Heroes of Might and Magic III: Difference between revisions

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-- Get your capital as soon as possible. Getting that 4000 gold a day is much more important than being able to buy 2nd or 3rd level creatures right away.
+- If possible, it's generally not adviced to play the official HD remaster version of HoMM III due to it lacking all expansion content. The original HoMM III Complete can be brought up to modern resolutions with a free HD patch (https://sites.google.com/site/heroes3hd/) which also adds a bunch of very useful quality of life improvements such as the ability to purchase all creatures in a town at once, the option to re-attempt fights, and more.
-- Get as many skill boosters for your hero as possible. It's called heroes for a reason, once you get your attack/defense/magic power/knowledge above 10 it helps soooo much. So stop at all those places that give you +1 skills. Also go out of your way to pick up the artifacts, some will boost your skills a ton. Learn which artifacts do what as well, as far as I'm aware, there aren't any artifacts that directly hurt you, there is no Hideous Mask for those Heroes II players.
+- The order the official campaigns are meant to be played goes Restoration of Erathia -> Armageddon's Blade -> Shadow of Death. The campaign menu lists these in the opposite order, leading to a lot of players inadvertendly starting from the hardest campaign.
-- In the beginning, I'd take the gold whenever you pick up a treasure chest, but once you have enough money where you are able to buy out your creatures on day one, start taking the experience.
+- Save often and in multiple slots, do not rely on the game's autosave function very much as it autosaves at the end of each turn rather than the beginning. This is incredibly important in campaigns where you often have an essential hero that is not allowed to lose or even flee from combat without failing the entire scenario, as it's very possible to get stuck with an autosave where that hero has used up all their movement and thus has no way to avoid an enemy army they can't win against.
-- If you take over another town, get it up to a City hall, the more money you make the better.
+- In campaigns where your hero carries over from one scenario to the next, it's worth getting as many permanent attribute boosts and spells as possible before finishing the current scenario as they will carry over as well. Artifacts will not carry over, some plot-specific ones notwithstanding.
-- Magic is very important, use it a lot.
+- Upgrading your Village/Town/City Hall into a Capital in your starting town should usually be your first priority due to the income boost it provides. There are a handful of exceptions however, for example Tower will want to upgrade Gremlins into Master Gremlins and Conflux will want to upgrade Pixies to Sprites on the first day as they're far stronger than their unupgraded counterparts and make early fights far easier.
-- Get Expert Wisdom(Lets you cast level 5 spells), Knowledge(gives you double spell points), Air Magic, and Earth Magic. In my mind those are the four most important skills.
+- It's often a good idea to hire a second hero from your town's Tavern on the first day. Not only can you add their starting troops to yours, but you can use them to pick up resources, transport troops, grab weekly creatures and resources and so forth while your main hero focuses on exploring and fighting enemies.
-- Town Portal, and Dimension door are the two spells that will allow you to move far away from your castle, and be able to return any day you need to protect it from enemy heroes. Get those, and use them to your advantage.
+- A handful of heroes start with a powerful high-level spell at level 1, such as Tower's Solmyr (Chain Lightning), Dungeon's Jeddite (Resurrection) and Necropolis' Aislinn (Meteor Shower). These can be very advantageous all throughout the game. Some heroes also produce free gold or resources, making them useful secondary heroes even if they never fight a single battle.
-- As far as choosing your town, I think they are all good, except I'm not a huge fan of Rampart(kind of weak), Tower(really expensive), Inferno, and Fortress. All the others, I find quite workable.
+- A town with a Mage Guild will fully replenish the Spell Points of any hero who ends their turn there at the beginning of their next turn.
-- Turn on movement shadow and movement grid and all those other things in the battle options. Right clicking will tell you how far a unit can move(speed), it helps to know how far your enemies troops can move, so you know what's going to get attacked. Remember, you always want to get the first attack in if you can, if you have 20 units against 20 units, say that first attack kills 5, then they are only retaliating with 15 guys, instead of 20.
+- Having Expert skill in a magic school often greatly amplifies the power of spells belonging to that school, most notably causing most status effects to apply to entire armies rather than individual units.
-- The above is limited to the regular games/random maps, NOT the campaigns.
+- Morale and Luck can't go over +3 or below -3, any further increase or reduction past those points has no effect.
-- Gold is the only resource you'll worry about late game. Get as much as you can as often as you can - it's almost always worth sacrificing a bunch of troops for gold mine.
-- Might heroes are usually better than magic heroes. A 2k damage implosion looks pretty cool, but a high level might hero can have troops 2 to 3 times as good as a high level magic hero.
+- Ranged units only deal half damage in melee unless they have "No melee penalty" listed in their abilities, so getting your melee units next to enemy ranged units and keeping your enemy from doing the same is very important. Most ranged units also deal reduced damage from long range and when attacking from the outside of city walls, represented by your targeting cursor turning into a broken arrow as opposed to a whole one which represents full damage.
-- The best hero skill is logistics, hands down. Move more, capture more resources, kill more bad guys, get more experience - and run down enemy heroes before they can get back to town.
+- AI heroes will always try to run away if they're losing a fight, often with an annoying "parting gift" in the form of a Lightning Bolt to your weakest stack. When your enemy is starting to be low on troops in a fight, do your best to wipe them out in a single assault before they manage to get a turn which would allow them to flee.
-- A hero with leadership, luck, archery, resistance, offense and armorer is hilarious. Expert archery increases ranged damage by 50%, expert luck will double damage like a quarter of the time.
+- The 4th level spell Armageddon can be combined with fire-immune creatures such as Black Dragons or Fire Elementals to deal devastating damage to enemy armies while leaving your side unharmed. A high-level Anti-Magic spell can also make individual stacks immune to Armageddon.
-- The aim of any battle is to win with the least casualties, or lose with the most enemy casualties - every unit counts. Meatshields backed by ranged units is always a good idea. Leave stacks you don't like back home (eg. pikemen), cos that stack of 1000 will save your castle some day.
+- Controlling your own and your enemy's Speed is one of the key components for winning fights with minimum casualties. This makes Slow arguably the most universally useful spell in the game despite it being 1st level, as a hero with Expert Earth Magic can cripple entire armies with a single cast of Slow.
-- Shooting units are way overpowered. Marksmen and Grand Elves attack twice, and will probably get two goes before the enemy closes, so its like you're hitting four times for free. The best army is all ranged (archangels and archdevils pretty much count because they can move anywhere).
+- In addition to its role in combat, the creature with the lowest Speed stat in an army also determines how many movement points that army has available on the adventure map. For that reason it's not recommended to bring very slow creatures such as Walking Dead or Dwarves along when going for longer journeys as they will slow your hero down significantly.
-- Combat speed is important and hard to increase. The cape of velocity artifact (there's some hand one as well i think) is awesome. First turn haste or slow is pretty much the best spell you can cast for most of the game.
+- Certain terrains increase the amount of movement points required to traverse them on the adventure map, in effect slowing down your heroes. These terrains are Rough (+25%), Sand (+50%), Snow (+50%) and Swamp (+75%), making swampland the hardest terrain to travel in the game. The Pathfinding skill reduces or eliminates these penalties. Roads have the opposite effect, allowing an army to travel further than normal.
-- The Castle town is the easiest, the Fortress is the hardest. The rest are much of a muchness. Some towns don't get 5th level mage guilds, so if you want to play a magic hero, try Tower first (they also get a 1st and 7th level ranged troop, so they can get pretty broken).
+- Each creature also has "native" terrain on which they suffer no movement penalties, and they even gain bonuses in battles taking place on that terrain. For example, an army consisting only of creatures from the swamp-dwelling Fortress town can move on Swamp terrain without suffering the normal +75% penalty to movement point costs.
-- The unofficial WoG expansion is cool once you're used to the game, but most of the options make the game a lot easier, so play up a couple difficulty levels.
+- Some secondary skills are more useful than others. The following is a rough order of usefulness, but it's by no means absolute as opinions vary and for example Archery is less useful if your army has weak or no ranged units and Leadership is more useful if you have creatures from many different towns as it offsets the morale penalty from having a mixed army.
-- Money, money, money.
+:: GREAT - Air Magic, Earth Magic, Logistics, Offense, Wisdom, Necromancy (only for Necropolis)
-- It's best to have ONE hero, preferably with Logistics, to do all or most of your fighting.
+:: GOOD - Archery, Armorer, Diplomacy, Intelligence, Tactics, Water Magic
-- I forget the name, but there's one hero who appears as a blue genie. He begins knowing Chain Lightning. Get him early and you can dominate the map.
+:: USEFUL - Fire Magic, Leadership, Luck
-- Black Dragons + Armageddon = teh win.
+:: SITUATIONAL - Navigation (Great on water-heavy maps, useless otherwise), Pathfinding (Great when facing lots of harsh terrain, useless otherwise)
+:: BAD - Artillery, Ballistics, Mysticism, Resistance, Scholar, Scouting, Sorcery, Estates (good on secondary heroes)
+:: TERRIBLE - Eagle Eye, First Aid, Learning
+- Once you have good handle on the game and want to experience something new, the fan-made and free expansion Horn of the Abyss adds a new town, campaigns and many good balance/QoL improvements. In the Wake of Gods is another option for advanced players, adding huge amounts of customizable options that can alter practically all aspects of the game, often to imbalanced but entertaining results.
 [[Category:Games]]