Wow, this game is rediculously hard

[mysticc]

I'm playing the first mission of the Necropolis campaign, and it starts off easy. You can go through basically every battle for the first hour and maybe lose 1 unit the entire time. But then the difficulty ramps up once you get to the middle of the map (where you need to win your second town)

In this battle, they have too much stuff. You WILL lose units. I think my army was smaller, just because the trek was long and I never replenished my troops at all. I recruited a hero to basically act as a caravan, but that probably added 6-7 days unnecessarily. I was sort of thinking the campaign would have given me opportunities to recruit from my town like the tutorial did. Well, it didn't.

The fights don't get any easier after this though. All the elementals and other cheap creatures get multiple attacks per turn, and kill 5-10 units per attack. I am thinking, "How the fuck do I even compete against this shit?!"

To make matters worse, once I took over the town, I realized it would take 5 crystals to convert it. Well, I had 2. Sure enough, there's no crystals in sight. If I had KNOWN this in ADVANCE, I wouldn't have upgraded some of the buildings in my first town at all. Joy. This basically added another 7+ days before I could convert it successfully, trying to find crystals. Eventually I found some, after taking loss after loss as I was creeping in the southern-middle section of the map.

I think I have to restart the campaign. It sucks though because these campaigns are so long - like multiple hours. To restart basically because you didn't have foresight is a real drag, and makes me want to throw the game out of the window. I mean, if I only knew in advance about my replenishment needs and the number of crystals I would need, I think I would have been able to achieve the same progress in about 10 days less than I did.

I am just playing on Normal difficulty. It feels like I'm playing Hard or something worse.

People say Easy is too easy... and I don't want to play on easy. But how the heck can you compete with this? I think some of these battles would be hard even if had 1.5x or 2x the units. I try not to take losses. Hell, I do some battles over like 5 times to ensure I am doing the best I can. I just can't compete after taking so many losses. It's depressing.

Part of the problem is that the AI attacks so many stacks you can't heal them all. There is no chokes in the terrain, nor is there any tanking abilities. So even if I can heal 2 stacks, I can't heal the 3rd one. The damage just gets spread too thin to get flawless victories.

And I find myself casting Mass Regeneration every battle to avoid losses, but eventually, I ran out of mana. Wonderful.

This seems overly difficult for the 3rd mission in the game. Why the heck is it so hard for? Is this supposed to be easy even?

How can one beat this?

[qiox]

Most comments I see call the necro campaign the easiest of the factions because of the free heal they get as their faction ability. No other faction gets that, and they also have a healing unit, where only 2 other factions have that.

You do have a tanking ability. Take the skill Rush. Cast it on the Ghouls 1st thing and run them as far forward as they can go. Next spell you cast is Drain Life on the Ghouls.

With the Ghouls all the way forward, none of the AI units will attack any of your other units. If they are taking too much damage for Drain Life to fully heal, you have your Ghosts to heal them twice, you have your faction ability to heal, and you can cast regenerate on them to heal.

I played the entire necro campaign on hard as well as all the other campaigns and necro is by far the easiest.

Some good skills to get: (assuming magic hero)

Counterstrike II
Reinforce II (use on ghouls early on, liches later)
Ambush
Rush
Drain Life + Dark Magic Power
Regenerate + Earth Magic Power
Stoneskin
And eventually the awesome Summon Dark Elementals


When fighting neutral armies, if they have any ranged units leave a single stack, cut down as small as you can get it and use regen over and over until either everyone is healed or you run out of spell points. Don't stand any of your units next to it, just let it plink away so long as you regen more per turn than it does in damage.

[mysticc]

I've been trying to abuse regen like this too, but I ran out of mana to keep doing it honestly. How do I get more mana then?

I've also been using the faction ability and the ghost's healing spell, but it's not working fast enough

If this is the easiest, then this game has gotten to be really hardcore.

Honestly, things went downhill after the conquering the second town. I took a lot of losses, despite all the healing I did. Every unit you lose makes the next battle harder.

I think the game assumes you don't lose any units. That has to be it. I don't know how to compete with what's to come after conquering the second town if you lost units.

[Mozared]

Don't worry, you aren't the only one. Even on easy I feel like I have to perfect pretty much everything to not get my ass handed to me completely. By the time I made that thread I had already thought long and hard about what I could improve and was genuinely wondering if there was something huge that I just missed (something along the lines of "yeah you're not supposed to win that battle like that, move east and you'll get a free army in a cutsceene"). Turns out I simply wasn't yet playing perfect enough.[/url]

[mysticc]

You seem to play like I do and are having the same general problem. You're not losing units, but you're getting your ass handed to you anyway. That's basically me.

I am tempted to restart this campaign (I think I've gone past the point of no return now). It just sucks that I basically can't recoup any of the hours I put into it.

I think the general problem is that the campaign's are very punishing for not playing perfectly, especially early. To make good decisions, you almost have to know what you're up against before you go up against it... but if it's your first time playing through the campaign, there's no way to know this (of course, if you have a strategy guide, then you would... but I clearly don't have one).

Someone said you turtled. Maybe you do, but I don't. I try and go through the map and get everything though. I will try my campaign and not make a single mistake. Maybe that will work? Who knows. If it doesn't, I'm at a loss.

I'll try those different skill picks too. Can't hurt. It's sort of different from what I had, so it might help.

[qiox]

Turtling is very bad in general. I find success by rushing forward. And you say you don't know the maps, well there is something you can do to help with that. Use your saves for taking exploratory turns.

You come to an intersection, just run down one branch for 2 or 3 turns or until your progress is blocked by a fight or you find an AI hero or town. Reload, check out the other way. Don't think of it as cheating. It's a simple thing that can turn a frustrating failure requiring a restart into a victory.

I don't have a Youtube playthrough up for that mission, but I do have one up for the 1st Inferno campaign mission on hard, that many posts on the official forums labels as the hardest of the 1st campaign missions.

Perhaps watching that and seeing the balance I use between aggressively going forward, sitting still, and retreating could help you. Maybe even seeing how I play out the fights could help since Inferno has no healer unit. I also picked the default Might hero, no dynasty weapon, and no dynasty perks. That gave me pretty much the lowest possible spell points.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlRRNK1bz6E

[mysticc]

Yeah, I don't think I turtle. I think my playthrough wasn't perfect though because I realized that by not even replenishing my units and by just pressing forward and going as fast as I could, I didn't have enough units to take out the 2nd town without losing my entire army. So I recruited a hero to bring me troops, but this obviously wasted almost a week. Then I wasted another week by not having the crystals to convert the town, which meant that I was further troop deprived.

I'm sure both of the above mistakes messed me up, but there really wasn't a way for me to know until it happened.

I think making saves for every 3 days might give me an oppurtunity to go back and not have to redo the whole scenario. I'll have to do that.

I'll watch that video. I'm sure I can learn something by your play. I'm looking forward to watching it. I'm going to do that right now.

[Ell1e]

One thing you should definitely abuse is that the Ghosts' healing spell becomes stronger when there are living units near their target. Their default healing is I think the weakest healing spell, but if there's one or two living stacks it becomes insanely powerful.

As for easy difficulty, I agree that it's really a huge difference, so maybe it's too easy. On the other hand, if you're having problems on normal, there's nothing wrong in switching to easy, getting to know the map and later coming back to beat it on normal. I always do this when I get stuck with a campaign map and so far it's working fine. I can always replay them later on hard if I feel the need to stroke my ego, but by then I will know where to find free armies and all.

If you're having trouble with mission 1, definitely play mission 2 on easy, it's considered the hardest mission in necro I think.

[ywhtptgtfo]

- It helps to buy 2 or 3 secondary heroes and give them all the skills in the second tab of might skills. With Moander and just 1 other secondary hero, you get 3 additional core units per week, which is a lot.

- If you have the resources, also upgrade fort to further boost growth.

- Visiting all the graves you find also give you a decent boost to troops (I think you can get 2 before the second town).

- Letting secondary heroes take resources also give you a 20% boost in acquired resources, which is a lot for early game.

- Try to use hero attacks on units that are about to die so that you get extra necro points to resurrect when your target is dead (you have 3 rounds to kill that target after your hero's attack).

- Get the building that resurrects dead units. This allows you to lose some units in battle without making the loss permanent (as long as you have money)

- With 3-4 secondary heroes and 1 town with market place, you can trade for 1 crystal per 2 wood/ore. You'd find that resource trading is very important for Heroes 6 because you'd often run into shortages (usually crystals).

- Visit all the boosters you find (although avoid air/fire/water/dark elementals until you are about level 8+).

[Sikon]

People say Easy is too easy...

In Heroes VI, easy is "still hard, but now we're calling you a wuss".

Just play on whatever difficulty suits you. You're playing to enjoy the came, not to prove how hardcore you are.

[Mozared]

I am tempted to restart this campaign (I think I've gone past the point of no return now). It just sucks that I basically can't recoup any of the hours I put into it.

I think the general problem is that the campaign's are very punishing for not playing perfectly, especially early. To make good decisions, you almost have to know what you're up against before you go up against it... but if it's your first time playing through the campaign, there's no way to know this (of course, if you have a strategy guide, then you would... but I clearly don't have one).

Someone said you turtled. Maybe you do, but I don't. I try and go through the map and get everything though. I will try my campaign and not make a single mistake. Maybe that will work? Who knows. If it doesn't, I'm at a loss.

Turtling is very bad in general. I find success by rushing forward. And you say you don't know the maps, well there is something you can do to help with that. Use your saves for taking exploratory turns.

You come to an intersection, just run down one branch for 2 or 3 turns or until your progress is blocked by a fight or you find an AI hero or town. Reload, check out the other way. Don't think of it as cheating. It's a simple thing that can turn a frustrating failure requiring a restart into a victory.

While I don't consider reloading as cheating, it's something that kind of annoys me. On easy difficulty, why do I need to do something like this to beat a map? I'll grab 3 random games I've played: Assassin's Creed 2, Anno 1404 and Warcraft 3. I've played these games on the easiest possible difficulty settings. Result: out of about an average of ~45 hours of playtime for all these games, I messed up so bady that I had to reload an old save only twice per game. I play most games for the storyline; I want to cruise through them on easy and expect to be able to make some ridiculous missteps without completely having redo the level in question. I from harder games I've played I understand the idea of saving/loading and how it helps you, but I find it too annoying and too much work to bother with in most games; which is why I play on easy. H6 is just incredibly overtuned in this fashion: it's 'easy mode' is comparable to the 'normal' mode in most games and the 'hard/brutal' mode in a couple of others.

I'll try those different skill picks too. Can't hurt. It's sort of different from what I had, so it might help.

Out of all the changes I made, this was probably the most useful one. Skills make such a ridiculous difference, especially in the start of map 1 of any campaign. Out of all things that make your hero more useful on the adventure map (scouting, generating gold, etc), the only ones really worth picking over combat skills up to level 20 or such are Logistics and Snatch. And as for combat skills; Heal is ridiculously overtuned because of the imbalanced AI. Not losing units is so frustratingly key that any form of heal, shield or reinforcements are just ridiculously strong when compared to stuff like Waterbolt and Freeze (which I'm currently trying to use for Irina in the Sanctuary campaign).

[ywhtptgtfo]

I'll try those different skill picks too. Can't hurt. It's sort of different from what I had, so it might help.

Out of all the changes I made, this was probably the most useful one. Skills make such a ridiculous difference, especially in the start of map 1 of any campaign. Out of all things that make your hero more useful on the adventure map (scouting, generating gold, etc), the only ones really worth picking over combat skills up to level 20 or such are Logistics and Snatch. And as for combat skills; Heal is ridiculously overtuned because of the imbalanced AI. Not losing units is so frustratingly key that any form of heal, shield or reinforcements are just ridiculously strong when compared to stuff like Waterbolt and Freeze (which I'm currently trying to use for Irina in the Sanctuary campaign).[/quote] Yeah, damage spells are almost not worth it because creature growth is way too fast in this game (Implosion at Level 30 can kill maybe 5 Celestials out of a stack of 50).

And no, snatch is not really a worthy pick for main heroes. It's really for secondaries who tail your main to pick up all the scraps.

[mysticc]

While I don't consider reloading as cheating, it's something that kind of annoys me. On easy difficulty, why do I need to do something like this to beat a map? I'll grab 3 random games I've played: Assassin's Creed 2, Anno 1404 and Warcraft 3. I've played these games on the easiest possible difficulty settings. Result: out of about an average of ~45 hours of playtime for all these games, I messed up so bady that I had to reload an old save only twice per game. I play most games for the storyline; I want to cruise through them on easy and expect to be able to make some ridiculous missteps without completely having redo the level in question. I from harder games I've played I understand the idea of saving/loading and how it helps you, but I find it too annoying and too much work to bother with in most games; which is why I play on easy. H6 is just incredibly overtuned in this fashion: it's 'easy mode' is comparable to the 'normal' mode in most games and the 'hard/brutal' mode in a couple of others.

I would essentially agree with this. I don't mind hard games, but they should be left for "hard" settings. I actually do play some games on hard difficulties, and it's not this hard. For example, I have the Kerrigan portrait in Starcraft 2 for having completed all the story missions on Brutal difficulty. I also have over 2200 achievement points in Starcraft 2. Yet, I'm having trouble with normal difficulty in this game.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/443421/brutal-starcraft2.jpg

Another series which is also very challenging is the Total War series. In Rome: Total War, you can do a Long Roman campaign and fly by the seat of your pants and manage to beat it on normal difficulty. Sure you can make mistakes, and the AI often does things you'd never be able to predict, but it's at least doable.

I think a "normal difficulty" in a HOMM game should be tuned so that you can auto-battle everything and still win the campaign, just as long as your macro isn't terrible. For "easy difficulty", it should even be easier than that. "Hard difficulty" should finally require you to micromanage battles to avoid losses and be fairly decent at macroing units, yet still not require perfection. It also shouldn't cheat too much either. A "brutal difficulty" should require mastery of all the game mechanics and truly be menacing.

Unfortunately, even the early stages of Normal difficulty require mastery of all sorts of mechanics. For example, a lot of people are mentioning tricks with heroes to get more units. I did not know this. There was no way for me to know it.

Also, no tutorial is given on hero skills. How is a new player supposed to know what is best for the task at hand? "Ask on forums" is not a good answer. In fact, this is a bad answer when it comes to proper game design. Can't the designers of the game explain their mechanics and game systems well enough for players to utilize them? The challenge shouldn't be "figuring out the game systems", the challenge should come from using the game systems to win the game. If you don't even know what exists, let alone what anything does, how can you win? Trial and error and asking on forums it seems.

I think there's a very good game in HOMM6. Most definitely. From what I've seen, I LOVE the campaign. I also LOVE the art direction and UI of the game. I think in these respecs, it's the best in the series by far.

But I've been playing HOMM5 on normal difficulty, and while it was also hard, I managed to beat the Haven and Inferno campaigns on normal difficulty. It was doablo. This is another thing entirely.

EDIT: Yeah, Reinforcements seems to make a lot of battles quicker. You don't have to worry about losing 1 or 2 units now because they are free, which means I don't have to restart them nearly as often.

That's the one thing I hate about very expressive build systems. There's always an "optimal" build in the end. I was using things like tactics, logistics, etc. because I thought they would be beneficial. I wish the game would allow endless respecs to try things out - at least on normal difficulty. You almost have to try every ability out to know what works and what doesn't... but then I'd argue what is the point of an elaborate building system if the game pushes you to do things a certain way.

[mysticc]

- It helps to buy 2 or 3 secondary heroes and give them all the skills in the second tab of might skills. With Moander and just 1 other secondary hero, you get 3 additional core units per week, which is a lot.

Wow, really? I didn't know that. I will give this a try.

- If you have the resources, also upgrade fort to further boost growth.

Yep, did that

- Visiting all the graves you find also give you a decent boost to troops (I think you can get 2 before the second town).

Yep, did that too

- Letting secondary heroes take resources also give you a 20% boost in acquired resources, which is a lot for early game.

This is a good idea too. How do you get them leveled up to even pick so many auxiliary skills in the first place? If I'm not fightning with them, how do they get experience?

- Try to use hero attacks on units that are about to die so that you get extra necro points to resurrect when your target is dead (you have 3 rounds to kill that target after your hero's attack).

Yep, been doing that too

- Get the building that resurrects dead units. This allows you to lose some units in battle without making the loss permanent (as long as you have money)

Yes, this would have helped out if I were able to convert my second town... but I didn't have the crystals.

- With 3-4 secondary heroes and 1 town with market place, you can trade for 1 crystal per 2 wood/ore. You'd find that resource trading is very important for Heroes 6 because you'd often run into shortages (usually crystals).

I didn't know the ratios could get that low. You know, I never even try it because a) I forgot about the market and b) I thought the ratios would be 1:10 like in HOMM5.

- Visit all the boosters you find (although avoid air/fire/water/dark elementals until you are about level 8+).

I've been getting them all. For the most part, I can win the elemental battles without losing units. It wasn't until capturing the second town where these battles got to be really hard. I guess I have to start skipping them. Won't going back and getting them though add more weeks to your total time? Won't that make the enemy stronger unnecessarily? I thought turtling was bad?

[ywhtptgtfo]

This is a good idea too. How do you get them leveled up to even pick so many auxiliary skills in the first place? If I'm not fightning with them, how do they get experience?

That's only 2 skills really (logistic being the third). You can quickly get heroes to level 3 by visiting the several experience stones near your starting area and the underground tunnel.

Yes, this would have helped out if I were able to convert my second town... but I didn't have the crystals.

Almost every map inevitably gives you a crystal problem, which is why using secondary heroes with "resourcefulness" to pick up resource piles is important (sometimes you do get an extra crystal from a pile).

Another source of critical crystal income is trading, as I mentioned. If you are just going to rely on crystal mines and resource piles, you'd find your town development very very slow. If my memory serves, wood and ore usually comes in abundance in this map, so you should trade the excess for crystals when necessary. On rare cases, trade gold for crystals as well, although gold problem can arise at the end when you need to raise cash to buy all the troops in that final battle.

I didn't know the ratios could get that low. You know, I never even try it because a) I forgot about the market and b) I thought the ratios would be 1:10 like in HOMM5.

Actually, I misspoke on this one, because you don't get secondary heroes to level 5 until after the second town (which open up more experience stones). But still, the 2 market places should give you a 1:4 ratio.

I guess I have to start skipping them. Won't going back and getting them though add more weeks to your total time? Won't that make the enemy stronger unnecessarily? I thought turtling was bad?

I'd say the difficulty is not linear w.r.t. time. Early game fights with enemy is hard because you simply don't have enough troops and skills to abuse the A.I. to death with ease. Very late game fights with enemy can also be hard in some maps where the A.I. cheats very immensely (i.e. Haven II, Sanctuary IV, and Necro IV to a lesser extent).

From experience, a sweet spot to start assaulting the enemy is around week 6 to week 8 when you have a safer cushion of units.

Personally, I did not really encounter problems in Necro I except for the final battle with some very annoying units. I think I walked into the second town with about 100 skeleton spearmen and then I quickly capped the nearby forts for extra growth. The marauding enemy heroes were annoying, but are usually quite easy to slaughter.

[mysticc]

Okay, I just beat the second town of the first Necropolis campaign mission after starting over... AND I did it with only losing *2* ghouls in total, rather than losing 20+ of each of my 3 stacks.

How? Because the enemy hero wasn't protecting the town this time - he was so far out that I got fight him outside of the town, which meant that the town's defenses were extremely minimal. I took no loses when taking the town over.

In fact, I would have taken ZERO loses against the hero, but the asshole used his hero attack to kill 2 ghouls and then he fled the battle before I had a chance to heal them. What a piece of piece of shit mother-fucker!

Anyway, what else did I do differently?

1. I recruited another hero right away. I gave him architect/economics as suggested, and had him buy a week's worth of troops and fed them to my main hero. I also had him pick up wood and crystals and gold, which probably gave my main hero more movement points. I don't know if this made a difference in actual resources, but compared to last game, I had an extra supply of troops at the right time rather than having to wait several days for them arrive.

2. Reinforcements II > Regen and Mass Regen. I was relying on regen so much, this is why I ran out of mana all the time before. With reinforcements, I was practically topped on mana all the time. I rarely had to use mana actually. Regen is still good - you'll need it for times when your ghouls take damage BEFORE you get a chance to cast Reinforcements II (otherwise, the game won't let you heal the unit that may have died before you used it... buggy...).

3. I also converted the castle right away since I made sure I had 5 crystals. Now I have 2 weeks of supply of units... AND since I never took any loses really, my army is large enough to take on anything probably. I also did everything I did before but more than a week earlier since I wasn't waiting for my late recruited hero to arrive to bring troops.

More or less, I think the biggest improvement though was catching the stupid enemy hero off guard and killing him before he got a chance to protect the second castle. If he gets in the castle, I don't think there is a way to get through the battle without taking heavy loses.

To be honest, if this game mechanic is so imbalanced and game breaking and forces you to restart the entire mission, I am questioning why it is scripted this way for normal difficulty...

Complaints about game mechanics

One complaint I have is not being able to heal units sometimes... like the end of a battle or before a unit retaliates. There's simply no logical reason why we can't freshen up the troops before the battle ends.

Also, I wish we could tell our units NOT to retaliate. Why must they always retaliate for? Sometimes they kill the last enemy unit, which prevents me from using a healing ability since the battle has ended.

Even worse, some enemies will even damage you when you retaliate in melee range, regardless if you killed the unit or not. This often results in unit deaths that you can't heal up afterwards. I try my best to prevent the retaliation deaths, but sometimes it's completely unavoidable. Again, why must a unit have to retaliate for? Is there any logic behind this?

Lastly, my main gripe about skills is that the game forces you to pick the same skills. Let's keep this real... what if you want a blood hero that is a mage? Why must you rely on tears skills and might abilities for? My "mage" has more might abilities than magic abilities. I think this is a design problem.

[Sikon]

Well, I'm playing on Normal, and with the right skills picked (I always, always pick Reinforcements and Regeneration, and Heal when it's available).

And I do play most battles on quick combat, only switching to manual mode when I feel I could do better and it's worth my time. So far I've played the first three missions in the Sanctuary and Stronghold campaigns, first two in Necropolis and Haven, and now stuck at Inferno 2...

[mysticc]

Well, I'm playing on Normal, and with the right skills picked (I always, always pick Reinforcements and Regeneration, and Heal when it's available).

And I do play most battles on quick combat, only switching to manual mode when I feel I could do better and it's worth my time. So far I've played the first three missions in the Sanctuary and Stronghold campaigns, first two in Necropolis and Haven, and now stuck at Inferno 2...

My main complaint is that the tutorial doesn't mention skills you might want to take. It doesn't feature a skill every few battles, showing you the ropes. In fact, it won't even let you pick from them in the first mission of the tutorial.

Take a game like Starcraft for example... it eases you into using each new unit, or even a new ability on an old unit - one at a time. So by the time you want to try brutal difficulty, you have all the knowledge to beat it - it just comes to understanding the game mechanics and skill. Some missions are really quite hard, but even if you die horribly, you know it's possible because you know what you need to know. It's just a matter of execution and sound strategy and tactics.

With this game, I feel like I'm just in the dark. Without the generous help from people here, I'd basically be screwed I think. I think this ought to be a lesson learned for the game designers of this game.

Another Cheap Moment in this Campaign

After you take over the second town, you have the choice of going down or right. I went right - the decision was kind of arbitrary. Sure enough after I take out the fort on the right, a hero comes from the south location upwards. I can't get back in time before he just runs into my 2nd town - man, he must have 14 logistics skill points because he basically trek'd the entire way there in a single turn!

What makes it even cheaper is that the AI converted the town back to Haven, which meant that I had spend those resources AGAIN to convert it. Sure enough, I had 0 wood to do so.

What a piece of shit game. Seriously. I feel like going back on an earlier save, just before I conquered the 2nd town, to prevent this entire cheap thing from happening. It's so damn cheap!

[Metathron]

Yes, it's cheap. A few days should have to pass at least before a city can be converted. Or something to that effect.

The difficulties are definitely out of whack. Easy should indeed be made easy, not normal. It must be off-putting and frustrating for less experienced players, let alone new players.

Also, I am rather disappointed in spells, especially when juxtaposed with warcries. Direct damage spells, particularly their "mass" counterparts deal ridiculously low damage, which is made even smaller when all the spell immunities percentages are deducted. I mean really, would you rather spend 45 mana for a chain lightning which deals 902 damage (should've been 1495, but the unit you want to cast it on has 39% magic defense) on the initial target, or would you rather spend 0 mana on Reinforcements to top off your cerberi stack with another 250 units?

[mysticc]

Yeah, this campaign kind of blows. I killed 2 more heroes from the south and north-east positions, and there's just no way 1 hero with an army can take care of both threats. I don't see how I can split the army up into 2 either because they are bring like 100 archers, 70 sisters, 110 praetorians, etc. on each hero. It's just dumb.

I would expect this sort of juggling act on Brutal difficulty, not normal. Actually, it's not even "hard" - it's just damn annoying since I can't seem to progress the game and their number of units sees no end in sight. Despite all the flawless victories I get, they just keep sending massive stacks over. Wish I could get that many stacks in 1 week...

If I could get the same number of units as the AI seems to get, I would have 2 heroes covering both directions at all times... but if I went in with half of my units, I'd get slaughtered. It's only through the superior number advantage that I can win over and over. But the game doesn't give me a way to be in 2 places at once, so I don't know what the hell to do.

And of course, I managed to take the wrong path again. There's two places you can go after you take over the south and eastern forts - the south-east direction where there's a town, or the north-east direction where you see a fort. Sure enough, I went for the fort -- thinking the town would end the scenario and wanted to explore the map. But sure enough, there's another castle in the north-east corner, so I was actually supposed to go to the south-east corner first.

Damnit!

Seriously, at this point, I think it might have been wise for the designers to put bloody waypoints now - i.e. suggestions on where you should probably go next, but are not forced to. The non-linearity of the maps is really crippling BECAUSE WE CAN'T SEE SHIT.

I simply can't stand lazy game design that hinges on the player arbitrarily knowing what to do without proper data to make the correct decision. Since time is an important aspect to the game, wasting 3 turns going in the wrong direction is a gigantic waste of time.

Also, the heroes just keep popping up out of nowhere on the map, threatening a town. It's just stupid now. It is a dumb mechanic because you can't SEE them come until it's too late due to the fog of war - and it's always when your main hero cannot possibly get back in time - even with town portals because you can't cast it from anywhere like HOMM5 - you have to be in a stupid town now.

The AI purposely places the enemy hero on the opposite side of your main army too - I've been testing it. The only way to plan for it is to make a save every few turns and corner them. What a shitty mechanic. I didn't know the "save/load" feature could be used as a means of telling the future. That's not what the save/load feature is for! Don't the designers know this?!

This isn't normal. It isn't. This is actually cheap as hell. It is actually ruining my enjoyment of the game honestly. I have a save 3 turns before the enemy shows up... but I have no idea what I can even do to prevent him taking the town. I can't anticipate anything because they come from either direction now.