Heroes I

Fun Facts

Bad luck is supported by the game. Only there's nothing to cause it, so it doesn't appear. As one could expect, it halves damage dealt by the unlucky unit. The only way to experience it for yourself is to hex-edit a savegame file.



Due to a bug (or an unlikely feature), the ghosts' overpowered ability is even more overpowered when they are counterattacking. For each creature killed by a counterattack, not one, but two new ghosts are added to the stack.



Cheat code: enter 101495 to reveal the entire map.



The "Eye of Goros" artifact that has to be found in the third mission of the campaign also appears in Might & Magic I: Secret of the Inner Sanctum. Here it is used to "heal the land", in MM1 it is used to unmask the false king Alamar. A multipurpose little eye. Neither game bothered to portray it.


As a tribute, in Might & Magic X there's an artifact called "The other Eye of Goros", which this time acts as a key to a secret dungeon where all the creators hang out.




It is possible to finish the campaign without ever getting a Hero on a boat, but only if you play as the Sorceress. And the Sorceress' specialty is faster travel by boat. How useless.



A Hero can use the Town Gate spell while being on a boat. It teleports him to the nearest town or castle along with the boat. If it is a coastal town he can sail out again. Or he could disembark on a shore square. In this case the boat stays in the castle and if another Hero is recruited, he appears on the boat. There is also a possibility of Dimension Dooring to a water square. The worst case scenario is if the castle is surrounded by land. The boat with the Hero is stuck, rendering both the Hero and the castle unusable.




A troll can only be killed if 40 damage is dealt to it during a single turn. This can lead to a curious situation - if both sides have a single troll, they can attack each other endlessly and the battle will not be resolved. Also, given that there's no information about the trolls regenerating, such unlikely scenario might be very confusing for a player.




A similar situation can happen if one side only has a flying unit and the other only a slow unit. For example, a hydra can never catch a sprite. This can be useful during a siege - a sprite can endlessly fly away from a hydra, while the indestructible keep shoots the hydra. As long as the Hero with the hydra has no magic to help win this fight, he cannot prevail.




What is the most amount of units that a single unit can kill in one attack? The victim will obviously be the peasant.

Let's start with the dragon. Maximum damage is 50, with some attack added from a Hero it will get multiplied by 5, another x2 thanks to luck, and we have 500. Also, breath attack can hit two stacks at once, so it would be 1000 dead peasants. In theory. In practice, a dragon can't be blessed, and damage against each stack is calculated separately, so there's one chance in 26 that a dragon will deal maximum damage to one stack. And 1 in 676 that it will deal maximum damage to both. Multiplying that by 25% chance of good luck gives 1 in 2704, or 0.037% chance of killing 1000 peasants.

Now, the phoenix. Maximum damage is 40, but they can be blessed. The rest is the same, so we end up with reliable 800 dead peasants every time the phoenix is lucky. This is impressive, but a dragon (with luck) has a 31% chance of doing better.

Next is the hydra. Maximum damage is 12, and let's imagine it blessed and surrounded by 5 stacks of peasants. It would kill 120 peasants from each stack, 600 in total. In theory, it could be surrounded by 8 stacks of peasants, and it would mean 960 dead, but this cannot happen in the game, as there can only be 5 stacks on each side. The only way for a hydra to attack more would be to have it surrounded by both friendly and hostile peasants and having Berserk spell cast on it. Which would unfortunately dispel the Bless spell, and the chances of a hydra dealing maximum damage against 8 stacks at once are an absurd 1 in 5.7 million, and that's not even taking required luck into account.


And finally, the genie. This is easy - maximum stack size is 32767, and the genie's special ability can kill a half of that (rounded up) - 16384 peasants with 20% chance. No need for Hero's attack bonus, Bless spell or good luck. The only challenge would be finding such an absurdly huge stack of peasants.

But do these need to be peasants? Can a genie also kill 16384 dragons? Well, surprisingly not. 32000 damage per attack cap supersedes the genie's special ability, so only 160 dragons would die if the ability was activated. Or, for a completely not random example, 1600 dwarves. (you're welcome, Acid :P)



Continuing with the wholesale slaughter theme, how many units can a single spell kill?

Armageddon with Spell Power 127 does 6350 damage to each stack on the battlefield. Assuming there are peasants in each stack (that can be legitimately done using a map editor), the result would be 63500 dead peasants. Crispy!


The only competition would be Turn Undead, which destroys a stack of ghosts. Even when it's 32767 of them. Not as many as dead peasants, but way more overall damage dealt (and XP gained): 655340. And here's the result of that: