Unread postby Jolly Joker » 18 Sep 2006, 08:34
I'm going to post here.
Heroes II got me hooked and you will always look with fondness onto a game like that. I've played II recently on some occasions, one of it being that I have the EU collector with Homm II gold and I checked some maps I didn't know yet.
The main thing is that Heroes II and Heroes V are two completely different games.
Heroes II is fast-paced. The skills are no-brainers. Building is a no-brainer as well. Lastly fights are no-brainers because you can't wait with your troops, so it's do or die most of the time (or let them come and shoot them). Moreover, with creature stats being much more tightly together (ranges from 1 to, umm, 15) and Heroes giving 10/5 % per point, neutral creatures rapidly lose the capability to do serioes damage. Lastly there is no balance whatsoever in the game - but who cares? I mean, the game is, well, fast and furious, campaigns are fast as well. You sit down start a game and are in month 3 in no time (on a bigger map).
With H V its's like, well: the first records that really got you hooked to music are really hard to top afterwards. They can be better in every respect, you still may tend to say, ah, but their debut: this rough, unpolished charme. And you remember the fascination and disbelief you felt then - a feeling that will always be harder to recreate later.
So, Heroes V is a lot more complex. Town building; Hero building; fighting; even adventuring. The game has much more depth; campaign maps are in parts tough, in parts immersive, in parts fresh and new and in parts boring. BECAUSE the game is more complex, a boring campaign map (a map that poses no specific problems, but just running around and fight pointless because easy battles is boring, for example) becomes even more boring: it gets tedious. In comparison with H II I found H IV campaigns tedious as well (not because of the story; the play was tedious).
That said, I found the campaigns in III already not as interesting to play as II. There are reasons for that, but basically I think that the campaigns in V could have had
a) one map less per campaign and
b) smaller map sizes; I notice that on many campaign maps in V a relatively big chunk of the map stays black - which is a waste; that time for making that could have been saved and put into more SP and MP maps.
So for campaigns I have to say that H II in reality is the ONLY Heroes game with the Heroes feeling.
On a normal MP map, though, Heroes V is far superior - with a price: the pace. The ease of play, the rather stratightforward pace of going ahead and do things without much planning except in certain logistic matters has been lost for depth: where to put money and resources into, needs as much consideration as planning hero development. With hero development, if you want to do it best, you'll have to print out the manual and look with each choice and so on.
So the bottom line is: less turns per hour.
So the H II Heroes feeling has been lost, and if H II is THE Heroes game, then, yes, H V doesn't have THAT Heroes feeling.
I think, though, that the game establishes a new Heroes feeling, by presenting a game sufficiently different from II, so it is possible to play both in their own right. V kills III and IV for me (with IV being never that much of an option), but not II. For those who play and like IV I expect V will kill only III, because IV is sufficiently different as well.
I don't find that bad at all.
I told you Im no sheep(though I know quite a few) 
