Heroes of Might and Magic 3...

[Worthington]

ack, you guys are making me want to replay this.

 

[Kalmah]

I keep running out of things to do. When I cant defeat any enemies and have uncovered and gotten all the resources that I can, is wasting turns to wait for troops at a town a normal strategy?

I still cant find a way to gauge how tough an opponent will be before fighting. So save before battle has become my only strategy. Because of this, starting a fight feels more like gambling.

hmmm

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I still cant find a way to gauge how tough an opponent will be before fighting. So save before battle has become my only strategy. Because of this, starting a fight feels more like gambling.

Nah, that's not gambling. Playing the early beta of Etherlords, now THAT was gambling!
I lost count of how many times I would get a crapton of crappy card draws in a row and get my a*s handed to me :|

 

[Jadow]

i still play 3

 

[AlexAL]

I keep running out of things to do. When I cant defeat any enemies and have uncovered and gotten all the resources that I can, is wasting turns to wait for troops at a town a normal strategy?

I still cant find a way to gauge how tough an opponent will be before fighting. So save before battle has become my only strategy. Because of this, starting a fight feels more like gambling.

hmmm

It depends what difficulty you are playing at. At hardest there's like no margin of error, so I hate that cause it's either difficult or depressing lol. You need a main army that goes with your strongest hero, a forward sweeper, that can clean up behind the main hero and save some turns or clean up somewhere else, and backfield runners, that bring enforcements every week to the fore dudes or check stuff like weekly resource spots. When you can afford a good second army, you are boss.

Don't forget it's ok to lose a castle, but make it up by conquering one of his castles. And if you pass enough turns to let him gather a huge army, it's bad.

Some of those skills are crap, like the sailing/boat one. I personally hate tactics with a passion, and something like estates has limited use. Balance army buying with castle building. Use the markets lol. Archery should be like on every hero. And knowledge is better than power, cause you run out of spells points easy, spell intensity is not that big of a deal. (Hope I didn't mix that up).

 

[IlllI]

3 was the best. 2 was second best. 4 was an absolute turd. 5 was somewhere between 4 and 2. if you want something similar but not as slow (by that i mean bogged down with building a castle etc) try kings bounty. just to give an idea, i put in 85 hrs in kings bounty the legend

 

[LtMikePowelll]

I'm in the process of relearning how to play HoMM 3 (it's been so long that I played that game)...

 

[masterxfob]

great game. burned way too much time playing it.

 

[Elcs]

3 was great.

I'm strange and prefer both 5 and 6, albeit only slightly.

And even then I'm a King's Bounty man

 

[Borealis7]

King's bounty is the new HoMM, definitely.

 

[biostud]

also get wake of gods mod

http://www.strategyplanet.com/homm/wog/

 

[shortylickens]

King's bounty is the new HoMM, definitely.

Definitely not. I've played through Armored Princess twice and while its buttloads of fun its hardly the same game. Theres no empire managing and really no strategy outside of battle. And most of the battles feel exactly the same since theres usually only one best way to defeat enemy parties once you get a solid party of your own.
The only reason either of the Kings Bounty games is interesting is that limited unit availability requires you to slowly swap out creatures and eventually you will be forced to play with most of them, whether you want to or not.

 

[Possessed Freak]

HoMM 3 is my second most favorite TBS game. It sits right behind MoO2.

I still play both regularly. Nothing to me is more fun than to go into battles not knowing if you can pull it off or not. When you enter battles against AI knowing that your force is weaker but you can manipulate the enemy in certain ways. Or getting completely trounced because of a mastery he has learned (CURSE YOU EXPERT SLOW).

To make the games quicker I do typically modify the maps to add shackles of war in multiple places. For better or worse our commanders are not getting out of these battles!

 

[EDUSAN]

i dont understand how you run out of resources...

basic tips

every 1st day of the week the units get "recruited/created/whatever" so...
its a good tactic to win a castle the 7th day of the week
its a good tactic to have a mule heroe in your town(s) every 1st day of the week and do a chain mule heroe travel (that is.... you place heroes so that where the heroe going out from the castle cant walk anymore you have another one to transfer the units and keep walking until you reinforce your main heroe)

in the campaign normally you will create the capitol building in your main city as fast as you can (4k gold per day)

remember not only to pick up the resources on the floor but also to conquer the mines that produce 1/2 of that resource per day

as someone said before.... ranged units are soooooo important. Keep them safe, put low level units covering them.

Mass spells are great. Moral and Luck win battles (you lose moral if you have units from different castles in your army)
if you have 300 archers, you MIGHT want to divide them into 2 units of 150 archers, at least until the rest of your army is strong enough.
Think carefully what units to buy each week if you dont have enough money (probably ranged units are the 1st pick)

 

[Martimus]

I keep running out of things to do. When I cant defeat any enemies and have uncovered and gotten all the resources that I can, is wasting turns to wait for troops at a town a normal strategy?

I still cant find a way to gauge how tough an opponent will be before fighting. So save before battle has become my only strategy. Because of this, starting a fight feels more like gambling.

hmmm

I thought that right clicking on the enemy would bring up a tooltip that told you his relative strength to yours. I know there are skills that will actually tell you the exact level of the enemy in HoMM V, but I thought that was available in 3 as well. I just looked at the HoMM3 skill list and I didn't see it though.

 

[EDUSAN]

i think there is a way to look at the exact numbers before a battle, but i cant recall if it is with skill or using one of the world map spells

 

[JamesV]

Some of those skills are crap, like the sailing/boat one. I personally hate tactics with a passion, and something like estates has limited use. Balance army buying with castle building. Use the markets lol. Archery should be like on every hero. And knowledge is better than power, cause you run out of spells points easy, spell intensity is not that big of a deal. (Hope I didn't mix that up).

Estates is one of the more powerful skills in the game. You should always run max amount of heroes, and if you find a shrine that gives estates, thats 6-7 heroes generating gold (hit up exp shrines, and that could be 1,000 gold per each one of those 'extra' heroes you don't use for battle.

Tactics is also quite good; at max you can hit enemy creatures on the first turn with melee troops. Plus, even better, you get to re-arrange your troops prior to ever battle - ie you could put tough melee mobs surrounding your stack of 100 archers, so enemy melee can't touch them (before battle begins).

I also tend to go Power over knowledge, since there are so many artifacts that give big knowledge boosts. A chain lightning with very high power imo is better than being able to cast it 20 times. Knowledge does however rule on huge maps, where you want to port around alot using Town Portal/etc.

 

[Martimus]

I remember that I always took Diplomacy, Tactics, and Logistics if I could for all my heroes. Lately, I have been trying out more magic oriented skills, and I found those to be quite effective as well.

 

[EDUSAN]

i loved diplomacy and having enemy armies join my side overwhelmed by my power =D

logistics was the one that let you walk more during map navigation? that one was very important for your main char.

i used to take leadership for big boost at morale, and normally at least 1 school of magic to have mass spells

 

[Obsoleet]

I bought HOMM1 and 2 on launch day. Great games, I have HOMM3 and 4 as well, all have their own particular nostalgia for me. Dead to me in HOMM5+.

In 2012, King's Bounty is your HOMM in my view. I'd pick up KB and recommend it to someone to create modern day memories of the Might & Magic universe, rather than pickup HOMM3 now.

That said, enjoy either way!

 

[you2]

Isn't there an open source remake of homm in progress ?

 

[sactoking]

I laugh at all of the comments about King's Bounty being the "new" HOMM; the original Heroes of Might and Magic was an offshoot of King's Bounty. HOMM has always been the "new" King's Bounty, not the other way round.

 

[AlexAL]

HOMM and King's Bounty are different games. They use the same lore and graphics, so that is nice when going from one to the other. But whichever you like, the other is a different kind of game.

 

[Obsoleet]

This is true, KB did come first. I have the game in the original box as well. To me, and many others HOMM as it was is dead to us in the latest incarnations. If I don't play HOMM1-3 (and 4 I guess as it has its unique elements), it's Kings Bounty all the way compared to the latest HOMM games.

 

[acheron]

5 was much better than 4. 4 is basically worthless. 5 was not as good as the earlier games but wasn't bad I guess.

Never tried 6, though I thought I heard Oobisoft removed the DRM from it? So maybe I'll try if that's the case.

Or else just go install 2 and 3 again.