Heroes of Might and Magic 3

Know how to pick your battles. You'll quickly learn not all neutrals are made equal. (A pack of liches may be far more damaging than a pack of gorgons if you have slow troops, for example). Knowing how and when to take on neutrals is the first step in actually getting somewhere.

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Should I divide my stacks at the start and surround my shooters with 3 stacks of my level 1 troops?

Hire more heroes for scouting and grabbing unguarded resources. If there is a body of water on the map, send one there too.

HoMM3 Protips:

Focus on building unit production buildings early. You'll be able to buy those units later in the game, but it's important to produce them now. Push for Week 1 Vampire/Lich or some other 3-4 tier unit, go higher if possible.

Always buy another hero or two or three at the start. Pick your main, gear him up, and have him handle neutral packs. Use the other guys to transport more units to the main stack, and to pick up items and resources.

Magic = Power. Always take magic mastery when offered as a skill, IE Air Magic Mastery or whatever. Fire and Water aren't the biggest deals, but Air and Earth are OP as fuck. Water and Fire still have value. A very strong magic using hero with a decent army can wipe a very strong melee hero with a large army if you know what you are doing. Fully mastered Haste, Slow, Bless, Stone Skin, Prayer, Meteor Shower, Fireball, these spells win battles. Town Portal and Dimension Door are huge in responding to enemy moves.

Splitting your melee stacks has it's uses, but if you don't split your ranged stacks you are only hurting yourself. Unless you just have the 1 archer, they should be in 2 stacks or more. Don't be afraid to fill all your empty slots with small ranged stacks.

If playing Necro, keep ALL slots full at all times, and have all your skeletons upgraded. This way all skeletons you get returned to you are automatically upgraded. Keep in mind, this only works if all slots are full at the end of the battle.

These are all good tips.

To go a bit deeper, air is strong because it has haste, lightning bolt (the strongest single target bolt spell that's cheap), chain lightning, as well as dimension door and fly (which give you unparalleled mobility on the world map). Earth has meteor shower, resurrection, slow, town portal, and implosion, which are all amazing, as well as other nice spells like shield and stone skin. Water depends on your faction. Castle gets prayer, which is great with expert water, and towns with high variance on their damage rolls (like tower or conflux) benefit a lot from bless, but otherwise water magic isn't worth taking the spell mastery. Fire mastery is mostly worthless, it has no world map spells, and none of the expert level spells are that much stronger than basic. Blind will be the most common thing you cast for fire magic, and it stops movement regardless of level.

Start off by getting a lot of archer stacks. If there's a general balance problem in HoMM3, it's that early and midgame are entirely dictated by archers. They win battles, and they win them for free because you won't lose units.

Most factions have a unit or two that's not worth getting since you don't have the gold to get everything. Tower's iron golems, rampart's dwarves, necro's zombies, etc. Typically the very slow units, since they get eaten up by archers and magic.

For campaign missions, you usually want to rush capital as fast as possible, gold income is mandatory.

Your world map movement is based on your SLOWEST unit in your army. So if you have 50 dragons and one dwarf, you can't move very far. For your secondary heroes, just leave them with a single fast unit so they can run around more.

Also regarding your last point, getting soldier skeletons back at the end of the battle is easier for managing your army stacks, but it's actually more efficient to get normal skeletons and upgrade them at your town. I think you only get 2/3 of the soldier skeletons compared to normal skeletons.

water has more utility than just bless and prayer, but the uses are way way more subjective and new players won't quite figure them out for a while. clone in particular seems really gimmicky at first considering the 'clone' is glass and dies in one hit to anything, but for particularly powerful stacks (or stacks that can cast spells), it really lets you squeeze some extra use out of your units offensively. timing on clone is key, and it's also good for making decoys because the AI will ALWAYS go for the clone first. water walk is also a cheap and easy way to get around, and remove obstacle/firewall/force field is great if you're into the russia-tier strat of making walls to kite your enemy around (note: you also need to have teleport for this).

also don't forget about how good bloodlust and stone skin are! heroes with those spells as specialities are most definitely worth stacking fire/earth magic on. also,
ARTIFACTS CAN BE COMBINED TO MAKE SOME SUPREMELY OP TIER SHIT

charm of mana? what are you going to do with 1mp/day? you combine it with the other 2 mana artifacts to make the wizard well which gives you FULL MP REGEN EVERY DAY. if you can see a recurring theme between some items, you should probably look for as many of them as possible to see what they do together. I won't spoil all of them for you, but some of them are straight up hilarious, especially the ones they added in the later expansions.

Split off as many single unit stacks as possible, they can still draw fire or soak retaliation and keep your main melee stack powerful.
A general piece of advice is to maximize the stuff your main army does every day and hand it off to multiple heroes a turn.

I tried playing a Fire-themed Inferno thing on one of the scenarios (Carpe Diem, was it?) but jesus fire spells really lack the utility of slow or haste. A-At least blind is okay. Didn't help Inferno is also basically shit-tier anyway.

send help

Give a scouting hero or two just one really fast early game unit you have access to and nothing else. A hero's base movement points are based on the slowest unit you have in the whole army. Early on in the game this is a key factor as some units are just really slow even after upgrading and should only be taken along for certain, hard to win battles you know you need to take care of early on.

Shooting units are easily your best best early on, plus some good spellcasting from your hero. The best efficiency is utilizing attacks and spells which will conserve as many units as possible for the long run, spells like Slow with good Earth Magic skill are really effective if you have some good shooting units in your army (or at least, a decent number of them). Conserving spellpoints of your hero also plays into things, so unless there's a well nearby it's good to conserve spellpoints and not have to sit a day in town to recover them.

Upgrading to the town hall and stuff first in your starting castle is important to get your income going, and if playing on a harder difficulty you'll need gold more than anything for troops and at the very least, low level buildings. It'll be up to your main hero to find extra sources of gold and the various resources out there, so picking certain fights first based on what you need for structures may come into play.

For campaigns and not single scenarios, fight and level up with heroes as much as you can so those levels carry over to the next mission in the campaign. Since spells from your spellbook carry over to all the future missions/scenarios with that hero, spellcasting secondary skills are far more important for them to get since you can use offensive spells to win fights with little to no troops at the start of scenarios in a campaign. Logistics can be moderately useful as well for your main hero, since they'll be the one attacking and moving around a lot so being able to catch enemies and travel around faster can be pretty helpful. Spellcasting should take priority though IMO, but if your hero levels up and doesn't get presented a spellcasting related skill Logistics is pretty good too.

Pathfinding isn't useful at all unlike Heroes of Might & Magic 2, the campaigns I've played so far most castles and towns are pretty much connected by roads so Pathfinding as a skill doesn't present much usefulness. Logistics or artifacts that add to your land based movement however are really nice. Being able to catch enemy heroes before they can hole up in a castle is an important part of any strategy and having extra movement points plays into that. Castle defenses are a pain if you have lower level ranged units that will slowly melt from being shot.

You can fight some strong units early on as long as you have good enough ranged troops and spellcasting to kill them before they can get on top of your troops. Depending what kind of troops you can get, Archery can be a pretty decent skill too since you always want your ranged units dealing damage in any fight.

To expand on this, pretty much any unit that has a spellcasting ability gains double the utility and usefulness if you split up into 2+ stacks of units. Master genies of the Tower castle especially so, as it allows you to cast more than one spell at the start of each combat round and buff up units.

If taking a treasure chest, always choose gold over experience. Experience is far less limited than gold, and more gold is always good to have.

The AI cheats in Homm3 - it will run away as soon as it detects a battle that it's guaranteed to lose, and unlike players, the AI can keep their entire army for free even if they retreat. The easiest way to deal with them is either haste your own army so you can destroy theirs in one combat round before they can even react (easier with high morale as well, you should really try to get +3 morale on every hero except necro heroes), or slow their army, wait for them to all take their move, and then mop up afterwards.

I wouldn't say always. Some campaigns focus on spellcaster heroes, and if you start at a low level, getting extra power or knowledge is a huge boon. It can let you break through that stack of neutrals earlier and explore more of the map without relying on your units. Being able to lightning bolt for 200 damage instead of only magic arrow for 80 can let you save 5 or 10 of that archer stack you had, which essentially saves you all that gold you would have gotten out of that chest.

But it is definitely dependant on the scenario, what needs you have, etc.

1. How do you complete good witch - bad witch on harder difficulties (impossible and 2nd highest too)?
2. Same with "Europe" scenario.
3. Is it even worth playing on the highest difficulty (impossible - start with 0 resources, AI starts with bonus)?

You must have multiple heroes. Not even for fighting, you need them for picking up stuff and scouting.

Impossible comes down to luck, if you don't have enough gold around to finance some heroes fast you suffer.

Harder difficulties are actually much easier during campaigns, since the start of each scenario after the first one means you start out with a hero that's decked out with experience, skills, and whatever spells they gained in the previous scenarios. Meaning early on having a troop shortage isn't as prohibitive since you can have a variety of spells to destroy enemy units before they can even touch your units (hence why spellcasting skills are so important, they allow you to win fights against neutral bands of units when you have little troops to work with). This helps you get resources and mines early on to make up for starting with nothing or next to nothing on harder difficulties.

Occasionally there will be 'cursed ground' where you can't cast any of the higher level spells during a combat, but with good magic secondary skills lower level spells will still kick plenty of ass.

What's up with the fucking enemy heroes starting first when I attack them?

He has a faster unit.

The hero with the fastest unit on the field goes first. Creatures that are native to the terrain you're fighting on get a +1 bonus to their speed rating. After that priority is given to the attacking hero if they both have a unit tied for the most speed in combat.

So for a single scenario, taking a look at the troop trees and finding out what you're fastest mid game unit is compared to other mid game units will help you figure out if you'll get in the first shot. Of all the units you can get from your own settlements I think the Arch Angel has the highest speed rating, so the Castle being your starting settlement could net you a late game advantage, and Arch Angels fly too.

This. Faster units = initiative, which is which haste and slow are so powerful. At expert level, they affect the entire army - so hasting your own army gives them all +5 speed, and slowing the enemy army cuts their speed by half. Having an archangel in your army guarantees you'll get first move, which lets you cast haste or slow before the enemy moves - meaning your entire army will be almost guaranteed to act before they can do anything.

Campaigns which you don't need to unlock are generally easier and ones in the top left are generally the easiest.

Get scout heroes whose sole purpose is collecting loose resources and transporting the army to your main hero. You might also want to invest into lieutenant heroes who can take some fights instead of your main hero if your main hero is away.

However one thing to consider is that might heroes are generally better than magic heroes and that Main skills by importance are Attack>Defence>Spell Power>Knowledge.
However, if you have extremely high Defence and Armorer secondary skill then you essentially get a similar effect to having an extremely high attack and offense secondary skill, which is why Crag Hack, Neela, Tazar and Gundula are considered the strongest heroes.
Spell power and knowledge aren't as important since in multiplayer games you'll usually just cast buff/debuff spells such as haste, slow, bless because they're generally more efficient than direct damage spells. Also, depending on the map you'll usually get to recharge your mana quite frequently (PROTIP: If a town has at least Magic Guild lvl 1 and a hero is in that town at the end of the turn, the next turn ALL HIS MANA IS FULLY RECHARGED).
However, in singleplayer, mostly since the AI is fucking retarded, once your spellcasting main hero in a scenario gets to a high level and you gave him good secondary skills and enhanced his primary skills as much as possible then they have become death, destroyer of worlds. This is especially evident in campaigns where he main hero is a spellcaster.

Rush strong units to expand quick, then build income.

Use archers strategically to take camps with 0 losses.

In campaign mode max all your stats/levels before going to the next scenario when possible.

Town Portal and Dimension Door completely break the game, especially with Earth/Air Mastery at max level.

High level warrior heroes are very good, since Expert level Slow is more gamechanging than throwing out lightning bolts. The only drawback is that you might not have a good mana pool for town portal dimension door cheese.

Morale is important and is a huge gamechanger.

Secondary skills from best to worst: (roughly)

Diplomacy (More troops always good.)
Earth Magic (Important Spels: Stone Skin, Shield, Slow, Quicksand, Town Portal)
Logistics (More move is good.)
Necromancy (More skellingtons for your undead army. Amazing with the necromancy artifact.)
Tactics (Setting up battles lets you save troops)
Water Magic (Important Spells: Bless, Prayer)
Leadership (More attacks is always good)
Offense (Kill more enemies before they can kill yours)
Wisdom (if you have access to town portal or dimension door or other good high level spells)
Archery (Makes archers even better)
Air Magic (Important spells: Dimension door)
Intelligence (Important for casters with highlevel spells)
Pathfinding (If on swampy maps)
Armorer (Saves troops)
Luck (More damage is always good)
Resistance (useful versus enemy heroes and very good in real PvP, but most of the game is just against random world mobs)
Estates (#1 skill for convoy heroes after logistics, still useful otherwise)
Artillery (Fairly useful in campaigns, since you often start with some level 30 heroes with barely any troops. If a hero has artillery mastery, he gets a free ballista and you can use them with a smaller army to conquer neutrals)
Ballistics (Useful for seiges, but not really necessary)
Scholar (give this to 1 hero so you can easily transfer spells mid-campaign)
Sorcery (good for dedicated mages, but spell damage is kinda underwhelming compared to a stack of tier 7 units)
Fire Magic (The least useful magic school. Having at least 1 school of magic mastered is important, so get this if you can't get any other)
Mysticism (If you really need spellpoints, go to a well)
Scouting (Okay for scouts but not really important)
First Aid (Healing a little is better than nothing)
Navigation (Okay on heavy water maps, otherwise useless)
Eagle Eye (Bad in campaign mode. Okay in single map scenarios if you get a bad selection of spells)
Learning (Basically useless. Gives you less xp than the amount it took to get it. Take maybe if you get a choice between eagle eye and Navigation but know you won't want either, or maybe on a convoy if you don't get any good choices.)

Way too high IMO. Better than offense? It's good but I'd rather have something like Armorer. You can get leadership from very common artifacts. I

Don't forget haste.

Above Pathfinding and Armorer? No way. On most maps you can recharge mana from wells and other shit. Unless you're casting Dimension doors like crazy you don't really need that much mana anyway.

Berserk is broken as fuck. Still the worst magic but below shit like Scholar or Sorcery? Nah.

In maybe 1% of situations, when you get screwed on good air spells and you're playing tower.
Also you forgot about resurrection and meteor shower for earth.
Typically you'll only ever have units of one or two factions, and +morale artifacts are a diamond dozen. Not necessary.

I might be wrong on this one since it's been years since I've played, but usually I don't have enough spare artifacts for most heroes and it lets you make good use of mixed armies. It could probably be lower, and it's not something you want on every hero, but I remember it being very useful.
Bless and Prayer are really amazing, and you get AoE cure, dispel, water walk, etc. For heroes without wisdom, water is hands down better. Haste is okay, but if you use Expert Slow you don't need haste, and the lightning spells are only good if you have tons of spellpower, and even then Implosion is usually a better choice in combat. The big advantage of air is dimension door and fly, which are pretty rare choices, but are utterly gamebreaking if you have them.
On a dedicated caster, it's important since it lets you abuse stuff like elemental summons, dimension door, town portal, and more. Pathfinding is highly situational based on map, but I could see it being higher in many campaigns.
Most Might heroes should only get 1-2 magic masteries, and Fire Magic is by far the worst school. Magic heroes still get diminishing returns, and if you have all 3 other magics, better implosions are still better than having fire magic. Another thing that's better is having all 8 heroes know town portal within 1 turn of completing the library. Scholar is actually a very good skill, but if possible you should obviously not have it be on your main combat hero.

Has the story ever been any good on Heroes games?

I used to play 2 and 3 a fuckton as a kid but not knowing English i never touched the campaigns at all.

Another thing is that some heroes tpyes are heavily weighted towards certain skills, so you may want to build around that

heroesofmightandmagic.com/heroes3/secondaryskilladv.shtml

For example, if you're stronghold, you should get offense and logistics very easily on your Might heroes. Or if you're playing Castle, you're probably going to end up with leadership on most of your characters due to your three most likely skills being leadership, navigation, and ballistics

If you play Castle, you're likely to end up with Leadership on every one of your (might) heroes because they fucking start with it. Same with Stronghold/Offense.

Nigger what? Luck is piss easy to max out through stacking artifacts.

u wot m8? How do you do that?

Try clearing an xl map with nothing more than a single stack of 40 vampire lords and counterstrike, then come back here and tell me air magic isn't the best shit ever.

You get a prompt asking you if you want to combine artifacts if you equip all the subcomponents.

See
heroes.thelazy.net/wiki/Combination_Artifact
It's only in Shadow of Death and the unofficial expansions like Wake of Gods and Horn of the Abyss. But if you collect all the pieces of a combination artifact, you get something that is either pretty much worthless, or breaks the game wide open.

Yeah, which also means "barely above 0 effort OP". Hence my reply.

Gold Dragons are immune to 1-4 as well. And Magic Elementals to all 5.

Still Phoenixes, as in HMM2.

On the surface it's generic fantasy, you learn more in corresponding Might&Magic games anyway.

There's a reason it's below every other combat skill. It still doesn't hurt though.
And then you get crushed the second you run into a hero. Air magic is useful, but isn't as versatile unless you get exactly the spells you need.

Diplomacy is ass and should only be used on a throwaway hero that isn't your main for actual combat. It's only useful early on in scenarios and even then you have to pay the enemy to join up with you and have an overwhelming force. It can be decent on a throwaway hero used for scouting and different stuff, but not on the main hero that needs things that are more important for actual combat.

If anything, Wisdom is the most important skill since that gives you access to the better spells and is the only way you'll be able to get them. Just one spellcasting skill by itself isn't all that powerful, but combine Intelligence, Wisdom, Sorcery, and all the spellcasting skills together then you have one secondary skill left over that could be used for whatever your preference is (probably Logistics so you can outmaneuver enemies and scout faster early on). But some of the super high level spells may actually end up being more useful in the tougher fights than the lower level spells, since level 4 & level 5 damage spells can do a crapton of damage with a well versed spellcaster. Then add in the magic skill bonus and the Sorcery bonus to that damage output and you can take out a number of tough enemies to mitigate any of your losses when they may get in a first attack. It's all about the context and conserving troops is usually your best best, and not many troops out there actually resist magic so you can deal with them in various ways with spells alone. Armorer & Offense will benefit your troops but only when engaging in close combat, spellcasting can indirectly take care of opposing troops before that melee combat even takes place and also help mitigate the effects of your opponent's spells in some cases.

Wrong, there's a reason any serious Heroes 3 multiplayer game is played with diplo banned.
If you even suggested on any Heroes-dedicated site that diplo isn't the most OP shit you'd get laughed out of that site with an endless sea of xaxaxaxaxaxaxaxa

Explain how it's OP then for the audience, because I fail to see how it is.

You can get free troops, you don't have to pay every time for them to join the hero's army. Now this may not sound like much but even something like 30 free archers is huge in multiplayer games.

Haste is incredibly common and comes in every single town. Lightning bolt is the strongest damage spell for a while and is excellent for clearing neutral stacks, and is also very common. Chain lightning is fucking god tier in campaigns, suffers a bit in single maps but it's nice enough. Air shield and precision are niche but I've used them both several times. DDoor and Fly are obviously broken as fuck.

But expert haste is THE reason to go into air magic on nearly every hero.

outside of other neutral stacks being easily recruitable, month of the cyclops is basically an auto-win because you wind up with more cyclopes you know what to do with and just shit all over everything

Diplomacy is literally the most broken skill in the game on maps where it is allowed. When you get a free (read: you *don't* have to pay) stack of high level monsters early on, you pretty much win the game. It also isn't particularly good on a scout hero, since if you have a weak army, the diplomacy doesn't always work.

Wisdom is completely useless if you don't have access to level 4/5 spells, and even then the main ones to use it for are town portal and dimension door. Damage spells are also seriously lacking lategame when you can just roll in with massive stacks of troops. Maybe you can do 2000 damage with implosion, but Crag Hack will be doing 5-10k damage with each stack of troops by that point.

By the time Diplomacy comes into full effect you have about 2 months worth of troops, minus losses, plus whatever odd gains, and a steadily growing income from at least 3 castles (speaking XL with underground here) and looting. Getting to pick the very best, like hiring two neutral stacks of Cyclops Kings to a total of ~70 while discarding your heavily battered Halberdier stack, affects combat outcomes a lot. You have enough gold by that point and those are sound investments.

It's not very hard to simply switch off the army of your main hero to your diplomacy hero to get the units with Diplomacy, then switch the troops back.

Sounds to me this is a multiplayer strategy on maps where there's a predetermined sort of units set to appear at timely times. Do you need Expert Diplomacy to get them to join for free or is it based on chance depending on your skill level?

It just doesn't sound like something you could count on in every match in that case, it seems like a calculated risk that could work out heavily in your favor if you get a good roll of the dice with what neutral creatures you come across.

Most multiplayer games nowadays are random maps based on templates and there's always quite a lot of neutral stacks to try your luck on.

The latter, you get a higher chance that if they'll join you that they'll join you for free if you've got expert diplo compared to basic diplo

Haste is good, but since usually I take earth magic whenever available, it is usually redundant with slow. Lightning is damage magic, which is only useful on dedicated magic heroes. Might heroes benefit more from water magic, with a few exceptions. Also even without lightning bolt/chain lightning, you still can use ice bolt, implosion, and meteor storm if you need strong damage magic.

Obviously it depends a bit on the available starting spells, but I stand by my choice.

Yeah basically Diplomacy, Town Portal, and Dimension Door are all banned because they break the game.

It's just less convenient to have it on another hero, since then they can't do anything else, and still have to fight if the enemies end up not running.

It is actually the opposite. Randomly generated units have a random setting affecting their disposition. Diplomacy shifts it better along with your army strength an composition.

Some monsters can be fixed to always fight, but IIRC otherwise it goes fight->flee->join with pay->join for free. You get a bonus for having the same unit in your troop, same faction, and for each level of diplomacy. (I might be off on one of the details, but it is basically this).

No, I can't even remember when I've last played hotseat, LAN or a non-random map. It works better on larger maps, of course, but good high-level guardians of some L3-4 artifact are often placed even on S maps.

Diplomacy changes neutrals' disposition, don't remember by how much and which stages, but at least two do that. But I've been only playing on random maps with strong neutrals so that means "monsters never join" == no freebies.

You have a sure-fire way of getting more troops than an opponent without Diplomacy can have. You can even pick which ones you get. And even having 30 more Lizardmen Warriors than you'd have from your castle(s) can mean going from about equal chances to certain victory for you.

I chuckled.

Except it does because you only have 8 slots for secondary skills you dunce.

These should always be your highest priority skills for your main hero regardless of scenario unless specific nerfs have been put in place by the map maker (such as setting all neutrals to savage).

- Diplomacy
- Wisdom
- Earth
- Air
- Logistics
- Offense
- Armorer

That's seven in total, doesn't leave a whole lot of room for anything else now does it? Depending on a number of situational factors any of the following seven should be your choice to fill your last slot.

- Archery
- Pathfinding
- Necromancy
- Tactics
- Intelligence
- Water
- Navigation

Now please tell me, under what fucking circumstance is luck superior to any of the above when it's impossible to have negative luck and you can gain luck easily either through treasure class artifacts or map locations?

Combine diplomacy with the lvl 1 spell visions and you can see which neutral stacks are willing to join you free of cost or at a price. Now imagine getting a stack of 5-10 arch angels for free with no risk before week 1 is even over and you might begin to understand how broken diplomacy can be.

I mean, I get it's hard for you to have informed opinions when you don't actually know how the game works, but I'll respond anyway.

Yes, and every single one of these skills (except Navigation, which is useless on 90% of maps) is ranked higher on that list than Luck. I'm not sure how it's hard to grasp that Luck is better than Mysticism, Learning, Eagle Eye, or First Aid.

You can't just magically handpick all 8 skills; there is some random chance involved. So while you're savescumming to get the exact skills you need, some of us actually play the game as it was intended and sometimes get stuck with the choice between Scholar and Learning on an important Hero and have to make an educated decision.

If I'm playing on a small map with Crag Hack (one of the best Heroes for small maps), there's a good chance there won't be any worthwhile level 4/5 spells on the map, and I'm pretty likely to win before a 5th level mages guild is even built. Even if it was, Crag Hack doesn't get much use out of high level spells outside of TP/DD/Fly/Prayer. Since Haste is relatively good for stronghold, I'm likely to get Air Magic, but if it's not in my mages guild, I'd rather get another spell school that has magic immediately available. Barbarians also have a really low chance to get Diplomacy, so I might not even see that skill show up.

A typical good build for him on a small map would look something like:

Offense
Armorer
Logistics
Pathfinder
Tactics/Air Magic
Earth Magic/Water Magic
Archery/Ballistics/Resistance/Leadership/Earth Magic/Water Magic

But maybe you get fucked and have to pick between Luck and First Aid. In 100% of those times, I'd pick luck.

events, fountain of fortune, devils/archdevils, misfortune
You don't automatically get every artifact and not every tile is a map location. Otherwise you'd permanently have infinite movement and mana as well, not to mention artifacts much better than the luck boosting ones.

I mean obviously you're retarded based on the Southpark/RLM reaction images, but you should at least be able to read properly.

(to correct myself, remembered that Barbarians don't get water magic, so you'd go Earth/Air for the magic assuming Haste/Stoneskin/Shield is available, possibly Fire if bloodlust but one is missing.)

Now I'm not completely sure about this, but I think that a hero's skill progression is predetermined after the map loads, meaning that you have to restart the scenario to get another skill progression. I vaguely remember when looking up certain walkthroughs of hard campaigns that they recommend you get a few levels and if they skills are not good enough that you should restart the scenario because saving and loading doesn't help, I could be completely wrong though.

Unless you're playing HotA, negative luck has no effect on your troops.

If you get them for free and early enough they matter a lot. Plus diplomacy snowballs out of control very fast, early on you don't have all army slots filled so you can pick random units > have better army strength > more units want to join > even better army strength etc, give the weakest units you don't have room for to your secondary hero. If it's the "month of x" you can pick them all up.

Lizardmen Warriors. 5/6/2-3/14/4 to 6/8/2-5/15/5 is a bit too much for +30 gold, and base stats are a bit underwhelming for 110, but they are decent L2 archers that shine with Bless, and Fortress heroes tend to get Water Magic. Also they don't die as readily as Gogs in melee.

Secondary skills are dependant on the faction of the hero, as well as whether they're Might or Magic. Each level up, you get the choice of one of your current skills that isn't expert, and one random skill you don't have that's available to your hero class. In addition, every (3 or 4, I can't remember) levels, you are guaranteed to get a choice of magic schools (I think wisdom can also apply here) so long as it's normally available.

I can't remember if savescumming after a single tree gives you the same choices, but I do know that there were ways to game the system. Even without complete randomness you'd be able to use a magic university or take a separate skillpath to ensure that you'd get different choices.

In terms of restarting a campaign due to RNG though, mages guilds seem more important that skills, considering getting DD/Fly/TP lets you get quest rewards without fighting anything or stealth-capture enemy cities.

After you level up set of 2/4 skills you get at next level up gets rolled. It prevents savescumming to some degree.

In most of the campaigns fast travel spells are banned some maps still might have cities that don't have them banned, such as first Sandro mission from Shadow of Death

Sometimes even if they were banned you could get them through Pyramids or artifacts. I distinctly remembering Christians final AB mission to be nearly impossible, unless you had DD/Fly in which you could get the second town for free, in which case it was a cakewalk.

Also out of curiosity, has anyone played the Chronicles games?

I never bought them back in the day and was wondering if they were any good.

They're not really "games", not even expansions like AB or SoD, just stand-alone campaigns. They're alright.

The Chronicles games are much more story-driven and are quite easy honestly. Think of how easy the RoE campaigns were compared to AB for example. I enjoyed them, but that's because I love HOMM3.

I actually didn't know this, thanks.

It also applies if you start a campagin with a hero who is already leveled. Some secondary skills are fixed (usually the first four of eight are fixed and leveled up to expert) while the rest are random.

That's still completely based on chance that your mage guild will give you the Visions spell or that some high tier unit nearby will happen to be interested in joining you. Otherwise it's just the usual save scumming.

Also, on higher difficulties you probably wouldn't be able to utilize Diplomacy as well cus you wouldn't have many troops to overwhelm a neutral stack's numbers, and you wouldn't have much money leftover for something like a mage guild, paying neutral stacks to join, etc. It's still based on chance and can't be counted on all of the time like some other skills.

You also have to take into account that the "weaker stacks" description is not accurate. You can sometimes have stacks which would fight you outright (meaning not flee in normal circumstances) offer to join you completely for free.
As I said, there is a reason why diplo is the only banned skill in serious multiplayer games, it's not just for shits and giggles.

Another reason HotA is so good is that they halved necromancy.

user, what part of "free units" and "exponential increase in forces" do you not understand? You do realize that if you don't have the money to afford the join offer the enemy just flees instead without even offering? There are only two settings for enemies not affected by diplomacy compliant and savage and creature difficulty set to hard makes everything but "month of" creatures savage making diplomacy far more timing dependent otherwise any neutral stack not set to savage has a chance to join you.

Yeah, before you couldn't pick certain heroes, couldn't level up necro until it was the last skill you could pick and you couldn't build the necro amplifier

That sounds like a logistical nightmare to manage for tournament games. Would people actually have to watch entire demos to make sure the necro users played fair?

They use a mod.

Man, Cove is designed with so much love. Probably too much considering their strength.

No, I think the HD mod comes with an option to turn HW rules (the basic ruleset for serious multiplayer play) and whenever it detects you trying to do something against the rules you get a pop up message saying that it's forbidden.

Cove is strong, but I don't know if I'd say it's better than just Castle, which is probably the strongest non-necro/non-conflux town (at least, in vanilla HoMM, without the nerfs to conflux or necro). I'd probably put it somewhere near the stronghold in that it's going to be a solid pick on every map, and has some good heroes, but isn't broken. Haspids are probably a little overtuned though and if you have sea dogs, they're broken but disabled for tourney play, right?

What's the point of a videogames replayability value if it's the only reason you come back?

I just shows an overall inability to make the game good and appealing. There's no point in returning here.

You should've learnt long ago that nothing will satisfy a correct Necromancer itch.

Could you try and reword your argument in the fashion that those that live on earth would?
Because it sounds like a game that has a large amount of re playability is a bad design and you back that up by saying no other games can satisfy in the same manner therefore making the game in question you return to bad?

I don't fucking follow

Wew, I just finished Jared Haret scenario (on hard, not impossible).
wew lads I did it

I play only random generated maps. I hate timed shits scenarios.

EZ way to win is make some macros to split your army, then take 1 unit of your cheapest type and place in all empty slots, proceed to rape hard encounters by using them to kite. I got some insane skeleton numbers by doing this, like 1.5k skellies by the time my first dragon was ready.

Getting a thousand spooky skellies somewhere around the end of week 3 is standard procedure on some random templates.
Pros can do this shit even with HW rules on in multiplayer games.

This. Also, it's tedious as fuck to go to weekly resource and creature generators, but they make all the difference in the world.

I usually have one dedicated thrash hero to do this. I figure out the patrol route to try to reach all the weekly generators to get that 1000 gold, those extra resources from the leprechaun and to drain the dwellings.

If you miss out on those then you are at a huge disadvantage.

It's not just high tier. Halberiers are good L1, Sprites can be good for certain army compositions as well. Marksmen are good L2, Obsidian Gargoyles are at least above average and can complement certain other troops very well, Harpy Hags are excellent with Haste and Bless, Wolf Riders can be very good with Shield and Bless and so on. Of course you don't want just a paltry 50..100 of L1 or L2 units, you plan ahead, like with everything in this game.
Otherwise you normally look for good L3-L5. Crusaders, Grand Elves, Archmages, Vampire Lords and any Liches if your morale allows, Beholders or Evil Eyes, any Minotaurs, Mighty Gorgons. Orcs and Rocs/Thunderbirds can be worthwhile too, even Ogres as meat shields

I only pick Impossible. You can't rely on income from just castles. And sometimes you forgo your own troops to pay those 50-75k for neutrals willing to join if they are better.

Mage Guilds are a must unless it's a small enough map.
By the time you start using Diplomacy in earnest you are supposed to have your important creature dwellings (sans L7) upgraded, a Capitol, Resource Silo and any other important buildings. For XLs it's early midgame so there's plenty neutrals on the map still. On Ms without underground it might be less viable.

Overall, just try it several times. You'll see why everyone who played this game a lot chooses to get it banned.

Peasant dwellings + transformer. Any other L1 dwellings help as well.

Even if you just get 50 trash L1 units, they can be very useful early game if you get them free. They can soak up attacks or if you get something moderately decent, you can fight something way beyond your depth. If they start becoming useless to your main army, throw your ragtag additions onto a secondary hero and have him explore a different direction. Or use them on a garrison hero.

Forgot to add that heroes with +350 gold specialty are made for running errands like that.

It makes no sense to use such a hero for a might or magic build when the specialty has no relevance for combat and is effectively wasted in that context.

When playing scenarios, I usually pick a 350 gold hero for my starting hero, then hire a decent one for my main off of the tavern. If I have bad luck, then I restart the scenario until I get a useable hero to recruit.

this advice is really useful. having a huge stack of shitty, free troops is useful for a ton of reasons. they can just absorb attacks and preserve your good troops from damage, and even shit-ass peasants deal decent damage when you've got a stack of a hundred or two

As long as they don't affect your morale too much. Undead tend to be rather bad unless you fill other slots with troops unaffected by morale penalties.

It doesn't hurt that Castle is one of the easier towns to get Diplomacy as.

Adela is a pretty good Cleric. Are there others? I've played with WoG's fixes and replacements for too long.

Loynis is pretty good as far as clerics go because of his Prayer specialty. Otherwise he's shit.

His second is Learning, I meant other Knights and Clerics with Diplomacy.

Well shit, you should've said so. Adela is the only Cleric with diplo and there are no knights who start with it, however Clerics have the highest chance of any class to get diplo with a level up (6.25%) while Knights have about average chance (3.6%)

That's the answer to both. That part was supposed to tell anons that I've been using replacements for various OP or shitty stuff for too long to remember who has them in vanilla, but, at the same time, I tend forget that not many people played WoG for years on end.

Isn't WoG an utter trash Rus mod that adds Heroes IV garbage and a ton of reskins?

Their campaign fits this description pretty well.
Otherwise WoG is just a bunch of settings. You can have things with HMM4 sprites (but which function differently from HMM4) or not, you can ban Fly and Dimension Door from appearing anywhere, ban certain artifacts and/or combination of artifacts, change/augment how skills work and many other things.
3.58 was the latest version last time I've been playing, but I've been actually thinking about going back to 3.57. They've added a lot of new features to 3.58 to support things new mods and then-in-development new neutral town, but it introduced new bugs and increased CPU load.

A big chunk of being gud at HOMM3 is controlling the map with an iron fist. Get multiple heroes to grab mines and shit all over, even running into enemy territory to gank all of their unprotected shit.

Last time I played I went on a 3 tiered hero system. Adventurer/Knight/Castelian. Your adventurer is probably your starting hero who goes around opening chests, getting levels, killing monsters, taking towns etc. Your knights follow suit, going to claiming mines, grabbing resources that your adventurer doesn't have time to grab, snagging shit away from enemies for a couple turns. Don't even have armies unless they buy from outside dwellings. Your castleian stays at home and commands your big ass troops. He doesn't just sit in town with his thumb up his ass, though, he's out patrolling for other knights and adventurers trying to take your shit. Hitting xp stuff, visiting windmills and waterwheels (which should be his weekly rounds).

Eventually your knights might form a monster transport line, though its a pain in the ass to do. Monsters don't spend movement, only heroes do, so can pass them on like a runner's baton to your badass adventurer.

Regarding this, it is important that your scout heroes have the fastest creatures in their "army".
For example let's say you're playing Fortress (more like Slowtress amirite?), put a dragon fly on each scout and they'll have much more movement. When you then chain them into a supply line to give this week's troops to your main hero, you'll notice that when you switch troops between the scouts they'll still move around as if they only have dragon flies, despite the fact that the army might have some slow as shit troops like gnolls or lizardmen.

It's even better to have some retainer hero hang around your main to take the troops at the end of each turn, so your main gets dragonfly movement each day as well.

FUCK

also

Don't only witch huts do that though?
I'm sure skill camps only increase attack/defence/SP/knowledge.

I just watched mekick on youtube playing necropolis and copied his strategy.
I seriously went from struggling on hard (equal resources, AI plays to the best of its ability) to finding impossible (start with 0 resources) a breeze (with necro at least).
Also thanks to this thread I discovered random maps, I didn't know they existed so I only played scenarios.
Pics related - impossible difficulty, 8MM6 map. Look at the dates (month week day) and the skeleton/liches/hero progression.

To elaborate:
Vid related - guys is a pro (well compared to beginners at least).

Well quite frankly I got back into the game after 6 years of absence. So I have no memory of which hut does what. I never learned them properly at all.
Was there a way to forget skills ?

No, any skill you learn is permanent. And witch huts give any hero that visits them a random secondary skill. If you can't learn any more skills, or the witch hut would give you a skill that you already know, it does nothing. It's best to always use a secondary hero to check witch huts before you use them, unless you really want learning on your main hero for some retarded reason.

Is it better to go for the dwellings first and then recruit immediately so my hero can progress faster, or wait until I get upgraded units?

It really depends on a lot of factors. Are the units in your faction? If not, is it worth the morale penalty? Can you claim the dwellings without using a lot of move and without losing many units? Some units are just garbage, while others are great - like wyverns, if you can take out a dragon fly hive early, you should try to.

Typically I prefer to rush income/structures first though, because your town will provide more units than dwellings will, as well as a mage guild and other potential benefits. If you're playing a mod where you can bank creatures in dwellings, grab them immediately of course. Especially the tier 5/6/7 dwellings, even if you don't buy the creatures immediately, you'll be able to recruit a few dozen by the time you've got the cash flow.

I guess I should have been more clear.
I was talking about those that you build in your town, not the ones on the campaign map.
As in, whether it is better to buy up all the units from the town that I can or wait to get the upgraded versions.

The main problem being the lack of resources – I cannot buy all the units that are available and still have enough gold to upgrade the town structures without wasting several days. The base troops are also inferior, but again, you cannot expect to make much progress with no army.

Get some sort of key stack and upgrade it (if the upgrade makes sense). Rampart for example doesn't really need more than Grand Elves (and centaurs) for quite some time, so you can get away with not buying more than the elves if you're low on money and spending your money elsewhere. Units that you don't buy in town don't run away, and often enough you don't need them either - bringing Dwarves would just be a waste of your time and money - so focus on just getting the units you really need and investing the money into getting to the next key creature or making more money.

They added new objects that don't blend in at all. It looks absolutely horrible. HotA nailed it though. The new assets in that one blend in almost seamlessly.

HotA is decent for a bit. They've been going into the "nofunallowed" and nerfing/removing the shit out of everything in an attempt to "balance" a game that was fundamentally made unbalanced from the start, so I'm dropping them as soon as VCMI incorporates Cove and is full featured.
Speaking of VCMI, Oasis is looking good.

Aside from necro/conflux nerfs, which if you play competitively you wouldn't use anyways because banned, nothing has been tweaked that hard in HotA. Minor cost changes and slight usability tweaks are the main things, like letting Gogs/Necros target any cell on the battlefield. I think if anything, the artifacts they added are a little too strong, but they're not restricted to specific heroes so that's okay. Plenty of new structures though, I think they appealed a lot more to the "pro" homm3 players when designing a lot of them.

The only thing that should have been touched balance wise was the Gog targeting, that was nice. Other than that, they should keep their heads out of the existing game and stick to new content specifically. Playing Heroes 3 "competitively" is the most autistic and retarded thing anyone could possibly do, in order to balance the game, they have to pose banlists of 75% of the game's content.

What the fuck did you say, иди нахуй пидар!

All right then, thanks.

...

One of the things WoG offers that make you never want to go back. It adds a script (all options are scripts, WoG is essentially just a scripting extension) that shows a confirmation dialog on Witch Hut visit and just prevents the interaction from occurring if you click "cancel".

Vanilla has Plague, though.

Or just save just before visiting and reload if it gives you something you don't want.

What is VCMI short for? I do remember there being other mods in the works, adding new factions. Some autistic idea about a night elf town and other shit that doesn't blend in. So far, Cove has been the only one that really worked. I've seen some of the Oasis project but don't remember the context. I do remember it looking decent though.

I have this one problem in strategy games as well as in Heroes 3 where if I focus I can do fairly okay although I wouldn't call myself a tactical genius, but I can never focus enough and start playing the game kind of mindlessly not thinking about my actions.

How do I fix that?

Does it work on windows 7?

get ADHD medication, because normal people never have to "focus" on games. I'm serious, you don't focus on chewing when you eat, you just do it. If you can't even manage that i'm afraid but you might seriously have some mental disorder.

Not what I was expecting and I'm a little disappointed

go play dominions 4, also consider killing yourself

Restoration of Erathia was released in 1999.

I think it's more the fact that I can't "focus" well enough or just start thinking lazily.

I'll check it out thanks

"The Restoration of Eratia" is a subtitle of Heroes of Might and Magic III.

I've never played the game with any mods by the way, what are the good ones?
I saw people play custom maps and I also noticed that I -don't- have some map templates (e.g. 8MM8).
What are the best mods?
(I only play single player).

Just play it for 1 hour max at a time.
When you start not focusing, drop it.

Either down to RNG or you're playing AB, I think. IIRC random maps appeared in AB so probably it's missing some of the templates that SoD has.

It's highly situational. Sometimes units are really dependent on their upgrades, so they get a huge boost. Stuff like lvl 7 units are usually strong enough that even 1 unupgraded one makes a huge difference if you get it week 1. Sometimes you just won't be able to afford upgrading your dwelling for awhile.

It's not ADHD to have your interest playing a slow paced game to erode over time as you play it. Not focusing in a strategy game is because of a lack of having the right mindset to think tactically and not being satisfied with the slower pace of the game. Result of this is that he stops thinking about strategy and is basically just hammering away at it with whatever he feels like instead of thinking things through before he acts. This lack of focusing can happen in other games too, like stealth games and even fast paced FPS games if it's not holding your hand but the fast pace demands your attention so you'll end up quitting in frustration instead.

No idea what it stands for, but it's basically a remake of the game engine based on the existing one, that requires the base game to run. So that modders have more control over the game in general when adding stuff. It will allow a lot more freedom in modding the game.

Desert town, no clue on how it will play yet, the guy who made the oasis thread seems pretty close to having all unit designs finished though, which means next year the stats and abilites will be chosen and they can hopefully start playtesting the town.