The Heroes Round Table

Inspired by cjlee's post, I thought I'd mention that my novel A Wizard's Dream has also been released recently. On the surface, it's a standalone work of epic fantasy, and can be read that way. Digging deeper, it uses a fantastical setting to explores themes from depth psychology - visiting the Unde...

The game is out on Steam, but I can't find it on GOG. Let's hope it gets there soon...

Will the game be available on GOG?

By the way, why is this thread called Songs of Contest and not Songs of Conquest?

PMed ~Pol

After taking a break from the game, I switched from campaign to skirmish maps. This helped revitalise the game for me because, on skirmish maps, the AI actually plays the game instead of simply spawning heroes with armies at the edge of the map. Skirmish maps play quite differently from the campaign...

My initial impression of the game is mixed. While clearly inspired by the Heroes games, I like that the developers have tinkered with the formula in an effort to alleviate the shortcomings of the earlier designs, but I think that their solutions are hit-and-miss. There’s a spreadsheety feel to the g...

This is freaky. The working title of my game is Aia - the name of the universe from my fantasy world - since the design has morphed into a world-creation game. That's why I've stopped posting about it here - it has very little in common with HoMM. If anyone would like to try it out, though, just sho...

I thought that was a feature rather than a bug. ;) Having some traits and abilities obscure others is intended behaviour. It requires players to make trade-offs when stacking creatures so that they get the traits and abilities they want on top, including not having stacks that are too big. Also, som...

Semi-transparent stacking is the key mechanic of the game. I discovered it in version 19, and decided to build the game around it from version 21. For example, say that you have a Grassland map tile. The only feature of this tile is that it has a Plant trait - it is made of plants. https://drive.goo...

I oscillate between the game and the novel as the inspiration grabs me. I've been working on the game for the past few months.

The other thing is all posts need proper time stamps. Right now you don't see the year, which has been confusing in a number of instances. The date format can be configured in User Control Panel. I'm using "d F Y, G:i", which shows the timestamp of your last post as "17 August 2018, ...

Thanks, Pol. I've posted it in the boardgamer topic.

I finished the preliminary design of version 23 about a month ago. Based on the play testing since then, it looks like this will be the final major version. It doesn’t appear to be missing any features, and there’s nothing any of us can think of taking away. There's a lot of balancing and fine-tunin...

I finished the preliminary design of version 23 about a month ago. Based on the play testing since then, it looks like this will be the final major version. It doesn’t appear to be missing any features, and there’s nothing any of us can think of taking away. There's a lot of balancing and fine-tunin...

Would anyone like to play test the board game that I'm busy making? I can email you all the blueprints that you would need to print and cut out in order to play the game. The game design was originally based on Heroes, but has deviated from it quite a bit over the years. It can be thought of as Magi...

No, I've done more writing since then. I'm busy with the undead now. I'll send the chapter your way when it's ready, probably in a few days...

Would anyone be interested in critically reading some of the material that I've written thus far? This would help me keep the narrative on the right track.

After watching the Star Trek: Prelude to Axanar short movie this weekend, and learning about the CBS lawsuit against its creators, it makes obvious sense to me to make the world of Heroic free for other people to use and build on, provided that whatever they produce is likewise free for others to ex...

I've decided to reduce the extent to which the game makes use of mythological creatures. Using them extensively was a no-brainer in the beginning, given the richness of world mythologies and their prominence in HoMM. I’m now finding it increasingly difficult to express faction themes through them. A...

I’ve been play testing the latest faction designs over the past few weeks. Here’s what I’ve found: It would appear that the game design, with its 10th iteration, has finally reached an acceptable level of complexity. We’ve played it at my work twice, and both times new players were able to get a sen...