HoMM hits Good Old Games!

[frogbeastegg]

Heroes of Might and Magic 2 is available now, with Heroes 3 to follow soon. Both games are the complete editions which include all expansions etc, and HoMM2 has the CD quality opera music which only featured in certain versions of the game.

I discovered this series when HoMM5 launched; I got the European special edition which included complete editions of all 4 previous games. They're exceedingly good games.

HoMM1 has been available for a while. I've never tried it, looks like it didn't age so well and the later games expanded on the concept considerably.

The Might and Magic series of RPG games set in this universe are also appearing. A pack containing 1-6 is already up, with the later games coming soon.

(On a completely unrelated but equally awesome note, Settlers II is available now too)

[Veho Nex]

You know with all the good news you bring us, I'm starting to think you're an angel.

[miotas]

I never did like the heroes games but I loved playing settlers back in the day.

Unless it's the lateness of the hour here, I don't think you mentioned where they are available.

[frogbeastegg]

The site's name is in the topic header. Good Old Games. There's some real PC classics on there, legally available and fully compatible with modern systems for pocket change.

[miotas]

Once again showing my relative ignorance when it comes to the internet

Looks like a nice site, cheers.

[TinCow]

HOMM2 was one of my favorite games of all time. It had great atmosphere and music and was an all around well-balance strategy game. The AI was very decent and some of the single player maps were actively difficult.

That said, I've tried going back to HOMM2 and it just doesn't hold up. Not because of any failings of the game, but because of HOMM3. The third game was an improvement in pretty much every area it could possibly improve. I would put HOMM3 in my top 5 favorite strategy games of all time, maybe even top 3. I still play HOMM3 to this day. It is permanently installed on my laptop (which can't handle many modern games, but still runs HOMM3 perfectly) and it gets a regular workout whenever I am out of town.

HOMM4&5 are... meh. Then again, HOMM3 is so close to perfection for that format, that there wasn't really much they could do to improve it. I'll probably be playing HOMM3 for another 20 years, if not for the rest of my life.

[Tratorix]

Yay! I never had a pc when these games were out, but I remember playing a crappy little gameboy port of the first game almost religiously. It stand to reason that I'll like these a lot more.

[seireikhaan]

HoMM 3 is a splendid game. I would recommend it to pretty much anyone. My only issue was that, even with the random map generator, the game felt a bit stale after what was, I'll admit, a profuse amount of use.

[Ser Clegane]

Indeed - I would also have to vote for HoMM3 as one of my all-time classics that I keep going back to. The graphics are timeless and the gameplay never lost its appeal.

It should be noted that this is one of the very(!) few games that even Mrs. Clegane played (the fact that you can play as allies against the AI in hotseat mode on a number of the maps certainly helped).

HoMM4 was quite a disappoinment - all of the major gameplay changes failed miserably and even the graphics were worse than in HoMM3. HoMM5 was quite an improvement over HoMM4 but did not manage to reach the perfection of HoMM3.

I think I have to play it again...

[FactionHeir]

Blasphemers, HoMM4 was the best of them all and 5 was really poor (though the standalone expansion did fix many annoying bugs admittedly and somewhat salvaged the game)

[econ21]

... HoMM4 was the best of them all ...

I loved the depiction of heroes in Homm4 - the levelling, their being on the battlefield, their inventories etc. The writing of the campaigns was decent. The battlefield AI was solid enough. But the strategic AI was just broken. Most scenarios, the most you would see of the AI was its corpses litttered on the campaign map, slain by wandering monsters (how hard would it have been to program that away?), or with an army of one skeleton or some such. I think I found only one map where the AI could actually fight you - all the rest were just you against the wandering monsters (which got really dull). The other nail in Homm4's coffin was that turns just seemed to crawl - due to the 3D graphics or map design or something (Homm5 was similarly glacial). One thing I like about Homm3 is that you can race through the turns, so that the action comes on fast and furious.

Homm3 had a rudimentary but surprisingly effective campaign AI. Designate one general as the main army general and keep ferrying troops to him so that he can stomp the opposition. Program generals to keep out of reach of enemies if they cannot beat them. Give the AI resource bonuses and let it build up/gather resources sensibly. And bingo - you have a reasonably challenging campaign AI. I can't fathom why CA has not copied that rudimentary AI for the RTW and subsequent TW games. It works.

Personally, while I can appreciate the quality of Homm3, it always lacked a certain something. Maybe it was just too darned effective an AI, it could be more like work than play. I hated the AI stack of doom just appearing out of the fog of war to squish me. Rather like playing Civ4 on higher difficulties - sometimes you just rather enjoy gathering the shiny things and not having to be made to sweat too much. However, every quarter or so, I blast through the Mandate of Heaven scenario and the user-made Middle Earth (allies) map on impossible as they are very nice depictions of other "lore" I am intereseted in.

Mandate of Heaven depicts the conflict covered by the MM6 RPG, which I still can enjoy playing - it's a real epic on an almost Morrowind sized scale. MM7 is smaller, but much more polished and balanced. After that, the RPG series went down hill fast.

[seireikhaan]

Wow....

Browsing through the site properly really brings back nostalgia. Sands of Time, Mandate of heaven and homm3? If they got Warlords 3 and Masters of Orion2 going, I'd be a super-happy camper.

[FactionHeir]

IMO HoMM4 was a lot more realistic in that the enemy heroes could actually die / lose a battle against neutrals. In HoMM3 and HoMM5, you'd never actually see this. AI can lose against AI, yes, but not against neutrals. HoMM4 allowed it, and that's what caused the corpses. An improvement that could certainly have been coded would have been to make them flee and not just attack a neutral they have no chance of beating.

HoMM5 is the worst in that. Pre-Orc expansion, the AI can run with hero and peasants into a horde of black dragons and win - and not take a single loss. Autoresolves were always 100% kill, 0% loss for the AI against neutrals and that kind of cheating just broke the game for me.

The biggest upside in 4 is that your heroes are actual fighters and you can have multiple in a stack. They tended to be fairly frail unless they got into the 20s and up with grandmaster combat and some great attack/defense items, and its really that upper bit that made them OP. Other than that they were a strategic element where you had to decide between a hero or a lot of extra creeps. This was best shown in one of the scenarios where you had a character with all 5 schools of magic and no combat skills.
Quite liked hexagonal squares and things like first strike, ranged retaliation and towers giving a unit bonus rather than self-shooting. The magic was very varied and gave you something for every situation as well.

[Mailman653]

How different/similiar is this game to Lords of Magic?

[Krusader]

Seems like I will have extra expenses now...

HoMM3 was incredibly fun in Multiplayer. Dont know how many games I played it along with friends. We had lots of fun with the map generator, creating real immersive scenarios.

And Settlers 2 is also a game I fondly remember from my younger days.

[pevergreen]

*sees ground control for sale*

Its free!

*sees that it includes expansion pack, which was only mailed out to people who bought the original for a limited time*



I WANT IT!

[frogbeastegg]

HoMM3 Complete is now up for download.

Much sooner than I'd expected; I haven't booted HoMM2 up once yet.

[mountaingoat]

2 & 3 were great , i would say 3 is probably the better of the two .. the rest of them ... meh

the game was very similar to an older game called kings bounty , if anyone ever played that.

made by the same company .

[Meneldil]

Am I the only who think HoMM5 is just as good as HoMM3?

I can't find anything wrong with the game. The gameplay is directly taken from HoMM3 with some improvements, the campaigns are interesting and offer living characters (first time ever in the HoMM serie - it's not Baldur's Gate, but it beats HoMM3 by large).
The soundtracks are very good (the best in the serie, once again - I have all of them on my Ipod)

[frogbeastegg]

I like HoMM5 a lot too. I'm not able to give a completely fair judgement on the games as I've played most of HoMM5+expansions and only a little of HoMM2/3+expansions, however the fact that I got all of them at the same time and ended up playing HoMM5 most says something.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I also didn't mind HoMM4 that much either. The AI stank but I appreciated what they were trying to do, and know it wasn't the developer's fault that the game was sent out unfinished.

I think 5 suffered from a situation where it couldn't get anything right for the hardcore fans. I saw it panned for being to similar to HoMM3, and, like HoMM4, panned for each thing it did differently no matter how minor that thing was. It lacked things that HoMM3 gained in its expansion packs - most notably the random map generator - and got panned for that too, to a degree understandably. It got panned for being 3D, got panned for being ugly, got panned for being too pretty and machine intensive. For some reason a portion of the community really had it in for the developers too; the treatment they got from some stands out in my mind as some of the most unjustly abusive that I've witnessed on the internet.

H0MM5 did have problems though. Its story is dire, as is the voice acting. The earlier games have it beat there. The AI of the release version was quite scripted and struggled if it was expected to act without a guiding hand from above, though most of the campaign was scripted so it wasn't obvious all of the time. The game was brutally difficult on release too; some scenarios became impossible to beat if you didn't rush and capture specific cities within the first week. The AI and difficulty were smoothed out during patches. The game as it stands now is very nice.

[Meneldil]

Right, the AI was ridiculous before the first patches. I remember that the campaign AI would sometimes goes dead because I've been doing something unexpected. That was annoying indeed, but got fixed quite quickly, and while the AI isn't not as good as HoMM3 ones, it still is more than capable of quicking my butt on the hardest difficulty settings.
The voice acting was actually quite decent for the french version, as many professionals worked on it (many voices from Warcraft3, Age of Kings and such). Granted, the storyline isn't top-notch, but still way better than the usual 'Go and get this uber awesome artefact in order to save the world' HoMM crap.


To be honest, I found the whole HoMM5 bashing quite annoying. As said, some people bashed it because it was too similar to HoMM3, and then some people bashed the few new gameplay options. As for the graphics, maybe I'm a freak but I think the game is still today the best looking fantasy-based strategy game. The animations are freaking awesome and cool-looking, so are most of the units (though the whole recycling that came with Tribes of the East was kind of a killer.). The maps are very nice and filled with any sort of HoMM-like details.

[frogbeastegg]

I liked HoMM5's visuals as well - I liked the vibrancy of the colour. In an era of grey, brown, wannabe realistic games it was refreshing to have something with emerald green grass, blue skies, and flowers. I agree that the units were well done as well. In terms of presentation HoMM5 really did have a lot going for it, especially with the music.

You know, there's a line I distinctly remember appearing in a review of the original Age of Wonders. It suits HoMM 5 well. "It's all very pleasant. In fact if there is a single word to describe this game, it is pleasant." Well, it works if you never encountered the original version of campaign 2 mission 3. That thing was close to impossible to win until it got nerfed. There was nothing pleasant about the original version!

I wonder what Nival are up to these days? Their Etherlords games were good too.

Heh. Thanks to this thread I'm currently reinstalling HoMM5 plus expansions. The patching process has become a bit of a monster. 1.0 -> 1.40 ->1.41 ->1.50 ->1.60 for HoMM5, then 2.0 ->2.1 for Hammers, and 3.0 ->3.1 for Tribes. HoMM5 and tribes both get the CD check removed with their final patches, but it doesn't look like Hammers ever got its removed.

[seireikhaan]

Question about 5- does it have a random map generator yet?

[frogbeastegg]

Yes, if you get the Hammers of Fate expansion. The Tribes of the East expansion has one as well; it's more limited as it's a standalone expansion and you only have access full HoMM5 and Hammers content if you actually own those titles.

There's a gold edition of HoMM5 available which includes the base game and both expansions.

[seireikhaan]

Guess I should have asked this alongside the previous question, but: How competent is the AI on the randomly generated maps? I'm not asking for super wiz, but I want a foe who knows what they're doing, has a sense of direction, and is a prolific user of common sense.

[frogbeastegg]

That one I can't answer too well. I haven't played it since Tribes' release version and the AI has been patched since then. In any case, I didn't play many random maps as I was still working at the various campaigns. The AI was decent back then. Not great, not slap in the face dire.

[Meneldil]

The map-AI is not nearly as challenging as it used to be in HoMM3, but it's still decent, if you play on the hardest difficulty levels. On the lowest one, you'll probably beat the game without even looking at the screen.

The battle AI is on the other hand IMHO a tad more challenging. I've fought some 1h-long battles in the campaigns. It knows which spells to use when (high level heroes with a dark spell mastery are a real pain). Oh, and the stupid 'I focus the same kind of unit in each and every single battle' behavior that constantly annoyed me in HoMM3 disappeared.