[Sirlancelot]

Originally Posted by Sir Whiskers

My first reaction is that these changes would reduce, not increase, the strategic depth of the game. Areas would need to be revamped, since currently all areas have stacks with a mix of strength. If it's more difficult - or worse, completely random - to avoid the powerful stacks, players will have to avoid entire areas until they are strong enough to fight the toughest opponents, which means most fights in the area would be just a boring walkover.

Worse why? Where is the fun if you always know in advance the consequences of your actions (movements)?

Regarding the other subject I remark on bold letters, you would simply not able to exploit the enemy units lack of speed so easily thus sometimes be encouraged (not forced) to play more cautiously. Wiith my system there wouldn't be any 100% safe areas, so the "let's simply retreat and face the theorically less menacing places first", shouldn't guarantee success... opposite of what happens in the raw game by the way.

So actually less walks in the park than now and a real danger of having to cope with defeat and its implications no matter your tactic and gaming style.

Not only that, terrain and landscape shapes, forms and their obstacles would become far more important, as would the type of army you manage, your strenghts and weakness.

Likewise, your third change punishes players for scouting ahead. A player who checks out a new area runs a very real risk of either being killed with no chance to win the fight, or losing rewards simply for seeing them.

Not punishing, just making it more realistic. Real scouting is supposed to be dangerous and therefore the game should address it somehow. Currently you can go and grab far too many things before even raise the sword for the first time... and then going one by one eliminating the weaker enemies and catching the resources left; that kind of playthrough is utterly boring, a chore, and makes no sense to me.

I don't understand the objections to no-casualty runs. I personally don't play that style - it's not worth reloading whole fights because I lost a single troop, or using very specific tactics that I find rather boring. I like to experiment, but if others want to challenge themselves with no-loss, go for it. I don't believe an explicit design goal should be making no-loss impossible, though if making the game more fun and challenging has that effect, that's okay.

I do agree that attrition can be a problem in the game. I believe no-loss goals developed in part because it's a pain to have to constantly replenish troop losses, or fight in specific ways to resurrect them before a fight ends (which often causes fights to drag out many extra rounds). It's much faster and easier to clear an area with a few dragons vs. thousands of dragonflies. KB:TL had an "army" mod where a player could pay double to recruit addtional troops without going back to town, but I don't believe it was ever updated to KB:CW. Something like that would encourage me to use more varied troops, IMO.

The annoyance and nonsense of no-casualty runs rest upon the fact they are possible even on Impossible. Not talking about Easy or Normal, but Impossible.

Glad that we share the big picture concept, though. We both want a challenge increase but have in mind two different approachs to attain it. You basically rather go for it in a classical way, keeping total control of the experience, while I can only embrace the former with a good portion of unpredictability. It's okay.

However, let me finish stating that when you play along the map, you do it so just against the fixed patterns of the enemy stacks of units. There's not AI there. This means not messing with such player advantage isn't allowing remain a good strategy, but allowing remain a dominant strategy/exploit, ie: take advantage of something that is inherently broken or derivated from poor design decisions regarding gameplay.

As Fatt Shade mentioned, the KB:TL mod (HOMM Babies) dramatically changes the difficulty, but in ways that add strategic depth rather than simply adding randomness or punishing players for using good strategy. In fact, that mod forced me to adapt my strategies, and it clearly rewarded good play. It also gave me good reasons to use troops I wouldn't normally use, depending on which wife/babies my hero had. I highly recommend giving it a try. I'm really looking forward to the KB:CW version.

Sure, looking forward to it, yet if good map strategies automatically lead to victory (no chance to fail), will probably dissappoint me.