Always when I think of Heroes 3 the main problems I find is randomness (not total) of secondary skills and utter usefulness of half of them. (Because of this entire hero classes are useless. Take witches for example (or I find it so)).
It is nice that you cannot build all your dream skills all the time, but to be forced to take Navigation in a non water map is plain stupid. I know mods are already in place that make some skills more useful but they are a little overdoing it and not everyone would play with the same mods on which means reverting to vanilla version.
Instead, address this issue from the standard VCMI release and everyone will just have a better game. It would be very simple to add and the specifics of the implementation could be resolved for you by others via a post to the right forums.
(Same goes for some much needed balance tweaks on Necro and Conflux).
Randomness MUST stay. Have you played HoMM 6? Unless perfectly balanced this will result in 2-3 generic builds instead of semi-random variety of H3 (semi-random due to selecting on level-up).
This problem should be fixed with better skills balancing instead.
Such skills like navigation can be even banned on non-water maps either by RMG or by map author.
Some hardcore player complain when they find much smaller differences not to mention re-balancing of the whole game. Some kind off recommend “vcmi rebalance” mod may work but not as part of release.
But is still too early to say - we need proper mod support first.
I’ve lost a lenghty response… here a sort version of it.
Randomness misrepresentation from my side: I like as well the “randomness” but more controlled like in H5. (The way H6 went with skills is total crap)
Regarding pro players. I think that a vote for a change in secondary skills and some tweaks to conflux and necro would pass easyly.
Side note: By creating a new engine you rely only on information that you could get from original game. Which is not complete so some variation will occur. In addition to this I hope some bugs that are widely used now will be corrected in VCMI so… another discrepancy. Secondary skill randomness as I understood it it is not completely reversed engineered so… here some differences too.
My point: Make FEW minor changes in discrete and contained areas in order to have a better game and ignore the few that will complain over the vast majority.
By H5 randomness you mean 4 skills to select instead of 2? I think that this was done mostly to adapt to much bigger amount of available skills (27 in H3, 12 + 1 + a lot of perks in H5)
This is huge amount of information - English Strategija and Russian FizMiG, some data from people that have reverse-engineered the game (WoG and HotA teams). More than enough to create almost identical mechanics.
Why do you think so? Right now in vcmi secondary skills are completely random but correct mechanics is known:
there is predefined “skill tree” so hero receives same skills on levelup no matter what he does (including reloading the game). I suspect that game does not stores whole “skill tree” but only random seed.
some skills (wisdom and magic schools) are hardcoded to appear on certain levels
Implementing this is a matter of time
Right now we’re trying to limit our changes to bugfixing. Any kind of rebalance should be done via mods. Why?
It is likely that there won’t be consensus on how balanced game should looks like.
If done as a mod it will allow us to test our modding system with multiple changes in multiple areas.
Yes you are most likely right, I do not want to change the way you learn skills was just making a remark that I liked H5’s way of learning secondary skills better. Was more predictable, but again you are right it does not apply to H3. (Here a retouch of the useless skills is more apropriate).
Keyword here is **suspect **:). I know about the tables, but if you do not have them you can only mimic so well their real behavior. (Again take it only as more or less informed remark)
I still remain at my conviction that: Because you will remake the engine you cannot stay 100% true to H3 (and here I talk mainly about battle AI and old H3 bugs that you will fix). Because of this reason there is opportunity to implement some MINOR and LOCALIZED improvements on old H3.
Mods are perfect for… modding, but if they touch game-play people will always revert to vanilla VCMI.
Ok I’ve pointed these out, my job is done :). Will not bother you with these anymore.