Friday 12 January, 2007

After a bit more play and diving deeper in the game I noticed a similar theme with difficulty involved in this Heroes V. I would consider myself a good player at the game. I can maximize the efficiency of my cities. I can usually find ways to get through battles with the least losses as possible. With the way missions are set up, you can barely squeeze by even when you play your best. Enemies sometimes start out with four full cities while you are on the other side of the map with a completely fresh city to develop. All you can do is hold them off long enough through skillful manipulation of your troops in combat until you get a large enough army to attack one of their cities. It's possible I'm just not as good at the game as I think but since I'm playing on Normal (also known as Easy since the lowest difficult is Normal) I'd hope not.I don't really mind the difficulty since I'm a fan of hard games, but it just is kinda odd the way it works.

The storyline is getting better after each mission I beat. They really did a good job with hooking you on the game, trying to beat more missions to try and get information on all the pieces of storyline they left hanging. That reminds me, I need to go finish this mission ...

To be honest the "overcoming of the seige" game dynamic has always been something thats turned me off to a lot of turn-based strategy games. It sometimes builds up a gameplay experience where your skill is based more heavily on your economy than your tactics, which is cool and all if thats what you like.

But, for the sake of argument, let's pretend I'm a Nival Interactive executive and you are my newest designer hired for the HOMMV project. I come up to you and say:

"Ok, I want this level to be harder. But...I don't want the computer to start with any more material than the player."

How would you tackle the problem? Change terrain advantages? Perhaps augment the AI somehow? And how? Maybe try to get them to mess with the player's head? Like sending a hero to wander randomly around the player's boundaries to make them think the AI is up to something it isn't?

How I see it, the game works like this. Even though your enemy has a huge advantage to start with, they squander it and don't fully produce since their AI limits them to being at say 40% capacity (on Normal mode). Then they stack the enemy with lots and lots of stuff to make it a reasonable difficulty. Then it moves the AI up in to something like 75% effective for Hard and 100% for Heroic. How I think it should be done, is even the easiest difficulty the AI produces as it should and maximizes its resources, but the difference is how much resource it starts with. On Normal they would start with a small army and low resources. The starting army and resources would be boosted with the difficulty. That way I don't have a map where I start with one castle and they have seven but I can go from there town to the next conquering them with nearly only my starting army.

See, I figured out why I was doing poorly at the time of writing this Game Log. I didn't develop my hero properly. I did a healing/blessing type hero and his turns were pretty much worthless. I figured out if I just made a small army to just absorb some hits, I can use my hero to throw around empowered fireballs and pretty much wipe out the enemies army in one or two moves of my hero.

So, nerf heroes, buff AI, nerf their starting resources. How I would do it.

How I see it, the game works like this. Even though your enemy has a huge advantage to start with, they squander it and don't fully produce since their AI limits them to being at say 40% capacity (on Normal mode). Then they stack the enemy with lots and lots of stuff to make it a reasonable difficulty. Then it moves the AI up in to something like 75% effective for Hard and 100% for Heroic. How I think it should be done, is even the easiest difficulty the AI produces as it should and maximizes its resources, but the difference is how much resource it starts with. On Normal they would start with a small army and low resources. The starting army and resources would be boosted with the difficulty. That way I don't have a map where I start with one castle and they have seven but I can go from there town to the next conquering them with nearly only my starting army.

See, I figured out why I was doing poorly at the time of writing this Game Log. I didn't develop my hero properly. I did a healing/blessing type hero and his turns were pretty much worthless. I figured out if I just made a small army to just absorb some hits, I can use my hero to throw around empowered fireballs and pretty much wipe out the enemies army in one or two moves of my hero.

So, nerf heroes, buff AI, nerf their starting resources. How I would do it.