December 7, 1999 Web posted at: 2:13 p.m. EST (1913 GMT) by Rawn Shah

From...

(IDG) -- When the people at Loki told me that they were about to go into beta with Heroes of Might and Magic III, I was eager to try it out. I'd already played the Windows version of Heroes II -- I enjoyed it very much, in spite of the cutesy graphics -- and Heroes III is easier to play and has a tighter focus on military units and fighting. Most of the game looks very familiar if you've played the earlier versions, but there are a few surprises.

The basic play of the game involves moving your heroes around the map and gaining experience by completing a quest, taking over enemy towns, or fighting free-ranging creatures or enemy heroes. All of your heroes can recruit creatures into their army to help fight their enemies. Some of these creatures come directly from towns you control, others from independent buildings around the map, and still others are unattached adventurers that wish to join your side.

On the map, you'll find treasures, artifacts, independent buildings, creatures running wild, and resource sites. The treasures give you extra gold, resources, or, in some cases, experience points. The artifacts increase some aspect of your hero's skills, or his magical or creature abilities. Some artifacts are guarded by creatures, and others you may have to purchase.

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Some independent buildings contain creatures you can recruit, but only after you defeat the guards outside. Others will raise your hero's skill levels in exchange for gold or other resources. Still others contain Seers or Magi who, in exchange for a particular type of artifact, will either give you a more important object in exchange, or give you experience or teach you a valuable skill.

The game has six types of resources: wood, gems, sulfur, mercury, ore, and crystals. You use these resources in various combinations to buy buildings and recruit creatures. Once a hero visits a resource site, it will produce a quantity of the given type of resource every day, unless an enemy takes it over. Having many resource sites is crucial, since you can exchange any given resource at a marketplace for gold or other resources needed to buy buildings or units.

My hero

The tactical battles play a bit like chess, with different types of pieces and a varying game board. When your hero enters a battle, the action moves to a tactical screen, with attacking forces lined up on the left and the defending forces on the right. Depending upon the terrain on which you are fighting, there may be different types of obstacles that your units must avoid, either by walking around or flying over them.

Keep in mind that, while you can move your units into advantageous places, the enemy can too. Preserving your units should be a higher priority than causing vast amounts of damage to your opponent's units. You do need to weaken the enemy early on, by taking out groups of creatures in combat or whittling them down with ranged attacks, but make sure that you don't lose too many of your own units in doing so.

If you're bored with tactical battles, you can always click on the autobattle button on the bottom of the screen and watch the computer handle it for you. This isn't so bad, although there will come times when you disagree with tactical decisions made by the computer.

Towns

Towns also consist of buildings. You can purchase buildings that produce and exchange resources, increase the strength of a defending hero during an attack, or build such weapons of war as Healing Tents, Catapults, and Ballistas. In any given game, you are likely to need most or all of the buildings that recruit fighting units, but you won't necessarily need to buy any of the other, more peaceful types.

The menagerie

Every town has at least one type of unit that can fire from a distance in a ranged attack, one that can fly, and one that can travel seven paces or more. Some units, like Pit Lords and Ogre Magi, can also cast a single type of spell, like Conjure Demons or Bloodlust. And some units, like the Ceberi, Hydras, and Dragons, can damage several units that are immediately adjacent to them with a single attack.

Each unit can be joined with others of its kind into a group. The more of them you group together, the better off you are in combat, since damage is spread across all the units within a group. In single-player games, the computer tends to attack the group with the largest number of units first; thus, you can draw fire to your less important units while preserving the more costly and powerful ones.

Heroes of Linux

What's more, the game only plays in 800-by-600 pixel mode in the X Window System. Having a larger screen size won't help; on such a screen, the game will appear inside an 800-by-600 window, which just makes it harder to scroll around the map. If you run XFree86, you can normally resize your screen with Control-Alt and the plus and minus keys. Thus, in most cases, you only need a 17 inch screen to play the game. This is a two-dimensional game, so having a fancy three-dimensional graphics card is not going to matter.

Like most of Loki's other ported games (Railroad Tycoon being the notable exception), Heroes III can only be played on the console and not displayed over a network through the X Window System. The game does have a multiplayer mode, but each station must have its own copy of the game installed and running locally. In a multiplayer game, one player hosts the game and everyone else connects to that host to join in the play.

If you enjoy playing turn-by-turn strategy games, this is a good game for you. It's involved less with building towns and more with direct combat. The somewhat comical two-dimensional look of the game may be a turn-off for some people, but it is drawn and animated well enough to make up for this failing. Those who are really into strategy gaming will probably be oblivious to the view anyway.