Necropolis 3 Cloak of Shadow Bug?

[BMJedi]

Hello, I'm playing Markal's campain, and the map is completely beat, except that the Cloak of Shadow movie never fired, Markal can't get it from the city he's supposed to get it from, and the map seems to be bugged, because Markal can't go through the portal to find Cyrus.

Does anybody know about this? Is there a workaround? I kept doing stuff that the map designer obviously didn't expect me to do, like taking Isabel out early, and having Markal defeat the elves because he had a strong army.

This map seems VERY badly designed. It's left a sour taste in my mouth about HOMM5.

[Mirez]

Best bet would be to replay the map. Though it will probably be a pain in the ass.

[BMJedi]

Best bet would be to replay the map. Though it will probably be a pain in the ass.

Yeah, I think what happened was that I had Isabel take some of the wizard castles.

The map seems to be hard-coded for Markal to do all the adventuring while Isabel stays home and waits for the elves, and if you do it any other way, the map crashes.

Bummer. I don't remember ever having a problem like this in any other version of HoMM.

And I'm starting to really notice all the AI programming copouts like huge pre-built armies that just sit there until a trigger event and then all of a sudden come crashing out onto the map. It seems like the programmers just couldn't get the AI to use building strategies, so they made all the maps with all the enemy armies and castles already built. And disabled the top-tier structures in your own towns for balance. I'm kind of shocked at how bad it is.

[parcaleste]

I also have huge problem with this one - Cyrus is supposed to stay in his castle, so when you get to him, he is supposed to escape through the teleportal near the castle. Of course, he can not do this because I had crashed him earlier and the game is stucks. The best advice I've got from here is "write some cheat and beat the map this way".

You sure you don't have the same problem? I had to replay it three times - the second time to assure myself about the problem and the third one after the first (and the last ) patch.

[BMJedi]

I replayed the map last night and finished it. I almost thought it was bugged again after I got my 20 bone dragons, because the exit portal didn't seem to be open.

I discovered by accident (thank goodness) that Cyrus' exit portal does not give you the little "leaping horse" active cursor or any information at all when you cursor over it. It appears to be a dead coordinate to the mouse pointer, even after it's open.

The only way to tell if you can finish the map is to smash straight into the portal coordinate as though you were rushing up against a brick wall, sort of like the Harry Potter train station. You do that by plotting a path either to the coordinate box where the portal is sitting, or straight over it.

I suspect a lot of people don't know about this problem - I didn't.

[Mirez]

I suspected a cinematic or something so I moved towards the portal anyways.
Though I'm glad it worked out for you.

[RudyYeezus]

I recently found out about a really important part of this bug. It appears that you won't get the item if you already have equipped any item in "shoulder" slot in your inventory. The item will go only into that slot and if it is occupied you will not receive it at all. It's really weird but I experimented a bit with conquering the Bahiyaa and only got it in instances where I had free "shoulder" slot.