King's Bounty Vs Heroes V

[prowler]

I am playing KB like 10 days now and i must admit its pretty good and adictive. I especially like graphics and nice story with funny characters. I am not easily impressed, to tell you the truth i have played and stick to only several games all my life cause those others dont have that something. I just install new game, play it few hours and on most time uninstall it
This game was something different it has something special. I havent felt that since i played Heroes III, which is till today IMHO the best game that i have ever played and i am still playing it online. I remember i played it for month without stoping and changing to another game. I hope it will be similar with KB. Heroes V doesnt have that something. Its just Heroes III with new graphics, but IMHO bad graphics. And story and gaming is not that adictive as in Heroes III and KB. It misses something. I dont know what. It felts like it was made just like another project (game) with no good ideas, and on the other hand KB is something really fresh and new in gaming world. I think that heroes V with KB graphics engine and funny storyline would be something special. Anyhow i hope KB team will keep up the good work.

[phoenixreborn]

For me playing heroes v online made it from an ok game to an excellent game.

[jwallstone]

I agree with Warmonger. The leadership system makes a big difference. In HOMM V, stacks grow without limit, so the game becomes a race to accumulate tons and tons of units, and typically you want to concentrate all the troops on one "super-hero" rather than spread them out, even though the game theoretically is designed for people to utilize multiple heroes strategically. The reason for this is that with huge stacks, a huge part of winning is simply hitting first. If two equal stacks fight, and the first one to hit kills over half of the other stack, then even with retaliation, that small battle is already won. It becomes annoying because in the late game, it's no longer fun anymore to see half or all of one of your stacks wiped out in one hit. The entire game becomes accumating units, avoiding major battles with your main opponent, going after neutral stacks until you build up your hero and a large army, and then one large "super" battle at the end where the built-up armies decimate each other and whoever happens to come out on top wins (i.e. whoever manages to get some good first hits). You could try to play more strategically, with multiple heroes engaging in medium-sized skirmishes, but the game will punish you for that compared to the person that just builds up a single large army. The economies of scale from large armies is just too powerful.

The leadership system I think goes a long way to solving this. By controlling the increase in power for heroes, it prevents this runaway arms race to simply accumulate units. I imagine if HOMM V had leadership caps for heroes, it'd become a much more strategically rich game, involving managing a number of decent armies across the map to control resources, towns, chokepoints, etc, but where even an opponent who's already behind in army strength due to bad luck or a lost battle can still recover with good strategy and tactics.

[jwallstone]

A couple more thoughts. Leadership is big, but there are a few other differences to be aware of. If you compare creature statistics between King's Bounty and HOMM V, you'll find that HOMM V creatures are designed with much higher damage potentials versus hitpoints. In KB, you'll have units with 50-80 hitpoints doing 5-10 damage (roughly), whereas in HOMM V units with the same hp range are doing 15-20 damage. Even the top tier units have 200-300 hp, but are doing 40-50 hitpoints. Compare that to KB top tier units, with 600-800 hp, maybe 3-4 times as much, but doing about twice as much damage. This means units die a lot faster in HOMM V. Even Attack and Defense give 5% bonuses rather than 3.3% in KB.

Also, I like the hero leveling system in KB more. Talent runes and skill trees are great, despite whatever skills may or may not be balanced. In HOMM V, just figuring out how to pick skills, abilities and perks (yes, they have three names for practically the same thing) can be a complicated mess. There are so many crazy rules and dependencies that it makes it difficult to plan and for me requires a skill wheel just to make sense of it (very well done, by the way, thanks to the HOMM V community). Furthermore, the choices are random, which can make it impossible to build a hero the way you want, and sometimes you can get offered two poor choices where choosing either one completely rules out other skills that you want. I like that in KB there is some randomness, in getting choices for Attack, Defense, Mana, Rage, etc, but it's a much smaller impact and not a big deal if you don't get what you want, and you can direct the growth of your hero's talents, which has a bigger impact in my opinion, whereas in HOMM V poor random choices can completely screw up your plan. Also, some skills in HOMM V are almost entirely useless, i.e. I think there's more imbalance in HOMM V between good/bad skills.

Sorry to rain on HOMM V so much. It really is a fun game that I like, and I've been a fan since HOMM 1 (or even since the original KB, if you count that). There are many things to like about HOMM V, but I think there are some major game design problems, which KB does a great job of addressing, and which make KB a superior game overall.