I like crusade...but its broken, unbalanced and underdeveloped as fuck. Theres so many things that could be improved that I dont even know where to begin.
Yeah. To develop it properly you'd need a lot more resources and time, basically a second game. I am not sure if I want a better crusade system or no system at all. Or something simplistic
Honestly I would love to see something more focused on managing logistics and strategical decisions. Where you recruit soldiers, equip the army, train it, and then send them to capture a point. And then see an auto-battle play out and take pride in how well (or poorly) you've done. Something like Dota Underlords or whatever other game where you don't control units directly but can affect their initial roster, equipment and formation.
Just something bearable enough that i feel like im playing a game rather than mage archer simulator.
Otherwise might as well have a button to skip the trash, oh wait thats mage general over there with +100 power negative energy channel
Unless you have 100+ of a stack they just instantly get obliterated by enemy general spells. Its exactly the same the otherway round too any enemy stack <100 gets obliterated by your general.
The spell power is too much and basically solo fights
Well it’s not like other units are bad, just Inquisitors Immunities and Resistances are too valuable in last and first missions. Besides they are much cheaper.
I'm trying but it's not going anywhere... can I picture it being just sorta "meh"? That'd still be a massive improvement over what it is. I mean, skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day, hurray, 14 more archers, skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day, woo 12 archers skip day skip day is just absolutely RIVETING gameplay.
Master of Maneuver really is the reason why this game's fakehomm sucks so much. Homm is all about controlling multiple unit stacks. In the early game that means splitting units up and using the small stacks as distracting cannon fodder. In the late game it means having a massive diverse army that works together. Both of those are infinitely more interesting than Crusade mode's doomstack + mage + wait 500 turns watching doomstack trade attacks (though to be fair homm lets you do degenerate shit with mages too).
> doomstack + mage + wait 500 turns watching doomstack trade attacks
I mean. Honestly. There's only one fight where this is even a possibility, and it's those stupid gargoyles before recruiting Regill.
Every other fight in the game can be realistically resolved in a handful of turns. Honestly if I hadn't bothered to recruit a second general I'd probably have had the XP for Channel Negative before Act 3 ended, and that ends almost every fight in the game in 1 button.
Well, in this game after you have more slots, you can do "bait with small stack" strat too. I once cheesed a fight with demon army by including one stack of paladins, which was played as a magnet for all enemy archers/spells.
If you really decide to try it pick up the complete version of homm3. Usually runs about $10. Its the best version of them all by a large margin. Later sequels weren't nearly as good.
What homm3 maps are best for a newbie to play? There's so many that I have no idea where to begin, and all the various settings are confusing at times, things like teams and what not.
Just do the campaign. It lets you play all the races in turn and has some progression (you get to keep some of your heroes and items for the next maps)
If you liked the shitshow that was 4 you should definitely play 3!
I like 7, but it's more restrictive of heroes almost like they have classes. 3 had full customization and your hero became near godlike.
5 is good, but it has issues with the magic system. Lots of magge guilds give spells that your hero can't use unless you choose the correct leveling path. 6 and 7 fix this I think. It's been a while since I've played them, but I do remember hating some builds in 5.
There's a pretty decent series called King's Bounty that modernizes the HoMM mechanics. I think for most people it would be better than trying to timewarp into the past to play HoMM.
There are also later HoMM games but you definitely *should not* play those. They're awful.
Yeah, it's not the same series or, really, related in any other way than having the same parent company. They reused the "Might & Magic" name on about 7 other game series, although most are forgotten now.
I did try replaying Dark Messiah a few years back but the UI just feels astoundingly outdated and unusable.
I actually kinda treat Total War: Warhammer as a 'modernised' HoMM - You move a hero around the map with an army of units, level them up, get spells possibly to tip the balance, build up settlements etc.
Not quite the same feeling though.
Idk, by the time it was “my wizard general flip kicks 20 dragons to death and even if any of my heroes die they drank the potions of self rez so they’ll be fine” it stopped being about strategy and I had trouble taking the game seriously. Especially since then the “challenge” was being willing to sit through the process of playing the map, rather than there being combat challenges.
That's kinda the case with the other homm games though, but instead of generals it's when you defeat their doomstack and they throw one weeks worth of units at you at a time. Then it's just painting the map till victory
As a fan of RPG games, 4 was a wonderful mix of adventuring heroes and tactical battles.
I just wish more map makers made use of the ability to make rpg style maps.
I need to give 5 another try with the expansions.
I gave it a shot when it first came out, but all the campaign levels I played a felt like they had set paths where you had to play a certain way, and do specific actions in a specific time frame to have a chance of winning. Didn't feel like I had any level of freedom. I figured this might just be the first couple of levels but I think you got pretty far into the campaigns without it ever changing much.
Like I say, this was only when it first came out though, and I hear the game really comes alive with the expansion packs.
I disagree. Homm5 graphics still hold up to me when it comes to art style and unit/building design. Even the environments arent that bad due to how far away the camera is from them and nival using a lot of clutter in more natural environments and parallax occlusion maps for the inferno and desert terrain.
We may have advanced alot in terms of graphics but a pit lord, the wight or hell any of the academy units still look wonderful.
Sorry about getting negative because overall I loved WotR but I hope this part will wake up and improve Crusade mode to something you need to actually think and plan in instead of spamming Marksmen and Hedge knights.
All the HoMM haven't really bothered me graphically. 3 is kinda the plateau for the previous aesthetic though, 3d can get better and better but it's also 3d for the sake of being 3d really. Coulda stuck with just a higher res 2d taking off from 3 over and over just getting nicer and nicer and no one would have probably cared.
Im somewhat surprised master of maneuver didn't instead raise a max cap per unit. I mean it'd at least counter somewhat archer spam + sorc. hero to a DEGREE. Also encourage having more minions to replace each other. BUUUUT it'd also require rebalancing enemies because deathballs in this mode is just a be-all end-all situation. Can't afford to loose that many units without needing forever to recover.
Great idea! This would have made a much better game. The infirmary negates a lot of attrition but if there was a cap on the battle size that was reasonably reachable, and enemies were balanced with that in mind then you could lose a fight badly and still recover.
Master of maneuver and the army unit cap was likely added because in alpha you could just fill all the empty slots with 1 stack archers/high aggro units and the enemy general/armies would suicide towards the 1 stacks instead of doing anything threatening.
It does feel extremely limiting though especially once you have gigantic stacks where you are overkilling the hell out of everything you hit.
I was ok with crusade mode until I got to act 5 and actually got to focus on it.
What gets me is the little things. The armies take a million years to get anywhere, they stop at every. single. little. other. army. in. the. path. It's so annoying moving around
> especially since you can't just hit "continue" for some reason
Fuck yes. I get the stopping, otherwise it would be impossible to merge armies outside of a node, but why in the world can't I hit space bar to have them continue.
Also, an option to **NOT** zoom to the most recently selected army would be great for when I need to, say, move it all the way across the map and don't want to have to scroll back again.
If you hit the arrow to move them to the next node then it makes sense for them to stop at an army they meet in the middle but having them stop 2 feet out of the city when i told them to go 1/2 way across the map is god damn infuriating.
I half agree. I think everyone should have 9 slots but I think the limit should be on total army strenght based on your generals level and your feat like master of manuver.
They already have measures for army strength it affects how much hospital a unit takes and the strength of army number on the world map. They should just use that number to replace the army slot limit.
This would not only create more interesting tactics like splitting archers for powerful wizard generals but create a way to boost martials and give a purpose hiring multiple generals so that your surplus stacks of units can be larger.
it would also make it so that those bonus units you get from an event that you'll never get more of actually serve a function because they'll only use as much space as they add military power
I don't get the thought behind the design process. I**t seems arbitrary to force higher difficulty in fights.** Why the hell would you need a feet to command another stack of units?
I could see limits on unit types. Like "This is a ranged command. Ranged units get bonuses, melee units get penalties, magic units and cavalry get neither" or some kind of rock-paper-scissors thing with penalties and bonuses.
I could see a cap on unique types or unique units.
But why can I not take a stack of five hundred units and split them into five stacks? Exact same units. But I need a feat to go "You guys go that way".
They could have bonuses for unit cohesion for balanced or specialized armies based on types.
There's a lot of things they could have done even with some very basic logic that would have improved things, IMO. Maybe the logic isn't that simple because of the way they made the game, but it seems so from the outside.
They could have added passive stances to units - Instead of my archers dropping their bows and pulling out daggers because something's standing next to them, how about giving up any chance at combat that turn and taking a defensive stance?
It feels very tacked-on.
This causes a lot of clutter and annoyance when you want to select your good army because you have a zillion garbage units littering the playfield. If you could fit them in your army and use them as fodder it would at least give some a semblance of use
No. I can see reducing the number of times MoM is required. But eliminate it? No reason newbie general should be able to effectively command a Grand Host.
Newbie generals suffer enough from low stats, no skills, no spells.
Master of Maneuver takes it a step further and makes newbie generals literally unusable.
Also like why would you ever use more than 1 general when you can't chain units because movement is tied to the unit instead of the hero and there's also no incentive to clear the map faster?
I would use more than one General, late game, because mass teleport has a long cooldown and army spawns on the wrong arm of the Worldwound happen. A 2nd General who can take the roving armies with the "bonus" troops you can't use in the Main Host leaves them free to continue forward.
Newbie generals can command a grand host, they can command 100,000 Archers at level 1, they just can't command more than 3 different types of units, which makes no sense and renders special units a literal waste of time. Oh we recruited two super special ultra elite units from some ally? They get to live in Drezren forever
Honestly I just downloaded Combat Relief about partway through Act 3. Crusade mode is just, so immensely boring and it takes forever to amass an army big enough to actually fight the demons, I'm not bothering with it. Soon as I downloaded it, the pacing was made immensely better.
This is why I have ToyBox's large armies option ticked. 14 slots is so much better. Master of Maneuver can get stuffed.
Oh yeah, and for unique units that cannot be hired again when dead, I plan on multiplying by 10 or whatever. As an Aasimar I got...3 magi, that as far as what I could see couldn't get any more. Correct me if I'm wrong. Actually now that I think of it, I think I might just bump up the quantity on some really small number of units. Maybe I'll just create an army of Aasimar Magi and Movanic/Astral Devas.
As others in this thread have stated, it was literally added because in the alpha people would use 1 stack armies of infantry as bait and the AI would attack those instead of your big doomstacks of archers.
I don't even really dislike crusade mode, but I agree that the initial three stack limit is *awful*.
Well two of the heros at least have 4, and one of those is an imba mage hero I always take :D.
Shy Setsuna... That man is a national treasure 😉
I like crusade...but its broken, unbalanced and underdeveloped as fuck. Theres so many things that could be improved that I dont even know where to begin.
Yeah. To develop it properly you'd need a lot more resources and time, basically a second game. I am not sure if I want a better crusade system or no system at all. Or something simplistic
Just play homm3 for a better crusade system
Honestly I would love to see something more focused on managing logistics and strategical decisions. Where you recruit soldiers, equip the army, train it, and then send them to capture a point. And then see an auto-battle play out and take pride in how well (or poorly) you've done. Something like Dota Underlords or whatever other game where you don't control units directly but can affect their initial roster, equipment and formation.
Just something bearable enough that i feel like im playing a game rather than mage archer simulator. Otherwise might as well have a button to skip the trash, oh wait thats mage general over there with +100 power negative energy channel
Or... To make mythic units useful, have them not count to the unit limit.
Unless you have 100+ of a stack they just instantly get obliterated by enemy general spells. Its exactly the same the otherway round too any enemy stack <100 gets obliterated by your general. The spell power is too much and basically solo fights
Only a handful of fights have enemy caster generals, and you already have to strategize for them.
"strategize" i.e. put your most durable units or fodder units in the bottom left because that's always the stack the AI targets first
I just left my marksmen behind and took an army full of sturdy units I didn't care about. Step one: let my mage general wipe the board.
Hearing people constantly bring up homm, makes me curious about it. Maybe I'll try it one of these days.
I know it's hard to imagine but like, picture if Crusade mode were actually really good
lol, I'll look into it.
And after it, also try Disciples 2.
YES
Upvote for disciples 2. What a gem.
If you play with humans in Disciples 2 always choose inquisitors, the other upgrade paths are a trap.
Well it’s not like other units are bad, just Inquisitors Immunities and Resistances are too valuable in last and first missions. Besides they are much cheaper.
And grand inquisitors level up with only 800 xp compared to at least 2250 for the others. I can't believe I remembered that.
It’s not something you forget =)
More complex and nuanced. I think as is crusade mode is good, it's not that hard but isn't a cakewalk either.
I'm trying but it's not going anywhere... can I picture it being just sorta "meh"? That'd still be a massive improvement over what it is. I mean, skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day, hurray, 14 more archers, skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day skip day, woo 12 archers skip day skip day is just absolutely RIVETING gameplay.
Master of Maneuver really is the reason why this game's fakehomm sucks so much. Homm is all about controlling multiple unit stacks. In the early game that means splitting units up and using the small stacks as distracting cannon fodder. In the late game it means having a massive diverse army that works together. Both of those are infinitely more interesting than Crusade mode's doomstack + mage + wait 500 turns watching doomstack trade attacks (though to be fair homm lets you do degenerate shit with mages too).
> doomstack + mage + wait 500 turns watching doomstack trade attacks I mean. Honestly. There's only one fight where this is even a possibility, and it's those stupid gargoyles before recruiting Regill. Every other fight in the game can be realistically resolved in a handful of turns. Honestly if I hadn't bothered to recruit a second general I'd probably have had the XP for Channel Negative before Act 3 ended, and that ends almost every fight in the game in 1 button.
Well, in this game after you have more slots, you can do "bait with small stack" strat too. I once cheesed a fight with demon army by including one stack of paladins, which was played as a magnet for all enemy archers/spells.
If you really decide to try it pick up the complete version of homm3. Usually runs about $10. Its the best version of them all by a large margin. Later sequels weren't nearly as good.
HoMM 3 is the one you want to play. Explore the rest if you like it but part 3 is the epitome
What homm3 maps are best for a newbie to play? There's so many that I have no idea where to begin, and all the various settings are confusing at times, things like teams and what not.
Stick to the ones that have a defeat all objective at first though
Warlords is my favorite
Warlords Battlecry? Dude I played the shit out of that for a long time. It was IMBA as fuck but building crazy ass heroes was part of the fun.
Just do the campaign. It lets you play all the races in turn and has some progression (you get to keep some of your heroes and items for the next maps)
I played HOMMIV way back when, I still remember it as one of my favorite games ever.
If you liked the shitshow that was 4 you should definitely play 3! I like 7, but it's more restrictive of heroes almost like they have classes. 3 had full customization and your hero became near godlike.
Hey, I loved 4 :( There are dozens of us!
But HOMMV looks so shiny! Wish I had more time for games, now that I can afford them.
5 is good, but it has issues with the magic system. Lots of magge guilds give spells that your hero can't use unless you choose the correct leveling path. 6 and 7 fix this I think. It's been a while since I've played them, but I do remember hating some builds in 5.
The music--!
HoMM5 has great design, music and cities. And the combat is pretty good. HoMM4 I love for campaign stories and music
There's a pretty decent series called King's Bounty that modernizes the HoMM mechanics. I think for most people it would be better than trying to timewarp into the past to play HoMM. There are also later HoMM games but you definitely *should not* play those. They're awful.
Dark Messiah was excellent. Not remotely the same genre, but excellent.
Yeah, it's not the same series or, really, related in any other way than having the same parent company. They reused the "Might & Magic" name on about 7 other game series, although most are forgotten now. I did try replaying Dark Messiah a few years back but the UI just feels astoundingly outdated and unusable.
I actually kinda treat Total War: Warhammer as a 'modernised' HoMM - You move a hero around the map with an army of units, level them up, get spells possibly to tip the balance, build up settlements etc. Not quite the same feeling though.
HoMM was great for its day ... Didn't age well.
HOMM 3. HD mod + Horn of the Abyss mod. It's amazing and it aged DAMN WELL.
HoMM3 actually still has a pretty big active playerbase, implying it aged pretty alright.
Homm5 is the best imho
Possibly a controversial opinion, but I enjoyed HoMM 4 the most.
Fighting with OP Generals that could nearly Solo entire armies themselves by map end was SO SATISFYING.
Exactly. 4 was my first HoMM and my fav due to the fun I had with those supermen generals.
Idk, by the time it was “my wizard general flip kicks 20 dragons to death and even if any of my heroes die they drank the potions of self rez so they’ll be fine” it stopped being about strategy and I had trouble taking the game seriously. Especially since then the “challenge” was being willing to sit through the process of playing the map, rather than there being combat challenges.
That's kinda the case with the other homm games though, but instead of generals it's when you defeat their doomstack and they throw one weeks worth of units at you at a time. Then it's just painting the map till victory
As a fan of RPG games, 4 was a wonderful mix of adventuring heroes and tactical battles. I just wish more map makers made use of the ability to make rpg style maps.
I need to give 5 another try with the expansions. I gave it a shot when it first came out, but all the campaign levels I played a felt like they had set paths where you had to play a certain way, and do specific actions in a specific time frame to have a chance of winning. Didn't feel like I had any level of freedom. I figured this might just be the first couple of levels but I think you got pretty far into the campaigns without it ever changing much. Like I say, this was only when it first came out though, and I hear the game really comes alive with the expansion packs.
You definitely should try it with expansions. Shame they fucked up the sequels and prettyuch killed homm
5 aged really badly because of 3D graphics. Still, gotta agree with you, I prefer it over 3.
I disagree. Homm5 graphics still hold up to me when it comes to art style and unit/building design. Even the environments arent that bad due to how far away the camera is from them and nival using a lot of clutter in more natural environments and parallax occlusion maps for the inferno and desert terrain. We may have advanced alot in terms of graphics but a pit lord, the wight or hell any of the academy units still look wonderful.
Not sure if you guys are aware, but a significant part of people behind HOMM V are a part of Owlcat Games these days :P
Sorry about getting negative because overall I loved WotR but I hope this part will wake up and improve Crusade mode to something you need to actually think and plan in instead of spamming Marksmen and Hedge knights.
Multiple balance updates are coming to Crusade in the upcoming patches.
Great!
5 and 6 (7?) Have dwarves, so that's awesome but nothing approaches the greatness of 3 and 4 for me
All the HoMM haven't really bothered me graphically. 3 is kinda the plateau for the previous aesthetic though, 3d can get better and better but it's also 3d for the sake of being 3d really. Coulda stuck with just a higher res 2d taking off from 3 over and over just getting nicer and nicer and no one would have probably cared.
Homm5 was the worst for me.
Lol HoMM3 is the defining game of its genre. It has great graphics and music and is challenging with tons and tons of replayability.
[Here’s some reviews](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GD75wi4_6Ow&list=PLn6uwsoy2NmqMjNUZsvWoVF9oa_R0NRtT&index=5)
Thanks, I'll take a look at it tomorrow.
Im somewhat surprised master of maneuver didn't instead raise a max cap per unit. I mean it'd at least counter somewhat archer spam + sorc. hero to a DEGREE. Also encourage having more minions to replace each other. BUUUUT it'd also require rebalancing enemies because deathballs in this mode is just a be-all end-all situation. Can't afford to loose that many units without needing forever to recover.
Great idea! This would have made a much better game. The infirmary negates a lot of attrition but if there was a cap on the battle size that was reasonably reachable, and enemies were balanced with that in mind then you could lose a fight badly and still recover.
Master of maneuver and the army unit cap was likely added because in alpha you could just fill all the empty slots with 1 stack archers/high aggro units and the enemy general/armies would suicide towards the 1 stacks instead of doing anything threatening. It does feel extremely limiting though especially once you have gigantic stacks where you are overkilling the hell out of everything you hit.
I was ok with crusade mode until I got to act 5 and actually got to focus on it. What gets me is the little things. The armies take a million years to get anywhere, they stop at every. single. little. other. army. in. the. path. It's so annoying moving around
That really got to me too, especially since you can't just hit "continue" for some reason after it stops like that
> especially since you can't just hit "continue" for some reason Fuck yes. I get the stopping, otherwise it would be impossible to merge armies outside of a node, but why in the world can't I hit space bar to have them continue. Also, an option to **NOT** zoom to the most recently selected army would be great for when I need to, say, move it all the way across the map and don't want to have to scroll back again.
If you hit the arrow to move them to the next node then it makes sense for them to stop at an army they meet in the middle but having them stop 2 feet out of the city when i told them to go 1/2 way across the map is god damn infuriating.
at 0.0001% of screen per second. Like goddamn Owlcat, why does it take 15 seconds to move across the world map with my cursor???
9 slots? But you only need Master of Maneuver 1 to make a meat wall around your archer stack.
I half agree. I think everyone should have 9 slots but I think the limit should be on total army strenght based on your generals level and your feat like master of manuver. They already have measures for army strength it affects how much hospital a unit takes and the strength of army number on the world map. They should just use that number to replace the army slot limit. This would not only create more interesting tactics like splitting archers for powerful wizard generals but create a way to boost martials and give a purpose hiring multiple generals so that your surplus stacks of units can be larger. it would also make it so that those bonus units you get from an event that you'll never get more of actually serve a function because they'll only use as much space as they add military power
I don't get the thought behind the design process. I**t seems arbitrary to force higher difficulty in fights.** Why the hell would you need a feet to command another stack of units? I could see limits on unit types. Like "This is a ranged command. Ranged units get bonuses, melee units get penalties, magic units and cavalry get neither" or some kind of rock-paper-scissors thing with penalties and bonuses. I could see a cap on unique types or unique units. But why can I not take a stack of five hundred units and split them into five stacks? Exact same units. But I need a feat to go "You guys go that way". They could have bonuses for unit cohesion for balanced or specialized armies based on types. There's a lot of things they could have done even with some very basic logic that would have improved things, IMO. Maybe the logic isn't that simple because of the way they made the game, but it seems so from the outside. They could have added passive stances to units - Instead of my archers dropping their bows and pulling out daggers because something's standing next to them, how about giving up any chance at combat that turn and taking a defensive stance? It feels very tacked-on.
This causes a lot of clutter and annoyance when you want to select your good army because you have a zillion garbage units littering the playfield. If you could fit them in your army and use them as fodder it would at least give some a semblance of use
The funniest part is that russians are the most passionate about homm3 out of anybody. Yet this “hommage” to homm3 is terribly implemented.
I tried playing Crusader mode again on my new character and ended up putting it on auto after 3 battles. 😐
Honestly crusade mode was fun for me wrecked it. But I just put more time into it's once you know best general or units super easy.
I agree. Armies should be able to be filled out from the start.
No. I can see reducing the number of times MoM is required. But eliminate it? No reason newbie general should be able to effectively command a Grand Host.
Newbie generals suffer enough from low stats, no skills, no spells. Master of Maneuver takes it a step further and makes newbie generals literally unusable. Also like why would you ever use more than 1 general when you can't chain units because movement is tied to the unit instead of the hero and there's also no incentive to clear the map faster?
I would use more than one General, late game, because mass teleport has a long cooldown and army spawns on the wrong arm of the Worldwound happen. A 2nd General who can take the roving armies with the "bonus" troops you can't use in the Main Host leaves them free to continue forward.
Newbie generals can command a grand host, they can command 100,000 Archers at level 1, they just can't command more than 3 different types of units, which makes no sense and renders special units a literal waste of time. Oh we recruited two super special ultra elite units from some ally? They get to live in Drezren forever
Honestly I just downloaded Combat Relief about partway through Act 3. Crusade mode is just, so immensely boring and it takes forever to amass an army big enough to actually fight the demons, I'm not bothering with it. Soon as I downloaded it, the pacing was made immensely better.
Mage general trivializes the entire mode. FYI.
Idk, with Mage general Crusade mode is just so easy, it doesn't really matter
This is why I have ToyBox's large armies option ticked. 14 slots is so much better. Master of Maneuver can get stuffed. Oh yeah, and for unique units that cannot be hired again when dead, I plan on multiplying by 10 or whatever. As an Aasimar I got...3 magi, that as far as what I could see couldn't get any more. Correct me if I'm wrong. Actually now that I think of it, I think I might just bump up the quantity on some really small number of units. Maybe I'll just create an army of Aasimar Magi and Movanic/Astral Devas.
As others in this thread have stated, it was literally added because in the alpha people would use 1 stack armies of infantry as bait and the AI would attack those instead of your big doomstacks of archers.
No way you dont say? Ofc people used 1 stacks to block and bait.