We commence with
an in-engine cutscene (2:54-8:12 in this vid, thanks, guy on youtube). Basically, Godric (old fuck) is guarding Isabel (Badass Warrior Kween!) and Beatrice (Creepy Nun that Isabel is friends with) at the Summer Palace, away from the demon invasion. As watching an impotent old man and two women sit around a palace would not exactly make for a fun campaign, things happen! Godric is sent off to try to bug the mages into allying with us against the demons, Beatrice goes to bug the elves, and Isabelle sticks around to rally some troops.
And we begin at the main Adventure Map screen. There’s a lot going on here, but not much to worry about yet. The floating blue unicorn is just the cursor, by the by. Fair warning, I will overexplain a bit in these first few parts so the future ones can focus more on the meat of things.
The bar up top is our resource bar, won’t be in play much this mission. The bottom right has the end turn button (hourglass), the blue and black notches surrounding it show the day of the week (will matter soon), the book is our spellbook, which won’t be in play this scenario, the gears are the options menu, and finally, the paper and magnifying glass are our objective screen and kingdom overview.
As hinted in the intro, our goal is to rally a small army, not hard given we’re under no time pressure and don’t have a proper opponent on this map. Isabel also can’t lose in battle either, but you shouldn’t be losing any fights this early.
The third button is our kingdom overview, it’s quite bare as we control no towns or resource mines, and have only one level 1 hero with a small army. (The second button is just a transcript of the cutscene we watched at the start).
The green bar underneath Isabelle’s portrait at the bottom of the screen shows her movement, it drains as we travel around the map, as you may expect. The signpost here is purely for decoration, although each time I interact with it, it drains some movement (important rule).
The path ahead is blocked by a group of neutral peasants. Neutrals aren’t under any player’s control and tend to be placed to black routes. However, in many campaign maps, especially early ones…
Most neutrals of your faction will offer to join you instead. This can happen naturally if you have certain skills or overwhelming force, but not nearly as much as it will in the campaign. I gladly accept the help of these unwashed men.
And add them to my forces.
You’ll notice Isabelle has a list of stats, she doesn’t gain from them personally, but instead adds them to her units’ stats.
Attack: Attack, as you may expect, boosts the damage her units do. I believe every point of attack you have over an opponent’s defense increases the unit’s damage by 5% (ergo, if a unit has 10 more attack than the defender has defense, they deal 1.5x damage), but it’s been a while.
Defense: Opposite of attack, reduces damage a unit takes, and I believe the same 5% rule applies, but in reverse if defense is higher.
Spellpower and Knowledge are related to casting spells, which Isabelle won’t be doing until the 4th map, so I’ll skip them for now.
Morale grants a unit a chance to act again sooner in combat, I’ll show it off when we get into our first fight.
Luck grants a unit a chance to do max damage, then double it, in combat, I’ll also show that off when I get a chance.
Mana is consumed when casting spells, its value is based on Knowledge (1 knowledge=10 mana).
Our army is shown below with amounts of each troop type, and below that are our war machines, they don’t count as units, but each give additional benefits in combat. The only one we have for now is the catapult (yes, I know it’s a trebuchet, but the game calls it a catapult), which is only active when sieging down towns.
South of the neutral peasants is our first pile of resources, gold in this case. It’s important to get these, because they don’t regenerate and are needed to buy troops and build buildings.
After picking up the gold, it’s added to our stockpile.
Riding south, we run into a creature dwelling (that is, the peasant hut), guarded by some footmen.
Being the first map though, it’s obvious they aren’t going to fight us.
The peasants, being shitty tier 1 units (out of 7), join us for free, and we “flag” the dwelling. Now peasants will start accumulating here, at a rate of 22 per week. We can grab them by just running a hero to the dwelling, easy stuff.
Before we visit the footman dwelling you can see at the bottom of the screen, I’m going to stop at this rally flag. This is one of many map objects that affects your movement and your battle stats (in this case, we get better luck and morale in our next fight, and some extra movement). I grab the gold pile to the east and then head on down.
Footmen, due to their improved stats and hygiene, won’t join us for free, and instead we have to pay for them at a rate of 90 gold a footman. Not a bad deal, so I buy them.
South of the footman dwelling, off the path to the west is some wood, it won’t serve any purpose on this map (wood is used to build stuff in towns), but my inner sperg tells me to grab it anyway.
Another group of peasants blocks the road ahead. The game doesn’t give exact numbers of enemies, but the group term under the name tells you how many there are. In this case, a pack means there are 10-19 of them, and the game gives us a threat assessment of very low (which is accurate).
As it turns out, these peasants aren’t interested in our shit. (Cutscene runs from 8:15-8:56) In our first bit of Isabelle’s lovely characterization, she attacks her own citizens for daring to not want to march into battle with their pitchforks and blue shirts, against corpse eating demons.
Our first battle commences! At the bottom of the screen, you can see the battle queue, it tells you what units (or heroes, or war machines) act when. In this case, our squires have the first action. During a unit’s turn, it can move (to any of the green squares highlighted on screen), defend (the shield), which raises its defense skill until its next turn, or wait (the hourglass, this pushes back the unit’s next turn a bit, not as much as defending or moving though).
In this battle, we have greater numbers and stronger units, so there’s no need to rush in, as the AI has no choice but to move forward.
This may also be a good time to show a unit stat page for comparison. Attack and Defense have been explained already, as have luck and morale. They are highlighted in green because of boosts from either the hero, artifacts, or map pickups. As for the rest.
Damage is the amount of damage that can be dealt by a single unit of the stack per attack. In this case, this stack of peasants will deal a base of 34 damage (1 damage per peasant with 34 peasants), before accounting for attack or defense.
Hit points are the amount of damage one unit in the stack can take before it dies. If these peasants took 3 damage, for example, 1 peasant in the stack would die, reducing it to 33.
Range is a stat that exclusively affects shooters, which we don’t get in this scenario.
Speed is how far the unit can move per turn, in number of squares. Peasants are kinda slow and can move 4.
Initiative (new to Homm 3 players but actually a carryover from 4) affects how often and how soon a unit acts. Units with high initiative get to act sooner and more often than units with lower initiative.
As stated, peasants are slowpokes, so I’m going to track the advance of the neutral peasants as they approach my forces.
And now they close in! Mousing over a unit in melee range will allow you to preview your attack, giving you a range of possible units killed, and whether they will retaliate or not. Melee works by the attacker striking first and inflicting their kills, followed by the defender swinging back. Getting that first hit in at the right time is essential to troop preservation. In this case, footmen are tanky and peasants are wimps, so even if we low roll on damage and that 1 lives, he’ll tickle the footman and die next turn anyway.
The footmen strike! (The Cinematic camera tickles my lizard brain and I’ll be throwing in screenshots when able).
We successfully strike down the peasants, ending the battle in a victory. Isabel also gains a small amount of experience points for the win too.
The road ahead is now clear, I pick up the peasants on the lower part of the screen (joiners), and then visit the footman tower you can just see down there, recruiting them brings their stack up to 26, completing one of our objectives.
Completed objectives grant a bit of experience too, not enough to level Isabel up yet though.
Two big things in this screenshot, firstly, we reach a new week, meaning that all of our dwellings gain a fresh batch of creatures to recruit. We don’t need to go back for any though. Secondly, you can see the windmill up top. These can be visited weekly to get a small stash of a randomly chosen resource.
I visit the windmill and head north instead of following the road, to gain some extra levels.
The stack of peasants aren’t joiners, but they aren’t a scripted fight, so the game can use its autocombat on them. In this case, the fight is very easy and we take no losses, so I just go with the autocombat result.
Past them are some conscripts, upgraded peasants, they aren’t so friendly.
But they are smart enough to run off. When you have a huge advantage over neutrals, they may try to flee. Pursuing them fights them and grants you standard experience, letting them flee skips the fight but only gives half as much experience. I take the fight and autocombat grants an easy win. I then recruit the peasants from the dwelling they guarded.
Down the path is some gold guarded by a pack of plague zombies. These “Ethan Ralph after shaving” looking guys are pretty easy pickings.
Which doesn’t stop autocombat from losing men to them. I choose to replay the fight manually.
In every fight after this point, we get access to the tactics phase. This allows us to arrange our units as we please before the fight starts. I stick with the default in this case.
Isabel gets a turn, which shows what a hero can do on their turn. She’s not a unit (sorry Homm 4 fans), but she has the choice to do an attack to damage enemies…
Or to cast a spell, which she doesn’t know any of yet.
My strategy here is gonna be pretty simple, use Isabel to whittle down the zombies as they slowly advance across the field, then finish them when they get close.
It takes them three full turns to reach my men, plenty of time to cut them down a bit.
Finally, they reach our lines. I could strike with the peasants now, but they’d eat retaliation, and being very fragile, would surely suffer some losses.
Instead, I wait with the peasants and let the much tankier footmen cut down the lower stack of zombies.
Which pays off, as you can see in the battle log. The weakening effect is a unique ability of Plague zombies, it reduces damage dealt by the unit. Not much of a concern here though.
The red color on the footmen means they are debuffed (from the weakness). I use the peasants to finish off the lower stack of zombies.
The green on the number of zombies is the enrage buff they get when a friendly stack dies. They try to chase down my peasants…
But my footmen finish them off before they can.
And we get our first level up! Levels grant one stat point in one of the four primary stats (Attack/Defense/Spellpower/Knowledge), chance to get each is weighted based on class. Isabel, being a knight, is most likely to get points in defense, followed by attack, knowledge, then spellpower.
It also grants you a chance to gain or upgrade a skill, or gain an ability (you get two skills and two abilities to choose from per level, they are selected randomly and weighted based on class). This system gets rather complex, although the big note is that each hero only has slots for 6 skills, two of which are filled at the start (one is the hero’s class unique skill, the other is their starting skill), leaving us 4 flex picks. Abilities are attached to skills and add extra bonuses.
Early on, we’ll be going mainly for skills that are desirable, to start forming our build. Isabel’s build isn’t too important, but later on, builds can make or break a hero.
Of all the choices here, Basic Luck is the priority to grab. It grants 1 luck to all of our units, and allows us to learn the listed skills later. The other stuff offered is all tied to Isabel’s innate class ability, Counterstrike, and none of it is IMMEDIATELY important, so I’ll save it for later levels.
After leveling up, we proceed down the path, and run into a stack of footmen.
I choose to battle them, it’s very similar to the zombie fight, although footmen are stronger than zombies and take a bit more pressure to take down.
I still manage to down them with minimal causalities. (I’ll probably accelerate or even skip most neutral fights like this in the future, I’ll only go play by play for major battles).
After defeating the footmen, we continue south and smash a weak stack of peasants.
And we are back on the path. I visit the faerie ring for the bonus luck.
And after flagging a peasant hut to the south (“guarded” by joiner peasants), we complete the 100 peasant objective. But the mission isn’t over yet, as a new objective is added.
The garrison is pretty well guarded given our limited forces in this scenario, but I’m not concerned, as Isabel’s stats will make the difference in the battle.
Before we fight the garrison, I clear out a stack of zombies, as you can see, some plague zombies (upgraded zombies) are mixed in with the stack as well.
Isabel levels up again… and this one is kinda shit. War Machines (Lets us control the ballista and catapult and buffs them) is pretty bad, counterstrike (basically a general buff to our class specific abilities, and makes our troops hit a bit harder on retaliations) is okay but not a major priority, recruitment (boosts growth of some midlevel creatures if the hero is in town at the end of a week) is meh, and diplomacy (grants neutrals a higher chance to join us) is really chancy. I stick with Diplomacy though.
The zombies were guarding a treasure chest, these grant a randomized amount of gold or exp (from 1000-2000 gold or 500-1500 exp), you choose which one you take. As we don’t need the cash here, I take the exp.
Which nudges Isabel up to 4th level. Light Magic is excellent (even though we can’t use it yet), so I take it. We’ll have plenty of chances to level up leadership (boosts morale) later, and Estates (+250 gold per turn) and Expert trainer (Will explain when relevant) aren’t really crucial right now.
As we near the garrison, we get one last group of reinforcements, some more squires (upgraded footmen)
We win on autocombat… I could end it here as this is the final fight of the scenario, but I’m no pussy and want to show off a proper battle.
This is a bit tougher than what we’ve faced up to this point, our numbers are pretty close to even, so it’s going to come down to tactics and Isabel’s stat buffs and attacks to turn the tide. I let them come at me, so we can get the first strikes in.
I bait in their conscript stack and hit it with my footmen, the footmen are tanky enough to take only one loss.
Most units can only retaliate once per round, so the squires can strike the conscripts without fear of taking heat.
Finally, the footmen can act again, and finish off the conscripts.
I run my peasants down low to finish off the stack of 35 down there.
We’re in a good spot now, they’re down to 32 peasants and their stack of Footmen, who are now enraged and hit a bit harder.
Isabel cuts down the peasants and the footmen finish what’s left. Their own footmen start hitting my peasants… and get a lucky morale which gets them far away from the rest of my army.
My peasants get chewed up pretty badly before the footmen and squires can roll in and rescue them, thankfully this is the last battle, so these losses are inconsequential.
3 stacks plus hero buffs against 1 neutral stack means the fight is basically over, we gang up on them and beat them down.
And we win! We lose more peasants than autocombat did, but without losing a squire and a footman comparatively.
Winning the battle and completing the last objective gives us enough exp to level to 5, the cap for this scenario. Neither of the skills are worth it right now (summoning magic is based heavily on spellpower, which knights are weak in, making it a bad choice, and it’s not necessary to put points into light magic yet). Retaliation strike is weak by itself but is needed to unlock some other abilities, while soldier’s luck is really strong (basically, any randomly occurring bonus effects on attacks will always proc for us). So I go for Soldier’s luck.
And we win! This is what Isabelle’s stats are looking like at the end of the scenario. We close out with
yet another cutscene (09:00-09:21), looks like Isabel's got some more work ahead of her, surely she won't exhibit more violent, sociopathic tendencies towards her subjects.
. Surely Isabel plants to peacefully persuade the people to help her… right?
