Heroes of Might and Magic

[T-hawk]

Since some folks were requesting it in the Alpha Centauri thread, here's a speedrun writeup for one scenario in Heroes of Might and Magic 2.  http://dos486.com/heroes2/

Feel free to talk anything HOMM in this thread.  Like the time you induced your college roommate into failing out of school by introducing him to HOMM 2 which he spent all his time on instead of classes and schoolwork.  (True story.)

[MJW (ya that one)]

Since some folks were requesting it in the Alpha Centauri thread, here's a speedrun writeup for one scenario in Heroes of Might and Magic 2.  http://dos486.com/heroes2/

Feel free to talk anything HOMM in this thread.  Like the time you induced your college roommate into failing out of school by introducing him to HOMM 2 which he spent all his time on instead of classes and schoolwork.  (True story.)

How is that even possible? In my school you have to fail two semesters in a row to get kicked out or be a very very poor student (spending 3.5 years in lower division, which should only take 2, and then failing) for only one semester to do you in. I guess different schools have different rules.

Edit: The only thing I know about HOMM is the stronghold theme being wildly out-of-touch in HOMM3.

[yuris125]

That was insane, and exactly what I hoped for

[T-hawk]

THH, I moved your post over here to keep the HOMM stuff in the HOMM thread.

MJW, it wasn't exactly failing enough to get kicked out, more like he was doing poorly enough in classes that he didn't want to try again. The HOMM addiction didn't help, but it was more a symptom than a cause.

[haphazard1]

Thanks for posting this, T-hawk! Very interesting.

It has been a long time since I played HoMM2; I generally prefer 3 as that is the first game in the series that I played and became familiar with. But a lot carries over. The speed run mentality reminds me a lot of what happens in HoMM3 with campaign scenarios where you carry over heroes from earlier maps. You can do an amazing amount very rapidly using just the starting armies, a few low level troops scraped together from various sources, and hitting enemies hard and fast before they can build up. It is very different play than the standard build-up-your-towns-while-developing-a-mega-hero approach, but it can work extremely well. It tends to ride the edge of disaster, though, and any screw up or unexpected set back can be crushing. Great fun when it works, though.

[Kofiman]

Thanks for the post. I can certainly see why you wouldn't want to do more of these, though. Solved games are solved games.

[T-hawk]

It tends to ride the edge of disaster, though, and any screw up or unexpected set back can be crushing. Great fun when it works, though.

Yup. In fact that happened to me here - the writeup was for my second attempt at the scenario - the first (trying a Knight castle) died out when the AI beat me to the Archer's House mentioned on day 5 and those troops were enough for it to defeat my hero.

My favorite part of HOMM 2, and what sets its skill ceiling higher than 3, is managing the first-tier troops. They make up the biggest offensive output for most castles until tier five (and sometimes even then, notably Barbarian), particularly with the large numbers accumulated from starting heroes and map dwellings. But they're so squishy, a single attack can wipe out half or more of a stack, obviously peasants and notably sprites or halflings. Keeping those guys safe is riding on the knife edge of disaster all the time and what makes HOMM 2 a thrill that 3 isn't, where the first-tier troops were scaled up to 5-10 hit points instead of 1-4.

[Jowy]

HoMM3 now has a multiplayer lobby made by modders. Only works with the fan made HoTA expansion, but the multiplayer pros seem to prefer playing with the expansion anyway for the balance changes.

I've practiced a little bit on Jebus Cross in preparation, but dunno if I'll ever get around to playing real matches.

There's a streamer/youtuber called MeKick who does HoMM3 stuff in English. I would much recommend his Wayfarer series, which is an extremely difficult challenge map. You might learn a thing or two about the game.

[Deceptus]

In my humble opinion, while Knight and Barbarian *do* have good early-game ramp-up, they are still generally eclipsed by the all-powerful Warlock faction even in the early game. This is because HoMM2 lets you buy infinite amounts of starting heroes and they will all have a starting army - a feature that was in HoMM3 until it was patched out as well due to how lopsided it made multiplayer games (and placed Tower firmly in the Tier 1 spot, because you could just overwhelm people with Master Gremlins with little to no counter, and Solmyr is an amazing early-game skirmisher).

So, the idea here is, Gargoyles have amazing stats - they're fast and have lots of health. They can reach any archer pack you might be forced to meet early game before the archers can act. With starting Gargoyles and bonus ones you get from hiring additional heroes, as well as the ones from your dwelling (unless you didn't start with it), your early game is robust - and that's not even taking into account the Centaurs, who are level 1 shooting units, and will be plentiful through this method.

On top of that, heroes with high magic focus (Warlocks primarily though) have two powerspikes - the extreme early game and extreme late game. The former because blasting spells work wonders on the low HP armies of HoMM2 (HoMM3 didn't adjust the damage spells but still bloated HP values across the board, making blaster spellcasting obsolete much more quickly), and the late game because with a ton of mana points you are a god of the battlefield. Might heroes excel in the mid-game, where they have just enough spellpoints to get off a few crucial spells, and they also have robust Attack and Defense power from levelling up, which scales extremely well in HoMM2.

In the extreme early game, a Warlock can shoot a 3 Spell Power Magic Arrow 6 times, which is enough to really ramp up some damage and help edge out some encounters that could result in losses. Warlocks also advance primarily in Spell Power and not Knowledge like their Good-aligned counterparts, the Sorceress and the Wizard. I really enjoy having a Warlock running around with a Very- or Ultra Fast unit, as a self-reliant blaster who clears out minor engagements, allowing my main hero to not bother with certain skirmishes that are too far away while I'm trying to conserve movement points and keep on trucking with my primary objectives.

I'd argue that the best quality of the Knight and Barbarian aren't their early game - Knight in particular starts with pitiful Peasants, which are absurdly useless in many situations and actively harmful in one case (fighting Ghosts). Knight is the best faction when you can double-build through conquering a different town early on, stockpile a lot of cheap Rangers in your hometown while enjoying a really good hero class, and combine armies using your Leadership bonus. Barbarian's power spike lands in how ridiculously good Ogre Lords and War Trolls are - if you field them early enough, you can destroy everything. That's why Barbarian outedges Warlock in most maps of the HoMM2 campaign - Ogre's Alliance lets you hoard Ogres and barbarian towns (or Hill Forts) let you quickly upgrade them, and also the campaign features quite a few maps with unsavory terrain (such as the one where you're racing to a Dragon Utopia).

Warlocks do have a pretty hard time getting to their Dragons, but once they do, they can easily fly around the map conquering with nothing but the Dragons themselves, and it's not like their early-mid game units are bad. Hydras can do a lot of creeping on their own, too, particularly against slow, walking units. I think it was the map Last Hope that starts you off with Corribus the Knight and a Dragon, as well as a decent army of Knight units. What I did on that map was hire a second Knight and have him run around with his comrades, while Corribus himself simply equipped the Dragon and rushed the corners of this Small map as fast as possible - turns out the Dragon was enough to bust open the highly-advanced Necromancer towns all by himself, and mop up all heroes that were on the way.

The counterpart to Warlocks - the Wizards - have absolutely atrocious build costs of everything, low self-reliance of their armies (Boars are not nearly as good as Gargoyles as they do not fly, and Golems are sedentary compared to Griffins, Giants are harmful to build before their extremely expensive upgrade because HoMM2 actually makes upgrading armies more expensive than just buying the upgraded version, and Giants are also not very good on their own, being fairly unimpressive walkers).

EDIT: Oh, and just because I nerded out too much: I loved this speedrun report! :D Perhaps the best way to encourage more in the future would be to try out challenging maps from fansites rather than the ones shipped with the game. Jowy posted a fine example, albeit for HoMM3.

[T-hawk]

Nice, some actual discussion.

The Warlock faction is good too but not great I think.  Yes wild shooters inflict the most losses, and gargoyles and griffins stop that.  Against flyers, split the griffins into two stacks and you can box in the centaurs using pocket formation.  But Warlock's problem is attacking castles.  With an auto-garrison running, you don't get time to fling 6 magic arrows.  The one shooter crumples to the garrison, the gargoyles and griffins don't have the damage and HP to stand up to defending heavy hitters like dwarves, wolves, golems; and the minotaurs and hydras take forever to get into the castle without Ballistics skill.

But I love the Wizard faction.  It's all about the rocs.  Flying ogres.  It's a tier-four troop, but plays like tier three since it doesn't require the actual tier-three dwelling (you can build it on day 1 if you start with the boar dwelling, and costs 3000 which is barely more than the 2500 griffin nest.)  Rocs do almost as well as gargoyles in blocking enemy shooters (only worse against faster shooters, which aren't common, only grand elves/druids/liches), and hold up much better against strong walkers.  The other half of the wizard faction is the halflings: they outdamage warlock centaurs (particularly with Bless), are cheaper, easier to box in with pocket formation, and come from a map dwelling that shows up everywhere (the centaur cave is only for snow terrain.)

You are right that the warlock's gargoyles are the best starting troop of all, and between that and the spell power and the scouting skill, he's the best spellcasting hero class.  But that's no need to use a warlock castle.  Hire one warlock and use his gargoyles to block shooting at your archers or orcs or halflings.


Knight in particular starts with pitiful Peasants, which are absurdly useless in many situations

Peasants are the most underrated troop in the game.  They come in absurd numbers from Knight starting heroes.  You can get 150 with three heroes plus a castle, which is a stack that dishes out more damage than any other of any castle you can rack up in the first week.  Yes, they are squishy, but the AI always goes for your archers over the peasants so it's not that hard to keep them alive.  I've won many a fight by peasants knocking a nasty stack of wolves off my archers.  Yeah they're a liability against ghosts, but how often does that actually come up, all the map locations where you fight ghosts involve enough that you won't be doing it with a week-one army anyway.


Knight is the best faction when you can double-build through conquering a different town early on

This is really an argument that the knight is the most cost-effective troops to get in a conquered castle.  That's quite true, and yes is relevant in your faction choice if you know there is (or can deliberately choose) a nearby knight to conquer.  That wouldn't happen in this speedrun since each target castle was the terminal goal in its direction and I never reached day 8 anyway.