Players can see the wagons on the adventure map itself and check their arrival time on the town's hire screen. Once hired the units will automatically travel to the town that ordered them and become part of the garrison there. Now players can actually use the hire screen in their settlements to recruit units from distant outposts and even other castles. Managing all this by hand wasn't particularly difficult but it was definitely time consuming and, let's face it, a real pain in butt. In Heroes V, players were required to send heroes from outpost to outpost recruiting small bands of units and then rallying them together in one spot. The caravans make a welcome appearance in the expansion. Being the pig-headed sorts that we are, we fought our way through a few of those groups and discovered that the only thing they were protecting was the designers' inability to come up with compelling a reason to place them there in the first place. To keep you from advancing into areas you're not supposed to explore, the designers thought it best to simply drop a few thousand enemy units in the nearest chokepoint. The same is true for the ridiculous number of barricades and gates found on the maps. The real reversals and upsets in the campaign are all so tightly scripted that they often seem more like the game is being unfair than challenging. It's not uncommon to encounter an enemy stronghold guarded by a single peasant or to watch an enemy hero completely ignore opportunities to seize areas you've left unguarded. Your enemies seem overly passive, even on the harder settings. The same can be said of the game's sometimes-spotty AI. This makes the campaign more a test of persistence than strategy. Rather than requiring the players to find inventive ways to accomplish their goals, most missions in Hammers of Fate simply force players to scour the entire map and eliminate every last army they encounter. Not surprisingly, most of the missions are long and not very interesting. What's the point of making an expansion and not even giving players access to the new content right away? We could understand having a few Haven missions to provide some narrative continuity here but including five long missions that feel just like they were tacked on to the end of the original game is just stupid. No, instead you spend another six hours trudging away with the same Haven units you were playing with in the last game. The first entire chapter doesn't even let you get your hands dirty with the game's new faction.

To begin with, the campaign is divided into three chapters of five missions each. Sadly, the campaign for Hammers of Fate is a bit dull. Sure, there are some new items and heroes but there are no new abilities or units for any of the other groups to make use of. Unfortunately, there's really nothing new for any of the other factions. As with the other factions' magic system, a wide range of skill upgrades give your hero the chance to increase the effectiveness or decrease the cost of these runes. Rather than spending mana points to cast their spells, dwarves will spend resources to grant bonuses to their own units. They're a little tougher overall, a little slower and not quite as versatile in ranged combat but, as with the armies of the other factions, you can downplay their weaknesses by adjusting the proportion of troops in a given army.ĭwarves have their own magic system based on runes. In all the Dwarves seem to fit the overall pattern of most other factions. Throw in resistance to lightning attacks just for good measure and you've got a unit that's worth their weight in gold. Even better, they can teleport around the battlefield, giving them a mobility that seems at odds with their size. These massive warriors carry powerful axes in their left hands and can use their flaming right hands to launch all manner of lightning attacks at their enemies. By far our favorite of the Dwarven units are the Warlords.

Heroes of might and magic v review