Heroes of Might and Magic III Review | Patrician’s Choice™ TBS Game

Hey, hey people, Sseth here. Today, I’ll be reviewing Heroes of Might and Magic III. Do you have any special talents? Reviewing Heroes of Might and Magic III is a difficult request. While you have good games with strong followings, You also have exceptional games, With fanatical followings. Fans of Heroes III applaud the game with a religious zeal. And rightly so, for much like a well-oiled, silky-skinned and voluptuous temple priestess,

You can play her for months, years and still not master her. In every crease and fold of her soft ASSets, There’s always more to learn and explore. New strategies to test the limits of her depth and design. In other words – it’s a really fucking good game.

More than a decade old, Heroes III still shines as a gorgeous, melodious, And tactically rich turn-based strategy game. Of course, when I refer to Heroes III, I mean the Complete Edition. Almost every Slav and their grandmother owned by now. NOT the HD Edition, Which contains a neither of the expansions,

And has every texture in the game sharpened and airbrushed, By underpaid interns, Making every monster in the game look like some bootleg Mugen character. Although to be fair, most of them mods out there for Heroes III, Also look like bootleg Mugen characters. The concept of the game is ridiculously simple:

You can play as any one of nine different… Sorry, you can play as any one of eight VIABLE factions, Represented by different towns. While you pick your starting faction, You could always conquer other towns and use their units as well. Each town is unique in its own strengths and weaknesses. With each town capable of producing several different tiers of units, Ranging, for example, from lowly Troglodytes To Red and Black Dragons for Dungeon town. Or Skeletons, To bigger Skeletons for the Necropolis. These cities get plastered and spread through the game world, Represented by a common map area shared by all players.

If you’ve built the appropriate unit dwelling, a town will offer you units to recruit, Which replenish at the start of each week. Unless there’s a plague, In which case – everybody dies. Bizarrely, this also includes the Undead. Remember to keep your heaters on in the winter,

As pneumonia is still a leading cause of death among the elderly. Including Liches. And Power Liches. Each turn you take on the map counts as one day, Meaning every seven days a new week begins, And everyone’s army expands… if they can afford it.

You often start scenarios and campaigns with a chosen or given hero, Each with unique abilities that can be exploited to victory. These act as generals under your direct control, With a limited number of map moves to spend per turn. Each leader can hold seven “stacks” of troops,

Arranged by position and formation, making up their army. A stack visually represents the number of a certain unit, Which influences the outcome of combat. Losing all your stacks means defeat for your hero. Heroes can’t die, but losing a fight will usually make them run off, And join the enemy,

Due to your incompetence as a leader. All this information finally makes sense when we get to the combat, Which is also turn-based and divided into rounds, And initiated by players, by robbing dwarven or Polish banks, Or moving next to enemy heroes on the map.

Each round, every monster on the battlefield gets a turn, To move, attack, use abilities, wait or defend And that’s the simple gist of it. When a stack attacks another, their stats are multiplied by the number of attacking creatures. Pretty simple shit, right?

So if level 18 Crag Hack with Expert Offense attacks level 18 Tazar’s four Chaos Hydras, with his five Ancient Behemoths, Who, we can only assume, has Expert Armorer. How much damage would that be? Easy. We just balance this quadratic equation. Plug in our expression coefficients into this algebraic expression. Do a linear regression.

Find the acute angle in this triangle. And solve for X. Okay, real talk. Any mouth-breathing polygon journalist can say this gay, generic shit. You know enough about the game. Let me try and convey why it’s so good. Your leaders can’t directly intervene in combat, But their stats transfer to units,

Their artifacts are bullshit ridiculous, And their spells are some insane shit. And that’s why the game is so damn enjoyable. Each town can build Mages Guilds to research random spells of increasingly higher level. Sometimes you get hot garbage like Hypnotize Which lets you… waste your mana and fumble your turn.

And other times you get nice stuff, Like Armageddon. Armageddon detonates a nuclear bomb in the battlefield Scorching everyone on it for massive damage. Except, there’s a few troops out there, who are immune to fire damage Or spells in general. A fun tactic, As in, not fun for anyone else

Is taking several spicy boys with your hero and running straight into enemy lines. The larger their army is, the better. Cast Armageddon, destroy most of his army and retreat Rebuy your hero at the tavern and do the exact same thing, every turn. At most, you spend a few thousand gold in this strategy,

While your enemy is incurring maybe twenty, thirty thousand gold worth of damages, Each time your suicide bomber rushes them. Berserk is also a “fun” spell. It turns any enemy rabid, attacking whoever’s closest, be it friend or foe. With expert fire magic, berserk becomes even more “balanced”,

Since it gives magic rabies to everybody in a ten-mile radius. Or 16 kilometres, for those of you still using outdated, barbaric systems like metric. It’s particularly enjoyable, watching your friends army tear itself in half, without even lifting a finger. In many ways, Heroes III is the torture porn of turn-based strategy.

Then, there’s the issue of the Undead, Which is one of my favorite towns by the way. If you let necropolis breathe, It will shit down your neck by late-game. That’s because every time they fight, Necromancy revives most units back as Skeletons. And if they can assemble a simple as seen on TV artifact,

Just pull the plug. Quit. Leave. Not sure if your opponent has assembled a Cloak of the Undead King? Don’t worry. I have a foolproof method of finding out: Mouse-over his stack of Power Liches in combat. Note down the number. If it’s somewhere between several hundred thousand,

Or if a textbox is flickering and glitching out, He PROBABLY has it assembled. Let me explain – normally necromancy revives only Skeletons, But with a Cloak of a “Balanced” King, You revive Liches instead. And Liches are level 5 necropolis shooters. And your opponent has billions of them.

He has so many that if he ever tries to split the stacks in his inventory, His game will crash. Most spells get better by leveling up your respective school of magic. Often expert level means you affect every possible target for the spell.

At expert Earth magic, the Slow spell soaks every enemy in shit, And reduces their movement speed to a crawl. Let’s say for a rampart dwarf, He’ll need 14 turns to reach your army, Provided there’s no boulders or small branches in the way. The same applies to Haste.

At expert Air magic, every one of your units, Becomes a high-velocity whirlwind of fucking shit up. If you’ve got a Black Dragon, or even better – a Phoenix in your party, This often means you win before the enemy can move a single unit.

Positioning and coordination on the map are vital skills to win the game. That is unless you have expert level Town Portal, Which lets your hero enter any friendly town instantly. This usually makes it impossible to lose towns, As a single hero can simultaneously defend them all alone.

That is unless the enemy can cast Dimension Door, Which lets them teleport to any location inside of their hero. At expert level this can be cast FOUR fucking times per day, Effectively letting a hero of large pools of mana to cover five days worth of travel, in one.

The Heroes III equivalent of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Alternatively, if you don’t care about strategy or tactics, Just recruit somebody with diplomacy. Level it up to expert and approach any stack of rape dragons. Somehow your poetic way with words will convince them to join you,

And then proceed to decimate the continent with your newfound rape dragons. Even better – the added strength of the rape dragons, Helps convince other, ludicrously powerful, neutral monsters to join you as well. Diminishing the quality of your current game, As you snowball straight to victory. If all those tactics seem unbalanced,

That’s the point. The game thrives on you straining its mechanics, Rewarding experimentation and punishing established conventions. There’s a reason this game has its own published version of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War”. Winning and victory is about meticulously knowing every intricacy of the game,

While making sure your bullshit strategy will beat your opponent’s bullshit strategy. Heroes III is a great game and still looks beautiful to this day. Thanks to its hand sprite at graphics Heroes III aged better than most of the girls I knew from high school,

Then again – heroine is one hell of a drug. The musical score and sound work is also fantastic. And I’ve got it installed on every computer I ever owned. It’s incredibly pleasant in its atmosphere and a complete joy to play.

The best game to cozy up to in a warm blanket with a hot mug of coffee in early spring. The very definition of comfy. That is unless you’re playing multiplayer. Then it’s a dumpster fire of hot garbage. The game is trash, unbalanced dog shit. “Who the fuck is playing necropolis?!”

“Do you want to be kicked out of the house?!” Heroes III – It’s a classic. And this review – generously paid for by the Merchants Guild. As always more content to come, So stay tuned.