Movement

[Pitsu]

Alright, a short experimentally found description to hero movement rules. By following it, I usually get very close values to reality, but not always perfect. There are things to confirm and improve. Any comments, which would improve our understanding are welcome.

movement rules

For starting the most important difference form previous Heroes games: creatures do not affect hero movement in any way.

The base movement of a hero is 2500 (yes 2500 not 25) points. It can be increased by logistics, which raises the points to 2749, 2999 or 3249 respectively. Boots of swift journey artifact adds 25% when equipped. Various structures add a bonus movement. The bonuses are:
Rally flag and fountain of youth 400
Stables 600
Oasis 800

Except the boost structures, movement amount is calculated in the begin of a turn. Equipping swift journey boots or gaining logistic skill, will not boost your movement until next turn.

Like the battlefield, adventure map is divided into square tiles. Again, like on the battlefield, stepping from one tile to another costs movement points. A step to side-adjacent tile costs normally 100 point, diagonal movement costs 1.41 fold more. The cost of tiles depends also on their terrain type.

Desert 50 % movement reduction and therefore costs 150 points per tile (EDIT: see post 5 for a comment)
dirt(swamp), lava, underground 25 % movement reduction, costs 125 points per tile
Roads 25 % movement increase, costs 75 points per tile

If road is placed over a rough terrain, the rough terrain penalty does not apply.

A hero on native terrain suffers no penalty (no matter whether the army is native or not). Native terrains are:
Academy: desert
Dungeon: underground
Haven: grass
Inferno: lava
Necropolis: dirt
Sylvan: grass

The movement penalty can be reduced by the pathfinding ability, which reduces the tile costs for desert and swamp/underground/lava to 125 and 112 respectively. Boots of open road should remove all penalties.

A hero can move until remaining movement points are not enough to make one more step.

The automatic pathfinder probebly tries to find a path with a minimal average tile cost. AI may have different pathfinding rules at different difficulty levels.

PS. yes, i know that sea travel is missing here.

[Indral]

thank you for your effort.

this is the first game (in my experience) usinga square map that compensates for the sqrt(2) in diagonal direction.

[DaemianLucifer]

Thanks Pitsu.Again something that nival thought is fun to hide

Seeing this now,means that academy has a bigger advantage on its native terrain then before.As I remember snow had 150% movement cost for all and 125% for academy.Now its 150% vs 100%.Maybe its their way of compensating for the high cost.

[Gaidal Cain]

Indral: you mean you never played H3?

[Pitsu]

Desert 50 % movement reduction and therefore costs 150 points per tile

Actually i do not know how it is correct to say. 50% reduction or 33%
The cost goes from 100 to 150 which is +50%, but in fact you move 66% of the distance. 100/150 = 2/3. A normal travel distance is 25 full tiles, in desert it is 16, which is 33% less.

[Indral]

Indral: you mean you never played H3?

i never realized.

[zhuge]

Very nice Pitsu
Movement has always been one of the most important elements in the game especially when employing rush strategies.

Here's some data on sea movement in an effort to help:

0 Lighthouse
no bonuses: 25 tiles (adjacent tiles)
with Sextant: 31 tiles
with Navigation: 37 tiles
with Sextant and Navigation: 46 tiles

1 Lighthouse
no bonuses: 30 tiles (adjacent tiles)
with Sextant: 36 tiles
with Navigation: 42 tiles
with Sextant and Navigation: 51 tiles


I would therefore conclude that:
1)base sea movement is 25 tiles
2)Lighthouse adds 5 tiles (I believe in H3 it used to add a bit more)
3)Sextant adds 6 tiles
4)Navigation adds 50% movement as per its description, the bonus for Lighthouse is NOT multiplied by 50% by Navi but the bonus for Sextant IS multiplied by 50%


P/S - btw Pitsu, I'd suggest having a movement section in the CH manual once things are more or less settled.

[Pitsu]

Here's some data on sea movement in an effort to help:

Good work. So it is basically the same as land movement. A sea tile costs 100 points. Hero base movement point pool is 2500, sekstant adds 25% and navigation 50% Thus
base 2500/100= 25 tile
sextant 2500*1,25/100 = 31 full tiles
navigation and sextant 2500*1,25*1,5/100= 46 full tiles (46,875, thus with diagonal movements you could have lower left-over than 0,876 and move a bit further)
navigation only = 2500*1,5/100 =37 full tiles

Lighthouse adds like stables or oasis and the final movement points is=
2500 * 1,25_if_has_sextant *1,5_if_has_navigation + 500*number of lighthouses

Of course, stacking of lighthouse bonuses is only an speculation at this point

P/S - btw Pitsu, I'd suggest having a movement section in the CH manual once things are more or less settled.

That is part of the plan, but it takes time to find out all the things and confirm them acceptable times. Therefore it was not in the first version.

[Gus]

sorry, a bit of a useless post, but i wanted to thank you for doing things like that... You shouldn't have to do this, and Nival should be ashamed to have people from the community do their work.

So, a big thank you to you, Pitsu, and to everyone helping with the effort, the community owes you a lot.

[maltz]

In many cases you might own both "the boots of swift journey", and "the golden horseshoe".

Now since the movement points are decided at the beginning of a turn, you can put on the boots of swift journey before presseing end turn, and replace it with the horseshoe at the beginning of the next turn. This way you get the bonus of both!

[stijn]

something i have noticed, is that dimension door always uses up half of the bar. so when you have already visited the stable that week, and you use dd, you loose (2500+600)/2 movement points. and when you haven't and visit the stable later that day you loose only 2500/2 movement points, so the time you visit the stable can gain you 300 points if i understand how it works correctly

btw, very nice work pitsu