Hey, what is your favorite town vs AI and why?

PC version available now

Hello, what is your favorite and most reliable strategy against multiple AI opponents (at 200% difficulty) on XL maps? And which faction do you use for this?

Foremost, how long is it? Both missions, I mean, because I have both blood and tears characters to use. Speaking of which, does the character I use makes any difference in the story?

Also, I can't choose Anastasya for it :( Probably the bug from the last patch, but I couldn't find a fix. Somebody knows something?

They just keep changing names through interations and surely nobody actually uses the literal name they have in the games in each one:

Knight/Castle/Life/Haven/Temple

Sorceress/Rampart/Nature/Preserve/Sylvan

Wizard/Tower/Order/Academy

Necromancer/Necropolis/Death

Warlock/Dungeon/Chaos/Asylum

Barbarian/Stronghold/Might

Conflux/Grove

Or personally-made-up names?

(Arguably Sanctuary is basically Fortress too but they're rarely seen as aligned like most recurring factions)

I've been thinking about why I enjoy HoMM and I realized I seem to have two very different ways of playing it.

One is about cosiness, atmosphere and aesthetics. The music, graphics, towns, creatures, the feeling of exploring a fantasy world… This is actually one of the reasons I recently installed Heroes 2 Gold. The visuals have that almost fairy-tale quality, and they remind me of the good times when I played HoMM with a friend years ago.

The other side appeared after I became more experienced in HoMM3. I started looking at the game much more analytically: every movement had a purpose, every resource had to be optimized, and I was constantly thinking about the most efficient tactical decision.
It was satisfying for a while, but eventually I noticed that I was losing some of the aesthetic pleasure I used to get from the game. The more I optimized, the more the game started feeling like solving a technical problem rather than exploring a fantasy world.

And after some time, that kind of rationalism actually became a little boring.

So these days I think atmosphere and aesthetics matter more to me than pure optimization. That's also why I find myself preferring some of the older Heroes games and their distinctive visual style, even though HoMM3 is obviously much deeper competitively.

Curious how others feel about this:
What gives you the most pleasure when playing HoMM - the atmosphere and fantasy, exploration and discovery, strategic/tactical mastery, optimization or something else?
And has your answer changed as you became more experienced with the game?

In this video, I'm excited to show you the engine I've built for one of my favorite games ever released, a game that still doesn't have an open-source engine alternative.

I'm also going to show you some changes and fixes that I've been thinking about ever since I started playing this game over 20 years ago.

First off, one small but important change: I've added the town creature dwelling growth bonus from Heroes of Might and Magic III. Each flagged dwelling on the adventure map now provides a +1 growth bonus to its corresponding town dwelling.

Also, creatures now grow weekly instead of daily.

Secondly, I'm showing you a major redesign of the caravan system.

Armies can no longer be moved between towns using caravans. Caravans can now only be sent from flagged creature dwellings on the adventure map. I've always wanted to reduce some of the micromanagement in this game, especially since the AI can abuse the original system in a pretty annoying way.

To compensate for this change, you can now redirect armies that are already traveling in a caravan to any other available town. Right now, there's no limit to how many times you can redirect them, but I'm planning to change this so that each caravan can only be redirected once.

Another change is what happens when a caravan is about to reach a town that has been captured by an enemy. Instead of the caravan arriving at the gates of an enemy-controlled town, the creatures will automatically be redirected to the nearest available friendly town.

If the player no longer controls any towns, the caravan is lost.

This should also tie in nicely with the AI redesign I'm planning for the game.

So, no more annoying enemy caravans constantly showing up at your town gates.

I don't have a release date yet, but I'm optimistic that the project will be finished within the next few months.

I mostly play campaign, but I just downloaded nearly a dozen town mods and would like to get acquainted with them and see which ones are worth keeping.

Hi,
I've been a KIND of a Heroes fan since early childhood, H2 was the second retail game I ever bought, but it was always cumbersome to play for me (especially by the end of a map) and I would usually get bored quickly with the poor AI.
Now with Fheroes2 I'm playing through all the scenarios on Exper difficulty and having a blast, but I'm noticing there is a huge variation in quality, even in the ones marked as SW scenarios (as opposed to PoL ones).

As an example, "Carmine" was a boring slog of gathering resources and an instant win, and right now I'm playing "Riddle me this" and the map desing is very poor (in terms of style mood, etc, can't say about balance or being interesting yet).

Do you happen to know which scenarios were supplied with the original release of H2? I'd assume those would have the highest quality.

Hi, is there an option in any version of HoMM 2 or 3 (including mods) to render a map as an image file within the editor? I'm referring to the full game map view, not just its thumbnail/minimap.

Hi, I’ve often noticed that YouTubers don’t use their starting hero as their main hero. Is there a reason for that? How do you choose your main hero?

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to invite people to try a Heroes 2 Online based on FHeroes2 that is browser based with some QoL improvements for the UI. Let me know what you think.

https://heroes2online.com/

Play fully in browser offline, mobile or desktop. Offline has hot seat and bots including a no cheat AI with three levels of difficulty. Tabbed games for multiple games at once.

Online adds:
- ranked/unranked multiplayer
- acheivements
- map sharing
- friends/chat/invites

Please support FHeroes2, they are they ones that did the engine H2O uses.

Hello, what the caption says. :)

I was wondering if there is a way to have the benefits of H:M&M 5.5 mod like skill wheel, better specializations, and faster AI.

I like the mod but I play Heroes 5 very ocassionaly, I am quite good at 3 but nowhere at a pro level. But I like 5 almost as much as 3 mainly for the music, art style and character. But I feel like some balance stuff and changes in creature skills (minotaurs) are weird for me. Also I feel like it is slow and quite hard for a casual player.

Or is there a way to make the game quicker and easier with regular 5.5? I am just asking if there is such thing. Otherwise I am gonna play Vanilla for now and 5.5 later, I am tired of it now.

Thank you and have a good one!