The Heroes Round Table

We already have the latter two, and we kinda have the first two. A unit with very low damage but with very high attack; A Titan. A unit with very high damage but with very low attack; A Wolf. A unit with very low hitpoints but with very high defence; A Pikeman. A unit with very high hitpoints but wi...

From what I know of behavioral psychology, saying too much publicly will destroy my motivation (and please don't speculate publicly either). If you PM me, I can try to share what I've done, though I don't think I'll be logistically capable of collaborating for a bit. Anyway, I guess the short answer...

No, because this is only how the heuristic for effects is computed. This isn't how the heuristics for spells is computed. (For example, the heuristic for casting the "Haste" spell on a Slow'ed creature is the sum of the heuristic for removing the "Slow" effect and adding the Hast...

In order for the AI to choose the best move, there must be a notion of "best" move. This is very hard to do without having a notion of "better" move. No matter how it compares moves to determine which one is better, since there's only a finite number of moves, it winds up being e...

If my Grad AI class taught me anything, it's that AI is so broad that every computer scientist can call themselves an AI researcher. Data structures are AI! Shortest-path searches are AI! Random number generation is AI! Linear programming is AI! As far as game AIs go, you have to make your compariso...

1: Every point of Attack OVER the opponent's Defense gives +10% on the attacker's damage roll. 2: Every Point of Attack UNDER the opponent's Defense gives -5% on the attacker's damage roll. Congratulations on figuring that out by pure observation. But that information is in the HoMM II manual (alon...

you have two stats that affect the same result. that result being the unit's melee output against all targets. take one out and increase the other, you'll ultimately have the same end result, that being melee damage. We've spent the last page trying to explain that you won't have the same result. Y...

This will be a series of posts explaining how the HoMM II AI makes its decisions. I'll post things as I figure them out. Expect a lot about the combat AI now, but don't expect anything on the adventure map AI for a while. Fight value Every creature has a hard-coded "fight value," a number ...

If I'm reading that post correctly, you understand that Attack and Damage affect the damage creatures do in different ways. You have thus retreated to saying "But we can already make creatures different -- why do we need to make them more different?" Is that something you would have said b...

I've not seen this documented anywhere, but water elementals actually already take double damage from fire elementals, and vice versa (although this works by the hatred system).

Let me give out a more detailed example. I have a stack of Phoenixes, with an attack of 12. My opponent has a stack of Boars with a defense of 4 and a stack of Golems with a defense of 10. If we only look at the HP, the Golems have twiceas much HP as the Halflings, and would thus be twice as hard to...

No. I'm saying that, while both Attack and damage modify the damage dealt, they do so in different ways. Increasing a creature's minimum and maximum damage by 10% always increases the damage it does by 10%. Increasing a creature's Attack by 10% may have no effect on the damage it does, or it may tri...

Yeah, I deliberately avoided discussing that. I started typing that post with me having Black Dragons and talking about "expected damage," but I switched it to Titans with Bless so I wouldn't have to explain what I meant. (Depending on who you talk to, "expected" is either a fanc...

Say I have a hero with Titans with Bless cast on them, and I'm attacking an enemy hero with Black Dragons. I want to draw out a graph of how much damage, on average, my Titans will do to his Dragons, versus how much Attack skill I have over the enemy's Defense skill. It starts out flat, where the en...

In HoMM II, if you have -1 luck, what is your chance of getting bad luck?

If you answered 10%, you're wrong! It's 0%.

-2 luck gives you a 1/24 chance. I believe this to be a bug, since +1 luck gives you 1/24, +2 luck gives you 2/24, etc.

I think I can handle a few of your requests with a bit of assembly hacking. Sit tight though; there are bigger fish to fry.

Downloaded. I'll have a look at them later.

It's fairly obvious that the cheaper factions will have an easier time in Impossible difficulty, but I don't think it's right to base analyses solely off that. You seem to mainly be arguing that the Knight *hero* is the best. Players can just as easily play Warlock and recruit a Knight for their mai...

Interesting. I've done that too in the Evil campaign, but I believe I would have lost if I had spent less time building an army.

Meanwhile, I've beaten Archibald in a month from the Crown using almost no army, the Book of Summoning, and a lot of spell points.

The army carries over with your first hero.

If you're shooting for a top score, the crown might be a better choice -- 8 weeks is a while. If you just want to win, it will definitely be easier to leverage the army into a victory than the crown.