Great Map

[Ed Robinson]

Just finished a map called Sunken Empires 1.2 I downloaded from here.

Heroes IV extra large, upper and lower levels. Thought the map was beautiful. Great battles with large armies due to the time it took to cover the Real Estate and my style, which is to develope only one or two heroes to a high level.

This is just "for what it's worth..."

Ed

[Vlaad II]

One of my all-time favorites. Perhaps too rich to be a challenge, but fun for a casual single player. The adventure map is gorgeous!

[Kalah]

Sunken Empires by Aczl is indeed a map of very high quality. Given a graphics rating of 10 (overall 8) by our map reviewer, it was hailed as nothing short of a work of art.

This map has undoubtably the best graphics of any Heroes IV map I've played. I can't commend them highly enough - this map is an absolute work of art... and it's XL!! Every inch of the map is tastefully covered with vegetations, trees, flowers and objects, and they are all combined in excellent and sometimes innovative ways. The dense red trees above "field of glory" terrain created an amazing effect, at times I mistook it for an entirely new tile-set. Nothing was over done and it all fitted together beautifully. I tried to find some screenshots that were at all representative of the graphics but I failed… they really need to be experienced for yourself! Unfortunately I can't express the same enthusiasm for the map as a whole. As you might have noticed I'm not particularly fond of XL maps because they are often large, boring, walking affairs with little player interaction, eventually boring neutral battles (you just get too strong, esp. once your heroes are level 40 and armies to match) and huge difficulties defending your myriad towns and then the frustrating process of moving an army over to retake them. Many of these criticisms are unfortunately applicable to this map. The distances between the players towns are immense and it was for me surprisingly difficult to figure out what the overall map design was and where the other players had their bases (I spent a lot of time in the red-herring, large, underground. The AI is also unable to complete the quest which opens up it's access to the middle making links between the players that much harder. Quite a bit of effort was put into the story and it generally worked quite well. It was a tad confusing, maybe I'm just slow, but it took me a while to catch on to the fact that teal was the forest king and orange was the witch king. I also have to admit I didn't finish this map, I conquered 3/4 of the map, but then I lost a couple of towns to moderately strong armies miles away from any of mine (they were hiding in the water), my heroes were all fully developed, I had 3 or 4 REALLY strong armies rolling everything over and I just could not have been bothered doing the necessary mopping up. Generally though this is an EXCELLENT map for those who like XL maps (and judging from the recent "what's your favourite map" poll, that's a lot of you) and a map well worth checking out even if you don't love them.

[Metathron]

Will try it out, for sure!