won’t the vocal minority of SP’ers brigade too? Pontentially more than the MP’ers?

Not in my experience with steam forums, reddit and discord.

What I see is MP’ers yelling for the following two things, and I’m pretty much convinced I’ll be witnessing this until the heat death of the universe:

  1. All SP games must either have MP bolted on or if there’s some MP on already then moar MP.

  2. And when/if #1 is agreed to by the dev they will be greeted by an endless parade of nerf/buff demands for units and/or game mechanics. Each subsequent change will be greeted by more demands stretching into infinity.

And yes, I’ll concede upfront I should do myself a favor and stop visiting these places. ;)

Man you summed up a phenomenon I have been seeing for years.