Heroes IV issue/bug

[Veknis]

Hey everyone. This is my first post on the boards, but I have been skulking here, reading topics for ages, and utilizing all of the resources on CH for my adventuring purposes.

Finally, I've made an account, but unfortunately, it's on a bad note. I have just recently been getting into Homm IV again (i have had it since 03, and get into, and out of it sporadically), and i have run into some trouble. I had never patched the game before, so i gave it a try, and must have screwed up because when I tried to open the game, it failed.

Luckily, I was able to restore to a not harmful point. Confusion and devastation struck again, however, when I tried to play. When I opened, H4, and clicked on either scenarios, or campaigns, the game would crash. Oddly enough, I could load saves, but when I loaded them, if i got into a battle and went to my heroes spellbook, it would say "%heroname" instead of the name.

I uninstalled it and reinstalled it twice since then, but it still won't work. Has anyone else heard of this problem, or know what to do? Thanks for your time, everybody.

[ByteBandit]

Welcome to the CH forums, first of all. Now, to your problem. Did you patch according to what area made your game? An example would be USA game with USA patches or UK game with UK patches? Check your game to make sure. It does make a difference.

[jeff]

Also it is necessary to know which version you are playing, for instance if you have the WoW expansion installed then it is patched already.

[Veknis]

I don't have any expansions, and I'm pretty sure i downloaded the appropriate one. I have the United States version (3d0), and i downloaded those accordingly.

Still, i'm not sure why that would have anything to do with it at this point since i have uninstalled it a couple times trying to reverse whatever I messed around with. I'm so confused

[Pol]

Couldn't be that your installation cd is slightly damaged? Try to copy its content on hdd and install from here somewhere else.

[Veknis]

Couldn't be that your installation cd is slightly damaged? Try to copy its content on hdd and install from here somewhere else.

My CDs are a little scratched, I've had a broken case for years and they're always falling out. I'm gonna be honest with you though, I'm not that good with computers, and I don't have a clue what that means. Sorry for my dimness. This is just so bizarre, it has never happened before.

Update: I installed it on my second computer and it was flawless, therefore it can't be the disks.

[ThunderTitan]

Actually, the CD/DVD-Drive you use counts a lot, so i wouldn't bet on it not being from the disk. Plus, having backups is always a good idea.

[Dracomancer]

It could also be that some bad registry entries remain when you uninstall. If that's the case, removing them should at least enable you to play the game unpatched. I would try a registry cleaning application. You could also try to edit the registry manually, but since you're not too experienced with computers, you might need some help with that.

If you come to the conclusion that the error happens because of bad discs, you should try to get Ubisoft's Heroes IV Complete DVD, which should be inexpensive. That would include both the expansions, so you wouldn't have to patch. But try Pol's suggestions before you do that.

[Veknis]

Thanks for all the help everyone. I just purged my system of every file relating to heroes IV (the uninstall doesn't do that evidently) and reinstalled it and it worked beautifully.

My final issue is, this all happened because I tried to patch it. Is there anything I'm missing regarding these patches? I thought it should be simple, but i complicated it somewhere