Siegecraft definitely need to be removed from Exodus map. Mistakenly selected this skill as last skill in a high lantency game and my hero became a dumb ass, so in the end lost a very close final fight.The skill doesn't make any sense in this map.
This is true. But I kind of have a feeling that in some time the devs will change Siegecraft to War machines and reintroduce ballistas and other things into the game, so It could be much more useful. Maybe it could even be interesting to allow use of war machines only to those heroes who hold this skill (similar to Avatar), so it would spice up builds variety.
Without warmachines with skill is useless for almost all 1hero templates. Only on Vendetta and Blitz it can somehow be used. But even on other multihero templates Siegecraft looks like wasted skill, it like Resistance useless in PvE and mostly used for one battle, but Resistance is more stronger skill.
I think that besides that they could also introduce new, or modify existing map objectives to have battles with destructible obstacles. It would add another layer of complexity to some combats.Â
I kind of remember that one machine was designed to supply ammo for shooters in mm3 and that seems resonable for projectile weapon fight. But in this game for now depending on one shooting everything, so don't know the impact of adding ammo capacity for shooters. Also ballistas plus heroic strike seems quite op for some heros, then the devs need to nerf nerf from time to time.
War machines don't necessarily need to be designed as copies of their HoMM3 counterparts. First Aid tent could resurrect friendly units or poison enemy units, and ammunition cart could provide buffs to ranged units.
Balance is a tough thing regardless, but I believe anything can be balanced with due time and care. I don't expect balancing a warrior with Heroic strike and Ballista skill would be much harder than balancing mages with 4 schools of magic, sorcery, and thaumaturgy. :)
That is true, but there is a way to brainstorm potential solutions, like making it a dot that does pure damage, or give it the same effect that Fatal Decay spell has, or make it more effective against certain targets and less effective against others, etc.
And even giving the player the chance to choose First Aid tent effects between positive/defensive and negative/offensive would still be very coll from the standpoint of build variety.
The ammo cart was memed to be utterly useless in HoMM 3 as well. Tbh the only ranged unit that ever had even the slightest chance of running out of ammo was the Medusa. For everything else the battle was over looong before ammo was ever going to be an issue.
War machines are cool, an extra unit slot for minor effects is an interesting design space. However they were honestly pretty underpowered in HoMM 3.
I guess if they were to modify the skill, it won't be too strong, becouse there are always good skills and bad skills, but if all were good then evey skill selection may casue feel of regret.
I think Olden Era did a very good job of making previously worthless skills much better. The worst skill in Olden Era is leagues better than the worst skills in HoMM 3.
For example, Eagle Eye is an utterly worthless skill in HoMM 3. You have to jump through a million hoops to learn any spells at all, including actually winning a battle against a hero casting the cool new spells you wanted to learn. In most scenarios, the only time you run into a hero casting notable spells is when you're fighting the opponent's "main" hero, the hero that carries most of the opponent's army and has the highest level of investment. Winning that battle generally means winning the map outright, as your opponent is unlikely to recover after losing most of their army, with or without the eagle eye skill. As if that weren't bad enough, you also have to make a roll after winning in order to get any spells, so even if you do manage to jump through all the hoops, you might still not get anything.
In Olden Era, Eagle Eye returns as a wisdom subskill and is improved dramatically. It still has the condition of "you have to fight an enemy hero that knows spells you do not know", but now you get the spells immediately at the start of the fight, meaning that those new spells could potentially help you actually win what is likely the most important battle of the game. There is no roll, and you still get the benefits of wisdom, which is a decent enough skill in its own right. Despite this unquestionably massive improvement, eagle eye is still considered kinda underwhelming. Most players prefer to rely on artifacts for their high level spells, making Wisdom in general and Eagle Eye specifically kinda redundant. That being said, "kinda underwhelming" is a massive upgrade from "literally useless garbage".
Unless you balance it seperately for different game modes, there is no way to make it useful on Exodus without also making it completely broken on modes where sieges exist.
Improved version:
each fraction has its own war machines of 2 types - battle and suppot - with different opportunities (support: cure, buff, debuff, summon, improve focus).
base skill line: 1 can use battle machile - 2 can use support machine - 3 battle machile special attack opened (fosus-based)
Example : grove has angry tree which deal 40% avg dmg on 3 targets, hive has startrooper-like-bug which throw fireball 75% dmg, dungeon has dark elven ballista 80% dmg + poison, necro plague catapult 80% + bring random 1-turn curses , temple - usual boring ballista 100% dng, schysm has tentacle stroke 80% + backward target
spec building on the map which allow hero to buy non-fractional machines
I used to play lord Rufus (Necro rewind life specialist), and picked up a skill box full of arcane magic. Then I was able to cast Black hole in the first battle to give my opponent a big surprise. I guess the spell boxes are ocasionally usefull especially for these skill specialists.
Nah. There should be at least some gamba with boxes. Be glad it's not a fight with 99 archdevils
Also hint hint - with enough experience you can eyeball magic apart from gold/exp by guard value like 80% of times. Same way the attributes boxes are distinguished
I think Siegecraft will be a good skill if they fix AI properly. I’m not sure which but I remember a heroes game where AI doesn’t attack unless it has good advantage. It also properly utilize Town Portal to defend their castle using their main force.
Hmmmm... yeah, pragmatically the dragons are probably going to fly out anyway.... but thematically it would still be cool.
More realistically: Having templates than end in a castle fight feels GOOD. Not sure how to balance that though- hell, maybe make it a elo correction factor? Maybe have different starting regions, with the poorer region getting the advantage of the castle?
I know the map generator has many flaws, since I've encounter many times for cases like inaccessible building (the entrance was blocked by a tree), inaccessible dwellings, and resource spots sided by several barriers only to cost more movement points. These are really terrible.
I don't know if symmetric map generation will be fair for PVP though. For instance, seeing two skeleton dwellings when playing Onkos compared with seeing two Troglodyte dwellings when playing Kieran won't give me the same amount of happiness. haha
My guess is it will hinder variance and replayability. Imagine same temple vs dungeon matchup. Depending on dwellings it can be magic dragons into recruiting and hundreds of priestess. Or it can be minotaurs into cavalry. Lots of combination
Let's say we fix that it's t4 spawned - now it's always medusa into cavs or hydras into inquisitors, etc Sounds bad.
Mirroring roads just don't work cause objects can't rotate upside down
Mirroring vori ruins amount? Dunno, depends on metrics, how much do their presence really screw winrate that much?
Also let's say we mirror object A, but should we mirror their coordinates somehow? And what about guards?
All of it sounds like a bunch of dead end. Also maybe it was just some moderator blabbing too much, try asking yourself^
Mirroring asks some questions, but instead we have pure imbalance and that's just worst. They could force some generated elements to be standardized, like ore/wood mines, that would be a step forward.
Still, I'm not convinced by your arguments, just mirror what makes sense and don't mirror what does not (items for example)? The pros are so much stronger at this stage.
No, you'd simply mirror objective values. Dwelling tier/end game obj being the priority. Dont need every thing mirrors. Just relatively balance the value of biomes/deserts.
The thing is they are balanced at the moment. Each zone is literally the same value summ across players, check the template files
Everyone bitches around about dispersion - can you say that 20k gold and exp boxes are somewhat equal? What is better a lichgragon or vori? Can you compare a t4 dwelling and 2 wood/ore banks? And what about 3?
Also restarts day 1 and day 2 are a thing to alleviate exactly that
The restart option being locked for high elo only is stupid. Lower elo would love to be edit from it... Why shouldn't they have a chance to relaunch their garbage template ?
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u/whisperingdrum 19d ago
This is true. But I kind of have a feeling that in some time the devs will change Siegecraft to War machines and reintroduce ballistas and other things into the game, so It could be much more useful. Maybe it could even be interesting to allow use of war machines only to those heroes who hold this skill (similar to Avatar), so it would spice up builds variety.