HEROQUEST - COMPANION APP discussion

[Kurgan]

So there IS a way to kind of add a 5th (6th, etc) Hero into the App, or mercenaries into quests where they are not officially supported...

At least in version 4.0/4.1, you can use the Hearthkin Horn (select from the list of artifacts under "User Special--->Use Artifact")... it's the last one in the list. While you can't rename the summoned skeletons, you can adjust their stats to be more like the hero or mercenary of your choice. Each hero gets one of a different color (one hero who has several would all be the same color).

Unfortunately the skeletons can't search for anything so you'd have to simulate those actions with other characters. They also can't use artifacts, but can have spell effects cast on them by others. So you still would have to simulate some things without the app, but it's nice to have a character that you can move around visually at least!

Be warned though that there is no "undo/cancel" feature if they walk into solid rock and you accidentally let your finger off the pointer/cursor (they just instantly die). Of course you can just use the artifact again to summon another one if that should happen!

Again the idea here would be to simulate other characters (you could even do it for a hero you accidentally killed off permanently, or was revived later in the quest with the Elixir of Life). So now you can use the App to accurately track your Animal companions in solo quests, or turn solo quests into group quests, and/or "hire" mercenaries in quests that didn't originally support them in every quest (GS, KK, ROTWL, SQT, PoT, New Beginnings, early ROTDM/Knightfall, First Light).

I love this!!


Can anyone confirm if this trick works in 4.2?

Edit: Thanks Liorlec, who confirmed it works on The Trial, so probably the same as 4.1!

[SirRick]

Yesterday I finished Quest 6: Tormuk’s Guests from the MotM. The quest went pretty well, with no app related issues or weird things happened. Upon discovering the wandering monster was a single Abomination, I ransacked each room on the map. While I still drew A LOT of wandering monster cards (sometimes 3 per room with a fresh treasure deck), in the end I managed to get 14 good cards. The only things I didn’t get was the Wolfbane Potion, and two of the smaller sacks of gold coins.

There was one huge battle in the center room with 3 treasure chests. This battle was completely wrecked from one cast of Hypnotic Blaze. Only one Dread Warrior was able to attack once or twice. The rest of the monsters were hacked to pieces while paralyzed. After the fight, my poor Rogue tried to disarm the trap on one chest and failed, setting off all three traps at once. She was at full health, took 6 BP of damage and was blown to bits. While she was able to use a healing potion to save herself, I might retroactively use an Elixer of Life instead for role-playing purposes because it was such a massive amount of damage. The mental picture of what happened makes me laugh too.

Tormuk himself was easy. I was expecting to trigger some traps while charging into his room, but I was pleasantly surprised there were none. This allowed my party to surround him in a barrel o’ fun and kill him before he could do anything. He had a whopping 6 BP but it didn’t help him in the end. I looked at his stats in the book afterward, and he has the Reanimation spell, but no way to use it. He does have Summon Wolves, which is probably one of the strongest spells in the game. If you wanted to make the fight tougher, or give him more options, a Zargon could give him the Escape spell. The designated spot could be by the door in the room marked “A” between the two Zombies. There he could cast Reanimation and make use of it.

When I rescued the Elven Archers, I still had a wing of the dungeon to explore, so I brought them with me. It was very satisfying to use their longbows and use 4 dice at range. It also made my heroes a bit jealous. Currently the only hero who can perform such a feat is the Rogue with a Crossbow using the Opportunistic Striker skill.

This quest was actually enjoyable, though it could have been much worse if Hypnotic Blaze had not worked so well, and if Tormuk had lived long enough to cast Summon Wolves. I already was burned by that spell when it was used by the High Alchemist, and I didn’t want to give Tormuk the chance. I didn’t know what spells he had until after, but I am glad I assumed he might have it. It saved me a lot of trouble.

[Kurgan]

I have confirmed that in 4.1/4.2 the App incorrectly gives you permanent control of enemy skeletons with the Bone Wand (the effect is only supposed to last for one turn).

[MonsterMotor]

This quest was actually enjoyable, though it could have been much worse if Hypnotic Blaze had not worked so well, and if Tormuk had lived long enough to cast Summon Wolves. I already was burned by that spell when it was used by the High Alchemist, and I didn’t want to give Tormuk the chance. I didn’t know what spells he had until after, but I am glad I assumed he might have it. It saved me a lot of trouble.

Interesting, in my gameplay at the board it was exactly the other way round. I was able to kill the High Alchemist before he could cast a spell, but Tormuk was too tough for my heroes. He quickly summoned 3 wolves, which made the whole quest 6 quite challenging. The heroes triumphed, nevertheless, and were able to loot his entire castle, too. All in all, quests 5 and 6 of this expansion are quite decent ones with only some minor shortcomings. Unfortunately, afterwards the fun is largely over as you will notice very soon.

[SirRick]

Today I finished Quest 7: Gliness Fenn from the MotM quest book. This quest was a doozy. The quest itself is not too hard at first glance, but there are a number of issues that cause a lot of difficulties, and suck all the potential fun out of the quest.

While these posts are mostly about app related issues, there are a number of things I would like to point out about the quest as written. Nowhere in the quest notes is there any mention of the Giant Wolves being Werewolves. There is mention of the wandering monster being a Werewolf, but that is it. My guess is a lot of players would assume the Giant Wolves placed on the map to be normal wolves. Reading the notes at the beginning of the book will tell you werewolf rules, however the text is worded badly, and may be easily misunderstood. The text states the heroes may meet werewolves. It should have been written the heroes will meet werewolves, as there is no way to not meet any wolves as you search for the other spiral stairway. A small mention of werewolves at the beginning of the quest notes and where to find the information would be very helpful for those trying to play the quest correctly.

The other issue is the large number of cheaply placed traps. I ran out of my normal allotment of pit trap tiles. My poor Elf stumbled into each pit trap in room “C”. I never had a chance to search for traps before falling into each one. She would climb out of one pit and happen to choose the wrong space with another pit trap on it. As the old knight in Indiana Jones would say: “The Elf chose….poorly”. The funny part about this is my Elf is the hero wearing the Rabbit Boots acquired from way back in RotWL. It didn’t do squat in this situation.

Playing through this quest, I encountered numerous troubles from the start. The the beginning room my Elf got turned into a werewolf immediately. The wandering monster wolf took up all the free space so none of my heroes could move. Eventually I defeated the wolf, but my Elf already lost 5 BP. The Elf started transforming into a wolf on her next turn. Though the app would not allow me, I had other heroes cast Tempest or Tempest spell scrolls to subdue the Elf until she took hero form again. I had to use a Potion of Superior Restoration to cure the curse. The app does not handle this transition very well. When a hero is turned into wolf form, their icon disappears from the line up on the top of the screen. Curing the curse does not make them reappear. You can still move the hero around and have them do actions like normal, however. This can be fixed by choosing “Save and Quit” from the menu, and loading the quest up again.

I found the secret door, and stumbled into the unavoidable pit trap. After climbing out, my Elf proceeded to fail disarming the trap on the chest, losing another BP. In the first two rooms, my Elf leader lost 7 of her 9 BP (Elven Bracers and a Ring of Fortitude equipped).

The third room had some app related shenanigans. On Zargon’s first turn the turn order went Skeletons, Goblins, then the Werewolves. I attacked what monsters I could and set my heroes in a position to draw the monsters into the starting room. One of the Goblins moved, but instead of the other Goblin taking its turn, the wolves began to take their turns. The first wolf moved to the center of the room and attacked at a distance (and through the wall) targeting my Elf. After making this illegal attack, the same wolf moved again and flew around the room like superman until it stopped roughly in the same spot it tried to make a ranged attack. The second wolf simply stepped forward and made a normal attack through the door. After the wolves took their turns, then the second Goblin moved.

On Zargon’s next turn, the same wolf that attempted to fly around and shoot lasers through a wall, confidently moved forward and made a diagonal attack through the wall, trying to target the Elf again.

The last app related note has to do with the trap door tiles. The rules say when a hero or monster lands on that space, it is immediately moved to the other side. This makes it seem you cannot move across it. The app will allow you to move a character over the trap door without transporting you. Only if you end your movement on that space will cause you to move to the other end. Monsters can do this too I noticed.

Now with Quest 7 out of the way, I have to build up courage to play The Gathering Storm, quite possibly the worst quest ever designed for this game.

[SirRick]

Today I finished Quest 8: The Gathering Storm from MotM. I had long dreaded this quest, as I had glanced at it previously and saw how many Giant Wolves there were. When actually playing the quest, it wasn’t so bad. There were not a lot of traps, and only one was unavoidable, so that helped. Also my dice rolling was much better than average. When I say average, I don’t mean statistics-based average. For me average is rolling mostly shields when attacking, and skulls when defending. Since the dice were nice today it removed a lot of frustration I might otherwise have.

The room with the Bone Wand had an inconsistency in the app versus the quest book. In the app, the treasure chest contains 650 gold coins and the Bone Wand. The quest book only gives you 500 gold coins and the Bone Wand.

I bypassed rooms I didn’t think was necessary. I almost skipped the large center room, but decided to go back and look anyway. I triggered each spear trap trying to disarm them, but in doing so I saw the door to the East, so I guessed I wouldn’t need to explore that room. The falling rock traps in the starting room steered me away from the secret door, so I never opened it. Looking at the map later I saw two Giant Wolves in there, so I am glad I never had to fight them.

The center room I allowed my heroes to jump the first spot in the room. I do this now as a house rule since this quest book has so many traps just on the other side of a door. My heroes all managed to jump the spot getting into the room, and I killed the Gargoyle with ranged attacks before he had a chance to do anything. As a result, I don’t know what happens if a monster tries to move over quick sand. The app let me search for treasure and open the chest from across the room, so I never had to try and jump the double-wide quicksand area. Some heroes did fall into the pit trap leaving the room, since I forgot to actually search for traps while in there.

I continued on until I reach the second to last room. The Elf blocked the doorway, so when the Ogre attacked, it moved away, allowing space for other heroes to enter the room. I moved the Wizard inside so he could play with his Bone Wand.

When using this item in the app, it seems to work indefinitely. After moving and attacking with the Skeletons, the app left them under my control, like mercenaries. One thing I noticed, is the Skeletons under your command cannot move through other monsters. In turn, monsters cannot move through the Skeletons. So even if you moved and attacked with them, they are still considered “yours” so monsters on Zargon’s turn have to kill the Skeletons to reach your heroes. This is a nice feature I did not anticipate, the only problem is at the start of the next hero turn, the Skeletons are still under your control.

The last room I cast Hypnotic Blaze for the second time (yay Spell Ring). All the monsters were paralyzed and easily defeated. The first time I cast the spell was in the second room West of the starting room. It was quite helpful there too. All monsters except one wolf was paralyzed, but the other 3 heroes managed to slay it before it could move. The others died easily as well. Giving the Elf a Spell Ring and storing Hypnotic Blaze in it is a key move.

The only times I searched for treasure was when I saw a treasure chest, and I took a gamble and searched the room with the alchemist’s table, so no wandering monsters or hazards slowed my progress. I’ll probably use all the money I found to buy Potions of Battle to get dice rerolls at key moments for the final quest coming up.

[SirRick]

Today I finally finished the MotM. The double quest, was more like a long single quest, since there was no need to switch the board around. It took me about 5 hours to complete. It wasn’t too bad compared to some earlier quests. The big difference there were less large battles with an obscene number of monsters in them. There were a few larger battles, but none where I felt I needed to resort to Hypnotic Blaze, and the Elf Speed potion. There were still a lot of Ogres and Giant Wolves, but they were more spread out through the quest. I did have to use several healing potions, because the bigger monsters were hitting really hard.

I didn’t fully explore every nook and cranny, but I did find the Elven Bow of Vindication. I only used it once, and only to one-shot Sinestra. The battle was over in a flash. The music that played during this fight was quite dramatic, its just a shame it was over after one attack.

The app doesn’t have any way to use the bow, so you just use it yourself.

Overall the story was great, this this would be a decent quest pack if the monsters were not so heavy-handedly powerful with better-than-boss stats.

Now I can look forward to starting Rise of the Dread Moon soon.

[Kurgan]

Yes I saw as well that the Bone Wand is definitely "broken" (in favor of the heroes) in the App.
I guess an "honest" work around would be to then move the Skeletons towards the nearest heroes and roll attack dice for them (and defend dice for you) after the first turn is over for the commanding hero (or the first round, if you interpret it that way). They are supposed to be like mercs until they go back to Zargon's control as normal monsters. It's the Hearthkin Horn summoned skeletons that are supposed to remain under your control until the end of the quest, so the App writers probably got that confused.

Remind us again what house rules/homebrew you're using for the digital playthroughs?

Also, what, if any, sliders in the App settings are you using (monsters attack weak, advanced, etc)?

Obviously you have to work around the App's limitations sometimes and those glitches are off the wall of course. Are you looking at the questbook as you play or only checking it after the adventure is over? Do you ever TPK and replay the same quest in it?

Not saying you're cheating, just curious.

[SirRick]

I’m only using a couple homebrew rules. I recently (as in Quest 8 of MotM) started to allow my heroes the chance to jump over the first space while going through a door. In the later quests there are way too many traps on the other side and you have no way to detect them. I also allowed the Rogue to use the Elven Cloak of Passage, but I don’t think she ever actually used it. The Barbarian, I allow to reroll 1 black shield if he is attacking with a melee weapon. For the “Into the Northlands” artifacts I added them by replacing similar items found with the artifacts, or if there was an empty chest.

I suppose this could be considered a house rule. I have the heroes leave stuff they don’t need “at home”. At the end of a quest pack all the gold and extra equipment I acquired gets stored at home. Even though its a fantasy game it seems ridiculous that the heroes carry around thousands of gold pieces and 18 weapons each. They stockpile their extra stuff in case they lose it somehow, like the Rust spell, or smashing orc statues that cause your weapons to break, etc. Also it might be handy to have a few extra Shortswords and Hand Axes around for RotDM.

Each quest pack I just choose a new group of 4 heroes from my pool of characters (one of each type of hero). This keeps things interesting and I can see how certain hero combinations work together. Each “new” hero has to save up for their basic gear, even though I have more than enough stuff to fully equip them. So when I finally use the Berserker and the Explorer, they will just have only their starting weapon. They will be accompanied two of the experienced heroes so the don’t die right away. Potions I divide up as evenly as possible, so new heroes get all the potions found until they catch up to their experienced comrades.

For the app, everything is on default settings, except I have advanced Goblins and Skeletons turned on. I toyed with “Monsters Attack Weak” for a number of quests, but a number of weird adverse effects would happen, so I turned it off. The main issue with that setting at the time was monsters would not move toward you if you were out of their movement range, which made the various conga line of death quests really easy, since the monsters would not chase you. I am not sure if those issues have been fixed.

I don’t think anyone has died so far. I may have had to use an Elixer of Life at some point from an instant death attack, but I don’t really remember. Normally my heroes have more then enough healing potions. I try to get by with using as few resources as possible, which is how I had amassed over 100 healing potions starting the FH. After playing FH and MotM I probably had to use about 20. My Barbarian was 1 BP away from dying in a Yeti hug in a solo quest, because I wasn’t going to allow him to use potions while being grappled in such a way. I had one big close call in the first quest of RotWL in which all four heroes fell into the same pit surrounded by a horde of undead monsters. The instant death chasms from FH are a real danger, but I found ways to bypass them, and in one case I used the Ice Bridge spell scroll.

I typically don’t look at the quest book until after I finish a quest, so I can study it to post my comments about it, and to see what I missed, or purposefully skipped. Sometimes weird things happen, or are not explained very well, and I have to look up what is supposed to happen. One example is Quest 4: The Halls of Vision from RotWL. The app requires you to find the keys to finish the quest and you lose instantly if you fail the “puzzle”. Keep in mind there are no clues whatsoever on how to access the secret laboratory. From reading the quest book it seems more like a special bonus treasure, and not a required task. I had to look up how to actually successfully get the keys so I could continue. I just replayed the level as is with the same heroes. They just went out for a beer and came back later to try again after the puzzle magically reset itself.

I have been toying with simple advancement rules on the side in a theoretical sense based on what I experience playing through the quests. For example it really hurts not having a Dwarf in the party when it comes to dealing with traps, so it would be nice if another hero could learn to do that as well. Thankfully we now have the Explorer hero and the Scout mercenary as legal alternatives, but I still like to think about this stuff regardless.

[Aki]

Today I finished Quest 7: Gliness Fenn from the MotM quest book. This quest was a doozy. The quest itself is not too hard at first glance, but there are a number of issues that cause a lot of difficulties, and suck all the potential fun out of the quest.

While these posts are mostly about app related issues, there are a number of things I would like to point out about the quest as written. Nowhere in the quest notes is there any mention of the Giant Wolves being Werewolves. There is mention of the wandering monster being a Werewolf, but that is it. My guess is a lot of players would assume the Giant Wolves placed on the map to be normal wolves. Reading the notes at the beginning of the book will tell you werewolf rules, however the text is worded badly, and may be easily misunderstood. The text states the heroes may meet werewolves. It should have been written the heroes will meet werewolves, as there is no way to not meet any wolves as you search for the other spiral stairway. A small mention of werewolves at the beginning of the quest notes and where to find the information would be very helpful for those trying to play the quest correctly.

True, I read about Werewolves only when completed the Quest

I finished AOH last days, in the final Quest the app crash if too many Orcs are spawned out and the app open also the secret doors (legit?)

I really like the Arena mode, especially for training new Heroes, however sometimes the app end the turn of the wrong Hero