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Heroes Of Might And Magic
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alt title(s): Heroes Of Might And Magic V Heroes of Might and Magic is a series of turn-based strategy computer games. Famous both for its extremely high quality and its sheer number of ExpansionPacks for the later games.
According to both That Other Wiki and the fansite Age of Heroes , the series was inspired when someone somone had the idea of combining the walk-around-the-map-trying-to-save-the-world strategy of the earlier 3DO game King's Bounty with the Roleplaying Game aspects of Might And Magic. There are occasional crossovers between the series: Might and Magic 6 shares a setting with Heroes of Might and Magic 1 and 2, and runs almost concurrently with Heroes 3. Might and Magic 7 shares setting with Heroes 3, and runs between 3 and it's expansion pack Armageddon's Blade.
Lord Morglin Ironfist is ousted from his homeland by his cousin, Ragnar. Fleeing with his few loyal followers through a portal, he finds himself on another planet, in the land of Enroth. Enroth is a contested land: Warlords Lord Slayer, Queen Lamanda, and Lord Alamar are locked in a civil war for control of the continent. Ironfist himself quickly establishes himself as a fourth player in this power struggle.
The player gets to chose which of the four warlords they control during the single-player campaign - however the canonical ending is a victory for Morglin Ironfist and the foundation of the Ironfist Dynasty.
The second game's campaign centers around a civil war between two brothers, Roland (good) and Archibald (not-so-good) Ironfist who are having some disagreements about who should be king of Enroth after their father's death. The Royal Seer who was supposed to make the decision unfortunately died in a boating accident. His next three successors died similar deaths before the fifth Royal Seer declared Archibald the king and Roland went into hiding.
The expansion pack, Price of Loyalty, included four new campaigns and some improvements to game balance. What it did not include was a continuation of the main storyline - this would continue in the third instalment (and installment 6 of the related Might And Magic series).
Backstory for the games Heroes 3 and M&M 6 states the canonical victor of the second to be Roland: By the time of those two games, he is King of Enroth, married to Catherine Gryphonheart, heir to the throne of Enroth's ally, Erathia. The two have a son together (Nicholai, an NPC in Might and Magic V).
It is around this point that the Kreegans (a race of demons) invade the North-West of Enroth and the North-East of Antagarich (the continent Erathia is located on).
The third game is the first in the series to move the action away from the continent of Enroth. Instead it occurs on the (presumed southern) continent of Antagarich. King Gryphonheart of Erathia has died and the enemies of Erathia (the Antagarich branch of the Kreegan Invasion, the Dungeon Overlords of Nighon, and the Necromancers) take the opportunity of it's weakened state to launch attacks against it. Queen Catherine leads a force of the Enrothian army to reclaim control of her homeland with the aid of Erathia's local allies Av Lee (elven nation) and Bracada (wizard nation). The other nations on Antagarich - the Barbarian nation of Krewlod and the Lizardman nation of Tatalia take this as an opportunity to bite off a little of their neighbour's territory while they are all distracted with each other: thus beginning the eight-way "Restoration War".
The third game's Expansion Pack "The Shadow Of Death" acts as a prequel to the actual third game, exploring the Backstory of several important people and the Evil Plan of the lich Sandro.
The third game's other Expansion Pack "Armageddon's Blade" occurs after the eventual victory of Erathia and its allies in the third game. It features the quest to stop a Devil from creating the titular artifact and using it to Take Over The World. It also has a bunch of other campaigns where some other bunch of people try to do stuff. Dragonslaying, undead hunting and bunch of other stuff.
Using the Heroes III engine, eight standalone episodes were released called Heroes Chronicles. The series starred Tarnum, who in the first episode, became the king of the Barabarians but fell to the forces of Erathia later. Resurrected, he becomes immortal and must seek redemption through fighting the forces of evil. He fights and defeats a campaign protagonist on Armageddon's Blade (Mature, the Dragon Queen), but in the final episode, he fails to recover the Sword of Frost before someone else did.
Sometime after Heroes Chronicles: The Sword of Frost, the clash of the titular sword and the Armageddon's Blade releases armageddon upon the world that Heroes 1-3 were set on. Those that survived used a series of portals to evacuate to another world, which leads into the events of Heroes of Might and Magic IV.
IV, much like Armageddon's Blade, features standalone campaigns, one for each town. These include the uprising of a man who claims to be an Gryphonheart descendant tossing the new kingdom of Palaedra into civil war, the efforts of a young barbarian to conquer all the other tribes to ensure that his people will not die out (as well as concluding the story of Tarnum, the protagonist from Heroes Chronicles), the journey of a sorceress queen to stop a Knight Templar from controlling the wills of every creature in the world, a Romeo-and-Juliet meet fairy tales story with an Elvish civil war, a half-dead man forced to play saviour of the world, and the adventures of a pirate captain's daughter.
After IV, 3DO went into hard times and eventually ceased to exist. The rights for the series eventually went to Ubisoft, and a new entry in the series was hatched, along with a spinoff.
Ho MM V started out as a remake of III in 3D and a different setting. Not all of the factions returned while most saw significant changes such as the addition of a specific skill similar to the Undead-only Necromancy. Castle Heroes could train their human troops up the tiers for gold, Rampart Heroes could pick enemies to deal extra damage against, Academy Heroes could outfit their troops with mini-artifacts, and so on. Aside from the general layout and a few sly lack-lustre references to Sandro and Crag-Hack, the new game had no connection with anything in the series so far.
As for the plot, the game set up a backstory of the demon's ruler, only known as the Demon Sovereign, being defeated and imprisoned by an alliance of the good races with the humans at the helm. At the opening of the game, the current King, Nicolai, is about to marry Lady Isabel when Demons crash the wedding and begin to invade the country. This sets off the plotline of a set of campaigns following each other in sucessive order much like War Craft III and continues into the first expansion pack, Hammer of Fates, and indirectly leads into Tribes of the East. Both expansions introduced a new faction with a campaign to go alongside with them aswell as two additional campaigns that tie into them. They also brought back some of the features of Heroes IV, such as caravans and a variation of the unit choices by giving each unit type an alternate upgrade with different abilities. The storytelling also improved somewhat, but the difficulty increased aswell.
Meanwhile, the Might and Magic series has so far not been continued, but a new spinoff, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, was made. Somewhat of an FPS in a fantasy setting (especially in multiplayer), it tells the story of the offspring of the Demon Sovereign, who has the ability to free him or to lock him in for good. Sharing next to no direct relation to the story in V, it was difficult to see how this fit into the overall picture, but Tribes of the East eventually told part of the backstory aswell as introducing the orcs that appeared in Messiah.
Yet another spinoff recently emerged under the name "Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes". Set 40 years prior to V, during the War of the Blood Moon, the game is a RPG/Puzzle hybrid. As of August '09, a sixth instalment of the main series is also as good as confirmed.
This article is a work in progress. It might look a little thin at the moment, but that is because it lost some content in The Great Crash and it just Needs More Love.
The series makes use of the following tropes:
- Action Girl: Catherine Ironfist in III. Tawni Balfour in IV, who, despite being a pirate, doesn't quite enter Dark Action Girl territory. Isabel in V tried to be one but failed miserably. She got a little better in the expansions. Freyda, also from V, is more successful and became a bit of a Magical Girl too in Tribes of the East with her new special ability. Ornella is more of a Dark Action Girl.
- All Trolls Are Different: they're filthy, they eat sentient beings, and they're kinda evil. They also regenerate.
- Always Chaotic Evil: Numerous creatures, but the Devils are probably the most obvious ones.
- Interestingly in V the demons are apparently the ONLY case of this.
- Animate Dead: The Necromancy skill raises a percent of the (non-undead) casualties from each successful battle as skeletons (or, in the case of dragon casualties, Bone Dragons). There is also a structure in the Necropolis (Necromancer/Undead City) that allows you to do this with 100% efficiency using your own troops.
- Bag Of Spilling: Artifacts generally don't carry over between missions (except for Tribes of the East, and even then not all of them). As for Expansion packs, recurring characters never get to keep the skils and boni you worked so hard to acquire the last time you used them.
- Big Bad: Archibald in the second game. The undead King Gryphonheart near the end of the third game. Sandro in the Shadow of Death expansion to the third game. Kha-beleth, the Demon Sovereign, in the fifth game. Biara, Kha-beleth's Dragon, takes up this role in the fifth game's expansions while her master is busy working on his plan to free himself for good.
- Big Damn Heroes: In V, the otherwise foppish wizard Zehir almost singlehandedly steals victory from the villains. He frees his own homeland, teams up with the other main heroes, frees the Griffin Empire, and takes part in the final assault on Kha-beleth. Findan also liberates his homeland from the forces of The Undead in his campaign. In Tribes of the East, Zehir does it again. His campaign is even called "Flying to the Rescue". Hammers of Fate's Downer Ending might have been due to Zehir dealing with personal business while Ashan was going to hell.
- Bloody Murder: The alternate upgrade for Hydra units in the fifth game's expansion Tribes of the East have acid for blood.
- Boring But Practical: The Logistics skill, especially in V. Being able to move further on the map may not be exciting, but damn if it isn't useful.
- Enlightenment in V. It's a fairly boring stat boost with largely unimpressive perks, but it makes a big difference at higher levels.
- Boss In Mook Clothing: The Fairy Dragon, Rust Dragon, Crystal Dragon, and Azure Dragon from III. The Megadragon from IV. Can't be recruited in towns, have high costs, low population growth rate. They will still kill you dead if you meet them on the map without a very powerful army.
- Breast Plate: Catherine in III and Biara in V. Averted with Isabel and Freyda.
- Cain And Abel: Archibald and Roland Ironfist in II. Canonically the 'Abel' Roland wins. Rolf and Wulfstan in V's Hammers of Fate expansion have this dynamic despite only being half-brothers. Curiously enough, Wulfstan has no direct part in Rolf's eventual death. Zehir ends up killing him in Tribes of the East.
- Came Back Wrong: This happens often thanks to necromancy. In III King Gryphonheart is revived as a powerful lich that proves to be more than the Necromancers of Deyja can handle. And in V Nicholai is brought back as a Vampire that can no longer feel love towards Isabel — only a thirst for blood.
- Class And Level System: All the games in the series have used a system where the skills a Hero was likely to learn aswell as his attribute growth was determined by his or her class. The fourth game, as part of a Re Tool allowed you to change your Heroes classes.
- Cool Old Guy: Godric in V. A veteran Knight, devout follower of Elrath, all around Badass, and the only person in the Griffin Empire who dodges the Idiot Ball.
- Well, somewhat. His sense of loyality prevents him from opposing his plans before its too late, and he forgot his daughter, allowing Markal to use her as a trap. He manages to see through it, but didn't think that sending Angels would allow Markal to craft an Artifact that lets him fly right to Godric's only town.
- Complete Monster: Markhal. The mind games he plays with Isabel and Zehir are just sickening.
- Of course his actions are lessened by the fact that the victims are suffering from Too Dumb To Live syndrome.
- Kalibarr of Heroes IV was extremelly evil as well and tried to kill all living creatures. He used his apprentice to help him gain more power (and to kill him), but he was stopped by him in the end, freeing children he attempted to sacrifice.
- Crowning Moment Of Funny: Sir Christian's entire campaign in Armageddon's Blade. The tale of a perfume salesman with some military training trying to get home after being shipwrecked on an island chain populated entirely by nutcases.
- Crystal Dragon Jesus: All of the gods in V are Dragons. All of the dragon units in the game (except for the undead dragons) are the children of the Dragon gods. So technically speaking, every dragon in the game (except the undead) is a Crystal Dragon Jesus!
- Dark Is Not Evil: Surprisingly played straight in Tribes of the East. The necromancer Arantir is a dedicated worshipper of Asha, the Dragon of Order (the closest thing to God in this setting), and spends most of his campaign fighting against demonic corruption in Ashan. Then subverted in Dark Messiah when Arantir's dedication to his cause leads him to the path of Well Intentioned Extremist.
- Gouldoth Half Dead and Tawni of Heroes IV, they are Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Neutral respectively.
- The Dark Elves under Raelag also play this straight.
- Deadpan Snarker: Zehir, especially in Tribes of the East.
Lorenzo: Heathen atheist wizard scum! You have set your stinking body on holy soil. I will take it as an offering to purify our empire.
Zehir: After my body, are you? You knights are all the same... these repressed tendencies. I'd hate to be a choirboy in your church...
- Decoy Protagonist: King Nicolai in the fifth game. The intro cutscene focuses on Nicolai as he fights and beats a devil in single combat. Agrael kills him in a cutscene at the end of the first campaign. Then he gets turned into a vampire. Then he gets Killed Off For Real.
- To a lesser extend, Isabel aswell. The Haven campaign puts her at the front, but it's her loyal Knight Godric who fights the final battle for the humans. But in the end of Tribes of the East, she kills main antagonist, Biara. The entire Heroes V saga revolves around her though.
- Dem Bones: Standard footsoldier for The Undead.
- Demonic Spiders: Phoenixes in V. Fast, powerful, and a permanent fire shield that damages any unit that attacks it. Even worse, when the stack is destroyed, it resurrects on the spot (cuz, you know, Phoenix).
- The spell version can be even worse, though without the ressurect part.
- Ghosts in II. Every time a stack of ghosts kills a creature, it adds a ghost to the stack. These are especially difficult early in the game, as a half dozen ghosts can hit a bunch of peasants, kill 20, and suddenly you're up against triple the number of ghosts you started with. Because of II's "flying enemies have no movement restriction" mechanic, it was impossible to protect yourself from ghosts. You just had to wait until you had a high level army that could take the ghosts with no casualties.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu: Wow Godric, Raelag, Findan, and Zehir. Did you guys really kick Kha-beleth's ass at the end of V? No, he let you rescue "Isabel" to distract you from his real plans.
- Downer Ending: Heroes Of Might And Magic V: Hammers of Fate. The bad guys win. The heroic main characters ultimately accomplish absolutely nothing to stop Big Bad Biara. They end up playing right into the villains' hands well, talons in the final scenario when they kill the Dwarven King Tolghar. Tribes of the East consists mostly of damage control, but this time the heroes except Arantir earn their happy ending.
- The main game to an extend. Everything seems fine until you see Isabels eyes...
- How about Heroes Chronicles: Sword of Frost, where Tarnum fails to get the Sword of Frost before Kilgore's wife does. Tarnum had a chance to kill her, but imprisioned her instead. Well she escaped. Tarnum states in the end "Please don't let my compassion destroy the world!". Well it does, Tarnum.......
- Elemental Embodiment: First appear in 2 as natural creature with traditional Air/Earth/Fire/Water. In 3's Armageddon's Blade expansion pack, they are part of new Conflux town and new Psychic was added as new elemetal. They have upgrade forms as Storm/Magma/Energy/Ice and Magic.
- Become the subject of Heroes Chronicles: Master of the Elements, where Tarnum has to face the four elemental lords.
- Elemental Powers: The third game uses the traditional Air/Earth/Fire/Water as spell schools.
- Other games use different schools but the traditional four elements are still present.
- The Dungeon racial also focuses on them, allowing "Elemental Chains" that deal extra damage when the right elements connect, either via spells or Dungeon creatures attacking.
- Enemy Exchange Program: No matter how many angels you've got in your army, nobody ever seems to object when you march right into a conquered necropolis or outpost of hell and, instead of razing it to the ground, violate nature by raising unnatural horrors to do your presumably virtuous bidding.
- Though it should be noted that having creatures from different castles serving under a single hero tends to decrease their morale. Becomes a plot point in The Shadow of Death when the barbarian and ranger heroes fail in their initial attack against Sandro because their troops can't get along with each other.
- Also occurs as a gameplay obstacle in V, when Demonlord Agrael has to field Elves... that promptly begin to desert his ranks every day.
- Enemy Mine: The third game's campaign "Song For The Father" features a team-up between The Necromancers of Deyja and Queen Catherine when the former discover that the recently undeadified King Gryphonheart is Eviler Than Them.
- Also the Dark Elves in V and it's first expansion. And the alliance between wizards and orcs in Tribes of the East.
- Evil Is Sexy: The Dark Elves' units in the 5th game in the series are mostly in bondage gear!
- Evil Sorcerer: There are quite a few of these. The most prominent examples would be Sandro the Necromancer, a recurring villain for most of the series, and Markhal from the fifth game, who was Sandro's apprentice before his master was Killed Off For Real.
- Game Breaker: The Necropolis' Vampire in every game. The upgraded versions in the third and fifth game as well as the Vampire in the fourth game combine decent stats for their tier, the ability to fly/teleport on the battlefield, no enemy retaliation, and the ability to heal and revive their numbers when attacking living units.
- Actually, the vampire's power is just due to the rather bizarre way to balance the Necropolis, where outstandingly strong creatures are "balanced out" with completely laughably weak ones
- Which are the laughably weak ones? At least in III, every single Necropolis unit is better than all or almost all units on its tier.
- In III the zombies (second tier), wraiths (third tier), and ghost dragons (seventh tier) were relatively weak for their tier. The skeletons, vampires, liches, and dread knights OTOH were really powerful. In V the zombies and undead dragons are also somewhat lacking for their tier while the other units rock. Vampires are overpowered in all games.
- The third game's Armageddon's Blade expansion introduces four neutral Dragon units. Each is in a tier of their own and they are obscenely powerful. How powerful? The strongest one, the Azure Dragon, costs 30000 gold and 20 mercury to recruit from its dwelling. And that's a bargain. It's special ability is to scare its enemies shitless.
- Ultimate skills in V. Sure, they require a very specific skill development and levels out of reach in smaller games... but once you have them, you pretty much won the game, at least most of them. How about guaranteed luck on each and every action (and 25% more damage, too)?
- Deleb, one of the random Inferno heroes in V. Her special ability is ridiculously powerful in the early-game and remains useful in the mid and late-game. It got nerfed, but as everyone else she also got more perks for the ballista.
- The Puppetmaster, Blind, and Frenzy spells in V (yes, V has quite a few gamebreakers). Careful use of these three spells will cripple even the strongest armies.
- V's Dark magic in general is pretty damn powerful. Even the 1st level spell Slow, which reduces the rate enemy units' turns come up, remains effective up to the late-game. Combine the mass version (which targets all enemy units) with the above three spells and your enemies are sitting ducks.
- The Stronghold faction in V has a particularly deadly late-game strategy. One stack of Untamed Cyclopses + 6 stacks of Orc Chieftains increasing their initiative (thereby giving them more turns in battle) = Curb Stomp Battle.
- Genies in the 1st and 2nd game. Any attack from a stack of genies (even a stack of one) has a chance of halving the target enemy stack's numbers. Mitigated by the fact that Genies can only be found in magic lamps.
- Death Knights take a similiar role in V. Usually chances are calculated by comparing the total hitpoints of the involved stacks, but Death Knights always have a 25% chance. They are even harder to get than Genies, though.
- How about Town Portal in III??? It allows you to instantly teleport to ANY town you own, so not only you can pick the most powerful creatures from each town, but also get the bonuses all grant (increased stats, extra mana, movement, etc, etc), but also makes the surrounding of all your towns insanely dangerous places even if there is no one around. Combine with Dimension Door, and there you go, instant doom for anything foolish enough to pop up in the map.
- Geo Effects (mostly affects movement, but III added each race or alignment having a terrain they feel comfortable fighting on, as well as some terrains that effect magic such as cursed grounds, magic fields, and elemental planes)
- Global Airship: Zehir gets one in Tribes of the East in the form of a flying city. Though he usually has to pay experience to move it.
- Goddamned Bats: Ghosts in V are incredibly annoying. They're not that tough but they have a 50% chance of avoiding any non-magical damage. A pretty big issue early-game when your heroes probably don't have any potent attack spells.
- Most factions have some sort of Goddamned Bats too, if not as bad as the ghost. For instance Pixies and Cerberi, which move fast, act often and strike multiple targets that can't strike back. Or the Assassin, which can decimate any valuable stack with their poison. Magic users dread the Magnetic Golem, which is not only immune to pretty much anything, but they even heal from damage spells and protect allies from area spells. Their annoyance factor declines in larger battles but they are dreaded as neutral monsters you want to deal with without taking too many losses.
- God Save Us From The Queen: Queen Isabel goes through a Face Heel Turn in the first expansion of the fifth game, Hammers of Fate. Only it's not really her.
- Good Is Dumb: Isabel all over. Godric also counts in the sense that his loyalty prevents him from opposing Markal until it's too late. Freyda faces the same problem in her campain in Hammers of Fate, then gets tricked, along with every other protagonist in the game, to kill the Dwarven King Tolghar for the false Queen. Raelag also acts far too naive when Shadya comes from nowhere to help him.
- Growing The Beard: YMMV, but while the fifth game and its first expansion suffered from lackluster storytelling, Tribes of the East featured better writing, a new level of strategy thanks to alternate upgrades, another new town, and several other tweaks to the gameplay. It also didn't hurt that Tribes of the East was a stand-alone product.
- Guide Dang It: Obtaining the ultimate skills for each of the Heroes in the fifth game. A specific set of skills needs to be acquired beforehand, and there is no way to find out which skills are needed in-game aside from trial and error. Due to the starting skills of some heroes, obtaining the ultimate skill might not even be possible. (Un)fortunately, the ultimate skills also vary from Awesome But Impractical to Game Breaker. Not to mention that obtaining the ultimate skills usually means losing out on other potentially more useful abilities.
- Also, quite a few gameplay changes were not documented ingame. For instance, Wasp Swarm slows the enemy if cast with any expertise. The spell tooltip doesn't mention it.
- Hulk Speak: The Orcs in Tribes of the East. Strangely enough, they don't come across as stupid in the least.
- Idiot Ball: Sandro deceives Crag Hack and Gem way too easily. Crag Hack at least is usually portrayed as a typical brutish Barbarian. Gem has no such excuse.
- Isabel in the fifth game just won't let go of the damn thing during Markhal's campaign - something Markhal gleefully uses for his own ends.
- And Winston Boragus, the ruler of Krewlod, dribbles it when he comes up with Yog's test to become a Barbarian. He has Yog split apart and scatter the pieces of the Angelic Alliance, one of the most powerful weapons in the game. If you've got an Infinity Plus One Sword, why the hell would you want to get rid of it? If Boragus had kept it, maybe Kilgor wouldn't have been able to kill him during Armageddon's Blade.
- Idle Animation: in the fourth game, these are often quite funny—for instance, a spellcaster with flaming red hair will be seen removing her wig. Also, flying units usually avert Stationary Wings.
- Infinity Plus One Sword: The third game (and the Heroes Chronicles spinoff campaigns) introduce three powerful swords that are treated as Infinity Plus One Swords in the story. The Armageddon's Blade expansion has the titular Armageddon's Blade. The Shadow of Death has the Angelic Alliance. The last Heroes Chronicles campaign revolves around the Sword of Frost. The Armageddon's Blade and the Sword of Frost were so powerful that they destroyed the world when they struck each other.
- Killed Off For Real: Most of the major storyline characters from the first three games were killed in the cataclysm that lead to the fourth game. And quite a few characters major and minor are killed in the fifth game and its expansions: Nicholai, Tieru the Dragon Knight, the Sylvan king Alaron, Zehir's father Cyrus, Markhal, Godric, Soulscar clan leader Thralsai, Dwarven king Tolghar, Giovanni, Ornella, War-chief Quroq, Alaric, Wulfstan's half-brother Rolf, and Biara all end up dead for good by the end. And in the backstory of the fifth game Markhal's mentor the lich Sandro was Killed Off For Real by wizards led by Cyrus.
- Lens Flare: Seen in some 3D town flythroughs in V.
- Magnificent Bastard: Sandro in The Shadow of Death. He manages to trick heroes into giving him powerful artifacts, kill all of his competitors, creates a comfortable position for himself as The Man Behind The Man to his puppet king Finneas Vilmar, and nearly conquers the world. Even when his first attempt at world conquest is thwarted, he still singlehandedly lays the foundations of the Restoration Wars. Near the end, his title is stolen from him by his "puppet" king. Vilmar tricks Sandro into attacking an innocent Deyjan lord, giving Vilmar an excuse to imprison him and then take all of the credit for Sandro's plans to conquer Erathia.
- Vilmar however botchers it when he proves to be too incompetent to rule the Necromancers without Sandro to tell him what to do. Sandro, on the other hand, shows to be quite a Karma Houdini, like the best Magnificent Bastards out there, paying for his crimes with just a bit of jail time. However, he seems to get a bit of a change of heart. He keeps being evil, but in Might and Magic VIII he seems to become the leader of the Necromancers Guild of Jadame and proves to be an effective protector of the Necromancer's right to study Dark Magic. His motives once in the world of Axeoth are unknown, but his hero description points that it probably orbitates around recovering the power he had on Colony.
- To be fair to Vilmar, the Necromancer campaign in the third game gives no indication that he was a lousy king. True, he wasn't capable matching Catherine Ironfist's tactical prowess, but since she's established as a brilliant commander there's no shame in that. He only makes one really stupid mistake: reviving King Gryphonheart as a powerful lich in the hopes that this lich could defeat Catherine. The Gryphonheart lich immediately kills Vilmar and seizes power for himself.
- Sadly (if you happen to be one of his fans), if the Sandro mentioned in the fifth game is the same Sandro from previous games, then he was Killed Off For Real in the game's backstory. His apprentice Markhal, though he does a good job manipulating Isabel in his bid to take over the Griffin Empire, is too much of a Complete Monster to be a Magnificent Bastard.
- Mentor Occupational Hazard: one campaign in the fourth game sets this up as a moral dilemma—do you attack the warlord who's captured your mentor, or the one who's working slaves to death by the thousands? This Troper chose to fight the latter, and was given a rather graphic description of the mentor's execution. Fortunately, they Never Found The Body . . .
- But, its Tarnum, an immortal, so yeah.......
- And in the fifth game, one of Markhal's goals in his campaign is to kill the leader of the Wizards, Cyrus, for the dual purposes of claiming an artifact he needs for his schemes and to avenge his master Sandro's Final Death at the hands of Cyrus.
- Murder The Hypotenuse: The Big Bad of the "Elwin and Shara" campaign in the fourth game tries to pull this on Elwin. Since Elwin is the player character, he fails. In the fifth game, this is the main reason Agrael kills Nicholai at the end of Isabel's campaign. He seems aware that, while this act removed one obstacle from his desires, it also introduced an even bigger one since Isabel knows he killed Nicholai and ends up swearing revenge.
Agrael: Well, things just got simpler. And a lot more complicated.
- Mutually Exclusive Magic: In some of the games certain heroes are barred from learning certain schools of magic, meaning those skills will never appear among the skill choices offered during a level increase. They can't even learn those skills at map buildings. This is a minor plot point in Adrienne's campaign in Armageddon's Blade. Unlike the other Witches of Tatalia (which is essentially an entire nation built on a swamp) who focus on Earth and Water magic, Adrienne...well, she's called the Fire Witch. In her backstory she was actually exiled as a result. She only comes back when her nation is under attack from the undead Lord Haart.
- Necromantic: That skull Markhal carries around in V? It's the skull of Nicholai's mother who also happens to be Godric's sister the former queen that Markhal somehow manipulated in the past. From time to time Markhal actually has conversations with it. Why he keeps it with him is probably better left unexplained.
- Nice Job Breaking It Hero: This trope is why the fourth game takes place on a different world from the past three games. Gelu, a hero from the Armageddon's Blade expansion of the third game wielded the titular Blade against the Barbarian Kilgor who wielded the Sword of Frost. Gelu was trying to stop Kilgor's mad campaign of world conquest. Unfortunately, when the two Blades struck each other, the entire world blew up.
- Agrael in V. If he didn't kill Nicolai before Isabel was crowned, she wouldn't have had to deal with rebels, and Markhal wouldn't have had an opening to manipulate her.
- And if Godric hadn't acted like the Knight In Shining Armor he is, the whole chain of events that forced Agrael to kill Nicolai wouldn't have happened. Agrael was, after all, preparing to betray the Demon Sovereign and run away with the captive Isabel.
- Nintendo Hard: The campaigns in the Armageddon's Blade expansion for III. The difficulty settings for each campaign set from "hard" to "impossible" and the scenarios themselves are just brutal. To get a feel for how tough these missions can get, take a look at the Game Breaker entry. See where it mentions the Azure Dragons? Yeah, the last mission of one of these campaigns gives your hero a six month time limit to get past a gauntlet of incredibly powerful creature stacks to fight one hundred Azure Dragons. And this isn't even the hardest campaign.
- V isn't shy of some brutal scenarios either. For example The Cultists where your two main heroes fight against a bunch of powerful heroes with no less than seven towns. You start with none, though you can capture the first two towns fairly quickly. For extra fun, there are also demon heroes that spawn on a regular basis to harass you. Or The Emerald Ones, where you are at a 3:1 disadvantage for quite some time and also have no access to your tier 7 unit. Contrary to what reviewers have stated, the expansions are fairly harmless in regards to AI opponents, but neutral stacks can be huge.
- Standard Fantasy Setting
- Ominous Latin Chanting: V got generous amounts of this, especially for the menues and the Haven faction.
- Order Versus Chaos: The fourth game has this and Good Versus Evil (though it's worth noting that Chaos hates "Life" and Order equally, and Life feels the same about Chaos and "Death.") Order is borderline good, but a spell to protect against that alignment references "what the self-righteous are capable of." Chaos . . . is just
evil awesome. Sorry.
- V also has this. Urgash, the Dragon of Chaos, is the entity worshipped by the Demons. Everyone else, even the Necromancers, worship Asha the Dragon of Order (the other "good" Dragon gods are her children). The Necromancers have a somewhat dark take on Asha and refer to her as the Spider-Goddess (ironic when you consider that another major spider goddess in popular media is an insane Always Chaotic Evil monster).
- Our Angels Are Different: Seraphs in V. Where else could you find angels with blood-stained wings? Besides Warhammer40000 or KULT.
- Our Dragons Are Different: In the fifth game, the gods of the setting are dragons; all the dragon units in the game (except for the undead ones which are assembled from the remains of the others) are the "children" of the gods. They vary in appearance depending on which god they serve; one faction's dragons are made of fire and magma.
- The fourth game had Dragon Golems: mechanical dragons piloted by Dwarves.
- Our Dwarves Are All The Same: Dwarves in V are pretty standard fare. Except maybe for the bear and mammoth riding. And their own brand of magic.
- Our Elves Are Better: There are the Sylvan Wood Elves and the Dungeon Dark Elves. Both hate each other! Thanks to a Demon's Xanatos Gambit.
- Our Orcs Are Different: The Orcs of the Tribes of the East Expansion Pack fit the Blizzard Orcs type. But they act more like Tolkienian orcs in Dark Messiah.
- Pragmatic Villainy: In IV, Gauldoth chooses an alliance with Emilia Nighthaven instead of conquering her kingdom, stating that he does not want to grow too powerful and provoke the wrath of the other nations.
- Public Domain Artifact: The artifact needed for a special, powerful structure (often a way to win) was called the Grail for most of the series. V got a bit more creative by calling it Tear of Asha, but there are still instances where the building is called Grail structure.
- Put On A Bus: Findan and Raelag from V don't appear at all in Tribes of the East unless you count the one stand-alone scenario which shows how Agrael/Raelag ended up watching over Isabel as she grew up. They both have excuses though. Findan's busy rebuilding his country after civil war broke out in Hammers of Fate, and Raelag left to deal with the threat of the Demon Messiah.
- Arantir also immediately disappears after his campaign, a first for any leading protagonist. He is the antagonist in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic however.
- Real Is Brown: Generally avoided, but the third game got the closest. Freed from the 256-color constraints of the first two games, it favored a "realistic" art style with a subdued palette, as opposed to the vibrant colors found in the rest of the series.
- Road Cone: The endings of the first two games. Only one ending out of four and two, respectively, is canonical.
- RPG Elements: You use Heroes as generals leading armies, walking around the map killing stuff and gaining levels, finding artifacts and learning spells. The fourth game took this even further by making the Heroes actual battlefield units, culminating in several campaign scenarios where you only have access to heroes.
- Sadly Mythtaken: Too many examples to mention here, all forgiven thanks to consistency.
- Save The World/Take Over The World: Both are used, depending on whether you're playing as the good guys or the bad guys at the time.
- Sequential Boss: The Demon Sovereign and Biara in the finale of V. First, the 4 main heroes have to defeat Biara in seperate battles, then destroy the barrier surrounding the Demon Sovereign in separate battles, and finally defeat him for real in seperate battles. And thats not counting the garrisons they have to conquer first. The last mission is essentially 16 battles in one day, though some of them can be pretty short.
- Godric counts as a minor example in Markhals campaign. Once his army (consisting of Academy units) is defeated, his Haven troops take the field immediately.
- Shock And Awe: Titans. That is all.
- Squick: Thralsai, leader of the Dark Elf Soul Scar clan in Hammers of Fate has a line that wouldn't sound strange coming from one of the Dark Eldar:
Thralsai: I feel the urge to celebrate. Fetch me a slave, a fresh one. And towels for the blood.
- Start Of Darkness: Arantir's campaign in Tribes of the East explains why he becomes the Well Intentioned Extremist Big Bad of Dark Messiah.
- The Shadow of Death acts as Sandro's Start Of Darkness. However, Sandro is evil from the start; The Shadow of Death tells the tale of his rise to power and how he basically started the Restoration Wars. It also explains why Sandro can be found in a prison during the Necromancer campaign of the third game.
- Stock Soundeffects: Aren't these jingles in Heroes of Might and Magic III a little bit too familiar?
- Strangled By The Red String: Raelag and Isabel in Hammers of Fate. Especially egregious considering that Raelag murdered Isabel's husband Nicolai in the main game. The awkwardness of this pairing probably contributed to Raelag being written out of the story in Tribes of the East.
- Of course, Isabel may not be aware of Raelags former identity. She's proven herself to be gullible before...
- The Atoner: Tarnum, of Heroes Chronicles, is the ur-example of this trope in this series. In the first episode, Warlords of the Wasteland, he commits many atrocities (almost killing his sister unknowingly) in his conquest of the wizard kingdom. He was later killed by Rion Gryphonheart. The Ancestors judged him unworthy to enter paradise and forced him to return as an immortal to redeem himself. He does this through seven later chapaters, even rescuing Rion's daughter from the underworld in Conquest of the Underworld. He is completely redeemed and judged worthy to enter paradise during the Might Campaign of Heroes IV, but refused to enter, remaining a protector for his tribe in the new world.
- Raelag aka Agrael in the fifth game. A stand alone scenario in the Tribes of the East expansion also reveals Tieru's reasons for leaving Sylvan society to fight Demons. A Demon made Tieru the Xanatos Sucker in its scheme to drive a wedge in Elven society. As seen in a different stand alone scenario, this led to a faction of Dark Elves turning to Demon worship to survive underground.
- The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard: In the 5th game, the AI gets building cost reduction, unit cost reduction, revealed maps and instead of actually battling wild monsters, it runs an loss estimate, which is usually favorable for them, among other things. The cost reduction starts at normal level and goes as far as 70% off on the highest level. All just because the AI is really stupid, doing things like not picking up treasure lying around and fleeing at the start of the battle, effectively giving up their entire army they had on that hero.
- This troper is convinced the AI doesn't actually lose their entire army if they flee.
- Not just 5, although it's the most egregious. Earlier games also had a cheating AI at least in the sense of being able to see through the Fog Of War, and III for instance outright tells you that higher difficulty settings give the AI more resources and starting troops.
- The 4th game was paticularly frustrating in this aspect. Several of the campaign levels featured one-way teleporters right into your territory. Coupled with the AI being unaffected by fog of war (and perhaps even shroud), you're going to get a lot of invasions as soon as you leave your towns at the least bit disadvantaged.
- The Evil Prince: Archibald in the second game.
- The Undead: Recurring villains throughout most of the series save for the Expansion Pack to the fifth game, where they become enemies of the Demons like the other races.
- They Changed It Now It Sucks: Part of the reason the fourth game wasn't so well received was because it completely retooled everything in the series. Combat, unit production, and hero development were all changed. Oh, and it blew up the previous games' setting. The fifth game saw a return to the third's style of gameplay — and was promptly criticized for removing the few changes that were well received in the fourth, such as caravans (these returned in the expansions). YMMV on whether or not the fourth was a good game in its own right.
- The AI was absolutely atrocious. Often it would not have even fully explored its home area by the endgame, and you would often find the mass graves of dead Heroes who kept futilely attacking the same powerful neutral stack. The worst? There is chance that you will found the hero you need to kill already dead. This is reason why people at Gamefaqs add instant win cheat in walkthrough, you might need it.
- Villainous Breakdown: Sandro in the end of The Shadow of Death.
- Villain Protagonist: In several campaigns/scenarios throughout the series the player takes the role of an evil bastard. In the 2nd game the player can take the role of Archibald Ironfist's Dragon. The third game's "Dungeons and Devils" campaign makes the player the commander of the invading forces of Nighon and the Kreegans, and its "Long Live the King" campaign gives them control of the Necromancers of Deyja. In two of the Armageddon's Blade campaigns, "Dragon's Blood" and "Festival of Life", you play as an ambitious young Evil Overlord named Mutare and the vicious Barbarian Kilgor who as mentioned above, ends up destroying the world later. The Shadow of Death has an entire campaign in which you play through Sandro's Start Of Darkness. The first episode of Heroes Chronicles, Warlords of the Wasteland featured the ruthless Tarnum, but later became The Atoner in later episodes. For the most part this trope is avoided in the fourth game, though you do play as Solymyr for a few missions in the "Price of Peace" campaign prior to his Heel Face Turn. And in the fifth game and its expansions there is only one campaign that fits this: "The Necromancer", in which you play Markhal, who is arguably the most evil person in the entire series.
- Well Intentioned Extremist: Gavin Magnus in "The Price of Peace" Campaign in the fourth game. Arantir becomes one in Dark Messiah. Notable since most of the villains in the series are Card Carrying Villains and Complete Monsters.
- What Could Have Been: The "Forge" town in III, and NWC's artwork for their version of V (which was supposed to be made on the Heroes IV engine, in isometry rather than 3D, before 3DO went bankrupt and Ubisoft and Nival started from scratch).
- What Do You Mean Its Not Awesome: And how! During in-game cutscenes in the fifth game, characters will conjure lightning, invoke random flashes of light and cast fireballs while discussing the weather. (Well, not literally, but you get the point.) Quite a bit of narm there, too.
- Thankfully, the expansions made more of an effort to make characters look like they are talking to each other. Better voiceactors, too, though some people disliked the change in Zehirs case.
- Worthy Opponent: Solymr to Emilia Nighthaven in her campaign in the fourth game. The only reason he's even opposing her is because he swore to serve Well Intentioned Extremist Big Bad Gavin Magnus for the rest of Gavin's life — and Gavin just happens to be immortal. Solymr manages a Heel Face Turn anyway.
- Xanatos Gambit: The entire plot of the fifth game is Big Bad Kha-beleth's gambit. Impregnating Isabel, splitting her soul so Biara could impersonate her and wreck havoc in the Griffin Empire (thus distracting all of the heroes); all to ensure that his son the Demon Messiah would have a chance to one day free Kha-beleth for good. Whether or not his gambit actually succeeds depends on the player's choices at the end of a different game, namely Dark Messiah.
- Not to mention Markal, who exploits Isabel's depression to crush his ancient enemies into the dirt, rise to power as leader of the Necromancers, raise the King of the Empire as a bloodthirsty vampire that almost destroys the Elves, take over the Empire and protect his mortality with three relics such that the good guys ultimately require three armies to kill him. He got to rule half the factions in the world all without actually lying to Isabel about why he needed to do it, meaning every single step of his plan was also one of his goals. That's efficiency. Oh, and he also came back to life and tried to kill the man that killed him by pretending to be his dead father in a side scenario in Hammers of Fate, but that didn't go quite as well.
- Xanatos Sucker: From the fifth game: Isabel. Just...Isabel. She's the Sucker of two gambits in the same game.
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