Devlog #2: Game Modes pt.1: Classic and Single-Hero
Previously, we told you about the many ways to play HoMM and the modes that Olden Era will feature. Today, let’s delve a bit deeper into some of them.
There’s no existing statistic to show which modes are the most played in the series. It’s probably a toss between randomly generated maps and custom scenarios (especially since not all games in the series featured a random map generator at all). So instead of the most popular modes, we’ll start from the most all-encompassing: the ways we approached randomly generated maps and templates for both single- and multiplayer.
[h2]Classic Mode[/h2]
This is the basic way to play the game: hire heroes, explore the map, build your kingdom, conquer towns, defeat the opponent by extinguishing all their heroes and towns. In Olden Era, we recreate the classic gameplay loop familiar to lovers of the series — but there are some advanced considerations we’re taking into account.
Remember when HoMM just appeared in your local video game store? These were the times when players would slowly and meticulously explore the map, manage castles, and steadily gather massive armies. That took dozens of hours, and the final battles were spectacular. For all intents and purposes, this is how the game was “meant” to be played.
But over the years the way people play the game has evolved. This is, honestly, a fascinating phenomenon — worthy of analysing on its own merits. Diehard fans of Heroes, particularly of HoMM3, would look for ways to optimise their playthroughs — lose fewer troops, fall upon their opponent faster, defend a castle with a single unit. These strats, of course, are particularly important in competitive multiplayer (that also evolved into flourishing over the years), but even in singleplayer people found ways to topple much stronger opponents or juggle armies around the map in ways that were clearly unintended, but created new gameplay dynamics.
Let’s talk about a couple of such “strats” and important characteristics that we took into account when designing Olden Era.
[h3]Pacing[/h3]
A single match in “Jebus Cross” (the most popular competitive multiplayer template) takes no more than a couple of in-game weeks. You heard that right: modern competitive HoMM playstyiles are fast. It makes sense: fall onto your opponent before they have time to prepare, and you win.
Now, let us be clear: we do NOT think that all games of Heroes need to be this fast. There absolutely is merit to huge maps that take months of in-game time to explore, and we will support those.
But it would also be unwise to ignore this tendency for quicker matches, because it doesn’t just come from nowhere. For streamers, faster matches are better content (and we can’t just ignore this factor in 2024). For players themselves, it happens because faster strats are often simply the most efficient.
Our general approach to this issue is creating various systems that would support both faster and slower matches. For example, alternative win conditions that do not require you to capture all opponent’s towns are a good way to allow for faster matches. Alternative hero caps can change the pacing of even familiar templates. And more traversal options and ways to deliver armies make big maps more fun to play.
[h3]Hero Roles[/h3]
While you can buy a number of heroes in Classic Mode and nothing stops you from using them all in similar ways, people generally designate a “main” (the hero they’ll level up) and “supports” or “couriers” — heroes that just run around the map, collect resources, deliver armies and generally help around.
As we already mentioned, our AI uses these roles in its actions. We also kept this in mind when developing Hero Skills and specializations: some of them are meant to be useful for supports and not just mains!
Supports matter!
[h3]Hero Chains [/h3]
The next step after designating hero roles is… strategizing. Since the power of a hero often comes from their armies and artefacts, you can juggle those around, transferring from one hero to another and using various heroes as “mains”, which is exactly what competitive players do. This allows them to explore the map MUCH faster, but you need to make sure that every hero in your roster can reach the point you need them to reach (like another hero or a town) in time. This is called “hero chains.”
Hero chaining is very skill-heavy, so we intend to keep it in the game. For example, just like in HoMM3, in Olden Era the amount of movement points your hero has depends on the speed of units in their army (an important aspect of chaining). So hardcore players that want to play the game the same way as HoMM3, can do that — and can challenge their chaining skills.
But other players feel that chaining is tedious and requires too much micromanagement. For them, we created alternative ways to transfer armies and artefacts to keep their “main” well-supplied. One such way is a Remote Foothold building: you can place a hero’s army and artefacts in a Remote Foothold and then grab them from any other Remote Foothold on the map. Yay, teleport!
(You can just exclude these buildings from a template if you want the super-classic experience that fully relies on chaining.)
Another way to transfer forces immediately is the “Assemble!” spell. Casting it allows a hero to interact with another hero from afar, as though they were standing next to each other, to transfer anything they need (which is probably troops). So it’s kinda like a chain, but faster, less tedious, and its links are connected from afar like magic. It plays like a nice compromise between the classic chaining experience and the quick Remote Foothold approach.
[h3]"One-Unit Stacks" [/h3]
In HoMM, you often have to fight strong opponents with a weaker army. This is where "one-unit stacks" come in — single-unit troops that absorb counterattacks, shield ranged units, or lure the enemy to the far corner of the battlefield. Of course, you can’t win using only these troops. The main damage is dealt by "strike stacks" — strong units gathered into a large single stack. The combination of "strike stacks" with "one-unit stacks" allows you to fight very challenging battles with almost no losses. Proper troop distribution has become a real test of skill.
The first thing you need to use one-unit stacks is QoL (it’s tiresome to split single units from a stack manually) — we got that covered. But we also feel that it’s interesting to have systems that interact with this type of troop. An upgraded “Impending Fate” spell can kill all one-unit stacks on the battlefield, leaving your opponent’s shooters unguarded.
And keep in mind that one-unit stacks still have access to active abilities — and while some of them depend on the number of troops, the others do not. All enemies adjacent to a Thunder Qilin receive additional magic damage, and it doesn’t matter how many units there are in a stack — so how about throwing a bunch of one-units stacks of Qilins into enemy ranks and then casting Armageddon?
And that’s just the simplest thing that comes to mind. We want players to find many ways to exploit and counter-exploit one-units stacks.
***
The way Heroes are played today isn’t quite what was intended from the start — the developers of the classic games likely didn’t plan for hero chaining or one-unit stack abuse. But we can benefit from the many years of gameplay evolution that the Heroes community went through. We think it’s fascinating and want to preserve these “strats” in Olden Era (sometimes optionally) while making sure their tedium is alleviated for those who are more interested in more modernized gameplay.
[h2]Single-Hero Mode[/h2]
Despite the acceleration of gameplay, rounds can still take a lot of time, and hero chains require a great deal of micromanagement, which is appreciated by some (as it’s an opportunity to show skill), but tiresome to others. Over the years, the community has developed a different type of template that Olden Era supports as a full-fledged game mode (with a separate ladder and everything): Single-Hero Mode.
This mode is more straightforward and fast: the player has only one hero, and their death means defeat, which ends the game. Managing one hero requires significantly less time and effort and raises the stakes.
In Single-Hero Mode zones are explored more slowly, and the game takes more in-game days. Because of this, the map templates themselves differ from the classic ones. For example, some templates have more creature dwellings, and the methods for acquiring adventure spells for rapid map exploration are simplified — they may be available from the start. This mode is particularly suitable for first-timers as it is easier to manage a single hero.
We will devote another blog post about this mode later, scheduling it closer to the internal milestone.
We are proud to continue the best traditions of ‘Heroes’, however we’re keeping in mind how the gameplay has changed over time and how the community has adapted some features to their needs. In the next devlog, we’ll share some details of the mode we’re especially thrilled about: Arena.
Follow news and updates:
There’s no existing statistic to show which modes are the most played in the series. It’s probably a toss between randomly generated maps and custom scenarios (especially since not all games in the series featured a random map generator at all). So instead of the most popular modes, we’ll start from the most all-encompassing: the ways we approached randomly generated maps and templates for both single- and multiplayer.
[h2]Classic Mode[/h2]
This is the basic way to play the game: hire heroes, explore the map, build your kingdom, conquer towns, defeat the opponent by extinguishing all their heroes and towns. In Olden Era, we recreate the classic gameplay loop familiar to lovers of the series — but there are some advanced considerations we’re taking into account.
Remember when HoMM just appeared in your local video game store? These were the times when players would slowly and meticulously explore the map, manage castles, and steadily gather massive armies. That took dozens of hours, and the final battles were spectacular. For all intents and purposes, this is how the game was “meant” to be played.
But over the years the way people play the game has evolved. This is, honestly, a fascinating phenomenon — worthy of analysing on its own merits. Diehard fans of Heroes, particularly of HoMM3, would look for ways to optimise their playthroughs — lose fewer troops, fall upon their opponent faster, defend a castle with a single unit. These strats, of course, are particularly important in competitive multiplayer (that also evolved into flourishing over the years), but even in singleplayer people found ways to topple much stronger opponents or juggle armies around the map in ways that were clearly unintended, but created new gameplay dynamics.
Let’s talk about a couple of such “strats” and important characteristics that we took into account when designing Olden Era.
[h3]Pacing[/h3]
A single match in “Jebus Cross” (the most popular competitive multiplayer template) takes no more than a couple of in-game weeks. You heard that right: modern competitive HoMM playstyiles are fast. It makes sense: fall onto your opponent before they have time to prepare, and you win.
Now, let us be clear: we do NOT think that all games of Heroes need to be this fast. There absolutely is merit to huge maps that take months of in-game time to explore, and we will support those.
But it would also be unwise to ignore this tendency for quicker matches, because it doesn’t just come from nowhere. For streamers, faster matches are better content (and we can’t just ignore this factor in 2024). For players themselves, it happens because faster strats are often simply the most efficient.
Our general approach to this issue is creating various systems that would support both faster and slower matches. For example, alternative win conditions that do not require you to capture all opponent’s towns are a good way to allow for faster matches. Alternative hero caps can change the pacing of even familiar templates. And more traversal options and ways to deliver armies make big maps more fun to play.
[h3]Hero Roles[/h3]
While you can buy a number of heroes in Classic Mode and nothing stops you from using them all in similar ways, people generally designate a “main” (the hero they’ll level up) and “supports” or “couriers” — heroes that just run around the map, collect resources, deliver armies and generally help around.
As we already mentioned, our AI uses these roles in its actions. We also kept this in mind when developing Hero Skills and specializations: some of them are meant to be useful for supports and not just mains!
Supports matter!
[h3]Hero Chains [/h3]
The next step after designating hero roles is… strategizing. Since the power of a hero often comes from their armies and artefacts, you can juggle those around, transferring from one hero to another and using various heroes as “mains”, which is exactly what competitive players do. This allows them to explore the map MUCH faster, but you need to make sure that every hero in your roster can reach the point you need them to reach (like another hero or a town) in time. This is called “hero chains.”
Hero chaining is very skill-heavy, so we intend to keep it in the game. For example, just like in HoMM3, in Olden Era the amount of movement points your hero has depends on the speed of units in their army (an important aspect of chaining). So hardcore players that want to play the game the same way as HoMM3, can do that — and can challenge their chaining skills.
But other players feel that chaining is tedious and requires too much micromanagement. For them, we created alternative ways to transfer armies and artefacts to keep their “main” well-supplied. One such way is a Remote Foothold building: you can place a hero’s army and artefacts in a Remote Foothold and then grab them from any other Remote Foothold on the map. Yay, teleport!
(You can just exclude these buildings from a template if you want the super-classic experience that fully relies on chaining.)
Another way to transfer forces immediately is the “Assemble!” spell. Casting it allows a hero to interact with another hero from afar, as though they were standing next to each other, to transfer anything they need (which is probably troops). So it’s kinda like a chain, but faster, less tedious, and its links are connected from afar like magic. It plays like a nice compromise between the classic chaining experience and the quick Remote Foothold approach.
[h3]"One-Unit Stacks" [/h3]
In HoMM, you often have to fight strong opponents with a weaker army. This is where "one-unit stacks" come in — single-unit troops that absorb counterattacks, shield ranged units, or lure the enemy to the far corner of the battlefield. Of course, you can’t win using only these troops. The main damage is dealt by "strike stacks" — strong units gathered into a large single stack. The combination of "strike stacks" with "one-unit stacks" allows you to fight very challenging battles with almost no losses. Proper troop distribution has become a real test of skill.
The first thing you need to use one-unit stacks is QoL (it’s tiresome to split single units from a stack manually) — we got that covered. But we also feel that it’s interesting to have systems that interact with this type of troop. An upgraded “Impending Fate” spell can kill all one-unit stacks on the battlefield, leaving your opponent’s shooters unguarded.
And keep in mind that one-unit stacks still have access to active abilities — and while some of them depend on the number of troops, the others do not. All enemies adjacent to a Thunder Qilin receive additional magic damage, and it doesn’t matter how many units there are in a stack — so how about throwing a bunch of one-units stacks of Qilins into enemy ranks and then casting Armageddon?
And that’s just the simplest thing that comes to mind. We want players to find many ways to exploit and counter-exploit one-units stacks.
***
The way Heroes are played today isn’t quite what was intended from the start — the developers of the classic games likely didn’t plan for hero chaining or one-unit stack abuse. But we can benefit from the many years of gameplay evolution that the Heroes community went through. We think it’s fascinating and want to preserve these “strats” in Olden Era (sometimes optionally) while making sure their tedium is alleviated for those who are more interested in more modernized gameplay.
[h2]Single-Hero Mode[/h2]
Despite the acceleration of gameplay, rounds can still take a lot of time, and hero chains require a great deal of micromanagement, which is appreciated by some (as it’s an opportunity to show skill), but tiresome to others. Over the years, the community has developed a different type of template that Olden Era supports as a full-fledged game mode (with a separate ladder and everything): Single-Hero Mode.
This mode is more straightforward and fast: the player has only one hero, and their death means defeat, which ends the game. Managing one hero requires significantly less time and effort and raises the stakes.
In Single-Hero Mode zones are explored more slowly, and the game takes more in-game days. Because of this, the map templates themselves differ from the classic ones. For example, some templates have more creature dwellings, and the methods for acquiring adventure spells for rapid map exploration are simplified — they may be available from the start. This mode is particularly suitable for first-timers as it is easier to manage a single hero.
We will devote another blog post about this mode later, scheduling it closer to the internal milestone.
We are proud to continue the best traditions of ‘Heroes’, however we’re keeping in mind how the gameplay has changed over time and how the community has adapted some features to their needs. In the next devlog, we’ll share some details of the mode we’re especially thrilled about: Arena.
Follow news and updates:
