Heroes 5.5 RC16 update with all 12 campaigns – The Campaign Release

Author: Liso1 October 7, 2022 1 Comment

Today Heroes 5.5 team release the update a lot of you have been waiting for, the new complete version of Heroes 5.5 with all 12 campaigns. The new revised campaigns will have much better gameplay than the old RC13 release, it will not only include all gameplay updates of RC14 and RC15, but also include many unique improvements to the campaigns themselves.

Heroes 5.5 RC16 changelog:

• 5000+ new mixed neutral stacks in the campaign instead of boring single stack fights.
• A million bugs in the campaign have been fixed (ok not that much but far too much to go to the trouble of mentioning them all),
• All campaign scripts are updated for use with the new AI, never play the campaign with _Utility.exe file, this will cause AI movement bugs.
• level caps are less strict and go up to around 40 in the last mission mostly.
• All your equipped artifacts will carryover between missions except movement artifacts, skillbooks, gold bags, wands, scrolls and the tear of asha. Unequipped artifacts will be lost.
• Trading posts can sell you mana potions and movement potions.
• campaign will have beautiful new graphics from RC15 (for those updating from RC13)
• campaign is adjusted for new standard battlefield size of 14×12 squares, but features like town conversion, governance, dimension doors and mine control are off, since they conflict with the original storytelling and objectives.
• The AI doesn’t cheat on any difficulty in campaign mode, but may have predefined larger start armies as in original game. Since the new AI concentrates power better it is recommended to be careful with the difficulty setting as this combined with mixed neutrals will make the game harder than vanilla, but still very doable on normal difficulty.

Playing the campaign from old saves can cause bugs because skills and artifacts carryover will not match, if you want to swap from another playthrough do it between the end of vanilla campaign and start of HOF campaign or between the end of the HOF campaign and the start of the TOE campaign.

Known issues (will be fixed in a future update)
-at the start of markal campaign a wrong cutscene from previous campaign plays, after that the right cutscene plays.
-narxes makes a T-pose in one of the cutscenes (this may never be fixable as the file seems missing from TOE)

balance finetuning included in this release

balanced shatters to be less hard counter
-lowered detain and weak magic school perks to 20%
-lowered corrupt magic school perks to 33%
-back to the void does double damage to summoned creatures.
-conjure phoenix loses much efficiency per mastery when shattered
-hypnotize loses less turn duration when shattered, frenzy less dmg
-summon elementals loses less efficiency when shattered below advanced level
-a bit more DBC creatures are summoned early as formula is based on 3+MG level instead of 2+MG level
-fixed some hero specials giving wrong amount of DBC creatures

balanced tent vs artifact resurrections to make knights and death knights more equal to attack focused might classes, improve regenerative capability of magic classes and make war machines less urgent skill choice.
-lowered first aid tent healing at expert level from 20 + 10*D to 20 + 8*D
-lowered first aid tent healing from defense secondary skill to +10,+20,+40HP
-kaspar bonus lowered to 4 per defense, but now he starts with only -1 defense
-increased strength of aid kits and low tier saint artifacts to 30 + 10HP per D (or K)
-resurrecting artifacts now take into account flat HP buffs like vitality and shield of wolf duchy bonus
-removed limit of 90% on resurrections. (apparantly some people can actually get 70 knowledge)
-pariah perk now gives vampirism to living heroes instead of raise death, but the morale penalty on it is permanent even after unlearning the skill, the mana regen on the skill is removed as well as the luck penalty for necro.
-the cold death perk now gives +2 spellpower again

-all heroes with sacred hammer spec now have 40% base chance to cast righteous might (instead of 15%)
-ufretin resets atb faster after casting righteous might at start of battle
-gem now summons a stack of pixies instead of casting endurance
-orlando now casts vampirism on griffins as specialization
-changed again formula for tieru and zehir summons to prevent midgame snowballing, amount is 1 + (sqrt(M) * M/200), also fixed not getting 2 half-size stacks when fighting human player without hero
-heroes with tracker specialization now also start with 8 dragonblood crystals

-increased dragon utopia difficulty scaling per month passed and improved some of its lineups.
-batttle sites like mage vault now have a second chance to teach a random spell level 3-5 to prevent getting level 2 parchments too often

bugfixes unrelated to campaign

-removed disruption spell from succubi, scaling doesn’t work well for t4 creatures.
-fixed campaign characters appearing in taverns on some SP maps
-fixed dimension doors bugs when visiting multiple towns
-fixed orbs and artificer wand not resurrecting
-fixed heart of darkness being a major artifact
-fixed weekly recruits conflict with governors
-fixed academy heroes gaining heart of darkness and pathfinders aid kit
-fixed bless invalid particle link
-fixed receiving movement points from boots after leaving a ship
-fixed plague tent txt
-chaotic discharge is renamed chaotic absorption because it matches the icon better
-improved Ai performance when visiting battle sites
-disabled beta debugger for improving performance