History & Background
Once upon a time, there was a game called Heroes of Might and Magic, the third installment was one of the more popular games of the series. You managed a city building one structure at a time, recruiting your army. You had resources and could capture mines to supply your city with resources. Your army would follow your hero around, which could field magic and abilities augmenting your army.
The battles would take place on a hexagon grid, with each side positioning and taking turns. Battles were very tactical and took a bit of knowledge on how you would play to their strengths.
Hero’s Hour does the same thing, but one step further and lets the battles take place in real-time. Rather than stacking all the units into one sprite, each unit will move and act on its own. The term used to self-describe this is “auto-battler”. It works well.
I could never get into HMM3, the pacing was a little slow and no one took the time to teach me the mechanics of resources and city building. Either they were being lazy or they wanted an easy win. Usually, rules would follow after the loss, so they could explain what happened and draw from experience. The pacing was the largest issue for me.
Hero’s Hour Overview
Hero’s Hour is a turn-based strategy game where you manage and build up cities and level up your hero. The main gameplay loop is about augmenting and strengthening your armies. Your cities will generate new armies each week. You obtain resources from captured mines, so it starts pretty simple, but there is a hidden strategy here. This is done with magic or gear for the hero. Hero comes in two roles, front-line general that directly augments the army and casters, who cast buffs or attacking spells at the enemy.
From turn one, there are some important decisions to make. In most other games, turn one is pretty dull, this one starts you out of the gate looking to do battle, which you need to do.
Hero’s Hour has a good pace to it and a sense of scale. From the moment you start, there are decisions to make and things to accomplish. The battles strike a good balance between simplicity and depth. I would describe it as a puddle 50 feet deep. Easy to get into and room to explore. The game has many factions, all with their strengths and weaknesses, abilities, and styles. But you can ignore more of that as each faction has its version of a “type”, this makes it easy to pick up on what the unit is.
Options and annoyances
When you open up the game the menu doesn’t appear right away, instead, the music flares up and then the menu items appear below an endless battle above. The menu isn’t clickable or usable until it appears below, which can take a second. Not usually an issue unless you’re attempting to install mods. If you’re in window mode (which I prefer to use the rest of my computer) you’re unable to resize to the exact size you want but have to use pre-set resolutions.
Starting a game is pretty straightforward, but there are not a lot of options. It’s easier if you have a favorite faction you like to use. There are no maps for this game, instead, there are parameters. Each area will connect to the other using the simple template shown in the corner when you select it. Each area will have its biome and then connect using a gate or portal. A gate is fortified and can be upgraded, a portal takes up a single square and can be easily guarded by a hero. There’s a lot of RNG in the game, especially in the world generation. You can be shafted by mistakes in the game by RNG and bugs. Simply restart.
But, is it fun?
Oh, yea. The games don’t go on too long, usually, and your decisions can easily snowball. The AI is somewhat challenging, but once you know what you’re doing it can go from fun to a toxic nightmare in an instant. Despite those limitations, which are very difficult to even address for any game, it’s very fun.
Due to the nature of the game and how they change combat, there is an emphasis on lower-tier units being more effective in combat for the Gold investment. You could put a ratio to there, but generally, your lower-tier armies tend to do better. The exception there is against magic.
Tips
Skills
Some skills are more useful than others, for example, “Legion” is a skill that buffs all of your units adding health and damage directly and not as a percentage. This means that it favors small units, as the skill can more than double the units’ health.
While Legion is a game changer in terms of making your army powerful, none does it better than the “Devour” skill. This skill sacrifices your army in an area of your choosing. The bonuses from it are permanent. This quickly goes out of hand and can snowball.
If you ever run into a powerful caster, they can be incredibly annoying, just smashing apart your armies. You’ll want to take “Warding” as it directly helps keep your armies resistant to spells.
While not a skill, a very powerful/broken ability is the Infernal Gate from Piro. It takes a bit of sulfur to invest, but once it’s at a higher level, it makes any Hero or city extremely difficult to take on. Combine it with Legion or, worse, Devour, and you have S-tier broken abilities. It causes the enemy to commit everything to every battle.
Equipment built on your Hero can also matter. The longer the game goes on, the more equipment you’ll run into and get. I generally try to specialize the heroes in one direction or the other. Equipment gives stats to your Hero which also affects all of your units on the field. That means with powerful enough equipment, you can be much more effective. Legion and Devour for example is a skill that basically gives free equipment like stat bonuses. I’ve seen gear be the difference between defeat and victory, though it’s pretty rare that’s the only factor.
Starting Out
The first thing you’ll want to do is build a structure for your second-tier unit, then purchase all the armies you can. This will give your Hero just enough to start picking low-level fights.
Your area will be isolated to start with and hopefully all the basic resources. The Wood and Coal will be your first targets as they will be low-level, those resources are used in most structures.
Every week you get a new supply of armies and the Hero cost resets to 2500 Gold. Which you should grab every week. The heroes are random and may give you a chance to get a good one.
I have as many active “main” Heroes as I have paths out from my base being active, one for defense and the rest will just camp by resources to increase the output. The one on defense I usually consider the “understudy” which is doing neutral fights to level up and look for gear. The rest camping by resources will improve the output if only by a little, but that can add up.
It’s okay to take your time clearing out your starting area and developing your city. Because of the week mechanic, you don’t have to be completely on top of the most optimized path. There is a little leeway there. As long as you get your recruiting sometime in that week you’re fine. The most important thing is to minimize the losses of your army because once people start breaking out of their starting areas, those numbers will matter.
Breaking out
There’s no middle game with Hero’s Hour, just a beginning stage and a late stage. Once people break out of the starting area, it’s all out war.
There are several hero builds where the numbers are less important, like Legion and Devour. When hover your mouse over an army, you will see a display on how your army selected compares to the gold of the enemy. It’s straight-up value to value by the measure of gold, not actual combat ability. I’ve had powerful hero’s solo armies that say “Impossible”, but that was with a very powerful build.
When it comes to building out your hero, you need to keep in mind synergies. Skills that work together. The more skills that combine into something better, the further and more effective the Hero will be in theory.
What seems to be the most important factor is neutralizing what the enemy is doing. By skills, spells, or resources.
Overall
The game’s fun, I recommend playing it. There’s enough content and difficulty to keep someone entertained for a while. It’s pretty rare to find a strategy game that has a lot of natural balance to it while not being frustratingly so to experienced players.
