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    Troll in the Playground
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    Default Re: If only: A manticore monster in heroes of might and magic 3

    Quote Originally Posted by Forum Explorer View Post
    HoMM3 really wasn't any better. In any way. For example, Stronghold and Fortress were much much weaker then pretty much any other faction simply because having good magic was a massive boost that having good Strength or Defense isn't.
    This is wrong. Stronghold and Fortress are insane tempo towns with great heroes (Barbarians are probably best in the game), good curve and some other useful utilities (Fortress gets to reap insane benefits from Dragonfly Hives). These towns ramp up really fast and continue to snowball. Any Barbarian can reach Wisdom and Earth Magic on Expert, and then still picks up from a very good set of skills. Every single Barbarian hero is great, and breadwinners like Tyraxor / Gretchin / Crag Hack are exceptional.

    Attack and Defense are insanely more valuable than Spell Power / Knowledge with the "mass level 1 spell" meta. Cast Expert Slow once on a hero with SP 5 ad Knowledge 5 and it lasts really long, and you can keep recasting it whenever. Often you will meet the enemy before your spellbook offers anything other than level 1 and 2 spells. It's Might heroes that take fewer losses throughout the game, too, and will continue to do so in the deciding skirmish because the impact of A/D is very noticable. Vanilla SoD also allows artifacts like Recanter's Cloak and Orb of Inhibition, in which case Wizards are horribly, utterly screwed with no available recourse if they're unlucky. And they have to keep hoping for good luck, because magic heroes keep being offered Eagle Eye / Scholar / Mysticism / Sorcery instead of Offense / Armorer / Tactics.

    The weakest towns are, variably, Inferno and Tower, because they suffer from insane teching costs, poor biomes, low unit cost-efficiency and the poorest selection of heroes, both starting and main material. Tower isn't saved by being a strongly Wizard town because it suffers from weird vestiges of HoMM2 design (Mages and Giants cost hideous amounts of resources for what they provide, and their tech tree is schizophrenic), poor movement speed, crap terrain (Snow spawns very few map features that provide resources). Inferno's overall brute force strength is low, making them downright tricky in end-game fights.

    By the time building up your mage guild is relevant (often enough it really is not as you win before that) the Strong/Fortress town simply builds up the guild in a more accessible town; the game isn't played in a vacuum where you only ever have your starter town.

    Tome of Magic (especially Earth) makes this a non-issue, and Strong/Fortress are both really good at taking Utopias, something that provides Tomes often. (Conversely, Towers struggle with Utopias because their powerstack is often really slow and the AI loves to prey on their best units, because they're archers). Pandora Boxes also provide spells.

    If you hit late game, all heroes become somewhat homogenized due to artifacts, in which case the edge is provided by specialty and secondary skills, and I'd rather fight alongside Crag Hack than Solmyr in that case. Might heroes fit the bill of a true Hero of Might & Magic much better than Magic heroes generally can.

    The best case scenario for dedicated wizards is early-mid game shenanigans with a strong tempo hero of their own, like Luna, Ciele or Solmyr, where they either abuse the starting spell for huge gains or meet the enemy super early and poke him down before they even buy a spellbook (in a really open, FFA map). Either that, or if they have tons of mana and manage to starve the enemy out with Elemental spam. Otherwise, they're struggling.

    Magic is great and all, but HoMM3 is horribly biased towards Might supported by a teensy bit of magic simply because of how broken level 1 mass spells are.
    Last edited by Winthur; 2019-09-11 at 01:20 AM.
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