Posts from Mapmaking tips.

Hello everyone! I suggest that in this thread, you share tips on mapmaking in Heroes IV. Unusual scripts, special artwork, and more. Here's an example of a script from me:
Let's say that after capturing a certain town, you need to end up in a specific location. You have one week. How can you implement this time limit using scripts? In the town's properties, on the "capture" tab, create an event: if the town is captured by a specific player, assign the variable, let's say "Time," to 8. Now, in the calendar events, create a daily event: if the variable "Time" is greater than 1, then "Time" minus 1; otherwise, if the variable "Time" = 1, then [the desired action, signifying the end of the time limit], and assign the variable "Time" to 0; otherwise, do nothing.
This is how you can create time limits with any duration and any conditions. You can also warn the player how many days are left until the time limit: if the variable "..." = (let's say) 3, then display the message "you have two days left until the end of the time limit."

A couple of days ago, I created a pseudo-random drop system, meaning I made a script that causes items and/or resources to drop randomly from neutral monsters. It's a bit complicated to explain in detail, so I'll just upload a map with 4 squads, each with a 72% chance of dropping something, with 4% for each of the 18 possible drop variations, and a 28% chance of nothing dropping. One part of the script is in the "Drops" calendar event in the map properties, and the other is in the squads themselves, in the Events - Defeat tab.

Lately, I've been working on playing through my collection of maps, and I decided to share some information. I hope it will be useful for both map creators and players. Most of the maps are in Russian, with a few exceptions. I mainly played on Champion difficulty, with mobile guardians, but there are maps that are designed for a lower difficulty level. I didn't set any goals for record-breaking playthroughs and played randomly. I opened the map in the editor and read the author's comments only if I couldn't find a way out of a dead end. There were almost no problems with the maps included in the official collections from Буки. However, there were problems with the maps included in the Alexander collection (Dungeon of Dragons, Lord of the Rings, Excalibur) and various other collections, including the top 30 maps according to Игромания and others. Here are some of the problems and other features I want to note:
1. The same maps are found under different names in the collections.
2. The difficulty levels of the maps are very subjective. Many level 2 maps (presumably by default) may be no less difficult to complete than level 5 maps.
3. Not all authors have a good literary style, but slang and interjections mixed with profanity, and poorly written, do not make the game more appealing.
4. Inadequate (large) guard force protecting the passage. Especially if the starting area is poor and there is no way to develop the hero and build an army. Sometimes you can just accumulate an army for a few months, but the guard force also grows.
5. It's good when there is a large guard force only in a few key places, but when such a guard force is encountered at every turn, and on an S-map... It's a different matter when it's necessary according to the scenario, and if you want, you can bypass such a guard force.
6. When playing on Champion difficulty, the AI heroes often need preliminary strengthening (a bonus). They develop weakly, behave cautiously, and are clearly not aiming for victory, so they can be taken down with bare hands. However, this applies to multiplayer maps.
7. Sometimes the author of a good map didn't test it for playability, and the hero suddenly gets stuck in a dead end in the middle of the game. You look in the editor - there is a passage, but in the game - the hero cannot go through it. Either the passage is too narrow, or the hero is too big.
8. It's good when there is an interesting plot, and not just mindless killing. But sometimes the plot is so convoluted that even the author cannot clearly explain the sequence of actions for completing it. In the third game, the sequence of actions was described more clearly.
9. And there are problems with scripts. For example, the hero is allowed to go further if he destroys a certain enemy. The enemy is destroyed, but the hero is not allowed to go further. And after 2 weeks, a message suddenly appears that the enemy has been destroyed. Or the hero gets to a place from which there is no way out, and he has to go back 1-2 weeks and go another way. But worse, when you complete an interesting map, fight many difficult battles, destroy all the enemies, and fulfill all the conditions for victory, but there is no victory and the game does not end.
There were also other, less significant problems that I didn't note. I didn't specify which problems were found on which maps, especially since I read positive reviews about some of these maps. But these reviews should be treated critically - for example, in a review of one of the prize-winning maps, it is written that it could not be completed due to a bug. However, creating a good map is a laborious task, and the author should not be blamed for minor bugs - no one is perfect.
In conclusion, I want to provide a list of maps that are often very interesting, but during which problems arose that prevented me from finishing the game, as well as those that I did not continue (going back for an indefinite number of turns, accumulating an army for a long time) and duplicates. I deleted most of the duplicates, but they are still found.
last hero
Oldwood the Empire province
Patlasar campaign
Search for the Old Heroes 2
Vedmak
World of alahor
Mir-Muzei
Vozvrashchenie zla
Korрида
Os' vremeni
Otkrytiya
Poiski Dzina
Priklucheniya prints Roberta
Proklyatye zemli
Puteshestvie Egmonta
Sluchainy geroi (and a duplicate - Spryatannye sokrovishcha)
Kvadrat (a duplicate of the normal Labyrinth)
There were a few more maps that I rejected, but I don't remember the reasons, so I didn't note them. I think I will add to the list later, as I have played through less than half of the collection.

What’s wrong with Egmont?)
I completed it entirely, though only playing as the humans. It was simply intriguing.

I looked at the map – I also played as humans. I explored almost the entire map, killed enemies in the lower-left corner of the dungeon, and I think something happened there. I didn't save, so I can't remember exactly, either some condition wasn't met, or the teleport didn't return me, or maybe I wasn't prepared enough for the encounter – in short, I hit a dead end. But I remember concluding that I needed to go back many days and follow a different path, and do it faster. This is more of a case where the map isn't impossible, but rather that replaying it felt tedious. Apparently, I needed to stick to a specific order of actions, rather than wandering around the map randomly.

I looked at the map – I also played as Humans. I explored almost the entire map, was killing enemies in the lower left corner of the dungeon, and I think something happened there. I didn't save, so I can't remember exactly, either some condition wasn't met, or the teleport didn't return me, or maybe I wasn't prepared enough for the encounter – in short, I hit a dead end. But I remember concluding that I needed to go back many days and follow a different path, and do it faster. It's more a case where the map isn't impossible to beat, but rather that I didn't feel like replaying it. Apparently, I needed to follow a specific order of actions, rather than wandering around the map randomly.

As I recall, on that map, in the lower left corner, there's an arena, and there was some condition associated with it, like completing it without an army on the sixth and seventh days of the week. The messages just didn't clearly state the condition for completing it, and I couldn't figure out how to do it either (if that was your problem). I played the map as the Dark faction and didn't notice any errors or bugs.

Sometimes, errors occur that are less related to the game itself and more likely to be specific to a particular game session (or, more precisely, a particular map). For example, I once completed the "Axis of Time" map without any issues. However, when I decided to play it again, it would suddenly end in the middle of the game and declare my victory, even though I was still far from achieving it. Perhaps the map was from a different build, but I encountered similar problems a long time ago. For example, in the fourth campaign, in the map about the pirate's daughter, the game would suddenly freeze in the middle of the battle (with a behemoth walking sideways across the bridge in mid-air). I don't remember if I had to replay only that map or start the entire campaign from the beginning – I wasn't making regular saves back then.
In general, I was prompted to write all this by two recent games: "World Museum," where a problem I noted in point 7 occurred after a difficult battle just before the final victory, and "Two Heroes," which has problems noted in points 5 and 7 (the latter problem doesn't affect the gameplay, so the map isn't included in the list).

I encountered the following bug on one map: the victory condition required finding an artifact, but this artifact was located right next to the hero at the beginning of the map. It's unlikely that this was a mistake by the mapmaker or a problem with the map itself. Perhaps the issue was with the game version: the map was created for "The Coming of the Storm," and I played it on "Whirlwinds." So, could it be that a script works incorrectly in one version of the game, but the map creator uses this "bug" to create a working script, only for the bug to be fixed in the next version, causing the created script to malfunction?

It's quite possible – I'm currently replaying maps on the "Whirlwinds of War" setting, and many of them were created for the fourth installment (there are significantly fewer for "The Gathering Storm"). But if you remember how the fourth game bogged down the computer, you wouldn't want to play it. Of course, this is if the problem is with the scripts. But if they forgot to create the necessary passage or the possibility to open it (with a hint), then it probably doesn't depend on the game version.

Of course, this is if the problem is with the scripts. But if they forgot to create the necessary passage or the possibility to open it (with a hint), then it is unlikely to depend on the game version.

Technical bugs/errors in rendering or imbalances usually indicate that the map author does not test it or works carelessly.

Technical bugs or errors in rendering, or imbalances, usually indicate that the map creator did not test it, or did not put enough effort into it.

I simply can't understand this. Creating a good map requires dozens, or even hundreds, of hours of work. How can it be so difficult to spend a couple of days testing it? I remember a few years ago, I was playing through the "Adventures of Might and Magic" campaign. In the second scenario, I couldn't get past a checkpoint, even though I had the required artifact mentioned in the message. It turned out that the author simply forgot to set the quest condition, and I had to replay the entire first scenario and half of the second.

There's some excellent advice on mapmaking from Marmot; I think it’s here: /topic/at/473791/ – I completely agree and couldn’t say it better myself.

Marmot has some really good tips on Mapmaking; it seems they are here: /topic/at/473791/ – I completely agree and couldn't say it better myself.

Interestingly, many of the Mapmaking tips (except for specific cases) apply to almost all parts of Heroes. So, the same advice applies to the fourth game as it does to the third.