strategic balance

[Hambone]

The strategic balance in skirmish maps against the AI or another human has been ruined by four mechanisms:

1) the global pool for recruiting troops means your entire army from multiple cities (and bonus buildings) can be raised in a city in one week, making it too easy to massively and suddenly swing the balance of power in a region. This also means that if you capture an enemy city, it is way to easy to get massive reinforcements immediately (see 3 below).

2) teleporters are available in each city and are very cheap to build, which means it is trivial for a single garrison to defend your entire empire. This also has the same problem as point 1 above.

3) town conversion is also relatively cheap, making it too easy. A simple strategy to exploit this is to conquer enemy cities on the 6th day of the week. Immediately convert it to your faction on the 7th day, then boom, on the 1st day of the next week you instantly have a massive army ready before any possibility of a counter-attack.

4) there is no fog of war, which makes it even easier to abuse the powers of points 1, 2 and 3.

In other words, as a strategy game, HOMM6 has been dumbed down so much that it is really more of a game of "collect your resources and do what is obvious" than a proper game of "determine how best to deploy your resources".

[klaymen]

Actually, the fog of war was only in Heroes IV and even then it was not liked, or at least many people who hated Heroes IV listed it in game's cons.
Just saying.

[Hambone]

Actually, the fog of war was only in Heroes IV and even then it was not liked, or at least many people who hated Heroes IV listed it in game's cons.
Just saying.

Agreed. The problem in HOMM6 though is that it is so easy to defend your empire with all these teleporters and the global troop pool that without some kind of check-and-balance, like fog of war (where an enemy could at least try and sneak up on you), there is really no strategy involved.

[Spin]

Heroes 4 fog of war was a fairly bad idea, allowed a lot of heroes to ninja up on your base without you knowing.

My advice is to play Heroes 6 on the hardest map difficulty on skirmish maps (choose the AI difficulty as you please, I find Hard AI just rapes if they attack you in the first 2-3 weeks). That way resources are always scarce so its actually a choice of how to best deploy your resources. Do you get another core unit and wait for that Elite next week? When do you get a town portal? etc. Even on maps like Broken Alliance it took about 4 weeks to get all core + elite units, then a couple more weeks to get that champion.

The mid-late game with heaps of town portals and instant conversions is fairly lacking though, but as I do say the most fun in Heroes is the first 2-3 months when you're exploring the map, building up bases and fighting other guys who are tough.

I assume you're playing on the smaller maps where there are not enough AI heroes to readily attack 2 bases in 1 turn.

[Hambone]

My advice is to play Heroes 6 on the hardest map difficulty on skirmish maps (choose the AI difficulty as you please, I find Hard AI just rapes if they attack you in the first 2-3 weeks). That way resources are always scarce so its actually a choice of how to best deploy your resources. Do you get another core unit and wait for that Elite next week? When do you get a town portal? etc. Even on maps like Broken Alliance it took about 4 weeks to get all core + elite units, then a couple more weeks to get that champion.

I have played the biggest maps on the hardest difficulty. It is very easy even against 4+ opponent AI. However, I do play with the AI set to "normal"; on "hard" the AI is just ridiculous how badly it cheats and how many free elite stacks it gets. Again, that isn't strategy, its just a brick wall to bash my head against.

The mid-late game with heaps of town portals and instant conversions is fairly lacking though, but as I do say the most fun in Heroes is the first 2-3 months when you're exploring the map, building up bases and fighting other guys who are tough.

Well that's the problem isn't it? You put a few weeks of effort into building a nice little kingdom and then there is nothing to do with it. The AI is so stupid and the "strategy" so limited that you just roll around the map steamrolling the AI until they are dead.

*yawn*

For solo players who are interested in good strategy challenge on skirmish maps against decent AI, HOMM6 is a complete waste of $50. I have better turn-based strategy games on my iPhone created by independent developers in small teams.