VCMI: Open-Source Engine for Heroes of Might and Magic III

Same here. Heroes 3 with HD Mod, but without HotA addiotions.

Tons of fun - usually I start a XXL map with 5 computers, I play Kyrre from Rampart and rush to find first the Dragon Utopia get Town Portal/Dimension door and hunt them down the map.

Try Songs of Conquest. It captures the original feel 100% for me, and is a game I really enjoy.

> It’s been a strong procrastination feeder over the decades, but it also gave me a lot of fun!

I remember buying some random Sega Genesis game that had the same effect on everyone I loaned it to, even a couple years after Playstation came out. Nobody was immune and, even after I showed them the tricks to winning, it only got worse.

Then I saw my baby brother playing the Heroes Playstation 2 port and I realized it's the exact same game, but was called King's Bounty on Genesis.

There's an incomplete HotA implementation on VCMI, too! https://github.com/vcmi-mods/horn-of-the-abyss/blob/vcmi-1.4...

It can be installed from the launcher, on the Mods tab.

HD Mod also works (albeit in reduced form) with HoMM3: Succession Wars, which is a mod for Heroes III which make them look like Heroes II. It's WIP but it is charming.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/h3sw

Dos won't cut it for H3; it's wine territory

and wine is a pain to use on mac, as Apple killed it with the move to Catalina

Other comments are talking about how it's not in scope, which is unfortunate for this case, but since you loved the app, I poked around and found a quite active fork! Unsure how functional it is, but it seems to have gotten quite a bit of love: https://github.com/MaddTheSane/Boxer

Loki software did some serious good. Any idea what they've become ?

VCMI dont conflict with licenses because it's not reverse engineering effort, but engine created from scratch and licensed under GPL. Pretty much like OpenMW, OpenRA and other purely open source projects.

Of course to play it you need to buy proprietary assets.

There’s a few games out there that have absolutely immense fandoms in places unexpected - Heroes III is absolutely HUGE in countries east of the old iron curtain, partially probably because it runs well on older computers but also because it’s one of the best games ever made.

Ditto. Just don't confuse it with official Heroes® of Might & Magic® III - HD Edition which is a blatant hackjob/cashgrab from Ubisoft with blurry textures.

Beware that the lobby plays modern H3 multiplayer with very specific rules - watch some YouTube about it before you venture into it. Twenty years has perfected H3 multiplayer to a science of when you do the break on Jebus Cross. And if you don’t know what those mean, you will be in for a sad time.

Is there an installer that gets you all that?

nvm. found it: https://hilo90mhz.com/homm3/

There's fheroes2 for that, an open-source port which mirrors most of the features of HoMM3's HD Mod.

Broken Alliance map on Heroes II (was map from demo) is something I still pull out every year or so to sink a whole weekend on.

When H3 released, I expected H2 colored art with more pixels, but have been disappointed by the CG-like approach with undersaturated colors.

H2 keeps a hand colored vib.

Same. It was more polished than 3. Love everything about 2.

Same here, as well as the original Jagged Alliance 2 DVD case. Glad to add HoMM3 to my list of previously closed-source games that are now open. Now if only they'd open source NeverWinter Nights . . .

Fun and balanced castles, expansions and mods, playable and bug-free on modern systems. It's a great game, or actually several games in one: town-building, map exploration, RPG, chess-like strategy battles

never played 4 or 5, but from reviews at the time it sounded like 4 and 5 were just lower effort games coasting on the reputation of 2 and 3

I think 3 was the series' peak. IIRC 4+ didn't add much, if anything at all, apart from superficial improvements, and there were more good game options out there too.

Also: nostalgia. There are many who were gaming during those peak times who spent a lot of time on these games.

HoMM 1-3 were fairly straightforward iterations on the formula. Most of the changes in the second and third games was just adding more stuff and filling in some obvious holes in the previous game. HoMM 3 was the point where the game was sufficiently complete that doing this another time was no longer a viable strategy, and HoMM 4 had to figure out how to make itself stand out as a new game. They didn't really succeed at that, and while it's a good game it's not really a better game than 3. 360 running out of money while developing HoMM 4 was unsurprisingly a big problem for the game.

HoMM 5 was a much more successful rethinking of the formula, and while the game as originally shipped had some major problems, with the expansion packs it's arguably the best game in the series. It's a meaningfully different game from 3, though. Many of the changes made the game different moreso than better or worse, so some people prefer 3 and some prefer 5.

I never played 6, but what I heard was that it had a similar problem to some of the Civilization games where HoMM 5 plus expansion packs was just a much more complete game than 6 with no expansion packs, and then it didn't sell well enough to justify continuing development to "finish" it.

There is iOS port of VCMI:

https://wiki.vcmi.eu/Installation_on_iOS

It's actually works, but you need to manually sign, install IPA and upload game assets on your phone.

VCMI engine is free and open source software licensed under GPLv2.

Original game assets (music, sprites) are proprietary and you have to buy them in order to play. There actually Heroes 3 Mac demo that can be legally used as alternative source of Heroes 3 game data, but it missing some towns.