Heroes of Might and Magic

Heroes of Might and Magic 2. I remember the first time I encountered the game in some obscure Italian magazine that had a disc and on the disc a demo of HoMM 2. I played the demo, and I was blown away. Then 1999, I got ahold of Heroes 3, then the expansions - Armageddon&#x27;s Blade, Shadow of Death - so much fun and unforgettable memories.<p>Then in university, I discovered Wake of Gods [1]. This was a fan-made extension of the game that fixed some stuff ( like Eagle Eye being useful, fishing for artifacts in mana well&#x27;s, having commanders ala heroes 4, having a bank from which you can loan money, etc.).<p>I play heroes 3 complete edition with HD Mod [2] to this day, a pretty awesome game, and still has an excellent, thriving community.<p>Honorable mentions besides Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - Heroes of Might and Magic 4 (with all expansions) and Heroes of Might and Magic 5 (all expansions - Tribes of the east). Heroes 5 is the closest to Heroes 3 as mechanics and gameplay, and I enjoyed it a lot.<p>To this day I play roughly 4-5 games: Dota 2, Civilization 5, Baldur&#x27;s Gate 1&amp;2 EE and Heroes 3.<p>[1] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;heroes3wog.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;heroes3wog.net&#x2F;</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.google.com&#x2F;site&#x2F;heroes3hd&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sites.google.com&#x2F;site&#x2F;heroes3hd&#x2F;</a>

Amazingly the source code for the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 expansions was lost for years, so they&#x27;ve not often been included in the HD ports. Someone has (apparently) dug it up on an old hard drive [1] though a few screenshots isn&#x27;t a true proof.<p>Knowing that a huge organization has lost such a treasured codebase has insured that I backup almost every piece of code I ever write... after 10 years of development I dip back in every now and then and look at what younger me was working on, always brings a smile to my face.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;diskblitz&#x2F;status&#x2F;920801845349466113" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;diskblitz&#x2F;status&#x2F;920801845349466113</a>

I yearn for the days of turn-based strategy games.<p>I played HoMM2 and (even moreso) 3 a <i>ton</i>. I loved the tactical combat and that resource management didn&#x27;t get out of hand. I played a ton of user-made maps. Loved it.<p>The other two games of this genre I played a ton were Civ1 and Civ4.<p>I can literally recall waking up at noon, starting up Civ1 and then looking out and it was dark. I didn&#x27;t really play Civ2 and Civ3 as much. They just added isometric view and even more micro-management (IMHO).<p>But that all changed with Civ4. It still had the stack of doom problem but the solution added in Civ5 (one unit per hex and hexes were also new) I found to be just annoying as it forced a dance to get units placed. Plus once you got ranged&#x2F;siege units to range 3 I felt like it was game over.<p>Anyway, the big thing that kept me on Civ4 wasn&#x27;t the base game it was a player mod called Fall From heaven 2 [1]. The depth was amazing. I&#x27;d really hoped they&#x27;d make a standalone game or a new version but I believe the creator now works at another game company.<p>So I never liked RTSs. To me it was a different kind of game that focused on APS (actions per second). It&#x27;s just not my scene.<p>But turn-based games like HoMM and Civ are so rare these days it makes me sad.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.civfanatics.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;mod-fall-from-heaven-ii.171398&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.civfanatics.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;mod-fall-from-heaven-...</a>

Heroes of Might and Magic is such a great long form gaming experience, whether you played solo or with some friends. GOG does provide access to new copies if you&#x27;d like it, but I have to highly recommend if you want to play on modern hardware to grab the open source VCMI Project engine for Heroes 3. Heroes 3 is often touted as the best of the series, and the cross platform engine allows you to play on modern Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vcmi.eu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vcmi.eu&#x2F;</a>

Fanstratics is a spiritual successor to Heroes of Might and Magic III, it is being developed by the lead game designer of HoMM3. There are some interesting newsletters being published about the game.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fanstratics.com&#x2F;fstnewsletter01" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fanstratics.com&#x2F;fstnewsletter01</a>

This seems like a great thread to ask for game recommendations.<p>These are my favorite turn-based games of all time:<p>HOMM 1, 2 &amp; 3<p>Advance Wars series (including DS and DOR)<p>Uniwar (a surprisingly excellent mobile game inspired by Advance Wars and Starcraft 1)<p>Civilization 5 + Vox Populi &#x2F; Community Patch (my favorite overall, but I&#x27;m getting bored of it because end game takes too long, even on quick. at least it&#x27;s still actively developed, which is nice when I get the urge)<p>Into the Breach (least amount of playtime on my list, but it&#x27;s still very solid. Playing it actually makes me feel kind of sad, because it seems like the skeleton for a great successor to Advance Wars, but there&#x27;s no Steam Workshop for it, and no built-in versus mode or multiplayer)<p>Battle of Polytopia (second-least played amount, but also very solid. Imagine if someone made a game out of the first ~30 turns of a Quick-paced Civ5 game)<p>Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (when I imagine my perfect turn-based game that I would design if I had the money to hire a full team of people, it&#x27;s a mix of HOMM, Advance Wars, Civ5, and DCSS. It&#x27;s the only roguelike I&#x27;ve enjoyed enough to play more than once, and I&#x27;ve played it a LOT)<p>Games that I already tried and didn&#x27;t like enough to continue playing<p>Total War series<p>Rest of the HOMM series (HOMM 4+), including mods<p>Civ 6<p>Wargroove<p>Endless Legend<p>Humankind (sad to not have liked this one, I was so hyped for it)<p>King&#x27;s Bounty series<p>Age of Wonders series (including Planetfall)<p>Warhammer 40k: Gladius (it&#x27;s <i>almost</i> worth playing, but falls short)

“The moment QA is arguing over which strategy is best to win, you’re ready to ship.” — Jon Van Caneghem, creator of <i>Heroes of Might and Magic</i><p>:) as quoted in the article

HoMM2 is one of my all time favorite games. I’ve spent countless hours exploring all the corners of every single map in the game. Sometimes, I would deliberately not defeat the last enemy, just so I can reveal all the places, monsters and castles on the map.<p>With its amazing soundtrack, there never was another game for me that would immerse me so deeply in a world of fantasy. HoMM3 was great, but the artwork was not quite to my taste.

Played a TON of HOMM3 back in university with some friends. We played coop on the same box that is we take turns to play the game. It was so much fun. That said, I never completed the campaigns (the expansion packs are considerably more difficult). I still have a copy of HOMM3 from GOG so might click it open tonight!

From the article:<p>&gt;And Heroes by no means resolves what has long been the biggest conundrum in wide-angle strategy-game design: that of the anticlimactic mopping up that follows that tipping point when you know you’re going to win.<p>Chess has a solution to this problem: Resignation. A turned based strategy game like Heroes of Might and Magic III should have the AI evaluate the game, and if things look hopeless, it should offer to resign. This will be a game-wide resignation; the AI will, when offering to resign, have all AI opponents resign at once and end the game then and there.<p>A resignation from the AI would be one which can be refused by the human; indeed, I wish the HOMM games had Civilization’s “Just one more turn” option to continue playing a game after it has been won: Useful in Civ for, say, after getting a domination victory, finishing up that one enemy you’re still at war with.<p>In terms of Heroes of Might and Magic, the general consensus is that it hit its peak with Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (HOMM3). HOMM5 deliberately copied a lot of HOMM3’s gameplay (albeit with 3d graphics), and HOMM3 to this day is being updated with fan-made mods. Horn of the Abyss is as good as anything New World Computing ever made for HOMM3, is a free download at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;h3hota.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;h3hota.com</a> and adds a new town type, more terrain types, user-selectable random map templates, a GUI random map template editor (much easier than editing the old tab-delimited text file which we were doing back in 2011), and support for giant 254x254 maps.

I think this project is worth being mentioned here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ihhub&#x2F;fheroes2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ihhub&#x2F;fheroes2</a>

I kid you not, I was just setting up HOMM 3 to play with my kids now. It used to be a New Years Eve tradition in my family and I think my kids are just about old enough to enjoy it with me.

Songs of Conquest looks like a very promising spiritual successor and modern take on HoMM, really nails the nostalgia for me. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.songsofconquest.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.songsofconquest.com&#x2F;</a>

I played HOMM3 for 5 hours straight when I first encountered it. I know that sounds like nothing, but unbeknownst to me, installing it had reset my graphics drivers to set my monitor&#x27;s refresh to 50Hz.<p>50Hz is one of those things you can see if you look at it in your peripheral vision, but not so much straight on.<p>After 5 hours I was screaming in pain my eyes hurt so bad. I couldn&#x27;t figure out why they hurt and I couldn&#x27;t stop playing either.

Lots of good memories playing HoMM2, both single player and hotseat multiplayer in college. I was a fanatic enough at one point that I had almost completed a conversion of the NES Zelda game to a map (sadly lost to the bits of time now). At least from my perspective, it was a unique blend that scratched the itches in my brain.

When I was about 7 years old I played HoMM 1 and later HoMM 2 with my dad. I didn&#x27;t have a computer at my mother&#x27;s house (parents are separated) so I started drawing the different game screens on large A3 and A2 sheets of paper to show it to my schoolmates.<p>We made character sheets, spell books, skill sheets and an ever expanding world map consisting of over a hundred A4 sheets. We basically invented a DnD-like role play where I was the game master, and it all started with me trying to emulate HoMM.<p>This epic campaign went on for over six years and had over 30 players, and several other kids made campaigns of their own that became popular as well (there was a &quot;car-world&quot; inspired by Need for Speed, a &quot;Harry Potter-world&quot; that was a strange mix between fantasy and high-tech, and several others).

I dare say, this blog is as dangerous as tvtropes.<p>I keep going down the memory lane with Master of Orion, Master of Magic, etc. and I couldn’t stop!

HoMM3 is a magical game. And the music, especially in HoMM4. It&#x27;s one of my favorite soundtracks ever. I can instantly go back 20 years and feel the warmth in my heart, playing this game countless hours as a teenager.

HoMM3 was soo interesting to me when I first saw it, I thought it was like chess (dumbed down) and a boardgame. The mythology was also like a reference to me. I played it for so many hours when I was a teenager. I played HoMM4 and HoMM5 also. HoMM4 felt like an incomplete game but very nice to play. HoMM4 has an amazing soundtrack, I occasionally still play it while working.<p>I think recently there was an imitation of the game on mobile, and we all know how bad that would probably be given the horrible game mechanics of mobile gaming (ads, play to win, waiting to build)

HoMM2&#x2F;3 are still two of my favorite games, I play them often. 3 especially has withstood the passage of time.

I like the HOMM series a lot, but my favorite game of this genre was Lords of Magic from Sierra. It played a lot like HOMM, but it had real time combat that you could pause. Amazing graphics for the time, and I love the soundtrack! This is a game I really wish had a sequel.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lords_of_Magic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lords_of_Magic</a>

I played countless hours of HOMM in “hot seat” mode with my brother. The castle songs for each civilization are still fresh in my mind.

For some reason, HOMM* games never had any appeal to it, but I&#x27;ve sunk hours in an obscure trading&#x2F;exploration game Merchant Prince and similarly obscure Hammer of the Gods.<p>Only recently I&#x27;ve learned, that these games were direct predecessors of HoMM made by the same studio, bridging the gap between earlier King&#x27;s Bounty (which I also played quite a lot).

As an aside on the topic of board games, I have been trying to find interesting board games that I can play with my daughter. She has no interest in computers and the local toy store only has the ordinary staples like Monopoly. Based on what I have observed, she will not be interested in anything involved or too complicated (though she loves Lego and is obsessed with dragons so there is still a glimmer of hope). Any recommendations for two-person board games? I can live with ordering online as long as the game is good.

I still play HoMM 2 over the holidays every year with DOSBox. I like its artwork the most out of all the other same-gen titles, it feels like I&#x27;m in a colorful story book the entire time. The mechanics are just enough strategy to still be relaxing and fun.<p>Every now and then I also revisit the Sega Genesis version of King&#x27;s Bounty, the precursor to HoMM. The over world on that particular port is real time action, you have to avoid enemies as you explore the map.

So many great recollections playing this on MS DOS. The thrill I would feel finding obsidian items!<p>Makes me wonder whether a world in which those items can be carried from one meta world to another, through web3&#x2F;MetaMask type wallets, is desirable. Should my hard-earned obsidian items retain some sort of secondary-market value, much like vintage Magic cards? I did work hard as heck to find them back in the day :)

Like many other people here, I have played a ton of HoMM 3 in particular. One under-appreciated aspect was the scenario editor- as a kid, being able to make my own maps, challenges, and hidden secrets was a feeling of immense power.<p>I still play HoMM 3 several times a year- play a few maps, use my normal terrible strategy of one super-powerful hero and a few heroes to ferry troops around, and enjoy the nostalgia.

Cool, HoMM3 is by far my most favourite game for &gt;20years now and we keep playing with my wife from time to time. It&#x27;s like chess with some RNG, thus strategical and tactical depths are unlimited. Art and soundtrack is also charming in some strange way, as it feels more like tabletop than PC game (highlighted in the article as well).

In games like these it was cool to diff save states after spending resources, and then increase those bytes for fun and profit.

&gt; whereupon they had managed to acquire a license for one of the biggest science-fiction properties in the world by employing a circuitous — not to say dubious — stratagem<p>Am I crazy or should there be an article about this and Star Fleet Battles??? This sounds like an impossible situation in todays protect the IP above all world.

It‘s not a traditional Might &amp; Magic game (maybe it just carries the name for brand recognition) but I love „Might &amp; Magic: Clash of Heroes“ it‘s very simple the extremely fun. I would love the have a browser version with online multiplayer for that. The mainline titles were always too tedious for me.

There are few HoMM projects on GitHUB. For example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ihhub&#x2F;fheroes2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ihhub&#x2F;fheroes2</a>

There is an iPad version of HoMM3 in the App Store that works wonderfully - until it crashes midgame every single time… don‘t know if this is a memory leak or something like that :-(

My favorite was HOMM3, which higher higher resolution art, and was the last before they threw out the nice art and switch to functionally lower resolution 3d models :-&#x2F;

There&#x27;s an open source engine for Heroes 3, with high res and mod support: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vcmi.eu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vcmi.eu&#x2F;</a>

Surprised not to see a mention of Bauldur&#x27;s Gate, the dnd-under-the-covers formula was and is extremely enjoyable and I think it leads to very deep gameplay.

Looking forward to the article on HOMM2 and then 3!

Is there a way to play this game on an iphone ?

Love that game. Might play it again today after years and years. Glad I saw this post.

You&#x27;ve found a secret area!!<p>The best, most addictive spiritual successor I&#x27;ve found to date is Eador:Genesis. Although it has a bunch of other inspirations such as Master of Magic.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eador-masters-of-the-broken-world.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eador_Influences" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eador-masters-of-the-broken-world.fandom.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ea...</a><p>It mostly has very bad AI for which it compensates with insane material advantages, but tactical layer is stellar and strategic layer has some VERY interesting ideas as well. Your actions have far reaching consequences, such as you choose only 3 tier II units from about ten or so, and they have very different niches and work to a varying degree with each of the 4 basic classes.