Each white dot is a player-controlled city. The number you see are the relative points (strength) of our neighbours. We were the red empire and at this time struggling to unify our territory. This probably represents about the first two or three weeks of a server as alliance borders start to grow and before "consolidation" starts to occur.
Top down view of an entire server during beta.
And the game doesn't really get interesting until then anyway.ĮDIT: Here are a couple of pics of how the game can develop over time. Back in beta you didn't have a hope of contributing meaningfully, materially or militarily, unless you had five or six cities and heroes to match. The 3 city / 3 hero limit is also a bit of a curious decision for Ubi, who never really did make up their minds about the monetization model. I do have some friends that have stuck with the game, so maybe it has evolved. The caveat here is that I haven't played the game in a fairly long time, but taking a look at it today, I don't see that much has changed with the fundamentals.
Resource sharing was also a bit of a nightmare to manage. I don't know if this has changed, but it can take a lot of time for the top two or three players in the guild chain of command to keep the wheels turning and everyone working in the same direction, especially during a protracted war. Which is a shame, because when you have a fiercely contested border at the intersection of three empires, and which is being fought over by 8 or 12 players with 5 or 6 cities each, things can be pretty fun to watch unfold.Īnother bothersome aspect, when I was playing anyway, is that almost everything had to be manually coordinated. At that highest level, PvP combat can require all-day monitoring and come down to a single 15 second timing window for troop movement. This is then exacerbated by a PvP combat model that has (had?) various tricks of timing that are within the rules but which can induce enemies to retreat, win cheap victories, etc. For the most part, your real personal "sphere of influence" is limited to about the nearest 8 players be they friend or foe. You can personally build-up a kick-ass kingdom and army, but unless you happen to be situated on the front lines of a war, there won't be much you can do to help. HOMMK is a potential nerd-rage drama-fest of the highest calibre.īut on the downside, the game can stagnate for most players just when the going gets good at the macro-scale of combat. Each guild has to pool resources and amass sufficient forces to be able to defend the long and expensive process of finding, producing or hijacking "Tears of Asha." Because control of territory is important, the political / diplomatic game of working to build multi-guild alliances, drawing up territorial treaties, negotiating the end to wars, keeping stronger powers in check, and efficiently dominating weaker powers is probably the best part of the game. Accordingly, the in-game politics can also be pretty excellent. Much success is achieved by controlling territory and contiguous borders in order to own and hold strategic resources, prime building locations, and to maintain trade routes between allies and guild members. The macro strategic game is also great, in theory. There are definitely multiple paths to greatness, little of it is rote, and you have real choices to make in order to advance efficiently and play effectively. Whether you are talking about game play in the short-term (days and weeks) or long-term (months), most of the aspects of HOMMK - kingdom development (micro and macro), economic activity, guild building, resource harvesting, map exploring, and the PvE combat model - are all generally much more interesting and strategically minded than other browser-based games. On the upside, its got some solid mechanics that rank it above other browser-based titles. Until recently, I gather.īottom line, as a browser-based strategy game, HOMMK both giveth and taketh away.
After five or six months of beta testing the game went public in France and the UK never to be heard from again on these North American shores. I was the leader of a guild that actually managed to win a round against 200-300 pretty dedicated opponents (a round back then took around two to three months as I recall). I played the hell out of HOMM Kingdoms last summer when it was in beta testing.
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