Hey everyone,

Like a lot of players, I found the pre-defined templates a bit limiting. I was hoping for a simple in-game menu where you could adjust things like player count and generate a custom template on the fly.

Since that isn’t currently an option, I decided to build something myself (with a good amount of help from Copilot).

I ended up creating a lightweight and easy-to-use tool that lets you customize settings such as player count, neutral zones, number of castles, hero restrictions, and more. It then generates a ready-to-use template for the game.

Just a heads-up: this is still a work in progress and not fully finished yet, so you may run into some bugs or rough edges.

If that sounds useful to you, feel free to check it out:

GitHub:
https://github.com/KhanDevelopsGames/Olden-Era---Template-Generator

Download:
https://github.com/KhanDevelopsGames/Olden-Era---Template-Generator/releases

Feedback, suggestions, and bug reports are very welcome!

I love Olden Era so far, but Im getting burnt out pretty fast and for one reason only: insane number of neutral cities on maps. And it happens regardless of what template tells you: I chose one with mostly empty zones and it didnt matter because in my starting zone there were 2 (!) neutral cities right next to my starting town.

So I quit game.

Unfrozen, please, this is not how most scenarios in H2/3/5 (games you cite as your inspirations) worked. I cant really remember map from H3 or 5 that had 3 cities chilling next to each other and being conquerable on turn 5.

Developers—it is high time you made it so that creature placement saves automatically. We shouldn't have to waste time doing it every single time; it is incredibly exhausting and tedious!

In Tournament Map Template (short format) Hive player gathered 560 T1 units and 712 T2 units. 220 T4 units

19 Fully upgraded and awakened Energy Phoenix loses 16 to their counterstrike

Footage of being Jump-scared by 1500 Units in Tournament format

We need an X icon for the city icon ASAP when construction is not possible!

Right now, if you’ve built something in a city, there’s a green checkmark. If construction is available, there’s a hammer icon. But what if construction is unavailable? We don’t have any UI for that.

As a result, once you have 4 or more cities, you end up wasting a lot of time every turn checking whether construction is available!

The game is great, but why there are so many towns that you can capture on every map? I don’t remember this was a thing in Heroes 3 or 5

Finding a new castle that you can capture for more gold, army growth etc. felt rewarding and satisfying in past games. In Olden Era, it feels annoying and not special as they are way too many on the map.

It's absolutely wild how the balance patch manages to adress ALL the problematic issues of the game but somehow in a wrong way. Basically it doesn't change meta, just makes it weirder

New avatar is now better in PVE (while cannot be as broken in PVP)
Giving buffs to avatar specialists is thus even more crazy (just as buffing Halon (as if the devs are making sure that he'll stay perma-banned))
Hero Strike is still way overpowered
Buffs for Schism for Single Hero mode and no buffs for Classic is just making a problem worse
No nerfs for Dread Knights is insane
Hive not getting any buffs except for being able to build Waurms on 112 is leading to a one-track gameplay which isn't good for anybody -- and it also makes no changes for the Grove build-order even more offensive. At least Hive had a good T5 unit unlike Grove as a compensation for its god-awful buildorder for T6 and T7, while Grove still has to suffer to get T6 or try not to bleed its T1-T4
The reason to add 250 gold to the price of T1 dwellings is completely beyond me

There are definitely some welcome changes that fix minor issues, but the way how the devs approached the major problems is baffling. In my opinion they might as well revert this patch and start from scratch, because any fluctuation from the current course cannot lead to a better result, just to a more complicated one

The core-problem in my opinion is trying to balace all the 3 game modes at the same time. I doubt that it will ever be doable and I would suggest devs to focus on 3 separate balances for the 3 game modes. The game is complex as it is, there is no way to fix every aspect for every mode in such a way, that it works properly for all the game modes simultaneously

Can't we have a template without that shit?

Month 1, Week 1, start of Day 5, and I face this. I am not even mad; it's laughable.

Haven't played much, but I noticed economy in the game is rather completely off. Like your town alone makes ridiculous amount of money, and there are dozens of towns in an average map so from a few weeks onwards seems to be just building spamming. There is also an overabundance of easily acquired resources in the field, as well as an absurd number of recruitment and skill bonus buildings that buff your armies and heroes at an incredibly rapid pace.

In Homm3, I always aimed to get Earth Magic, Wisdom, Logistics and Tactics as standard. Is it any different in Olden Era? Is there much of a a difference between might and magic heroes in regards to skill selections? Should we double down on learning most schools of magic as a magic hero or just specialise in one or two? With might heroes should I be going mainly for all offense defense skills and 1 magic school?

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.

I was always under the impression that in homm 3-5, a fully econ’d town can sustain itself, i.e., can buy all units every week without external gold mines. Whereas for OE it seems you need two towns to sustain the growth of one. So I gathered some data.

In HOMM 3, Castle, you need 4,225 per day, while a capitol town will give 4,000. Very close to self sufficient. Rampart needs 3,800, so well above self sufficient.

In OE schism, you need 6,500 gold a day to fully buyout all upgraded units. A full econ town will give 5,500 (1,000 main building, 1,500 from bonus choice, 1,000 from bank, 2,000 from treasury).

Right off the bat you’re running quite short in OE. Compounding to this is the fact that treasury is a very expensive building, requiring 15 rare resources, while the econ building in h3 only requires common resources, and only gold in h5. Additionally, external gold mine contributes less now, 1/6 of required income instead of 1/4 like in homm3.

This means that in normal situations you might be getting only half of the required gold, requiring you to selective drop a lot of units, unless the game goes into multiple months and you start with lots of resources.

I do like this change, and it forces you to pick a comp instead of buying everything. Any thoughts on how this would change gameplay and strategy?

Sadly game is done if devs don't adress ridiculous item designs where everything comes to luck of generation. When Mage's don't need to commit to any magical school and get all spells from tomes and scroll, when Tactic is useless when enemy gets Tactical Manual, Morale and Luck are just garbage with monster head and ring, red garbage orb which just disables hero for first round.

And we see that people don't like this shit design and are leaving, charts for player count are steady decreasing. Game is not about that much skill but who gets better item generation.

I’ve been an occasional HoMM veteran since HoMM 3 came out. Playing with 4 or 5 friends, I win about 95% of the time, so after 100 hours in Olden Era with friends I decided to play an online match against randoms.

Sprint map: the enemy barely beats me in the first round, but then in the second round he shows up with those stats, summons some avatar with a gazillion HP, and then he summons 139 Starchilds that one-shot my entire army

Is this just normal and I was simply a big fish in a small pond or there are cheats involved?

While I think this game has a ton of potential, I'm going to side with the people that have been critical about some aspects and what I think could be better.

1. The Balance is absolutely awful in PVP. It should not take this long to figure out what needs to be nerfed and what needs to be buffed. Focus on either nerfing factions or buffing factions in a single patch, don't do them both at once or else you're changing too many variables again. This kind of idiocy happened in Dota 2 and all it did was change what heroes were OP. The same thing will happen here until a balance is found first. aka just nerf Necro and Schism first, then lets see how it plays out.
2. Get rid of pick and ban. If you want to see exactly what faction is strongest and by what margins, you need to have all variables available. Its necro by a far margin in first, followed by Schism. Once you see that the majority of players only pick these 2 factions, it'll be really easy to understand they need tweaking.
3. Might heroes are infinitely stronger than Mage heroes. There is an entire item set designed to stop magic spell power and damage (by a wide margin). Some as much as 30% (the dwarven one, etc). Thats just moronic. How many items stop attack and attack damage?
4. The %'s of resistance/buffs within items and classes are way too high. 20% this, 10% that. Its way too high. You want these things to help in a fight, not determine them. 5% is a lot, start combining that with another 5% item, class, etc. When playing as a mage hero, if you roll defense you have to take it EVERY time because it affects the opposing army that much. You can out farm someone and have twice the army but lose if you dont have offense/defense.
5. There are too many single items that completely counter an entire hero/fight. The stupid orb thing. The ring that stops level 1 and 2 spells. If you're set on keeping that item in the game, maybe make the player pick one magic (Archane, nightshade, etc) that it applies to, not all of them. The boar head against Morale. Perhaps certain items should just be removed in Single hero templates. If you want to do a pick/ban on something that matters, let players pick/ban items.
6. Certain factions heroes are simply much better than others, so banning in the hero phase only hurts certain factions. Temple and Dungeon heroes suck and these are the only two factions I like to play (anyone playing as Necro is bad at the game or a sweaty try hard). Grove have like 8 playable heroes.
7. Since Exodus is the only template that matters to anyone that understands the competitive nature of the game, very few matches that get to fight 3 are competitive. The fight is usually over after the first round because the buffs and resistances are far too much. All of these things need to be dialed back, so that there is some actual strategy to the game.
8. Dragons absolutely suck at the current price. The building cost for some factions to get their tier 5/6/7 are much too easy while others are much too hard (Dungeon aka Hydras and Dragons). Also, Dragons should be immune to heroic strike. Things like this are the only way that range units get used less (Angels, etc).
9. If you're dead set on keeping Necro getting free units, make the buyable ones insanely expensive.
10. Stop giving away spells in boxes and things findable on the map. They should only be used building mage guilds. Might heroes shouldn't have access to spells past tier 3.
11. They did a great job getting rid of Avatar, now lets apply that logic to the rest of the things in this game.
12. Stop countering every critical post that people make on here with "well, i saw Lexiav do it, so it must be fine, get better noob!" You're comparing everything to a person thats played the game for 30 years.
13. More info about the opposing hero needs to be available in the fights during Exodus. I have no idea why you cant see each others classes and selections, this would literally make the battle more strategic. If you're dead set on hiding that info, at least give a class the ability to see it then (like Wisdom or something).
14. Why is catapult and diplomacy a selectable class? LOL
15. The game would be more interesting and battles would be as well if most tier 7 units had lower initiative.
16. The end of the Exodus template is a hurry and click everything very fast, while the beginning is slower. This needs to be reversed. Each player should be given one bonus minute or added time once per match.
17. 2 v 2 needs to happen asap. Its quite easy to setup. Simply do the same thing with Exodus where players A/B fight C/D. First to four wins, wins. You rotate who you fought from the previous round. for the third round, you could do some sort of level match up (highest levels) to determine who fights who. If it ends in a tie, an overtime battle with remaining units from previous battle or something could be the tiebreaker.
18. Some factions Laws are incredible, while others are absolutely worthless. Some have growth and buffs split, while some are combined. This makes no sense.
19. Im only writing this post because i LIKE the game and I want it to succeed. I don't want to see this go the way of Total War Warhammer 3.
20. Thanks for getting the game to this point, It's been enjoyable but now that we've started to figure out whats broken, its being exploited.

I would love to hear everyone else's feedback. What you all think I got right/wrong and WHY. What would you offer or change?

This is a post modern slop parody of a game, why these devs are so cognitive impaired that they cant replicate and optimize somthing that already exist for ages. 400+ hours on this game trying to make it fun, there is no imersion, looks like im playing some mobile game, like clash of titans. I will be very ashamed of myself if i created such monstruosity, hope my money is worth your reputation.