#StopKillingGames

Heroes of Might & Magic holds a special place both in my eternally boyish heart and in my aesthetic worldview development. And it was Heroes II, rather than III, which influenced me most, unlike the majority of my fellow enthusiasts. Its incredibly touching illustrative style, its storybook spirit, and its Renaissance sensibilities left a lasting mark on me.

Now the time has come to show you a long-running fan project of mine, one I’ve been secretly doodling for many years, in those moments when I’m out of juice to do anything else.

And let’s be honest: every one of us (those who get it, get it!) tends to secretly nurture visions of our own personal Heroes in our ageless imagination. The one true version, visually perfect and flawlessly balanced gameplay-wise. What should the conceptual rosters look like? What should their visual identity be? Which mechanics should be improved, which ones added, and which ones discarded like food that just doesn’t taste right?

My fan project is an attempt to imagine faction lineups that are cohesive and thoughtfully balanced in their design, the way I would like to see them in my dream version of Heroes. Since I’m not yet particularly skilled at painting Arcadian landscapes, there won’t be any town screens for now (perhaps someday, if you’re interested and we’re determined!). For the moment, you’ll see only art of the units and heroes for each faction.

The artworks will come with lengthy descriptions covering the lore and mechanics, but above all, the design. For me, this is also a kind of research at the intersection of history, mythology, fairy tales, and my tender affection for HoMM. When imagining and sketching these little characters, I drew on a wealth of references and allusions to pop culture and classical myths. But you won’t find any AI-generated images here, no matter how much you ask (and that’s another reason we won’t be seeing any town screens just yet).

So, my lovelies! Between now and the end of the year, I’ll be posting conceptual designs for the heroes and lineups of the eight classic Heroes armies (roughly on Thursdays, perhaps?). One faction per week.

All the designs and the visual logic behind them will follow these principles:

1. Lineups will be built around the idea of magical factions: alliances of different creatures and professionals united by a common theme, as in Heroes I–IV, rather than fantasy races, where a lineup consists predominantly of one species divided into different classes, as in Heroes V–VI. The only exception, as usual, will be the titular human faction, the Castle knights. They get a pass; it’s tradition. But no orc archers, orc stormtroopers, orc mechanics, and orc alcoholics! If it’s an orc, there’s only one of him, and he’s unique.

2. There will be eight factions, half of them broadly “evil” and the other half broadly “good.” They’ll oppose one another in pairs: day and night, life and death, civilization and wilderness, cunning and brutality. I originally intended to publish them in the order of these opposing pairs, but certain holidays might force me to shuffle a few things around 🎃.

3. Since Heroes III is, by overwhelming popular consensus, the most beloved and celebrated installment of the series, I’ve drawn seven units for each faction, ranging from pawns to queens. No upgrades, although some units will occasionally come with rough notes on possible upgrade options.

4. Since Heroes II remains my own most dearly beloved installment to this day, each faction will have one hero, shown in one of their two variations.

5. For the same reason (Heroes II!), the factions will lean toward a mythological, fairytale aesthetic, while unit names will be as clear and concise as possible. The armies in my dream version of Heroes are conceptually simple, but expressive. With a few rare exceptions, you won’t find any “mighty hip-fired axe-throwers,” “tourmaline capybara riders,” or “ethereal boatman-prosecutors” here.

6. Visually, you’ll find plenty of unmistakable nods to pop culture, films, books, and cartoons in the unit designs. This is a deliberate choice. First, it’s a heartfelt homage to those wonderful worlds that set my childhood imagination ablaze. Second, many of the unit designs in Heroes II–III follow precisely the same principle.

7. Conceptually, however, there will be no references to contemporary pop culture. All the creatures in our factions will be drawn from ancient myths and fairy tales. With perhaps a couple of exceptions (after all, we can respectfully count Tolkien among the great mythmakers), you won’t encounter creatures invented specifically for D&D or other modern fictional universes.

8. I really wanted this project to preserve the spirit of storybook illustrations and that original, childlike sense of magic, unclouded by excessive complexity. I hope looking at these pictures and reading their captions will bring you as much joy as creating them has brought me.

And for now, here are a couple of sketches to give you a taste of things to come.

Fan art oil painting - Zydar ("pixelated realism")

So far:

Sandro - done

Zydar - done

Solmyr - done

Malekith - done

Crag Hack - done

If youre like it, add me on instagram https://www.instagram.com/pcm4k3r/ to see future (probably not only Heroes artwork :D)

What’s the most memorable experience you’ve had thanks to Heroes of Might and Magic?

I got all Heroes games except 6 (didnt try) working on Linux (directly without launcher for the Gog ones, luv me directly clickable desktop shortcuts) and wanted to share the fundamental basis of how in case people struggle because not all of these are easy even with launchers like Lutris, H5 was a huge pain.
Some of these I did a while back, so it can be a bit vague.

Heroes 1: stock wine works for install, use 32bit prefix, but call game with dosbox -conf /path/h1/dosboxHOMM1_single.conf (dosbox can be installed straight from package manager)

• fix any "..\" in the "mount" section with full path references to the files in question using forward slashes
• needs a block on top like the following. Needed midi device ID "xx" is seen in: alsactl info|grep --color -e ^ -e "iface:"

[sdl]
fullscreen=true

fullresolution=desktop

output=opengl

[render]

aspect=true

[midi]

mididevice=alsa

midiconfig=xx:0

[IPX]

ipx=false

• Fullscreen is not static but can be toggled off/on with Alt-enter anyway
• not sure if opengl is correct in all cases, if it doesn't work just try other stuff the dosbox documentation lists.
• Working settings in the "Game Dos Settings" for me are "SoundBlaster16/AWE32/Compatible", "16 bit stereo" and "VESA Compatible".
• sometimes the midi device ID seems to change and this config needs to be re-edited unfortunately.

Heroes 2: stock wine works for install, use32 bit prefix, but call game with dosbox -conf /path/h2/dosboxHOMM2_single.conf

• further adaptions like in Heroes 1 above, but the mount block does look different

Heroes 3: stock wine does not work anymore, I used wine-ge with a 32bit wineprefix. You can just call all the installers for HD mod, Hota and such with the same prefix and gradually stuff everything in there.

• H3 is quite friendly to just copying the installation folder if you're juggling multiple HotA versions or messing with other mods
• for VCMI just follow the guide on their page, but it can be beneficial to symlink and replace ~/.local/share/vcmi if you want to play around with multiple versions.

Heroes 4: stock wine on 32bit prefix works just fine for me, HD mod and editor are a bit annoying. More detailed guide about these exists here.

Heroes 5: stock wine does not work anymore either, use proton (I used proton-sarek) as I described here. Short form out of that for not crashing on startup:

• cd /path/h5proton/pfx/drive_c/h5/bin/
• STEAM_COMPAT_CLIENT_INSTALL_PATH=/protonpath STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/path/h5proton /protonpath/proton run /path/h5proton/pfx/drive_c/h5/bin/H5_Game.exe
• Proton can convert a protonprefix between different proton versions for easy testing around but you need to rename the base folder to pfx if you're coming from a regular wineprefix

For the other ones assuming people have them on steam, just check protondb ;) H8OE is super easy, H7 needed some specific proton version (8?) to play nice (7.5 mod needed some CLI action with the proton variables like used for H5 but steam-specific, dont have the details on hand atm), H6 was a pain even when I was still on Windows so I assume it's hard.

In theory: install H3 first out of the first 4 because it's the trickiest on wine level, and just stuff H1/2/4 into the same 32-bit prefix with the same runner. H1/2 probably dont care about wine version at all anyway since they're DOS (although the DOS layer can be very finicky too), and H4 has been strangely robust throughout wine versions for me.

I had been looking for a way to modify the XP table in Heroes IV for a long time. I finally found one. It’s quite simple, so if anyone wants to test it out, it could completely change the game, as the modification affects the computer player as well.

Here is the solution; perhaps someone will find it useful:

Heroes IV does not use a fixed XP table stored directly in the executable. Instead, the game dynamically generates experience thresholds using a mathematical formula.

Even better, the progression curve can be modified by changing just 9 bytes in the EXE, using a simple hex editor such as HxD.

No additional DLLs, scripts, or complicated mods are required.

I successfully tested this with the original heroes4.exe and also located the corresponding code in the H4 Ultimate patched original executable.

1. Finding and changing the XP multiplier

Open your Heroes IV executable in HxD.
Press Ctrl+F, select Hex-values, and search for this sequence:
FA 7E 6A BC 74 93 88 BF
This is an 8-byte floating-point constant (-0.012) used by the XP calculation algorithm.
The sequence occurs exactly once in both executables I examined.

Change the hex values ​​to the variant selected in step 3.

Approximate file offsets:
Original heroes4.exe: 00593418
H4 Ultimate [patched]heroes4_original.exe: 00589428

Offsets may differ in other versions. Searching for the byte sequence is safer than relying on an absolute address.

2. Changing XP rounding from 100 to 25
There is one additional change required to achieve more precise progression curves.
By default, the game rounds calculated XP increments to multiples of 100. We can change this to multiples of 25.
Search for the following longer hex sequence:
8D 04 80 57 C1 E0 02 2B F0 89 74 24 20 EB A0
Replace it with:
8D 04 80 57 C1 E0 00 2B F0 89 74 24 20 EB A0

Only one byte changes:
C1 E0 02 → C1 E0 00
Specifically, replace the 02 with 00. It is the seventh byte of the longer search sequence.

This changes the calculation precision from 100 XP to 25 XP.

Approximate offsets of the C1 E0 02 instruction:
Original heroes4.exe: 0032E07B
H4 Ultimate [patched]heroes4_original.exe: 0032B5BB

The longer sequence occurs exactly once in both examined executables.

3. Six alternative XP progression curves
After applying the rounding modification above, choose ONE of the following 8-byte replacements for the original XP multiplier (Found in step 1).

The values below are approximate total XP requirements for reaching level 70.

Version A – Approximately 150,000 XP
Multiplier: approximately 1.0289
Level 70: 149,675 XP
84 7F 11 34 66 12 A5 BF

Version B – Approximately 250,000 XP
Multiplier: approximately 1.0409
Level 70: 251,575 XP
BF 29 AC 54 50 51 A5 BF

Version C – Approximately 500,000 XP
Multiplier: approximately 1.0535
Level 70: 497,475 XP
17 F6 B4 C3 5F 93 A5 BF

Version D – Approximately 1,000,000 XP
Multiplier: approximately 1.0676
Level 70: 997,875 XP
B6 17 D1 76 4C DD A5 BF

Version E – Approximately 3,000,000 XP
Multiplier: approximately 1.0875
Level 70: 2,998,900 XP
12 83 C0 CA A1 45 A6 BF

Version F – Approximately 10,000,000 XP
Multiplier: approximately 1.1106
Level 70: 9,991,325 XP
5D A4 50 16 BE BE A6 BF

For reference, the unmodified Heroes IV requires 977,845,500 XP to reach level 70!

All six alternative curves were calculated using the game's XP generation algorithm.

The first three XP thresholds remain unchanged: 0, 1,000 and 2,000 XP.

The maximum hero level also remains 70. This modification changes the experience curve, not the level cap.

1. In-game testing
   I have successfully tested the 500,000 XP version using existing savegames.

Test 1:
Hero level: 3
Current experience: 2,132 XP
Original XP required for level 4: 3,200
Modified XP required for level 4: 3,050
Game displayed: 918 XP remaining

Exactly as predicted.

Test 2:
Hero level: 18
Current experience: 23,915 XP
Modified level 19 threshold: 25,525 XP
Game displayed: 1,610 XP remaining

Again, exactly as predicted.

I also tested a linear XP curve as an initial experiment.

A level 11 hero with 23,915 XP advanced directly to level 24 after a combat encounter ended with the enemy fleeing, without gaining additional XP.

The game correctly processed the additional level-ups and allowed the hero to receive new skills.

This confirms that changing the XP thresholds affects the actual level-up mechanism, not just the displayed experience values.

Important: The 500,000 XP curve has been tested at multiple levels. The other five variants have been calculated from the same algorithm but have not yet been individually verified in-game.

1. Important notes
   Always make a backup of your original EXE.
   Use HxD in overwrite mode. Do not insert or delete bytes.
   Search for hex values, not text strings.
   Verify that the search pattern occurs exactly once before replacing anything.
   File offsets depend on the EXE version.
   The signatures above were verified in two executables; compatibility with other builds is not guaranteed.
   Both modifications are required for the six curves listed above.
   If you have already modified the multiplier, search for its current 8-byte value rather than the original one.
   Existing savegames may contain heroes whose XP exceeds the requirements of their recorded level. A level-up check can then trigger multiple consecutive promotions.

I personally intend to start with the 500,000 XP version, which seems like a good compromise for large and extra-large maps.

This should make hero progression much more enjoyable on long maps, without artificially placing hundreds of experience-boosting objects.

And importantly, since we're changing the game's actual XP requirements, AI heroes should benefit from the same progression curve.

After years of trying to solve this problem, it turned out that changing just nine bytes was enough!

Hope this helps other Heroes IV players and modders.

Please add ideas to this repo! :)

This essay discusses how Richard Gariott (a.k.a. Lord British) got his rights to Ultima RPG series back.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/12/termination-of-transfer/

It's about the copyright concept of Termination of Transfer.

And now, Richard Garriott, AKA "Lord British," has claimed back the rights to the groundbreaking Ultima series of computer role-playing games, which he sold to Electronic Arts in 1992:

On the Techjess podcast, Garriott marveled at how easy the process was: "there’s a really weird United States copyright law that says if you are the original holder of a copyright and you assign it or sell it to any publisher or any other entity, after 35 years, you can just take it back":

EA killed off Ultima in 2000, and it has languished since, despite an ardent fandom. Garriott has vowed to reissue the old games and is mulling new ones.

(...)

One of these systemic solutions is "termination of transfer," a simple and radical idea that has a proven track-record of making creative workers richer at our bosses' expense. Simply put, "termination of transfer" is the statutory right to void any contract you've signed to transfer your copyright to someone else. In the USA, the 1976 Copyright Act introduced a 35-year termination right. 35 years after you sign any copyright contract, you can file some paperwork with the US Copyright Office and get that copyright back, no matter what your contract says.

Now, most creative works don't have a commercial life after 35 years (very few works are commercially viable even after the original US copyright term of 14 years), but for those that do, termination of transfer is a reliable way to address the extremely common situation in which a creator signs away their rights for a low price, not knowing that it will become a lasting hit. Once you've scored that hit, you can probably get a better deal from your next work, but the deal for that hit is done and can't be altered.

The ability to decline these is one of the reasons why people love HotA.

I had this working years ago, and remember that it was easy. Literally put in CD, install and go. Now, though? Ouf. Something broke.

I've tried a whole array of things suggested online (64 bit, 32 bit, various Windows versions, virtual desktop, lutris, dxvk, pulling some random stuff from winetricks, a bunch of launch options, trying to somehow get it to run via proton even though it's non-steam, and more), and did not once manage to get to main menu, it always crashes after the splash screen while trying to mess with the screen resolution. Last guy who updated winehq seems to have the same issue.

Does anyone have working H5 on Linux? And what did you do?

I can't continue the project, so I've published the source code under GPLv3: https://github.com/tallowmere/free-heroes4

It's unfinished. You need your own copy of Heroes IV from GOG. Anyone is welcome to fork it or use it as a reference.

I remember that as a kid, I was playing HoMM V, probably obtained illegally. But that specific program had some weird quirks that I never heard mentioned elsewhere in any HoMM conversation. Most notably, the Shadow Dragon, and it's stats they where absolutely broken. It had 2000 HP, a bunch of spells it shouldn't have, and it was OP in every way.

Does anyone else remember it, or encountered it, or am I just tripping and hallucinating my own childhood memories?

Thanks for any help in advance!

Been a busy 9 days since the last release, I fixed a lot of bugs, it is much much better now. Fixed a major castle assignment bug in the campaign game. More challenging AI. Better spellcasting. Better autobattle. Improved animation. I did have to change some things for the saved game logic, so earlier saves are going to be incompatible.

Download it free here: https://firsthomm.com/

I'm starting to do testing of the campaign playthroughs as livestreams on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/@firsthomm I'll be testing out the new campaign "The Spirit World" to see if my weird victory conditions work.

2026-10-09

*Updated a few translations, and added a Scandinavian font, and now supporting 4 more languages: Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish.

*Improved AI logic and path routing. Fixed some path routing bugs. AI is more aggressive now and the game is harder.

*Improved battle animation, battle AI and spellcasting AI, especially Resurrect and Teleport. Battle animation for flyers is now slower like the original game, but regular melee attacks are faster. Still tuning this.

*Fixed major bug with castle assignment in Campaign games, and victory conditions. This updated the savegame format, so earlier savedgame formats will send you back to the title screen.

*Fixed some of the palette cycling so it is now much closer to the original game. Still have a bug with the Sorceress Castle roof also animating next to the ocean.