Heroes of Might and Magic VI is a War Crime

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Post by K »

I'd post the patch notes from just the May 2013 patch of HoMM VI, but that document is eight pages long even though each issue that was resolved only gets one sentence or less.

Obviously, the game had major quality issues when it shipped. After patching, it's a mildly enjoyable game in the turn-based fantasy army genre that compares well against other games in the genre.

Compared against a strategy/RPG hybrid like King's Bounty or other strategy games, it's a good deal at $14.99 and a poor deal at $49.99.

Final recommendation: Not a "war crime," but wait for a sale offering at least 75% off.
Last edited by K on Tue Jul 23, 2013 2:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Zinegata wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:1. Single Player Only.
2. Limited Replayability due to lack of random map.
3. Inability to choose your faction until late in the game.
4. Kind of stupid character advancement system.
Crossworlds has a couple of extra campaigns where you aren't pidgeon-holed into playing the Princess; and it has an editor.

That said I haven't really seen anyone work magic on that editor yet to create a demon-based campaign...
The Arena campaign is on the right track, you get a lot of customization available with only a few battles under your belt. Unfortunately, it's short. The whole campaign is what, 20 battles long? They are huge, epic battles full of crazy, but mini campaign is mini. The Defender of the Crown campaign is possibly even tighter, with each playthrough giving you a couple of random cities to recruit troops out of. But it's even shorter.

What we want is a game where you can come right out swinging with a Dwarf Army or a Lizard Army or whatever, but which still has an actual game to play after that.

As for mods, some of them are pretty neat. The "Adventure" mod gives me pretty much exactly what I want out of a mod: a modest pile of extra content to wade through. I really like their Champion unit (a Cavalier in gold armor as a level 5 unit with appropriate stats). But it's not that extensive.

The problem is that the modding community is mostly Russian. There's apparently a mod that adds a whole new island and like undead T Rexes and shit, but it's made in Russian. There's a Heroes 3 Mod community that is in Russian as well. I appreciate what they are doing, and would even like to help, but I don't Russian.

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Post by Ikeren »

I really liked HoMM2. Are any of them better than that?
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Post by Whipstitch »

If you liked 2, you'll like 3. It has more units, spells and factions but they didn't really try reinventing the wheel.
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Post by Zinegata »

HoMM4 is also pretty good, albeit heroes are now also units in the battlefield.
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Post by K »

Looks like King's Bounty is on sale on gog.com right now.
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Post by Orion »

Whipstitch wrote:If you liked 2, you'll like 3. It has more units, spells and factions but they didn't really try reinventing the wheel.
Also it's way prettier. It's one of the best-looking strategy games I have ever played.
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Post by Zinegata »

K wrote:Looks like King's Bounty is on sale on gog.com right now.
It is the duty of every HoMM fan to buy it then :biggrin:
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Huh. It looks like I already have a copy of KB:AP from an indie bundle. Never installed it because the cover art sent up warning flags. So it's actually good? Let's give it a shot.

Is Mage a viable starting class for new players?
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Post by Whipstitch »

Mages own, yeah. Sometimes they have a little trouble in the mid-game depending on the spells you can locate but otherwise they're my favorite.
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Post by Username17 »

Crossworlds is pretty much exactly Armored Princess with some minor expansions that are pretty much across the board improvements. It adds a few units and unit abilities that make the Dwarves and Orcs a lot more interesting to play and fight against. So if you are presented with a choice between playing Armored Princess and Crossworlds, it's no contest: play Crossworlds. That having been said, Armored Princess is a fun game with a decent campaign.

Mages take a while to get off the ground. However, their late game unique super skill lets them take more turns than other characters, which is exactly as badass as that sounds.

If you want to get a no-loss victory against some of the late game bosses, it is very difficult to do that without being a Mage spamming illusion copies of Paladins.

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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

If anyone was thinking about picking up a copy of King's Bounty, all three games are part of this week's Humble Weekly Sale.

http://www.humblebundle.com/weekly
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Post by K »

Avoraciopoctules wrote:If anyone was thinking about picking up a copy of King's Bounty, all three games are part of this week's Humble Weekly Sale.

http://www.humblebundle.com/weekly
How long does it take to get keys? I just paid and it seems that they have no records that I paid despite Amazon having records that the transaction went through.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Weird. I just tried buying it with Amazon and got an error message. I tried again with Paypal and it worked instantly. Want me to send you a gift URL?
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Post by K »

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Weird. I just tried buying it with Amazon and got an error message. I tried again with Paypal and it worked instantly. Want me to send you a gift URL?
Thanks, but not needed. It took some time and a support ticket, but it came through.

Steam has me a bit spoiled these days. Instant access is too easy.
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Post by Starmaker »

Avoraciopoctules wrote:If anyone was thinking about picking up a copy of King's Bounty, all three games are part of this week's Humble Weekly Sale.

http://www.humblebundle.com/weekly
BTW, I strongly recommend that you direct all the $$ to charity/HIB itself. 1C may not be a huge evil corp like Apple/Google/IBM/Microsoft/Sony, but they more than make up for their smaller size by being as evil as possible for an IT company.
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Post by Istred »

Starmaker wrote:1C may not be a huge evil corp like Apple/Google/IBM/Microsoft/Sony, but they more than make up for their smaller size by being as evil as possible for an IT company.
A thousand times this.
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Post by Zinegata »

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Huh. It looks like I already have a copy of KB:AP from an indie bundle. Never installed it because the cover art sent up warning flags. So it's actually good? Let's give it a shot.

Is Mage a viable starting class for new players?
I would suggest Paladin for most beginners, as you get a lot of options and the difficulty curve is smoother. Plus, her outfit is much less striperrific.
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Post by TiaC »

So, HoMM 3 definitely has the most options and customization, but what would you take from the other versions if you were in charge of HoMM VII?

In my opinion, Heroes V had a better initiative system as well as a better skill system.
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Post by Longes »

FrankTrollman wrote:There's a Heroes 3 Mod community that is in Russian as well. I appreciate what they are doing, and would even like to help, but I don't Russian.
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Frank, saying there is a HoMM3 mod in Russian is such an understatement... There is HoMM 3.5 "In the Wake of Gods", which is basicly a whole other game.
It has:
  • New monster tier
    Religion
    Tons of new neutral monsters
    Castle destruction
    Archer towers leveling
    New combat options
    Army leveling up
    Features from later games
    New artifacts
    Script engine
    Six new cities
    etc.
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Post by Username17 »

TiaC wrote:So, HoMM 3 definitely has the most options and customization, but what would you take from the other versions if you were in charge of HoMM VII?

In my opinion, Heroes V had a better initiative system as well as a better skill system.
Heroes V initiative is annoying. Most of what I would take is from the King's Bounty series, because that is really the part of the series that has moved forwards rather than sideways and backwards over the last dozen years. That being said, there are ideas to take from the latter games in the Heroes line, even VI.

From IV, the big take home would be putting your leaders on the board as a unit. Not mandatorily as it is in Heroes IV, but as an option. It's kind of insulting when you have a single boar and you are defeated by five halflings or whatever, and if you had the option to deploy your hero, that kind of bullshit wouldn't happen. But in the really big battles, heroes are a liability and just sit there chugging resurrection potions, and it's all stupid. So having the option to not deploy your hero should also be there. Also the troop mailing system was slightly more cumbersome than it needed to be, but was definitely in the right direction. Heroes VI troop mailing was too extreme, but it seems clear that a happy medium could exist.

Heroes IV skills are too numerous, it takes seriously one hundred skill ups to fill out a hero. That is fucking stupid. But the basic idea of having skills that can let you take secondary skills was a good one. It's just that having five levels of each of three secondary skills is too fucking many. Three levels of primary skills and binary secondary skills would be plenty. We really don't need a bullshit complicated Heroes V "skill wheel" nor do we need an extremely abusable and deterministic "buy whatever skills and spells you want, so you always end up with the same good ones in mostly the same order" crap that Heroes VI gave us. Just Heroes IV skills with less granularity would be pretty much perfect.

Heroes VI is a genuinely bad game. Strategy is almost non-existent and one-true-wayism runs rampant. Also it's amazingly unbalanced with not even a token effort to make the factions that are better at loss reduction be anything other than better overall and hilariously fucked up math. That being said, there are a few good ideas buried in there. The first is having tagged dwellings send weekly growth to the imperial army. That means that we don't have to wander around re-tagging dwellings every week, which is a major time savor and reduction of micromanagement. The Imperial Army depository could have been a good idea, but it went too far. Having troops be in the castle dwellings they start in and get gradually transferred to the imperial army reserves would have been better. That way, you wouldn't always literally have all your army in your main army and there would still be reason to field armies elsewhere.

Heroes VI Warcries were potentially interesting, though their unlimited use was problematic. See Rage, below. Even more importantly, VI came up with the idea of having the basic structural buildings (fort improvements, marketplaces) have actual economic effects, leading you to actually build them. They fucked that up, because everything in VI was fucked up, but the core idea is solid. Giving bonuses to troop production for building higher level forts does make you actually build those fort upgrades voluntarily. Giving marketplaces an income generation made those things valuable as well. That probably should have been taken further, getting rid of the old "village hall, town hall, your mom's hall" progression and replacing it with various city improvements like marketplaces and ports that came with income and could be built in different orders would be cooler.

I honestly can't think of a single thing in Heroes V that I would actually want to copy moving forward. It's a much better game than Heroes VI is, but only to the extent that it is more like Heroes III and Heroes IV. Even item sets and alternate unit advancements were pioneered in Heroes III expansions.

Now, the latter installments of King's Bounty I think are the way and the future for most aspects of combat and troop recruitment. First of all, Rage. Rage is a separate mana total that you spend on a separate list of spells that are generally more "fighty themed." Unlike mana, your Rage starts each day at zero (barring a secondary skill that lets you keep some while resting), and you gain it during battle when troo'ps get injured or die on either side. This would give "War Cries" and "Spells" a sufficiently different system to make might and magic heroes play differently, without making either clearly inferior (in most versions of the game, Might Heroes are unquestionably superior in the late game).

Secondly: Leadership. This is key on several levels. Basically, heroes in KB have limits on how many points worth of troops they can lead in each stack. More powerful troops cost more points per unit. This in turn means that strategies where you take losses from time to time are not automatically retarded, as your long term production of units will outstrip what you can actually put into your armies by an amount that allows some non-zero amount of attrition without permanently crippling you. It also means that all-star armies aren't restricted to high level units and archers like in most Heroes games, as lower level units inherently come in larger numbers even in the late game. Also it means that you can unironically use unupgraded troops alongside upgraded troops because when you field Hydras instead of (or in addition to) Chaos Hydras, the stack of Hydras will have more units in it. So no longer will stacks of Minotaur Kings be larger than stacks of Minotaurs. You can even have a secondary skill that allows you to have two stacks of the same unit count their leadership separately - considerably increasing the number of possible army configurations.

Thirdly, every unit should have special abilities. This is something that the later King's Bounty games do totally right. Even basic crap neutral units like snakes and wolves have activatable special abilities. And that makes for a much richer tactical environment and a much richer army composition minigame. The fact that Engineers boost droids makes the Repair Droid/ Guard Droid/ Engineer triple into a module you can plop into non-Dwarven armies for good effect. The fact that even simple units like elven hunters have the ability to fire off a high powered shot every few rounds means that they lose less from alternating moving and shooting than they otherwise would.

Further, I think that any Heroes title that ships with less than eight cities is insulting. HoMM3 had eight fucking cities on release, there's absolutely no excuse for having less than that. Frankly, I'd go with at least 9 and probably 12. A new edition is supposed to be better, not "some neat ideas and half the content" like all the Ubisoft offerings.

But the bottom line is that the series should go back to the Leadership caps it had in the first game, and have the upgraded and unupgraded creatures appear side by side to recruit for different gold and leadership costs out of the dwellings. What should be stressed is the ability to make many different kinds of armies and for there to be numerous local maximums of effectiveness. The one-true-wayism of Heroes VI was offensive, and I think it is simply unacceptable for a new game to not have army building be an actual thing.

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Post by TiaC »

FrankTrollman wrote:Heroes V initiative is annoying.
Why is this? I prefer it to the old initiative=speed because it allows for units like gargoyles who can cross the map while still going last. It also means that fast creatures actually go more often.

Also the troop mailing system was slightly more cumbersome than it needed to be, but was definitely in the right direction. Heroes VI troop mailing was too extreme, but it seems clear that a happy medium could exist.
Heroes V just went with free caravans in the later expansions. So not the instant gratification of VI, but a bit simpler than IV. Something like that, then?
Just Heroes IV skills with less granularity would be pretty much perfect.
I think we agree there more or less. Sub-skills could be dropped to single level to allow them to be new options rather than something else to max.
The first is having tagged dwellings send weekly growth to the imperial army. That means that we don't have to wander around re-tagging dwellings every week, which is a major time savor and reduction of micromanagement.
Also something that first appeared in heroes V expansions.
Even more importantly, VI came up with the idea of having the basic structural buildings (fort improvements, marketplaces) have actual economic effects, leading you to actually build them. They fucked that up, because everything in VI was fucked up, but the core idea is solid. Giving bonuses to troop production for building higher level forts does make you actually build those fort upgrades voluntarily. Giving marketplaces an income generation made those things valuable as well. That probably should have been taken further, getting rid of the old "village hall, town hall, your mom's hall" progression and replacing it with various city improvements like marketplaces and ports that came with income and could be built in different orders would be cooler.
Perhaps have the town hall just put a cap on build level? Without a city hall you can't build the highest tier of buildings? It'd be nice if by combining this with Leadership it could make sense to leave towns at low levels more.
Now, the latter installments of King's Bounty I think are the way and the future for most aspects of combat and troop recruitment. First of all, Rage. Rage is a separate mana total that you spend on a separate list of spells that are generally more "fighty themed." Unlike mana, your Rage starts each day at zero (barring a secondary skill that lets you keep some while resting), and you gain it during battle when troops get injured or die on either side. This would give "War Cries" and "Spells" a sufficiently different system to make might and magic heroes play differently, without making either clearly inferior (in most versions of the game, Might Heroes are unquestionably superior in the late game).
I like it. Having magic that scaled at the same rate as army size would be nice too.
Secondly: Leadership. This is key on several levels. Basically, heroes in KB have limits on how many points worth of troops they can lead in each stack. More powerful troops cost more points per unit. This in turn means that strategies where you take losses from time to time are not automatically retarded, as your long term production of units will outstrip what you can actually put into your armies by an amount that allows some non-zero amount of attrition without permanently crippling you. It also means that all-star armies aren't restricted to high level units and archers like in most Heroes games, as lower level units inherently come in larger numbers even in the late game. Also it means that you can unironically use unupgraded troops alongside upgraded troops because when you field Hydras instead of (or in addition to) Chaos Hydras, the stack of Hydras will have more units in it. So no longer will stacks of Minotaur Kings be larger than stacks of Minotaurs. You can even have a secondary skill that allows you to have two stacks of the same unit count their leadership separately - considerably increasing the number of possible army configurations.
This sounds amazing, it should solve many problems by itself. However, I would add that unrecruited heroes should scale in level with time so that they aren't rendered irrelevant.


Further, I think that any Heroes title that ships with less than eight cities is insulting. HoMM3 had eight fucking cities on release, there's absolutely no excuse for having less than that. Frankly, I'd go with at least 9 and probably 12. A new edition is supposed to be better, not "some neat ideas and half the content" like all the Ubisoft offerings.
I'm less concerned with this. I think you could get similar strategic depth by giving each town a few units that aren't enabled each game. If a town has a total of 10 types of units, but only 7 are enabled each match then strategy must change from game to game.
But the bottom line is that the series should go back to the Leadership caps it had in the first game, and have the upgraded and unupgraded creatures appear side by side to recruit for different gold and leadership costs out of the dwellings. What should be stressed is the ability to make many different kinds of armies and for there to be numerous local maximums of effectiveness. The one-true-wayism of Heroes VI was offensive, and I think it is simply unacceptable for a new game to not have army building be an actual thing.

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I would also allow for a range of Leadership coefficients so that there would be games where players could field a large number of maxed heroes at the same time.
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Post by name_here »

IV had the ability to deploy an army that did not contain a hero for your bullshit troop shuffling, which I feel should be kept in.
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Post by TiaC »

As long as it doesn't lead to 50+ 1 unit "armies" running around to grab resources and flag dwellings.
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Post by Username17 »

TiaC wrote:Why is this? I prefer it to the old initiative=speed because it allows for units like gargoyles who can cross the map while still going last. It also means that fast creatures actually go more often.
Creatures have a separate speed and move stat in Heroes IV and King's Bounty (in KB it is called move and initiative). Hell, if all you were concerned with was slow creatures being able to fly across the map, flying creatures were able to move to any part of the board regardless of speed in Heroes 0, 1, & 2. The only new idea that Heroes V brought was having units refresh actions on a cooldown schedule so as to make spell durations and the effects of wait actions hard to eyeball. That wasn't a good thing. That was stupid. Durations are a really important part of the game, especially the duration on counterattack refresh, which people fucking need to be able to fucking plan around.
TiaC wrote:Heroes V just went with free caravans in the later expansions. So not the instant gratification of VI, but a bit simpler than IV. Something like that, then?
I think that instead things should be set up with Heroes VI's imperial army reserves that you can recruit from out of any castle that is set up to have an imperial recruitment post. And that local troops would bleed into the imperial reserves at some rate if the town had reached the appropriate level of administration. So you could recruit minotaurs now in whatever dungeon their dwelling is in, or you could wait a while and recruit them wherever you wanted. But you wouldn't have to select specific points to mail them to ahead of time because that's annoying micromanagement that makes you remember what the different cities are named and collapses completely when the random city name generator inevitably names two cities "Lovendon."

I think the Imperial Army Reserves could be expanded somewhat, so that your Capital put some national troops directly into the reserves each week for each city you owned - so that a Dungeon nation would always benefit from capturing towns of any type without actually pulling in the strategyless bullshit that was Heroes VI city conversion.
TiaC wrote:Perhaps have the town hall just put a cap on build level? Without a city hall you can't build the highest tier of buildings? It'd be nice if by combining this with Leadership it could make sense to leave towns at low levels more.
In Heroes VI, each fort level adds to your per week unit production. And since all cities are converted to one type, and the number of units that cities make is exactly equal to the number of stacks your hero can lead, every single city always builds all the fort upgrades. It succeeds at getting you to build the arrow towers, but it certainly doesn't make it much of a strategic choice. My preference would be to have the fort upgrades replace the dwelling upgrades entirely. So you can recruit Medusas if you have the Garden of Stilled Voices, and you can recruit Minotaurs if you have the Labyrinth. But if you have a Garden and a Level 3 Fort you can also recruit Medusa Queens, and if you have a Labyrinth and a Level 3 Fort you can also recruit Minotaur Kings. So you wouldn't necessarily feel you had to build fort upgrades in every captured city.

Income generating buildings are a different story. You're going to build all the fucking income buildings because in the long run they have a negative cost. The only way I think you could introduce dynamic choice into their production is to make each income building do something in addition to merely producing income and allow players to build them in different order. Building a marketplace improves your resource exchange rates and generates income, a port allows you to build ships and also generates income, a foundry lets you build siege engines and also generates income, and so on.
TiaC wrote:I think you could get similar strategic depth by giving each town a few units that aren't enabled each game. If a town has a total of 10 types of units, but only 7 are enabled each match then strategy must change from game to game.
I was thinking more like 13 units, which is easy enough to do when Troglodytes and Troglodyte Hoplites are actually different units that can be fielded side by side. Heroes VI nominally had 14 units per city, but it was all bullshit because the upgraded types fully replaced the unupgraded ones. Having 13 real units that you chose 7 of for your army would allow for 1716 differently composed armies even before you factor in the secondary skill that lets you have two different stacks or armies composed of troops from two different cities. Such a game could have more strategic depth out of one city than all of Heroes V or VI (especially VI, which only had one final army per city and only five cities).

But it's more than just wanting strategic depth, it's also about wanting the kind of crazy content that the previous games were known for. Heroes 3 had eight cities when it came out, and it really feels pretty insulting when new versions have less than that. Hitting eight isn't even particularly difficult, the current King's Bounty games have: Castle Humans, Barbarians, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Lizards, Demons, Undead, and several importantly different flavors of "neutrals" (such as Dragons and Animals).

Making a new city isn't even terribly difficult. For fuck's sake it has less than twenty units, and at least four of the units are probably the unupgraded and upgraded forms of the basic race of the city with a different job. You could totally fill out a faction with as little as two actual fantasy monsters (see: Castle. Five different flavors of humans and their upgraded forms plus Griffons and Angels).

And there's no shortage at all of races to build a city around, over and above the fact that there's no particular limit to how many cities you could throw out with the basic race being humans with a different culture and unit set (see: Castle & Barbarian humans in King's Bounty or Castle and Tower Humans in Heroes 3). Heroes of Might & Magic has at various times thrown down: Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Goblins, Orcs, Gnomes, Halflings, Sprites, Gargoyles, Lizards, Gnolls, Gremlins, Troglodytes, Dark Elves, Imps, Snake People, Skeletons, and Centaurs - while there is also certainly room for Bugs, Atlanteans, Robots, Beastmen, Spirits, Nezumi, Vanara, and Giant Frogs based on Might and Magic lore. And while in Heroes 0 the Gnome, Elf, Dwarf, and Sprite were all in the same city type ("Type C" it was called), there's ample precedent for making them all the basic race of different cities.

All in all, asking for 8 cities simply isn't onerous at all, and merely a sign of good faith. To see how simple this is, let's put twenty below the spoiler:
Castle
Race: Humans
Theme: Medieval European troops + Heraldic monsters
Fantasy Units: Griffon, Wyvern, Angel

Stronghold
Race: Orcs
Theme: Viking Barbarians who are Orcs
Fantasy Units: Valkyries, Winter Wolves, Trolls, Jotun

Sanctuary
Race: Nezumi
Theme: Weeaboo
Fantasy Units: Ki Rin, Ogres, Kamaitachi, Tengu, Kappa

Teocalli
Race: Lizards
Theme: Aztec Lizard people.
Fantasy Units: Couatl, Onaqui, Ozelotl, Basilisk, Tyranosaur

Foundry
Race: Dwarves
Theme: Steam Punk Dwarves
Fantasy Units: Golems, Droids, Cyclopses, Cave Worms

Hideout
Race: Gnolls
Theme: North African Pirates, and also Ghost Pirates
Fantasy Units: Ghosts, Mummies, Scarabs, Ammit

Necropolis
Race: Humans and Undead
Theme: Eastern European Vampire Kingdom
Fantasy Units: Skeletons, Zombies, Vampires, Liches, Bone Dragons

Dungeon
Race: Troglodytes
Theme: Greek Cave Monsters
Fantasy Units: Minotaurs, Medusae, Harpy, Cerberi, Tartarian

Bazaar
Race: Gnomes
Theme: Pseudo-Arabic Sultanate
Fantasy Units: Rocs, Simmurgh, Manticore, Ghouls, Phoenix

Tower
Race: Gremlins
Theme: Wizard Academy
Fantasy Units: Gargoyles, Winged Monkeys, Scarecrows, Slimes, Iron Dragons

Temple
Race: Sprites
Theme: Buddhist lore.
Fantasy Units: Naga, Garuda, Vanara, Nymphs, Loxxo.

Asylum
Race: Frog People
Theme: Madness and Chaos
Fantasy Units: Hydras, Chimerae, Shoggoths, Beholders, Invisible Stalkers

Hive
Race: Bug People
Theme: El Hazard + Nausicaa
Fantasy Units: Swarms, Doom Beetles, Remorhaz, Umber Hulks, Scorpion Beasts

Inferno
Race: Human Cultists & Imps
Theme: Generic Fiery Demon World
Fantasy Units: Horned Demons, Efreet, Succubi, Mariliths, Arch Devils

Shire
Race: Halflings
Theme: Pastoral Halflings with enchanted farm animals
Fantasy Units: Cockatrices, Gorgons, Glow Sows, Golden Rams, Unicorns

Bastille
Race: Dark Elves
Theme: Spiders and Prisons
Fantasy Units: Phase Spiders, Nightmares, Driders, Black Dragon

Haven
Race: Elves
Theme: Generic Elven Fantasy Kingdom
Fantasy Units: Pegasi, Ents, Centaurs, Green Dragon

Fortress
Race: Humans, Lycanthropes, and Beastmen
Theme: Animal Totemism
Fantasy Units: Werewolves, Goatmen, Behemoths, Displacer Beasts, Cave Bears, Thunder Birds

Conflux
Race: Elementals
Theme: The Four Elements with a vaguely Turkic architectural sense
Fantasy Units: Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and Magic Elementals. Plus Weirds and Genies.

Sunken City
Race: Fish People
Theme: Polynesian Shark Men plus D&D inspired Atlantis
Fantasy Units: Kraken, Yuan-Ti, Mind Flayers, Sirens, Pooka


Now obviously, you'd have to use non-copyrighted terms at times. Mind Flayers need to be Soul Suckers, Ents need to be Dendroids, and so on. But it's really not hard to populate 20 cities or 30 cities in the Heroes style, if that's what you want to do.
-Username17
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