The Heroes Round Table

Well, that depends heavily on week number. If the main battle happens on week 4-5, you won't have much Dragons... But you can have lots of Sprites and War Dancers (esp. if you've been careful not to lose too many, Sprites are easier to save now that they can be changed to Dryads who can resurrect th...

The Sylvan example is a bit... wrong. Dragons and Druids don't do the main damage, it's first 3 tiers that matter. Consider this: both Sprites and War Dancers attack multiple enemies at once, have high Initiative AND high speed AND high numbers. So, if the enemy Ranger has Attack+Battle Frenzy+Tacti...

Elemental Gargs do wonders with Circle of Winter and Mark of the Wizard - put Mark on them and cast 2 Circles that do +50% additional Cold damage at once without damaging the Gargs themselves. Not so good with other Destructive spells, but still usable (their aura effects Archmage's Fireball too, so...

Try some Divine Vengeance based hero. Preferably the one with non-living troops so the Vamps won't refenerate on them. I'd expect Jhora with Expert Sorcery and Expert Light + Mark of the Wizard (add more skills and artifacts as seems appropriate, tweak stats for high SP and Knowledge) and an army of...

Don't forget about the Dwarves - they have 3 Fire-immune units (one of Rune Priest upgrades, one of Thane upgrades and their Dragons), 3 units that don't lose armor to Master of Fire even though taking damage from Fire spells, rune of Elemental Immunity that gives Fire immunity 50% of the time plus ...

Of all the new ToE triggerable abilities, I think the only ones NOT affected by soldier's luck are Goblin Trapper's Snare and how-its-called-Goblin-Shaman Defile Magic ability. Those only depend on the number of Goblins and the creature (or Hero in the case of shaman) you're using them against.

I find that, unless the map is gold-rich (at least 2 gold mines for each town) or you have other ways to supplement your income (such as Spoils of War), training is useless, as you will barely have enough gold to buy the available weekly creatures and little left for training. I don't think so. Fir...

All of those .pak files are actually just zip archives. You can open them with WinRAR, WinZIP or any of the countless archivers out there (Windows built-in 'zip folders' feature won't do it most probably though). Then you look into data.pak and find the file there (if not, then it's in some of the o...

Confusion can be countered with Vampirism however (I suspect that's what the enemy did - Succubi become undead and immune to Confusion after that). Deflect Missile, on the other hand, can only be countered via Cleansing. That's the difference.

A masked hero won't have any abilities though, so while the Vamps will have high stats, they won't have anything like say Expert Defence + Expert Attack (which really helps them).

The Mask is bugged. It doesn't equalize levels, rather it works like this: if a hero with the mask is lower level than the opponent, the Mask adds DOUBLE the level difference to the hero that wears it. So if 1st level hero with a mask fights a 20th level hero, he will be at 1+2*(20-1)=39th level. Th...

Does it work even if you don't have the expertise to affect the marked target normally (e.g. you don't have Expert Summoning duplicate a tier-7 creature)? AFAIK no, you cannot override rules with the Mark (ie if the spell cannot affect a unit directly, it won't work via the Mark, too). Plus the Mar...

MOW also works with other area spells, such as Mass Decay or Fireball/Meteor Shower. It doesn't work with Arcane Crystal or Summon Hive though, real shame for a Wizard... Another interesting use is casting Acrane Armor on 2 stacks at once. Also, if you use Magnetic Golems, casting the Mark on them b...

Alastor can work great - enemy Inquisitiors won't have any mana left after his Mass Confusion, so they cannot use their Haste to counter your Mass Slow (and his hero won't have mana thanks to your Familiars). So you should start the battle with Mass Confusion and then Mass Slow, they will only take ...

Artifact left behind was a result of mission-specific scripting. TotE campaigns use that quite often, and custom maps can have that, too. As for surrendering instead of fleeing, was the AI in any of HoMM games able to do so? I played HoMM2 and HoMM3 a lot and can't remember a single time the AI surr...

One of the Dragon artifacts (AFAIR it's the Crown) also increases War Machines initiative. Runic Machines is a Dwarven only skill, while the Crown can be found by anyone.

You cannot order a 2-tile attack if there is a friendly unit on the 1st tile (however a friendly unit on the seconds tile doesn't prevent the attack), so a Vampire stack in a corner always has only 1 Dragon stack to fight. Also, with Last Stand you don't risk losing the battle before 5 Raise Dead ca...

Be more creative. Last stand was given to most (all? I don't remember exactly) factions in TotE. So, think of it like this: you play Necro. You take Last Stand (Orson can do so easily). You have a stack of 2 Vampires. Cast Raise Dead on them a few times so that their max health becomes very low (som...

Well, that depends. If you somehow happen to have developed some Dark magics with your Ranger, you can cause 3 x (Mass Decay OR Mass Vulnerability OR Berserk Or Blindness). Keep in mind the fact Vulnerability casts stack with themselves, so you can drop entire enemy's army Defence very low (because ...

The only case when you cannot cast TP (excluding things like not having enough mana or not knowing the spell) is when your nearest town has a visiting hero. You can cast it even if your movement points are at 0.