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  • Abridged Arena Array: The vast, vast majority of III competitive games are played on either the "Jebus Cross" template or one of its variants. Since players gain a boatload of power very quickly in the central "treasure" area, games usually boil down to one or two battles where a player's entire army is either annihilated or victorious, and JC multiplayer games typically end in a few in-game weeks.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: In the third game, is the faction seeking independence for the Contested Lands right that this is necessary to prevent war between Erathia and AvLee? Or are they opportunistic and self-serving, not to mention blind to how they're causing a war?
  • Anti-Climax Boss:
    • The final mission of the first game's campaign has you taking a Dragon City, which is guarded by 20 Dragons, split up into five stacks of four. While Dragons are the most powerful units in the first game, the group you face isn't as strong as the garrisons of the other faction strongholds in the preceding three missions; Lord Alamar will likely have at least twice as many Dragons by the time you face him, as well as dozens of Hydras, Minotaurs, Griffins and Gargoyles.
    • In the first mission of the "Dungeons and Devils" campaign of III, you're tasked with killing the Gold Dragon Queen. Does that sound difficult? Not when you consider that she's just a single Gold Dragon, who won't pose much of a threat to you if you've fought your way through the dozens of Green Dragons in her lair.
    • This is repeated again in the expansion pack's campaign Dragon Slayer where the final mission is to slay the Azure Dragon king. Before you're allowed to fight the king, you gotta get through his royal guard, which is a stack of 100 Azure Dragons. To top it all off, the King doesn't have any unique stats himself; he's completely identical to any one of the 100 Azure Dragons you just destroyed, meaning that you should have no problem dealing with him if you got past his guards.
    • "For King and Country," the final campaign mission of the third game, is this. Despite being set to Expert difficulty, the two Necropolis towns you face are easy to defeat if you rush them at the first opportunity with Queen Catherine. Even more so if she has Dimension Door.
    • "Independence", the last mission of the third game's secret campaign, requires you to build a Capitol in your home city. This is harder than it sounds, since wood and gold are frequently stolen from you, but if you think carefully and plan ahead, you can finish the scenario in eight days at minimum.explanation 
    • You can do this to yourself - in fact, if you like winning the game it's recommended - in the second last scenario of "The Pirate Queen" in IV. If you know Pete Girly is going to betray you, you can make sure to give him as many abilities that don't have anything to do with combat when he levels up as possible, like Scouting and Pathfinding, so that he's a pushover during the final battle. That's him personally, mind you - he'll still have a gigantic army with 100 Hydras in it, but those Hydras are a lot easier if they're not backed by Pete with Grandmaster Chaos Magic. His army is also not supported by any towns and just stays still in the middle of the sea throughout the scenario, meaning that you can just build up your forces at your own leisure before crushing him with overwhelming force.
  • Ass Pull: V has quite a few that pretty much pull apart the entire premise at the seams upon rewatching:
    • The idea of the Demon Messiah within the game's narrative. A demon hybrid that can walk on Ashan freely without having to worry about being sent back to Sheogh is indeed terrifying, so that's why Kha-Beleth started the events of the game for a half-human and half-demon hybrid. Only one problem. He already succeeded with Agrael, a dark elf demon cultist who can freely walk the earth and bringing in demons freely while being immune from being banished back to Sheogh as demonstrated with his battle with Nicolai. All Kha-Beleth needed to do is to repeat the same method as he did with Agrael and he will have demons walking all over Ashan in no time. Kha-Beleth already won without even realizing it. This seems to have been noted as of Dark Messiah, where it is revealed that the real purpose of the Demon Messiah is that he will be capable of freeing all demons from their prison permanently. Agrael is definitely not capable of that.
    • The Reveal that after being rescued in the base game's finale, Queen Isabel is with Raelag in Hammers of Fate while half of her soul is stored in another city in Tribes of the East at the same time. Not only it doesn't make any sense narrative-wise, it also destroys any sympathy for her as even if she is ignorant of Biara masquerading as her, she is effectively knowingly neglecting her duties as queen, the same duties that she fought tooth and nail for while resorting to employing Markal in the base game. There's a reason she is considered The Scrappy for quite a while on this very list.
      • While the former was supposed to be explained by Word of God that the switch was only noticed by Raelag who set free the real Isabel after the battle with Kha-Beleth and Sheogh isn't exactly a place you can just walk to on the map meaning that returning to the Holy Griffin Empire isn't going to be easy, this explanation wound up being a Voodoo Shark to most people as it raised the question as to why Raelag didn't just tell the other heroes that they were bringing back an imposter after the battle with Kha-Beleth. Meanwhile, the purpose of the soul splitting is to make Biara be able to disguise herself as Isabel on a spiritual level, which allowed her to fool everyone else except for Raelag. However, it's noted that both of these explanations are not stated or shown properly in-game and are from looking up interviews and wikis, making players wonders why weren't they added in the script itself.
  • Best Level Ever:
    • "Colossal Caverns", from the second game. You have a year to get a million gold by exploring a large dungeon, capturing towns, claiming gold mines and acquiring resources and treasures to fund your way to the goal. It's a very long mission, but it's also quite well-designed.
    • In addition to "Colossal Caverns", the second game in general deserves credit for shipping with a lot of fantastically creative maps with tons of Worldbuilding and attention to detail - "Ghost Planet", "Plains of Aekon", "Gates of Hell", "Slayer Legacy", "THUNK" and more. The fact that Heroes II's developers did this before the advent of Game Mods allowing scripted events really shows the extent of how well these scenarios were planned out.
    • "The Mandate of Heaven", in the third game, is a replica of the eponymous sixth Might and Magic. It features all sorts of references to the RPG, from towns and dungeons to the monsters you might find in the various regions of the game, and includes impressive attention to detail. This led to several other scenarios paying homage to the RPG series, such as the Xeen scenario in VI.
    • "Myth and Legend" from III pays homage to Greek Classical Mythology, where the player controls Heracles, Perseus, and many other heroes in a large, detailed map of ancient Greece plus the underworld. It received a sequel in Armageddon's Blade called "Pandora's Box".
  • Broken Base:
    • There's a large sect of fans who despise anything that's even slightly different from Heroes II and Heroes III.
    • Even the overall well-liked third game gets this occasionally for its Art Shift from the more fairy-talish visuals of the first two games(more the first than the second) to a Real Is Brown palette.
    • Fans still debate whether the Forge (a cancelled town replaced by the Conflux for Heroes III: Armageddon's Blade) was a good idea or not. Supporters think the genre clash could've been fun, while detractors don't want unfitting sci-fi elements in the game. There's also a third group that like the sci-fi stuff in general, but hate the Narm-y idea of, say, robots with laser guns guarding a lumber mill.
    • When it comes to III, there was a three-way split: playing it vanilla, playing WoG/ERA or playing HotA mods. Over time, a fourth group splintered off, using WoG solely for quality-of-life changes, but otherwise sticking to vanilla rules, units and their stats. Over two decades after its premiere, there is a rift the size of Great Canyon when it comes to any discussion on how to "properly" play III.
    • Heroes IV: An interesting unorthodox take or an Audience-Alienating Era best forgotten?
    • Heroes V: A breath of fresh air or a buggy and unoriginal remake of III in 3D? Heroes VI: Is it going to be the best or worst installment ever? Ashan: a valiant effort to clean up the Continuity Snarl of the NWC era, or a bland and generic fantasy world? Practically every mention of Ubisoft or Nival is bound to have split opinions among the fanbase.
    • With the release of Heroes VI, the broken base has been shifted to "Is it irredeemable, or can it become a good game with sufficient patching and feature-adding via expansions?". With support for VI discontinued since Sept 2013, we'll never know...
    • The reception to the Shadow Council element for the Heroes VII blog has been rather venomous, as they were forced to choose between two factions from the previous games, with only one having a chance of being added. Later on, fans also voted for the lineups for factions as well as their town and creature design, with lots of vote-stuffing. The Fortress faction, which lost to Sylvan, was later added in the Trial by Fire expansion.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome: "Glove/Shoe switching", named after the Equestrian Gloves and Boots of Speed in III. The bonus given by movement boosting artifacts is determined whether or not the hero(es) has them equipped at the end of the previous day, so keeping them on at the expense of the combat artifacts during your turn is an idiot move. So players who know this mechanic equip the movement boosters at the end of the day and change them for combat ones at the start of the next day. The downside to this is that it would nerf your hero if he got attacked during the enemy turn, which is why it is not fully considered a Game-Breaker. A variation of this "artifact juggling" is swapping artifacts to gain as much Knowledge as possible before interacting with spell point replenishers and boosters, changing back after obtaining the (extra) spell points.
  • Complete Monster:
    • Heroes of Might and Magic IV: Kalibarr, once The Mentor to Gauldoth, got separated from him, but Gauldoth frees Kalibarr from prison years later. Having all his previous good qualities gone, Kalibarr starts with sending his old apprentice on dangerous missions in hopes of getting rid of him. Later, Gauldoth learns that Kalibarr was worshiping a God of Evil and under his orders, he wanted to destroy the whole world. He also kidnapped many children from the kingdom, fully intending to use them as human sacrifices to his God.
    • Heroes of Might and Magic V:
      • Kha-Beleth, the Demon Sovereign, is the Big Bad of this game, the Greater-Scope Villain in the expansions, and the secret antagonist of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Kha-Beleth's main aim during the game is to kidnap Queen Isabel and force her to bear a child that is half human and half demon. Kha-Beleth initiates a war with the Griffin Empire to accomplish this objective. When the Demon Lord Agrael, who has betrayed the Sovereign, defeats Erasial, Kha-Beleth executes him. Kha-Beleth sends Biara to join forces with the purged Agrael, now Raelag, and infiltrate his ranks. Kha-Beleth sends reinforcements to the Soulscar Clan, expecting them to be slaughtered. Kha-Beleth then takes advantage of Markal's invasion of Irollan to send Biara to get the scroll and kill Tieru, wanting revenge on the Dragon Knight for interfering. When Godric, Raelag, Zehir, and Findan attempt to perform the Rite of True Nature, Biara summons Kha-Beleth and kidnaps Isabel, taking her to Sheogh. Once Isabel is secured, he rapes her, and uses his magic to age the child up to force her to deliver it early. When Raelag arrives, Kha-Beleth reveals he raped Isabel and gloats to him about it. Upon being defeated, Kha-Beleth flees, and needing time for his son to escape tells Biara to create a distraction that the factions will have to spend time fighting her, and when Biara and most of the armies of Sheogh are destroyed, Kha-Beleth writes it all off as acceptable losses. Years later when Sareth is knocked unconscious, Kha-Beleth reveals his lineage and orders him to release him. Should Sareth choose to imprison him for eternity, Kha-Beleth will scream and curse him. Evil, smug, and a sadist, Kha-Beleth will do anything to escape his prison and destroy the world, even if it means starting a war just to rape a woman to bear a child.
      • Markal, who also appears in Clash of Heroes, is an evil necromancer who, learning that King Nicolai is dead, schemes to gain the trust of his grieving love, Queen Isabel, and raise Nicolai as a vampire lord. Marching to the Griffin Empire, he defeats a rebel army and persuades Isabel that he can resurrect Nicolai, knowing fully well what the result will be, and persuades her to attack the Wizards. Slaughtering the wizards who stand in his way, Markal restores the citadel of Lorekeep and ransacks the town of Hikm to gain the Amulet of Necromancy. Vowing to reunite the Vampire's Garment, Markal storms into the Silver Cities, turning the Wizard cities into Necropolises and converting the citizens—including children—into undead puppets for him to throw away as he sees fit. After killing Cyrus to gain the Ring of the Unrepentant, Markal kidnaps Freyda, Godric's daughter, when he rebels. Once Nicolai is resurrected as a Vampire, Markal decides to take command of the Griffin Empire, and he immediately orders Nicolai to attack Irollan, leading to the deaths of thousands of Elves, including their king Alaron. After Zehir breaks Godric out of prison, they attack Markal at his citadel and, after a close battle with the necromancer, defeat him. He tells them that killing him will ensure he can return, laughing all the while. When Zehir burns his corpse to ensure that cannot happen, Markal decides to get revenge on Zehir and lures him into the Ring of the Unrepentant, hoping to take control of his body. Ambitious, power-hungry and vengeful, Markal will do anything to further his desire for power and gain revenge on those who wrong him.
      • Hammers of Fate & Tribes of the East add-ons: Alaric is the new Archbishop of the Griffin Empire, the leader of the Red Church, and The Dragon to Biara disguised as Queen Isabel. "Isabel" appoints Alaric as Archbishop and the leader of the Red Church, and he very rapidly shows himself to be an absolute fanatic. Ruining negotiations with rebel leaders when they disrespected his "Saint", Alaric endorsed a policy proposed by Laszlo to burn and kill off entire villages simply because some of them were helping the rebellion. He nearly orders the rebel leader Duncan executed for mocking Isabel, and is only stopped because killing him will make him a martyr. Upon recovering Prince Andrei, Alaric abandons their allies to be slaughtered by the rebellion, and orders anyone who disrespects Isabel to be executed. After killing Andrei, Alaric routs the Orcs and kills their Warchief, but then departs the battle when he is ordered to meet with "Isabel", leaving his soldiers to be slaughtered. When Biara is exposed as a demon, Alaric goes completely insane and kills anything he encounters, believing it to be a demon. A fanatical Knight Templar, Alaric shows that even a follower of Elrath can be an irredeemable monster.
      • Hammers of Fate (primarily): Laszlo is the new commander of the troops of the Griffin Empire appointed by Biara disguised as Isabel. When first introduced, he demands the rebel leaders surrender, and when one of the peasants informs him that the peasants are supporting the rebels and their Elven allies, Laszlo burns him and his entire village alive. Laszlo then tortures an old war comrade to get Prince Andrei's location, and is envious and disgusted that Freyda will be commander, as he sees her as not understanding his version of war. When Freyda goes to negotiate with the dwarves for Andrei's return, Laszlo attacks the dwarves in the hope that the dwarves will kill Freyda, and also simply to fulfill his bloodlust, only stopping when Biara-as-Isabel negotiates a peace. When Laszlo discovers Freyda has rebelled, he orders Godric to be executed while he engages the rebel leaders in battle. A sadistic Blood Knight, Laszlo shows that even a knight of the Griffin Empire can be a complete and remorseless sociopath.
  • 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 (because, you know, phoenix).
      • The spell version can be even worse, though without the resurrect part.
    • Ghosts in I and 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.
    • Vampires. Reasonable stats everywhere, can fly around you, upgrades can prevent you from retaliating, and resurrect based on dealt damage if they're fighting living creatures. If it weren't for the fact that half the Necropolis' army is garbage in any game, they'd be much worse to stop.
  • Designated Hero: The Tower faction as a whole from III is good-aligned, despite their alliances with Castle and Rampart being lorewise strictly professional, the town in question acting as repressive antagonists for Tarnum's and Yog's origin stories, and practicing slavery.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: From the otherwise unremarkable Heroes IV expansions, Spazz Maticus, a young king on a mad quest to rule the world, gained somewhat of a cult following, thanks to his memetic faces in the official art, even spawning a small subset of "Spazz-posting" memes as a result
  • Esoteric Happy Ending: The ending of Tribes of the East is pretty much this for V as a whole. Sure, Biara is dead or is going to punished by Kha-Beleth for her failure and demons as a whole are purged from Ashan while everybody laughs at the prospect of Freyda and Duncan's upcoming wedding and family life. However, as Arantir and Zehir noticed, the Demon Messiah aka Sareth is born from Queen Isabel's rape as foretold. Not to mention, pretty much all of Ashan except for Irollan and Heresh is in ruins from the demons' rampage and schemes. Finally, if Sareth chooses the wrong side in Dark Messiah, all of the heroes efforts will be a collective "Shaggy Dog" Story.
  • Even Better Sequel: Heroes II and III are often regarded as the pinnacle of the series, and for good reasons. II is an Expansion Pack to I that expands on the scope of the gameplay and defined many of the features later games would implement such as more involved heroes. III improves on II in the best way possible, implementing tons more content and some new features like hero specialties and a dramatically expanded magic system. It's telling that III is still frequently displayed as being among the most top-selling games on the GOG.com storefront even to this day.
  • Fan Nickname:
    • "Ubival" (Ubisoft and Nival, the publisher and developer of V, respectively).
      • Funnily enough, "Ubival" is the male third person singular past tense form of "kill", i.e. "he was killing", in Russian. Seeing as Nival is a Russian developer and the entire HOMM series is quite popular in Russia, it might not be a coincidence. There are numerous players, both Russian-speaking and not, who dislike the changes in V (either the gameplay or the art style or the completely different universe).
    • And now "Ubihole" from, you guessed it, Ubisoft and Black Hole.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: Many fans don't want anything to do with the entries that came after Heroes III. However, in light of the even more poorly received VI and VII, IV and V were Vindicated by History. However, it's noted that V is often paired with mods to make gameplay less frustrating and the AI less dumb.
    SsethTzeentach: Heroes V is a fantastic addition to the series, and probably the last good game it will ever have. Since I'm fully convinced that Heroes VI and VII don't actually exist. I'm just having a bad dream. One that I can't seem to wake up from. (Timestamp here.)
  • Funny Moments:
    • Sir Christian's campaign in Armageddon's Blade. The tale of a "fragrance alchemist" (perfume salesman) with some military training trying to get home after being shipwrecked on an island chain populated entirely by nutcases. A rare case of a Nintendo Hard Funny Moment.
    • If you visit the tavern often enough in the third game, the tavern keeper will get annoyed and tell you that he's out of rumors, something he says is your fault.
  • Game-Breaker: Here.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
    • III is one of the most popular games in Russia and Eastern Europe. In particular, a group of Russian modders created Horn of the Abyss, including the pirate-inspired Cove faction. There have also been a number of Heroes of Might & Magic concerts in Poland, home of the Heroes Orchestra, celebrating the game's Awesome Music. Interestingly enough, the fifth game of the series (which is spiritual successor to Heroes III) is created by Russian gaming company Nival Interactive.
    • V seems to have a cult following in China, with a separate MMORPG based on it released, including a Chinese-esque faction.
  • Genius Bonus: The Academy and the Necropolis in VI have "Arabian Nights" Days and Babylonian themes respectively, two settings that share the roughly same geographical location, only a millenia apart, which is ironic since the Necropolis is an offshoot from the Academy. Stronghold changing their motif from Born in the Saddle to Mayincatec after fleeing from Wizards to the islands could also be a nod to Mongols and Aztecs being genetically close.
  • Goddamned Bats:
    • Sprites in the first and second games. They're a Fragile Speedster unit without very good offense, even for a first tier unit, but they can fly across the battlefield and it's impossible to retaliate against them. If you face enemy Sprites, expect them to go straight for your ranged units, especially since their turn will likely come up first.
    • Ghosts in V are incredibly annoying. They're not that tough, but they have a 50% chance of avoiding any non-magical damagenote . A pretty big issue early on, when your heroes probably don't have any potent attack spells. They were particularly annoying in early versions of the game when the 50% chance could trigger multiple times in succession. Thankfully, they were patched so they can only dodge twice in a row.
    • Imps and familiars are pretty crappy as far as tier 1 creatures go, and are officially considered the weakest unit in the gamenote , but become fairly annoying as large stacks of imps can smash through your mana on their first turn.
    • 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 invisibility and 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.
    • Neutral Shooter stacks in early game, especially those guarding resources, are horribly annoying to deal with. Unlike melee units, shooters will typically get at least one shot off, which usually will kill a handful of your units since you gotta slog it across the field. It doesn't help that most early game units are slow and melee, meaning not only will you get shot at, but chances are you will get shot twice as you slowly make your way across no-man's land.
  • Good Bad Bugs:
    • The Sacrifice spell in III is reasonably rare and does not look too hot on paper (kill your own unit to heal damage to another). Fine. However, there is a bug that means that you can kill any unit to heal your own, including enemy units.
    • Another one in III was that a hero with the Tactics skill (that lets you arrange your units before battle) and a stack of cyclopes could get a free shot at an enemy town's towers or walls in the Tactics phase.
  • Growing the Beard:
    • II is generally considered to be a vast improvement over the first game, and codified many of the gameplay elements of the series, such as hero skills, mana-based spellcasting, and creature upgrades. It also added storytelling to the campaign and moved away from the artstyle of Might & Magic and gained its own identity. III furthered polished the gameplay elements to create what many fans consider to be the apex of the series.
    • While V 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.
  • High-Tier Scrappy: The Conflux faction is banned from most official tournaments of III (which spawned jokes about players pretending it doesn't even exist), due to being ridiculously unbalanced in both the early-game (powerful heroes two good early shooters, and a flier which prevents retaliation) and the late-game (access to all spell schools and ridiculous creature growth). More details on the Game Breaker page.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Irina from VI can be harsh and abrasive, but it's hard not to sympathize with her considering the Emperor basically sold her to an abusive husband in a half-assed effort to keep peace in the realm, and her father ultimately allowed it to happen. Whether her heart of gold shines through or gets snuffed out is up to the player.
  • Low-Tier Letdown:
    • The Walking Dead in III. Slow, weak, and hardly used, it was more effective to turn them into skeletons instead.
    • Peasants in its expansion Armageddon's Blade. They have 1 in every stat except speed, which is 3, which ties with the Walking Dead above. The game manual outright calls them useless and mentions they're only good for being turned into skeletons. Even their Idle Animation has them facepalming.
    • The Peasants in the first and second games aren't any better, since they're similarly weak and can't be turned into skeletons. Most Knight players will leave them out of their army once they gain access to Paladins.
  • Memetic Mutation: Astrologers proclaim week of the X. X population doubles! Explanation 
  • Misblamed: There has been quite a substantial portion of players who consider IV the reason why 3DO and New World Computing went bankrupt. In actuality, it is due to rampant game piracy that crippled sales combined with many other factors, with Heroes IV not being one of them. More details from a former employee here.
  • More Popular Spin-Off: A significant proportion of the gigantic Heroes fanbase never played the original RPG series. This factor led to the scuttling of the Science Fantasy Forge faction in Armageddon's Blade, as Heroes had been almost strictly fantasy prior to then and the sci-fi elements of Might and Magic were seen as foreign to the franchise.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: III has so many of them. It's not an exaggeration to say half of the sound effects are absolutely wonderful..
  • Narm Charm: The first installment had some pretty silly looking creatures, but some of the sound effects, such as the druids and turret sounding like TIE Fighters, and the peasants' monotone "Ah!" when they get hit just take the cake.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • In the first three games, if you lost a map, you'd be treated to a scene of your own execution, either by the guillotine (I and III) or the sight of your abandoned skeleton in a cage that was hanging off a tree (II), complete with music to further emphasize your failure.
    • Also in the same tune is Heroes II's battle defeat scene. I shows the defeated Hero walking away from the battlefield in a rather gloomy tune. II shows the Hero running from the scene like a coward while vultures immediately pick on the flesh of his freshly-killed army. The music doesn't help either. The one from III is similar to the one in I, but a lone soldier runs towards the hero with a flaming arrow in his back then promptly falls dead.
    • Several map objects in Heroes 3, such as the Warrior's Tomb, many creature banks, and the Dragon Utopia, give off Scare Chords which can be quite startling to an inexperienced player with their volume turned up. The wailing of a Subterranean Gate is also unsettling.
    • The Danse-Macabre-like Heroes 3 Necropolis theme, which is why many fans like it so much.
  • Obvious Beta: Seems to plague the series from IV onwards, requiring lots of patches to get the gameplay right. More than two months after VII's release, major bugs were still around.
  • Obvious Judas: Lord Haart being a traitor responsible for poisoning King Gryphonheart in III is a lot less surprising if you check his biography and see that he was rumored to have ties with a necromantic cult.
  • Sacred Cow: Heroes III has gained this legacy in many places throughout the world, especially in Eastern European countries where the game was exceptionally popular. Its lasting impact basically sustained the Heroes series for four more games by itself, and it's widely looked at as both an incredible strategy game and an exceptionally fun game in its own right. Thus, looking down on it for any reason isn't taken lightly.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • A series-wide example. If you are aiming to obtain or improve a hero skill upon levelling up, you have to pray to the Random Number God that it will show up instead giving you skills that you don't want which will mess up your build. For example, III only offers two options, one of which is usually a pre-obtained skill. IV is like III but it has three options instead. V dials back to two options for main skills and abilities each, which is dangerous for those aiming for the Ultimate skills. Outside of Save Scumming (a luxury that cannot exist in multiplayer), you usually can't change the skills offered upon levelling up. There is a reason for the existence of Memory Mentors in V.
    • Certain tiles have scripted events that will force the hero that steps onto the tile into an unavoidable battle. There's no way of knowing when you'll be ambushed, so you can be in for a nasty surprise. For example, on Griffin Cliffs, you might try to attack the lightly defended cities to the north, only to face an encounter that you can't win.
    • When you start a scenario in the first game, your faction and (in some scenarios) your starting point are randomly chosen for you. This can be frustrating for those with strong preferences when it comes to their starting heroes.
    • A few campaigns in III's Restoration of Erathia campaign revolves around obtaining an artifact and bringing it to a subsequent mission. This would initiate a chain of deals in each of those missions until you got to the final one, where the final artifact you receive will determine one of the possible bonuses you get (usually a very powerful artifact, troops, or something like a full map reveal). The idea was that the in-between missions of these campaigns could be done in any order, and so the bonuses encouraged replayability. Unfortunately, the chain of deals wasn't communicated well in-game, and thus it left a lot of players scouring the map looking for an artifact to turn in to the trader when the idea was you were suppose to do the other mission first. On top of this, when the game was ported into the Complete edition, it resulted in some of the traders asking for the wrong artifact, breaking the chain of deals and making it impossible to get the bonus unless you do the missions in a specific order.
  • Sequel Difficulty Spike: The second game, in comparison to the first. While the first game had Claw, a fairly easy level for new players, there are no obvious missions for beginners in the second game. The campaign also starts off more difficult and stays that way, culminating in Roland's final mission.
  • Sequel Displacement:
    • While the RPG Might & Magic games weren't exactly unpopular, the Heroes spinoff series became much more widely known and helped define the turn-based strategy fantasy game genre. It's telling that the Heroes games were rebooted in the new Ashan continuity well before the parent series received the same treatment.
    • Within the Heroes series itself, II and III definitely eclipsed the first game in popularity due to technical and aesthetic advancements. For many players, one or the other was their introduction to the series, and they're re-visited more often.
  • 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:
    I feel the urge to celebrate. Fetch me a slave, a fresh one. And towels for the blood.
  • 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.
  • That One Boss: Orlando, the Demon Lord you fight at the end of the Necromancer campaign in Tribes of the East. Due to a ridiculous combination of skills and the Lion artifact set, he has Luck and Morale parameters at +9, meaning that every unit will either crit or get an extra turn 90% of the time. Even with the ultimate Necromancer skill and the various artifacts you have by now, you can at most reduce this to +3 or +4. On top of that, he has a stupidly powerful ballista that does about 500 damage per shot, shoots 4 times a turn and can crit. Luckily, you have a massive number of towns to draw forces from, but Orlando also gains troops with time.
  • That One Level:
    • "Castle Alamar" in the first game, the penultimate mission for non-Warlock players. There's a giant maze in the middle of the map, and while the game hints that the Gargoyles will show you the way, you'll have to kill a lot of them in order to make your way to the enemy city. Castle Alamar is extremely well-defended, and is probably more of a challenge than the actual final mission.
    • The final mission in Roland's Campaign in II is an absolute MONSTER. First off, normally, campaign missions will give you a choice of one of three bonuses to assist you in the scenario. Just to show how you are getting NO help in this scenario, the choice between three bonuses is actually a choice between getting one of three artifacts that will hinder your army instead. Next, the developers put an enemy hero right next to one of your starting castles, but just out of sight. If this is your first time playing this mission, it WILL catch you offguard and essentially force your first of many restarts. But the most difficult part by far is the magnitude of the armies you will face in this mission. Your opponents have no less than TWELVE towns, (technically thirteen, but one of them simply exists to amass troops for the epic final battle, which compared to the rest of the mission is a cakewalk.) backed up by more than enough resources to fund every single one of them. By comparison, you have 3 towns. Yeah...A playthrough on Youtube took roughly EIGHT HOURS to beat this mission. And that's a single attempt. Account for failed attempts and we're easily talking FIFTY HOURS of gameplay on This. Single. Mission. And as if that isn't enough, the fact that The AI is a HUGE cheating bastard in this game means that you can't just abuse the AI. You'll have to fight tooth and nail for every single castle on the map, and sometimes even that won't be enough. It is impossible to describe the pain, time and amount of attempts it will take to finally put this monster of a mission down. The only redeeming factor is that this IS the final mission, so an epic battle is what you would expect. And boy, does it deliver.
    • "Steadwick's Fall" in III, which, as the last mission of the first Evil campaign, is a severe Difficulty Spike. The goal is to conquer Erathia's capital of Steadwick within 3 months. The catch? It's guarded by General Kendal, a very powerful Campaign-exclusive heronote , who also has an incredibly large armynote . Not helped by the fact that the city's barricaded by heavy garrisons and extra cities surrounding the entire map. On your end, you can only carry over one set of heroes from the two previous scenarios while at the same time having no campaign bonuses. Not surprisingly, many players choose to beat this scenario by luring General Kendal with a decoy hero out of the city that is just far enough to prevent him from coming back in the same turn while a second hero takes the unguarded city.
    • "Tunnels and Troglodytes" in III, the last mission of the second Good campaign. It's a large map, making it difficult to control territory. You start with a Castle, a Rampart and a Tower, making it difficult to field a large army of a single type. The enemy, however, has five Dungeon towns, and there are creature dwellings all over the map, making it easy for them to outproduce you if you're not careful.
    • "The Pirate's Daughter" in IV seems to have been designed to punish people who got complacent with the relatively low difficulty of the previous campaigns. This first scenario is Early Game Hell defined, you start with a small army of weak units, far away from any town, while your two opponents start with two each, and will aggressively pump out units from day 1. It takes days of sailing to reach the nearest neutral town, and it begins poorly developed and is in area that lacks in resources. Just stopping to build it up is not an option, or else the Green player to your immediate east will bowl over you with their superior resources and numbers, but executing an attack is no picnic either, due to their decently levelled heroes and strong starting position. And before you think about just using your heroes to overpower it, they have an Absurdly Low Level Cap of just 12, and are both thieves, who take multiple levels to get direct combat skills and have them on lower priority compared to their scouting skills, which are useless in direct combat. If you can survive the early part of the game and knock out Green, things ease up a lot, but getting to that point requires precise execution.
    • The Lord of Heresh mission in V can be pretty damn absurd in terms of difficulty. Sure, you get two cities and you only enemy has just one... but in order to even get to him you need to acquire a specific artifact, which requires winning two battles against a large number of high-tier units. Due to how the scenario is designed, you get at most two months to build up your forces, while Haven troops keep leaving you, your mines get randomly captured and two enemy armies invade your territory. Before the time is up - and assuming neither of your heroes got killed yet, which is an automatic failure - you have to confront your opponent right in his city, where he has a huge army and maxed-out fortifications at his disposal. But there is one more thing which can make this scenario downright impossible - the hero defending the city is Godric, who was one of your main heroes in two earlier missions. If you developed him well, then you might suffer a case of Hoist by His Own Petard, where you are defeated as a result of your own abilities.
    • The Faerie Dragon scenario from the campaign "Dragon Slayer" in Armageddon's Blade. While it is not hard, it is incredibly long as it requires your hero to trudge through multiple rough terrain (and often backtrack) completing random objectives to unlock the next area. Your hero will also hit the level cap in this scenario long before you get close to finishing, meaning that the latter battles are more or less just a waste of time as you gain nothing from them while potentially losing troops and have to backtrack, which is even worse if you chose this as the second mission, as the next one has the same level cap rendering all those battles a pointless slog as well. Finally, much of the enemies in this mission, due to the time limit, are trick bosses that require specific usage of spells or creature abilities to overcome, the most infamous of which is a stack of Nagas numbering 3500 (nagas seldom reach 100 in normal gameplay).
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
    • The Updated Re-release of III by Dotemu is generally disliked by fans for not including the two expansions. That means an entire town, several creatures and heroes, and multiple campaigns are missing, as well as the fan-favorite random map generator from Armageddon's Blade.
    • 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).
    • 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 find the hero you need to kill already dead. This is reason why people at Gamefaqs add instant win cheats in the walkthrough — you might need it.
      • Speaking of the AI, check here if you want a laugh.
      • Some of the criticism of the sixth game is in this vein (for instance, criticizing the reduction of the number of resources).
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: While IV receives a lot of praise for having surprisingly well-developed lore, the origin of the Chaos faction could have been significantly expanded upon. As the fourth game's counterpart of Nighon, it acquires a lot of troops from the faction's previous incarnations, however, its storyline focuses more on pirate queen Tawni Balfour's naval conquest rather than the incorporation of the former Nighon armies into her ranks. With every single other campaign from the core game explaining the troops available to each faction in believeable ways, sometimes focusing an entire mission on obtaining a certain creature type, it stings quite a bit that orcs and minotaurs are barely mentioned, medusae are only a part of a plot-irrelevant sidequest, black dragons aren't present lorewise, and the newcomers like hydras, efreeti, and nightmares aren't even mentioned.
  • Tough Act to Follow: Every game post III has to deal with being a successor to it, and that is a massive pair of shoes to fill. Not only is III one of the most popular and beloved strategy games of all time, but it has a massive and still active playerbase that loves it to pieces. Thus, each game post III is looked upon with scrutiny for different reasons. IV changed too much, V changed too little (and what it did change is often considered poorly planned, such as the lack of caravans from IV), VI is a glorified reskin of V and has some of the worst DRM in any game ever, and reactions to VII range from "poorly written, buggy, but fun" to "unplayable nightmare". Most diehard fans stick with II and III.
  • Viewer Gender Confusion:
    • Kyrre, one of the Ranger heroes from III is female. Which is completely non-indicative outside of using "her" in the lore blurb. To make things more confusing, there is also Kyrre the male Ranger from IV.
    • The Rakshasa Ranis in V are muscular and have quite masculine faces. The only indication of their gender is the green sashes they wear over their pectorals.
  • Vindicated by History: In light of the even more poorly received VI and VII, IV and V were re-evaluated as much better than upon their releases. In the case of IV, it also helps that a lot of its Troubled Production became widely known.

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