ec2-18-221-165-246.us-east-2.compute.amazonaws.com | ToothyWiki | RecentChanges | Login | Webcomic Series of TurnBasedStrategy games, originally developed by New World Computing/3D0, with the fifth in the series having been produced by Nival Interactive after mergers and inquisitions of parent companies.
The first four games of this series and the nine MightAndMagic? roleplaying games are all set in the same universe; after Ubisoft/Nival? acquired the series they junked the cosmology and started again for Heroes 5. Despite this, the actual mechanics of the game are fairly unchanged.
Gameplay behaves somewhat differently to most TBSes, in that it is midway between the 4X of MasterOfMagic and the tactical level games like BattleForWesnoth. There are cities which produce troops and can be upgraded, but you can't build any more of them; there are lots of different resources (wood, coal, gold, mercury, crystals, gems, and sulphur, no I don't know why they chose them), all with their own mine buildings which appear on the main map and need to be captured and held. These resources are required to upgrade cities and buy units (cities produce gold and one other resource after upgrading). It's not entirely dissimilar to EtherLords except that EtherLords doesn't have armies in.
To capture cities and buildings you need armies. Armies are lead by heroes (except in Heroes 4 where they don't have to be, but we'll ignore that because it certainly seems that the Heroes 5 developers did). Heroes are RPG-like entities which have statistics which add to their armies and can cast spells to help their armies, but don't directly fight in battle. So the minimum amount of force is one creature and one hero. When armies meet the game switches to a square grid turn-based tactical map in which all the creature stacks fight each other. This bit's a bit like MasterOfOrion except there are more special abilities to reckon in - Elves get a double archery attack, Assassins poison the enemy, Hydras and Cerberi strike everything in front of them, Vampires drain life etc. Each unit has an upgraded version of itself which does something a bit more impressive. Units and heroes take turns until everybody on one side's dead or people run away. The AI is reasonably adept at knowing when to run away, less so at actually commanding troops. It does focus fire on some stacks though - especially low-level ranged attackers. Most maps devolve into building up an army and repeating this battle sequence until the objectives are met. Sometimes you get attacked in the buildup stage, and things get lively. This might happen more often in multiplayer if I'd played any multiplayer. Generally to finish the objectives one has to attack a town or two, which leads to sieges. Sieges are entertaining affairs in which the attacking hero manifests a catapult which flings rocks at town defences (which you can buy up to the point where they shoot back). There is then much assaulting and defending the breach. Alternatively, sometimes the AI decides to come out and fight, and is duly massacred. They should do something about that.
Most of the games have a campaign mode of some kind of another. 4 is probably the best for this, but 4's mechanics are kind of weird and high-level heroes are stupidly overpowered. 5's features some amusingly bad voice acting (as well as a very hackneyed but still entertaining plot).
Hmm, reading this, I seem massively underwhelmed by the entire game. Which I'm not, it's one of my favourite series. Maybe I need to work on expressing enthusiasm. Maybe it's just that when writing reviews on ToothyWiki one unconsciously starts imitating Vitenka. --SF
No, see, I'd have said something more like: It sounds like an RPG but turns out to be a very boring strategy game, where the main element of excitement is discovering which shiny magical effects cause the game to crash your machine. --Vitenka
Strangely, practically nothing except Freelancer? seems to be capable of crashing my machine. I'm aware that I'm letting the whole WindowsBox side down here. --SF
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