Heroes of Might and Magic V - NECROMANCY ONLY CHALLENGE IS PERFECTLY BALANCED WITH NO EXPLOITS! 

Warrior: "I swear I will have my revenge for the death of my brother." Elf: "You have my bow." Dwarf: "And my axe." Necromancer: "And your brother."

HoMM2 hotseat flashback. "How can those 4 skeletons kill a stack like that?" "Ah, you obviously failed to spot the 'K' after the 4..."

Necromancy army: We live in eternal undead servitude without feeling warmth nor pain and fight our former comrades. 24 peasants: We pay taxes. Necromancy: "gasp" The horror!

Me and my mom used to play this version. She came up with a strategy to use the demon castle against me when I was the necromancer. More than a thousand familiars stole all my mana before I thought about it. Necromancer defeated.

Necromancy: If all your friends are dead, they can never leave you!

"We can convert any living thing to a dead thing." Uh, murder, Spiff. That's called murder.

The funniest thing I find is that you can recruit an all-powerful Demon Lord from the local tavern.

The merchant's guild have known this for awhile

paladin: my whole order was murdered necromancer: oh, that's horrible, where?

I remember playing the campaign of this game, and was enjoying the necromancer portion's ridiculous "all undead units on the map join you unconditionally", spent all the time collecting the largest most OP army I've ever created, only to realize I have to fight this character in later campaigns and I've created a monster.

"Nobody can defeat my army!" Necropolis: "OUR army"

Spiff, if you think the ghosts in Heroes of Might and Magic 5 are balanced because they can dodge 50% of all non-magical attacks, try getting ghosts in the expanded version of Heores 2. Everytime Heroes 2 ghosts kill a unit in battle, that unit is instantly added to the ghost's stack. Your 15 ghosts have just kill 10 goblins? You now have 25 ghosts. Your 25 ghosts have just killed 100 peasants? You now have 125 ghosts. Perfectly Balanced indeed.

Heroes of Might and Magic series: Everything is broken, but every broken thing cancels the other and that's how game becomes balanced.

The fact that Spliff never thought to split those archers really annoys me. THAT is how you truly become a steamroller. No more insane overkills on single stacks.

"You see peasants are the backbone of just about everyone's economy and so they're kinda broken" - their backs sure are

My inner HOMM cheese monster was screaming for him to split that archer stack but he never did. Why have one gargantuan stack that does 100x the HP of anything you run into when you can have 4 that do 25x the HP of anything you'll ever fight...

“It’s an odd structure that turns living things into non living things” so... murder shack?

Ohhh, I remember wielding more than 10k skelies archers when I played this lmao.

Undead factions having living human peasants makes a ton of sense in my headcanon. Unless you are like the Scourge and effectively an unliving weapon of mass destruction meant to end all life on a world, you want to have some way to increase your numbers. Living humans are your livestock and breeders, basically - you keep them around to have a supply of fresh corpses for later. Vampires do this all the time too, like in the Warhammer setting and MTG's Innistrad, keeping some villages around and even protecting them from other threats like demonic invasions and random roving monsters in exchange for a constant supply of supple virgins to snack on. The supple part is important, nobody wants to eat stringy meat.

"Resurrect over a hundred of them!" - Resurrects exactly one hundred skeletons

*PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT* "Remember to be drinking your cups of tea! 🍵"

Hey hey people, Spiff here. I hope people haven’t already made this joke

This channel has a masterful use of stock images. Frankly, I’ve never seen such magnificent usage. I enjoy it quite a lot. Props to this channel for that.

I freaking love how spiff reacts to the exploits "it's fantastic" "brilliant" "lovely" it's great I love it I've actually considered buying Yorkshire tea

HOMM5 gave me one of the best moments in my gaming life. At one of the last missions I wasn’t able to win. After quickloading a few times I managed to completly cheese the game and kill the whole enemy army with just my hero and reinforcements. You see summoned Phoenix is extremly strong unit and Palladins have an ability to completly heal a unit as an action. After my enemy made a hole in my walls I put the phoenix in it and spend rest of the fight healing it. Deafeted a deadly army with minimal looses and won the mission. Good times.

Spiff: Necropolis is a perfectly balanced faction! Literally anyone who played HoMM before: well, duh!

I remember my roommate laughing maniacally when he played this as a necro. Now I know why.

There was another cheesy tactic, this one for knight faction. Essentially, you amassed gold and turned all of your peasants into archers early on (150+ archers on week 2 was a force to rush down anyone), or if you played a long game, you could amass ridiculous amounts of monks or knights.

Spiff be like: "Geneva Convention? More like Geneva Suggestion!" Love your vids man

This is so weird i have literally been playing this game this afternoon after not touching it for years. And now this video

"this building converts living things into dead things!" That's called a warehouse with coffee in it.

This brought back so, so many memories of me trolling my friends in a LAN game. "Oh you have Arch Angels? Well I have a millions Skelli Archers!" I am crying right now.

Ah, the legendary Vlady The Bone Raiser. He reminds me of someone...

HIT ME WITH THAT RIMWORLD SPIFF!!!!

This is an early version of the game. Once with the final release of Tribes of the East , necromancy has been balanced with Dark Points , around 200-250 per week( depending on heroes skills and buildings ) and ALL raised undead army from fighting and winning cost dark points to rise. Therefore , no more endless skeletons of undead armies. That's because raising an undead creature costs Dark Energy points, depending on the power of the creature. Undead , elementals and dragons cannot be raised , and do not count. Also , a skeleton cost 3-4 dark points to rise , so you do the math. Also in Tribes of the East Haven can't train more than 20 creatures - no more tier 1 idiots transformed to archers , and all creatures from every faction got a second up-grade that can be chosen when you up-grade you'r units. This and Heroes of Might and Magic 7 are the only games that balanced Necropolis. Heroes 1,2,3 and 4 are unbalanced to the points where Necropolis can be invincible on every map.

HoMM V will always hold a special place in my heart. It was my introduction to the series. Unfortunately, I think my copy was from a later printing, so I never got to actually see this version of Necropolis in action myself. Just the one with the necromancy with the points that let you get much lower numbers of slightly higher tier troops.

I know Sseth already covered it, but I'd love to see your take on Necromancy's hilarious brokenness in HoMM III, as well. Or really any of the broken stuff in HoMM III. Game is comfy.

Spiff: Do you want A, B or C Me: I want it all

_"I'll definitely have to be messing with a Phoenix."_ - The Spiffing Brit, 2020 And in 2021, we'll be facing the world's first game exploiting Human-Phoenix hybrid.

"When I'm necromancin;, everyone's dancin' No one can stop me, I dare you to try The dead are infused with sensational groove And they're coming for you now There's nowhere to hide" -Bear Ghost, _Necromancin' Dancin'_

This makes me want to make a series using this. God I miss the old might and magic games, three was truly fantastic.

Definitely gonna have to go with option C Gotta love Rimworlds whackyness

It's easy to make friends when you're a necromancer.

Man, I remember this game!! I bought this back in the day so I could play it on my laptop while staying in the hospital getting chemo. I never got to play it due to various factors, but after seeing this...man am I glad I held on to the disc version. I think I know what I’ll be doing this weekend. 😆

You know what makes this even more fun? Having multiple stacks of skeleton archers so you can kill multiple stacks every turn

You have the most superior english accent I heard on anyone. I keep imagining you saying "oh no, the chinese refuse to give us tea, now we have to utterly murder them all" in a very calm manner

I can just imagine the Devs Boss: "ok Jim you will be in charge of all of the necromancy mechanics" Jim: "I will make sure that they are perfectly balanced."

"In HOMM V our heroes finally can fight on a battlefield!" *laughs in HOMM 4*

As a long time HOMM fan, this video was perfectly perfect. Also as the self-appointed and opponent recognized science boi in our Civ V games, I would love to see you show how perfectly balanced science really is in Civ V. Thanks Sir Dr. Spiff et al.

HoMM 4 necromancy is even more hilarious, since vampires are much stronger in that game, and with grandmaster necromancy you can get vampires after each battle with living creatures, so you can farm the map for one of the most powerfull tier 3 creatures :D

As I recall, necromancy was even more OP in HoMM4 when you could get Vampires.

I LOVE The heroes franchise! so glad you are doing them. Do the Ubisoft cd version of heroes 4 where they gave the prestige demonologist class to nature castle absolutely free! 5 devils every round? Sure, well how could I resist? 100% balanced, no exploits! (For reference, when ubisoft aqcuired heroes, they changed everything slightly, I believe for copyright reasons. It included such wonderful decisions as the above, in addition to giving chaos (dungeon) the "potion of mana" spell. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Omg I just realised this is that game my brother stole from me and then lent to one of his friends and I never got it back! It's been more than a dozen years since then, but it's interesting what you remember watching these videos - stuff you haven't thought about since you were a teen!

Fun fact: In the early patches of Heroes 3 there was also the ability to cast the level 5 Fire spell "Sacrifice" to sacrifice ENEMY units and resurrect your own! The UI wouldn't make it seem like it was possible, but you could still click and it worked. Even on Black Dragons and other units that are normally immune to Sacrifice.

Thank you Spiff!!!!! HoM&M V is my all time favourite game! I have it since its release, and since I'm a fan of the series, I dare to say that it;'s at least as good as the 3rd part. I never dared to suggest or ask you to play with it, but here you are, so thank you very much! :) I do agree, the v1.0 Necro was OP, but there are ways to deal with them. Although they are numerous, but flimsy units altogether (although they have the highest count of flying units in the game, good against castles). But there are other OP Hero+faction combos, just to name a few: Wizard (good spell count + most ranged units + unit artifacts) -Nur: constant mana-regen during battles (UNLIMITED POWEEEEEEER) -Jhora: Initiative grows with level, you just have to have enough mana to obliterate the enemy Sylvan (fast units, and grab Mass Haste for max effect, great unit skills) -Wyngall: Units gets extra initiative, depending on hero level, combine this with the units, add some basic tactical knowledge and you can wipe out almost the entire enemy army before any of them moved :P (my personal favourite) Knight:( balanced overall,m strong choice anytime) -Maeve: Haste/Mass Haste improves with level Barbarians (OP units, especially with rage just be careful not to lose them, no resurrection) - Urghat: increased movement speed on the map, doesn't seem much, but with the right skills, laughable how much she can roam on the map and grab/kill/catch up with anything The list can go on, there are OP possibilities in almost every faction. You an exploit the system a little bit as well. If you're not satisfied with a battle result (unnecessary losses for example), load it back and put down fewer units. The Initiative of your creatures will be faster (guess the system divides it up to fewer, therefore higher numbers). The only thing you cannot cheese is the skill choice at level up. The game lacks a random generator in this case, so igf you load it back, no matter how you gain the level up, it will be always the same choices. Same goes to a battle,: if you replay a battle the with the same setup and do the same moves, 99% of the cases the result will be totally the same. On the other hand, since I play with this game for 14 years now, none of my friends wants/dares to play with me anymore.... :D

You didn't even break it all the way my friend - the BEST part about mass-units in any Heroes games is that you can split the troops into groups. 1: Split the skellies in half; because they do so much damage that you can one-shot troops with only half those units which means that each turn you can one-shot two of the Opp. troops. 2: If you split the troops up to a bunch of single unit troops - the AI will focus on those single units; effectively making their units attack with all their might...a single skelly-boi. Imagine the power of many titans raining their wrath upon one single, sacrificial skelly-boi; like an undead Jesus (just Jesus, actually) taking the yoke of all the enemy AI's anger. So yeah; you don't even need any other units when you get a mass of skeletons; just 2 groups of 1k each, and 3 groups of 1 each. This strat works on every single Heroes game I am aware of.

err spiff... you do realize that once you realize your stack one-shots everyting, you start another, right?

"Very strange old men who exude wrinkles at an incredible rate" Shows hero with Hungarian name. Yep, kinda can confirm, we have some old folks like that.

Very excited to see the title of this!!! Dude this was my JAM back in the day. Definitely spent countless hours making custom maps and creating campaigns for me and my sister to play. I remember starting the player out with only a ghost or two, maybe a vampire lord which you'd need to be very careful with not to lose, eventually amassing an undead army with high level necromancy later on. Love it so much. I haven't yet started watching this video, I simply freaked out when I saw the title as HOMM was one of my favorite series, with 3 and 5 specifically being my favorite (if I remember correctly). I love your videos, and I am excited to crack open a brewskie and begin watching this one. I hope to see you exploit something I didn't already know, which is almost always the case~ I need to find a copy of this game now and hope it can somehow run on my PC, as now I crave the peasant army of death! (Lol attack thousands of weak armys, ressurrect them after battle as skellys or what have you...I have a feeling this will be covered here lol...) BTW check my recently discovered exploit (first?) in skyrim if you want~ I haven't done anything (too) crazy with it yet and you will likely be the first person to utilize it to the max. After watching your ritual stone exploit video, I now realize you can likely combine my glitch/exploit with that one, and several other potential combinations, to do things that have likely never been seen before in all of Skyrim😂. (Or give me a week and I'll poorly make several "first ever" videos on it, but let's be honest, we need a respected and known content creator like yourself to share this stuff with us. You are loads funny.) Anyways, great videos overall, glad I found your channel.

I only started to watch your videos recently, and came to enjoy them very much. Love to see more 🤘🏻

Vladimir looks like a strange mix of He-Man and Skeletor...

I remember in HoMM2, when I hit stack overflow on a stack of ghosts after farming peasants. Good times.

"Exude wrinkles at an incredible rate" such a fantastic phrase

Thank you for your continuous and excellent entertainment throughout these precarious months Spliff!

Enemies: Send out the army! Necromancy: Our army now!

this is why me and my friends would do random - and redo it if anyone got Necropolis xD we just knew even a person that never played it would eventually steamroll everything

it pisses me off that he didnt start splitting his archer stack into 2 and then three XD

"overpowered necromancy" laughs in 100k power liches

Ooh, I'm early for once! Early enough that I'm actually drinking my tea during it for once!

Is this really an exploit? Or is it just exactly how redicous the power of what over a thousand skeleton archers would be? History has taught us just a thousand regular archers will melt anything, afterall... now imagine them without any vital organs.

My good man your rimworld series is why i subscribed. Loved it so much i bought it right away. Keep up the good work

Your videos on Exploiting Elder Scrolls are incredible. I recently discovered this channel and you are now my favorite youtuber

This is still good in the third installment! You can ressurect Liches (in the same quantity as Skeletons) just by assembling an artifact from 3 others! The TRUE king of Balance is the fan made mod, In The Wake Of Gods. - Units as powerful as Dragons, dirt cheap! - Free Double Units! - MORE UNITS - EVEN MORE UNITS - So many units that the unit market collapsed due to inflation. Edit: Also, in the 1.0 version of this game, Haven is actually so overpowered they can have thousands of Paladins, a level 6 units (trust me, I have done this once) just by training other units in their special building, the "Training Grounds", which at release had NO LIMIT on how many units you could upgrade. Yes, that was very balanced indeed.

"in HoMM V our heroes actually gain the ability to also fight on the battlefield" -*Laughs in HoMM IV*

I'm glad there is someone like You who try to bring this game back to life, respect 💪😇

I love Heroes of might and magic V And i love you for recording it.

Hey, ever thought of proving that Star Wars the old republic is “perfectly balanced”? Purely for academic purposes of course.

19:17 'This allows us to turn any living thing into a dead thing' Just like all wars then?

Great video. So many memories. I loved playing the undead. I used to play with a different hero, can't remember the name looked like a ghost with Einstein wild white hair. When you killed a stack of the enemy they immediately converted into ghosts that would fight for you

Would loooove to see more homm3 videos! One of my favourite games and u are the only one who makes it entertaining to watch

What kind of stock image is that "Skull on top of head with shirt pulled over head while giving thumbs up"? Why does that specific one exist.

I finished my tea five minutes ago.... and I’m out! This is dreadful!

Necromancy may have been nerfed in the dlc, sure, but should this game ever be revisisted, think of these few balances: Gating with a certain inferno hero is STILL perfectly balanced with no exploits Blood Rage with a certain Stronghold hero is ALSO perfectly balanced with no exploits And, last but not least, Fortress ultimate skill is perfectly balanced with no exploits what so ever!

Ah, it's always a joy to find an over powered class. Like the advanced Demonologist class in HoMM 4. Sure, it could be difficult to get both Death and Nature magic up at the same time, but the demonologist spells were worth it ! First you got Fire Imps, then Cerberi, then Ice Golems, then Venom Spawn and finally ... DEVILS !! The Devils could summon Ice Golems themselves ... and Teleport, lets not forget that ... and they were a tier 4 creature. My maxed out Demonologist could summon 30-40 Devils per cast ... that's like, a whole year of Devil production !! It was probably the most broken class, I have ever seen. Yes, it was difficult to pull off, but by Golly, was it OP once you got it !

Me: sees title *remembers skyrim* “Mum! I need a gallon of tea!”

Also remember: you can split the gigantic skeleton archer block into multiple smaller ones with shift, so your doing less overkill

You should play more of this game it's really cool. I remember my dad playing this and using the demon people.

My brother and I have played this game since HoMM 2. Bro usually play Necromancer and I usually play Stronghold, which i'm highly skilled at, though i know there's always someone better then me, skillwheel does help a LOT. both he and I do love playing HoMM V, "Seven Lakes" is legendary map.

Ohh, one of my favourite games of all time! But Necromancy isn't even the cheesiest thing in the game. You need to try the infinite mana hero of that golem faction (forgot the name). She can spam spells every turn and even regens it during combat. Completely broken imo

I remember thousands of hours of playing heroes 4 winds of war with my friends via hotseat. Best game of the series by far in my opinion. Exploit in 2 words: Djinn & illusion. Also: scouting/pathfinding skill + unlimited heroes And: charm skill basicly. I Love your content glad I found this channel

This was version 1, and was really broken. Then they did a lot of patching + 2 expansions. At the end the game was pretty balanced. Necromancers were still strong but not so OP. And most of the factions had some way to be OP in the late game if well played

Hey Spiff! Been a fan of your videos for several months now! HOMM are some of my favorite games! You should really try the Grandmaster Stealth Exploit on HOMM IV, its pretty broken! Would love to see a video of it.

This is great... one of my favorites. Now you have to do the Thief in Heroes of Might and Magic IV.... :)

I loved Heroes of Might and Magic IV. The Stronghold faction got a melee Lord which gets OP if he has enough potions of Immortality.

this is such a throwback to my childhood, id love to see more HoMM videos!!!

finally one of my favorite game ever, yes Necromancy is kinda op and cursed also try the expansions, Tribe of the East, you'll find some pretty overpowered stuff there to wreck everything in a perfectly fair and balanced way

Spiff: *offers a chance to serve Vladimir post mortem Me: "No, Sir. Skeletons can't drink tea."

A few things that come to mind about HMM4 are the high level summoning skills that druids can get where you basically get decent level units for free, like griffins or elementals, if I remember correctly (don't remember how often but I think it was every day when my army just got bigger by itself whiletraveling). Also druids in general were OP as f**k in my opinion, because you could summon a ton of units in every battle and you rarely run out of mana if you play right and you rarely need an actual army. At mid-levels and up I could basically leave all the units behind and dothe maps with just the hero. Worked most of the time.That's how powerful you can get. I would mix nature with life and chaos plus combat and scouting and I could sneak past just about everyone, and get the xp for doing that, and then just come back and kill them solo without an army and get xp for that too. Need troops? Summon a stack of archers who shoot twice in a row. And yeah,death magic + nature would give you the power to summon devils, who can summon ice demons in battle and teleport anywhere...so yeah,quite a bit of things to play with.

Gosh I loved this game and still do. So many wonderful memories. Always used to play the orcs from the expansion pack.

I think Barry might want a word with this “Vladimir”. Also C, love me some war crimes.