The release date of the expansion pack is approaching.

The main question that no one from the TE community has given me an answer to is: what exactly is TE? Is it truly the ideological successor to SoD, more advanced and improved, or is it a similar but completely different game?
So far, I haven't heard anything concrete. For now, I've formed the opinion that sometimes it's beneficial to present TE as the ideological successor, and sometimes as a completely new game. Something like "...a little bit man, a little bit woman...".

I read player reports on TE and constantly hear complaints about this very issue.


Personally, I don't really care about the outcome; I play for relaxation. But in the days of Chaos, Joker, Bishop, Mega Dog, Phil, and many others, it was a little different. And I didn't hear these wonderful players being thrilled about TE.

TE is the ideological successor to SoD, more improved and advanced in terms of balance and, most importantly, gameplay convenience, and the absence of many prohibitions and restrictions, and the resulting loss of a number of heroes and tactics...

But I heard from Chaos, Joker, Mega Dog, Phil, and many others enthusiastic exclamations about TE, when I saw and talked to them in Kingisepp last year (and Mega Dog - when he came and played with me in Alaska, on TE, by the way...), the only thing is that each of them individually didn't like some aspects of TE - some didn't like the experience, some didn't like the bank, some didn't like taxes, but the global changes - a much faster and more convenient multiplayer game, balance in the game, and the removal of restrictions on most things - everyone was very happy about this (the problem with these strong players from Moscow is different, they have all switched to poker and now hardly play Heroes at all, neither SoD nor TE)

As for the legendary Antal, a multiple-time world champion in ToH, what's the problem with talking to him? He's almost always online during the day. Antal was one of the first to recognize TE, but again, he recently got married, and because of that, he stopped playing, although he still wants to, he says.

And the Championship, in which I also played for some time before TE, is called the "father of TE" because it already implemented the idea of not banning or prohibiting the leveling of certain heroes, and thus hindering the game - but simply changing their properties, and it was also there that the necropatch was introduced...

Now, what would I keep from SoD and what would I remove... Considering that I am a terrible conservative, and I played TE with even more terrible conservatives (and I continue to play), here's how it was for us:


1) Fast transfers and division of armies and artifacts with one button, buying all troops were kept.

2) Scrolls were replaced with gold, healing fountains and cartographers - with dwelling places of fairy dragons.

3) All heroes are allowed, i.e., the magic or specialty of the prohibited ones is changed (and with diplomacy, troops do not join).

4) The most important thing for us (since we all had terrible slowdowns in the game) is the introduction of chess clocks; the game really became much faster after that, this is extremely important (and disabling mana consumption in combat during fast battles, since fast battles were often used in the late game (why fight normally with a pack of angels, for example, with large parameters, when almost everything is defeated without losses and so in fast battles, and this saves a lot of time (in SoD, fast battles were impossible, since the stupid computer spends all the mana in battles that are carried out without losses without using mana).


Everything else was disabled and was as in SoD (i.e., the bank, experience, guild restructuring, and all other additions were without this).

I also think that for starters, it is necessary to leave the magic in the previous elements and remove the hero classes when they gain certain skills. Why? Just because the main thing that prevents the transition from SoD to TE, despite all the advantages, is the laziness to read at least the manual and the laziness to figure out the installation (although this is not difficult at all, even for me, who is very far from computers, except for playing games...).

Therefore, for starters, after installing TE, the player should not have to read anything at all, so that he can simply sit down and start playing, and everything should be as in his familiar SoD, but with the convenience of transferring and dividing armies with one button and time ticking in the turn and in battles, as in TE...

The same applies to installation and setting options - the player should not have to read the manual to install TE, even if it is simple, he should just click the "download" button, and that's it, nothing else should be required of him, and after downloading, click on the shortcut and start playing... And also, it is important that in the finished game, all the checkboxes are already checked where they need to be, so that the game is the same as SoD, with the exception of the four points that I mentioned above, so that again, the player can simply sit down and start playing, and not worry about where to put a checkbox to disable the bank and experience, for example, and the game is the same as the usual SoD...