Heroes of Might and Magic: A Strategic Quest

Heroes of Might and Magic: A Strategic Quest is the first installment of a popular series of turn-based strategy games.

Sub-Pages#

Prototype Info Prerelease Info

King's Bounty#

Windows releases of HoMM:aSQ contains "KB" folder featuring fully playable early strategy game by Jon Van Caneghem - King's Bounty.

Unused Stat Modifiers#

Bad Luck#

Although fully scripted, animated, and having its own sound, there are no negative luck modifiers in the game, so it can't be acquired by the player. It's possible the "Fizbin of Misfortune" artifact once gave a player negative luck, given its name, but in the final game it just induces bad morale. It was reused in almost unchanged form in the game's sequel, but there it can obtained only in one way - by visiting ravaged Pyramid map object.

Bad

Awful

Cursed

View Bad Luck Info?

Bad Luck
Bad luck sometimes falls on your armies in combat, causing their attacks to only do half damage.

Animation as seen on a Battlefield

Icon for Hero Screen. Bad Luck sound.

Battle Cowardice#

Only one line of text in the game .exe mentions battle cowardice. Probably surrendering or fleeing the battle would decrease hero's morale as much, as many times he left the battlefield infamously.

Current Morale Modifiers: Battle cowardice %d

Unused Sounds#

Intro Music#

Extended version was planned to be used on early stages of development when intro animation was longer, but later it was cut down together with music.

Unused Graphics#

Unused Resurrection Animation#

Resurrection spell used different animation eventually.

Early Miniatures of Adventure Map Objects#

Comparing with a few screenshots from the Winter CES 1994 preview, objects from OBJECT32.ICN and OVRLAy32.ICN are only decreased miniatures of discarded objects.

However, a few shrunken objects were reused in the final release:

Early	Final

Early	Final

Early	Final

Early	Final

Unused Rock#

Unlike the objects above, it's stacked in one file with a group of available Adventure Map objects, but for some reason, this rock is not used in the game.

Catapult Button#

At one point in development, players had to click this button every time they wanted to fire a boulder off during sieges. In the final game, this action is automated.

Unused Crests#

Can be found in some prerelease screenshots. Probably before different crests were introduced, players had in their place sleep (moon)/wake (knight) a hero functionality.

Creature Tags#

For 1-hex and 2-hex creatures. Probably were meant to mark active creature (finally they have golden glowing rim), but there is no code left for this feature.

Debug Mode and Skip Intro¹#

Both Windows and DOS versions of the game contain debug mode. It can be easily enabled by placing code /d{n} (where "n" means level of details that will be generated in log chosen from 0, 1, 2, 5, 9) at the end of command line, for example heroes.exe /d1. After enabling debug menu many objects on map will show their coordinates and additional info on right click, moreover enemy hero path will be visible. In the game folder a new kb.txt file will be created containing logs from the last played scenario.

Debug menu grants access to F# cheatcodes:

Windows Version

• F3 - Win scenario
• F5 - Loose scenario
• F6 - Give a hero 5 casts of all spells
• F7 - Give a hero 800 points of experience
• F8 - Give a hero 1 Dragon and 1 Troll
• F9 - Give a player 10 units of each resource and 1000 gold
• F11 - Give a hero 2999 movement points
• F12 - Show map only for active player

DOS Version

• F2 - win scenario
• F3 - loose scenario
• F4 - (??? better to not press)
• F6 - give every spell (5 of each)
• F7 - give 800 experience points
• F8 - give 1 Cavalry, 1 Unicorn, 1 Griffin, and 1 Dragon
• F9 - give 10 resources and 1,000 gold
• F10 - show the entire map for a current player
• F11 - give 2,999 movement points

There is also alternative way of granting access to debug mode:

• In English 1.0 version for Windows change byte 00 at 503D2 address to 01.
• In DOS version replace 1D at CC23E with 35. Will work only for 1.1 version²?
• In Russian 1.1 version from Buka address of byte is 3DE25. In this version kb.txt log won't be created.
• For GOG version open dosboxHOMM1_single.conf and change 'loadfix -4 heroes.exe' to 'loadfix -4 heroes.exe /i0 /d1'

Skip Intro#

There is also working code for skipping intro, to make it working paste /i0 in command line after "heroes.exe".

Differences Between Versions#

1. Original DOS release (September 1995, v1.0, v1.1 or v1.2 game versions) contains three different sound sets on the CD: 8-bit Mono, 8-bit Stereo and 16-bit Stereo. There are no CD-Audio tracks on this CD.

2. Original Windows release (February 1996, v1.0) contains Red Book Audio (CD-Audio) tracks. Millenium and Platinum compilations contain this version.

3. Combo release DOS v1.3/Windows v1.2 contains only 8-bit Mono sound set (for DOS) and Red Book Audio (CD-Audio) tracks for Windows. This version also known as Heroes of Might and Magic Compendium CD1 (September 1997).

Current GOG release is DOS version from Compendium, but containing 16-bit stereo soundtrack.

Links#

• https://handbookhmm.ru/1-not-realization

References#

References#