https://milkandhate.wordpress.com/2026/07/26/heroes-of-science-and-fiction/
full text didn't fit
Brilliant. Genius. Magnificent. Great. Absolute art. Raspberry ringing.
Originally this game was called Silence of the Siren, which is way better name. And that's why they had to change it, someone already registered it, so that's my theory why they changed it to a stupid suck up name like Heroes of Science and Fiction, without releasing a dungcrawler Science and Fiction the Facial ID of Central Server.
Heroes of Science and Fiction is a Heroes clone, and specifically a Heroes 3 clone. It's not just in the same genre like Disciples, Age of Wonders, Songs of Conquest, Eador, and Malgrimia, but a direct take on the very specific formula. Still, even so, it is braver than Heroes 5, and isn't stuck in HoMM 3 ways. They weren't afraid to tone down its tiresome obsession with logistics, and summon the wrath of haters of Heroes 6 and 7. Every city can build a metro station, tying all your cities together, transporting your troops for a fee. You cannot get troops directly into your hero, but once you reach a city, you can gather all your new units from all the cities. The global map is much more complex, but still manageable. You can upgrade and fortify your mines. You can erect supplemental buildings in special spots, or one-time sow some resources to reap later. You can very slowly train by standing in one place or participate in mock-battles in the special buildings. The native flora doesn't like you being there so you can get attacked by carnivore plants, or spored by berserker mushrooms. The annoying neutral spawners are collapsed into an annoying casino spawner. The are separated into the factions, and can spawn once per week any unit from its faction randomly. It can be upgraded or unupgraded. There are thrall-markets which sell upgraded and unupgraded units randomly selected from the entire roster of the game. And you can attack them to get re-rolled units for free. You can bust open many of the weekly visitable unownable places, which makes them restock every ~12 days instead of every 7. But not all of them, some, the most important ones, you have to visit every ~four days. With the number of cool additions, they could've added a button to outright buy the replenishable spots for a lot of cash, but removing the need to visit them anymore. Or even add carts for them to haul stuff to your bases, which can be intercepted by the enemies if you want to make it not so simple.
The "weeks" are split in days, in some of which locals are more dangerous. Different planets have different week lengths. Tho, the standard four day week results in very fast escalation, and somewhat strained logistics. It's not helped by the game following the current fashion of limiting your heroes number in the campaign to two or three.
The game has five factions, and they are decently diverse. Each faction has its own special buildings. Bugs are fully mechanical so they do not work with the bio spells. Meanwhile locals are fully organic and cannot be repaired. But the best part of the factions is the aesthetics. You have the commie racist space moles. The religious robot bugs. The natives are parasites who take local fauna and all the colonizers as their hosts. Even the default humies have giant moths in management positions.
The paid inter-city public transport works between all the cities. You can have as many capitols as you have cities, but to reach it you have to build every single buildings, including every useless one. The magic guild is not separated into tiers, but into schools. And you can upgrade it with remote learning and with an ability to directly buy a spell you didn't roll. The castle upgrades are tunable. Instead of adding turrets, the upgrades add HP to the walls and the protected spots. And you can pick two out of four upgrades. But i think the mines and surprise turrets are over-tuned. They just end enemy's turn, not letting enemy melee units even come near for multiple full rounds. Way better than two weak machineguns or stronger walls.
The best part is of course the units. Almost every single one of them does something. Instead of being just classified as cavalry (or flying cavalry), archers and melee wallflowers, the units have AoE attacks, there are short-range archers, many flamethrowers with short-range AoE attack, delayed archers, artillery which shoots the field instead of units, so you need to guess. Almost every upgraded unit receives an active ability. Like a half of melee units receives a ranged grenade of sorts with a very long cooldown. You are limited to only one mechanism, and every faction has its own. The most interesting ones are probably one that denies melee units entry, and one that protects from projectiles. There's no defend button, so if you skip your turn you skip it. The battles range from no-loss puzzles to absolute meatgrinders.
In the middle of my playthrough, starting wit the release date, they patched-in virtually mandatory quick-battles with no downsides. And i am super torn on that. On the one hand it reduces the number of repetitive tactical fights you will win without looking. On the other hand this genre is about tactical fights. It doesn't take its root in civilization, it takes it root in Kings Bounty, an RPG-like game. In Heroes you have to take an educated guess if you will or if you won't lose your units on a mundane mob. This game was already super accommodating, with the instant retry button. And now you don't even have to guess. It already tells you the result of the battle before you even had a chance to think about it.
Heroes of Might & Magic & Logistics.
The heroes primary skills are simplified, and it doesn't feel any worse. Instead of four primary stats you have two — attack and defence are combined into combat prowess, and magic stats into magic prowess. Plus there's a new dedicated logistics stat, which boosts the marching speed per day. The primary stats are limited to 30.
The secondary skills range from generic basics, to overcomplicated ones. Some look useless AF. Some are basically mandatory. Like, by default your artefact slots are very limited, so you'd want to pick the skill that unlocks the rest of the slots. Tactics is as strong as tactics. Unique faction skills are usually very strong. Globetrotter allows to use logistics spells, which includes town portal, and exchange of a bit mana for some more move points. So that feels pretty useful. Yet, at the same time, there are skills which are worse than Eagle Eye.
But tuning a build is eased with the global map buildings that allow you to unlearn something, and buildings that let you pick a new skill from the list. So even a high level hero cans till be fixed. Unlike that alcoholic who was just released from the prison yet somehow is the most popular fixer-upper with the young females crowd. So you are not stuck with a choice between eagle eye and navigation in a landlocked desert. But there are no complex per hero skill trees from Heroes 5. Tho, while that is fun, it is also a bit too complex, unintuitive, and confusing.
After the might i mean the science, we have the magic, i mean the fiction. And the fiction is split into tech, which is mostly concerned with direct combat spells and mechanical units; bio which is more about buffs, debuffs and bio units; and psycho which is only about weird buffs, debuffs, and can assume direct control. The last school of magic is for spells used on the global map. Those are focused on movement, logistics, and PvP counter-espionage.
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