Obi
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I play without the HD mod, of course. The question of saving time is irrelevant here – if you want to save time, there's no point in spending it on Heroes at all; there are much more useful things to do.
Let's start with the obvious: Heroes was released 20 years ago. Back then, there were no platforms to support games with the ability to release patches and instantly fix bugs like Steam. So, if you released a game and then found a bug in it, or came up with a great feature shortly after release, the only way to add them was to create a new version of the game, and no one would do that just to fix a couple of bugs. Obviously, NWC had other thoughts and concerns at the time, which is why they decided to end Heroes 3 on the SOD version, then released Heroes 4, and then went completely bankrupt in 2003. Unfortunately, when you're developing a game on behalf of an entire company, you need to think not so much about making the game great, but about making it popular and profitable so that the company can stay afloat.
As for additional tools like the HD mod and the Sod_SP plugin, they were developed by Heroes fans purely out of enthusiasm, with community support. The features that these tools add are a natural progression of the game in terms of convenience, which the developers at the time didn't come up with simply because of limited resources and time. The desire to make a process more convenient is perfectly normal; if you need to transfer money to someone who lives in Vladivostok, you'll do it with one click through online banking, or will you go to the Russian Post because "you need to use tools that were created 150 years ago"?
Why are you focusing specifically on the developers of SoD, which was released in its "bare" form 20 years ago, is unclear. Okay, if you found out that baratorch, who is developing the HD mod, or RoseKavalier, who is developing SoD_SP, suddenly turned out to be the developers of the game, would that make you feel better? Or if the developers who no longer work at NWC looked at the HD mod and Sod_SP and said, "Cool, it's a shame we didn't think of this 20 years ago," would you then start using these tools?
Regarding simplifying the combat part, I think that in the process of battles, as in any business, there are two components: creative and mechanical. Finding a winning strategy in battle is a creative process that requires human experience and understanding of the game, and therefore it is unlikely that it is possible to write a plugin that will find a winning strategy by simply trying out different options, as there are too many of them. But the process of going through a battle with knowledge of the strategy is a mechanical process, reduced to repeating monotonous actions, which consist of clicking on the screen in a certain area, and SoD_SP is designed to make this process more convenient and faster, because any person monotonous, repetitive actions cause boredom.
If I have a task: "kill one archdevil with 10,000 crystal dragons through quicksand," then I would rather write a plugin that will win this battle for me, because the task of writing such a plugin is creative in itself, requiring an understanding of many aspects of coding, and it is definitely more interesting than the task of "performing a cycle of clicks on the screen in a certain sequence N times," where N is large enough, and deadly boredom sets in after the 50th time. And your statement seems strange and illogical to me: "Well, playing Heroes is useless in itself, so you need to stretch it out so that it lasts even longer and is even more boring." I don't think playing Heroes is a useless activity, nor do I think any activity in which you can find room for creativity is useless, even if it doesn't
bring you material benefits.
What other argument do you have? You claim that with the high animation speed in SoD_SP, the likelihood of misclicking is greater, even though you have never used it. This is not true, because misclicks, in my opinion, occur from boredom and monotonous actions, and this happens sooner the slower your battle speed is. But even if this is not the case for you, and you misclick for another reason, nothing prevents you from setting the standard battle speed directly in the battle; this option is available.
I wouldn't write all this text if you just said, "I play the original SoD because I'm a fan of the archaic," but you said it as if you were a truth-teller, implying: "I play the original SoD without the HD mod and SoD_SP, making my game 10 times more inconvenient, and I believe that everyone else should do the same." That's why I wrote this post; I think anyone who reads it should see that you are wrong.