On Wednesday, October 7, 1998 at 9:00:00 AM UTC+2, Arkady Zilberberg wrote:

dar...@my-dejanews.com wrote:

In article <6ve6mr$goi$1...@mark.ucdavis.edu>,
"Spanky" <mha...@ucdavis.edu> wrote:

The main problem with diplomacy is that creatures never join you for free when you have it. They should work it so that you can have diplomacy but that creatures who might join you for free usually still can without you having to pay. Then suddenly, diplomacy might become a much better skill.

Au contraire; creatures *will* still join a diplomat for greater glory. All diplomacy does is adds in a second chance, to join for money instead.

Now, if diplomacy added to the greater glory chance instead, or started off with 100% of the enemy joining for a reducing price as diplomacy improves, that would be more useful.

Darryl.

In fact, the only drawback I noticed with diplomacy is that sometimes monsters
who would
otherwise flee, might offer a deal and attack if you refuse. I once had such situation and
didn't want to fight some Throng of Halflings with my Knight forces. I reloaded, bought off
all troops in my castles I could afford, and halfling fled since now I didn't have enough money
to buy them. I did have creatures join for free quite a few times even when I had Diplomacy
with that hero.
I remember seeing some nice article about Diplomacy in Xanadu on www.astralwizard.com -
you might want to go there and check by yourself. For me, Diplomacy is good because:
1) You get troops where you need them - with your main hero and not in some remote castle
which you can reach in a "mere" two weeks or so.
2) You might avoid an unwanted fight - helps against hordes of wolves, Grand Elves or Greater
Druids, several Genies, etc.
3) Even if you pay double price (with Advanced Diplomacy, for example) you avoid losses at
the same time thus often making the deal worthwhile.
4) If you have a squire following the main hero you can create some strong secondary army this
way and start picking off lesser monster stacks and building a good secondary hero.
5) Unless you are very lucky with double and +5 population increases you can't
have much more
troops than your opponent (especially if recruiting sites and neutral towns are
rare and resources
are evenly distributed). Diplomacy is very useful for changing this balance. Regards,
Arkady.

Hey guys, still playing Homm 2? This is a messager from 2021, that is, 23 years in the future! :O

Playing HOMM 2 right now, its a version played out of something called Dosbox, basically Dos-in-a-box, a program that emulates dos games in Windows, Windows 10 in this case, not 98!
Homm 2 was sold on a site called Good old Games, GOG.com, its gonna be another 10 years before its launch.

Cheers!

/ Erik

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