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How to Improve The Design of Heroes of Might & Magic Style Games

Nikita Sadkov · 2019-02-07T13:03:22

I wanted to make my own version of HoMM myself one day, because I was really annoyed with the design flaws of the original and I doubt Van Caneghem will ever return to his games. But it is unlikely, that I will ever have a chance to make more than one game, so here is a proposition to improve the core rules of HoMM type games: 1. Limit army size by hero's leadership ability, like in the original King's Bounty. Each unit would have leadership cost. That will favor using several heroes, instead of a single strong one. Therefore larger tactical depth on the strategic map. 2. Limit max city's unit population by player's controlled land, like i.e. monster layers. That will force players to fight over map structure. 3. Allow splitting unit stacks during battle (in particular during the beginning of a battle), while maintaining fixed 7 unit type slots. That would simplify strategic map interaction by moving it to tactical phase, and greatly improve the tactical element itself. 4. Allow building map structures, like fortifications in bottlenecks, like mountain passes. That ability should be limited by facilities provided by nearby city or other structures, to have a way to disable it in some maps and encourage more strategic uses of such feature, instead of just cluttering whole map with fortifications. 5. Use Final Fantasy Tactics style turn scheduling system, where fast creatures get more turns, than slower ones, with hint for user what creatures will move in the next few turns. 6. Make unit upgrades auto apply to all hired units to avoid forcing player to wait until upgrade structure is ready. Upgrade system should be a nice gimmick, instead of a way to annoy player or force him to wait. 7. Damage to units (and heroes, in case HoMM4 style heroes participating in battle) carry over to the next battle, unless healed. To emphasize use of healing structures, abilities, items and magic. It also make armies with high tier creatures less unstopable. A mandatory requirement for 1. There are several obvious way to implement stack splitting with damaged creatures. 8. Unit stack specific items, like say banners, giving that stack some bonuses. One can probably easily implement these changes into say fheroes2 engine.

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by NikitaSadkov December 02, 2018 12:16 AM

11 comments, last by MichaelMurphy 5 years, 4 months ago

Kavik Kang

-217

January 02, 2019 04:19 PM

I actually have a direct connection to HoM&M, through "King's Bounty"... for the I am guessing 3 people reading this who even knows what King's Bounty was. The first ever attempt to release a board game and computer game simultaneously was Task Force Games & New World Computing's "King's Bounty". They didn't wind up releasing together, they released about 9 months apart. The relationship between TFG & NWC ended, and NWC released future versions of King's Bounty as Heroes of Might & Magic.

Since the origin of HoM&M are hobbyist game rules, you might look to similar games of the hobbyist game era, and Avalon Hill rules, for how you might enhance HoM&M in ways that would be thought of as "new and innovative" today. "What is old is new again." You people have spent 35 years devolving game and simulation design, not evolving it. You go backwards... you are looking in the wrong place to "improve" HoM&M... you will only further devolve it by bringing even more of the first generation children playing in a sandbox level of simulation design knowledge of the computer game industry.

"I wish that I could live it all again."

MichaelMurphy

February 07, 2019 01:03 PM

On 1/2/2019 at 2:55 PM, NikitaSadkov said:

Ok. With everyone suddenly making remasters of older games, like Blizzard's Starcraft remaster. I found that Ubisoft has also remastered Heroes game. I expected them taking the original 3d models and rendering them in real-time for any resolution. But it was like WUT?!!! They just badly resized and edited old 3d rendered sprites for higher resolution. For example, look at the title screen archangel's sword fire animation:

In original flame looks like flame:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFbMLorQkIM

Original devs probably sampled real flame and put a lot of effort into editing it into game.

In a remaster we have an ugly out of place paintover, of a quality an 8 years old would do without using any reference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymc6jaGyV7w

They also added some sparkles, and removed the muscles. Is that some cryptic message? And the icons got moved closer to center, leaving huge space on the right.

Is that what you get when people don't actually care about what they are doing?

These effects look as masterpiece https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFbMLorQkIM

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