[ARTICLE] Troop Experience

Take chess, for example. Why are electronic clocks introduced there? To avoid any imbalance with flags, so everyone can see exactly how much time they have left instead of guessing. This is really necessary. But why aren't new pieces introduced? For example, why have two knights on the board? You could remove one and replace the other, that would give more options, make it more interesting). Because nobody needs that at all. The point of the game isn't about that.

The chess example is incorrect because its gameplay is quite balanced and diverse in itself. That's why they don't touch it, only tweaking the interface.

Similarly, for example, with StarCraft — the balance was last changed way back in 2000, and since then for 10 years only bugs have been fixed and the interface slightly improved. Because the game was originally very deep and balanced.

With Heroes it's different — the developers didn't bother to polish the game to a proper state, a mass of raw and poorly thought-out things, a ton of bugs and imbalance. Hence the attitude towards the gameplay is not so reverent: as soon as you see something off, you immediately sharpen your scalpel or prepare a prosthesis.

And everyone is doing this — our SoD players (through rules and external programs), and foreign SoD players (by editing text files and again through rules), not to mention WoG and its successors like TE and VT.

The same HeroesWorld rules for SoD are quite far from the original Heroes gameplay, and various tweaks and clarifications are constantly being made to them.

Some Chinese rules or WCL rules or Chaos League rules have also deviated significantly, and in a different direction. So it's hard to talk about SoD as some kind of classic/standard; each sandbox has its own standard and its own classic. In WT, at least the rules are more or less unified (despite constant attempts by various irresponsible comrades to shake them up), there isn't such a wide spread, even if the gameplay is a bit different.