Heroes of Might and Magic III

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Before Starting

  • 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.
  • 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 final campaign.
  • Save often and in multiple slots, do not rely on the game's autosave function alone 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 who isn't allowed to lose or even flee from combat without failing the entire scenario! 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.

Early Game & Town Management

  • Upgrading your Village/Town/City Hall into a Capitol 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 easier.
  • It's 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 the secondary hero to pick up resources, transport troops, grab weekly creatures/resources and so forth while your main hero focuses on exploring and fighting enemies.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Marketplaces offer terrible value at the beginning but the more of them you own, the better the deals you get. Even early on exchanging less useful resources for valuable ones at bad rates can be worthwhile, for example if doing so lets you build a high-level creature dwelling before the end of the week.

Adventure Map

  • 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. 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Combat

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • AI heroes will almost 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.
  • 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.

Miscellaneous

  • 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.
  • Morale and Luck can't go over +3 or below -3, any further increase or reduction past those points has no effect.
  • 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.
  • 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's value depends entirely on how many ranged units you have.
GREAT - Air Magic, Earth Magic, Logistics, Offense, Wisdom, Necromancy (Necropolis only)
GOOD - Archery, Armorer, Intelligence, Water Magic, Diplomacy ("Great" if you get it very early, "Bad" if you get it very late)
USEFUL - Luck, Tactics, Fire Magic (Jumps to "Great" if you have Berserk)
SITUATIONAL - Navigation (Only valuable on water-heavy maps), Pathfinding (Only valuable on maps with lots of harsh terrain), Leadership (+Morale sources are abundant but can be valuable if your army has creatures from many different factions)
BAD - Artillery, Ballistics, Mysticism, Resistance, Scholar, Scouting, Sorcery, Estates ("Useful" 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.
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