We can be Heroes (of Might and Magic)

Contents:

The Intro

The Game

The Replay

The Verdict

The Intro

Title: Heroes of Might and Magic II

Release year: 1996

Developed by: New World Computing

Genre: Turn-based strategy

Platform replayed on: PC

Classic. Fantasy. Turn-based strategy.

If you like the sound of those three mixed together, Heroes of Might and Magic II is worth a try. It’s obviously not the first entry into this long-running series, but it was my entry point. I didn’t play this quite at the time of release, but it was definitely late 90s. I borrowed this from a friend, and was hooked. It’s not without its flaws. But as I try to do with these replays, I look at this game for what it achieved at the time, and its legacy. In those regards, it’s a winner.

At the time I first played this, real-time strategy games were booming. Warcraft II, Command and Conquer: Red Alert, and Age of Empires were games I spent a lot of time with. But I wasn’t a huge fan of the real-time aspect, and I wasn’t into online gaming. I remember some of my friends would play against each other from their own homes using dial-up modems. Heroes of Might and Magic II was more my style. It still allowed for the building of large forces, and epic fantasy battles, but without the frantic pace of a real-time strategy game.

This game introduced me to the “just one more turn” syndrome, more commonly associated with the Civilization series. I wish I knew how many hours I sunk into this back in the 90s, but given how quickly this game came back to me, I’m betting it was quite a lot.

This series is now in its seventh iteration, with the release of Might and Magic Heroes VII (2015). It also has a connection with the King’s Bounty series, which I wasn’t aware of. The original King’s Bounty (1990) was also released by New World Computing, and is considered a forerunner of the Heroes of Might and Magic series.

My own connection to this series has come only within the last few years, when I played King’s Bounty: The Legend (2008). This game was a reboot, as there was no sequel to the original game. It is also a series that continues to this day, with King’s Bounty II releasing in 2021. I noticed similarities immediately upon playing, but it wasn’t until researching for this blog that I found there is actually a connection.

And with that little bit of video game history behind us, let’s have a look at what Heroes of Might and Magic II was all about.

The Game

Heroes of Might and Magic II is a turn-based strategy game, where you must manage your resources to build up your towns and armies, and ultimately achieve the goal of any given scenario. In most cases, the goal is to defeat your enemies in combat and control the land.

There are three ways of playing: Standard, Campaign, and Multiplayer.

Standard games are one-off scenarios, where Campaign games follow a series of interconnected scenarios (essentially story mode). Multiplayer games could be played over the internet, using LANs, or by hotseat.

During a scenario, you will control heroes and towns and castles, as you explore and build up armies to conquer and control territory.

Each turn will see you managing different types of finite resources:

• Gold—received each turn dependent on how many towns and castles you control, as well as any gold mines you happen to control
• Ore, Wood, Gems, Crystals, Sulfur, Mercury—received each turn dependent on how many mines/mills/labs you control
• Hero movement

The core unit of the game is the hero. You need a hero to transport your forces and take them into battle. In the bottom right of the image above, you can see the army the selected hero currently controls.

There are six hero archetypes, each with their own associated castle and the armies that can be raised from them:

As you can see, there is quite a cast of fantasy creatures on offer here. Each hero archetype is also quite distinctive; the Necromancer castle features undead creatures, for example, where the Sorceress castle is nature oriented. This also plays out in combat, which is asymmetric; each archetype has their own strengths and weaknesses which must be balanced when opposing a different archetype. I’ll go into more detail below.

Further, in the campaign, the Knight, Sorceress, and Wizard heroes are considered the forces of good, where the Barbarian, Necromancer, and Warlock heroes are considered the forces of evil.

Hero units also have their own sets of skills: primary and secondary. The primary skills are used in combat:

• Attack—a bonus provided to the hero’s units when attacking
• Defense—a bonus provided to the hero’s units when defending
• Spell Power—the strength of the hero’s spells
• Knowledge—the hero’s spell points

Attack and Defense apply to the units under the hero’s control, where Spell Power and Knowledge apply to the hero’s ability to cast spells.

Heroes start with one or two secondary skills, and can learn more during a scenario, up to a maximum of eight skills. The secondary skills provide the hero with additional bonuses or abilities. Some apply during combat, like Archery (bonus to ranged units), Ballistics (more effective siege attacks with the catapult), Leadership (increases unit morale, which can lead to bonus attacks), and Luck (increases the chance of a unit attacking at full potential). Others apply on the strategic map, like Logistics (increases hero movement on land), Pathfinding (reduces the movement penalty when travelling over rough terrain), Estates (increases the amount of gold received per turn), and Navigation (increases hero movement on water).

Secondary skills can also be advanced twice, increasing their effectiveness.

Heroes improve both their primary and secondary skills by levelling up. This comes primarily from experience gained in combat.

Exploration is important, as you need your hero to claim and control resource generating structures (mines/mills/labs) on the strategic map.

As you build up your resources, you are able to build up your castle with additional structures, the majority of which generate units for your armies. From the unit images shown above, you will see that next to each unit is the structure you must build in order to generate them. Here are the units for the Wizard Castle again:

Each turn in the game is measured as one day, and you are only allowed to build one structure per castle per day. At the start of each new week, any unit generating structures will populate with new recruits for you to purchase. This is how you build up your armies, so resource management is a crucial part of the game.

Each castle can generate up to six types of units. Units are ranked from one to six, from weakest to strongest. In order to build the structures for the stronger units, you must first build the structures for the weaker units. There’s a type of “power creep” at play here, where the longer the game goes, the stronger your army gets (or should get). It’s also a race, as you need to build up faster than your opponent(s). Again, it all comes back to resource management!

Inevitably, you must lead your armies into battle. There is no diplomacy option here; you win by effectively managing your resources to build armies and conquer your enemies.

As you travel around the strategic map with your heroes and their armies, you will have the option to attack other heroes, towns and castles, and neutral units (which are often guarding resource generating structures and artifacts, or blocking pathways into new areas on the map).

Of course, you can also be attacked by other heroes. This can happen out in the open on the strategic map, or when defending a town or castle.

As the battle begins, you will be taken to the tactical map. This is where you maneuver your units around the battlefield, attacking and defending against enemy units. The battlefield is grid-based underneath (you can toggle this to show the hexes).

Each unit stack will take a turn moving and/or attacking each combat round. Heroes can also cast one spell per round. Heroes can learn more spells as they build and visit mage guilds in towns and cities, as well as visiting certain locations on the strategic map. Magic is important to master, as this way your hero acts as a sixth unit in combat. Each hero can only have a maximum of five unit stacks in their army (see the sieging force in the image above), though the number of each unit in a stack has no limit. In the image below, you can see both heroes control four unit stacks each, and the number next to each stack indicates the number of units in that stack (for example, the hero on the left controls six unicorns).

Each unit is ordered into an initiative order, based on their speed. Faster units go earlier, and slower units later. This is important, as it can give the faster units first attack advantage; it’s always advantageous to take out or weaken enemy units before they get a chance to attack.

Units are split into two attacking categories for both moving and attacking:

• For attacking, it’s melee and ranged. Melee units can only attack when next to an enemy unit, where ranged units can attack enemy units anywhere on the battlefield.
• For moving, it’s land-based and flying. Land-based units march up to their movement limit, where flying units can reach anywhere on the battlefield in a single turn.

Units can also be affected by random elements such as morale and luck during combat. High morale enables a unit stack to immediately attack again; low morale causes a unit stack to lose its turn altogether. Good luck means a unit stack will do maximum damage with its attack. These elements can be improved with spells, artifacts, hero secondary skills, and by visiting certain locations on the strategic map.

I mentioned above the asymmetry at play between the castle types and the units they produce. There is incredible variety here, when you consider the melee/ranged and land-based/flying dynamics of the units available in each castle. Each castle is not created equally. For example, two castles do not have any flying units: Knight and Barbarian.

On the plus side, the Knight castle features very strong defensive units, making them strong in defending castle sieges. In the Barbarian castle you’ll find very strong attacking units. The Warlock castle features three flying units, but limited ranged ability; the weakest unit, Centaurs, are the only ranged unit. The Wizard castle has three ranged units, meaning there is limited melee strength.

You get the picture. I’ve also mentioned how this game is a race: an arms race. Some of the strongest units in the game are difficult to build up to, but when they appear on the battlefield, they are game changers. The Tower in the Warlock castle can be upgraded twice, to go from generating Green Dragons, to Red Dragons, to Black Dragons: the strongest melee unit in the game. In the Wizard castle, the Cloud Castle can be upgraded to generated Titans: the strongest ranged unit in the game. It takes a lot of resources to get to these points with these two castles, and the units themselves are expensive to recruit each week. If you manage your armies with these units well, there’s not a lot that can stop you if you’re coming up against a non-Warlock/Wizard army.

Coming back to the race aspect, if you are coming up against either of these two castle types, you need to hit hard and early; you cannot afford to get into a lengthy slugfest. Other castle types have lower-cost top units (for example, Paladins/Crusaders in the Knight Castle, and Cyclopes in the Barbarian Castle), meaning you will likely have the resources to build their structures earlier than an opponent might be able to build a Black Tower or upgraded Cloud Castle.

Once in combat, the two sides will battle it out until one is defeated or retreats. If victorious, it’s time for the spoils: experience, and enemy-hero artifacts.

And that I think about covers it for how Heroes of Might and Magic II plays. If you would like to see this game in action, the video below shows my playthrough of one of the campaign missions.

Now, it’s time to see how my replay went…

The Replay

I decided for this replay that I would play through the main campaign. I was hoping this would provide some mission variation, rather than just play one-off scenarios. The physical version I have also contains the expansion: The Price of Loyalty.

The main campaign, The Succession Wars, starts off pretty much how you would expect with a title like that: King dies, battle for the throne. In this story, the two vying for control are brothers: Archibald and Roland.

The story begins with Archibald seizing the throne, and Roland exiled. It’s a good versus evil struggle, and you guessed it: it’s time to decide where your loyalty lies. There’s not a lot going on here story-wise, but I like that you get an immediate choice here.

I went with Roland, meaning I would primarily be fighting using the “good” heroes: Knights, Sorceresses, and Wizards. You act as Roland’s commander, and in between missions you get nice cutscenes where he updates you and briefs you on the next mission.

The image above shows the campaign screen. This is where you will select your next mission and starting bonus.

You will see on the right the choice of starting bonus you have to make for this first mission. The problem in-game, is that if it’s an artifact (like the Thunder Mace and Gauntlets above), you don’t know what benefit they provide. Here’s an early example of the interface showing its age, though it’s not necessarily bad. You see, with games of this vintage, you were provided with physical manuals (you can see it in the image of my physical copy above—the brown book on the left). You needed to refer to these sometimes to supplement your gaming experience, and in some cases actually learn the game. These days, we no longer have these physical manuals. In-game interfaces provide all the information you need, as well as tutorials.

So, off I went then into the first mission. Roland has got to build up his alliances to strengthen his forces, so it was time to sort the locals out with a show of force.

I’ve played a lot of the Heroes and Might and Magic series over the years, and I definitely spent a lot of time with this one in the late 90s. Coming back in, it all came back to me pretty quickly. I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew how to explore with my hero, I knew how to start building up my castle and forces, and I knew I had to be aggressive.

However, on reflection, I realised that this game has a pretty steep learning curve. All that I was doing intuitively, I wondered to myself: how did I learn all this in the first place? This is not an easy game. How did I know what to explore? How did I know if my army was strong enough to take on those creatures guarding a mine? How did I learn to manage the time and resource economies?

The answer? I honestly can’t remember. I can guess there was a large amount of trial and error (piece of advice—save your game often!). That was generally the approach I took with video games back then. I didn’t have many games, so those I had I played and played. Eventually I was bound to get good, right? I had the manuals too, of course. As a younger gamer, I know I was time-rich and resource-poor. As an adult, this usually flips. When I was younger, I had the time to play this game over and over, and the time to read long manuals. Now? Well, let’s just say that during this replay I never reached over for that manual. I had to get this game played; I had a blog to write!

The image above was taken almost eleven weeks into the game, remembering each turn is one day. You can see there is still a lot of the map to explore. For a first mission, this is a tough barrier to entry if you’re coming in without much prior knowledge of the series.

In the end, it took me 92 days (turns) to complete the first mission. A very different second mission awaits, played out on a very small map with allied enemies surrounding you. You need to quickly adjust from the strategy in the first mission, where the enemies were further spread out and not aligned with each other.

For a newcomer, it’s a tough start. But if you can make it through the first couple of missions, you get the first interesting choice. At a couple of points in the campaign, you can choose your next mission. Now, like with choosing starting bonuses, it’s not immediately obvious what the benefits or penalties are for selecting one mission over another. The first choice below, I quite liked. You can choose to defend the Dwarves against Archibald’s forces, or you can skip this. To me, it’s not really a choice, as the long-term benefits outweigh the cost. If you skip, you can complete the campaign faster (you are being timed over the campaign to see how many days it takes you to complete it—there’s a leaderboard). Choosing to help the Dwarves actually means that in each subsequent mission, dwarves on the strategic map will be allied with you and will join your forces instead of attacking you. Over the course of the campaign, I recruited many dwarves like this, and I believe it made the following missions significantly easier.

Another choice I enjoyed having was the chance to change sides completely! Mid-campaign, you are presented with the option of betraying Roland. From Roland’s side, it’s a tough mission involving close and allied enemies. Or you can switch sides and have a much easier time of it.

I didn’t particularly like the final campaign choice. On the surface, both options looked good. They both will provide you assistance in the final mission. But it is difficult to know which one will provide the better benefit. I chose to seek out an artifact that would assist Roland, by bolstering his primary abilities significantly (it’s a magical crown). The other option was to build up forces which would then be available in the final mission.

The option I chose failed for a couple of reasons. What I didn’t know was that you could build up your forces very significantly in the other mission: you end up with Black Dragons! Taking Black Dragons into the final mission greatly outweighs the benefits of the magical crown.

The second reason my choice failed is that the mission itself is poorly executed. The idea behind it is good. There’s actually a hidden artifact side-mission that is not available in all missions. Basically, you need to search out map pieces by visiting obelisks on the strategic map. Each one magically provides you with another piece of the puzzle. Eventually, when you have enough of the map, you can start to figure out where the artifact is buried. Using your hero, you can then dig in that location, and hopefully uncover the hidden bounty. Again, this is good design. However, in the campaign mission, the execution lets it down. I lost this mission due to an enemy hero finding the artifact first. Okay, well maybe I wasn’t fast enough? No, I barely had enough time to find several map pieces before it was “mission failed”. So what did I do? Restarted the mission and headed straight for where the enemy hero found the artifact (fortunately, I had uncovered the part of the map where it was buried, so I could see exactly where it was).

Now that I had the Crown though, little did I know that the final mission was going to be that much more difficult than if I had chosen the mission to build up carryover forces. Once I did discover this, it left a bitter taste. I had quite enjoyed the pacing and branching of the campaign so far. The final mission was going to be a long haul, and started at a disadvantage.

To put this fully into perspective, it is possible to win the final campaign mission in about a week if you bring enough carryover forces. You can rush Archibald and defeat him before he has a chance to build up his already formidable forces. If you can’t do this, you’re in for many months of slogging it out. To me, this was a frustrating end to the campaign. 

In the end, I have mixed thoughts. I enjoyed the campaign up until the point I felt like I had really disadvantaged myself through no fault of my own. Of course, this doesn’t take away from the core game at all; it’s only the campaign mission design which I am critical of here.

I liked the branching paths, and the option to turn traitor mid-campaign. However, the missions were fairly repetitive: defeat all enemies. When there was a variation, like searching for the Crown, it didn’t work.

To end this section, I’ll briefly discuss an area that is important in real-time and turn-based strategy games: AI. For the most part, the AI is well done. Enemy heroes are aggressive: they will take your resource generating sites, and will target undefended towns and castles. You need to position yourself well around the map. On larger maps, this will often require multiple heroes, and “supply chains” where one hero transports units to another hero on the frontline. Enemy tactics on the battlefield are a bit more mixed. Enemy heroes target ranged units with melee units, which makes sense as they become neutralised when an enemy unit is in melee range. They will also defend a castle by remaining inside it, meaning you will need to lay siege to the castle walls and break in. Enemy spellcasting is also good, for the most part. Enemy heroes will buff their units, as well as casting damage-dealing spells. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense though. The spell “Blind”, for example, makes the target unit unable to move or attack. However, if the blinded unit is attacked, the spell is broken. So casting it on a unit and then immediately attacking that unit doesn’t make a lot of sense.

And with that, my time replaying Heroes of Might and Magic II has drawn to a close. So, what’s the verdict?

The Verdict

I come back to my words from The Intro, where I try to look at classic games in terms of what they achieved at the time and their legacies. In these terms, Heroes of Might and Magic II is a success.

The sheer scale of this game is immense. I can say that by reflecting on how challenging it was to explain this game in this blog: there’s just so much to it. The multiple hero archetypes and dozens of units, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Heroes having progression through the levelling system. Effective enemy AI. And the campaign, while ultimately falling flat with me, attempted to provide some interesting choices with what is a very generic story. All this, in a game released in the 90s.

When I think of its legacy, I look at this game’s place between its predecessor and successor. I played the first game after playing this game, and it really felt like an improvement. I liken it to my feelings about Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. I’ll play the second game again, but going back to the first one is a step too far. It’s the same for me with Heroes of Might and Magic.

The third game is spectacular, and quite possibly my favourite in the series. I look at this second game as part of a very successful progression.

This game has a special place in my gaming history, as it introduced me to turn-based strategy games. I didn’t start with Civilization. I didn’t get around to that series until the fourth one. So “just one more turn” started for me with Heroes of Might and Magic II.

Again, it’s a difficult game. But one I wanted to sink my teeth into and invest in. I discussed how I couldn’t remember how I got good at this game. A lot of trial and error, plus the manual, were given as reasons. But perhaps the design deserves credit here too; perhaps it was (and is) intuitive to pick up. I’ll never know now, as this game came flooding back to me; I never had to relearn how to play it. I think that also speaks to its legacy, and how a strong foundation allowed this to become one of the most popular strategy game series.

As I replayed this, I also recalled how there’s something very relaxing, almost cathartic about playing this game. I compared it earlier to my experiences with real-time strategy games. I played a lot of those games alongside Heroes of Might and Magic II. But to me, speed wasn’t something I wanted to be measured on as a gamer. I never knew any of the keyboard hotkeys (and still don’t), and have never been interested in head-to-head competition. Heroes of Might and Magic II, as a turn-based strategy game, offered me the opportunity to plan and execute strategies, but without the chance that failure might come down to a slow reaction time or a missed hotkey. It’s still incredibly satisfying to put hours into a mission and succeed.

Finally, this has been the first blog I’ve written where I’ve actually had my physical game copy with me as I replayed it. I mentioned the manual. I recall those days of going through manuals with feelings of nostalgia. It’s a bygone era, with PC gaming moving all but completely digital over what feels like the past ten years. I’m a collector at heart, so there was something special about finding my physical copy of this game and touching all the supplementary information.

Heroes of Might and Magic II was building a successful formula here, which lives on today. There is an ongoing story, so the lore has continued to be built on with each release. This is a classic, though not without its flaws, that still deserves to be played. If you’re interested in where this series came from, this is a great entry point. Likewise, if you’re looking for some good old 90s retro PC gaming, you could do a lot worse.

Just don’t forget to save your game.

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