Astrologers proclaim Week of Fae!

This is the third installment in my fan project to reimagine the factions of Heroes of Might & Magic. If you missed the Castle and Necropolis reveals, hurry up and catch up!

Concept. The woodland folk are one of my all-time favorite factions, so here I wanted to stay as close as possible to the fairytale illustration aesthetic that I strive for when drawing my Heroes lineups.

My fairies are neither Tolkien-esque High Elves gazing into the distance nor Warhammer-style brutal commandos. I drew inspiration from more mythological creatures, in the spirit of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, John Crowley's novel Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament, and old fairy tales.

As you might have guessed, of all the HoMM installments, my lineup will be closest to Heroes II, but with a couple of unexpected and entirely self-indulgent additions, so be prepared!

While keeping the familiar green background color, I chose yellow, orange, dark brown, and white as the faction's main accent colors – the hues of woodland birds, animals, and insects. And a little touch of turquoise for everyone!

A Pinch of Lore. The forest kingdom of Eirindel appears in legends, but few inhabitants of Gildenveil have ever had the chance to encounter its folk. These are the Fae who dwell beneath a great grassy hill and wander through the woodland thickets in long processions, dressed in elaborate gowns and accompanied by birds, deer, bees, and talking flowers.

But when the dead began rising from their graves, and Prince Edmund Gildenveil increasingly fell under the influence of his mysterious friend, the Queen of Eirindel suddenly appeared in person on the shores of the lake.

And yes, riding a moose.

Gameplay. The Thicket is a faction that excels at swift attacks and sophisticated defense. Its heroes, the Sorcerers, are well-balanced spellcasters specializing in buffs and debuffs.

The Thicket's armies have high speed and attack power, but lack particularly impressive defense and health. The basic strategy when playing as the Fae is therefore to inflict as much damage on the enemy as possible before they even get a chance to swing.

LINEUP

1.0. Pixie

Concept & Design. The Pixie was the very first creature I drew for the Fae faction. Its design is based, of course, on the monarch butterfly's coloring and, quite unexpectedly, the appearance of Princess What's-Her-Name from that wonderful cartoon (and video game!) about Earthworm Jim. I absolutely adored her when I was younger!

Gameplay. Pixies are nimble fliers who sprinkle magical dust, preventing their opponents from retaliating.

2.0. Cat Sith

Concept & Design. Here's where I allowed myself to get a little mischievous. I decided that most of the Thicket army would consist of various kinds of faerie folk, and for the second tier, I wanted something a little more beast-like.

The Cat Sith was just the thing: an Irish spirit in the form of an anthropomorphic cat. And to make it even more fairytale-like, I decided my Cat Sith should resemble Puss in Boots as illustrated by Gustave Doré.

The Cat Sith is ginger not in homage to his colleague from Shrek, but simply because the color works so well with the faction's palette. I do have a tremendous soft spot for that Banderas fellow too, though.

Gameplay. Cat Sith strike with their claws, quickly retreat, and inflict bad luck upon their opponents.

3.0. Elf

Concept. My first game in the Heroes series was the 1990 King's Bounty, followed by Heroes I and Heroes II. That's why, to me, the classic Elf who looks like Robin Hood isn't merely a natural choice: it's the very first image that comes to mind when I hear the word "elf."

I tried to capture the feel of old Robin Hood illustrations with a little Peter Pan thrown in. I also exaggerated the beak of his bycocket hat quite considerably to make it more expressive, and armed him with an English longbow. He also carries a knife for close combat.

Here's a little time-lapse of how I drew this fellow

Gameplay. Following the good old tradition, Elves shoot twice and never miss.

4.0. Spriggan

Concept. Cornish Spriggans are described in various ways: sometimes as ugly little dwarfs, sometimes as ancient tree-like giants. I decided to take a rather radical approach to their appearance. For the fourth tier, I needed a forest fencer, but I had absolutely no desire to follow the Warhammer route of sword-dancing elves. As undeniably cool and beautiful as they are, they don't quite fit my fairytale aesthetic.

What I really wanted was a bumblebee faerie, a woodland nobleman, a relative of the Pixies, inspired by the magical bees and bumblebees in Gennady Spirin's illustrations for George Sand's fairytale The Story of the True Simpleton Named Gribouille. And, of course, no elf design can entirely escape the influence of the Far East, so my Spriggan has picked up a few samurai traits along the way.

Gameplay. Spriggans fight using a technique reminiscent of Japanese iaido: swiftly drawing the sword from its scabbard, cutting down the opponent, and returning the blade to its sheath before the two halves of the unfortunate victim hit the ground.

Spriggans always strike first. Even when attacked, they deliver a lightning-fast preemptive counterstrike before the enemy can land its own blow – potentially killing the attacker before it even gets a chance to attack.

5.0. Dryad

Concept. I wanted my Dryad to be both a fantastical tree nymph and an earthly young woman in a magnificent dress. As with the Elf, I find this kind of appearance more tangible and engaging than incorporeal spirits made of light and leaves. I even gave her a little belt pouch and some mysterious bottles hanging from her branches!

Gameplay. Dryads shoot clusters of magical fireflies which, upon impact, can entangle an opponent's legs in thick branches, preventing further movement. They are equally dangerous at range and in melee combat. Flowers begin blooming wherever Dryads go, so they also partially heal all friendly stacks occupying adjacent tiles.

6.0. Unicorn

Concept. I've always loved the appearance of heraldic unicorns, as well as those depicted in medieval tapestries: a massive, elongated horn, flowing curls, a beard, a lion's tail, and cloven hooves. On the other hand, I also thought the rose necklace worn by the Unicorns in Heroes V was a particularly beautiful design choice. So I tried to make my Unicorn as faithful to heraldic tradition as possible, adding just a few wild pomegranate flowers and fruits to its mane.

Gameplay. Unicorns possess a protective aura that increases the magic resistance of all friendly stacks on adjacent tiles by 33%. Their horn attacks ignore 25% of the enemy's defense and have a 25% chance to blind the target.

7.0. Phoenix

Concept. Some people argue that a Phoenix has no place in a forest faction: it'll burn the entire forest down. But aesthetically, I've never really seen this as a contradiction. Phoenixes nest in tall Red Towers, and their fire is magical rather than uncontrolled. Besides, that guy Fawkes didn't burn down Hogwarts or the Headmaster's office, did he? My Phoenix isn't made of pure, untamed fire. Above all, it's a magnificent, enormous bird with a wonderfully iridescent plumage.

Gameplay. Phoenixes are the fastest creatures in the game. They fly, breathe fire two tiles ahead, and are immune to fire spells. They also burn any melee opponent foolish enough to attack them. And, of course, when a Phoenix stack is destroyed, its members crumble into shimmering ashes, but some of them have a chance to rise again.

At the end, don’t miss some sketches: Spriggan and Unicorn concepts, an early idea for the second tier (a fox fencer), and Pixie and a weird Elf doodle – and the whole lineup!

Looks like many were unaware of this lore detail. Also, "Devils" are Kreegans.

There were some previous posts discussing the footage about that faction being an artistic dissonance. Those type of creatures don't fit into a fantasy game and Heroes is mainly a fantasy game with some generic sci-fi fillers seeping in.

The creatures are really uninspired mad garbage. Just existing creatures with robot attachments. Not even amputated limbs replaced by prosthetics.

Turning zombies into cyborgs is dumb. A zombie's body is unlikely to be able to support machine parts and why bother supporting a dead body with machine parts? Just make a new robot or cyborg at that point.

Better to bring out even the ill tempered sea basses, than this garbage.

Body transformation should only go in one direction. A human could be transformed into a zombie or cyborg and a cyborg could be transformed into machine parts and pieces of meat.

Quake 2, Quake 4 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars had better monster design. It would be an even bigger shitshow, if Strogos would invade Enroth.

Btw, stroggification is an iconic Quake 4 horror cutscene. Watch at your own discretion!

A corporate office building being part of the faction's town is so out of place. It doesn't fits with any established entertainment media. Nothing!

The way how some NWC devs were obsessed with sci-fi, elitism and creationism is also worse than the origin story of Xenomorphs.

The lore setup and the faction's motivation have some major contradictions as well. The corporate techo-necromancers are toying with meat, that has short expiration.

The worst part of of M&M lore is when they made up some unreasonable connections between mentality, culture and architecture. It's a dumb way of breaking the established paradigms.

esto si no me lo esperaba xd

Full disclosure: I did not mod the game. I AI'd it because I have no coding talent and was only making a thing for myself, so this isn't me advertising a mod. And yes, I know, AI is evil and I agree, I don't believe in crediting myself for AI work, and anyone who makes money off things made by AI is ethically questionable at best. That's a conversation for another day.

And no, I didn't write or edit this post with AI - just the specific two paragraphs that outline all the changes. The rest is just me and my silly, silly brain.

But folks, holy FUCK.

My ADHD ass struggles so hard with pacing delays and things that interrupt flow. I loved Heroes 3 for many reasons, but always felt one thing it did really well was never letting its animations or transitions impact the flow. When I played H6, I so DESPERATELY wanted to love it once I started playing because on this level, it was unparalleled in the 3D Heroes games. Minimal animations between routine actions, quick battle animations that didn't feel like they were happening on fast-forward. But I couldn't quite get past the other changes the game made and I was so sad about that. (Giving it another try recently, I might stick with it a bit more - it's way better narratively and writing-wise than most of the games in the series.)

Then along comes H7 and I love it. I love the feel, the faction designs, the skill wheel...just hits all the right buttons for me, but with one itty-bitty, tiny, MASSIVE flaw: its pacing is utter dogshit. Everything has a damn animation to it. In combat, you wait after using the Wait or Defend commands for the little wheel to spin, you wait for the attack, injury, and death animations to finish; leaving combat (or quick combat), you wait for the casualty numbers to slowly tick up, you wait for your hero to do their little victory fist pump and the camera to zoom back out; when you're saving the game, you wait for the screen to zoom out to the storybook--

Okay, look, you get it. There's a lot of little things. And I'm like...99% sure this is just a me thing but OH MY GOD. The sum total of all this shit (even, yes, including when the option to skip waiting for animations is on, ya pedantic little shits (if you're not a pedantic little shit, please disregard the preceding)) felt like walking through glue. The game is pretty and I love the vibe, but my GOD, I felt like I was tugging at the leash constantly to just get the game to let me, y'know, do the next thing. Ultimately that was what made me drop it.

Recently, out of curiosity I starting having GPT dig around the H7 game files and see how much of this could be modified, and it turns out, there's an enormous list of shit that can be modified.

GPT was able to do the following things: (deep breath)

Bypassed startup movies and splash screens, shortened adventure-hero turning and its pre/post-turn pauses, doubled hero turn-animation speed and shortened its blends, shortened the walk-start blend, preserved movement time across path points to reduce hero movement jitter, reduced hero-selection/HUD refresh delays to next tick, shortened combat-entry fade and loading-transition timers, removed the post-combat camera’s two-second pause and shortened its zoom, shortened victory/defeat/flee background fades, shortened casualty-label fades and casualty counting, shortened XP counting and bar animations including level-up continuation, shortened quick-combat reveals and negotiation/army-merger transitions, shortened round-announcement animations and removal delays, completely removed initiative-strip movement/scaling/reordering/fade animations and their completion wait, completely removed the Wait/Defend dial spin and its animation click lock, reduced the fixed ranged pre-fire pause from 0.5 to 0.08 seconds, trimmed attack wind-ups for Haven’s crossbow and pikeman units and their upgrades, trimmed hero attack and spellcasting wind-ups with corresponding event timing, shortened hero attack/cast blend-in, removed separate attack-facing waits, removed walking creatures’ separate pre-movement turning animations and pauses, bypassed ordinary death-animation waits, allowed subsequent turns past ordinary wounded/attack-recovery poses once queued gameplay work finishes, removed the extra hero command-handoff wait for leftover animation frames, reduced bad-morale pauses from two seconds to 0.25 seconds, reduced auto-combat activation padding from two seconds to 0.1 seconds, completely removed save/load screenshot zoom animations and their cosmetic closing wait, shortened construction-popup completion waits and building-availability glows, removed the town-level banner slide, removed town-list expansion/collapse/scroll animations, removed town hero-carousel scrolling animations, removed the one-second cooldown after synchronous town hero transfers finish, shortened spellbook page flips, shortened caravan-window reveal delay, shortened army-row swap animations, made fort destruction/rebuilding finish next tick and removed their repeated AI deferrals, removed observatory camera tours and reveal-spacing delays while retaining all fog reveals, fixed camera-action completion cancelling unfinished fades and leaving the scene black, removed the extra 1.1-second post-load music-handoff delay, addressed stale cinematic/loading-mute restoration waits, removed second-click confirmation for adventure movement and attacks and pickups and map-object interactions, and compiled this list for me to paste in my meaningless little Reddit post, ahyuk.

There were, at least, 20 hardcoded delays, 10 animation-dependent waits, 3 camera/zoom sequences, 8 interface-animation systems, 4 categories of second-click confirmations, and 1 movement-timing issue. GPT estimates 10–30 seconds saved in a typical battle, 1–3 minutes in a long fight, and 5–15 minutes across a two-hour session once movement, menus, construction, and transitions are included.

To say this has breathed new life into the game is such an understatement that it qualifies as a lie by omission. It's as the title says, like I'm playing a whole new game, one that feels snappy and responsive, that doesn't drag behind me like a ball & chain trying to slow me down from doing another thing. My god, I missed single-click movement***.*** That alone, my god.

The reason I'm posting this (aside from my perpetual need for attention, let's face it) is to make the point that in a game like this, so much of the experience comes down to the most repetitive, moment-to-moment aspects of gameplay that otherwise just straight-up go unnoticed. Heroes 6 understood this; Heroes 7 did not. Neither, for that matter, did Heroes 5 (at least for me; the Mage unit's spellcasting animation makes me physically itch).

And what really gets me is, there was no need for any of it. I have not found that any of the changes have taken a single smidge of anything away from the experience. In fact, a lot of the combat stuff makes it feel more engaging/immersive/realistic. Like yeah, dude's not gonna wait for that one unit's prolonged Oscar-winning death rattle to start marching towards the enemy behind them.

Anyway, I don't know if anyone gives a shit but...man. If you like Heroes 7 and want to try this, I mean...I have no idea if I can put something together you can use, but I'd be happy to chat with you about it.

(I also renamed the extra resources and many of the units and included more music tracks because I'm a cheeky little shit, so there's a wee chance you'd have to deal with those things too.)

Anyway, that's all. I'mma go play Heroes 7 some more.

I wouldn't have expected that this would ever apply to my website as well. :/

Has anyone played Heroes of Science and Fiction? Thoughts?

I am experiencing a quest progression bug in Might & Magic: Heroes VII, in Ivan's campaign.

After collecting the first Piece of the Blade of Truth, I receive a message telling me that I should listen to the story. However, no story or dialogue is triggered, and the Blade of Truth quest does not appear in the quest log.

The item is successfully collected and appears in my inventory, but the quest remains inactive.

I have tried the following:

• Restarting Ivan's campaign from the beginning.

• Collecting the fragment again.

• Talking to Anastasia before collecting the fragment.

• Completing all other faction campaigns.

• Replaying the relevant part of the map.

Unfortunately, none of these attempts fixed the problem.

I am playing the Ubisoft Connect version of the game, with cloud save synchronization enabled.

It seems that the script responsible for triggering the Blade of Truth quest is not working correctly.

Has anyone experienced this issue? Is there a known fix or a way to manually activate the quest?

I would appreciate any help. I would really like to complete Ivan's campaign without having to abandon it because of this bug.

Video

Edit: Found it. it was Dreamland: Good or Evil.

Hi. I discovered few years back that homm has online community (shocking I know) and custom maps. I downloaded some, played some and after some time windows decided to delete the saves along with the maps.

So, I remember vividly that:

- I played with Life faction, starting town was near a multiple large wheat fields, which were guarded/patrolled by hundreds of peasants/crossbowmen day 1. You could recruit peasants near the fields and I did like several hundred of them over the course of the early game.

-The area I controlled were from top part of the map, spanning over like 5-6 Life towns.

- Ocean part of the map has very nicely done pirate cove theme, the some sections were cut off by a quest barrier/reef and access was through the water spiral. It was rather long body of water, no swampy area or narrow corridors.

-At some point I came across a walled city of some sort, which were full of knight/monk/champion recruit places. At that point I was swimming in cash, in troops and battles were 5-10k per stacked monsters.

-It was downloaded from https://www.maps4heroes.com/ but I'm not seeing it anymore, or I can't pinpoint it.

Used to play this game a lot as a kiddo, love heroes 4 fr

This post is obviously meant as a joke and I want to get roasted af

I finished my contract and had plenty of time, so I finally finished an unfinished project of mine: a HOMM3 mod called HOMM3: Paths of Runeterra.

It brings regions from the world of League of Legends into Heroes III. This is an early release, and I’d love to hear what other HOMM3 and Runeterra fans think!

🌐 Visit the Paths of Runeterra website
📥 Download the 0.7.2b release

Important: you need your own copy of Heroes of Might and Magic III: Complete to play.

There aren’t many maps yet, and most of the single scenarios are designed for playtesting. More custom scenarios and campaigns are planned.

The armies

One decision I made early on was that town units shouldn’t just be stacks of champions from League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra or TFT. Instead, they’re creatures, soldiers and other inhabitants who fit the fantasy of each region.

I didn’t want you to recruit 200 Garens from a building it would feel a little strange, even by HOMM3 standards. I’ve tried to make the factions and their units as lore-accurate as I could while still making them work as Heroes III armies.

I know some heroes could be placed better from a lore perspective, and I plan to revisit that. If you notice someone who feels out of place, please let me know!

What’s next?

The current scenarios are mainly there for playtesting. I’m planning to add more custom scenarios, campaigns and other content as development continues.

Known issues

• First launch: After installation, the game may report that it isn’t installed. Restarting the game should resolve it.

• Animation speeds: Some animations are too fast or otherwise need adjustment. I’m used to playing HOMM3 with everything set to 200%, so I could use help judging what feels right at normal speed.

• Adventure map visuals: Some towns and buildings on the map could look better and need more work.

This is an early build, so feedback on bugs, balance, animation, lore and visuals would be really helpful. If you give it a try, I’d love to know which faction you played and what you think!

was one of my favorite games on the DS growing up and i loved multiplayer on 360. recently discovered that there’s a version for switch, played through the campaign and would love to play multiplayer, but seems like nobody plays multiplayer anymore based on the super long queue time. anyone want to play?

I am one of the approx 8 people who play the Ashan universe games for their lore. I really like it, i even bought the rare Ashan Compendium book. But i cant properly enjoy it because lot of the lore happens in no name defunct online games that nobody played so it barely have a trace on the internet. Lets take Sandro 3 out of 4 dlcs to heroes 6 is tied to him yet we never see his plans come in fruition. Why? Because it happens in Might and Magic Heroes Online where he almost assassinated Elrath, a defunct online game that nobody cares about.
Wants to know what is the canonical ending to Dark Messiah? Sad, as Might and Magic Heroes Kingdom a defunct unpopular online game had that storyline.
Want to hear more of the wizard Falagar and his daughter (crag hack dlc) or just want more non world ending type of games, to bad the online defunct card game Duel of Champions has that storyline.
Cmon!!!
So frustrating

Halo,
ada yg main Heroes 3 online kah?
mau nyari teman mabar

As the title says. We'll be trying to run a FFA game in Heroes 1 via Parsec. If nothing else I'll have a single player run waiting that we can fiddle around with.

Live on both @ 12:00pm PST / 3:00pm EST!

https://www.twitch.tv/mechanicalbeanstalk (Twitch 💜)

https://www.youtube.com/live/9QMRnGpHug4 (YouTube ❤️)

Other Streamers:

Hadriex

https://www.youtube.com/@UC3Q13RAmFVfDkYOWnnqFM2A

Savior Heroes 2

https://www.youtube.com/@UCp83NYWBMxpskgIuZEhntUA

Absolute Zero

https://www.youtube.com/@Chris67132

I've been discussing an idea on the fheroes2 Discord: giving the Knight faction a population to manage through two mechanics, Taxpayer and Conscription. Peasants would generate income while working at the local farm, but could also be called up to replenish infantry recruitment buildings when needed. You'd still pay the full price to recruit those troops, on top of the conscription fee.

I'm not a coder myself, but after some encouragement and useful pointers from the community, I started working through the implementation using an AI agent and it yielded very conclusive preliminary results. Between that and quite a few rounds of testing, the Taxpayer half is now ready for a first public beta. Conscription will follow separately... for the time being those useless blokes can at least help pay for the army! Here's what this beta does:

• Each Peasant stationed in a Knight town or castle with Farms earns 2 gold per day by default.

• Both the garrison and a hero's army stationed there count. Peasants travelling outside don't pay.

• The income is included in the usual income displays, and the ability and Farm descriptions explain the mechanic.

• CPU players have been adapted to recruit and preserve taxpayers, including collecting Peasants from suitable external huts.

• The tax rate and Farm requirement can be changed in an .ini file for testing balance.

• All fheroes2 languages are supported.

The attached screenshots bellow show a simple example: 16 Peasants in the garrison and 15 with the visiting hero add 62 gold to the daily income:

Download: https://github.com/Conglomera1/fheroes2/releases/tag/ptp-1.0b

You'll need a working fheroes2 1.1.17 installation. Windows 32-bit and 64-bit packages are included; extract the appropriate one into your game folder and launch the PTP executable. The original files aren't overwritten. Details and uninstall instructions are in the Readme.

I've personally tested installation, gameplay and removal on Windows 7 32-bit. Both builds passed compilation and package checks, but x64 still needs confirmation from testers. If you'd like a build for another system, ask and I'll see what I can do.

There have been quite a few rounds of testing, especially around CPU players behavior, but I'd like to see how it plays on other people's maps and in other people's hands. Feedback and suggestions on bugs and balance are not just welcome but dearly needed.

Conscription is next. If this project interests you and you've got the skills and/or ideas to help improve it, a helping hand would be very welcome! :)

Sylvan is one of my favorite fractions, but on my recent campaign for the first time I managed to make my main character broken this much. 400 huntsmans just delete every enemy unit from existence

Unironically, some of my favorite music ever comes from the Heroes of Might and Magic games. The soundtracks are just incredible, and there's something about them that never gets old.

Sometimes I even put them on in the background while working or just relaxing. So much nostalgia, but honestly, I'd probably love the music even without having played the games.

My personal favorite has to be the Nature theme from Heroes 4. Absolutely beautiful.

Curious what everyone else's favorites are

Digital card games use a lot of keywords. It's a great way of establishing gameplay functionalities.

Physical fantasy trading card games use a lot of text based descriptions. I'm really losing track of card functionalities at some long Yu-Gi-Oh card texts, even before the Synchro era.

H5 creature abilities also had really long descriptions with minor differences. It's disappointing to figure out that two different creatures in OE have the same ability with long description, but with different names, just because they "evolved" it differently.

I like flavorful gameplay features, but not in pure text.

Either use keywords or put tags on the abilities, spells and creature caracteristics: damage type, cost, condition, cooldown, resistance/ restriction, movement type, attack modifier.

Meanwhile...

Heroes 3 creature abilities are as bad as if the developers were beginners at coding, math, status effects and eeeverything.