Heroes of Might and Magic III

[The Almighty dF]

I'm stuck on a not-so-gaming-friendly laptop for a bit, so I decided to grab HoMM3 off gog.com since their version runs on XP, Vista, and 7.
I figure if any fandom also enjoys HoMM, it's bound to be the Civ fandom, as HoMM's easily still one of the best TBS games I've seen, and easily one of the most difficult.

It's actually harder than I remembered, I've found myself losing four times since installation, like I can't balance my budget.

So, who else still remembers or even still plays this old strategy gem from the late late 90s? (At least I believe it was 1998/1999)

 

[Rub'Rum]

I'm stuck on a not-so-gaming-friendly laptop for a bit, so I decided to grab HoMM3 off gog.com since their version runs on XP, Vista, and 7.
I figure if any fandom also enjoys HoMM, it's bound to be the Civ fandom, as HoMM's easily still one of the best TBS games I've seen, and easily one of the most difficult.

It's actually harder than I remembered, I've found myself losing four times since installation, like I can't balance my budget.

So, who else still remembers or even still plays this old strategy gem from the late late 90s? (At least I believe it was 1998/1999)

Some of my best gaming memories. Especially HoMM 2. It's one of the first games I bought, back in the days when I could only buy one game per like 6 months and was obligated to find a way to enjoy it and spend countless hours with it...

HoMM 3 I also played a crapload with a friend of mine, often Hot Seat. But it was really 2 that I remember fondly because of that time in my life... Warcraft 2, Diablo 1, HoMM2. Good times. The ambiance in HoMM 2 was so great compared to other games of the time. The sound effects, the music, the "nature" sounds. Great great game. I wasn't even really good.

 

[The Almighty dF]

Some of my best gaming memories. Especially HoMM 2. It's one of the first games I bought, back in the days when I could only buy one game per like 6 months and was obligated to find a way to enjoy it and spend countless hours with it...

HoMM 3 I also played a crapload with a friend of mine, often Hot Seat. But it was really 2 that I remember fondly because of that time in my life... Warcraft 2, Diablo 1, HoMM2. Good times. The ambiance in HoMM 2 was so great compared to other games of the time. The sound effects, the music, the "nature" sounds. Great great game. I wasn't even really good.

Oh man, the music in HoMM2 and 3... those two games and most of Blizzard's games had the best music for PC. I still get this awesome tingley feeling hearing the Tristram music, the awesome acoustic guitar piece in Diablo 1.

 

[FriendlyFire]

IIRC HOMM3 required several early aggressive attacks to clear several maps.

 

[Yeekim]

Oh, the countless hotseat games of HOMM2 and 3 I played against my brother...
Became real pro in these games...wish I´d remember more of them...

HOMM 2 was the first game I ever played - together with AoE I

 

[Kyriakos]

Never picked that up, since i went the Age of Wonders way instead...

 

[Rub'Rum]

Never picked that up, since i went the Age of Wonders way instead...

I went there too

 

[Kyriakos]

Now it seems that both the age of wonders series, and homm1-4 are pretty much dead, small community left.

I wonder why people are so interested in games becomming full 3d. Personally i dislike their gfx, and strategy games should never be about gfx anyway.

 

[Psyringe]

I love HoMM3, imho it's the pinnacle of the series (which kind of went downhill afterwards). Gameplay is pretty simple for a strategy game, but still very engaging. And the presentation was great. Actually I'm regularly using HoMM3 as an example why 3d graphics don't necessarily look better than 2d, I think its crisp, colorful, atmospheric graphics put many contemporary games with their washed-out, blurry textures and wooden animations to shame.

If you like HoMM3, 'd recommend having a look at the WoG mod. It takes a while to understand what all the new options actually do (and some don't work well together), but after an inital learning phase and some headscratching, I found it to be an addition that I wouldn't want to miss.

There's also the VCMI project, a very promising endeavour to recreate HoMM3 in an open Source environment. It's not seriously playable yet, but it's already fun to poke around in it.

 

[Rub'Rum]

I just realized HoMM 6 is in development. I didn't know that. Well hopefully it can return some of the magic... Although it's getting published by Ubisoft so it will probably require you to steal your grandma's dog and make connect its brain to the internet 25 hours a day to play.

The actual developers are some people who worked on some Warhammer games.

 

[Yeekim]

I love HoMM3, imho it's the pinnacle of the series (which kind of went downhill afterwards).

Indeed. HOMM2 was good too, but "Heroes of Magic" were massively underpowered against "Heroes of Might", on anything else but the tiniest maps...

 

[Kyriakos]

I really like this image:

Particularly the giants. They look frightening and magical

 

[MajKira]

I liked HoMM V most, the fifth installment beat all previous IMOO

 

[Serutan]

Ah, the original release of HOMM3 - where you could exploit a bug and use the 'Sacrifice' spell
to destroy an enemy stack, and resurrect one of yours.

 

[The Almighty dF]

I liked HoMM V most, the fifth installment beat all previous IMOO

I wasn't fond of HoMM5 myself, felt too stripped down.
It wasn't as bad as 4, though. 4 was easily the weakpoint of the series.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

I wasn't fond of HoMM5 myself, felt too stripped down.

Why did you think it was stripped down ? I thought it took every aspect of 3 and expanded on it. (4 did the opposite of this)

 

[Psyringe]

When HoMM5 was released, I checked the respective forums. There were flame wars about new game - not that I had expected anything different, but it's interesting to see which arguments exactly come up in these discussions. My impression was that the critics complained about an overall reduction of content compared to HoMM3 (less factions, less creatures, less spells) and a horribly bad AI (to which the developers responded that, in their opinion, the whole purpose of an AI was to "lose gracefully", not to really challenge the player's path to victory). The fans of the game mostly argued that the game looked great and was less confusing than HoMM3.

Since complexity and AI quality are key elements for my enjoyment of a strategy game, and graphics aren't important to me at all, I concluded that I probably wouldn't like it, and passed on it. I remember checking some of the arguments and arriving at the conclusion that the reduction of content was rather obvious, e.g. lumping together the demons and the undead into a single faction (which was a terrible decision imho, I think each of them contributed a lot to the atmosphere separately).

However, since I never bought the game, I might of course be wrong. I also think that the expansions weren't released yet when I checked all this, so they may have remedied some of the initial flaws. I'll probably buy it when the "complete" version hits the bargain bins for 5 Euro, last tme I checked it was still at 20, so it'll take another year I think.

 

[The Almighty dF]

When HoMM5 was released, I checked the respective forums. There were flame wars about new game - not that I had expected anything different, but it's interesting to see which arguments exactly come up in these discussions. My impression was that the critics complained about an overall reduction of content compared to HoMM3 (less factions, less creatures, less spells) and a horribly bad AI (to which the developers responded that, in their opinion, the whole purpose of an AI was to "lose gracefully", not to really challenge the player's path to victory). The fans of the game mostly argued that the game looked great and was less confusing than HoMM3.

Since complexity and AI quality are key elements for my enjoyment of a strategy game, and graphics aren't important to me at all, I concluded that I probably wouldn't like it, and passed on it. I remember checking some of the arguments and arriving at the conclusion that the reduction of content was rather obvious, e.g. lumping together the demons and the undead into a single faction (which was a terrible decision imho, I think each of them contributed a lot to the atmosphere separately).

However, since I never bought the game, I might of course be wrong. I also think that the expansions weren't released yet when I checked all this, so they may have remedied some of the initial flaws. I'll probably buy it when the "complete" version hits the bargain bins for 5 Euro, last tme I checked it was still at 20, so it'll take another year I think.

You aren't wrong.
5 was... really lacking. Sure it was pretty, but the AI was dumber, there were less factions, less of a variety in terms of what you could do differently each time, etc.

Civ4 and Starcraft 2 are sadly two of the only strategy games I've seen make the 3D leap without losing gameplay features/options. I mean SC2's pretty much just SC1 - but with 3D art. Civ4? Actually -added- to Civ3, making it a complete -reverse- of the norm.

 

[Yeekim]

HOMM V (post ToE at least) had its good points - I really liked the skill wheel and the way how each faction had really unique abilities, as well as alternative unit upgrades.

But I just hated its graphics and... I guess...I just kind of grew out of that franchise.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

Am i the only one here who actually played Heroes5 ? The only one who saw that it has a LOT more units. And what's this i hear about the demons and the undead having one faction - WTH Necropolis and Inferno are different towns.
HeroesV has 8 factions, HeroesIII has 9 factions (HUGE diff)
HereosV has 168 creatures (excluding creatures you can't recruit in towns), HeroesIII has 145 creatures including those you can only recruit in dwellings.
HeroesV DOES have less spells, but 1/3 of the Heroes3 spells you never cast anyway.
There are tens more abilities creatures can have in V.
Heroes have hundreds of skills in V as opposed to the rudimentary skill system in 3.

The only good argument against HeroesV is about the horrible graphics. Every concept used in heroes 3 was expanded in 5.