Heroes of might and magic 3 game download

Routine movement and exploration in Heroes 3 is carried out on the two-dimensional overhead adventure map with an icon bar to the right. From here, you can access any hero or town under your control.

When the fighting starts, the game switches to the combat screen, an abstract, hex-divided battlefield with more than just a passing resemblance to SSI's masterpiece, Fantasy General. Popping up in between are the town and hero screens, where you actually make the decisions, swap troops and artefacts from one hero to another, trade various items on the free market to balance resource production, and add town buildings.

The screens are well-planned and neatly designed. A single click - never more than two - is all that's usually required to move from one screen to any other. Your objective in Heroes III is to build bigger and better armies so you can dominate the map, take over things like sawmills and gold mines, and wipe out the opposition. Disappointingly, there's very little diplomacy or negotiation in this game - it's kill or be killed.

Single-player mode gives you the choice of one of 42 predefined scenarios or one of three initial campaigns. If the bundled scenarios become a yawn, there's a map editor, which enables you to create maps and new scenarios for up to eight players. You can multi-play over a network, by modem, over the Internet, hot-seat or linked by a null modem serial cable. Expect to do a lot of waiting, though.

It's a turn-based game, after all. You start Heroes III with a town, a hero and a small army of creatures under your command. There are eight different town types, including castle, fortress, rampart, dungeon, inferno, tower, stronghold and necropolis, each producing seven different troop types from the types available. Start with a rampart, for example, and you can recruit centaurs, dwarves, wood elves, dendroids, unicorns and green dragons.

Dungeons are limited to troglodytes, beholders, harpies, medusas, minotaurs, manticores and red dragons. Heroes come in 16 flavours and range from bog-standard fantasy fare, like knights and wizards, to more exotic characters, such as beastmasters and necromancers.

Each town supports only two hero types: ramparts, for example, attract druids and rangers, while castles have knights and clerics. Not that you can't recruit other hero types - it's just that they're less likely to appear. The most irritating feature is that you have to choose one of the odd pre-defined heroes in the single-player scenarios, rather than being able to 'roll your own'; in campaign mode, you get no choice at all.

Whatever happened to role-playing? If you move your hero on to an enemy, you immediately activate the battle screen. Your troops -seven units at most - are set out on one side, witn the enemy on the other, and in the middle are randomly placed obstacles to liven things up. The fastest troop types move first, and they can either fire ranged weapons or move close up for hand-to-hand combat. Unfortunately, that just about sums up the range of strategies on offer.

With seven a side and roughly equal forces, it's virtually impossible to find a winning strategy. If you have more ranged fire units, like archers, you can stand off and whittle down the enemy, but that way you lose more of your own ranged fire units to counter-fire, and these units tend to be harder to replace and recruit. A hero with good combat spells can make a small difference but, in the end, the battles rely on luck more than skill. As always, whatever gods there are in the Might And Magic world are on the side of the big battalions.

Finding the right strategy on the adventure map isn't easy, either. You can't build new towns or fortresses, and once you've cleaned up the freebies you can only spread outwards. There's nothing groundbreaking about Heroes III. Okay, it features bit colour at x resolution, but although there's plenty of detail on the adventure map - and too much animation -it still looks somewhat dated. Mind you, it does have two levels the surface and the underworld which adds to the variety of the gameplay.

The big changes from Heroes 2 are to the game system itself, where there are bigger maps, more unit types, more spells and improved combat. Existing Heroes fans will be well chuffed. For many strategy gamers, it will seem inflexible and a bit too shallow, especially when compared to other games on the market. And while it's often compelling enough to force us into 'one more turn' mode, I just can't for the life of me work out why.

When you start a game, you usually find yourself with a hero, a town and some troops. The first thing to do is explore the area and grab whatever resources and buildings are within easy reach. Your hero, a knight, has 80 pikemen and 4I archers, so he's well-equipped to take care of himself. Note the four ships, which can be used for transport. When your hero has finished moving, go straight to the town screen.

Each building in the town has a function, and is highlighted when you move the mouse over It You can hire a limited number of extra troops In the town, and another hero or two to lead them. They are your game winners. You'll also want one hero per town, leading the garrisons, though a lot of times I found myself skimping in this department, particularly with cities well away from the front lines. Finally, you'll use other heroes as scouts and explorers, and a couple others for more mundane chores, like going to the sawmill once a week to collect resources, or ferrying troops from the cities where they were bought to the heroes on the front lines.

These tasks are suitable for low-level duds. But when two armies meet, the heroes don't actually get out on the battlefield and fight. That's handled by your armies, and stacking tons of good troops with each hero is the key to victory. Every hero can handle up to seven slots of troops, and there is no real upper limit to how many of one creature will accompany your hero.

So a knight might have pikemen, archers, and 20 griffins with him, for example. What heroes add to the fray are combat bonuses, acquired either through experience or magic items, and spellcasting ability. They can also direct the siege equipment that can accompany an army. When combat does occur, the game shifts away from the overland map and onto a hexagon grid that serves as a battlefield.

Each creature type is represented by one big icon on the field even if the icon represents only ten or a hundred pikemen, it's always the same size. Units take turns moving and attacking, and a really good, if complicated, formula is used for dishing out damage and allowing the defending units assuming they survive to strike back. And while it isn't actually simplistic, since the game mechanics are balanced, highly detailed and very sound, the scope and presentation of the battles--goofy, over-sized characters on a narrow, flat field--doesn't really stack up with other wargames, fantastic or not.

Although it does beat Warlords III and that game's almost non-interactive combat, hands down. During the six fairly short campaign games, most of your heroes will carry over from one scenario to the next, though strangely, their accumulated artifacts and armies do not.

I found that kind of a rough transition. What are my Heroes doing with their magic items after each mission, throwing them away? Another thing I've never understood with this series however is why you can't flee a battle without having your hero quit from your service. This creates an unnatural situation of 'win or die', and for the player it simply means you're going to save the game before you go into every battle. Why can't you retreat?

This brings further annoyances, since the save and load game interface is a bit cumbersome, involving something like four or five steps to save a game, and it quits out of the engine altogether if you just want to reload a game. In addition to combat skills, among the 8 secondary skills, there are also neutral skills that improve some of the character's features. For example, "Logistics" increases the distance traveled by the hero in one turn, and "Diplomacy" allows you to recruit neutral creatures for service..

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