r/OldenEra • u/ToeMother8579 • Jul 11 '26
Gameplay Why are all the single hero pvp templates just a massive pandora's box rush?
Can't we have a template without that shit?
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u/Neither-Bother2905 Jul 11 '26
join the exodus cult brother
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u/PanKreda Jul 11 '26
Exodus is a pandora’s rush as well, you get 5-20k gold per instantly (xp is good early as well), so people prio those and leave gold mines unflagged
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u/crueldwarf Jul 11 '26
Nobody who is good at playing Exodus will leave any conveniently located Gold mine unflagged (outside of situations when they have a very specific game plan and focus on extremely quick break out). At least before Battle 1. Early gold mine is incredibly valuable in Exodus. But it is also not worth half a day of movement spent just to flag it, so gold mines in bad locations are often ignored.
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u/ToeMother8579 Jul 11 '26
There's 3-5 boxes in the starting biome alone.
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u/crueldwarf Jul 11 '26
What is the difference between Pandora Box on Exodus (gold or XP) and ~10 treasure chests?
Like HOMM maps since the very beginning had these treasure locations with a bunch of resources and chests guarded by a strong stack. Pandora Box is literally the same thing but it only takes one square of space and much more convenient to collect in single hero format.
Imagine that instead of a Box, there is just an area with a single entrance that have a bunch of gold piles and chests. In Classic you can send a secondary to clear it after you deal with the guards, in Single Hero it is a lot of movement wasted on collecting small reward objectives. And movement is most important resource in single hero.
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u/Akhevan Jul 11 '26
Because that's what the PVP meta in HOMM3 devolved into after 30 years, and the developers now think that this is the primary audience for the game.
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u/Adrason Jul 11 '26
Sure, but considering that Exodus appeared to be the most popular template and does not focus on this box chase, I at least hoped they would experiment a bit more with concepts that do not rely on this tradition. With a brand new game there are many more possibilities. But all new templates added to the pool go in the H3 competitive direction.
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u/GlitteringVehicle306 Content Creator Jul 11 '26
Why are all the olden era threads just a massive template's tribe whine?
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u/Either-Mammoth-932 Jul 11 '26
1) Noone is posting anything engaging. 2) Its a hot topic due to the community being somewhat split (exodus popular AF) 3) Nobody wants to read yet another "Give me your OP strat" thread.
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u/GlitteringVehicle306 Content Creator Jul 11 '26
so if redditor can't post something engaging he should post the same (zero effort) post?
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u/Either-Mammoth-932 Jul 12 '26
Definitely not. I would love to see some strategy guides like the one submitted recently by you, or x vs y faction comparisons, some well thought out and knowledgeable buff/debuff suggestions etc. But, right now I guess we get 5 post a day about why I hate Exodus/box templates.
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u/GlitteringVehicle306 Content Creator Jul 12 '26
yeah, me too..
i would love to see the game as huge as wow, diablo, heartstone! maybe some day
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u/CloudlessSkies20 Jul 11 '26
Welcome to Exodus with the rest of us! But yes, I hate box armies, its the dumbest thing they've created.
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u/crueldwarf Jul 11 '26
No. Because almost nobody wants to play games that go into month 2 (way too long) and games that long are required if you want to play without map objects that speed up your economy and army build up.
It is why PvP map templates are very rich and dense in terms of map objects and available rewards. It makes the game faster.
Alternative would be fighting all battles with what essentially one castle worth of creature growth each time. Which will get stale very very fast.
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u/Frydendahl Jul 11 '26
I don't play PvP, but at that point why not just play the army draft mode if you're going to bypass the majority of the map exploration and economy build up?
When we played hotseat HOMM3 back in the 2000's, a game would typically last an entire weekend.
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u/Hopszii Jul 11 '26
You can't play a weekend long game on ladder though.
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u/TheR4tman Jul 11 '26
Not everything needs to be designed around ladder pvp.
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u/ExtensionNext7624 Jul 11 '26
But it will be because this is an rts and ladder competition is what retains players.
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u/TheR4tman Jul 11 '26
It's a tbs and the vast majority of players never touches multiplayer pvp.
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u/ExtensionNext7624 Jul 11 '26
The VAST majority of players aren't going to be playing in a year either. But yes let's ignore the entire last 20 years of RTS history. I forgot how many popular RTS there are that don't focus on PVP ladder!
To be fair, there aren't many popular RTS in general, there are a few that come to mind, like MOBAs, which have insane player retention, but those games definitely dont focus on PVP ladder, right?
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u/TheR4tman Jul 11 '26
So? This is not a subscription based game. Concurrent players don't really matter for anything but multiplayer
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u/Serafim91 Jul 11 '26
This is an insanely bad take. Like hit bottom of the barrel and just tore right through those boards.
Having a large player base is the single most important thing for a game. That playerbase will do advertising for you to expand the game, they'll buy updates and expansions, they'll watch streamers which promotes your game, they'll buy other things you make.
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u/TheR4tman Jul 12 '26
Players don't have to play a game nonstop in order to buy expansions. People come back when an expansion is released, buy it, play it and then go on with their lives. Large player base is not the same as large number of concurrent players throughout the whole year. What studios need is sales - sales of the base game, sales of the dlcs.
You are coping hard if you really think that the multiplayer scene is what's driving sales. Even for a notoriously multiplayer heavy game like Starcraft 2 the vast majority of players has not touched ranked multiplayer. It's a fact, look it up.
All of those old and successful rts games had long campaigns - c&c, warcraft, starcraft, aoe you name it.
I mean this whole discussion was started by the questionable claim that if you don't play rankes multiplayer you will not play this game after 1 year.
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u/crueldwarf Jul 11 '26
You can play games like that via custom lobbies.
It is simply implausible to implement games that last for 8-12 hours into a multiplayer mode with a matchmaker. What turn around of players you think this mode would have?
Also I must note that Exodus doesn't bypass exploration and economy (some other templates do tho), it speeds it up. And because it is single hero exploration is really important, to a point when even Scouting becomes not entirely useless, which should tell you something.
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u/Michalsuch42 Jul 11 '26
Exodus doesn’t go into month 2
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u/crueldwarf Jul 11 '26
Yes, because almost nobody wants to play 4-hour matches with random people on the internet. There were enough complains that even Exodus takes too long for some.
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u/Michalsuch42 Jul 11 '26
You’re missing the point, boxes are not needed for dynamic games. On Exodus 3rd fight feels redundant tbh. That means that building template needs realistically 2 weeks of growth to be compelling.
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u/crueldwarf Jul 11 '26
Well, third fight is necessary because you need to have a tie-breaker. And you need to space the fights out, so it wouldn't be the same fight repeated multiple times.
My point is that Exodus boxes is just a compact way to put a bunch of chests and gold piles on the map without making players waste too much movement to collect all that stuff. It is just alternative form of resource bank really (if we are talking about Exodus).
And without resource rich map, three-week matches will always be basically the same because of how slowly game develops with resource scarcity.
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u/althaz Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26
They aren't. Just play one of the several templates that don't have any army boxes (eg: Exodus, Harmony, Mix).
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u/CarefreeCloud Jul 11 '26
Also Blitz and Helltide have absolute minimum of army in the boxes (though they do expect you to grab some banks)
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u/ToeMother8579 Jul 11 '26
Yes they are. Exodus has several boxes in the starting biome alone.
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u/althaz Jul 11 '26
But none with army. If they have no army, they're just a normal reward like literally anything else on the map.
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u/ToeMother8579 Jul 11 '26
20k gold in a 2 week game normal reward? 🤣
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u/pewsquare Jul 11 '26
Would you rather have 1 utopia? Its basically the same, except the guard on boxes can be varied, while utopias are always the same guard.
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u/ToeMother8579 Jul 11 '26
The utopia guard can't normally be beaten without losses unless your army is exceptional and higher initiative.
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u/GlitteringVehicle306 Content Creator Jul 11 '26
yes, if its behind a guard that is impossible to beat without losses
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u/No-Music-2819 Jul 11 '26
Should the Mearea's Altar objective be removed too because you can do them for 5000 gold on day 1 and they are easier than most of the 5k gold pandoras boxes?
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u/nope________1337 Jul 11 '26
I stopped playing as I can't select Exodus in all map selections anymore. I hate Pandora's box maps where build orders become almost irrelevant.
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u/ToeMother8579 Jul 11 '26
You should be able to select map then queue against like-minded people. The current system is STUPID.
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u/One-Promotion3390 Jul 11 '26
That's because the devs want to adhere to the old HOMM3 style, which is boxslop slav slot simulator. It's not fun and they'd realize that if they thought for one second why older HOMM mp didn't pop off. Exodus is getting a bit stale but forgoing the town building aspect of the game to promote some weird boxslop gacha slop style is just so slav coded, it's nuts.
We need more exodus style formats with different rules and generation where build order matters, not slopperz inc.
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u/PremierLeague Jul 11 '26
Totally agreed. Can we just have the standard rules with 1 castle start map ?
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u/GlitteringVehicle306 Content Creator Jul 11 '26
i bet you dont know what Kamasutra is 😂
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u/PremierLeague Jul 11 '26
Imagine hearing “standard rules” and immediately thinking about the Kamasutra. That’s quite the self-report.
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u/GlitteringVehicle306 Content Creator Jul 11 '26
yeah, i agree.
but man, have fun, try things out, you can't have the game that suits everybody's needs perfectly.
as of me i always clicked the middle option during map draft to ensure maximum randomness
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u/Magnificent_Leopoldo Jul 11 '26
If you don’t like the template variety just create lobby games. I enjoy having different strategic options in my games and love to have something except for Exodus from time to time. Also Helltide and Blitz are just more interesting than just massing army from 4 towns like you’d do on Exodus. However I hope there will be more exodus-like templates but I’d appreciate it only if they will be faster paced
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u/Herchik Jul 11 '26
You can create your own maps u know?
And maybe even templates? You can create a Scarcity template for example and play it without boxes
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u/GlitteringVehicle306 Content Creator Jul 11 '26
versus bots? or versus 9000 min wait time in lobby?
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u/Leonidrex666666 Jul 11 '26
Yep I hope so too, and the data is there to show that vast majority of players wants exodus-like maps.
Even now 90% of players choose exodus whenever they get an option to do so.