My H5-rant\whine (long post)

[Alamar]

However for things like the number of maps, map editior, campaign editor, RMG, and crushing small bugs I'm "ok" with waiting for a patch or two. If they can get the majority of those things totally handled in 3 months or so I'm personally fine with it.

Looking at the first patch,3 months is way to optimistic.

Well I did say "if"

Why would it be a problem to make a waypoint automate option?

I think that setting up waypoints wouldn't be hard and getting it to repeat properly. Documenting it and generating the interface and things of that nature may be hard to get right.

As far as map objects go I think that there should be a button [CNTL / ALT / something] that you can hold down to show you everything that you can interact with.

[ThunderTitan]

She's so heroic that if she has already been to a dwelling, the new creatures available there, or the old ones that couldn't be bought the first time, won't try to join her if she doesn't get back to their door.

Well people are fickle.... and need to feel important.

[Alamar]

Heck the entire point of the Queen Campaign is for a great hero to go amongst the people to raise an army ........

She's so heroic that if she has already been to a dwelling, the new creatures available there, or the old ones that couldn't be bought the first time, won't try to join her if she doesn't get back to their door.

Hearing stories about the hero and meeting them might be two totally different things. If they aren't coming to your doorstep of their own volition obviously they need the motivation of a hero.

BTW the creature growth in your castle is exactly that. Creatures coming to you from the field because they've heard about the great hero / cause / etc.

[LordErtz]

One thing I just remembered! Does anyone find the lack of a kingdom overview annoying? I want to know my daily income of sulphur, or gold. I want to know how many creatures are for hire in all my castles, and to be able to hire them from the kingdom screen. I thought the kingdom overview was VERY valuable, though maybe underused. But again, how can we tell how much mine income we're getting in this game??? Anybody?

[Alamar]

One thing I just remembered! Does anyone find the lack of a kingdom overview annoying? I want to know my daily income of sulphur, or gold. I want to know how many creatures are for hire in all my castles, and to be able to hire them from the kingdom screen. I thought the kingdom overview was VERY valuable, though maybe underused. But again, how can we tell how much mine income we're getting in this game??? Anybody?

It bugged the crap out of me last night ... that's for sure.

[OliverFA]

Very nice review there. You argumented the not so good things about H5 in a constructive, neutral way. And IMO what you wrought wasnt whining

Still I wonder, why not ask out Fabrice about the lack of H4 features in H5? If done before, well thats quite a long time ago. And as far I can remember the questions about the lack of H4 content wasnt exactly directly asked more like a "walk around the park".
I say its time for asking him yet again no matter if its done before or not. I guess both myself and many others are eager to know why they didnt include flaggable windmills, waterweels, caravan like system etc. It would be nice with some enlightment on those topics, really.

I agree with you. I understand the main aproach of not taking too many risks for H5, as it was a little miracle itself that the frachise survived to both an unfinished (but not badly designed) H4 and 3DO bankrupcy. But one thing is getting closer to H3 and the other is refusing to add those H4 features who where in fact just an improvement over H3 like flagable dwellings. Certainly is extremely difficult to find a reason why all that was left out, even more when fans asked for it again and again during the beta.

My question is: How long until a fan group created a mod with those little improvements?

[LordErtz]

Haha, I keep thinking of more things...how about the catapult? Anybody annoyed with that like I am? I had my catapult attack the same empty place 3x in a row! I mean, that section of the wall is dead, so whoever is manning the damn thing has really bad aim, or is undead like my troops and has no brain. Not sure if that's a balance issue or if it's supposed to just hit random places.

I find that w/o war machines specialty the catapult almost always fails to break more than 1 tower or the gate

[DaemianLucifer]

One thing I just remembered! Does anyone find the lack of a kingdom overview annoying? I want to know my daily income of sulphur, or gold. I want to know how many creatures are for hire in all my castles, and to be able to hire them from the kingdom screen. I thought the kingdom overview was VERY valuable, though maybe underused. But again, how can we tell how much mine income we're getting in this game??? Anybody?

If you hover your mouse over the resources in the top of the screen youll see your income.Although Id like the overview because it displayes dwellings,town and hero information as well.

My preference is still for a hero autopilot and the reasons are:

1. I don't much care for the invisible caravans of H4. Having a hero means they are vulnerable to enemy attack in the standard ways. Implementing visible & attackable caravans would be [possibly] as much or more new work required as an autopilot.

I agree with you here,but not just because of that,but because a hero could be met in the middle and creatures transfered.Although Id prefer some sort of visible caravans.

2. One caravan structure could control practically an entire empire. I prefer [in empire terms] to having to hire multiple heroes to take care of these sorts of things. [Think 1 castle and dozens of creature generators, windmills, etc.]

I prefer having caravans that dont count towards your army limit.

3. A hero on autopilot feels more like heroes and meshes a little better. For example a lackey you send out weekly couldn't get a Leprachaun to give up its gold ..... it takes a special person [hero?] to do this. The same might be said for raising an army.

Then why dont we need heroes visiting mines each day?

I think that setting up waypoints wouldn't be hard and getting it to repeat properly. Documenting it and generating the interface and things of that nature may be hard to get right.

Youre right.Considering how sloppy they did rest of the game,implementing something like this is hard for them

As far as map objects go I think that there should be a button [CNTL / ALT / something] that you can hold down to show you everything that you can interact with.

I completely agree with you here.

[OliverFA]

Warning: reading the below may induce feelings of hostility towards the authour and\or severe boredom.

First a fair warning for those who don't know: I like HoMM 4 and what it brought to the heroes of Might and Magic series. [...]

Despite my point of view is not as negative as yours, I have to say that I agree with 90% of what you said here. All the little details that you point are what would have turned Heroes V from a good game into an excellent one. But I still hope that they will fix them, if not in the patches, at least in the expansions.

I also believe Heroes IV was an unfairly bashed idea that suffered from 3DO situation. However, I also understand UBI reasons for not wanting to take too many risks and coming back to the "safest" choice of making a 3D version of a H3 clone. And on the other hand is fair to recognize that H3 deserved to have a 3D version. So, despite it would have not been my choice, I accept the 3D clone idea The problem is that they cloned even the mistakes such as the non-flagable dwellings! Problem number two is that they paid too much attention to eye candies and even prefered it over usability. And problem number three is that there is a lot of missing information.

But I am optimistic and believe that those three problems can be solved by patches, an expansion, or even a fan made mod.

[HodgePodge]

Thank you Ethric for your review of Heroes 5. Sometimes when I had a serious problem with the game and posted it over at the UbiSoft Forum, I've been verbally attacked for just voicing my predicament. Most notably, the navigation of the underground and the game crash in the 3rd map of the last campaign (the Mage). It's as if there are Nival employees continually online over there, waiting to discredit and discourage any type of complaint of Heroes 5.

Instead of fixing the problems it seems like Nival would rather stick their head in the sand and pretend the game is perfect. Even the patch, is an insult. And, oh yes, I am a Heroes 4 fan, big-time!

My main complaints with Heroes 5 are:

no documentation, poor quality manual, no creature/faction stat card

poor underground navigation

wrestling with the user-interface (both on the adventure map & in combat)

the town build & buy creatures windows (so much time spent on 3D graphics … but the town screens are pitiful)

the Heroes window and lack of seeing what their army is without clicking through a bunch of submenus

the cheating AI

no cheat codes for players

the combat initiative system (I don't think my Rakshasas have EVER had a chance to fight unless they were directly attacked and retaliated)

not enough Single Player maps/not enough Multi-Player maps

the hideous voice acting & dialog in the campaign cut-scenes (it would have been better to just read what the characters are saying … and use one's own imagination as to how they sound, than to have to listen to the horrible voices used for the characters)

the moronic marketing decision to have so many different "editions" of the game (CE, LE, RE) that's just plain ridiculous … everyone should have had access to the supposed 3 extra maps & the creature stat card

no map editor (although Nival has promised us one in about a month)

the storyline (lack of originality & creativity) It ended as dumb as I expected in the first place. But how else could Ubi/Nival keep the door open for the expansions & the DM game?

Now for the good points of the game:

the graphics are supurb

the Hero specialties

the Creature specialties

the skills/abilities system

the spell system (less spells, but I actually use most of them at one time or another)

the Artifact Merchants (both in some towns & on the adventure map)

the Sylvan

the Elephant & the Lizard

Well, I can't think of any more at the moment, but if any pop into my mind, I'll post them later.

[Ethric]

My preference is still for a hero autopilot and the reasons are:

1. I don't much care for the invisible caravans of H4. Having a hero means they are vulnerable to enemy attack in the standard ways. Implementing visible & attackable caravans would be [possibly] as much or more new work required as an autopilot.

2. One caravan structure could control practically an entire empire. I prefer [in empire terms] to having to hire multiple heroes to take care of these sorts of things. [Think 1 castle and dozens of creature generators, windmills, etc.]

3. A hero on autopilot feels more like heroes and meshes a little better. For example a lackey you send out weekly couldn't get a Leprachaun to give up its gold ..... it takes a special person [hero?] to do this. The same might be said for raising an army.

I can agree on creatures, that it might be an idea to somehow make the caravans attackable\interruptable. But a caravan like in H4 is better than no caravan at all IMO.

As for a resource caravan (let's make it an upgrade to the resource silo or somesuch), that's easy enough for someone to interrupt: just capture the resource-structures of the enemy. You say it's because for example that it should take a special person, a Hero, to wrest the gold from a leprechaun. But what's so special about a level 1 hero that is just a picking up stuff-flunkey anyway? But I guess we won't agree with this

[Caradoc]

Well said, sir! As another avid Heroes IV player, I share your disappointment that the series has taken a step back in so many areas.

I also heartily agree that the user interface has some problems. If I had my way there would have been a 'map' mode on the adventure screen that was equivalent to the adventure map for previous Heroes games. No 3D, no camera angles, no overhangs, just a simple map showing towns, objects, and terrain. How hard could that be?

The graphical style is too much like Baldur's gate to suit me. What worked well for a party-based RPG fails for a game of strategic scale. I have become reasonably good with the camerawork, but I can't stop wondering why it is necessary. Is this supposed to be fun?

You didn't mention this, so I'll add it -- the thing I miss the most are the scripted objects and encounters from Heroes IV. Sure, the NWC maps did not make much use of scripting so maybe the capability will be there again and I'm fretting over nothing. But so far I've seen almost nothing in the way of customized objects or events, apart from that one Sphinx.

[DaemianLucifer]

The graphical style is too much like Baldur's gate to suit me. What worked well for a party-based RPG fails for a game of strategic scale. I have become reasonably good with the camerawork, but I can't stop wondering why it is necessary. Is this supposed to be fun?

What?BG has excelent graphics style,unlike HV.Its more like WCIII.

[PhoenixReborn]

Add to that that the scouted area around your hero doesn't update as he moves; you have to stop moving to see what you have explored

I'm just curious what you mean by this? I can immediately see what is around me when the fog is lifted as my hero moves.

Otherwise, I can see where you're coming from for the most part, but I feel that much of it is getting used to the game.

[ramparter]

I generally agree with the review. Lack of Heroes IV(which I really enjoyed and after that I could never return to HIII) features really disappointed me.
Not being able to flag some building and gather my creatures with caravans are some of the backwards step that HV took.

[Chorus]

Although I've only played the demo (still loading...), I still agree with much of Ethric's review. As a side note, I never played Heroes IV (yes I know, I killed 3DO), so please do not judge me on that account. Generally, compared to previous Heroeses, Heroes V seems to glorify form over substance, and I'm particularly disappointed that a TBS demands more from my year and a half old video card than it can provide; indeed, I think TBS's in principle should work swiftly on just about any machine.

One of Heroes III's weaknesses over I-II was its introduction of scads of adventure objects without any means of managing them efficiently - hence the micromanaging. I think the map sizes grew in III over I-II as well (plus the underground level), which exacerbated the problem. Having recently played through the Heroes I campaign (as Knights, keep getting spanked by the Warlocks on the last map), I found that there really wasn't a huge need to hero chain or creature/resource collect because there weren't so many interactive objects on the map.

A nefarious side-effect to micromanaging is how it inhibits the AI's abilities. I don't think I've ever seen a Heroes AI pull off a hero chain, much less something as complex as the resource/creature collecting circuits my heroes run on. Nor can I recall a time when an AI hero disrupted my chaining and hero circuits. Consequently, when those here suggest automating or waypointing creature/resource collecting, that means that the AI also has to automate it similarly by making the same quantitative decisions as the player. Moreover, I find it difficult making sure heroes don't get stuck in traffic jams at choke points ("Gunnar you d@mned rubber-necker!!" "Serena's in front of me and her Gremlin's outta movement!"). How can an AI run my waypoints better than I can?

It can't, and it probably won't because any time you automate what the player can do, the player can usually do it better anyway (see Heroes auto-combat feature). With a qualitative gameplay improvement like the Heroes IV caravan, the AI's job becomes easier because the quantity of decisions it must make is reduced. This makes it better to play against, and easier for the developers to design.

[DaemianLucifer]

I'm just curious what you mean by this? I can immediately see what is around me when the fog is lifted as my hero moves.

When your hero moves the area around him fades in,and is not instantly shown.Thus you are able to wenture deep into the dark,not knowing where you are going,nor what is around you.It is pretty annoying since it slows down the game,since you have to wait 2,3 seconds after every few steps.

[LordErtz]

I'm just curious here, but does anybody else's computer have a problem with the 3d engine? Enough to make the overview map frustrating? I run a 2.6ghz with 1 gig of ram and a raedon 8500...on VERY LOW setting it frustrates me.

I also run it on my laptop athlon 3700+ w/ ati raedon 9700 pro mobile and 1.2 gigs of ram...on LOW it even has problems... JUST ME???

I agree that the graphics are great..they are colorful and give a rich texture to a fantasy world that we love, but I personally think it's too much to the point that the strategy used to play the game is actually more cumbersome and less enjoyable

[DaemianLucifer]

I'm just curious here, but does anybody else's computer have a problem with the 3d engine? Enough to make the overview map frustrating? I run a 2.6ghz with 1 gig of ram and a raedon 8500...on VERY LOW setting it frustrates me.

I also run it on my laptop athlon 3700+ w/ ati raedon 9700 pro mobile and 1.2 gigs of ram...on LOW it even has problems... JUST ME???

I agree that the graphics are great..they are colorful and give a rich texture to a fantasy world that we love, but I personally think it's too much to the point that the strategy used to play the game is actually more cumbersome and less enjoyable

What resolution are you using?It fares better on 1024x768 then on 800x600.

[Ethric]

I'm just curious what you mean by this? I can immediately see what is around me when the fog is lifted as my hero moves.

Well for me it has worked like this: set trail, set hero moving. Hero moves, shroud stays. Hero stops, shroud recedes from new area in range. As opposed to the shroud receding as he moves.