Ghost Mode

We made the mistake of playing Ghost Mode because we thought it would give us something fun to do while we waited for others to end their turns. Because, as you know, there is basically nothing you can do while you wait for others. You just sit and watch the bar that says, "Wait for other players, please" in a false-polite tone that implies you have been impatient.

Ghost Mode was so atrocious it was insulting. We thought we could use them to scout the map, but it turns out they're so slow it's hardly worth it. You can spend their movement points to make them faster, which wastes your time and the ghost's turn. Instead of watching your bar, you can watch the absurd blue screen of Ghost Mode that makes some features of the map impossible to identify, especially if you're underground.

There were a select few things you could do in regular mode while you "waited for other players, please." You could, for instance, move your view around the mini-map so you could see what buildings you had captured. In Ghost Mode, you can't even do this because your hero does not share vision with you ghost!

Also, the fact that you have to expend your ghost's movement points to get good at any skill made them a waste of time. How fun is it to stare at your ghost after you spent its movement points beefing it up?

Our other concern, though we did not test this, was that our ghosts might cause simultaneous turns to be ended sooner if they came close to another player and our "field of influences" overlapped. Since we do everything we can to keep simultaneous turns, this is another potential flaw of Ghost Mode--our ghosts became that much more worthless.

Ghost Mode made us want to kill ourselves. Having to sit and stare at that worthless blue screen while we listened to the awful and repetitive music that plays while you wait was terribly corrosive to our souls. We will never suffer through that nonsense again.

"Simultaneos" Turns

Our first experience with multiplayer for Heroes of Might and Magic was so incredibly frustrating we almost didn't play again. We were not playing the expansion, and therefore multiplayer was entirely turn-based. Three of us were playing, and grew so impatient and angry whenever someone went into battle that we had to stop after maybe ten turns.

Imagine our excitement when we discovered the expansion, which we owned but had not yet installed, had a simultaneous turn feature!

We played joyfully, marveling at how much faster the game was going, when all of a sudden a message popped up telling us simultaneous turns had been deactivated. For the rest of the game.

Confused, we looked it up online and found, indeed, the game does turn off simultaneous turns when players get too close to each other.

Many other players have complained about this, particularly that alliances cause it to happen from the beginning and that once it is off, it is off permanently. We were mostly infuriated that the game fucking LIED to us, and also that we were nowhere near each other when simultaneous turns were deactivated!

The game advertised simultaneous turns as the solution to fucking slow-ass multiplayer games and proceeds to take it away maybe, oh, ten turns in REGARDLESS of where players are. We've had it occur repeatedly when we've been nowhere near each other, can't see each other, etc.

Another source of our disappointment is that other turn-based games, such as Civilization 4, have absolutely no problem with the concept of simultaneous turns. Even after you end your turn, you can still do things in your cities. Here, you have no choice but to sit and wait. Or, you can play Ghost Mode, which is another disaster for another entry.

You'd think the game fucking lying to us and making multiplayer almost unbearable after the first couple turns would daunt us. BUT NO. We came back for more, despite this severe fucking disappointment.