Do Any of You Still Play HoMM1?

[Sir Alock]

Hi: I was just wondering, do any of you still play HoMM1? I must admit, it's my favorite HoMM game. Not that it deserves that much credit, just that it was one of my 1st true TB strategy games that I purchased wat back when (1995)

It's so HoMM'ish, just that it's so scaled back! Not so many upgrades. It really is a sweet game! I'm going to start a campaign right now.

[UndeadHalfOrc]

I played very rarely, but I do play slightly more now that I re-balanced creature stats (dragon growth is 2 now) and hero primary stats distribution.But it STILL pisses me off too much that:

- Unlike in Heroes 2, defense bonus reduces damage by a whopping 10% per point difference, instead of the 5% from H2 and the 2.5% from H3. WAY too high.
- Warlock AI players RARELY, if ever, build the Minotaur maze dwelling.
- AI players always prefer to send hordes of weak heroes (who cast lightning bolt on your weak shooter stacks, or Paladins) instead of making 1 strong hero with a big army.
- The Mage guild of my starting town always gets crap spells while the opponents get lightning bolt, armageddon, elemental storm, etc. I am convinced that the computer cheats that way.


And this prevents me from really enjoying the game. So it's really strictly H2 and H3 for me. A shame, because I really enjoy the music and the general colorful, "cheery" atmosphere.

The only time I really played HOMM1 was back in 1996 when I played hot seat with my roommate constantly. I hate playing vs the computer.

[Kristo]

Heroes I isn't very stable on my computer for some reason, so I don't play it anymore. At any rate, I look at H1 as a subset of H2. I figure why bother with 2/3 of a game?

[UndeadHalfOrc]

Yeah, I also forgot to mention that it's not very stable for me either. It always end up crashing at some point, when a battle begins. (Unless I disable all sound effects - NO FUN)

And like Kristo said, all game elements present in H1 are found in H2.
(Except the stupid spell memorization system, which is a good riddance)

[Muszka]

I play it about once/year. It has a good nostalgic value.

[ThunderTitan]

OMG, it's actually working this time (HoMM1)... last time i tried it it froze at the start screen... playing right now.

[ThunderTitan]

And of course it crashed once i tried loading the 2nd scenario...

[Edwardas 3]

I think to buy full edition to play 1-2 but there're already reports of corrupted sound in 1

[Darmani]

- Unlike in Heroes 2, defense bonus reduces damage by a whopping 10% per point difference, instead of the 5% from H2 and the 2.5% from H3. WAY too high.

Just thought I'd mention that game mechanics by themselves are not unbalanced. If all creatures had low defense stats and/or all hero classes had a low chance of getting defense skill, that would not be too high a percentage. Of course, they don't...

(After seeing people saying that flight is unbalanced in H2 in and of itself, I can't stand to see people make these kinds of comments.)

Anyway, about a decade ago, when I was little, H1 stopped working on my family's computer (IIRC it was because we upgraded to Windows 98 or something). I think we got rid of the CD. I haven't played it since.

[ThunderTitan]

I think to buy full edition to play 1-2 but there're already reports of corrupted sound in 1

Yeah, the game says something about 8 bits being better and then crashes the game... but only when loading/exiting from what i can tell... and the music sounds just fine otherwise.

[UndeadHalfOrc]

- Unlike in Heroes 2, defense bonus reduces damage by a whopping 10% per point difference, instead of the 5% from H2 and the 2.5% from H3. WAY too high.

Just thought I'd mention that game mechanics by themselves are not unbalanced. If all creatures had low defense stats and/or all hero classes had a low chance of getting defense skill, that would not be too high a percentage. Of course, they don't...

Great minds think alike. That's precisely what I did when I modded the game via Hex editing! The first thing I did (after I found out the 10% factor) was lowering chance of getting def skill / increasing attack skill for all 4 hero classes.

[Akul]

Try changing sound settings. On my PC, game crashes whenewer default sound is on, but once I change the settings, there are no crashes (playing on XP).

[UndeadHalfOrc]

Besides all the flaws that we've listed, there is another thing that always disappointed me about Homm1, from the very beginning: NO UNDEAD FACTION!

My first game in the series was not Homm1, it was King's Bounty, and in it there was a crypt like dwelling were you could recruit Skeletons, Zombies, Ghosts and Vampires... why did HOMM1 excluded them except ghosts (which you could not recruit anyway)?

When H2 came out, it also brought back Archmages and Giants (sort-of) from King's Bounty.

Now there were only Demons and Gnomes to bring back. With H3, demons got a whole faction for them. I'm still waiting for GNOMES in a Heroes game!

[Metathron]

What ARE gnomes exactly? Off the top of my head they're either a variant of dwarves or, if you take the earlier Tolkien mythology into account, the Elves (the Noldor specifically). We have both of those already, I really wouldn't want to see a copycat faction.

[Trevor]

Maybe I'm just lucky or Microsoft has recently updated how XP runs legacy programs.

I've recently been playing HOMM1 and HOMM2. I put my old DOS CDs in my XP system, ran the install off the CD, and run the game exe.

I've done absolutely no fiddling with settings, running other programs, anything.

The games have run fine for me, very few if any crashes.

It looks like Windows does all that dosbox and compatibility mode stuff itself now.