Balance of creatures

Hi

I was wondering about theses unbalanced creatures in H2, so I did patches to balance them.
And finally I found to ways of "balance" :


1/ Nostalgic
Almost nothing to balance, reducing the cost of magic guild, creatures may get or loose few stats...
Because there is a category of players for who this unbalanced creatures is an important point of the H2's attractiveness.

2/ H3 style
All creatures must be balanced like it was balanced in H3.
So, Titans, Black Dragons, Phoenixes, Cyclops, Paladins,etc, must have more or less same HP !
Because there players who plays H3 and not H2 only because of that !



When I asked for peoples opinions in the french community (ArchangelCastle) I felt like most of people had interest in the H3 style balancing.

H2Ironfist allow to make your own balancing of the game... Great! But, then, playing a map with your own "version" make you unable to share the result, because nobody knows what version you used.. (maybe you put 500hp on black dragon and price at 0 gold?.. Who knows..)

So I think it would good that we make a "main balance version"...


And.. I would say the same for H3SWmod because creatures have same stats as the original H2 game.


ps/edit:
That's also why I don't play that much Heroes II (note enough time to make a huge balance patch alone), and barely never tournaments because using PoL 2.1 seems to be good for playing Wizard or Warlock only... (so, I am in the category 2, people who would enjoy an H3 style balance of creatures ^^)

In H3SW the stats are going to be changed. The initial Mister Kalu's idea about keeping H2 stats is lame and it wouldn't make any good result because Heroes 3 mechanics is just different.

Still, I am in doubt about making balance changes without a proper multiplayer statistics. Either we leave stats in a classic way for now, or make a major series of multiplayer games to obtain decent statistics.

You know, even in Russian community nobody managed to create a Tournament Edition because of many arguments between players since H2 balance is too hard to understand only with pure analytics. Unlike Heroes 1 where the Tournament Edition actually exists and there are even some offline tournaments featuring it.

For the H3 style balance : I would say that it's in fact kind of simple for balancing :
more or less same HP for each "tier".
Then after playing some games, we can adjust with others stats... Not difficult. Just very long if only 1 people work on it. ^^

Of course people may say that a Paladin up with 250 hp is too much, they usually forget that it will be 3 paladins/week (same as black dragons/titans), and prices (building&recruit) will also follow...
And also people also forget that if you take Wizard castle but recruit a barbarian Hero you will have no difficulties versus Barbarian castle with Barbarian Hero..

And because castles can recruit others alignments's Heroes, then Creatures should have same HP first. Because HP is the only thing that is linked with damage spells : warlock lvl1 without artefacts cast "Lightbolt" on an ennemy Paladin : he kills 1.
Same Warlock lvl1 cast it on Phenix : he kills 0. need 2 turns.
Same Warlock lvl1 cast it on Titan : he will need 4 turns.
Just to show the link Magic~HP ... (it's Heroes of might and magic! heh! )

Yes, but that Warlock first needs to find that Lightning Bolt spell. It's complicated.

magical arrow? :p

warlock lvl1 without artefacts cast "Magical Arrow" on an ennemy Paladin : he kills 1 in 2 turns (3 turns for paladin up)
Same Warlock lvl1 cast it on Phenix : he kills 0. need 4 turns.
Same Warlock lvl1 cast it on Titan : he will need 10 turns.

The problem is same, whatever the spell.

But anyway, there is 2 ways of patching it.


By the way. The "creatures.xml" file will change time to time or not?
of course yes when adding or removing creatures to the game, but otherwise?

The main priority for Project Ironfist now is adding the 7th faction. I suppose, the stats for creatures will be left classic for now. But who knows.

Oky! Thanks for your answers
So it will be "easy" to keep updated a balanced patch. I will work on that soon... (finding latest ironfist version first.. :p)

It might not be as hard to balance a game like H3 as you think. H2 is a bit harder I guess because of different combat mechanics, but it should be possible. Since the Fall of 2013 I have been trying to make a "best possible" balance proportion for TSWM, but it sure takes long time and even though my calculations are way better than those we currently use, there is still need of testing by pro players.

I would like to see your TSWM balance.
...And to be able to share it with some others people (I'm sure I've friends who would like to try it. ^^)...

Before I started Project Ironfist, I helped UndeadHalfOrc with his H2 balance patch, http://www.celestialheavens.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8724 . We may use stats very close to its.

By the way, I already featured it here on the forum: link.

Too bad UndeadHalfOrc is not around these days.