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#1-Faction variety. HoMM III has 9 factions, and while 2 of those factions (Conflux and Necropolis) are stupidly broken in the hands of a player, the AI doesn't abuse what makes them OP too badly, and so for all intents and purposes HoMM III single-player has 9 viable factions. Each of these factions plays completely differently from the others. How many other strategy games can claim that?
#2-The art is fantastic. HoMM III's adventure map and town screens still look gorgeous, even today. The battle graphics have aged a bit, but they're not an eyesore by any means. HoMM's townscreens are (imo, of course) some of the most memorable sights in gaming, and HoMM VI leaving them out was nothing less than an outrage.
#3-Great gameplay. HoMM III expanded on the already-great base provided by II by adding more spells, skills, heroes, units, abilities, and adventure map features. You can easily pour hours into the game and never get tired of it, with its excellent blend of tactical combat, turn-based strategy on the adventure map, and the RPG elements of leveling your heroes. Additionally, the game has literally hundreds of pre-made maps, most of which feature a funny or engaging story, a RMG if and when those become tiresome, and a community which has churned out hundreds more amazing high-quality maps thanks to the inbuilt and fantastically easy-to-use editor.
#4-Great atmosphere. The HoMM series always had a fantastic sense of humor, and the little message boxes that would pop up (up until NWC died, anyways) were filled with charm, wit and soul. Even the individual "skirmish" maps typically have legitimately interesting or gutbustingly hilarious stories. There's an engaging story featuring all-out war between more or less the entire roster of D&D's Monster Manual. Ever wanted to see efreeti battle basilisks? This is your game. Additionally, the HoMM III OST is quite literally the best I've ever heard in any game, ever. Even the ambient themes are a joy to listen to, and the town themes are nothing short of magnificent. People talk about Zelda and Final Fantasy OSTs, but there's no competing with the HoMM series when it comes to amazing music. It always gets overlooked in favor of the notable console series' OSTs when it comes to music discussion, which is a goddamn shame.
Really? That's very weird, HIII almost never CTDs for me, and certainly not that often. Are you running any mods or anything?
Also, there should be an autosave feature.
MechWarrior Online: Khyber Pryde
Famous last words.
its no big deal at all tbh but I am a little miffed because I miss out on the achievements and general ease of access through steam.
My Backloggery PSN: Bigisy24
Were they Vampire Lords? If so, be warned, Vampire Lords in any significant numbers are an incredibly difficult stack to deal with. They lifedrain the full damage dealt back as health, and any excess health will go toward raising dead members of the stack. Vamp Lords are probably the best L4 in the game.
That said, here's the criteria you should use for picking fights:
1) Level. Generally, if the neutrals are at least 2 levels above the highest-level creature in your army and you don't outnumber them by a very considerable amount, you should take a step back and seriously evaluate whether the fight is worth it. If you're fighting Level 7s, you really should take a step back and seriously evaluate whether the fight is worth it. Remember, there's always other areas of the map you could be clearing, and you can come back later with more troops.
2) Hero stats and skills. If I'm a level 15 Tazar with 12 DEF and Expert Armorer, I could probably take a stack of Dragon Flies (Level 3) and mop the floor with pretty much any Level 5 stack you'd care to name. Equally, magic such as Blind and Berserk can have the same effect. Generally, the more powerful your hero is, the more lopsided fights you can take on.
3) Ranged ability. Many melee neutrals can be wiped without any losses on the part of the player as long as you employ some basic tactics, which I will detail for you later when I've got time. This will not happen with ranged neutrals; you will lose troops, and quite possibly considerable amounts. As such, ranged neutrals are best avoided early game unless a) they are in very small numbers, b) they are guarding a vital resource/artifact/pass, or c) you have a means of blocking them or minimizing casualties from their fire.
4) Speed. A decent player can kill far larger slow neutral stacks than linear arithmetic would seem to indicate. The quintessential example of this in the Heroes series is the Zombie. It's tough as hell but incredibly slow. You can easily rip zombies apart by the score with just a week or two's worth of low-level ranged units, as long as you have a means of baiting the zombies away. If you've got a fast no-retaliation unit such as the Sprite, you can literally kill infinite numbers of slow stacks.
Conversely, fast stacks such as Vampire Lords, Serpent Flies or Thunderbirds are going to be much harder to handle, because they will get up in your face immediately and minimize both your ability to deal ranged damage as well as your ability to mitigate casualties. Fast Level 7 stacks (and most of them are) are an absolute nightmare. Expect to lose many troops, often before you've had a chance to do anything.
5) Special abilities. Some creatures (the classic example being Vampire Lords or, in HoMM II, Ghosts) have special abilities that make them a serious threat even in neutral stacks. You need to get a feel for everything's special abilities; the manual is great for this. Alternatively, you can just get your ass kicked for a while ingame, but you may potentially find that less fun.
Anyways, if you have more specific questions, feel free to PM me! I learned so much about this series simply by talking to other fans online, and I'm glad to do the same service for a new player.
Yeah, like how Steam had to redownload the entire game for a patch until Steam just recently updated their patching service for incremental updates. Your bandwidth cap would have loved that Isy.
I still think the GoG edition of the game is the quintessential edition. And now everyone who has the game has access to this version. That's amazing. I applaud GoG for the move, it's super cool, even if I personally get nothing out of it.
My Backloggery PSN: Bigisy24
You've got another 18000 seconds to go there man.
http://www.gog.com/en/forum/general/preorder_legend_of_grimrock/post503
http://www.timeanddate.com/counters/customcounter.html?msg=Legend+of+Grimrock+GOG+release&day=11&month=04&year=2012&hour=17&min=00&sec=00&p0=0
Or 5 hours from now, assuming it releases on time.
Not played the second yet, but I definitely prefer the pixel art of the original over the (admittedly higher resolution) FMV nature of the second's narrative.
The game runs totally fine. Well, even.
Aw yeah. I love this game, and it's rare to find a physical copy, so this should give more people the chance to play it.
And they should. Everyone should play Theme Hospital.
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Same. I played way more Theme Park, until RCT came out and then I played the crap out of that.
Still gog has been on a roll lately.
I tend to like my building games long form (like Evil Genius). How's the average level size in Theme Hospital.
Like sofas appearing in the Operating Theatre, staff becoming unclickable and eventually just crashing.
Anyway, once you've met the victory conditions for a particular level, it will ask you if you want to move to a new hospital so you can stick around for a lot longer if you want to.
I spent so much time playing this game, even tried playing it lately but found it very unstable on newer hardware. Hopefully the GOG version sorts that out.
This.
I own a copy of theme hospital but its such a pain to get it running on new hardware, I'll likely pick it up and see if gog has it sorted out
Basically you don't want your cities set to build stuff automatically. It's better to pick and choose everything you want yourself, as the city governors are usually pretty bad at deciding what to build.
Edit: And now I want to play Alpha Centauri. This always happens when people talk about it.
Ohh, so I shouldn't choose anything for the governor to do? How do I know when something can be built then?