Caltrops - Heroes of Might & Magic VI





	[quote name="fabio"]<b>Pros</b> No more overwhelming neutral monster garbage. You're here to fight heroes. It's right there in the title, HoMM5. Auto combat gives you the results of battles and allows you to manually replay any ones you're not happy with. <b>Not sure</b> Resources have been simplified. Wood, ore, crystal. That's it. Pooled creature pool. All available creatures can be recruited at any town of their type. If you have 3 towns growing 10 creatures a week, all 30 will be available at any of them. No more resource sniping. You must capture the closest town to take control of mines. You can convert towns to your starting type for a minimal cost. They've gone from penalizing mixed armies to eliminating them outright. <b>Cons</b> Town screens are minimalist ugly. A tiny animated movie of just the town hall in a postage stamp sized window. It's almost like an early 90s FMV game. You get the feeling that the entire thing started out as a browser or Facebook game the way everything is in a compartmentalized window and the icon for loading is the same for Windows! Castle fortifications are almost useless. No more arrow towers. If you have fewer ranged units than your opponent, defending a castle puts you at a <b>disadvantage</b> as you have to deal with the gate bottleneck. Hero management made needlessly complex. The old system of choosing 1 or 2 skills was fine. You're now presented with a dozen different tree screens without much idea how each is going to help for any given hero. Some skills require a certain amount of "darkside points", yet you can still choose them even if you don't have any? You can now equip over 30 items and you have to worry about gear sets now. For fuck's sake, guys. No more mage guild building. Spells must be learned with skill points from leveling up, meaning they now have an opportunity cost and further tips the already questionable balance between might or magic heroes. You're also raildroaded into certain spells. Direct damage spells are point traps. Healing spells that mitigate long term losses are mandatory for the campaigns. Tech tree dribble. Hope you have fun spending 3 hours on a map with only the first two or three town units available. Mandatory internet connection. There's a button for offline mode, but clicking it just closes my window. <b>THE DIFFICULTY LEVEL</b>. I haven't played such a perfection mandatory single player strategy game since the Panzer General games. The campaigns are ludicrously difficult (especially the undead). Not only does the enemy outnumber you 3 or more towns to 1, but they get access to an additional creature type over you (skeletons and ghouls vs crossbows, spearmen, and griffons THANKS). You almost literally have to plow through every neutral stack and first town with zero casualties (out of 100 creature or so, you can <i>maybe</i> afford to lose 5). This is why healing spells are mandatory; lose 1 creature on each neutral stack and you're fucked. Even with zero casualties you're going to be forced back to your only town and maybe just barely win thanks to the end of the week coming the instant before the enemy hero attacks you. Do that 3 times every map. It took me 6 hours to beat the first undead map. 2 of those were aborted restarts and 2 more were aborted restarts following online guides. The entire time you only have skeletons (shitty ranged units), ghouls (basic melee unit), and ghosts (not even the upgraded kind). Imagine the designer who figured it would take people playing a 15 year old franchise entry that long to get used to 3 units. The first infernal map only took 1 hour of restarts.[/quote]