Mini-Analysis: Experience in Heroes of Might and Might series

In Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (And indeed in all the entries of the series I'm at all familiar with), players command Heroes whom lead armies to battle against other players commanding Heroes leading armies, while also stomping whatever random monsters happen to be in their way, and the Heroes in question gain experience for victorious battles, with enough experience leading to a level up, etc. (They get better the more fights they win, in short)

What's unusual about Heroes of Might and Magic 3 compared to many other games making use of an experience-to-level-up system, is that in most games the amount of experience a given foe provides upon its defeat is an arbitrary value designated for that individual type of enemy by the designers of the game. (So Red Goblins provide ten experience, and Green Goblins twelve experience, because the designers said so) In Heroes of Might and Magic 3, instead experience is directly correlated to the hit points of units; a unit with 40 HP provides 40 experience points, a unit with 10 HP provides 10 experience points, and 100 units with 10 HP apiece will, in total, provide 1,000 experience points.

This is really a terrible fit for the game's overall design.

The most obvious way it's a bad fit is the ability to upgrade units: every unit players may normally recruit/produce has both an un-upgraded form and an upgraded form, the latter of which is superior to the un-upgraded form in all ways except a price increase. The price increase is marginal in most cases; the basic Skeleton costs 50 gold a head, while its upgraded form (The Skeleton Warrior) costs 60 gold. Players can both purchase upgraded units directly and also upgrade existing units for the price differential. So an existing Skeleton costs only 10 gold to upgrade, which is an excellent deal for the improvement to its stats.

This is all well and good, but the problem is... only some units gain health when upgraded. Which means only some units provide additional experience in their upgraded form as compared to their base form. Even though they're all more dangerous in their upgraded form, and the general idea with experience is that more danger/difficulty equals more payoff in terms of experience ie there is a strong correlation between risk and reward.

So in Heroes of Might and Magic 3 the risk always goes up when facing upgraded forms, and yet the reward rarely does. Some units become dramatically more dangerous when upgraded without gaining any hit points at all, while other units gain quite a few hit points when upgraded while becoming only marginally more dangerous.

Making things worse is that the game makes use of a lot of typical trends for strategy games, which don't at all fit to this experience model.

The two extremes are the ranged units of the game and the 'mighty glacier' units. (Slow, tough, hard-hitting melee) Like in many strategy games, ranged units can strike from safety without fear of retaliation, but balance this out by having low hit points and otherwise just sucking in an even melee fight. Also like in many strategy games, the 'mighty glacier' units are incredibly slow, but incredibly tough; dangerous if they can get in close, but useless if picked apart from a distance. So in actual gameplay the ranged units are the most likely to inflict casualties on the player's forces, and the 'mighty glacier' units least likely to do so.

Yet it is the 'mighty glacier' units that will provide excellent experience, and the ranged units that provide terrible experience, precisely because their hit points directly determine the experience.

So the easiest targets are the most rewarding... and the least rewarding targets are the most dangerous.

This is particularly significant since players are expected to fight quite a few neutral, hostile forces before ever engaging in battle with other player forces, and are able to largely pick and choose their battles against these neutral enemies. Since a given fight with neutral, hostile forces is normally exactly one unit type (Or occasionally both forms of a unit eg Skeletons alongside Skeleton Warriors), the player can cleanly go after Zombies for massive, easy experience while ignoring Crossbowmen, unless they really want an item the Crossbowmen group is guarding.

Then we get into resource hoards guarded by neutral hostile enemies which, when cleared out, provide money and other needed resources, in addition to the experience the guards provide.

The Dwarven Treasury is ludicrously worthwhile to attack because Dwarves have astoundingly high hit points for their danger level, and even more astoundingly low speed, whereas the Cyclops Stockpile is not only guarded by a unit intended to be much more dangerous, but is also a powerful ranged attacker with bad hit points for its tier. I've actually managed to wipe out a Dwarven Treasury with no casualties while being so badly outnumbered I was half-expecting to lose my entire army! Not so for the Cyclops Stockpile.

In addition to all that, though Heroes level up and become ever more impressive leaders and spellcasters, they always provide a flat experience amount tacked on atop the experience their army gave; 500. It doesn't matter whether they just arrived on the battlefield that very moment, just to die, or have slain five hundred dragons just last turn, it doesn't matter whether they're completely naked or wearing the absolute best equipment in the game, and it doesn't matter whether they're carrying no spellbook at all or know every single spell in the game; a Hero is worth 500 experience. Done.

This is another way in which there is a huge disconnect between risk and reward, though at least in this case it simply encourages players to prey on weak enemies. (Which they'd want to do anyway)

To be fair, Heroes are a force multiplier more than anything else; the best Hero possible in the game leading exactly one instance of the worst unit in the game would still lose to the worst possible Hero in the game leading a mighty army, and it would probably be even more deranged to then grant this terrible Hero tens of thousands of experience for killing one peasant instantly... but then, Heroes qualities could instead have acted as experience multipliers, so that the amount of experience they provide is proportionate to both the hero's strength but also to the army's strength.

I'm frankly kind of amazed the developers persisted in using this system for at least three games in a row without even trying to normalize HP to a unit's overall threat level.

There is one discrepancy that actually makes sense to me: attacking and successfully taking a fortified city, in spite of the many advantages offered to the defenders of fortified cities, provides no experience reward beyond the army/Hero experience values... which is fine, because cities are sources of troops, money, special resources etc. In the case of cities, the payoff isn't supposed to be in experience.

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