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. They'll be used to take over enemy towns and intercept enemy armies before they get into your territory. Your toughest and most experienced heroes go out on the front lines with powerful stacks of troops. Generally, you're going to want as many heroes as you can afford, and you're going to put them into a variety of different roles. What is key is hanging on to your heroes, building up their levels, and equipping them with useful magic items and powerful armies. A tenth or twelfth level hero of any class is worth far more than a bunch of low level minions. More important than the class of the hero you hire is getting them up in levels. They range from the normal Humans, Elves and Dwarves to more outlandish characters like Demons, Vampires and Efreeti, though the race of the hero has virtually no affect on the game. So for example there are Battle Mages and Beastmasters, Death Knights and Druids, Wizards and Witches. Each of the eight town types has two character classes associated with it, generally one mage type and one warrior type. Heroes can be one of sixteen different character classes, which is more than you'll find in most straight up roleplaying games, let alone a strategy game. This is very reminiscent of Master of Magic, though the disparity between heroes you can hire early in the game and later on is not as great. There are more than one hundred individual, pre-packaged heroes, each with their own name, portrait and special abilities. There's a tactical mini-game, cities to upgrade, costly armies to raise, and an exploration and overland adventure mode, but the game never really bogs down into the sort of tedious micro-management that plagues most other explore and conquer games near the end of a scenario.Īt the heart of the game are the heroes. It achieves this by making you worry about four or five things at a time, just enough to keep you busy but not enough to overwhelm you. Like all great turn-based games, it has that addictive, up-all-night quality.

While I've always thought Master of Magic was the best of the bunch, due to its rich magic system and more detailed, Civilization-style economy, the latest installment of the Heroes series comes close to changing my mind.īe advised, Heroes of Might & Magic has a lot of great gameplay in it.

Fantasy-themed strategy games have two great series-Warlords and Heroes of Might & Magic-and one game that damn well should have been a great series-Master of Magic.

Heroes of might and magic 3 platforms