The year is coming to its end, but the developers from Unfrozen show no sign of slowing down with the news for Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era. Following the full reveals for the Dungeon (Dark Elves and Underground creatures) and Necropolis (Undead and Vampires) factions, the Olden Era team is back with the first glimpse at templates and the Random Map Generator, the true bread and butter of a Heroes game.
“In essence, a good map generator is one of the primary tools used by the community to ensure replayability of the older games in the series such as Heroes 3, Heroes 5 or Heroes 7. We can see that in cases where such a tool was missing, such as Heroes 4 and 6, which are far less popular than the other three and have a much smaller following as a result. Having a well-established and well-adjusted map generator means that players can play the game over and over again without feeling like they’re continuously running into the same routine.”
The Olden Era approach might seem similar to those of the previous games and focuses more on the quality of the maps vs their quantity. The developers have conducted interviews and gathered feedback on the topic, and received some interesting data. In their estimates, roughly 15% of the matches played were borderline unwinnable due to the randomly generated map being generally too unfavorable:
- Crossroads too far from the starting castle and with uneven distance for all players (e.g. one player has it within the reach of their town, another has to spend 2 turns to get there)
- Impossible to form a unified strike force to eliminate guards because the spawn zone doesn’t have enough external dwellings
- The main hero can’t be upgraded to a high enough level because not enough experience and attributes are available in the spawn zone
- Roads shifted to the edges of the zone, making significant parts of the area difficult to access due to terrain penalties
- Paths blocked by very strong neutral squads
I am sure you have been nodding along as you were reading through the list and remembering your own experiences. Thankfully, the developers have already come up with a plan on how to improve these painful points so that Olden Era doesn’t run into the same problems with Random Map Generator.
Olden Era Random Map Generator Features:
- Guarantees that paths won’t be blocked by a random enemy.
- Provides control over ease of accessibility of different objects. E.g. one could ask for a sawmill to be placed near the starting city, for a road between two cities or for a powerful item tucked away in a corner.
- Has a flexible system for mandatory content. The original has something similar for mines, and they are indeed the most obvious target for such a system — after all, the player needs a sawmill no matter what. But the devs from Unfrozen can and do use it for much more — dwellings, hero stats, visibility — you name it. It is a key instrument for designing fair map templates.
- Ensures that distance between the starting town and the higher value biomes (ex. treasure zones) is kept similar for all players.
- Allows you to select what types of Pandora Boxes can be found in each biome.
- Allows full control over what artifacts can and cannot show up. This also includes spells, units, heroes and skills.
- Lets you disable and enable biome types that will be generated (e.g. no lava)
- Mandatory objects will be customizable.
Check out the official Steam blog post to find out more, including the more technical details and some of the templates.
