Heroes V for Macintosh

[Ijuuin Enzan]

This dead relic seems to be a Ciderized copy of the Windows version. Given that there will likely never be any further support for Macintosh players, what is the feasibility and general willingness to do the same for the expansions and further patches?

[RobB]

Does anyone read this thread? Is there anyone else who has the Mac verions of HOMM5?

I am really stuck on The Ranger, The Refugees. Contrary to Celestial Heaven's walkthru, my garrisons cannot withstand any attack - well, one did once, but the remaining Treants went down on the next atttack. I've got a fairly strong hero, but he never seems to be able to afford many troops or rather, by the time I've reached a gold mine, he usually has to go home to restock his army.

I am playing on "Easy". I can't even get together an army as strong as the average garrison - since they lose, how am I to survive. Moreover, the attacks come fast near the end of Month 2 - I restock one garrison (poorly), but it loses shortly after another garrison loses. And that's it: game over - none of my heroes have lost and I wasn't given a time limit, but I always lose at the end of Month 2.

[ShadowLiberal]

Are you updated to the latest version, 1.6? This mission has had some big changes from bug fixes over time.

A few of my tips.

-Despite what the guide says, DO NOT ADD ANY OF YOUR MEN TO THE GARRISON, because...
1) In later patches your garrisons will ALWAYS be hopeless overwhelmed when you get attacked.
2) Even if you do heavily reinforce say 3 of your 5 garrisons, the computer is smart enough to ALWAYS attack the weakest one, rather than committing suicide against a 9,999 tier 6 creature garrison.

-You have something like 6 to 8 weeks before Biara shows up in later patches, not 4 weeks like the guide says.

-This mission is very random. At times you get hit several times by Teal, other times not at all. If you get hit by teal their hero will often either run from your hero, or stay put right where they are. Just be close enough to recapture the garrison in a week, and DON'T put any reinforcements in it.

-Use another hero (or two) to transfer reinforcements to your main hero.

-When Biara attacks it doesn't matter how many garrisons you control anymore, that objective is complete.

-Biara will go through a garrison (losing pretty much nothing) and then will seize your town. This gives you time to quickly grab the last of the 11 stat boosters on the map while Biara just sits there in your town.

-Before Biara attacks your unguarded town, trade everything for gold, and hire EVERYTHING on a level 1 hero, and send those reinforcements to your main hero.

-If you get hit with the bug where Biara shows up but doesn't move then you can use the '@Win' cheat to get to the next mission.

[RobB]

Thank you for replying. Firstly, mine is a Mac game. As far as I know, there are no patches. From the Celestial Heavens walkthru, I understood about the attack on my town, but that is not what happens. As soon as Biara defeats my garrison - once Biara attacked early and my garrison won, but took heavy losses - anyway, when Biara beats my garrison, the game immediatelys says "You lose". My hero has not been beaten; my town is still uncaptured, but the computer says it's game over. I was really annoyed last time because I'd just upgraded 10 Druids and a few unicorns at the hill fort. True, I was caught between two gates as I was going to help the one on the far right, when B. came through the other one, but I was near enough to catch up I think.

My theory is a bug in my game which is why I contacted Ubisoft, who as usual were totally uninterested. I suppose for them H5 is old history. I have to say 3D0 were not very helpful either, but at least the Mac versions of H3 and H4 worked. I will try again, but at the moment I'm in one of the less demanding stand-alone scenarios.

[ShadowLiberal]

Well, in the early days before a lot of the patches I had to cheat myself to get past this mission, yet now I play all my missions on Heroic difficulty, so don't feel bad about it, this mission was horribly unbalanced in early patches.

There's a couple of missions on Heroes 5, such as this one, that are really really stupid in my opinion, both balance wise (too many garrisons to defend, the enemy armies are too strong and big), and story wise (the idiot Sylvan don't seem to realize that once a single enemy attacks war has already started, so there's no need to worry about being blamed for starting the war at that point. So why can you not just cross the border and take their town?).

Agrael Mission #3 is also really dumb for the same reasons (Agrael can't recruit tier 6 or 7 demons or build a castle/city hall why exactly? If it's because he's a traitor why do any demons follow him? And the Sylvan being able to declare every single week their week of Sylvan creatures, really? Why doesn't everyone who's under attack just do the exact same thing then?).