nancygold's Journal

Tried Songs of Conquest
Songs of Conquest is a dumbed down clone of the Heroes of Might & Magic 3 (HoMM3), but with more emphasis on combat and tactics. It has an idiotic magic system that would feel at home in some JRPG about collecting pokemons. There is no sea travel or teleporters or world maps spells (cant blame them since these are rather complex features, breaking a-star pathfinder). Mixing factions is impossible either, outside of multiplayer. The single player campaigns are overloaded with scripting and triggers, making them super annoying to play.

The game has no town screen. Instead it has separate adventure map buildings similar to Lords of Magic. And just like in LoM the buildings can be razed by enemy. The number of buildings is strictly limited, so if you need a marketplace to purchase resources for new structure, you will have to raze some building, build marketplace, purchase resources, raze marketplace and build the building you actually want. Some buildings require temporary support buildings during their construction (say stone quarry), but after the construction these can be safely razed and replaced with actually useful buildings. Large part of game consists of this rather complex micromanagement.

There is no magic guild in these cities, the spells, heroes can cast, are determined by the creatures they have in the army. But there are magic skills, which can be upgraded every level. Some spells are categorized under a single school, while others require skills in different schools and a matching creature composition. The system feels needlessly convoluted.

The number of stacks in army is limited by hero's skill, while the number of creatures per stack is limited by the city upgrades. Such system favors ditching weaker creatures in favor of stronger ones, especially since all the weaker creature dwelling occupy land lots which can be instead used for money making.

Just like in HoMM3, the units can't move separately from a hero, so you will need a special collect and carry hero. Similarly, the heroes can't participate in combat and cant be combined in a single party, which means player has to maintain a single universal hero, which will consume all experience. Unlike HoMM3 the resource system is completely broken: all factions need all resources.

Generally the game feels shoddily designed, where at first interesting ideas got botched implementation. And the only redeeming feature is the nice pixelart graphics. But the adventure map graphics is rather unreadable, and absence of obvious grid combined with a tilted blurry 3d camera makes it hard to see where character can move. That is additionally exacerbated by invisible walls. I do appreciate limiting the stack number and creatures per stack, but these could have been implemented without incentivizing dropping weaker units. But there are far worse HoMM3 clones, especially that Native Linux support gay furry one: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/05/broken-alliance-from-the-death-and-taxes-dev-gives-strong-heroes-of-might-and-magic-vibes/

Have to be honest, the game is just not for me, since I'm a fan of Master of Magic and HoMM4. The later allowed for strategies like hiring a thief (a hero which can go behind the guarding monsters stealing everything), leveling it up to field-marshal, while at the same time leveling up a necromancer to raise vampires, and then joining the heroes somewhere in the mid-game. HoMM4 also had cool mage duels, reminiscent of D&D, although these happened only in multiplayer, since the AI was not capable of using spells properly or even using the potions of immortality (the game design device which made heroes viable in combat even with the stacks of thousands).

TLDR: just play HoMM4 with the equilibris mod.

Current Mood: annoyed