What races does the AI play best?

[Daynarr]

Actually, Fomoria seems to always come out as one of the top if not THE top nation when AI is playing it in my games. I usually play large SP games with 12+ opponents in it so there is usually lots of competition in them. I suggest you include Fomoria in yours too as AI with Fomoria seems to be much more consistent and stable then Niefielheim (another giant nation). Niefelheim usually expands fast but gets beaten later by other nations while Fomoria seems to keep its advantage. Well, that is what I had experienced so far.

[Edi]

Oh, I will include it, all right, just that not playing a lot of Dom3 at the moment. HoMM5 has stolen my attention for a while, though I still hang around here.

[Zeldor]

MA Ermor [always very strong]
MA Oceania
MA Machaka
MA Jotunheim [but it can also be quite weak]
MA Pangea

The worst AI nations, MA too:

MA Bandar Log
MA Caelum

But it really depends on scales. I am not fighting MA Pythium that has 10k people in capitol [Death 3, Misfortune 3!]

[Sombre]

Abysia always does really badly, yeah, I forgot to mention that. Seems they always tank and die horribly before any other non blood AI nation in my games.

[Zeldor]

MA Mictlan can be really nice if it doesn't die fast.

[Edratman]

Edi said:
Oh, I will include it, all right, just that not playing a lot of Dom3 at the moment. HoMM5 has stolen my attention for a while, though I still hang around here.

Is HoMM5 fun?

I loved 1 and 2 but didn't like 3 for reasons that I have long forgotten. (HoMM1 must have come out 15 to 20 years ago. Great game.) Because of that I skipped 4 and 5 entirely. I think I remember reading that it was put out by a different company than the first 4, but I've found that once a series goes starts going downhill, either books, games or movies for that matter, the slippage is seldom reversed.

[mathusalem]

the 4 was bad, because Heroes become units like others : you made armies of heroes and campaigns was very buggy.

I don't like the 5 too, candy eye but poor story, poor optimisation, and game very similar to the 3rd one without several nations.

[Edi]

I realize this post is drastically off topic, but since I was asked:

I like HoMM5 very much, it is very similar to HoMM3, which I also liked, though the skill system has been changed rather drastically and everything is 3D. Heroes 4 was crap out of the box, but the Heroes 4 Complete version (included both expansion packs and all patches) was a good game, though played very differently from its predecessors since heroes were on the battlefield like units and a lot of the concepts were stolen from AoW.

I don't think the story in the HoMM5 campaigns is a bad one at all. But if you don't like campaign play, I recommend buying the Tribes of the East expansion straight out. It's standalone, you don't need basic HoMM5 or the Hammers of Fate expansion and everything that was wrong with the heroes and skill system in the base game and HoF has been fixed in ToE. ToE also has the combo artifacts that were introduced to HoMM3 in the Shadow of Death expansion.

[Edratman]

I apologize for dragging the thread off topic.

Thank you for your replies. I'll probably try ToE, primarily because of my fondness for 1 and 2.

[vfb]

Ewierl said:

It's not that the AI is good with LA Ermor, it's that the AI is terrible at countering LA Ermor. You need simple but specific strategies to counter those undead hordes, and the AI never fields such strategies. So if you're playing a medium-to-large SP game against multiple AI opponents inclosing LA Ermor, Ermor is going to crush the other AIs handily, and expand unstoppably throughout the game, making it an extremely powerful foe unless you catch it very, very early.

It's good enough with LA Ermor to cast Burden of Time halfway through year 3 . And here I am on the other side of the world realizing it would be a really good plan to finish researching Enchant 5 before all my researchers die. I'm just hoping the AI doesn't use much of a boost to its globals.

I rarely play against LA Ermor in SP for this reason. It's just not much fun, there's no variety, since every other foe is dead, just you and vast wastelands full of skeletal hordes.

Vast wastelands full of skeletal hordes? I sometimes hang awake at night dreaming of vast wastelands full of skeletal hordes!