An interesting flashback

[Jolly Joker]

DL, I DID say where you get the resources from: In case of a conflict go for magic/artifacts instead of creatures. Can I say it more clearly? Academy doesn't win with might and ultimately creatures ARE might.
So, Academy doesn't win by trying to compete in the creature-dwelling-building arms race.

[Metathron]

No amount of complaing can actually change the fact that Heroes V is the best in the row (but cannot compete with the fond memories people link with any of a prior installment).

If you consider the latest installment as the best in the series, then by all means go ahead and say so as loud and clear as you wish, as everyone is entitled to their opinion. But please, step down from your supercilious pedestal and stop trying to pass opinion off as fact. It is exactly this kind of hubris, and your frequent attempts to paint a romantic veneer over many a wart and wattle of HoMM V, that do a great disservice to the rest of your post(s) - which otherwise has substance and even merit. Also, though I've an abundance of "fond memories" for the four previous titles, it is far, far more than this that makes me return to them even today, and consider them as superior products (though that's still far from saying HoMM V is not a good game). And that's my opinion.

[okrane]

JJ do you truly believe that H5 doesn't have any balance problems: meaning spells vs might, creatures vs creatures, faction vs faction? Or are you just unhappy about all blaming being done here?

[ThunderTitan]

No amount of complaing can actually change the fact that Heroes V is the best in the row

Right, all these bugs are cosmetic:

viewtopic.php?t=1884&start=0

And everyone that complains about X or Y is just a n00b who doesn't know how to play the game, coz if they did they would know how to bypass the problem.

[Jolly Joker]

I believe truly that a lot of people experience something they cannot explain easily and try to claim balance problems. I don't think that most of them are balance problems.
The game is too complex for an easy assessment. Creatures are not that important, I think. Take the Teleport Assault. This ability is possible for Demon Lord, Warlock and Wizard. It not only gives the Teleport spell, but will cast it with assault effect letting the teleported creature act immediately. I mean, what a difference! It's your Warlock's turn, and wham, Chaos Hydras into the midst of it, acting immediately. Or Pit Lords. Or Golems. Or even Rakshasas. On the other hand you sacrifice things to get these. You may still lose because the opponent has, err, expert Luck with lots of double hits. Or was too good in skeleton raising.
In the face of all this, yes, I think the game is quite balanced. Not totally balanced, but quite. It cannot be totally balanced. It can certainly still be better balanced.
A really well indication for a game being well-balanced is a situation where you cannot decide what to do. I find myself constantly in a situation of having no easy or "no-brainer' build.
Before three there were some problems. I never made a secret on the fact that I found Necro overpowered. And Nival found a way to balance it DEPENDING ON DIF LEVEL. You will get more skeletons the heavier the diff (more creatures) but the resource demands will make it extremely difficult to keep up the building pace. I also didn't make a secret on finsing Haven unbalanced because the Training Ground was a lot more attractive option than the Angels - which in turn made Haven overpowered due to the fact that the others didn't have an option around the level 7s. I knew, however, that there would be resource changes - keep in mind I translated the patch log already a month or so ago.
So, yes, we have a general good balance. There will probably be some small adjustments made, but I think 1.3 has found a solid foundation.

[Jolly Joker]

Yes, TT, if you would actually READ the list instead of speaking of it, you would see that most of them are indeed cosmetic. Things like "Mane" instead of "Ghost", models aiming into the wrong direction and so on and so forth.

[Sir_Toejam]

Creatures are not that important, I think.

why do I think JJ would get spanked in multiplayer?

[Mytical]

Ok JJ. I have tried being respectful, but I just got to know. Do you think me a total moron? Please enlighten me. Take into fact that Academy is the only town which gives me trouble. Yes other towns have problems, but I have had no trouble with those, yet academy gives me problems. But I dont grasp the concept of Academy...hmm. Ok enough, I dont want to start a flame war here..I will behave and hush..feel free to get the last word JJ. Seems you don't take anybody's opinon but yours, so why bother? *sighs*

[Sir_Toejam]

don't bother.

it's pretty obvious to the rest of us that academy has some problems too.

since you are spending time playing with them right now, you should make some specific suggestions about what you think needs tweaking in the academy to bring it back up to snuff.

[ThunderTitan]

Yes, TT, if you would actually READ the list instead of speaking of it, you would see that most of them are indeed cosmetic. Things like "Mane" instead of "Ghost", models aiming into the wrong direction and so on and so forth.

Yup, over 50%, you're right, my bad. And they're so hard to fix too, might take a whole 5 min for each.

[Naskoni]

Jelly man,

For starters – quoting (especially yourself as to prove a point) without any form of reference is like wishful thinking as far as relevance goes

Second – your comment on "not enought movement points" not being a bug and something that is not fixed by coders almost shocked me. Such statements regarding such basic, even fundamental elements betrays a level of ignorance way beyond what a self-proclaimed Oracle like you might like. I might be able to teach you something fundamental here, despite your self-esteem, from Wikipedia:

“A software bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from working as intended, or produces an incorrect result. Bugs arise from mistakes and errors, made by people, in either a program's source code or its design. A program that contains a large number of bugs, and/or bugs that seriously interfere with its functionality, is said to be buggy.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_bug

As for it being cosmetic and non-important. The point was that for the amount of time they had (and they had plenty indeed) they didn’t correct something that would take the correct person less than 30 seconds (literally). It goes to show that even simple requests for ultra-obvious and extra-easy to correct things are… ignored, due to… incompetence or inability? If something so simple cannot be fixed within a patch even though it was pointed out what can we expect for far more complex issues? Fan corrected bugs and added content within days, teams of two or three at that - they did it like 20x times faster and definitely a lot better than Nival did. Fans wrote their manual for crying out loud!!! And what does Nival do - they announce that basically they will not support mods - no time... Now that is game support as in the fans should fix the game for them but despite them...

As for AI – you obviously haven’t played that many games besides HoMM it seems – as pointed out, play a bit of GalCiv II, read a bit about the highest AI setting that doesn’t cheat AT ALL and see when you will manage to beat it, if at all Just because your ignorance prevents you from comprehending how people can and do make good AIs it doesn’t mean it cannot be done. Nival obviously cannot do it, so don’t generalize as if it cannot be done in principle (which is basically yet another attempt to excuse them, again). Based on your comments on how simple GalCivII is in comparison so that the AI is a joke to make you obviously haven’t played it at all. GalCiv’s sandbox design is MUCH more open, there is always a myriad of choices on what to do with your resources, where to build what, upgrade or not, build what ships vs whom, how many, on which planet, balance between research, military and social production, and the greatest achievement – the outstanding diplomacy (something HoMM doesn’t have at all). Heroes in this game travel along rails – they are constrained at where they can go, the number of routes is limited too, while in GalCivII you can go in every direction, build whatever base you want anywhere and borders are dynamic and change all the time. The “units” you can build are designed each game according to your strategy and what you have researched and can be upgraded and tweaked in any moment, unlike the strictly predefined few units with known parameters in HoMM. The only thing strictly simpler in GalCivII are the battles - that much is true - it's all statistics and dice there. On the other hand what is built on planets is an open sandbox as well – you get bonuses here and there on what you build but where you do that and in what order it completely open, unlike HoMM where there is a much stricter hierarchy of build order, not to mention that in addition you can chose to focus a planet for a specific tasks, and plenty of them as well. Each planetary structure can be upgraded numerous times as well and you have to take into account the upkeep costs, government type, morale, taxes, income balance expenditure and so on and so on and so on. And you claim this is such a simple game so even Joe from kindergarten could write an AI for it! GalCiv doesn’t have MP by design and frankly I don’t need one – the AI does such a great job at it (without ANY cheating at that, and I do mean NO CHEATING WHATSOEVER here up to a very high difficulty level) that frankly it would be hard to find enough players that good to play with online anyway. Try the game for yourself before commenting on it, see for yourself what actual developers do when they care about their project, especially because the changelogs of each of the patches for GalCiv is bigger than the list of new features HoMM V has over it’s predecessors. Witness how project management is not only influenced but stimulates constant user feedback through regular polls as what features are most wanted, what content do people want in expansions and so on. There is a very good reason the community there is so supporting and the relationship goes so well. Small bugs like “not enought points” are fixed immediately in the next beta, which is released to the public for immediate feedback. Whatever respect I had for your opinion up to now you have convinced me how utterly ignorant you can be regarding the stuff you seem to pride yourself the most…

Regarding attitude as I find it REALLY ironic that it is exactly you to criticize others of theirs this thing is quite indicative of your own level of self-esteem/arrogance:

“What I've seen is a ton of things like this creature is too strong and that is too weak, but I never saw a really serious resource balancing discussion except the two or three I initiated personally. The reason for that may be that people were too lazy to simply gather all the info and check things. “

I mean what would have we done without you? Without you not a single one of us could even start (not to mention participate in one) a decent thread about balance. I’m so happy that you exist to start those threads for us. Thank you, Oracle!

As for the manual the game came with. Well, the game didn’t come with one if you ask me, it’s a lot more like a quick installation guide, but I’m sure Nival did their best here too (no doubt). The fans had make their own manual. Nival refuses to incorporate the best solution for the skill tree as well - the skill wheel, even though they get it as a gift (and would have never come with such a design in the first place).

As for you defending Nival’s basic design – I’m afraid you go WAY beyond doing just that. By the way in complete opposition to what you have written there it was the outcry of the fans that managed to penetrate the thick skulls at Nival regarding the size of the battlefield for example – in their really BASIC design it was supposed to be half the current area, remember? To speed the gameplay which they ironically slow down with the resource rebalance... Do you defend that basic small battlefield design decision of theirs too? Or just the implementation of the initiative system? Wasn’t it UBI that initially wanted to make an RTS out of the franchise too as claimed by a Nival employee, because that sort of “basic” design would have gone seemingly well with you as well… as long as you were selected to do the German translation I guess. I can almost imagine the arguments of why going over to an RTS is good for the series, a breath of fresh air and the like…

And yes, they don’t have to do anything and they don’t for the most part. As I said it seems they think they know best and act like it. Strange thing is they still expect people to give them money for their attitude and here is the other side of the medal – people don’t have to give them anything either so in the end it sort of balances out, doesn’t it? For you every single one that criticizes them is a Nival hater, an extremist of sorts, that has to be banned and expelled from every single community, arguments or not, suggestions or not… because you know better and are sufficient all by yourself to make all the necessary analysis and suggestions as it is…

The fans are the ones that care the most and thus criticize the most, or maybe just because one is a fan he/she should embrace EVERYTHING? I know you think so, but I beg to differ. I remember another developer that thought they knew best, irrespectively of the huge negative feedback or argumented suspicions on many decisions announced during the development process and they proceeded anyway, because who the heck are those dumbwits to tell them how the game should look like or play like and as a final result my most favourite TBS series of all time died, namely Master of Orion. Yeah, I’ve seen this attitude already, I’m just sorry that another great series is headed “lively” into the direction of shiny mediocrity…

As for the technical side of the game, which shows a rather badly optimized code too – I have an AMD X2 @ 2.8GHz, 2GB of DDR500 3-3-2-6 RAM and a 7900GTX 512MB card and the game almost comes to a halt if I change the viewing angle, even towards the fog of war so there is hardly anything in sight to render in the first place and you think there is no performance issue here? Oh, wait – they did their “best” so I should be content, irrespectively that I can otherwise run everything (bar Oblivion) at stellar speed and max details with the same machine…

I cannot believe that you are STILL telling the “fans” to have faith in Nival, faith for what exactly? That they will change overnight? Why do I doubt that… All of my remaining faith was drained when I read their answers:

viewtopic.php?p=76865&highlight=nival+d ... port#76865

Now read it again yourself and tell me as to why should I have faith in these people? Their vision of resource demands just makes the game much more reliant on the design on the maps, which they are incapable of providing themselves - we might get the rest of the ones that were supposed to come with the original release sometime this year maybe. Making "balance" so dependent on the map is like saying that Necromancy is ok too, because that is the ultimate skill that is balanced almost entirely by the map and look at what people think about it. The resource change might look good for you on paper but for me the direction is wrong, or maybe just excessive, not to mention hardly necessary in its current form.

Keep the "good" stuff coming.

[DaemianLucifer]

@JJ

So,whenever a thread titled "How the hell am I supposed to win against necro in multi?!" appears,its just some noob that has no clue how to play,right?Give a shot to hotseat once,even against yourself,and soon youll see the imbalances as clear as the sun.That is,if you manage to remove that pink veil from your eyes.

@Naskoni

Ah,but wikipedia is not a scientific enciclopedia and as such is to be completelly disregarded

[ThunderTitan]

“What I've seen is a ton of things like this creature is too strong and that is too weak, but I never saw a really serious resource balancing discussion except the two or three I initiated personally. The reason for that may be that people were too lazy to simply gather all the info and check things. “

I don't belive i missed this. So basicaly they only listen to you, coz the rest of us are too lazy and stupid to know what we're talking about?! Nice.

So, yes, we have a general good balance. There will probably be some small adjustments made, but I think 1.3 has found a solid foundation.

Didn't they change the res reqs for all factions while you considered unbalanced only 2 of them, and even then only about a few buildings?! How is it that there was and good balance before and it's a good balance after too, but the change was really needed?

[Jolly Joker]

@Naskoni
A lot blablabla.
An error like "not enought mp" is no bug because it's neither in the source code nor in the design; it's in the text that are made not by Nival, but localized for each country by way of simple doc or xls files.
I own GalCiv and play it.
Strangely enough MOO is my favorite, too. Cheats like hell, though.
And for the rest:
Play GalCiv II.

[Mytical]

I want to appologize for my outbursts. it is very unlike me, and I am very sorry. Sometimes I get carried away.

[ThunderTitan]

An error like "not enought mp" is no bug because it's neither in the source code nor in the design; it's in the text that are made not by Nival, but localized for each country by way of simple doc or xls files.

And missing lights and erronous animations aren't either, ey. And those are bugs, just not Nival's fault.

@Mytical:

Never appologize when you're justified...

[Jolly Joker]

“What I've seen is a ton of things like this creature is too strong and that is too weak, but I never saw a really serious resource balancing discussion except the two or three I initiated personally. The reason for that may be that people were too lazy to simply gather all the info and check things. “

I don't belive i missed this. So basicaly they only listen to you, coz the rest of us are too lazy and stupid to know what we're talking about?! Nice.

So, yes, we have a general good balance. There will probably be some small adjustments made, but I think 1.3 has found a solid foundation.

Didn't they change the res reqs for all factions while you considered unbalanced only 2 of them, and even then only about a few buildings?! How is it that there was and good balance before and it's a good balance after too, but the change was really needed?

I'm getting really sick of this. It looks like reason is wasted here. No, they don't listen to me, no more than to you. The resource thing just was there to show that there are complex balancing processes involved.
If you would care to think instead writing stuff, you would immediately see that the Haven/Level 7 problem makes it necessary to rebalance all other factions as well; you cannot drop Havens Level 7 prices and leave the others as they are.

[Mytical]

JJ stuff like "I'm getting really sick of this. It looks like reason is wasted here." translates to = "Everybody but me is an idiot."
And you think we dont think before we post....but I am not going to help you close another thread...which I am beginning to think that is what you are after. You see something you don't like, then you keep posting until somebody, like me, helps you close the thread...gotta admit that is clever. Well this will be my personal last post here, give me a pm jj I will debate till the sun goes down..I for one wont help you close another thread.

[ThunderTitan]

I'm getting really sick of this. It looks like reason is wasted here. No, they don't listen to me, no more than to you. The resource thing just was there to show that there are complex balancing processes involved.

If you would care to think instead writing stuff, you would immediately see that the Haven/Level 7 problem makes it necessary to rebalance all other factions as well; you cannot drop Havens Level 7 prices and leave the others as they are.

Heaven forbid the actualy balance the Paladin a bit.

So the game had good balance, but it couldn't just be tweaked, it had to be completly changed.

And i'm sorry my inferior intelect could not grasp the complex balancing reqs of making 1 creature viable, i'm used to other games lik SC, where balancing was done by doubling the price of Spawning Pools...


And you're right, they don't listen to you, you're just in complete agreement on what should and should not be fixed.

[Jolly Joker]

@ DL and Mytical:
What do you think I included that quote for? So that everyone feel addressed? Yes?