Brief Review of Heroes 7.5 mod

[cjleeagain]

This is a brief review of the Heroes 7.5 mod, which you can get here:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/heroes-of-might-and-magic-75

The latest version is v1.35 as of the writing of this post.

Installation:
Installation is quite straightforward. Just download and follow the instructions. Basically, unzip it and use the installer.

What they don't tell you however, is that you need a lot of hard disk space. Something like 58gb during the process. (or 42gb if you delete).
First you have to download around 15gb. Moddb is fast, but I understand they have mirror sites that are quite slow.
Then you need to unzip it. It takes a lot of time and becomes just under 21gb.
If you don't have enough space you could delete the downloaded file after unzipping.
Then you have to install it.
This will take up 21gb in your documents folder. You can't choose where to install the mod to.


playing speed
Game runs slightly slower than the original version. But yes, I noticed the slowdown.
There is a lot more information in this game. They more than doubled the number of factions/ races. Each faction gets new units. There are many more spells, as well as many more racial abilities/ 'what they call 'secret' abilities that unlock after your hero reaches level 20. It's a whole order of magnitude more complicated.


stability
I have no complaints about the stability. In maybe 20 hours of gameplay, game quit on me twice suddenly. Both times were in the process of loading a game. The savefiles were not corrupted; I restarted and game was fine.
There was no other issue with stability.

bugs
There are still a lot of bugs. I'm not sure how many are caused by H7.5, since we have all experienced similar bugs in H7. However the number of times we see these bugs at play has increased in H7.5.
Practically every other battle, at least 2 units are not rendered on the battlefield. (They can still fight and you can control them, but you can't see them except as lighted up squares on the grid.)
Some spells just don't work.
I experienced many surprising interactions on the battlefield that I'm not sure whether to blame on my unfamiliarity with the game. Despite reading the materials and descriptions, I don't know what will cause the Infernal Spiders to shoot three times in a battle, for instance.
I also don't understand why my mana kept going down in a few battles against Sanctuary opponents. I didn't see any description in the enemy units that would result in my hero's mana dropping.
The AI seems improved a bit, but because game has gotten so much more complicated, it's hard to tell.

new spells
The new spells are definitely a huge plus. The modders have reinstated spells from the past that we loved, such as Vampiricism and Animate Dead. They have also created many new spells to help with healing. Water Magic/ Sanctuary has several healing spells, and Fire/ Inferno faction also has several healing spells and abilities.

new factions
There are a lot of new factions, but I'm not really impressed by anyone.

For instance, Tower Faction is not the Tower of H3. It is a Cold-based faction (Cold is a new racial ability). But Cold is not an attractive factional ability at all. It basically strengthens your side after you start taking losses. The more you lose, the stronger you get.
I'm afraid this logic might sound interesting in theory, but it makes me not want to play this faction in reality. I did not enjoy playing Tower.

Xel and Temple factions are just a lot of weird monsters if you don't already know the lore of whatever universe these come from.

conclusion
I think it's just a personal reaction, but I didn't really like H7.5 so I uninstalled it after a few days. I believe the modders went for quantity, resulting in a lot of new units, but I feel a lot are not well thought out. Many spells and factional abilities are poorly documented.

[Pol]

Xel is part of Heroes 7.5 but independent. It comes from Czech modding community, here: https://wpu.worldofheroes.cz/tsoaEN.html

From here also comes Atmos, which is weather mod.

As of Heroes 7.5, previously known as Hades mod, you are encouraged to check their Discord, see here, down: https://www.celestialheavens.com/tags-o ... -hades-mod

[cjleeagain]

Thanks Pol, I should add some clarifications to help people understand this mod better.

-The Hades mod was originally intended to add Inferno, and this is definitely an interesting faction that is well developed.
Inferno's racial ability is gating, which requires only 1 mana to cast to summon an Archdevil if you already have another Archdevil. A second summoning requires only 2 mana (if you increase the racial ability to tier 2). This ability seems to require some tweaking, because I ended up going all over the map with just 2 archdevils. With a grand total of 3 mana over 2 turns, I can turn my 2 archdevils into 4 archdevils. Which is really too much for game balance.

Moreover nowadays Inferno can heal its troops with fire, or with other spells. It's not like the Inferno of H4 and H5 days.

-Sanctuary is back, but only halfway. The Wakizame/ Shark Soldiers, the Kappa/ Kappa Shoyu, the YukiOnna/ Snow Maidens are back. I didn't really understand or appreciate their other new units.
I know you want a 'Japanese' theme, but it's a weird chinoserie effect for me. Some of the Sanctuary heroes are drawn like ancient Chinese emperors on the hero screen, and rendered as Naga leaders in battle. Whole thing looks weird.
One thing that should make many people happy though, is that Water Magic (Sanctuary) now has a few healing related spells.

-Mage guilds now provide 7 spells for lower tiers. That's good and it really made me happy.

-According to the instructions, you can delete Xel or Temple if you don't like them. They are not fully integrated into the gameplay, so I would recommend deleting these.

-The biggest single problem with the H7.5 mod is the fact that it always installs to your Documents folder and cannot be put elsewhere. This crowds up my onedrive, and results in onedrive not having enough space. Nothing can be done about this unless I pause onedrive, play the game, then move the game folder away before restarting onedrive.

-One big problem with the multilingual European collaboration efforts, is that many descriptions are missing or poorly worded in English. If this is a problem for a language as big as English, I dare not imagine how terrible the descriptions would sound in a different language!