Hey guys. Hope all of you are doing well in these months of the plague.

I'd like to propose a few things regarding the categories we have at this moment.

As you may know mikethev discovered a very significant manipulate where you basically have the OG version of homm2, load a specific scenario first then go campaign and that in turn will give you the exact same seed every time depending on which scenario you load up first (you have to reedo this step every new game, right?).

The run mike has up at the moment is very impressive and lets be very honest, you cant beat it with straight up tactics of the past unless you get VERY lucky.

Today we have cheats and no cheats category. I think mr. flogoo has one run submitted in Archibald campaign under cheats category other than that all other runs are no cheats.

I'm not suggesting removing "Cheats Allowed" category per se but I am suggesting that we replace "No Cheats" with two new categories.

1. Any%, usage of the manipulate mechanic and all old rules apply.

2. No Mikemanipulate (I mean the name for this category is up for debate but the man discovered this and should get all the praise of course). This category is straight up rules of the past without the manipulate being allowed.

This would in my opinion give the option of either master the game really in depth discovering what configs of scenarios would clear the game fastest or just play the hands you've been given.

Both categories have their own challenge and would (hopefully) reinvigorate the Homm2 speedrunning community.

What do you guys think? Is this suggestion reasonable or do you possibly have any other ideas? Total trash thought by good ol' Hydra or does he have a point?

What do the mods think?

Hope to hear from someone soon!

I thought about this as well and basically completely agree.

I'd even say make "no rng manip" the main category that's shown by default and just call it any% or beat the game or w/e. Then have the rng manip category on a second tab, because 1. it requires that old arcane version that not everyone has access to and 2. is kinda gimmicky. (It's fun to route though!)

Personally I don't like runs with cheats (and in this case the run is neither particularly fun nor popular) so I'd just get rid of that, but at least change the name of the main category to something other than "no cheats"...

Hi, sorry for the delay in responding.

As there's not much going on in any of the HoMM speedruns these days (a new run is submitted once in a while and I'll review it as best I can), there hasn't been feedback for a while now for improving categories or adjusting rules for consistency, ex. music in submissions are a mixed bag (I might be thinking of HoMM III runs though).

I can adjust the categories as you ask; the main categories being 'No Manipulation' and 'Manipulation Allowed'. I can leave 'Cheats' as a Misc. category so it's not prominent on the Leaderboards, and so previous runs submitted aren't removed/hidden.

My issue for adjusting the categories are revising rules and how future runs should be submitted. For Manipulated runs, it would require showing the specific scenario before starting the campaign. For No-Manip, my issue is how to verify they haven't been fixed/edited, such that to skip showing the scenario and just begin the run. Albeit that's for the original version, the GOG version might have a way as well, but that's something to worry for later.

I have updated the categories as suggested. I'd appreciate any feedback to help improve the rulesets.

Hey Adam and thanks for responding quickly!

It's really nice to see that you're on board with changing up the categories somewhat. I think I'm the only runner that has submitted runs with personal music on the stream and I can totally get behind why that should be a no go by default. I'll stop with that and go to original homm music for my runs.

Regarding manip runs I think mike is better suited helping with how to best verify those runs since I haven't tried it yet.

In my run I made sure to show the whole process of starting the game before the run and showing the empty "load game" screen, just for maximum transparency. Dunno if it makes sense to make something like that a rule. I feel like we can be pretty relaxed with our little niche game atm ;)

Btw it doesn't say anywhere which version of the game you're on, right? I technically don't even know which exact version I was using, only that I didn't apply any patches, so I assume it's 1.0.

@Hydralicious My issues with music was related to verifying HoMM III speedruns, but should apply here and for other game's speedruns. Some had no sound effects/music or had non-game music covering the game's. One way for me to verify runs is to listen to inconsistencies when I watch, barring when the game lags/stutters.

@mikethev Currently yes I can be lax about verifying runs. As mentioned before, my responsibility as a mod is to ensure runs are on an equal level and they haven't been edited or such.

As for game version, I assume the base game is version 1.00, 1.01, 1.02, etc. depending if there were later discs released at the time. For the expansion, I assume similar, 1.10, 1.11, or 2.00, 2.01, etc. I'm definitely not strict on that, as I'd have to look into it and I'm not sure it'd be on levels of optimization

Hi, there's been discussion of in-game days before, primarily on the HoMM III webpage: https://www.speedrun.com/hommiii/thread/p1yyj

So it comes down to if the admins would create another webpage if there was more interest and demand for a category that isn't based on real time attempts. I can ask again on the forum, but it'll probably be ignored again.

What would this even look like? No saving/loading during missions? Otherwise it seems there'd be so much correcting via quickload that you might as well do a manipulated run ;)

Interested to see a run in any case!