Quite a few basic noob questions.

[ShadowXOR]

Note that I'm familiar with turn-based strategy games and I read the instruction book/searched around the forums before posting this. I've never played Heroes of Might & Magic or King's Bounty so some of these concepts are new to me. Note that I'm playing on the normal difficulty as a Paladin.

1. I'm tired of constantly going back for reinforcements. On average, what is an acceptable percentage of units to lose per battle, and after how many battles should I return for reinforcements? Does this aspect of the game ever get less repetitive?

2. What difficulty level of monster is it best to fight? Weak monsters provide boring battles with little gold or experience. Strong monsters provide more experience and gold but often cause great troop loss requiring me to reinforce more often. Should I try to stick to only battles containing slightly weaker, match, and slightly stronger opponents? Or do the greater gains from difficult fights offset the losses I'll incur?

3. Equipment appears geared towards certain races, why should I focus on Human equipment, when I could use Neutral equipment that benefits all troops? Should I try to rarely sell items since I'll be swapping armor depending on who's in my army? Should I avoid using different races within my army at any one time?

4. With so few slots to store spare troops, how do you keep unit variety interesting or adjust your army without dismissing a large chunk of units you paid for to swap out for another?

5. How do you know when you're strong enough to fight a battle against one of your items to upgrade it? I tried once and got totally destroyed.

6. I don't want to miss anything. Are there "points of no return" in this game where you can't go back to an area you were at previously? Or where you can miss important items by not doing something right? No spoilers please.

Thanks a lot for any help! I know it's kind of an old game but it seems great.

[Vulture]

Hey, ShadowXOR and welcome to the forums on here and to this awesome game
As for your questions:

1. It will never stop being repetitive. It can't. Walking back and refilling won't ever become diverse and interesting all of a sudden xD
As for the other part of the question: there's no general amount of unit losses per enemy encounter that one can call "normal" or "acceptable". Especially since the outcome of a battle can differ HUGELY depending on the parameters: player skill/experience, player units and their attributes, enemy units and their amount and composition, progress in the game concerning spells already available, leadership boni taken and so on.

To conlude this point: it is best to play with strategies limiting or better preventing losses completely. There are numerous strategies on this forum concerning "no loss campaign"s or "no loss challenge"s. You don't have to play a perfect 0 loss game but the strategies presented in these threads WILL make your life immensely easier. I highly recommend reading those.

2. As a beginner you should always pick the weakest fight you can. being a beginner is not the only reason for that, tho. The more important reason being: there is no respawn. The amount of fights in the entire campaign is finite. A weak monster ignored more and more will yield significantly less experience for a incrementally higher-leveled hero. Therefore: kill low stacks as long as you're still low yourself to get maximum experience from them.
On the other hand, it works the other way around, too. Stronger enemy stacks will yield significantly more experience. But you said it yourself: at a price; and again: it greatly depends on your setup and the enemy's to say if the losses outweigh the gain or not. A strong medium level setup with good spells can easily annihilate even "very strong" or "overpowering" (enemy heroes excluded, they're a different story) stacks while a not so good setup can even have problems with "slighty weaker" or "match".

Important: note that the "weak" "strong" descriptions of the enemy stack is ENTIRELY dependant on the amount of leadership YOU have. If you have 10,000 ldr and an enemy stack is marked "match", go to the castle and put half of your squad in the garrison; come back and you will find the same stack labeled "very strong" or "overpowering". It's NOT taken into account if the enemy units are good counter-strategic units to your setup and well put together or just cannon fodder. A strong female troop with well boosted Lake Fairies and Sprites (and respective support and ranged damage units) will completely annihilate an "overpowering" troop mainly consisting of units that are weak against fire, magic damage or have a poor hitpoints per leadership ratio like Ents or Skeleton Swordsmen. Whereas, when the same setup is facing magic immune opponents and strong ranged units behind a line of melee blockers the odds are very much different.

3. By no means do you have to stick to a race. That is not intended and you can use qhatever YOU see fit for your playstyle.
When it comes to army composition you also have free hand in that. You will, however, be limited when it comes to employing undeads and humans as the latter tend to piss their pants and be demoralized (HUGE malus in stats)by the presence of the former. You will see a few more of these animosities ^^

But in general, it nowhere says that the only way to go is to stick to one race. Moreso: [race here]-only armies are often inferior to mixed setups. When it comes to certain roles like range damage, tanking or melee striker you will find that some races just don't have any good of that kind.
Take demons for example: you won't find any decent ranged units in that race (catapults only make sense in very specific setups and with respective items and for the most setups they just suck) but you WILL find one of the greatest tanking units in the game (note: depending on your setup). And so on.

4. well, there are quite many garrisons. Soon you will have more garrisons on the map than you can fill troops in. However, they're far apart at some point and it becomes more annoying to swap. One solution is speccing into "Reserve" in the Mind skill tree. That gives you 2 slots to carry your most used substitute (or refill, whatever you like) units.

I for example like putting one sort of dragon and an additional melee unit in my reserves to swap them with a support or ranged unit if I am facing an enemy army that makes quick work out of unprotected units (arch demons instantly teleporting in front of them for instance). On the other hand, as soon as you have found a playstyle and your favorite troops you will rarely need more than 7 different units to contest the majority of the game, especially on normal difficulty.

5. Like you did. You save your game, try and then you should already see if it's manageable or not. Then you load and come back to that when you feel strong enough.

6. there is no such thing as missing something important or areas not being accessible aftert doing something, EXCEPT one. But you will be notified numerous times that you will not be able to acces this particular area (it's only one and it's independant from the "normal" world). And a second area but it only has one vendor. If you don't want spoilers I won't tell you which one that is, but don't complain when you can't go back xD

However, things like that can occur on a smaller scale (e.g. in single quests, by picking one option you make it impossible to pick the other one). But that doesn't change anything on the big scale. No worries, quest away !

Okay, I have nothing to do tonight so I wrote a lot when usually I just refer to the many threads that deal with these issues but I was in the mood ^^

If you have problems understanding anything or have further questions that ensue, ask away.

[ShadowXOR]

Thanks for the help...I'm getting a better feel for it and enjoying it more the further I go. I do have a question that you may not know the answer to...

Why didn't they ever make a multiplayer version of the game? I would love to compete with my friends. I see they're making a Facebook game but that sucks because first of all, it's on Facebook, and second, it's not the same developers. What's the deal with that?

And sadly the developers of this game are now making an MMO...hope they go back to making turn-based strategy games in the future (hopefully ones with multiplayer).

What are your thoughts on Heroes of Might & Magic VI that goes into beta soon? I may get that since it has multiplayer but I've never played that series before. How will it compare?

[Vulture]

The main reason for the King's Bounty series not going online is the fact that it's just not even remotely wide-spread and well-known enough to give a satisfying coverage of users. Multiplayer games die because of not enough users. Looking at the sold copies of the series so far it doesn't even remotely justify even looking into a multiplayer option ^^ of course many developers don't understand this mechanism and fall on their asses with their attempts at making their small niche SP game into a MP variant. Like the Patrician series for example or Tropico 3. Big fail ! Servers are deserted.

But it would've been mighty cool, I agree.

How will HoMM VI compare ? Well, considering that King's Bounty (the original from 1991) is the official predecessor of HoMM I they don't really have to be compared. It's basically the same game/world/idea/system with, of course, variations. Wait and see I'd say.

[ShadowXOR]

I still think it would have been great for play with your friends or other random people. Will you be in the beta for the new Might and Magic? I'm thinking of pre-ordering to try it, then canceling it if it sucks.

Heck, if King's Bounty: Legions is good maybe I'll make a Facebook account just to play it only...

[Vulture]

No facebook game is awesome. Period. ^^