HoMM III on Twitch

[Banedon]

Something made me look this up some time ago, and I saw one tournament game with 100+ viewers in progress. My immediate takeaway was, now I understand what csarmi was saying! The map was so giganormous that one hero would never be able to clear it; in fact I would have built up multiple heroes and explored in different directions. There are so many resources scattered around that despite having 8 heroes on the field, the streamer still leaves plenty of them lying on the map with no time to get them! The games are completely different from the ones I'm used to, where the map is much smaller and nobody plays with eight heroes (in fact four would be pushing it). Obviously under these conditions Necropolis and Expert Necromancy would be completely broken. Unfortunately the stream is in Russian, which I don't understand, or I'd probably enjoy it more.

Each turn also easily takes up more than 15 minutes ...

Personally I can't imagine playing HoMM 3 in this fashion. It's too tiring, and games take too long to conclude. No idea why tournaments - or any multiplayer player for that matter - use this format. What do people do when it's the opponent's turn, sit there and twiddle their thumbs!? My hotseat games with my brothers were already slow enough, and e.g. most of the games we played in HoMM 5 was arena, where both players start with large resources to build a big army and fight the end battle in one turn. This kind of game would be sheer torture.

Anyone actually played in one of these tournaments?

[Bandobras Took]

It's something I learned with the Civ series -- there are people out there who actually *enjoy* excruciating detail and planning their games out on spreadsheets.

I don't count myself among their number, but I can accept their existence.

[Salamandre]

Much exaggerated imo.

XXL maps are extremely rare in tournaments - 90% are medium maps, then turns rarely exceed 4 minutes in multiplayer (exception for first turn only). Then with HD mod we can now do same actions but twice faster, including battle animations. HD mod has also simultaneous feature now, so time is additionally cut by half. Then is not about clearing map but using parts of it to upgrade your hero until both main heroes fight.

At least this is the usual configuration I observed in actual tournaments, where a lot of people look at the game, in real time. If you found something different from this, please post link I am interested to look at.

[Pol]

Link would be fine.

[Banedon]

Uhh, https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/He ... of%20Death?

For example https://www.twitch.tv/aiwezo has a game going on right now, and after five minutes of watching (not much time to watch unfortunately) it's still the opponent's turn.