I'm very happy to have found this community but I never modded the game before so I'm curious as to the Stormheim units and Kheroes. What are they and why does everyone seem to play with them? Thanks!

Hi Jerzul,

The Stormheim units were created a long time ago (2001 era). They were created to fill in the gaps in the unit skills (ie 1 turn curse unit Banshee for example) and to add more variety to the game because at that time only a few units were being used by players. The Stormheim units meant that a lot more choices were opened up in terms of what units players could put in their army sets.

The KHeroes were created by me a couple of years later when the same problem arose with the heroes. Only it was worse because there were only 15 heroes and only about 4-5 were viable because they were over powered. With the help of many of the top players in the game I created the KHeroes to balance out the over and under powered heroes so that any of the 15 heroes would be usable with the right armies.

KGB

Thanks KGB.

I'm guessing the discussions surrounding the creation of the KHeroes was lost when the site was transferred. Otherwise I would love to hear the reasoning behind the choices and what 4-5 heroes everyone considered the best options.

I wasn't the best gamer when I started playing this game in the 90s. I always thought that the General was the best hero, but I imagine I might be very wrong.

Jerzul,

Your hunch is right. The General is actually one of the worst heroes and was never used in human vs human games.

The top 5 heroes in 1.02 were Wizard, Summoner (clearly top 2) then Thief, Barbarian and Ranger/Shaman/Priest (arguable who was 5th).

The top 2 were because they possessed Teleport allowing you to zip around the board and complete Medium quests (the ones that give all the gold/allies/mana rewards). The Summoner also brought the ability to summon vast numbers of armies cheaply. The Wizard heroism spell gave +5 Leadership/Morale very easily (easier than General) and +12 group move.

Thief and Barbarian were used for their speed (1.5X movement) and cheap Siege (Thief) or Chaos (Barbarian).

The General looks good when you only play the AI. But in human games he's SO slow that by the time he gets anywhere level wise the hereos above will far outclass him and have gathered so many armies, gold, mana and other stuff from quests that it's game over.

KGB

KGB,

Yeah, I have been noticing how SLOW the General is in my current games. I ended up giving him the movement upgrades for the first two levels! So how did KHero make the General better and the Wizard/Summoner more balanced?

We can all agree that the Warrior was the worst hero though, right?

Jerzul,

Those movement upgrades show how bad he is because you really want to be giving him Leadership for 1 point or Morale once you have Leadership at +4 (normally get the last +1 from an item).

Nope, the Warrior wasn't the worst. His renouned skill is actually quite useful at +5 for very little XP (22). All those mercenaries really add up fast especially if you put something good in slot 3.

The worst heroes by far were the Vampire, Bard and Paladin. All 3 leveled up REALLY slowly and they had no easy way to increase their stack movement. Worst of all their spells & skills were too expensive (or useless).

You can go here and see the KHeros stats. It's a bit misleading about the green because that green shows only some of the changes from the original stats because it took a couple of iterations to get things right.
www.warlorders.com/warlords3-dlr/statistics/dlr-k4-heroes

Changes included changing XP level costs, reigning in spell powers, increasing spell costs etc. Changing which skills a hero has and/or skill costs.

They aren't all perfectly balanced but there are no more 'must have' heroes and you can make a case for using all of them if you design the right army set + other heroes to go with them.

KGB