Final Consensus: Was Heroes V a step in the right direction?

[Deadguy118]

I figure, that since we are reaching the 4th anniversary of Heroes V soon (wow, has it really been that long?) and with plenty of hints about a Heroes VI it's time for a conclusive answer to the question whether or not it was a step in the right direction for the series as a whole, and implicitly what our expectations for Heroes VI and the rest of the Might and Magic series are.

Personally, I say yes, although Heroes V really didn't become a worthy (or at least semi-worthy) successor to the franchise until after Tribes of the East came out.

Say what you will about game balance, the super generic fantasy world, or the questionable AI, many of the changes to Heroes V were smart, such as the initiative mechanic and the skill system which was a nice compromise between the 1-2-3 separate skills of Heroes III and the highly sectioned skill system of Heroes IV. And although Alternate Upgrades are kind of a mess balance-wise, they are at least good on paper, and I would like to see them in the next game in the series.

But that's my two cents. What's yours?

[Corelanis]

I overall think that HV was a step in the right direction it got what I thought would become a dead franchise up again. The initiative and skill systems, including racial specials were a major improvement over HIII and HIV so several paces the right way there. The alternate upgrades were also a good addition but could have been better done so small step there. The town themes were a major (Dungeon and Fortress oh god fortress ) step backward and the lack of flagging mills was also a small step back. All the 3d crap was a side step in the wrong direction. The lack of purple insect fairy dragons was a major step back from HIII.

[Dstr]

H5 was not a step in the right direction after the NWC/3DO went bankrupt... first as I don't like the 3d...you have to change camera so that you won't lose by mistake some wood, ore even gold... also there are too many skills and a complicated system which we should learn so that you can cope with human players. still it's great the imba DD, fly, logistics specialty disappeared
h5 i think is better than h4, so you can tell from this point of view it's a step forward but compared to h2/h3 it's not!

[wimfrits]

Some improvements and new ideas. Also some forgetting of lessons learned in the step from H3 to H4.

Overall I vote negative because of the reintroduction of exploitable features.

[TheUndeadKing]

I have completely uninstalled H5 and haven't touched it for more than 2 years. I doubt I will ever return to H5 again. So that means, I'm officially done with H5.

Bring on H6, please. (My vote is "No")

[Kalah]

Brilliant skill system, but excessive game resource requirements. Lack of game support (RMG, map editor etc.) and multiplay systems make my final vote more negative than positive, but there were several good elements in the game.

[jeff]

Four years, sorry the editor still leaves a bad taste, that was a huge step backwards along with the H3 features of having to visit resources and creature huts every week, and having to hire a hero to shuttle troops to the front lines all became too much. Nice graphs to be sure but overall it drove me away and I have no plans on returning.

[lotusreaver]

Incremental steps in the right direction, but not as much as I would have liked.

The interface simplification, convoluted storyline, and tunnel-like map design, were all turn-offs for me. However, I did like the improvements made to the flow of combat as well as the skill system.

I used to play around with the map editor in H2 and H3 for weeks at a time. But I never touched the H5 editor, so I can't comment on that.

[Kristo]

I'd really like to vote neither on this one. H5 was a loud statement from Ubisoft: "We own the Heroes series now, and that means we get to decide what happens." That's not really a step forward or backward.

[Corlagon]

To keep things simple as per the thread's nature:

It wasn't perfect, but I really liked this game. But I really disliked its lore (setting, storyline) and support after release. Therefore, I will not stop harping on about how bad they were, in hopes that future installments will improve them.

[Qurqirish Dragon]

Four years, sorry the editor still leaves a bad taste, that was a huge step backwards along with the H3 features of having to visit resources and creature huts every week, and having to hire a hero to shuttle troops to the front lines all became too much. Nice graphs to be sure but overall it drove me away and I have no plans on returning.

I have to agree with you about the editor, but the other points I disagree on.

When all sites were "flagable" there was no difference between a water wheel and a poor quality gold mine. Similar with other resource sites. It would have been nice to be able to program a hero to run on automatic, recovering resources without your direct micromanagement (thus you would still have to decide: is it worth using one of your heroes to gather resources? But wouldn't have the tedium of revisiting sites.)

As for creature sites, with the addition of the H5 style caravans, you didn't have to visit them, so this was now the same as H4. And I liked the idea that your troops while being transported could be attacked. Again, it left you with a choice of whether or not you want to guard your caravans or not.

[lumpoor]

I'd say yes. The creature creativity, and the adventure map were meh. It didn't feel as magical and ancient as H3. But the added conveniencies in H5 were great. The initiative system, the atb bar, the number of kills indicator before attacking, the allowing you tosee how far the enemy can walk when hovering your mouse over them, caravans, the ability system (so you didn't have to get a whole skill just to get navigation...) and lots of other things (like actually being able to read what creature the abilities do) made the gaming experience so much easier.

I don't like the adventure map being 3D, but what game companies have to do in order to earn as much possible is to not try to satisfy the old fans of the franchise, but to make new people attracted to the franchise. If the map wasn't 3D, people who haven't played heroes would think it sucked, so turning the adventure map 3D was an inevitability.

[jeff]

As for creature sites, with the addition of the H5 style caravans, you didn't have to visit them, so this was now the same as H4. And I liked the idea that your troops while being transported could be attacked. Again, it left you with a choice of whether or not you want to guard your caravans or not.

I only played HOF briefly and did remember the carvans (a nice addition and I did like their vunerability) but I did not remember being able to use them to shuttle troops to the front line heroes unless they were in a city. Regardless my main interest now lies in map making not game playing and there the H5 editor killed all my desire to even having any form of H5 on my computer,

[vicheron]

I don't think Heroes 5 really added anything to the franchise.

Heroes 4 may have been controversial but at least they took risks and experimented with the series. Plus many of the game's problems can be blamed on 3DO rushing the game since they were losing money. Ubisoft was under no such pressure when they made Heroes 5.

Heroes 5 pretty much just reused a bunch of old ideas. What I really don't understand is why they decided to get rid of a lot of the features in the Heroes 3 expansions and Heroes 4. Was it really that hard to give players the option to refuse to learn from Witch's Huts? Why can't we flag wind mills, water wheels, and Leprechaun groves like in Heroes 4? Why did they reduce the number of adventure objects and power ups? And not putting in kingdom overview until the fans complained about it was inexcusable.

The initiative system was pretty unbalanced. Slow creatures were almost useless and fast ones would get in attack after attack. Creatures with less than 9 or 10 initiative like hydras, horned demons, zombies, etc., almost never got to do anything. At least in previous games, slow creatures got opportunity to attack as often as fast creatures and haste was much more useful since it added a flat bonus to their speed rather than a percentage. The Heroes 4 speed + movement system was much more balanced.

The one thing that I liked about Heroes 5 was the new skill system. It was a good innovation that forced you to make some tough choices between equally viable builds. It's not like in previous games, where everyone got pretty much the same skills with a few minor exceptions.

[ThunderTitan]

The problem with the initiative was that they gave units such different speeds that some got 2 turns for each one other units got. But even without that, i don't think i prefer one over another, so i can't say it was an improvement.


And the skill system alone isn't enough to make it a step forward when it took all those steps back.

[lumpoor]

Well, that's the point of initiative. Some are tanks, and some are fast ones.

The thing with ini is that unlike attack/def, it won't protect you at all against retaliations, so even if you COULD attack more often, you will often find that your army would just be decimaed after the first attack, so all the other attacks aren't that great.

So just because you attack twice as much doesn't mean you deal twice the damage. That's the con of initiative, retaliations.

[TheUndeadKing]

That's the con of initiative, retaliations.

Ironically enough, retaliations also can be considered the con of H5 combat. With the luck system, it gets worse - you can actually kill off an entire stack without a single scratch.

[vicheron]

Well, that's the point of initiative. Some are tanks, and some are fast ones.

The thing with ini is that unlike attack/def, it won't protect you at all against retaliations, so even if you COULD attack more often, you will often find that your army would just be decimaed after the first attack, so all the other attacks aren't that great.

So just because you attack twice as much doesn't mean you deal twice the damage. That's the con of initiative, retaliations.

Tanks are meant to protect weaker creatures by soaking up damage but if they have low initiative then they don't get to move very often and don't get to soak up damage.

Pretty much none of the tanks can actually do their job. In Heroes 3, Dwarves and Treants can actually protect Elves by tying up fast creatures that try to attack Elves, Zombies can protect Liches, and Golems can protect Gremlins and Mages. It's the same thing with Heroes 4. In Heroes 5, fast creatures can just run past tanks to kill the creatures they're supposed to protect. Zombies can't do anything to protect Skeleton Archers and Liches, Golems can't protect Gremlins and Mages, Horned Demons can't protect Succubi, etc.

As for retaliations balancing out initiative, it doesn't. It's much easier for faster creatures to avoid retaliation. The easiest way is to have stacks of one fast creature soak up the retaliation then your main stack can attack the slow stack two or even three times without getting hit back.

[lumpoor]

well, that's hard to pull off in a final battle.

For creeping, there are pros and cons to tanks and fast ones. Fast ones die, that's the thing. Creeping is about minimal losses. Tanks usually soak retals, so the fast ones can attack. I've never actually tried making dumy stacks, but that's probably because I aim for 0 losses when creeping, not 1.

I remember when doing the necro campaign in TOE with Arantir, and he was an amazing hero. Both I and the enemy had big armies, with his a bit bigger. I saved before starting the fight, and fought him over and over, bt always lost.

During the fighting I always prioritized attacking the golems last, since the archlich had some great death-cloud opportunities, and the skeleton archers wanted to focus on immediate threats.

But as soon as the golems got an attack in, I'd load and restart the fight, since I lost so incredibly much to basically something which shouldn't be a threat, meaning the lost ones went to waste completely.

The hero wasn't razzak by the way

After I fought many times and always lost I noticed a pattern. Constantly I killed off all of his non-golem units, and left him with only his golems left, almost completely healthy. My archers were usually dead or few by now. And I noticed I had no way of killing them. I couldn't attack him, because of his unlimited retaliation. The trade-off would be very bad for my part. Maybe kill 20 of his 500 golems and lose 5 spectrals at the retal.

I couldn't mind control him, which I would've done with any other brutal unlimited retal unit. I couldn't use destruction magic, due to his magic-proof. All I could do was use ranged attacks, which I didn't have left, vampires, which were usually dead by that time, and didn't like attack golems, since they couldn't leech rom, so eve early on I never attacked golems with them and Arantir's normal attacks.

The golems were lumbering toward me and I couldn't do anything to stop them.

So yeah, low initiative guys can be quite fierce too. I did win after many tries though, by saving my vamps for later, and basically through trial and error.

[ThunderTitan]

Well, that's the point of initiative. Some are tanks, and some are fast ones.

The thing with ini is that unlike attack/def, it won't protect you at all against retaliations, so even if you COULD attack more often, you will often find that your army would just be decimaed after the first attack, so all the other attacks aren't that great.

So just because you attack twice as much doesn't mean you deal twice the damage. That's the con of initiative, retaliations.

Yeah, it's such a total con, being able to do damage first and ensuring that the other stack doesn't do full damage to your stack because you killed half of it.

Even so, i'd prefer that speeds where closer to eachother, so that the difference between unit's survivability isn't as great just to make up for getting half the turns as others...

I remember when doing the necro campaign in TOE with Arantir, and he was an amazing hero. Both I and the enemy had big armies, with his a bit bigger. I saved before starting the fight, and fought him over and over, bt always lost.

Either his army was way bigger or someone needs to learn to play the game better.

Plus, sounds more like the unlimited retaliation was what got you, not it being so slow... actually the Golems being so slow is what allowed you to get that far.