Posts from Heroes 5.5 WarGame Edition - Tactical Edition.

I consistently maintain the position that diversity should be preserved, and within the achieved framework, the best balance should be established. The opponent conveys the point of view that everything should be simplified as much as possible because then the balance will be better.

From my perspective, I believe that everything is correct; for an ideal, minimalist balance, you can play chess... Although even there, you can lose your queen (analogous to a one-shot squad, as mentioned in the previous message) with a single thoughtless move, or even get checkmated, so there is no balance anywhere.

If perfect balance were the only crucial criterion, then yes.
But in my system of values, diversity and a multifaceted experience play a key role.
That is, first and foremost, I work on high diversity (this is what makes balance interesting), and secondly, I fine-tune the optimal balance to suit it, avoiding cutting back on diversity.

Moreover, I prioritize combat diversity above all else. I am willing to sacrifice interesting progression (leveling up 10 levels is not as interesting as 20), and I am willing to forgo the most powerful artifacts, such as +50% damage, just so that these factors do not harm the existing combat, where the abilities and parameters of units are fully revealed.

However, what I am not willing to do is reduce the role of individual parameters or abilities. That is, no reducing a 10% difference to 5% (parameters here play twice as strongly as in the original, and I see no point in making a smaller step). And no weakening abilities (except perhaps for BB), on the contrary, abilities need to be made more vivid and impactful; this always increases interest (better quality than quantity).

For example, 10/20/30% attack is interesting, while 5/10/15% is a pathetic remnant of a skill. On the other hand, with a large number of simultaneously taken skills for physical damage, 30% attack will exacerbate the gap, so the total number of skills in a build should not be large, that is, the hero's level should not be high.

Added 53 minutes later
That is, it turns out that:

The highest priority is high diversity, which creates a multifaceted experience and ensures high interest (hence the desire for strong and spectacular abilities, as well as "unconventional" types of units).
Balance and dynamics are secondary things that should serve this diversity.

A game with high dynamics but without gameplay is meaningless. As an example in the discussion, some maps in Heroes 3 were mentioned, where utopia is taken in 1 (!) week, due to the fact that a lot of wyverns/angels are farmed on snakes/canned creatures on the map, the same army is broken through many times per turn in a chain, and so on. It's fast, dynamic, but monotonous - there is zero interest in it.

A game with excellent balance but little diversity is dry and uninteresting. Chess is not the best example here; I would rather cite checkers as an example - a game where multi-step and deep calculation + combinations are important, but the basic diversity of pieces is very low, which is why interest in the game is quite niche. Getting a person to play checkers against modern games requires skill.

@Nargott what do you think of balance when it comes to Destruction school compared to the other three? I am interested in your perspective.

I ask this because if one looks at the schools  by their behaviour and ignore the strength of their effect Destruction falls into the pit of being the best school (or the worst if nerfed).

Destruction spells deal their effect instantly, are reliable (you always know what they will do), their effect is permanent and affect the enemy by reducing its life force which brings you closer to success in combat.

All other spells are with traits that look less beneficial - for example:
- buffs/debuffs - temporary effect that takes time to give value, some buff/debuff effects are questionable depending on circumstances
- Conjuring summons - temporary effect that needs time to give value
- Conjuring battlefield obstacles - Arcane crystal, blade barrier, Fire mine - have questionable effect depending of circumstances.

All 3 schools - Dark, Light and Summoning are in the same league because their effect on combat is indirect and is time dependent so it can be countered. 

Destruction is instant and with direct effect so it is hard to balance as it become either overpowered or underpowered. Also it is the only school that is not dependent on the army behaviour. You just defend with your troops and spam spells.

What is your take on this? What do you agree and what you don't? If you could change anything in destruction what it would be?

 

 

@Dredknight
One could argue that Destruction magic is the most problematic, but I see it as a fundamental school that other schools should be built upon.

I think that buffs/debuffs should heavily depend on spell power, as well as spells from the Destruction school. That is, the effect of buffs should primarily scale with spell power, while duration is less important. This opens up the possibility of using these schools of magic most effectively with magical heroes, thereby compensating for the lag in passive stats.

Summoning is effective in a prolonged battle, so each effect it creates should ideally be long-lasting. A wall should not be destroyed in one hit (more durable, but with less damage), a phantom should not be destroyed in one hit (I plan to make incorporeality 1/3, that is, every third hit lands, while the first and second are guaranteed misses), a hive should not be destroyed in one attack, and so on.
In addition, for Destruction spells, spell power is the key parameter, and for summoning, knowledge should be the key parameter, because this school is focused on prolonged combat.
This also means that summoning spells can be made more powerful and expensive than Chaos spells, specifically to enhance the role of knowledge and mana.

The Arcane Crystal plays more of a role as an area-of-effect damage spell rather than an obstacle, and with a sufficiently high damage output, summoning has no problems with the relevance of this spell. It has been thoroughly tested (even in early versions of the mod) that with very high damage, the crystal becomes overpowered, to the point that it is spammed every turn and wins. The same can be said about mines - they are more situational (the enemy needs to move), but high damage can also compensate for this. Even better, if not so much with damage, but with the number of mines themselves - the more there are, the more reliably they work.

The problem with Destruction magic is that it is optimal at a certain point in time - if the armies are too small, it wins, but if they are too large, it is weak. Both effects can be mitigated:

1) If spells are made with a smaller multiplier to SP and a larger constant value, then the fluctuations in power will be lower - this is especially true for the most powerful spells. I think the ideal option is when the multiplier does not scale with the skill at all, but the constant value does - this allows you to play Chaos even with low SP, if you invest in the skill.

2) This effect is mitigated by strong abilities with additional effects (freezing, stunning, reducing defense, etc.). But an even more effective way is to motivate players not to gather a huge army with one hero. If a powerful army is less effective than many smaller armies, then this will work. In addition, the player should have several vulnerabilities - cities that cannot be defended by one army. Under these conditions, the problem of huge armies is solved, and therefore, Chaos will work better even in a prolonged game.

It turns out that huge armies are the key problem for Destruction magic. Because it can be balanced for a specific point in time, and then it inevitably weakens if the armies continue to grow significantly. Another means of curbing army growth in the late game is active exchanges, when players have several battles with each other, and troops are consumed rather than accumulated.

Added 15 minutes ago
If we remain within the model of "one large army accumulates", then a possible solution here is to introduce abilities/artifacts that enhance damage, depending on the hero's level. And/or to incorporate the hero's level into the spell formula itself, if possible. How sufficient this measure will be depends on the specific numbers and the number of such abilities.

Added 7 minutes ago
Regarding:
You just defend with your troops and spam spells.

A good defense against spell spam is mana scarcity - that is, powerful spells should be very expensive. In this case, it will not be possible to cast them throughout the battle, and you will have to switch to cheaper and weaker ones. Powerful Chaos spells, even if very expensive, are also effective against larger armies - when the player still has the opportunity to spend a lot of mana, but inflict significant damage, despite the size of the troops.

If the army is in defense, and the player has enough tempo and mana to defeat the enemy only with magic, this means that either he has too much mana, or the physical damage is so weak that the troops themselves cannot inflict enough damage. In the 20/80 model (20% damage from troops, 80% damage from the hero), the player has no motivation to leave defense. In order for the troops to play a role and not just stand in a defensive position, the damage from the hero and the damage from the army should be comparable. In addition, if the hero has a mana shortage (too expensive top-tier spells), then the player will have less incentive to prolong the battle with passive defense and more incentive to engage in an exchange, trying to inflict additional damage with troops.

Another perspective - fighting PvE vs destruction capable stacks.

A normal heroes V game that revolves around as fast as possible with as less casualties so at some point a snowball effect is achieved - enemies with destruction are a significant threat compared to other creatures on map. When it comes to tournaments there is a significant  disbalance if player 1 border stack is Destro caster and player 2 border stack is not.

Good evening!
How is the mod doing in terms of casual gameplay? Is it worth downloading it from the first post of the thread right now? About a year ago, I downloaded it, and there was only an arena with fixed heroes and their armies. In other words, I couldn't see any Efreet, but I would have liked to. How far are we from creating an arena where the player is given, say, 40k gold and can choose a castle, hire an army from that castle, level up from 1 to 20, and then fight against a similar opponent?
I'm just eager to play the mod, but it's taking so long.

Updated skill styles (offensive, defensive, magical, scientific).

Previously: +3 to a parameter for both heroes (against neutrals, it was simply +3).
Now: +3 to a parameter, but -1/-1/-1 to the other parameters.

Thus, no skills now provide bonuses to parameters (except for the education skill, which I weakened from +2/+2/+2 to +1/+1/+1), and styles only redistribute less important parameters into more important ones.
Gaining parameters is now the prerogative of artifacts (or a higher-level hero, which is "created" through education).

Also, if previously the offensive and defensive styles were effectively nullified against enemy heroes (both received +3/+3 to attack and defense, which had no effect on the battle), now they will work together (+2/+2 to attack and defense for the hero, but -2/-2 to magic and knowledge).

I don't know when the next mod update will be – I've only just started working on it again after a break.

Regarding units, here are my thoughts.

Damage output – the ratio of damage to survivability, taking into account abilities:
15-25% – tanks
26-39% – warriors
40-60% – damage dealers

That is, units will be in the range of 15 to 60% damage output. Why these parameters?
In my opinion, Heroes 3 (except for peasants) approached this issue in the best way. The lowest damage output there is for zombies (12.5% without considering abilities – 2.5 damage against 20 health). The highest is for wolf riders (40% without considering double strike, and about 65% with it). These boundaries are ideal.
In Heroes 5 (original), there are units that are too tanky, such as gargoyles and ents, which have a damage output of around 6% (without considering abilities). They literally do nothing except live for a long time. In my opinion, this shouldn't be the case – it's an exaggeration (on the other hand, in WGE, there remains the option to significantly reduce damage by going into defense, which was not strong enough in the original).

Also, I had to abandon the concept of racial restrictions, in the sense that each race would not have access to 3 class slots out of 9 (we're talking about a 3x3 grid, where one dimension is high/medium/low initiative, and the second is high/medium/low damage output). In fact, these restrictions will not exist; instead, racial features will be in effect.

1. Racial initiative of units: undead 6/8/10, dwarves 6/9/12, orcs 7/9/11, demons 7/10/13, humans 8/10/12, elves 8/11/14, shadows 9/11/13, mages 10/12/14 (or 9/12/15 – I haven't decided yet).
2. Racial damage output of units: the range of permissible damage output (for example, for demons from 26 to 60%, and for humans from 15 to 39%).

Within these restrictions, all class slots will be available, so there will be no dominance of, for example, dwarves with an initiative of 6 just because 3 out of 6 permitted class slots can only be with that initiative. In other words, dwarves have access to all 9 class slots, both in terms of initiative and damage output (nevertheless, within each slot, racial properties are preserved, such as reduced initiative and reduced damage output).

That is, in the case of dwarves, the average initiative of their troops will actually be 9 (with racial initiatives of 6/9/12), and not lower than 8 due to the prevalence of an initiative of 6.

Oh, that’s great news. WGE is like a drug; once you try it, you can’t play Heroes without it anymore.))

Can anyone tell me how to extract the new Gargoyle visual mod from Wargame? I found the mod separately, extracted all the matching files from the archive, but when I launch the game, a ton of errors appear. It seems like I need to clean something else.

 

Solution 1: Editing within the mod. (Incompatible with the Wargame update when it comes out - you'll have to repeat the edit.)

- Find the folder: \GameMechanics\CreatureVisual\

- In it, find the Academy folder and delete the files related to the gargoyle, there are three of them.

 

Solution 2: Editing with a separate mod. (Forever.)

- Create an empty mod.

- In it, create the folder \GameMechanics\CreatureVisual\ and copy the .xdb files of the original gargoyle into it, there are three of them.

(It also works with the Creature folder, I'm not sure what the difference is between Creature and CreatureVisual.)

Updated style skills (offensive, defensive, sorcery, scholarly)

Amazing, you're still working on this. Main respect)

I accidentally stumbled upon a project — some guys on UE are porting Heroes 5. Thought it might interest you.
https://www.youtube.com/@Heroes5Reborn
https://t.me/heroes5reborn

@Nargott I was inspired by your mod. Now I'm creating three different versions of creatures with a significantly altered balance and visuals, based on Heroes of Might and Magic 5.5. It's kind of a collection of mods with my own adjustments. Thank you very much. I probably wouldn't have come up with it myself.