
			    BTB'S "ANOTHER HEROES 3 MOD" - README

				       TABLE OF CONTENTS
				       -----------------
				    1. INTRODUCTION & INSTALLATION
				    2. OVERVIEW OF FACTIONS
				    3. HEROES & SKILLS
				    4. MIGHT (UNIT CHANGES)
				    5. MAGIC (SPELL CHANGES)
				    6. ARTIFACTS & OTHER CHANGES
				    7. BUGS & KNOWN ISSUES
				    8. VERSION HISTORY & FUTURE
				    9. CREDITS & CONTACT INFO

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				    1. INTRODUCTION & INSTALLATION




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Heroes of Might & Magic III is a game that's regarded by nearly anyone who's familiar with it as one of
the best strategy games of all time, if not just one of the best games period. Many of you reading this
may not be familiar with Heroes of Might & Magic III at all, but have played my other mods. Simply put,
Another Heroes 3 Mod (named in loving tribute to Another Metroid 2 Remake, the gold standard for any fan
project) aims to do what Brave New World did with Final Fantasy VI. This isn't a radical overhaul that
tries to make the game into something that it's not, just a better version of what it already is.

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		Please note that AH3M was built for - and requires - the fanmade HD Mod:

				https://sites.google.com/site/heroes3hd/

Once installed, use the launcher to generate an HD executable file - this is what will be patched along
with the following other files: h3maped.exe, HD_SoD.dll, H3bitmap.lod, and H3sprite.lod. Backups of all
of these files will be created with the .bak extension. To uninstall the mod, either run the installer
again and choose the "uninstall" option when prompted or simply do the following:

	 Revert to the original (backup) versions of the above-mentioned files

	 Delete all .txt files and both .pal files from the data folder

	 Move everything from "maps_bak" and "_HD3_Data\common\bak" back into their original folders

Please note that installing or updating HD mod for some reason enables the game's quick combat option,
wherein it basically plays itself. This can be disabled in the system options menu or via the "tweaks"
tab in the HD launcher by setting <Quick Combat> and <HD.QuickCombat> both to 0. While you're in there,
you may wish to also disable its other most annoying feature by setting <UI.AdvMgr.SkipMapMsgs> to 0.

Another feature of HD Mod is "HD+" mode, enabled from the launcher (it will change the background from
blue to red). Although AH3M will work with this enabled - and multiplayer games will require it - it's
otherwise useless since the features it adds are unnecessary and/or incompatible with this mod. Aside
from the "War of Mages" option overlaying the setup menu text, however, it will cause no ill effects.

Since HD Mod continues to be updated on a regular basis, it's possible for these updates to break one of
AH3M's edits by changing the HD_SOD.dll file. If the installer detects that this file has been changed,
it will not patch that file (since doing so will break the game) and issue a warning. Please contact me
if this occurs so that I can put out a fix - my contact information is at the bottom of this file.

Support for colorblind players has also been added to AH3M. You will be asked during the installation
process if you want to enable this feature. It will add a blue tint to several map objects that would
otherwise be difficult or impossible for people with colorblindness (red/green specifically) to see.

Another optional feature of this mod is a custom soundtrack ripped (mostly) from the game that inspired
it: Might & Magic VII. For space reasons, it is not part of the main download and can be found at:

		https://www.mediafire.com/file/oq68czzkfsz74yw/ah3m_ost.rar/file

Finally, if you're new to the game, I suggest Divided Lands as a good map to start with. You might also
want to read over the next section, as it's meant to function both as a general introduction to the nine
factions for novice players as well as highlighting major changes made to them for veteran players.

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				    2. OVERVIEW OF FACTIONS




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					    CASTLE
					    ------

				      MIGHT HERO: Knight
				      MAGIC HERO: Cleric

Castle is easily the game's most "vanilla" faction: all of its heroes and most of its units are human,
its unit abilities and special buildings all provide very straightforward bonuses, and its units are an
even mixture of the three basic types which solidly represent the game's core combat mechanics. Although
simple, Castle's units are powerful - notably possessing the best non-neutral unit in the game - so much
so that it's balanced by being magically weaker than most other factions. This weakness is most apparent
in the inability of Castle to build its mage guild to the final (fifth) level to get a top-level spell.

That Castle's 7th-level units are the most powerful available to any faction is both an advantage and a
drawback. The pros are obvious, but that power comes at a price. Angels require a sizable investment of
both gold and resources, enough so that players generally don't survive long enough to see them without
first learning how to effectively utilize the rest of Castle's forces. Castle is otherwise a relatively
cost-efficient town due mostly to a combination of the cap on its mage guild and the fact that Knights
have Estates - which directly increases your kingdom's income - as a major class skill.

Though a predominately defensive town, Castle's physical prowess and extended skillset lead to it being
played more offensively. A central theme of Castle, particularly in this mod, is morale. Of little value
in the original game due to its low cap, its formula has been reworked here to make it more significant.
Positive morale allows units to potentially get two actions in a single round, and at high enough values
(which Castle can achieve easier than any other faction) the odds of that happening are now substantial.
This provides not only the obvious benefit of higher offensive output through additional attacks, but it
also makes it easier for Castle's units to quickly cross the battlefield and engage their opponents.

The abilities of several Castle units have been modified here to further reflect its themes. Aside from
morale, which is now a bonus on two of its units, Castle's defensive nature is immediately apparent when
looking at their first-level unit; Pikemen now receive a greater defensive bonus when using the "Defend"
command and their upgrades now preemptively retaliate while doing so. A core mechanic in Heroes games is
that ranged units such as Archers (Castle's second-level units) need protection since they're very weak
at melee, and Pikemen highlight this concept for newer players by being ideal candidates for the job.

Monks, Castle's other ranged unit, show us something else we'll be seeing quite a bit of: ranged units
who can also fight at melee. As we'll get further into later on, this ability showed up a bit more than
it probably should have in the original game, the end result being which ranged units could and couldn't
effectively fight off a blocking enemy unit wasn't very intuitive. As Monks are traditionally a fighting
class, it made more sense for them to be punchers first and shooters second. Thus, they are now a ranged
unit only when upgraded to Zealots (who still possess the ability to fight effectively at melee).

Another major change in this mod is that First Aid is now a starting skill for Clerics, which means that
they all come with a medical (AKA "first aid") tent. This would appear useless at first glance, however,
since Castle's blacksmith sells ballistas and so there's no way to replace them when they inevitably get
destroyed in combat. This is actually a problem for any hero with a war machine specialty and a massive
detriment to the (already unpopular) skills themselves; war machines are thus now only disabled for the
remainder of a battle when destroyed rather than permanently removed from a hero's inventory. As for the
First Aid skill itself, it's been reworked into something far more useful than the trash it used to be,
providing both a health boost to all units and the ability for the tent to remove negative statuses.

Speaking of Clerics, note that the role of magic even in a physically-leaning faction remains important.
As a rule of thumb, might heroes are more partial to support spells since their potency is static (magic
power determines only their duration) whereas magic heroes can cast directly offensive spells to greater
effect and are thus more interested in those. This is a sliding scale, however, that depends in part on
how much a faction leans toward magic overall. In Castle's case, both its heroes tend to prefer casting
spells to strengthen or defend their own army than to harm their opponents. Offensive magic is present,
but takes a backseat for the most part to support spells. Further, adventure map spells like Town Portal
and Fly (both very common in Castle towns) are extremely useful to any hero, might or magic.

Additionally to its spells, Castle's unique buildings also focus mostly on helping its heroes get around
the map. Most notable are Stables, which provide a weekly movement boost to visiting heroes - while they
can also exist as standalone locations on the adventure map, Castle benefits from not needing to rely on
them. Castle is also one of the towns able to build a Shipyard on coastal towns and is the only one able
to construct a Lighthouse to boost water movement. These were less notable features in the base game due
primarily to how uncommon it was for a town to meet the requirements to build them; AH3M addresses this
by having towns look north for a coastline (as the graphics would suggest) instead of south.

All of this comes together to make Castle the game's de-facto "tutorial" faction. The good mix of units
and strong leaning toward might - particularly defense - make Castle a great team on which to learn the
ropes, hence why the first campaign ("Long Live the Queen") sees you playing as them. While most other
games would present Castle as a "beginners-only" town that's outdone by the others once you get a handle
on how to play the game, it remains a powerful choice here for newcomers and veteran players alike.

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					    RAMPART
					    -------

				      MIGHT HERO: Ranger
				      MAGIC HERO: Druid

Rampart is arguably the closest thing in HoMM3 to a completely evenly-balanced faction, hence it being a
perennial fan favorite. Its spread of units is nearly as versatile as Castle's and its balance of might
vs. magic is more even than that of most other towns. Like Castle, Rampart's "might" half leans toward
defense while the "magic" half skews toward knowledge. This will be a consistent theme: the "good" towns
all focus on these attributes while the evil factions instead like attack and raw magic power. But while
Castle is a defensive town with enough focus on might and strong enough units to be played offensively,
Rampart wants you to take a more balanced approach.

Perhaps the most important place to start is with Rampart's noticeable lack of a second ranged attacker
in the original game. This is a thematic curiosity given its strong predilection toward archery, doubly
so in that Centaurs actually were ranged units in the first two Heroes games and even have ranged attack
animations in the game's data. AH3M uses those animations, but the fact that the shots are thrown spears
rather than fired arrows leads us to a wider-ranging topic: ammo carts. These were of limited use in the
original game since every ranged unit had more ammo than they would ever need in most battles. This mod
separates ranged units into three categories: traditional archers (i.e. elves) receive six shots apiece,
units which shoot things like fireballs or magic beams have infinite shots, and units which throw things
get only a single shot unless an ammo cart (now sold by Rampart blacksmiths) is present. To prevent them
from becoming useless after one attack, these units do not receive a penalty for melee combat like other
ranged units do. Since most "yeet"-type shooters only have a ranged attack in their upgraded forms, this
also prevents said upgraded units from possessing a weakness that the regular ones don't.

As for the rest of Rampart's units, it introduces one archetype that we didn't see truly represented in
Castle: the tank. Extremely resilient, but also extremely slow, Rampart's forces include two such units.
Players of the original game often leave them garrisoned to avoid slowing heroes down since map movement
is based on the speed of the slowest unit in a hero's army and Rampart units are otherwise quite swift.
Here, there's more incentive to bring defensive units into the field due to how Logistics (a major class
skill for Rangers) now works. Whereas before it was a flat bonus to movement, it now raises the minimum
amount of movement a hero can receive regardless of army composition. In other words, it helps close the
gap between armies with slow units and armies containing only faster ones by having less or no effect on
the latter. Also common for both of Rampart's heroes is the Pathfinding skill to counteract the movement
penalties for rough terrain, making it one of the better factions for getting around in general.

Also pushing Rampart in a defensive direction is its magical alignment. Much of its spell list will be
familiar if you've already played as Castle since both factions prominently feature air and water magic.
Fire, the most offensive element, is only lightly represented in Castle and, uniquely to this mod, is
completely unavailable to Rampart (one of only two factions in AH3M to shut out any element wholesale).
However, as you might expect from the faction of elves and dwarves, the element with by far the biggest
focus here is the most defensive: Earth. While Rampart certainly has its fair share of offensive magic,
it's a far richer source of any support spell in the game that isn't fire-based. Of particular note is
Resurrection, the top-level Earth spell that's more commonly found in Rampart than any other town.

This brings us to the subject of dragons, whose blanket spell immunity in the base game also prevented
them from being affected by friendly magic (including Resurrection). Immunity to spells by level or in
their entirety has been removed here and replaced by a damage reduction from directly offensive spells.
However, in a bid to keep Rampart's dragons more distinct from Dungeon's - as well as to keep closer to
Rampart's theme - Gold Dragons instead get a natural 50% resistance to spells. The chance to completely
negate the effects of any hostile spell is both a recurring ability amongst Rampart's units as well as a
common skill for both its heroes. In combination, particularly at the magnitude we see on Gold Dragons,
this can equal near-total immunity to hostile spells that doesn't also block out friendly ones.

The asterisk to the above is that, in the original game, many physical unit abilities such as poison and
paralyzation were treated as spells and thus also fell under the "magic immunity" umbrella. That is not
the case here, and immunity to these abilities is now an entirely separate distinction possessed only by
certain units that one might expect it from, such as those which aren't technically alive. This category
does not include dragons, who are thus now vulnerable to such abilities where they previously weren't.

Cost-wise, Rampart is a moderately inexpensive town owing largely to its unique buildings that mitigate
its demands of both gold and resources. The latter is subject to a good deal of randomness, however, and
the former requires initial frugality to be effective since it provides interest to stored funds rather
than a flat bonus. The general strategy with basically any town is to prioritize getting dwellings built
to maximize growth, but Rampart will want to slow their roll at some point to bolster their finances.
This can eventually lead to a substantial nest egg in the late game with some patience, especially on
larger maps with multiple Rampart towns since the effects of multiple treasuries is cumulative.

Given the many similarities between them, Rampart is an excellent second town for novice players to move
on to after playing as Castle. It's a very middle-of-the-road faction that's well-representative of most
aspects of the game and serves well to help ease newbies into the further complexities of magic. That it
digs deeper into defensive play than Castle also provides a good learning experience for anyone who has
thus far gotten by with a mindless "beatstick" approach to combat: something that works to a degree with
Castle, but not a strategy that will get you very far in the long run.

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					    TOWER
					    -----

				      MIGHT HERO: Alchemist
				      MAGIC HERO: Wizard

The third and final of the good factions, Tower leans heavily into the "magic" half of the game's title.
The specific focus here is knowledge; Tower gets a wide variety of spells - including a unique building
which grants their mage guild one additional spell per level - and its heroes get plenty of spell points
with which to cast them. As with the other good towns, there's also a strong defensive slant here: units
are mostly either frail shooters (Tower being the only faction with three ranged units) or bulky tanks.
The downside here is that Tower's units are the slowest on average of any faction and Logistics isn't a
common skill for either of its heroes, thus making it harder for them to get around the map early on.

Tower compensates for its biggest shortcoming with its greatest strength: magic. Its mage guild has the
best representation of all four elements that we've seen thus far, but like Castle it leans most heavily
toward air and water magic. These two elements contain all of the game's spells that speed up both units
in combat as well as travel on the map, and due to Tower's expanded mage guild it's more likely than any
other town to get one or more of them. Air magic also provides some of the most potent offensive spells
in the game, which one could get by relying on almost exclusively, but playing Tower well means learning
how to use all of its spells effectively... as well as its units.

Several changes have been made to Tower's units, perhaps the most notable of which is that Gargoyles are
now properly classified as unliving units (they were still affected by morale in the original game) and
now have the same resistance to spell damage as Golems. Much more noticeably, however, are Gremlins, who
receive the same treatment as Centaurs did: their upgrades only get one shot since they throw a ball and
chain - thus providing a reason to purchase an ammo cart from the blacksmith - and they now hit at full
strength in melee since they'd otherwise be rendered useless after a single shot while ordinary Gremlins
wouldn't be. That said, only Gremlins will benefit from Tower's ammo cart since Mages and Titans both
fall under the "fires things that aren't actually physical objects" label and thus have no shot limit.

Both here and the original game, Titans are amongst the most powerful of all 7th-level units. They're as
strong - and as resilient - as Angels, and most notably are the only 7th-level unit with a ranged attack
(gained upon upgrade). The ranged attack is particularly important because where Titans fall way behind
is in the speed category. In the original game, superior and often excessive speed was a given for any
7th-level unit, even if it made no sense. This is no longer true, and Titans are one of the hardest-hit
casualties of this new policy. Despite this nerf, however, Titans remain firmly within the upper echelon
of 7th-level units and are a massive boon to Tower when they can finally be afforded.

This brings us to a final point: Tower is the most expensive town in terms of initial building costs and
also on the pricey end for weekly unit buyout. Tower's situation is further complicated by a build-order
bottleneck that gates most of its higher-level dwellings behind a hefty resource paywall. In games where
resources are tight, this can mean a difficult decision between early-game unit growth and focusing on
Tower's greatest strength by building up its mage guild. If you've been glossing over the Estates skill
on your heroes up until this point, this is where it really starts to show its worth. More importantly,
if you've been neglecting to use the town marketplace to shore up resource deficiencies (note that this
mod offers far better prices than the original game did), this is where you'll really want the help.

Further, all of the magic-leaning towns have a major cash sink in the form of a marketplace upgrade that
sells artifacts, which given unlimited funds can go a long way toward compensating for the statistical
weaknesses of their heroes. In a more realistic setting, however, it's a minor tool at best in the early
game that mostly exists to fill in the gaps in your end-game equipment setups. Note that, just as with
marketplaces, the prices offered here are much fairer than they were in the original game.

In short, Tower is not a faction for beginners. The game generally expects players to start off with the
"might" factions and slowly make their way over to the "magic" ones, meaning that Tower tosses your ass
into the deep end expecting that you know how to swim. As is generally true of any magical class in any
game, Tower isn't as powerful as most other factions right out of the gate and only manages to find its
true strength in the late-game. Thus, the goal here is managing to survive until then.

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					    INFERNO
					    -------

				      MIGHT HERO: Sentinel
				      MAGIC HERO: Hellion

The first of the game's evil factions, Inferno is the opposing town to Castle: leaning hard into offense
where Castle is more defensive, but also lacking its counterpart's restrictions on a fully built-up mage
guild. The drawback to being one step closer to the middle of the "might & magic" spectrum, however, is
that its "might" half is less well-rounded as a result. While Castle's strong defenses are complimented
by solid offensive capabilities, Inferno's durability leaves a bit more to be desired.

Contrary to Castle's heavy focus on morale, Inferno instead showcases its sister mechanic: luck. Whereas
morale provides the possibility of an extra turn, good luck can cause a unit's attack to deal double the
damage. On the surface, this is effectively the same thing as two attacks, hence luck being viewed as an
inferior version of morale since it doesn't also allow for additional movement. However, it does reduce
the damage from retaliatory strikes by virtue of allowing attacking units to slay more opponents with a
single blow - something of great importance to a faction that prioritizes offense over defense.

In other regards, Inferno actually has a lot more in common with Rampart, namely in its lack of a second
ranged attacker and being the only other faction in this hack to be totally shut out of one of the four
schools of magic (guess which). But while Rampart barely even notices the lack of fire magic, Inferno's
mage guild ends up feeling much more restricted and one-note as a result. This isn't actually the case;
Inferno gets a solid variety of spells that even includes several defensive ones, but unlike fire magic,
the school of water is home to some important mainstays that many spellbooks will feel lacking without.

Aside from offense and fire magic, Inferno's other primary theme is speed. Its units are the fastest on
average of any faction, air magic (and therefore Haste) is also extremely prominent here, and skills to
facilitate land travel (Logistics and Pathfinding) are common for both its heroes. However, the lack of
water magic takes two of the three major adventure map spells off the table. To help make up for this,
Inferno  towns have a built-in Town Portal which in the original game was of extremely limited use since
they could only send you to other Inferno towns that also had one of them built. In this mod, they will
transport you to any other town that you own - bearing in mind that the trip is one-way only unless it's
to another Inferno town that also has an Oblivion Gate built.

Also worth mentioning is that Inferno's native terrain, "volcano" (previously "lava") is now classified
as rough terrain whereas it wasn't in the original game. Movement penalties for rough terrain are higher
here, with volcano tying swamp as the most difficult to navigate through. Inherently ignoring movement
penalties on its native terrain is thus a notable advantage for Inferno on certain maps.

Fire immunity is another important item of note. It behaved differently than other elemental immunities
in the original game, providing blanket immunity to any spell of its element rather than just the direct
damage ones. As with spell immunity by level, this was a double-edged sword which failed to distinguish
between harmful and beneficial spells. Fixing this to act like other elemental immunities was similarly
polarizing since fire magic includes many indirectly offensive spells which are no longer covered - nor
is immunity to the Armageddon spell. Its impact can still be softened through Fire Resistance (a common
spell in Inferno towns), but natural immunity to a powerful battlefield nuke was the catalyst for total
bullshit strats in the original game that have no place in this hack.

Indifference toward the safety of its own army is another running theme with Inferno, as its spell list
largely indicates. Aside from the above-mentioned Armageddon spell (which appears only in evil towns and
is most common in Inferno), its mostly-unique Sacrifice spell will revive slain units at the expense of
another unit stack. But perhaps the most maligned example of this trait lies with Inferno's sole ranged
attacker: Gogs. The only thing that Inferno's weak ranged game really has going for it is that upgraded
Gogs shoot explosive fireballs that can damage multiple foes... as well as any of your own units nearby.
AH3M maintains this property, but does throw Gogs a bone by removing their melee attack penalty as well
as making the explosion completely ineffective against fire-immune units, namely Efreeti and Devils.

Inferno doesn't gain a second ranged attacker in this hack like Rampart does, but it does get a ballista
to replace the completely useless ammo cart that was in its blacksmith before. It also sees some notable
buffs to some of its units, namely Familiars and Devils. The special ability of the former to absorb a
fraction of enemy spell costs now absorbs a much higher percentage while the latter now synergizes with
the former by massively increasing enemy spell costs. Devils are also now much stronger overall, up from
one of the worst 7th-level units in the original game to matching or mirroring Castle's Angels in every
metric (notably tying them as the fastest unit in the game) except for durability. That lone deficiency
is significant, rendering them mid-tier overall, but they're otherwise amongst the best available.

Depending on the order in which (or if) you play the campaigns, this is generally the second town that
new players are expected to use. It provides a good contrast to Castle's more defensive approach without
burdening those who are still learning the basics with too much more emphasis on magic. That it focuses
more on might than magic - albeit only marginally so - makes Inferno among the most physically offensive
factions in the game. This, of course, comes at the expense of defense, which is the biggest weakness
that one will need to overcome when playing as them.

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					    NECROPOLIS
					    ----------

				      MIGHT HERO: Undertaker
				      MAGIC HERO: Necromancer

Though the relationship is less obvious than with other pairings, Necropolis is the game's evil version
of Rampart. While it possesses a similar balance of might vs. magic, it otherwise plays by a special set
of rules that keeps it from falling under the same "average all-rounder" umbrella. The undead are immune
to many things that can be problematic for living units, but also several things which are beneficial to
them. Most notably, non-living units are unaffected by morale - positive or negative - and undead units
specifically are a severe detriment in that regard to any living units in the same army. Necropolis thus
has little interest in mixing units from other factions into its ranks, instead wanting to convert them
by killing them in combat and raising them as zombies or bringing them back home to be turned undead.

If you're familiar at all with the base game, there's two major points in the above paragraph that need
to be highlighted. The first is morale, which you may have glossed over since it's mostly a non-issue in
the original game, whereas here the formulas have been rewritten to make luck and morale more impactful.
Secondly, and perhaps more noticeably, the Necromancy skill now raises zombies from the dead rather than
skeletons. This is an entire conversation in and of itself (see section two for more), but the main note
here is that this takes Necropolis's trademark ability to amass legions of a single low-level unit and
spreads it across two units. Zombies come from both Necromancy as well as being the result of sticking
most living units into a Death Converter (AKA "Skeleton Transformer" - see section 6 below for more on
how it's been changed), but you'll still get skeletons from any first-level unit you toss into one and
that still adds up to a substantial source of them if you've got any peasants or other weak units handy.

This brings us to what is perhaps Necropolis's greatest weakness: it's very slow. There are several fast
units within its ranks, but its hordes of skeletons and zombies will slow your heroes down considerably.
And as with Tower, the Logistics skill isn't as common for Necropolis heroes to counteract that penalty.
While other factions would simply elect to leave their slow, low-level units back at home, Necromancers
are largely built around their ability to raise zombies from every battle that they win. Rejecting them
is certainly an option, but doing so will negate one of the primary benefits of playing as Necropolis.

What really puts Necropolis behind Tower more than anything, however, is that the adventure map spells
which can eventually help Tower overcome its speed deficiency are rare finds in a Necropolis town, as is
expertise in either air or water magic (needed to cast them effectively) amongst its heroes. Necropolis
does have one saving grace here, however, in that it excels on water maps. It's the only evil town with
any affinity whatsoever for ocean travel and is one of only two factions here where the Sailing skill is
common for both its heroes. Even without Sailing, however, boats don't care how slow your units are.

Statistically speaking, Necropolis leans in the same direction as the other evil factions: attack over
defense and magic power over knowledge. But inversely to Castle - a defensive faction that can be played
offensively - Necropolis is an offensive faction that tends to be played defensively. Yes, thousands of
zombies can pack quite a punch, but their more likely role in most scenarios is that of a massive shield
of rotting meat. This all makes more sense when we look at Necropolis's spell list, because in addition
to its unique unit situation it also plays a much different magic game than the other factions do.

The primary element here is earth, which provides Necropolis with two unique spells. First is the undead
version of the top-level earth spell, Resurrection, except Reanimate is cheaper and far more accessible.
The second is a spell which damages every living unit on the battlefield, which is huge considering that
most other directly offensive spells are either single target or, at most, have a small area of effect.
The remainder of Necropolis's spell list is mostly debuff magic, but given that you're extremely likely
to pull at least one of Necropolis's unique spells in any of its towns, battles will often devolve into
spamming one or both of them. And since they're level two and three spells, respectively, Necropolis is
the one town which can fully build up its mage guild that's arguably the least interested in doing so.

(Side note: do watch out for good-aligned factions, particularly Castle. They get their own version of
Necropolis's battlefield nuke that only affects undead units. Anti-Magic can be an extremely important
spell in these situations since Air Resistance is unreliable for Necropolis heroes.)

Moving on, we come to an odd thematic inconsistency in the original game. Necropolis heroes cannot learn
First Aid, which before this mod made it better (see Castle's entry above) did nothing but make the tent
marginally less shitty. This makes sense: from a thematic standpoint, you can't really give first aid to
a corpse, and mechanically speaking a major benefit of the skill in this mod is that it allows the tent
to heal status effects which unliving units are immune to in the first place. For whatever reason, then,
Necropolis's blacksmith sold first aid tents. In AH3M, it sells ballistas. In addition to being far more
thematically appropriate, it also compensates for Necropolis's noticeable lack of an early ranged unit.

Although we've discussed at length Necropolis's predilection for its bottom-level units, a significant
part of what made them so overpowered in the original game was the strength of their higher-level ones.
In particular, the ability of Vampire Lords to absorb health from their targets which can revive their
own dead makes a large enough stack of them nigh-unkillable. Not too far behind them are Liches, whose
"death cloud" ability is basically the same thing as the explosive fireball shots from Inferno's Magogs
except that it doesn't hurt your own units. And while Ghost Dragons are the weakest overall 7th-level
unit, their special ability is one of the best in the game at taking down other powerful units.

And then we have Wraiths. They're a particularly weak unit, both here and in the original game, and were
mostly notable for being fucking obnoxious in multiple stacks due to their ability to drain spell points
from enemy heroes. That power has been replaced here with something more universally effective, as well
as more fitting with the theme of Necropolis: they summon Ghosts (formerly Wights) from everything that
they kill for the remainder of the battle. Players of Heroes of Might & Magic II might recognize this as
a balanced version of the broken Ghost ability that saw them insta-banned from any competitive game.

The unifying theme here, at least with the first four levels, is that Necropolis units are comparatively
weak in small numbers, but far more dangerous in large quantities due to their abilities that allow them
to either regenerate or reproduce on a mass scale. Like Tower, Necropolis is slow to start out, but can
grow completely out of control if left to its own devices. It thrives most against large numbers of low-
level units, but faces its greatest opposition against units that aren't alive and are therefore immune
to the majority of its toolbox. Both of these can be seen when facing Conflux: Sprites are ideal fodder
for Necropolis shenanigans, but the remainder of its troops will completely negate them. Having a weak
7th-level unit actually plays to Necropolis's advantage in cases where its typical strategy fails since
Bone Dragons can provide an early edge if you push to get them quickly enough.

In conclusion, there are many reasons that Necropolis is widely considered to be a massively overpowered
faction in the original game, most of which are still true here. But that alone isn't enough to win, at
least not anymore. Anyone can play as Necropolis and annoy their opponents, but only someone who takes
the time to truly master their unique mechanics can do so and consistently come out on top.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					    DUNGEON
					    -------

				      MIGHT HERO: Overlord
				      MAGIC HERO: Warlock

The evil equivalent of Tower, Dungeon was originally the only other magic-heavy town in the game until
the introduction of Conflux in the Shadow of Death expansion. While Tower's theme is knowledge and spell
variety with a strong focus on defense, Dungeon goes all in on offense. Seemingly a blunt instrument at
first glance due to its black mage leanings, the subtle difficulty of playing as Dungeon is learning how
to best utilize the army of a faction that's primarily built for zapping its enemies with spells.

Perhaps most illustrative of the above point are Dungeon's second-level units: Harpies. The most common
role of flying units is to quickly reach the other side of the battlefield and block enemy shooters, but
the special (and, might I add, Goddamn annoying) ability of Harpies is to fly over to their targets, hit
them, and then fly back to their starting position. This keeps them safe - which is the point - but it
also makes them function more as a ranged unit than a flying one. Now consider that the next two units
after them are both shooters and you start to get a pretty good picture of what Dungeon combat is about.
It acknowledges that, at least until you reach its beefier units, Dungeon armies are extremely unlikely
to win a fistfight with most other factions, and so it prefers not to try.

This is where status effects come into play. Three of Dungeon's units have the ability to set them when
attacking, but all three are just slightly different flavors of the same thing: preventing enemies from
acting. Given that two of Dungeon's three status-setters are also its shooters and that they can only do
so at melee range means that they tend to function more as passive defensive abilities than as offensive
ones. Scorpicores, its third, are actually quite similar to Rampart's Unicorns in their role as a strong
lead-off unit with a chance of disabling whatever it manages to hit. They're particularly valuable here
since they're the best unit available to Dungeon until you can afford dragons.

Like every other faction, Dungeon's combat mechanics shift dramatically when their 7th-level unit comes
into play. The perennial rivalry between Dungeon's Black Dragons and Tower's Titans dates back to Heroes
of Might & Magic 2 where they were the strongest units in the game by several magnitudes. Although now
beaten out by Castle's Angels, that otherwise remains true here - albeit by a much less severe margin.
The primary metric by which this is measured is durability: Angels, Titans, and Black Dragons have more
health than any other affiliated unit in the game. But while Titans have a ranged attack and the higher
damage output, Black Dragons have the speed advantage and the ability to strike multiple targets with a
single blow. Where the true duality between these two units lies, however, is in their resistances.

As mentioned earlier when talking about Rampart's dragons, their trademark blanket immunity to magic by
spell level has been reworked here into a resistance to the damage dealt by any directly offensive ones.
This is ostensibly a nerf for Black Dragons, who were previously immune to ALL magic, but that immunity
also included beneficial spells. The more significant tradeoff here, however, is that Dungeon's dragons
are newly susceptible to both unit status effects like those mentioned above and, more to the point of
this discussion, indirectly offensive magic. Since nearly all such spells are classified as Mind spells,
to which Titans are immune, this creates a clear and equal contrast between them.

As we saw with Castle and Tower, the downside of having a powerful 7th-level unit is that they're also
expensive and thus tend to show up later. This is a major contributing factor to the fact that Dungeon
is one of the most expensive towns to build up (second only to Tower), as well as the most expensive in
terms of weekly unit buyout. Estates being a primary class skill for Overlords will greatly help offset
the gold costs, and although Dungeon's resource costs are just as steep as Tower's, it doesn't have the
same bottleneck in its build order gating its high-level dwellings behind a substantial investment. This
allows Dungeon to put more resources into building up its mage guild without sacrificing early-game unit
growth in the process, which is important for more than just the obvious reasons.

Directly offensive spells of all elements are prominently featured in Dungeon's mage guild along with a
select few support spells, but unlike Tower there's no standout elements that you're sure you'll want to
specialize in. Water magic is a safe bet if for no other reason than Ice Bolt is a near-given and you'll
be wanting it if you're lucky enough to roll Town Portal, but everything else is a crapshoot until you
know which spells are available. This is less of an issue on larger maps with more towns and therefore a
higher likelihood of learning something relevant, but on smaller maps you'll generally want to build up
before your heroes gain too many levels and start choosing magic skills.

Finally, in the original game, Dungeon's blacksmith sells ballistas. This fits with them as an offensive
faction, but runs contrary to the notion that they prefer to achieve that end primarily through magical
means. Also, we've already given a ballista to Inferno and Necropolis in this mod while Dungeon is the
only evil town where a medical(/first aid) tent feels even remotely appropriate. Mechanically speaking,
it's also a concession for the loss of immunity to status debuffs on Black Dragons since tents now heal
status effects when your hero has the First Aid skill.

A proper summary of Dungeon would mostly just be a copy/paste of the last two paragraphs from the Tower
section to which I would add a cautionary note that, since Dungeon's greatest strength is its offensive
spells, the opponents to watch out for are the towns with the biggest focus on magic resistance, namely
Rampart and Fortress. As stated in the introduction paragraph, while Dungeon may be all about its magic,
learning how to best utilize its "might" half is the ultimate key to mastering it.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					    STRONGHOLD
					    ----------

				      MIGHT HERO: Barbarian
				      MAGIC HERO: Battlemage

While the good and evil factions all reside at least somewhere near the middle of the balance spectrum,
the "neutral" factions live on the extremes. For Stronghold, that extreme is offense. This comes at the
expense of everything else, specifically defense and magic. That's not to say that neither exist at all
here, but rather that Stronghold's primary defense is a good offense: strike fast and hard before your
enemy can kill you. For Barbarians, this is about as straightforward as the game gets. For Battlemages,
this includes making good use of Stronghold's limited - and also quite straightforward - spell list.

Perhaps the two most similar factions in the game, at least in this mod, Stronghold plays like a muggle
version of Inferno. This is most apparent in their shared elemental affinities (with fire and air) which
highlight the emphasis of both factions on offense and speed. Battlemages and Hellions both sling mostly
the same list of offensive spells with the same potency, but the latter does so with more sustainability
while the former is very much a hybrid class that doesn't function well as a pure spellcaster.

Like Inferno, Stronghold's focus on speed also translates to getting around the adventure map. Logistics
is common to both its heroes (and very important, as we'll see just below), as is the Pathfinding skill
to deal with rough terrain. Furthermore, the native terrain for Stronghold's units - for which they will
inherently ignore its movement penalty - is the most generally common type of rough terrain. Barbarians
also get Sailing as a common skill, making them one of the best overall classes for map exploration.

Stronghold notably differs from Inferno by having much better ranged unit coverage. Because Orcs attack
by throwing axes, they now fall under the same classification as Centaurs and Gremlins by only having a
ranged attack when upgraded and having only one shot when they do, but also being able to attack at full
strength in melee combat. Cyclopses, who throw giant rocks, still possess a ranged attack even in their
base forms, but are otherwise treated the same as Orcs. And although their blacksmith sells ammo carts,
it also sells ballistas thanks to a special upgrade unique to Stronghold towns.

The rest of Stronghold's units fall in line with the primary "high attack and speed, low defense" theme
of the faction with one notable standout: Ogres. As was the case with Rampart's Dwarves and Dendroids,
these sluggish tanks are often left behind by players of the original game so as not to slow down their
armies, but the Logistics skill overhaul in this mod provides more of a reason to bring them into combat
where they can provide much-needed bulk to Stronghold's otherwise-lean forces. They also gain the power
to use magic when upgraded, which in the original game was the Bloodlust spell. They instead cast Frenzy
here, which is not only more powerful, but also won't be rendered useless by a hero with the same spell.

Of particular interest is Stronghold's 7th-level unit: Behemoths. One trait shared by all of the neutral
factions is that their 7th-level units aren't as powerful as those from the good and evil towns, but are
also cheaper and come much faster. In the original game, Behemoths curiously had the most HP of any 7th-
level unit, which struck me as very contrary to Stronghold's design; that they now possess the lowest HP
amongst 7th-level units is a rather significant downgrade. However, while their attack power is merely
average for their level, that fact alone is misleading. In effect, their ability to ignore a percentage
of their opponent's defense rating puts them in - and possibly above - the same damage tier as Angels,
Devils, and Titans, especially versus units with very high defense (read: other 7th-level units).

Due largely but not entirely to a combination of cheap 7th-level units and mage guilds that cap at the
third level, the two muggle factions (Stronghold and Fortress) are far and away the cheapest to manage.
Stronghold in particular is most powerful in the early game when it can press the unit advantage before
its opponents are able to fully build up their towns. Things become much more difficult for Stronghold
when not only other 7th-level units, but also more powerful spells start coming into play, and they'll
want to have asserted their position on the map by the time that happens.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					    FORTRESS
					    --------

				      MIGHT HERO: Beastmaster
				      MAGIC HERO: Witch

The opposing town to Stronghold, Fortress instead focuses on defense to the near-exclusion of everything
else. This makes for an interesting faction to play since its primary strength is sandbagging as much as
possible to mitigate losses in the early game, which in theory will lead to superior numbers in the mid-
to late game. This creates something of a paradox since Fortress is ostensibly designed to play the long
game, but otherwise possesses the same traits that push Stronghold toward early-game dominance. Playing
Fortress well isn't terribly complicated, but it does require some adaptation and patience.

Whereas Stronghold is basically just an extreme version of Inferno, Fortress is more of a unique flower.
Its closest analog is Rampart, at least in terms of elements. But while Rampart gave us earth magic with
a side of water and air, Fortress is (in contrast to Stronghold) mostly just earth and water. It shares
Rampart's affinity for support magic, but is almost completely lacking in offensive spells. Furthermore,
Fortress starts looking a lot more like Tower or Necropolis when we take its units into account due to
their overall low speed. But while those factions can both fall back on strong offensive magic to offset
that weakness, Fortress goes all in on the status effect game and demands that you master it.

Even for Beastmasters, a purely might-focused class with no magical abilities to speak of, the above is
true. Among Fortress's ranks are three units with special abilities that set negative statuses on their
enemies. We've seen them before, most notably with Dungeon, but whereas Dungeon is an offensive faction
that tends to apply status effects reactively, Fortress is a defensive faction that relies on them as a
primary form of offense. Dragonflies, who were third-level units for some reason in the original game,
are now the weakest non-peasant units in the game and will quickly be obsoleted outside of their ability
to spread disease. Wyverns, by contrast, are crucial in their role as Fortress's only fast/flying unit,
but the oft-overlooked poison ability of their upgraded forms is an excellent way to wear down even the
strongest of opponents. Where Fortress's real power lies, however, is with Basilisks and Gorgons.

If any one unit could sum up Fortress's approach to combat, it would be Basilisks. They're one of only a
handful of units in the game with a special ability that can disable their opponents, and newly to AH3M
their upgraded versions are the only melee attackers that can do so consistently. Gorgons, on the other
hand, are the closest thing that Fortress has to a purely offensive unit since the status they can set
(Fortress technically has four status-setters) is instant death. This is widely regarded as one of the
strongest unit abilities in the game and makes Mighty Gorgons amongst the best 7th-level killers.

Some good news is that since magic immunity has been overhauled in this mod to no longer cover physical
status effects or indirectly offensive spells, some powerful units which were previously immune to them
(namely dragons) no longer are. The bad news is that this doesn't do anything to change towns consisting
either mostly (Conflux) or entirely (Necropolis) of unliving units who are immune to Fortress's bullshit
and thus force them to play a more directly offensive game. Thankfully, Fortress has a multitude of buff
spells as well as a few debuffs (namely Slow and Weakness) that aren't covered by unliving immunities so
that they don't go into battles against those opponents at a severe disadvantage.

Fittingly, Fortress's 7th-level units - Hydras - are the ultimate tanks. Just as Behemoths are able to
out-damage units with better raw stats due to their special ability, so too are Hydras able to outlast
the likes of Angels, Titans, and Black Dragons despite having less HP due to their regenerative powers,
even moreso when in concert with a medical tent (sold by Fortress blacksmiths). Alongside their ability
to attack every surrounding hex, this tends to lead to strategies involving baiting foes into dogpiling
them. Of course, a human opponent is usually smart enough to avoid doing that, and Hydras are otherwise
difficult to use offensively due to their critically low speed. They are, at least, a lot cheaper than
most other 7th-level units so you can start stockpiling them early on.

While Fortress has the same issues with slow-moving units that Tower and Necropolis both do, they're at
least more adept at getting around the map. Logistics is a common skill for Beastmasters whereas Witches
are more likely to pick up Sailing for speedier water travel. As with Stronghold, however, their major
strength is dealing with rough terrain. Pathfinding is a major class skill here, and while their native
terrain (swamp), isn't as common as Stronghold's, it's one of the hardest to get through otherwise.

Finally, a major advantage of Fortress is that it's the cheapest town in the game, narrowly beating out
Stronghold. But while Stronghold needs to press that early advantage, Fortress tends to play the longer
game. Both factions want to leverage their low costs to build out quickly, but Fortress is often slower
to act. It prefers to outgrow rather than overrun its opposition earlier on and, unlike Stronghold, is
very well-equipped to go up against an opponent with powerful magic when the time comes.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					    CONFLUX
					    -------

				      MIGHT HERO: Guardian
				      MAGIC HERO: Sorcerer

On the far opposite end of the scale from both Stronghold and Fortress, Conflux rounds out the roster as
our third major magic faction. While Tower is more defensively focused and Dungeon offensive, Conflux is
simply pure magic. However, to call its execution in the original game half-assed would be entirely too
generous. Conflux was an eleventh-hour pivot in the wake of negative reaction to the originally-planned
"Forge" faction which sought to introduce the trademark sci-fi elements of the mainline series into the
strictly fantasy-based setting of its spinoff and the resulting time crunch is clearly apparent in every
facet of the final product. It does manage to present some interesting ideas, which I took and attempted
to the absolute best of my abilities to flesh out into something coherent.

Aside from its focus on magic, Conflux is mostly characterized by its unique unit structure. Rather than
seven units of increasing power, the bulk of Conflux's army consists of elementals of roughly equivalent
power. This was the idea, at least - in practice, the expansion ended up changing their stats around to
make them progressive and the result was the worst of both worlds. It was enough to ruin their symmetry
by making Earth and Fire Elementals stronger than Air and Water, but not enough to make them fit in with
their new levels: Air Elementals became a ridiculously overpowered 2nd-level unit while Earth Elementals
became the game's most woefully underpowered 5th-level unit.

AH3M goes all in on the envisioned concept of a lateral unit structure, equalizing not only the power of
the elementals, but also the build order and costs of their dwellings. The twist is in the upgrades: the
four base elementals are treated as 3rd-level units while the upgrades are 4th-level units. This creates
a massive price gap; Conflux goes from being the cheapest town by a large margin in terms of unit buyout
if you purchase only the base units to by far the costliest if you only buy upgrades. Conflux is also as
resource-hungry as Tower and Dungeon counting the upgraded dwellings, but is otherwise relatively cheap.

Unlike other towns, Conflux doesn't favor any one particular resource and requires an equal mix of them
all to fully build up. The only points of divergence are the above-mentioned dwelling upgrades for Fire,
Water, Earth, and Air Elementals, all of which need a large quantity of one of the four rare resources.
This means that Conflux's initial build order moreso than any other town is less about what you want and
more what resources you have available to you. The "resource" starting bonus is of particular note here
since, as we'll discuss later, it's effectively a free upgrade to one of the four elemental dwellings.

As for the remainder of Conflux's units, Sprites are amongst the most aggravating opponents in the game
despite being as weak as flies due to their trademark ability to attack without their targets being able
to retaliate - as well as the newfound ability of their upgrades to remove positive statuses from their
targets (which makes far more sense on them than on flies). Mind Elementals and their upgrades continue
the theme from earlier by acting as fifth and sixth-level units, respectively. Their ability to strike
every surrounding opponent makes them function similarly to hydras and is arguably the most compelling
reason to invest in a medical tent from the local blacksmith (now sold in place of ballistas) since, as
unliving beings, elementals are immune to most of the things that tents exist primarily to heal.

The 7th-level unit for Conflux, Firebirds, are useful mainly because they're cheap and, like Hydras and
Behemoths, show up earlier than other, more powerful 7th-level units. Also like those two, Firebirds are
in the upper echelon of 7th-level units for a single metric - speed, in this case - despite being one of
the weakest overall. This is important since it plays to Conflux's strengths: their time in the sun as a
powerhouse unit is limited, but their ability to secure spellcasting initiative in combat never wanes.

Another unique aspect of Conflux is that all of its heroes - even its might ones - begin with elemental
magic skills rather than the two most common skills for their class. Further magic skills are available
for purchase at one of its unique buildings: the Magic University. This is a necessary tool since, true
to its theme, Conflux's mage guild is a totally even mix of all four elements and can contain any spell
in the game except for the few that are of little/no use on unliving units. The lack of any real focus
means that what you get from them is essentially completely random, and so it's generally better to buy
magic skills after you know what spells are available rather than blindly guessing.

As the game's most magic-oriented faction, all of the combat skills (i.e. Offense, Armorer, Archery) are
uncommon even for its might heroes. Instead, Guardians focus heavily on adventure skills like Logistics
and Sailing, making them excellent explorer heroes. One such skill, Diplomacy, is notable here since the
four basic elemental units are now more commonly found as random units on the map due mostly to the fact
that every month is now a guaranteed "growth" month that will spawn them in random locations. Aside from
that, Conflux heroes are similar to Necropolis heroes in that morale is (mostly) useless to them because
their units aren't alive, but since elementals aren't unDEAD, they won't be an active detriment to any
other units you recruit - thus providing a modicum of usefulness for boosting your morale. Further, it
also provides a better reason than Mind/Magic Elemental dogpile strats for Conflux's blacksmith to sell
medical tents to a town mostly full of things that don't need one.

Conflux does not lean toward either offense or defense like every other faction does; both are at a bare
minimum so far as its "might" half is concerned, so how it approaches combat depends largely on how the
dice roll for their mage guild. Ideally (and quite likely), you'll pull a decent offensive spell or two
and end up playing them like Dungeon. Conflux's army contains two shooters and four fliers, so keep-away
is the game it wants to play if you've got the magical firepower to keep up. Failing that, Conflux plays
more like Tower or, worst case, falls short and ends up in Fortress territory.

This is, at least, the case for Sorcerers, who are the most potent and sustainable spellcasters in the
game. Guardians, on the other hand, are much trickier to play as because, like Battlemages and Witches,
they go against type and end up as a hybrid class. The difference is that Guardians tend to have it much
harder than the other hybrid classes due to a combination of the volatility of Conflux's mage guild and
Diplomacy being their only major combat-related skill, thus forcing a stronger need for adaptability.

As is generally the case with expansion-pack content, Conflux was designed with veteran players in mind
and is best experienced by those already familiar with the rest of the game. Its unusual unit structure
takes the established convention of quadratic growth for magically-aligned characters (which we've seen
already with Tower and Dungeon) and tosses it into a blender. While generally regarded as an overpowered
town in the original game due mostly to poor balance decisions made in haste, that's no longer the case
here. You can play as Conflux and win in AH3M, but just like every other faction you'll have to earn it.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




				    3. HEROES & SKILLS




---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Moving on to the "heroes" part of the title, this is the one aspect of the game where AH3M takes a few
creative liberties. Heroes of Might & Magic III is a gorgeous game that still looks as good today as the
day it came out over twenty years ago with the notable exception of the heroes themselves, who all range
from merely decent to horrifyingly incompetent trash (Ayden and Olema are particularly awful). There is,
thankfully, quite a lot to be found online in terms of replacements for hero artwork, but it took a lot
of work to find consistently good quality stuff that wasn't stolen from Magic: The Gathering or Lord of
the Rings or some shit. I can't promise 100% (or any) originality, but I at least did my due diligence.

With that acknowledgement out of the way, let's move on to talking about the actually important stuff!
Simply put, classes are more distinct here than in the original game. While their base stats and initial
growth remain largely similar, there is no longer a shift toward completely even growth beyond the 10th
level; this is of particular note for classes with more extreme leanings such as Barbarians and Wizards.
Further, each class now has a unique starting skill - including magic classes, who no longer simply get
Wisdom as a global default - which, along with a second skill, are the most commonly available to them.

    o-------------o-----------------------------------------------------o---------------------------o
    | HERO CLASS  | ATTACK       DEFENSE      MAGIC        KNOWLEDGE    | (STARTING) & MAJOR SKILLS |
    o-------------o-----------------------------------------------------o---------------------------o
    | Knight      | Good         Excellent    Awful        Awful        | (Leadership)  Estates     |
    | Cleric      | Poor         Poor         Good         Good         | (First Aid)   Water Magic |
    o-------------o-----------------------------------------------------o---------------------------o
    | Ranger      | Good         Good         Awful        Poor         | *(Archery)    Logistics   |
    | Druid       | Awful        Poor         Good         Excellent    | (Earth Magic) Resistance  |
    o-------------o-----------------------------------------------------o---------------------------o
    | Alchemist   | Average      Good         Awful        Average      | (Learning)    Armorer     |
    | Wizard      | Awful        Poor         Good         Excellent    | (Wisdom)      Air Magic   |
    o-------------o-----------------------------------------------------o---------------------------o
    | Sentinel    | Excellent    Good         Awful        Awful        | (Luck)        Pathfinding |
    | Hellion     | Poor         Poor         Good         Good         | (Mysticism)   Fire Magic  |
    o-------------o-----------------------------------------------------o---------------------------o
    | Undertaker  | Good         Good         Poor         Awful        | (Tactics)     Necromancy  |
    | Necromancer | Poor         Awful        Excellent    Good         | (Necromancy)  Earth Magic |
    o-------------o-----------------------------------------------------o---------------------------o
    | Overlord    | Good         Average      Average      Awful        | (Estates)     Tactics     |
    | Warlock     | Poor         Awful        Excellent    Good         | (Sorcery)     Wisdom      |
    o-------------o-----------------------------------------------------o---------------------------o
    | Barbarian   | Excellent    Good         Awful        Awful        | (Offense)     Ballistics  |
    | Battlemage  | Average      Poor         Good         Average      | *(Fire Magic) Offense     |
    o-------------o-----------------------------------------------------o---------------------------o
    | Beastmaster | Good         Excellent    Awful        Awful        | (Armorer)     Pathfinding |
    | Witch       | Poor         Average      Average      Good         | (Resistance)  Learning    |
    o-------------o-----------------------------------------------------o---------------------------o
    | Guardian    | Average      Average      Average      Average      | *(Diplomacy)  Scouting    |
    | Sorcerer    | Awful        Awful        Excellent    Excellent    | *(Sorcery)    Mysticism   |
    o-------------o-----------------------------------------------------o---------------------------o

			*There are a few exceptions to starting skills:

		 Dwarven Rangers start with Resistance instead of Archery
		 Some Battlemages start with Air Magic instead of Fire Magic
		 All Conflux heroes start with magic skills instead of Diplomacy or Sorcery

Further stressing the individuality of classes is the fact that it's now far less likely to find heroes
who aren't affiliated with your starting faction in your taverns. While before it was almost completely
random, the odds are now a 1/3 chance of your starting faction's "might" hero, 1/3 of its "magic" hero,
else one of a chosen handful of classes whose alignment doesn't oppose yours (i.e. evil heroes will not
appear in good taverns and vise versa). The external classes which can appear also depend on whether the
faction is more physically or magically inclined - Castle attracts more "might" heroes from other towns,
for example, while Tower is more likely to find their "magic" heroes.

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Specialty bonuses - the primary individualizing feature amongst heroes within the same class - have been
overhauled here. Gold and resource bonuses have been removed along with Sir "Banned" Mullich, leaving us
with just unit, spell, and skill specialists. These have all been edited in a broad sense, most notably
in that unit and (most) spell bonuses are static and no longer scale with level. Skill bonuses, with the
exception of Logistics, do still scale with level, but the formula is now linear rather than quadratic.

Take, for example, Crag Hack's infamous Offense specialty. At basic expertise, Offense is a 10% bonus to
all melee damage. Under the original formula, a 1st-level Crag Hack would receive a multiplicative bonus
of 5% to that 10%, meaning the bonus would be 10.5% (since 0.05 * 0.10 = 0.005). However, a 20th-level
Crag Hack would see the 30% bonus from mastered Offense doubled to 60%, and things would only get more
nuts if he kept gaining levels from there (which he would). Here, the bonus is a simple +1% per level or
its equivalent (i.e. +1 spell point per level for Mysticism specialists) for most skills with the major
exception of Logistics, which doubles the skill's effect (see below). Learning and Estates also qualify,
since 1% would be too little for either one: Learning is 5% per level and Estates is +50 gold per level.

Heroes with unit specialties now possess a static bonus of +5 to attack and defense in addition to a +1
bonus to speed. All units except Pixies now have a specialist, including 7th-level units and the few odd
ones (i.e. Pikemen, Medusas) which previously lacked one. Heroes now also come with the units in which
they specialize with the exception of 7th-level unit specialists for reasons that are hopefully obvious.

This is probably also a good time to mention that heroes will now always come with all three unit stacks
(or two stacks and a ballista/medical tent) instead of the second and third stacks being randomized. The
number of units in each stack is still random, but it's a significantly narrower range than before. Note
that this is still subject to the rule of any hero beyond the initial two to populate your tavern at the
start of each week only coming with a single troop to prevent cheesy rush strats. On a somewhat-related
note, there was a 25% chance in the original game of your starting town having its second-level dwelling
initially built. This is, in the same vein as the above change, no longer the case.

As with unit specialist heroes, those with spell specialties now also come with the relevant school of
magic as a secondary starting skill, thus ensuring that they'll eventually be able to cast that spell to
its maximum effect. The bonuses for spell specialties vary considerably and have been changed up quite a
bit here, most of them becoming significantly more powerful in the process. Status/support spell bonuses
still mostly scale with the level of their target unit while directly offensive spells ditch the formula
that made them marginally more powerful only on the lowest-level units in favor of a flat 50% bonus to
their damage output. For a complete listing of spell specialty bonuses, consult the Printme.

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As one might expect from a complete balance overhaul, the natural skill growth rates for each class have
all been changed here - again, see the Printme for a list of every skill and their odds of being learned
by each class. Note that the probability table has been simplified: while the original game used a range
of values from 1 to 10 (out of 112 total), AH3M uses only 10 (for each class's two major skills), 7 (for
other common skills), 4 (uncommon), 1 (rare), and 0 (no). Note that a class's inability to learn a skill
now also extends to it being learned from teachers (AKA "Witch Huts") on the map.

An astute reader might look at those above values and come to the (correct) conclusion that much of what
this mod does was inspired by the original Might & Magic series. This will become increasingly apparent
through a number of name changes we see throughout the hack, but there's an important nomenclature note
to be made right here: there is no such thing as "advanced" skill expertise in the mainline games.

				    Basic -> Expert -> Master

I'm sure that will cause absolutely no confusion whatsoever for people who've spent two decades getting
used to what the original game called them. As for changes to the skills themselves...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					MOVEMENT SKILLS
					---------------

Logistics is widely considered to be one of the most overpowered skills in the original game, which is
not exactly correct. A more accurate statement would be that it's the most universally useful skill, so
it's an obvious pick whenever it gets offered. It really only got out of hand with Logistics specialist
heroes - to the point that they were usually banned in competitive play - but even then it was only bad
at high levels while the specialty bonus remained insignificant early on due to being a percentage-based
bonus to a largely binary skill. In other words, a small boost to a hero's movement points does nothing
unless it reaches the threshold (generally 100 points) to move another tile.

Now, rather than providing a flat bonus to movement points, the Logistics skill now sets a minimum unit
speed with which to calculate a hero's movement points. It's thus still a flat bonus to movement in most
cases, but it will have less of an (or no) effect on an army comprised only of fast units. So instead of
allowing a hero with only fast units to outpace everyone else, Logistics is now more about letting those
with slower units keep up. This, in turn, acts as a much-needed buff to said slower units.

Since Pathfinding is essentially a situational version of Logistics, its effects are obviously going to
be a lot stronger whenever it comes into play. The concept is perfectly sound - its only problems in the
original game were the staggered execution (advanced skill only affected snow/sand/swamp and expert only
swamp) and lava not counting as rough terrain, both of which left Pathfinding decidedly TOO situational.
Here, Pathfinding reduces the movement cost for all rough terrains with each level of skill attained and
lava (now "volcano") is among them. Further, the movement penalties for rough terrain are higher in this
mod than they were before, ranging from +40% (wasteland) to +80% (swamp and volcano).

Sailing (formerly Navigation) is by far the most situational of the three movement skills - to the point
of being useless on any map that doesn't feature water travel (which is many of them). It's niche enough
that I had no issue with increasing its effectiveness to make it more useful whenever it does come into
play - including having it now lower the turn cost for boarding and unboarding - but I drew the line at
specialist heroes. It's one thing to have a skill that's highly desirable on some maps and literal trash
on others, but it's quite another to have a hero like that. Some heroes still do start with Sailing as a
secondary skill; on maps where Sailing is banned because there isn't any (or is very little) water, they
will instead start out with their primary skill at expert level.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					LEADERSHIP & LUCK
					-----------------

Leadership and Luck are unchanged directly, but this is a good place to discuss how the formulas which
they impact were overhauled. Originally, morale and luck were values which couldn't exceed 3 in either
direction, with each point conveying a 4.1666~% chance of gaining an extra turn (morale) or dealing 2x
damage (luck). Considering the abundance of methods to raise them, the restrictively low cap for morale
and luck values greatly diminished the worth of those individual bonuses. Compounding this was the fact
that, even with a maximum value of 3, the odds of seeing a result (12.5%) weren't significant enough to
be competitive. For a case-in-point example, consider the value of the Leadership and Luck skills in the
original game: both were derided primarily because they were redundant with several artifacts and map
objects, but even putting that fact aside they were still uncompetitive with other, better skills.

Here, the divisor for the bonus is 16 instead of 24, meaning each point is now worth 6.25%. Further, the
maximum/minimum value is now +8/-4, meaning you can potentially achieve a whopping 50% chance of getting
extra turns or dealing double damage. The factions most affected by this are Castle (focuses heavily on
morale), Inferno (focuses on luck), and Rampart (a mix of both). Several towns, most notably Necropolis,
also gain a powerful new weapon with the Misery spell due to the fact that negative morale remains twice
as effective here: an army with neutral morale will lose 37.5% of their turns to a master-level casting.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					    DIPLOMACY
					    ---------

Diplomacy was a highly polarizing and potentially massively overpowered skill in the original game, but
most of why that was came down to a combination of the map in question and random chance. The Diplomacy
formula has been rewritten in AH3M, but not substantially so. It could and still does allow for an early
advantage if you get lucky with the random spawns in your starting area, but it can't snowball as badly
here since most 7th-level units in AH3M's maps are flagged to never join. Moreover, its far lesser-known
(and far less popular) secondary effect of reducing the cost of surrender has been replaced here with a
discount for units bought from external dwellings - which, again, is only as useful as the map dictates.

In short, random units on the map may offer to join a hero instead of fighting them. Whether they do is
determined primarily by their "aggression", a hidden random value between 1 and 10 which is set for each
random unit when the map is loaded. Provided that your army is powerful enough to pass an initial fight
check against that value, the unit will offer to join if that value is matched or beaten by twice your
hero's Diplomacy skill level plus a "sympathy" bonus of +1 for each of A) your hero being from the same
faction as the random unit, and B) your hero's army already having that unit type in it. If the sympathy
bonus is +2, then the unit will offer to join you for free - else it will charge.

The initial check to see if a unit will fight or offer to join is a comparison between the approximate
strength of both armies with aggression added as a bonus to the enemy army and Diplomacy and "sympathy"
added to the hero's army along with the hero's Attack and Defense. However, unlike in the original game,
neither Diplomacy nor sympathy will be factored in to whether the random unit will fight or flee if the
check to join is unsuccessful or if the offer is rejected. In short, while Diplomacy can cause a random
unit that would otherwise fight you to offer to join, it will not make it any more likely to run away.

In the original game, heroes received a one-level bonus to their Diplomacy skill - even if they did not
have it at all - when playing on the easiest difficulty setting. Here, that bonus is instead applied to
heroes who specialize in the target random unit. It will still provide a bonus even if the hero does not
possess the skill, but will not apply if Diplomacy is already at master level.

Finally, aggression is a somewhat-controllable setting in the map editor. The default - and by far most
common - setting for a random unit is "Aggressive", or 1~10. The "Friendly" and "Hostile" settings have
been edited in this mod to effectively add or subtract 1 to the hero's Diplomacy skill by having ranges
of 1~8 and 3~10, respectively. Both maintain a spread of 10 possible values by having 3x odds of a "1"
roll for "Friendly" units or a "10" for "Hostile" units. "Compliant" units will always offer to join at
no cost - even with no Diplomacy skill - and "Savage" units will always roll 10 and thus never join.

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As for the in-depth explanation, every unit in the game has two AI values: "fight" and "AI". Fight value
is used to determine which unit stack the AI will prioritize attacking while AI value is used primarily
to calculate army strength. These values were fairly sensible in the original game with a few standouts.
Archers and Marksmen, for example, had identical fight values, leading the AI to consider a stack of 37
Archers to be a bigger threat than 36 Marksmen. Several other upgraded units have the same problem, with
fight values either identical to or insignificantly higher than their base forms. The other major issue
is that the original values severely overvalued 7th-level units, particularly their upgrades.

Since there was no real point so far as I could tell to maintain both of these as separate values, they
have both been recalculated according to the following formula:

		     FIGHT/AI VALUE: (HP * (SPD + Lv.)) + ((ATK + Lv.) * (DEF + Lv.))

An important note is that army strength is not a factor in determining whether a random unit will join
beyond the initial check to see if it will fight. In other words, once your army is powerful enough to
make a random unit run away in terror, making it even stronger won't make them join instead. However, as
mentioned above, Diplomacy and sympathy in the original game both had a "double dip" effect since they
were both also factored in to whether or not a random unit would fight or flee - this is no longer true.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					    NECROMANCY
					    ----------

As mentioned earlier, Necromancy now raises Zombies instead of Skeletons. This is a very simple change
with a very complicated explanation. The short version is that, since Necromancy is based on the total
health of the units to be revived, you'll get less Zombies than Skeletons, but you'll get roughly the
same economy (i.e. 8 Skeletons at 5 HP each vs. 5 Zombies at 8 HP each). As for the long version...

The "roughly" part above is where we hit a snag. In a vacuum, you'll get the same total HP regardless of
the unit raised. In practice, you'll lose more of the higher-HP unit to rounding. In the above example,
both the skeletons and zombies add up to 40 HP because we were lucky to get a nice, round number. If it
were instead 35 HP, we'd get 7 Skeletons (35 HP total) and 4 Zombies (32 HP total).

Much more significant, however, is the critical detail that you can't raise more units than were slain,
which shifts favor to raising beefier units since the kill/revive ratio is only optimal when the units
that were killed had equal or less health than the unit to be raised (hence why Necropolis traditionally
thrives on having lots of peasants to kill and not just any random unit). To use a more extreme example,
a Necromancer wearing the Cloak of the Lich King will raise fewer Liches from a pile of slain Ogres than
they would Zombies, but the total health of those Liches will be much more than if Zombies were raised.

In conclusion, it's really hard to say for certain how this change impacts the game. On paper, it makes
Necromancy slightly less effective earlier on, but much more so as the game progresses. In practice, the
HP disparity between Skeletons and Zombies is likely insignificant enough that the whole thing is a wash
and the more impactful change is simply the difference in their combat roles. Skeletons hit considerably
hard for first-level units whereas Zombies are much weaker for their vintage - 8 Skeletons can deal more
damage than 5 Zombies will. But what is lost in offense is eventually made up for in bulk, not only in
the greater revival economy, but also the fact that Zombies gain 2 HP when upgraded instead of just 1.

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A secondary change worth noting is that Necromancy can no longer harvest unliving units, i.e. Gargoyles,
Golems, and Elementals. More broadly, this umbrella includes units which are already undead - you can't
make zombies out of other zombies. Although this encompasses just a small portion of the overall unit
population, making it a relatively moot balance concern in most cases, it is a somewhat notable nerf to
Necropolis in light of the fact that growth months - famously known for being an all-you-can-eat buffet
for Necromancers if the dice rolled their way - now always produce elemental units.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					    FIRST AID
					    ---------

Because combat in Heroes of Might & Magic is more about volume rather than the bulk of individual units,
there's generally little value in the ability to heal a single one of them until you get to the absolute
strongest units available that can actually take a hit without dying. Even then, requiring a skill to be
able to choose which unit stack to heal was retarded and the fact that it restored a random amount of HP
regardless of your skill was somehow even more retarded. Medical tents no longer require the First Aid
skill to be targetable in AH3M and will always heal for a set amount of 100 HP.

The primary benefit of the First Aid skill is now a health boost to your hero's units. This is meant to
counteract the fact that tents are disproportionately useful for higher-level units since the boost is
far more pronounced for lower-level ones. Secondly, to keep First Aid tied to the medical tent, it now
also allows the tent to remove negative statuses in addition to restoring health, with each progressive
level of skill allowing it to remove more types of statuses:

		    Basic (Body)	    Expert (Mind)	    Master (All)
		    ------------	    -------------	    ------------
		    Aging		    Berserk		    Curse
		    Disease		    Fear		    Slow
		    Paralyze		    Misery		    Weakness
		    Petrify		    ------		    --------
		    Poison		    ------		    --------

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					    BALLISTICS
					    ----------

It always felt odd that Ballistics and Artillery were different skills in the original game given both
their similar effects and their massive individual unpopularity. AH3M merges them into one skill which
doesn't function any differently than its components, but has been buffed both directly and indirectly.
Even without the skill, the ballista and catapult are both more inherently powerful in this mod.

In addition to much higher base damage, Ballistics specialists have also been improved with a +1 bonus
per level to the Ballista's Attack and Defense (the old bonus for first-level unit specialists) instead
of a paltry +1 for every five levels. As for the catapult, it can no longer miss - the lack of targeting
with no Ballistics skill is more than enough of a penalty without most of its shots whiffing. There's a
bit more nuance to siege battles here since, as will be repeated later in the "town buildings" section,
the durability of all town defensive structures now varies depending on both segment (i.e. inner walls,
outer walls, and main/side turrets), as well as the type of town. For more details, see the Printme.

For both the ballista and catapult, the benefit of the Ballistics skill is the same: a chance of dealing
double damage at basic level, a guarantee of double damage at expert, and two shots fired at mastery.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					    MYSTICISM
					    ---------

Mysticism was a redundant skill in the original game since it and Intelligence both aimed to accomplish
the same thing, except one of them was ludicrously overpowered and the other was trash even without the
competition. At master level, Intelligence was a 150% boost to spell points (imagine that same value on
any of the other skills that are effectively just boosts to base stats, like Offense or Sorcery) while
Mysticism at the same level regenerated an entire four spell points every day. Of the two, Mysticism is
the more mechanically interesting, so it got buffed while Intelligence got the boot.

Mysticism now regenerates more spell points every day per skill level while heroes without the skill no
longer regenerate them at all. The decision to stick with static values rather than a percentage of your
maximum spell points was so that Mysticism can be effective even on heroes with low knowledge, allowing
them to be mostly or even entirely self-sustaining in the field. See also the changes to spell costs in
section four below; in particular, cheaper low-level spells mean that you can get more mileage here out
of just a small amount of spell points than you could in the original game.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					    LEARNING
					    --------

Since Learning is just a buff to experience gains, any discussion of it is really going to be about the
leveling system in its entirety. Learning was a fairly maligned skill in the base game simply due to its
ineffectiveness: at best, it would keep you a level or two ahead of your peers and simply was not worth
the wasted skill slot. Making it more useful was ostensibly a simple matter of buffing it, but the flip
side of that coin is the experience table itself - all the buffing in the world won't do a whole lot of
good if the ultimate result is still just an extra level or two for your investment.

For the first twenty levels - which is the most you'll see in a typical match - AH3M's experience table
is virtually identical to that of the original game. Beyond that point is where they deviate, with the
vanilla graph taking a sharp upward turn due to the exponential formula while the new one continues on a
relatively linear path. In other words, while growth began to stagnate around level twenty in the base
game, thus allowing other heroes to catch up, it's easier here for heroes with Learning to remain ahead
until the cap is reached at level 30 (which is perhaps the most notable change from the original game).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

				       WISDOM & MAGIC SKILLS
				       ---------------------

Wisdom is no longer required to learn high-level spells, only to cast them(*). This is a subtle change
that makes it more convenient by reducing the need to backtrack. Less subtle is the way that spells are
now learned in the first place: rather than being acquired automatically from a town's mage guild by any
visiting hero, they are now individually purchased from the mage guild. This is meant to make the mage
guild a more interactive experience and to prevent your spellbook from being filled with unwanted crap.

	(*An exception is made for heroes with no Wisdom who specialize in a third-level spell)

Magic skills will be covered in the spells section later on. In short, spell point costs are now static
and the skills now increase the potency of spells at every level. Most notably, the threshold for spells
with mass targeting to do so has been lowered from master level to basic since such spells are generally
of little use on a single target and the idea behind the skills seems to be that spells are of little or
no use without the associated skill rather than being mostly garbage until the skill is maxed out.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					SCHOLAR & EAGLE EYE
					-------------------

		       ________________   ___/-\___     ___/-\___     ___/-\___
		     / /             ||  |---------|   |---------|   |---------|
		    / /              ||   | | | | |     | | | | |     | | | | |
		   / /             __||   | | | | |     | | | | |     | | | | |
		  / /   \\        /  ||   | | | | |     | | | | |     | | | | |
		 (-------------------||   | | | | |     | | | | |     | | | | |
		 ||               == ||   |_______|     |_______|     |_______|
		 ||  ACME TRASH CO.  | =============================================
		 ||          ____    |                                ____      |
		( | o      / ____ \                                 / ____ \    |)
		 ||      / / . . \ \                              / / . . \ \   |
		[_|_____| | .   . | |____________________________| | .   . | |__]
			  | .   . |                                | .   . |
			   \_____/                                  \_____/

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

				      As for everything else...

The Armorer, Resistance, Sorcery, and Scouting skills have all been buffed to varying degrees, but there
isn't much else to say about them otherwise. Offense has been nerfed given its status as the second-most
universally useful skill in the game, leaving only Archery, Estates(*), and Tactics unchanged from their
original forms. Again, there's not much to say except that Archery still affects ballista damage here as
it did before. The effect is far less than from Ballistics, though they are very powerful when combined.

	*Basic Estates is now only 100 gold instead of 125, but expert and master are unchanged

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




				    4. MIGHT (UNIT CHANGES)




---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of the many ways in which Heroes of Might & Magic 3 appreciably built upon its predecessors was that
it went all-in on the idea that every unit should be somehow unique, even if in a wholly inconsequential
way (i.e. Pikemen disregarding the "jousting" bonus of Horsemen). It did the same thing with the concept
of upgrades, allowing them for every unit instead of just an arbitrarily-selected few. AH3M takes this
philosophy to its logical conclusion by ensuring that every unit upgrade is also special. Upgrades were
something of a mixed bag in the original game since there was no real standard for what you'd get aside
from more speed and HP. Here, every unit upgrade provides a new or improved ability along with more HP,
while for simplicity's sake, all other stats (attack, defense, speed, and damage) remain unchanged.

Many new unit abilities have been added in this mod, so let's kick this section off by listing them:

		 2x defense bonus when defending (Pikemen & Halberdiers)

		 First-strike retaliation when defending (Halberdiers)

		 +2 Morale/Luck (Paladins/Archdemons)

		 2x "Jousting" bonus (upgraded Horsemen)

		 +25% damage bonus when retaliating (Battle Dwarves)

		 50% spell resistance (Gold Dragons)

		 Shot dispels positive statuses (Archmagi)

		 Attack reduces target's defense by 3 (Djinni)

		 Enemy hero spell costs +20 (Archdevils)

		 Summons slain foes as Ghosts (Wraiths)

		 +50% damage if target has "fear" (AKA "blind") status (Troglodyte Soldiers)

		 +3 attack until end of combat for every non-lethal attack (Minotaur Kings)

		 Will not reduce morale in mixed teams (Peasants)

		 3x Attack/Defense/Speed bonus on native terrain (Nomads)

		 Increased odds of attack setting a negative status (several units)

Several of the above abilities are not entirely new, but are rather improvements or entire reworkings of
existing ones. +2 Morale/Luck on Paladins (upgraded Swordsmen) and Archdemons, for example, is just the
old "always has positive morale/luck" bonus from Minotaurs and Halflings made less shitty. The Archmagi
dispel shot is a ranged version of an existing melee ability, the Djnni debuff is just half of the old
"Acid Breath" ability, and the Archdevil spell cost effect is a former Pegasus ability with a huge buff.

Negative statuses are of particular note since there is a greater emphasis on them in this mod. Nearly
every unit ability with random odds of occurring (AKA "procs") had a 20% chance in the base game. Here,
those odds are 1/3 for most statuses and 2/3 for units with increased odds. The effects of disease are
more potent here (-3 Attack and Defense instead of just -2), and all non-disabling statuses (poison and
aging) now have a much greater duration, thus requiring either a medical tent or the Cure spell to heal
them in a timely manner. Of those that do disable their victims, only fear (AKA "blind") is removed here
when the unit takes damage. Petrified and paralyzed units can be now attacked with impunity, though the
latter still halves any physical damage and nothing is able to set the latter with a 2/3 success rate.

And then we have resistances and immunities, which have been overhauled in their entirety. As mentioned
earlier, spell immunity by level has been replaced with spell damage reduction (O-Magic) while immunity
to physical status effects (O-Body) has been de-coupled from the "unliving" property to exist as its own
effect on units such as Angels and Genies. It also properly respects the paralyze and petrify statuses,
which previously did not check for immunity at all. Fire immunity was also mentioned earlier, as it no
longer blocks status magic - friendly or not. The three elemental resistances/weaknesses (Fire, Water,
and Lightning) now only cover damage from spells or from elemental units. Spell coverage includes the
"Thunder" ability of Thunderbirds, but not the two fifth-level spells (Implosion and Armageddon) whose
damage can only be reduced via O-Magic or the Air or Fire Resistance spells. As for physical damage...

		 Water & Ice Elementals deal "Water" damage
		 Gogs & Fire/Magma Elementals deal "Fire" damage
		 Storm & Energy Elementals deal "Lightning" damage

These units will deal double damage to targets weak to their element and halved damage to targets immune
to it. The "halved damage on immunity" rule also applies to Mind and Magic Elementals versus units with
O-Mind or O-Magic, respectively, but they will not be able to hit a weakness against any unit. Gogs and
Magogs follow the same rules as elementals do for both their melee and ranged attacks, but the explosive
effect of a Magog's fireball is completely ineffective against units with fire immunity. Finally, units
with fire immunity will not take damage from Inferno's "lava" moat, but will from the standard moats of
Castle and Conflux towns (with otherwise no longer deal damage at all).

	(NOTE: the elemental resistance spells only affect magical damage and not physical damage)

There are also several abilities that are unchanged from the base game and simply see more use here:

		 Flying (Imps/Familiars & Air/Storm Elementals)
		 20% spell resistance (Unicorns/War Unicorns)
		 No range penalty (Marksmen & Titans)
		 No wall (AKA "obstacle") penalty (Lizard Hunters)
		 Rebirth (Bonewalkers)
		 Retaliates twice (Hobgoblins)
		 Regeneration (Chaos Hydras)
		 Attack dispels positive statuses (Pixies)

On the flip-side to the above, there are a few abilities that felt a bit overused in the original game.
These were "no melee penalty", which showed up so much that it risked invalidating the general rule that
enemy shooters can be disabled with fast units, and "no enemy retaliation", which just got tossed onto
units seemingly at random or when the developers couldn't think of anything else. An honorable mention
goes to "shoots/strikes twice", which always felt like a weird cop-out on Castle units meant to either
emulate the effects of morale (since actual morale bonuses were so ineffective in the original game) or
just to give generic beatstick abilities to the "tutorial" faction.

"No enemy retaliation" appears less in AH3M largely by virtue of the fact that it's no longer a standard
rider to the ability to strike multiple foes (Cerberi, Hydras, Mind/Magic Elementals). This was never a
necessary requirement to begin with: when these units attack, only the "targeted" (i.e. the one that was
clicked) unit will have the opportunity to retaliate. It's also been removed from Devils/Archdevils and
Vampire Lords, but it's been added here to Rogues (meant to emulate a "backstab" bonus) as well as Gnoll
Marauders (meant to emulate the fact that maces can stun enemies in Might & Magic VII).

As for "no melee penalty", it ties in directly to the earlier-discussed reclassification of ranged units
into three categories: traditional archers, throwers, and magic shooters. We went over this earlier when
talking about the changes to the "throw"-style units specifically. To recap, these are units who throw
objects like spears (Elite Centaurs), axes (Orc Warriors), rocks (Cyclopses), or balls (Boss Gremlins).
They hail only from factions whose blacksmiths sell ammo carts and only get one shot otherwise, but are
also all able to attack at full strength at melee so as to prevent them from becoming useless after one
attack, as well as to prevent them from having a weakness that their base units do not.

Traditional archers are units with an actual bow and arrow or other ranged weapon (i.e. the slings used
by Halflings). They all now have a standard shot count of 6 (except for Grand Elves who get 8, but shoot
twice each round and so only have four turns' worth), which makes ammo carts helpful but not necessarily
required, as well as adhering to the general rule of halved melee damage. The only unit in this category
to previously ignore this rule is Medusas, presumably because the developers felt uncomfortable leaving
it on a unit whose special ability can only be triggered at melee. AH3M doubles down on its role as a
defensive/reactive ability, giving Empress Medusas a much higher chance to petrify their targets.

This leaves us with the final category, which is where things get tricky. Any ranged unit with a magical
or otherwise non-physical projectile now has a practically infinite shot count; whether they follow the
melee damage rule was a judgement call made on a case-by-case basis. Mages/Enchanters and Liches are all
squishies, so they get the penalty. Gogs and Storm/Ice Elementals are actually physical fighters - plus,
we don't want the latter to have a weakness that their base forms lack - so they don't get the penalty.

Monks and Beholders, finally, were special cases: neither get the melee penalty, but they also now only
get their ranged attack when upgraded (as with Storm and Ice Elementals). The reasoning for this was to
maintain simplicity with which unit types are and are not able to fight effectively in close quarters by
specifically not having it as an upgrade bonus. In other words, rather than being ranged units who gain
the ability to fight at melee, they're now melee units first which gain a ranged attack when upgraded.

With this mod's strict emphasis on new or improved abilities as the primary benefit for upgrading units,
it was perhaps inevitable that certain base units would lose theirs to compensate. Monks and Beholders,
as mentioned above, are the most notable casualties of this policy. Others include the following:

		 Griffins
		 Dendroids
		 Unicorns (1/3 chance to paralyze)
		 Genies (MP discount; formerly a Mage/Archmage ability)
		 Liches

    On that note, let's have a quick look over the abilities that didn't make the cut and got trashed:

		 Immunity to "Jousting" bonus (Pikemen & Halberdiers)
		 Resistance Aura (Unicorns & War Unicorns)
		 Fire Shield (Djinni)
		 SP Drain (Wraiths)
		 Weakness (Dragonflies)
		 Spying (Rogues)
		 Sandwalker (Nomads)
		 Magic Mirror (Fairy Dragons)
		 Acid Breath (Rust Dragons)
		 Crystal Generation (Crystal Dragons)
		 Fear (Azure Dragons)
		 Hate (many units; this code is now the elemental damage system)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the above list includes all four dragons from the Armageddon's Blade expansion.
Although nowhere near as egregious as Conflux, these abilities were still half-baked at best and needed
to go. We haven't really had a chance to go over them yet since they're "neutral" units by means of not
being affiliated with any faction (not to be confused with Stronghold, Fortress, and/or Conflux units,
which are "neutral" in that they're neither good nor evil), so let's do that now.

The four neutral dragons are standard expansion pack content: way stronger than anything than anything
in the base game and thus used sparingly. While tiered in the original game, they're all roughly equal
in power here. With their original unique powers gone, they're defined more here by their resistances
than by their offensive capabilities (Fairy Dragons notwithstanding). Immunity to status effects are
prevalent, most notably with Crystal Dragons which are now classified as unliving. There's something of
an elemental theme here as well, again with Fairy Dragons as the outliers by resisting magic in general.

Fairy Dragons in specific are worth talking about due to their special behavior, namely their ability to
cast spells in combat. The massive damage potential makes them arguably the hardest of the four to take
down despite being the least durable. Their spells are cast at the unskilled level (down from expert in
the original game) with a magic power of four times the number of Fairy Dragons in the stack (down from
five times), and it's that second one that gives them a real punch.

Unit spellcasters are otherwise downplayed in this mod since their abilities often felt awkward and at
odds with a hero who could cast the same ones. The ability has been removed from both Master Genies as
well as the four upgraded elementals while Ogre Magi now cast Frenzy instead of Strength (AKA Bloodlust)
to avoid conflicting with hero spells. That just leaves the aforementioned Fairy Dragons and Enchanters
as the primary spellcasting units, both of whom will choose their spells at random as follows:

			ENCHANTERS			FAIRY DRAGONS
			----------			-------------
			10%: Cure			20%: Magic Arrow
			10%: Weakness			20%: Ice Bolt
			15%: Fortune			15%: Fireball
			15%: Strength			15%: Lightning Bolt
			10%: Slow			10%: Ice Blast
			10%: Shield			10%: Inferno
			15%: Haste			05%: Meteor Shower
			15%: Stoneskin			05%: Chain Lightning

      (Enchanters cast spells at Master level and so will not weaken the same spell cast by a hero)

As for the other unaffiliated units, Peasants have been made marginally less shitty by gaining a little
more HP (3 instead of 1), an actual damage range (1-2 instead of a flat 1), and the ability to integrate
into any team without causing a morale penalty for mixing units - as other neutral units will still do.
Rogues gain the ability to attack without retaliation instead of their old "Spying" ability, and Mummies
receive a substantially more devastating ability to inflict fear on their targets with 2/3 odds in place
of curse. Trolls and Enchanters have both been kicked down a level to more closely match their abilities
while Diamond Golems received a substantial buff to better qualify them as sixth-level units.

Finally, there's Nomads, which brings us to the much broader topic of native terrain. Their ability in
the original game was to remove your army's movement penalty over sand. Now, they simply treat sand as
native terrain, notable in that other unaffiliated units don't have native terrain. Thus, they'll still
ignore the movement penalty over sand - provided that the rest of your army is also native to it.

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In addition to ignoring movement penalties, units fighting on their native terrain receive a +1 bonus to
their attack, defense, and speed. While the first two are fairly inconsequential, the speed bonus can be
a potential tide shifter. In the original game, three factions treated grassland as their native terrain
(Castle, Rampart, and Conflux) and none were native to sand - a rather significant disadvantage for our
revised Nomad units above. In AH3M, both Rampart and Conflux have new native terrain:

             o------------o-----------o  o------------o-------o  o----------o--------------o
             | CASTLE     | Grass     |  | RAMPART    | Dirt  |  | TOWER    | Snow         |
             o------------o-----------o  o------------o-------o  o----------o--------------o
             | INFERNO    | Volcano   |  | NECROPOLIS | Dirt  |  | DUNGEON  | Subterranean |
             o------------o-----------o  o------------o-------o  o----------o--------------o
             | STRONGHOLD | Wasteland |  | FORTRESS   | Swamp |  | CONFLUX  | Sand         |
             o------------o-----------o  o------------o-------o  o----------o--------------o

AH3M also corrects a poor intentional design choice from the original game that forced the subterranean
background on any battle taking place in the underground layer, regardless of the underlying terrain.
This is more than just an aesthetic fix since it also affects the aforementioned stat bonuses. Depending
on the map, this change is either a minor nerf for Dungeon and/or a minor buff for any other faction.

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Growth events on week/month rollovers have also been changed. The odds of a growth week have doubled to
50% and the chances of "silent" (non-growth) and plague months have been removed. AH3M also fixes a bug
in HD mod wherein rolling a week bonus would overwrite a month bonus: the effect of the "month" creature
appearing at random spots on the map would still occur, but the growth bonus would be a weekly one (and
extremely likely for a completely different unit).

While weekly bonuses can potentially be for any unit, there were only twelve potential candidates in the
original game for month bonuses, most of which were level 1-3 units due to the fact that they will spawn
all over the map. In AH3M, there are only four candidates for growth months: Earth, Water, Fire, or Air
Elementals, all of which are now 3rd-level units. This is high enough to be a good source of experience,
yet low enough that it shouldn't be problematic when they end up blocking off a major thoroughfare. That
they're unliving units averts the classic all-you-can-Necromance buffet (as mentioned earlier), and it's
finally also a notable buff to Conflux for reasons which are hopefully obvious.

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We'll wrap this section up with some general notes on the most powerful units in the game (the neutral
dragons notwithstanding). While there's a lot to be said about 7th-level units individually, that's been
covered already in the faction overview. There are two major changes, however, that apply to them all:
their speed is no longer excessively high by sheer virtue of being 7th-level units (nor is ludicrously
excessive speed present on any unit, for that matter) and the added rare resource requirements in their
recruitment costs have been standardized to one for base units and two for upgraded units.

Aside from that, see the Printme for a full/detailed listing of every unit in the game.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




				    5. MAGIC (SPELL CHANGES)




---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We've already touched on some of the major changes to the spell system earlier on in the skills section,
mainly that spells are now purchased individually from mage guilds instead of learned automatically when
your hero enters a town with one. Might heroes are no longer required to purchase spellbooks in order to
buy spells (thus preventing the mage guild from being unviewable unless you buy one) and Wisdom is not
required to purchase high-level spells - only to cast them. Accompanying these changes is a completely
redesigned spellbook interface which has a designated position for each spell rather than a condensed
list, making it easier to tell at a glance which spells you have or which ones you're missing. There is
also no longer a separate interface for adventure spells (all six of them) or an "all spells" tab.

Perhaps the biggest issue with spells in the original game was their imbalanced distribution throughout
both the four elements and five levels, with many ending up in places where they clearly didn't belong.
Each element now provides the same number of spells per level: four first-level spells, three spells for
the second and third levels, and two fourth and fifth-level spells. Further, spell point costs are now
static, with magic skills benefiting most spells with every level of expertise.

      o-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------o
      | LEVEL 1   AIR                 EARTH               FIRE                WATER               |
      o-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------o
      | (1 SP)    Wizard Eye          Clairvoyance        Fortune             Cure                |
      | (2 SP)    Sunray              Magic Arrow         Curse               Bless               |
      | (3 SP)    Air Resistance      Earth Resistance    Fire Resistance     Water Resistance    |
      | (4 SP)    Haste               Slow                Fire Wall           Ice Bolt            |
      o-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------o
      | LEVEL 2   AIR                 EARTH               FIRE                WATER               |
      o-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------o
      | (6 SP)    Fate                Stoneskin           Strength            Weakness            |
      | (8 SP)    Shield              Misery              Fireball            Heroism             |
      | (10 SP)   Lightning Bolt      Reanimate           Fear                Water Walk          |
      o-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------o
      | LEVEL 3   AIR                 EARTH               FIRE                WATER               |
      o-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------o
      | (12 SP)   Jump                Quicksand           Frenzy              Dispel              |
      | (15 SP)   Counterstrike       Toxic Cloud         Pain Reflection     Ice Blast           |
      | (18 SP)   Destroy Undead      Anti-Magic          Immolate            Enslave             |
      o-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------o
      | LEVEL 4   AIR                 EARTH               FIRE                WATER               |
      o-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------o
      | (20 SP)   Fly                 Earthquake          Berserk             Town Portal         |
      | (24 SP)   Chain Lightning     Meteor Shower       Sacrifice           Clone               |
      o-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------o
      | LEVEL 5   AIR                 EARTH               FIRE                WATER               |
      o-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------o
      | (25 SP)   Summon Air          Summon Earth        Summon Fire         Summon Water        |
      | (30 SP)   Implosion           Resurrection        Armageddon          Teleport            |
      o-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------o

			As you can see, several spells have been renamed:

		(View Air) -------> Wizard Eye     (Visions) -----> Clairvoyance
		(Disrupting Ray) -> Sunray         (Precision) ---> Fate
		(Air Shield) -----> Shield         (Bloodlust) ---> Strength
		(Sorrow) ---------> Misery         (Mirth) -------> Heroism
		(Animate Dead) ---> Reanimate      (Fire Shield) -> Pain Reflection
		(Teleport) -------> Jump           (Blind) -------> Fear
		(Death Ripple) ---> Toxic Cloud    (Frost Ring) --> Ice Blast
		(Inferno) --------> Immolate       (Hypnotize) ---> Enslave
		(Dimension Door)--> Teleport	   ------------------------

      (If any of these seem familiar, that's because almost all of them are from Might & Magic VII)

See the Printme for a full listing of appearance probabilities for each spell by town type. Each dot on
the table represents an approximate 10% chance of that spell appearing, not counting Tower's higher odds
for any spell to appear due to the Magic Library. Before we move on, let's talk a little more in-depth
about each element and the general roles they fill in the magical pantheon.

Fire is the most offensive element and by far the least subtle about it. Nearly every one of its spells
is either directly offensive (Fireball, Immolate), indirectly offensive (Fear, Berserk), or a buff that
increases damage (Strength, Frenzy). The only real exceptions are the mandatory resistance spell and an
evil version of the Resurrection spell that requires a ritual sacrifice to work (which, in all fairness,
is very offensive). Fire is the magic school that runs into the most problems dealing with units immune
to mind magic, both ally (Frenzy) and foe (Fear, Berserk), and is also the element most strongly aligned
with the evil factions (particularly Inferno) as opposed to the "good" ones.

Air is also an offensive element, second only to fire in terms of total destructive output and actually
winning out in terms of single-target damage. It's also the most common overall, with only two factions
(Necropolis and Fortress) not favoring it to a significant degree. Air has more variety than fire magic
does, including a specific focus on speed (Haste is a particularly important spell) but not necessarily
travel (Dimension Door had no business being an air spell, but Fly still is). It even has an important
defensive spell with Shield, but overall is mostly concerned with offense and movement.

Water is a more defensive element focused on control and manipulation spells such as Dispel and Enslave
(which also had no business being air magic). If you've ever played Magic: The Gathering, you'll have a
pretty good idea of the theming, and if you've ever played Might & Magic VII then you probably won't be
surprised that both Town Portal and Teleport (AKA "Lloyd's Beacon") are now in the water school, making
it by far the biggest element for adventure magic. Water is also home to several notable support spells,
particularly Bless and the good, old-fashioned Cure. Directly offensive spells are present here, but are
more downplayed. Ice Bolt is an early-game staple, but the only other damaging spell (Ice Blast) is not
only weaker than the strongest of any other element, but its unique targeting pattern makes it best used
defensively. Finally, in contrast to fire, water is the most "good"-aligned of all the elements.

Earth, finally, is the most defensive of all elements - unless you're Necropolis, that is, in which case
it's also the source of your primary offensive spell (Toxic Cloud). Like air magic, there's a focus here
on speed, except it's about slowing down your foes (Slow, Quicksand) instead of speeding up your allies.
Aside from that, it looks to either directly defend your army (Stoneskin, Anti-Magic) or bring them back
from the dead (which comes in both zombie and non-zombie flavors). As with water magic, there are a few
offensive spells here, but they're less noteworthy (Toxic Cloud notwithstanding). Although several earth
spells are common finds in most mage guilds (Stoneskin is notably omnipresent) it's actually the least
common element overall in terms of factions with a strong preference toward it.

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As mentioned earlier, one of the biggest overarching changes that AH3M makes to magic is that it lowers
the "mass effect" threshold from magic skill mastery to basic level. Of particular note is that heroes
with a specialty in any such spells (see below) are thus now able to mass-cast them right away.

		Air Resistance     Earth Resistance   Fire Resistance    Water Resistance
		Haste              Slow               Fortune            Cure
		Fate               Stoneskin          Curse              Bless
		Shield             Misery             Strength           Weakness
		*Counterstrike     *Anti-Magic        --------           Heroism
		--------------     -----------        --------           Dispel

				(*Previously not mass effect spells)

As for the impact of elemental skill mastery on other spells, the basic approach was that it has a more
significant impact on higher-level spells than on lower-level ones. For offensive spells in particular,
the low-level ones (i.e. Magic Arrow and Ice Bolt) are slightly weaker here as they're now considerably
cheaper to cast while the mid-range ones are stronger, but only the highest-level spells derive more of
their damage from the caster's elemental magic skill relative to their magic power. As is the case with
any lower-level spell that requires its associated magic skill to mass target, nearly every spell from
the top two levels is either useless or at least substantially less useful for an unskilled user.

Enslave is of particular note since it's an "all or nothing" spell: either its strength matches or beats
the total HP of a target stack and it works, else it does nothing. It was the subject of particular ire
in the original game due to its low power and thus extremely limited use. Here, it's one of the biggest
examples of the above-mentioned spells which become drastically more powerful with magic skill mastery.

Something that was brought up earlier was the general concept that might heroes tend to prefer support
spells instead of directly offensive ones since their magnitudes are fixed and therefore unaffected by
their much lower magic power. Several spells actually don't consider the caster's magic power at all and
are therefore of particular use to might heroes: Quicksand, Fear (see below), Frenzy, Berserk, Dispel,
Jump, Earthquake, and all adventure map spells. That aside, most of the game's support spells have been
buffed to some degree here, perhaps most notably the (Air) Shield and elemental protection spells.

An oft-overlooked property of spells is that most of them can be cast on war machines where appropriate:
all war machines can be buffed with Shield, Stoneskin, or resistance spells while ballistas can also be
blessed or cursed. Ballistas are not affected by the Strength or Weakness spells, however, nor can Pain
Reflection (newly in AH3M) be cast on any war machine for thematic reasons that are hopefully obvious.
Further, war machines can be damaged by any directly-offensive spell, including Implosion which was for
some reason the only such spell that did not damage them in the original game (not that you'd want to).

Finally, we'll wrap this section up with some further notes on individual spells...

	-------------------------
	Wizard Eye & Clairvoyance
	-------------------------

Wizard Eye combines the effects of View Air and Earth sans the effect of View Earth revealing the entire
map at master level and the master-level View Air bonus of showing all towns (the former omission is for
balance reasons; the latter is because the effect would only show neutral towns on the main map and felt
kind of janky). Clairvoyance (formerly "Visions") no longer has a limited range (except for when viewing
surface/underground objects from the opposite layer). Both are now free to cast at master level.

	-------------
	Cure & Dispel
	-------------

Cure is generally more useful here due to the increased prevalence of physical status effects while the
substantially reduced casting cost makes it a handy staple in any spellbook. Dispel, on the other hand,
is now more expensive and only affects hostile units since A) Cure is the friendly variant, and B) this
way you don't remove your own buffs whenever you want remove your opponent's. Note that this means that
the Fire Wall and Quicksand spells are no longer affected by Dispel, nor are Tower's land mines.

Of note is the interactions of these spells with Enslave. A bug in the original game prevented Cure from
removing it when mass targeted because it would consider the affected unit stack to be hostile. In AH3M,
only Dispel can remove the Enslave status from a unit stack - and can do so at any level of skill.

	-------------
	Bless & Curse
	-------------

Because these spells originally eliminated rather than merely reducing a unit's damage range, they ended
up having a stronger impact than higher-level spells which directly affect attack power. Both now reduce
a unit's damage range (a truer analog to the mainline series, might I add) instead of eliminating it.

	--------------------------
	Fortune, Heroism, & Misery
	--------------------------

These spells are all now significantly more useful due to the earlier-discussed changes to the luck and
morale formulas; Misfortune has been removed since bad luck effectively does nothing.

	----
	Fear
	----

AKA "Blind", this is generally regarded as one of the most powerful/useful spells in the original game.
This is due to the fact that, like most other support spells, its duration increases with the caster's
magic power and its effect of completely paralyzing an enemy stack is excessive beyond just a couple of
turns. Unskilled Fear now has only a single turn duration (note that it will be completely ineffective
against a unit that has already taken its turn since status removal is checked at the beginning of each
round), with basic fire magic now removing the target's ability to retaliate if attacked and expert and
master fire magic increasing its duration to two and three rounds, respectively.

	------
	Frenzy
	------

Frenzy now doubles a unit stack's attack power rather than adding its defense to its attack. Basic fire
magic now eliminates the defense reduction rather than increasing the magnitude while expert and master
level now increase the duration (as there is no longer a downside to the spell at this point).

	-------
	Berserk
	-------

Berserk now expands to a 3-hex area of effect at master level (the largest of any spell) and a bug which
prevented the AI from being able to use this spell has been fixed.

	---------
	Sacrifice
	---------

The exact formula for this spell is a bit too complex to display in-game or in the Printme, hence the
vague description. As with Resurrection, it revives units up to a maximum of (X) total HP according to
the below, with bracketed values corresponding to unskilled, basic, expert, and master Fire Magic.

    X =  # of units sacrificed * (caster's magic power + base health of scarified unit + [*1,4,7,10])

	---------
	Reanimate
	---------

Now requires Earth Magic for its effect to be permanent just as normal Resurrection does.

	----------
	Anti-Magic
	----------

Anti-Magic no longer blocks physical statuses (i.e. paralyze and petrify), but still prevents Beholders
and Mummies from inflicting fear as well as the "thunder" ability of Thunderbirds since both are still
considered to be spells in the code. Moreover, it will no longer remove any existing negative statuses
from its target(s) and most notably now follows suit with Frenzy and Fear by having its duration depend
on skill expertise instead of magic since mass effect (new to AH3M) would otherwise be extremely cheap.

	-----------
	Toxic Cloud
	-----------

This spell no longer works on unliving (but not undead) units, i.e. Golems and Elementals.

	----------
	Earthquake
	----------

Similar to the issue with Sacrifice, Earthquake's effects have only a vague description both in-game and
in the Printme since exactly how it works is still kind of a mystery. Under most circumstances, however,
it will destroy a single random wall section when cast with no skill, two sections at basic, and three
sections at expert. At master level, it will also destroy one or more turrets (AKA "arrow towers"); if
there are none are present, it will instead lower the drawbridge.

	-----------
	Town Portal
	-----------

In a similar vein to mass effect spells, Town Portal now allows casters to choose their destination at
basic skill level, with both expert and master levels reducing the required movement points. As this is
one of the most useful spells in the game, bordering perhaps on being overpowered, the movement point
requirement is higher here than in the original game - massively so until master level.

	----------------
	Summon Elemental
	----------------

Summoning more than one type of elemental in the same battle is no longer disallowed.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




				    6. ARTIFACTS & OTHER CHANGES




---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The most notable aspect separating Heroes III from its predecessors so far as artifacts are concerned is
the implementation of equipment slots. This makes sense: loading your heroes up with fifteen swords like
a katamari buzzsaw (or Fighter from 8-bit Theater) is fun, but kind of stupid and extremely overpowered.
This system has its drawbacks, however - standardizing each attribute bonus to one equipment type (i.e.
attack on weapons, defense on shields) limited the diversity and created a weird scenario where neither
helmets nor armor raised defense. The bonuses here are a bit more spread out, so instead of having, say,
two swords on the same tier that raise attack by different amounts (thus making one objectively better),
one will boost both attack and spell power while the other has a higher bonus, but only to attack.

That said, one thing in particular that I still love about the original Heroes of Might & Magic moreso
than any of its successors is the way that it handled artifacts. There wasn't much variety: they either
boosted a core stat or luck/morale. Simple, yes, but this meant that every artifact you found was a nice
thing and not a piece of trash which made you immune to a spell that you'd never have used against you
or boosted a skill you didn't have (or, for that matter, want). To this end, many of the less desirable
artifacts have been thrown in the trash or reworked into something better.

Starting with the trashpile, we have the two Scouting artifacts ("Speculum" was a very unfortunate name)
along with the long list of artifacts that blocked specific spells. We also have those with effects that
only occurred at the start of a hero's turn (i.e. there was no reason to keep them equipped otherwise),
which includes the movement-point boosters, the mana restoration artifacts, and the resource-generating
artifacts. The Statue of Legion components are still here because, one, their effects are actually kind
of interesting, and two, they tend to be held by reserve heroes who don't generally have other, better,
artifacts to swap to every turn - nor an incentive to do so on the daily.

Next, we have the skill-boosting artifacts, which are only partly garbage because three of them boost a
skill that's only used by one faction and another three boost a skill that nobody wants. Addressing the
Eagle Eye artifacts was a simple matter of converting them into a new set of Learning-boosters, but this
still left the bigger issue of them all being useless without the skill (except for the Resistance ones,
which for whatever reason didn't require it). They now all require the boosted skill, but also slightly
boost one of the four core attributes as consolation should your hero happen to lack it.

Due to the earlier-mentioned changes to the formulas for luck and morale, there's now a wider variety of
artifacts which boost them. The Badge of Courage, which in the original game also defended against mind
spells (actually not a bug but a deliberate design decision according to the developers), is now just a
morale booster like the others of its ilk. The Glyph of Gallantry and Ladybird of Luck have both been
removed, leaving only a bonus of +2 luck and/or morale from treasure-level artifacts alone (bearing in
mind that the effects of duplicate artifacts do not stack).

On a related note, the "Artifact" starting bonus will no longer give morale boosters or the Ring of Life
to Necropolis or Conflux. If these are rolled, it will instead give them the Dead Man's Boots or Amulet
of Wisdom, respectively - meaning that these particular artifacts become much more likely to be received
by these factions. It also won't give the Dead Man's Boots to any faction other than Necropolis, instead
opting for the Clover of Fortune if it gets rolled for them. See also the miscellaneous changes near the
bottom of this file for edits to the other starting bonuses (gold and resources).

And then we have the combination artifacts, most of which have been changed drastically. Their focus is
now primarily on their unique benefits rather than ludicrous stat boosts (looking at you, Holy Alliance
and Dragonlord Armor). We'll go over each one and what's new with them below:

	----------------------------------------
	The Perfect Bow & Cloak of the Lich King
	----------------------------------------

These are the only two artifacts with no changes to their primary bonuses, but both now benefit from the
newfound stat bonuses on their components (+3 Attack for the bow and +3 Magic for the cloak).

	---------------------
	Ring of Infinite Mind
	---------------------

Ostensibly a brand new artifact, this is technically just the Ring of the Magi with a slightly different
list of components and a completely different effect. Rather than increasing spell duration, which was
stupid, these are the new Learning skill artifacts (as per the above discussion), with their resulting
assembly conveying a +50% bonus it (a 20% increase over their combined individual effects).

	--------------
	Elixir of Life
	--------------

Since they provided a minor, static bonus to health in the original game, the Elixir of Life components
were effectively useless on anything except first-level units; only the percentage-based bonus conveyed
by the assembled combo had any significant effect on higher-level ones. Here, the component effects are
based on the unit's level, providing a bonus of +1 health per level with the lowest-tier component (the
ring) to +3 health per level with the highest (the Troll's blood). The Elixir itself now adds only the
regeneration effect since the combined component bonus is now a substantial +6 health per unit level.

	----------------
	Statue of Legion
	----------------

These artifacts now boost all seven creature levels in a single town, with the head pulling double duty
with both the fifth and sixth levels and the assembled statue now acting as the 7th-level bonus rather
than a global 50% boost (which, might I add, was a stronger effect than that of the fucking Grail).

	---------------
	Titan's Thunder
	---------------

The unique benefits of this combo are now O-Mind and O-Lightning (same as actual Titans). Stat-wise, it
now changes -1 penalties of its components into +1 bonuses for a net gain of +2 (+9 total) to all stats.

	------------------
	Armageddon's Blade
	------------------

The only combination artifact to actually remove stat boosts from its components, Armageddon's Blade now
converts the +7 defense of the Shield of Hades, Hellstorm Helmet, and Brimstone Breastplate to an attack
bonus (for a total of +10 Attack and Magic). Perhaps more notable is that it's now able to be assembled
at all outside of its campaign, but with that comes a change to its effect, which was overpowered even
within the context of said campaign. Rather than allowing its user to cast Armageddon with impunity, it
now itself casts Armageddon - on the opposing team only - at the outset of combat. Any further castings
of the spell by its wielder will behave normally, plus it won't actually teach you the spell anymore.

	-------------
	Holy Alliance
	-------------

The most overpowered combo in the original game at first glance if not in actuality (Armageddon's Blade
and the Statue of Legion are both strong competitors), the Holy Alliance drops from a ridiculous +21 to
all stats to a more reasonable +10 to all of them except Magic (a +6 Attack increase over its individual
component effects) bolstered by a +2 bonus to luck and morale (both new effects on two of its component
artifacts). It no longer casts any spells at the beginning of combat and still doesn't consider Conflux
units as "neutral" due to a bug in the original game that I've yet to fix.

	----------------
	Dragonlord Armor
	----------------

Essentially a less overpowered version of the Holy Alliance in the original game despite being more of a
pain in the ass to assemble, the Dragonlord Armor is instead reimagined here as its magical counterpart.
It boosts all stats by 10 (+4 Attack and Knowledge more than the sum of its parts), as well as providing
an additional +25% boost to all spell damage. It's also slightly easier to assemble with the removal of
one of its components (the Dragonwing Tabard), but still has way more pieces than anything else does.

		    (All other combination artifacts have been removed from the game)

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since war machines are technically considered to be artifacts in the game's code, it makes sense to talk
about them here. First and foremost, war machines are no longer removed from your hero's inventory when
destroyed in combat; they're merely disabled for the remainder of the fight. This is of particular note
for any hero with a specialty in a war machine which can't be purchased in their hometown - i.e Clerics.
The availability of war machines per faction has been adjusted, as well, namely to replace Necropolis's
medical tent with something much less bone-headed (I made a funny). Availability is now as follows:

         o------------o------------o  o------------o--------------o  o----------o--------------o
         | CASTLE     | Ballista   |  | RAMPART    | Ammo Cart    |  | TOWER    | Ammo Cart    |
         | INFERNO    | Ballista   |  | NECROPOLIS | Ballista     |  | DUNGEON  | Medical Tent |
         | STRONGHOLD | Ammo Cart  |  | FORTRESS   | Medical Tent |  | CONFLUX  | Medical Tent |
         o------------o------------o  o------------o--------------o  o----------o--------------o

As before, all three are still available for purchase from War Machine Factories (now called "Blacksmith
Forges"), but they will charge more than a Blacksmith would (+1,000 gold and 5 wood).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					TOWN BUILDINGS
					--------------

Before getting into anything else, a note of particular interest to newer players who haven't memorized
the location of the town hall for every town type is that the town hall button in the bottom left of the
town interface screen is now a shortcut to the build menu (which normally requires clicking on the town
hall itself to access). This is in addition to - and right next to - the shortcut button added by HD mod
which allows you to quickly recruit from all of that town's dwellings at once rather than needing to go
to each one individually. This puts the two most common things you'll be doing in any town you visit in
one place that's the same regardless of what type it is. That said, onto the buildings themselves...

The costs and build-order requirements of town buildings have been edited across the board, but there's
only a few such changes of particular note. Most importantly, the Capitol - which players will generally
prioritize building before anything else - now only requires the City Hall instead of also requiring the
fully-upgraded Fort. By extension, Citadels and Bastions (the latter renamed here from "Castle" since we
already have a faction called that), now require substantially larger investments than before.

As with the original game, moats (renamed here to "barricade" in general reference since only Castle and
Conflux towns have actual moats) deal varying damage depending on the town. In AH3M, the damage dealt by
turrets (renamed from "arrow tower" since most of them don't fire arrows) now also depends solely on the
type of town instead of scaling with the number of buildings it has. This damage ignores the defense of
units and can be reduced only with the Armorer skill and/or Shield spell (a well-known bug caused these
to raise damage from arrow towers in the original game). Further, the durability of both the walls and
turrets now also varies not only per section, but also per town type - see the Printme for details.

The other significant change in regard to build-order requirements is that most of the unique buildings
are now required by certain dwellings, such as Necropolis's Shroud of Darkness now being required by the
Vampire dwelling or the upgraded Mage Tower now needing the Magic Library. The end result of both this
and the above changes is that the trunk of each town's build tree has what was previously dead-end twigs
woven into it while fortifications now exist as an independent branch of it rather than its foundation.

Aside from that, the costs of unit dwellings are now more standardized. This mostly affects the notable
outliers from the original game: Angel/Archangel, Titan, and Cyclops dwellings. As discussed before, the
four elemental Conflux dwellings are now completely even in cost, the only difference being the resource
required for the upgrade, while the Pyre now requires a mix of all four to match Conflux's theme. Other
notable dwelling changes include Castle's third-level dwelling no longer requiring its fourth-level one
and Necropolis's horde building now increasing Zombie growth instead of Skeletons. And since its horde
building is graphically attached to the dwelling it's on, that meant swapping the units they produce.
Horde buildings now also require the upgraded versions of their respective dwellings, a decision which
was not made for so much balance reasons but rather technical limitations with other changes.

    (Also, as mentioned earlier, the 2nd-level dwelling no longer has a chance to be built initially)

Taverns now give new (and much better) advice than before which updates daily instead of weekly. In the
original game, they had roughly equal chances of a random stock rumor, a rumor from the map itself, or a
hint about the location of the grail, defaulting to stock rumors if the map had no rumors and/or grail.
Later in the game, they could also start parroting information from your Thieves' Guild, such as which
player has the strongest army. It will now always use the map rumors if present, else it will always use
the stock rumors; Grail hints are no longer necessary as we'll get into just below.

Another lesser known effect of Taverns is that the right-click information you received from other towns
was dependent in the original game on how many Taverns you owned, requiring two in order to see even an
estimate of how many units were present in each stack. This seemed like a pointless limitation, as well
as an unnecessary double dip since the Thieves' Guild already counts taverns to provide additional info.
You are thus now always able to see approximate stack values when right-clicking on enemy towns.

Most notable, however, is a fix to the handling of heroes who retreat or surrender. In the vanilla game,
doing so on day 7 during another player's turn (i.e. they attack you) would cause that hero to be lost
since there would be no opportunity to go to your tavern to re-hire them before the weekly refill. Here,
heroes who escape from battle will remain in your tavern without being replaced until you enter it. Note
that, as a side effect of this fix, they will now always replace the left hero in your tavern instead of
choosing one at random. See also further below for an important change to taverns on the adventure map.

A major general change is that Resource Silos have been removed. This more heavily impacts the factions
whose silos provided nice resources than those who got the shitty "wood and ore" ones, but it's a global
change nonetheless. Perhaps more notable is that, since we've also removed resource-generating artifacts
and hero specialties, there's a greater emphasis here on obtaining resources through the adventure map
and via trading. And speaking of trading, another significant change is that the exchange rates are now
better when you control fewer marketplaces and cap at five instead of nine; see the Printme for details.

		(Note: these rate edits also affect Artifact Traders and Mercenary Guilds)

Shipyards are now substantially cheaper, both in terms of initial build cost and boats purchased (boats
from external still cost full price). Perhaps more interestingly, towns now look north for a coastline
instead of to the south: more specifically one tile up and three over rather than two down and one over.
This was changed because since towns are entered from the south, it was extremely uncommon for them to
meet the requirements and near impossible to create coastal towns that didn't look extremely janky. The
reason that it was set up like that to begin with was so that the game could be certain that any ships
would be accessible once built; these new settings place that responsibility on the mapmaker.

Note that the above change also affects the ability of Castle towns to construct Lighthouses, which have
been fixed in AH3M to only provide movement bonuses to the town's owner instead of to all players. They
have not changed aside from that, but we do see notable changes to most other unique buildings:

	 Defensive buildings (Stormclouds, Glyphs of Fear, etc.) are now +5 instead of +2

	 The Mana Vortex is now the spell point equivalent of the above (+50 to defending heroes)

	 Mystic Pond is now +2~4 of a random magical resource instead of +1~4

	 Inferno's "Oblivion Portal" now transports you to any town you control

	 Magic University tuition has been raised from 2,000 to 2,500 gold

Necropolis's "Death Converter" (formerly "Skeleton Transformer") has also been significantly reworked.
First and foremost, only first-level units now become Skeletons; most second-level units and beyond now
turn into Zombies, instead. Second, upgraded units will convert to their upgraded undead counterparts.
Third, there are more special results like how any Dragon or Hydra in the original game would turn into
Bone Dragons: Dendroids become Specters (seeing as they have neither bones nor flesh), Genies and Efreet
become Vampires, Monks and Mages become Liches, and Horsemen become Night Riders. Further, all 7th-level
units will now become Bone Dragons. However, units which are either already dead or were never alive to
begin with (i.e. Gargoyles, Golems, and Elementals) can no longer be converted.

Finally, the unique bonuses of most grail buildings have been edited. Tower's grail building now allows
your units to always receive a native terrain bonus in combat; its spell point bonus is now attached to
the Mana Vortex, whose old effect of doubling a hero's spell points is the new Dungeon grail effect sans
the "once per week" restriction. The old Dungeon grail effect of boosting a defending hero's magic power
is now the Conflux grail bonus, replacing the incredibly broken effect of filling the town's mage guild
with every spell in the game. This is more thematically consistent than before: Dungeon's grail gets a
more offensively-minded bonus while the three "neutral" towns all get stat boosts for defending heroes.
Said bonus is a static +15 across the board, meaning that Stronghold's grail is slightly less ridiculous
than it was before and Fortress's grail is now just a Defense bonus instead of +10 Defense and Attack.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the notoriously shitty Inferno grail effect of making every week
Imp week - which was frankly more of a bonus for Necropolis than it was for Inferno. Inferno's grail now
instead makes every week Demon week while the Necropolis grail turns the map into Night of Living Dead.
Just to be clear, we're talking about Zombies ("Walking Dead" in the original game). Actual Living Dead
would be the upgraded version, which would be RETURN of the Living Dead to indicate Russo-style zombies,
which are faster, smarter, and stronger than the shambling, brain-dead Romero-style zombies.

As for the Grail itself, it's something that rarely came up in most games since the computer was likely
to beat you to it in most cases. The only way to grab it first was to find the general area and then dig
a few hundred holes and pray you got lucky, which felt contrary to the spirit of its design. Here, as in
the mainline series, digging for the grail now requires locating every obelisk for both the AI and human
players. And while doing so will still consume the remainder of your hero's turn, it no longer requires
you to have not yet moved at all since the balance reason for that restriction has been removed.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					 MAP OBJECTS
					 -----------

The effects of most objects on the map have been changed, ranging from extremely minor to quite drastic.
We'll start off by going over the three basic items - gold, resources, and artifacts - and the numerous
places on the map where they can be found. These changes will start off on the minor side as we look at
the most commonly-available objects and work their way up to the more drastic when we get to the stuff
that you have to actually fight for. Of particular note are the changes to treasure chests, which now
provide more gold relative to experience to compliment the changes to Learning and the experience table
as a whole. Also of note are Castaways and Warrior Tombs, both of which had a random chance of providing
any level artifact in the original game but are limited here to strictly low-level artifacts (Castaways)
or high-level ones (Warrior Tombs). See also Mr. Bones, which in vanilla usually had nothing at all.

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	OBJECT		RESULT/QUANTITY			(ORIGINAL GAME)
	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	Gold		600~1000			(500~1000)
	Wood/Ore	6~10				(5~10)
	Gm/Cr/Sf/Mr	3~5				(3~6)
	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	Campfire	4~6 wood + 400~600 gold		(4~6 any resource + 400~600 gold)
	Lean-To		4~6 random resource		(1~5 random resource)
	Windmill	4~6 random rare resource	(3~6 random rare resource OR ore)
	Water Wheel	(500 * week of month) gold	(500 gold on first week, 1000 thereafter)

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	OBJECT		(ODDS)/RESULT			(ORIGINAL GAME)
	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	Treasure Chest	(30%) 1500 gold *OR* 500 exp.	(32%)
			(30%) 2000 gold *OR* 1000 exp.	(32%)
			(30%) 2500 gold *OR* 1500 exp.	(31%)
			(10%) lv.1 artifact		(7%)

	Wagon		(80%) 4~6 random resource	(50%) 2~5 resources
			(20%) lv.1~2 artifact		(40%)

	Mr. Bones	(60%) 1500 gold			(only received if backpack is full)
			(40%) lv.1~2 artifact		(20%)

	Warrior Tomb	(50%) lv.3 artifact		(15%)
			(50%) lv.4 artifact		(05%)

	Sea Chest	(80%) 1500 gold			(70%)
			(20%) 1000 gold + lv.1 artifact	(10%)

	Flotsam		(50%) 5 wood			(25%)
			(25%) 4 wood + 200 gold		(5 wood + 200 gold)
			(25%) 3 wood + 500 gold		(10 wood + 500 gold)

	Castaway	(50%) lv.1 artifact		(55%)
			(50%) lv.2 artifact		(20%)

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	CREATURE BANK/(ODDS)	GUARDIANS & QUANTITY (+UPG.)	REWARD
	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	Gnarled Oak		Flies				Wood & Gold

	 (20%)			80  (+40)			15 / 1000
	 (30%)			120 (+60)			15 / 2000
	 (30%)			120 (+60)			20 / 1500
	 (20%)			160 (+80)			20 / 2500

	Dwarven Treasury	Dwarves				Ore & Gold

	 (20%)			40 (+20)			15 / 2000
	 (30%)			60 (+30)			15 / 4000
	 (30%)			60 (+30)			20 / 3000
	 (20%)			80 (+40)			20 / 5000

	Gem Bank		Nagas & Genies			Gems & Gold

	 (20%)			 4 (+2) /  4 (+2)		15 / 1000
	 (30%)			 6 (+3) /  8 (+4)		15 / 3500
	 (30%)			 6 (+3) /  8 (+4)		20 / 2500
	 (20%)			 8 (+4) / 12 (+6)		20 / 5000

	Crystal Reserves	Cyclopses & Ogres		Crystal & Gold

	 (20%)			 4 (+2) /  4 (+2)		15 / 1000
	 (30%)			 8 (+4) /  6 (+3)		15 / 3500
	 (30%)			 8 (+4) /  6 (+3)		20 / 2500
	 (20%)			12 (+6) /  8 (+4)		20 / 5000

	Mercury Cache		Demons & Efreet			Mercury & Gold

	 (20%)			 4 (+2) /  4 (+2)		15 / 1000
	 (30%)			 8 (+4) /  6 (+3)		15 / 3500
	 (30%)			 8 (+4) /  6 (+3)		20 / 2500
	 (20%)			12 (+6) /  8 (+4)		20 / 5000

	Sulfur Stores		Medusas & Minotaurs		Sulfur & Gold

	 (20%)			 8 (+4)  /  4 (+2)		15 / 1000
	 (30%)			16 (+8)  /  8 (+4)		15 / 3500
	 (30%)			16 (+8)  /  8 (+4)		20 / 2500
	 (20%)			24 (+12) / 12 (+6)		20 / 5000

	Conservatory		Griffins			Artifacts & Gold

	 (40%)			20 (+10)			1 (Lv.1) / 2000
	 (40%)			30 (+15)			1 (Lv.2) / 3000
	 (20%)			40 (+20)			2 (Both) / 4000

	Crypt			Vampires & Specters		Artifacts & Gold

	 (40%)			12 (+6)  / 12 (+6)		1 (Lv.2) / 2000
	 (40%)			18 (+9)  / 24 (+12)		1 (Lv.3) / 3500
	 (20%)			24 (+12) / 36 (+18)		2 (Both) / 5000

	Shipwreck		Water(/Storm) Elementals	Artifacts & Gold

	 (40%)			20 (+10)			1 (Lv.1) / 1500
	 (40%)			30 (+15)			1 (Lv.2) / 3000
	 (20%)			40 (+20)			2 (Both) / 4500

	Ghost Ship		Water(/Storm) ELs & Specters	Artifacts & Gold

	 (40%)			12 (+6)  / 12 (+6)		1 (Lv.2) / 1000
	 (40%)			18 (+9)  / 24 (+12)		1 (Lv.3) / 2000
	 (20%)			24 (+12) / 36 (+18)		2 (Both) / 3000

	Dragon Horde	 	Green & Red Dragons		Artifacts & Gold

	 (25%)			4 (+2) / ""			3 (Lv. 2,3,4) / 5000
	 (25%)			6 (+3) / ""			3 (Lv. 3,4,4) / 5000
	 (25%)			8 (+4) / ""			3 (Lv. 3,4,4) / 10000
	 (25%)			8 (+4) / ""			3 (Lv. 4,4,4) / 5000

    (Note: heroes no longer incur temporary morale penalties from Warrior Tombs, Crypts, or Ships)

Next up, we have the map locations which temporarily boost luck and/or morale. These were of limited use
in the original game due to the above-discussed reasons of neither having much impact under the vanilla
ruleset. With a new formula now allowing them to be more impactful, it's no longer necessary for them to
provide large bonuses in order to be substantial. Thus, they all now provide a flat +1 bonus to either
luck or morale except for Mermaids who boost both (due to being much more inconvenient to access).

The locations which boosted both morale and movement, on the other hand, now boost movement exclusively
by a flat 800 points. Further, these locations can now be visited once per day (in addition to any time
after winning a battle) and now include buoys since it always seemed kind of strange that they weren't
movement boosters in the first place. The new effects of these objects are thus as follows:

		    +1 MORALE		 +1 LUCK		+800 MOVEMENT
		    -------------------------------------------------------------
		    Temple		 Idol of Fortune	Fountain of Youth
		    Swan Pond		 Lucky Fountain		Watering Hole
		    Rally Flag		 Fairy Ring		Oasis
		    Mermaid		 Mermaid		Buoy

		      (Note: visiting a Swan Pond no longer ends a hero's turn)

Moving on to the permanent stat boosters, we don't see any changes to the basic +1 locations aside from
name changes to make them more indicative of what they do. Schools of Magic and War in the original game
were just two more +1 boosters that added a price tag for the benefit of being able to choose one of two
stats to raise; here, the boost from schools is +2. Finally, Arenas and Libraries of Enlightenment were
particularly curious since they seemed like they were meant to be mirrored counterparts instead of what
they were: an objectively better version of the School of War (Arenas) and a +2 boost to every stat for
the mere cost of being level 10. AH3M splits the Library's across-the-board bonus between it and Arenas,
with Libraries now boosting only Magic and Knowledge while Arenas raise Attack and Defense. And instead
of a level requirement, they now demand a combined minimum of 10 in the two stats they raise. This still
results in a massive bonus for advanced heroes, but only in a field where they already excel.

Of the map objects which provide experience, most of them have been changed. Wise Trees will now always
charge 2,000 gold instead of randomly charging 10 gems or simply nothing at all. Sirens now claim 50% of
your army (up from 30% originally) and provide double the value of their health in experience as well as
a baseline bonus of 1,000. Altars of Sacrifice now provide experience equal to 1/3 of the gold value for
units (instead of 1/8 of their AI value) and better value for most artifacts:

				      ARTIFACT EXP. VALUES
				    ------------------------
				    Lv.1 = 1000  (unchanged)
				    Lv.2 = 3000  (was 1500)
				    Lv.3 = 6000  (was 3000)
				    Lv.4 = 10000 (was 6000)

And then we have map objects which teach things to your heroes. This includes spell shrines, whose only
notable change here is that they now ban the two Necromancer spells, but it mostly concerns those which
teach skills. Teachers (AKA "Witch Huts") now respect the inability of a class to learn certain skills
and, far more importantly, will allow you to decline their offer. Universities, which already did refuse
to teach skills to classes unable to learn them, now charge more than they did before (it uses the same
code as Conflux's Magic University) and have the possibility of empty slots in their rosters due to the
removal of Eagle Eye, Scholar, Intelligence, and Artillery (this is a bug/feature).

Trading Posts and Hill Forts are generally considered to be two of the best map objects (to the point of
being typically banned on random maps) since they allow players to effectively bypass hard restrictions:
the need to control multiple towns in order to get decent exchange rates and the need to build upgraded
dwellings to get upgraded units; that Hill Forts actually offered a discount for upgrading lower-leveled
units in the original game was downright inexplicable. Hill Forts now charge a premium to upgrade units
that increases with each unit level (see below) and all trading areas (Trading Posts, Black Markets, and
Mercenary Guilds) now offer rates equal to the number of markets you control plus one.

					HILL FORT RATES
					---------------
					  Lv.1 = 1.10
					  Lv.2 = 1.20
					  Lv.3 = 1.30
					  Lv.4 = 1.40
					  Lv.5 = 1.50
					  Lv.6 = 1.75
					  Lv.7 = 2.00

External dwellings receive a number of changes here. 1st-level external dwellings now charge instead of
joining for free and 5th-level dwellings and higher are no longer inherently guarded. Most importantly,
however, they no longer cap at a single week's worth of units, leading to potentially large reserves of
units for the first players lucky enough to find (and can afford) them.

Taverns which appear on the adventure map now behave differently from the ones in your towns. They will
have different heroes available for hire and they are more likely to be from other factions (only a 25%
chance of a hero from your faction as opposed to 66% in your towns). More specifically, each class which
can appear in your town taverns (eight per faction) will have an equal 12.5% chance of appearing in an
adventure map tavern. This is important due to the rule that any hero beyond the initial two in any week
will only come with a single unit; external taverns thus provide double the amount of units to purchase
for early-game rush strats, but it's extremely unlikely that they will all be from the same faction.

Garrisons were a curious structure since they offered nothing in the way of actual defense and, aside
from the anti-magic variety, were objectively worse than leaving units in a town where they'd have the
benefit of a hero with spells and stats. They now act similarly to a town with a Fort, providing siege
walls and a barricade, but no turrets. The appearance of the walls and barricade will vary depending on
the type of terrain and will match that of the faction most closely associated with it. Also note that,
unlike normal siege battles, defending heroes are able to retreat (but not surrender) from garrisons.

Battles on Cursed Ground now only null the effects of luck and morale - which is a far more significant
effect than in the original game. This is notable from a thematic standpoint, as well, since it favors
Necropolis and Conflux (the "true" neutral faction) over those who can benefit from morale. Necropolis
actually benefits more since all undead units now treat Cursed Ground as native terrain.

Other special terrain overlays are unchanged, although the maps in this mod only use the four which make
all spells of their element always cast at master level regardless of the caster's skill. This is mostly
notable due to the fact that this also includes adventure map spells, namely Town Portal. Since this is
such a critical travel spell, particularly on larger maps, several of them feature Lucid Pools to help
facilitate easier travel so as not to overly favor factions which lean more heavily toward water magic.

And then a few other things that I couldn't really find a good way to slip in earlier...

   Stables on the map will no longer upgrade any Horsemen in your army to Crusaders

   Thieves' Dens now cast master-level Clairvoyance on heroes in addition to providing information

   Magic Springs now function identically to Magic Wells instead of doubling a hero's spell points

   Whirlpools no longer send units overboard; they now function identically to two-way portals

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					MISCELLANEOUS
					-------------

And finally, we'll wrap things up with the changes that don't fit anywhere else, which funnily enough
consist mostly of the very first changes you'll encounter in AH3M. In addition to the new title screen,
a more observant player might also notice that choosing to start a new game will now default to the list
of maps rather than a functionless background that requires an extra click to get to where you're going.
Repeated clicks now also do nothing instead of toggling to it, double-clicking a map will now bring you
to the team & player settings (AKA "advanced options") screen instead of starting the game, and clicking
on "Back" from that screen now returns you to the map selection screen instead of the main menu. To help
prevent accidental double-clicks, the timeframe for performing them has been cut in half (400 -> 200ms).

My reasoning for the above change is that the selection of factions and players is an important part of
the game setup, so calling it "advanced options" and making the button small and out of the way is not a
good design choice. The only reason that a player would ever want to start a game without going to this
screen would be to play completely at random, except the original game failed in this regard by always
defaulting the player to the first human-playable team instead of selecting one at random. In AH3M, a
random team will now be assigned by default when  clicking "begin" from the map selection screen.

More noticeably, the map size filters have been removed since there are nowhere near enough maps in AH3M
to necessitate them. The map version and loss condition displays have been replaced and now instead show
information about whether the starting factions for each color are forced as well as any spells and/or
skills that are restricted. Note that this is a purely informational change: support for RoE/AB maps as
well as alternate loss conditions remains fully intact outside of being indicated in the UI. Also note
that the spell/skill restriction display works by checking the "restrict hero level" setting for the
following values (all of which will have no other effect due to AH3M's hard level cap of 30):

			  31 = Fly & Teleport are disabled
			  32 = Sailing & Water Walk are disabled (dry map)
			  33 = Fly, Teleport, Sailing, & Water Walk are disabled

It also struck me as odd that the default player color in the original game was red instead of blue like
it was in Heroes 2, especially since the main menu interface would suggest that blue still should be the
default color. Their new distribution keeps two basic thoughts in mind. One, games with just two or four
players (i.e. the first four slots) should include only the most basic colors: blue vs. red for just two
players and then add green and purple for players three and four. Yellow would have been a better choice
for the fourth slot than purple, but it's clear that the original developers had a hard time with it, as
well, and eventually pivoted to tan (which is decidedly NOT a basic color that should be in slot three).

The second thing that was kept in mind when re-arranging the colors is that it should allow meaningful
association with the faction most likely to go in that slot, at least in maps where the factions are
predetermined instead of randomized. One of the things that I loved about both Might & Magic VII and the
second Heroes of Might & Magic game was that the interface would match your alignment, and I wanted to
preserve that concept as much as possible here. Going in straight faction order wasn't going to work out
here, so I instead went in the order of opposing factions like so:

		Player 1 - Blue   (Castle)	Player 2 - Red    (Inferno)
		Player 3 - Green  (Rampart)	Player 4 - Purple (Necropolis)
		Player 5 - Pink   (Tower)	Player 6 - Brown  (Dungeon or Fortress)
		Player 7 - Orange (Stronghold)	Player 8 - Teal   (Fortress or Conflux)

An actual mechanical change that you'll run into when setting up a new game is that all three starting
bonuses have been revised. We mentioned earlier in the artifacts section that the "artifact" bonus will
no longer provide you with something inappropriate for your starting town. That said, the artifact bonus
always seemed like the clear winner over the extra gold or resources in the original game simply due to
the low quantity of the latter two. Even the cheapest treasure-level artifact is of greater value than a
mere 500~1000 extra gold or just a few extra resources. The starting gold bonus is now a static value of
2500 and the resource bonus is now 10 of the faction's favored rare resource (no more wood/ore bonuses),
with Conflux's bonus being chosen at random since Conflux doesn't favor any rare resource in particular.

Speaking of wood and ore, the positions of ore and mercury on the resource display bar have been swapped
so that the two common resources and the four rare ones are now properly grouped together. Less notable
is that the kingdom overview screen now displays all equipped artifacts in a more sensible order as well
as showing the fifth "misc." slot (this screen was never updated for the SoD expansion) in place of the
catapult (which is pointless to display here since every hero has one by default). Also, clicking on the
hero/town status window no longer cycles through various displays because who actually used that thing.

The most noticeable interface edit to the main adventure screen, however, is that the buttons have been
rearranged into a more sensible/intuitive layout. Further, the generally-useless "move hero" and "sleep
or wake hero" buttons have been replaced with "next town" and "activate" buttons. The latter is used to
re-activate any map object that the current hero is standing on top of without needing to step off of it
and then back on. The spacebar also does this, but it's not very intuitive and something that a lot of
players are unaware of. Moreover, this button removes a major reason why players who prefer to play with
only a mouse still need to use their keyboards (spamming multiplayer chat with dicks notwithstanding).

That said, by far the most common reason players will use a keyboard is to make use of the shortcuts to
easily split unit stacks added by HD Mod. To this end, the buttons to switch between "tight" and "loose"
formations and to disable tactics mode (which were, respectively, virtually and completely useless) have
been replaced to emulate them. The formation buttons switch between "move/combine stacks" mode, which is
normal mouse behavior, and "one-click stack split" mode, which will cause clicking on units to behave as
either shift+click (splits units evenly) or ctrl+click (move one unit to a new stack) depending on what
the former tactics button is toggled to (shift+click is the default setting).

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lastly, let's talk difficulty. There are two distinct difficulty settings in the game: map difficulty, a
setting that in the original game served no purpose but to inform players what to expect from said map,
and player difficulty, the iconic chess pieces which oddly posed "hard" as the middle/default setting.
These labels are now: Very Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, and Very Hard, with "Normal" as the, well, normal
difficulty level. By and large, this was already the case since most of what is influenced by difficulty
are subtle AI decisions that already considered the third setting out of five to be the average one. And
since locating every obelisk is now required for anyone to dig for the grail, that just leaves us with
the differences in starting resources. This is the most obvious (if not the most impactful) thing that
changes with difficulty - for the exact values of what you'll start out with, see the Printme.

Given the above, as well as to avoid confusion with map difficulty, player difficulty has been rebranded
in AH3M as "handicap level". You may also notice that, rather than a percentage (since this setting acts
as a multiplier to your final score in the original game), the setup screen will now display your "base"
score as determined by the size of the selected map as well as the handicap level. Your final score will
subtract the number of days taken to win and add a bonus of 15 points times the map difficulty (1~5) if
you dig up the grail. There is no longer a bonus for defeating all opponents since it's A) the victory
condition on most maps already and B) something I don't want to encourage on maps where it isn't.

				The new scoring formula is as follows:

		 Base Score = (Player Difficulty [1~5] * 70) + (Map Size [1~4] * 40)
		Final Score = (Base Score) - Days(*) + (Grail Bonus [15] * Map Difficulty [1~5])

				 *(For team maps, double this value)

The table which assigns a ranking to you depending on your final score has been rewritten to be in line
with both the new relative power levels of each unit as well as the expected results of the new formula.
The original formula tended toward little variance in scores regardless of performance; here, you should
expect to see slightly higher scores than before if you play relatively well - or much lower ones if you
don't. As for the rankings themselves, they now range from Peasant to Azure Dragon (see below), neither
of which were present in the previous table since it was also never updated for the SoD expansion.

       0-4  = Peasant     100-104 = Gargoyle      200-204 = Troll         300-304 = Night Rider
       5-9  = Halfling    105-109 = Elf           205-209 = Monk          305-309 = Diamond Golem
      10-14 = Serpentfly  110-114 = Orc           210-214 = Lich          310-314 = Hydra
      15-19 = Pixie       115-119 = Wight         215-219 = Roc           315-319 = Behemoth
      20-24 = Gremlin     120-124 = Evil Eye      320-224 = Genie         320-324 = Bone Dragon
      25-29 = Skeleton    125-129 = Gnoll         225-229 = Dendroid      325-329 = Firebird
      30-34 = Goblin      130-134 = Golem         230-234 = Enchanter     330-334 = Green Dragon
      35-39 = Imp         135-139 = Nomad         235-239 = Gold Golem    335-339 = Devil
      40-44 = Troglodyte  140-144 = Hell Hound    240-244 = Minotaur      340-344 = Giant
      45-49 = Centaur     145-149 = Mummy         245-249 = Fiend         345-349 = Red Dragon
      50-54 = Pikeman     150-154 = Griffin       250-254 = Gorgon        350-354 = Angel
      55-59 = Zombie      155-159 = Mage          255-259 = Mind Element  355-359 = Chaos Hydra
      60-64 = Archer      160-164 = Medusa        260-264 = Mag. Element  360-364 = Dread Behemoth
      65-69 = Rogue       165-169 = Basilisk      265-269 = Cyclops       365-369 = Ghost Dragon
      70-74 = Lizardman   170-174 = Sharpshooter  270-274 = Naga          370-374 = Phoenix
      75-79 = Gog         175-179 = Vampire       275-279 = Efreeti       375-379 = Gold Dragon
      80-84 = Dwarf       180-184 = Pegasus       280-284 = Manticore     380-384 = Archdevil
      85-89 = Harpy       185-189 = Demon         285-289 = Unicorn       385-389 = Titan
      90-94 = Boar        190-194 = Ogre          290-294 = Wyvern        390-394 = Black Dragon
      95-99 = Wolf        195-199 = Swordsman     295-299 = Horseman      395-399 = Archangel

					400+ = Azure Dragon

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				    7. BUGS & KNOWN ISSUES




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				     UNFIXED BUGS FROM VANILLA
				     -------------------------

  Players are unable to recruit from ally-owned towns/dwellings or use their Oblivion Portals

  Angel/Devil/Bone Dragon, Master Genie, Familiar abilities do not stop working when the units die

  Units with morale/luck boosts do not display them outside of battle

  The Berserk spell does not appear in the battle logs

  Slain cloned units are reported as post-combat casualties

  The Holy Alliance does not treat Conflux units as neutrally-aligned

  Magical terrain (i.e. heavy clouds) is functional but visually overridden during siege battles

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

					AH3M-SPECIFIC BUGS
					------------------

  Medical tents are unable to remove negative statuses from units which have not taken any damage

  The battle logs incorrectly report the damage dealt by units that can hit multiple targets as 0

  The targeting shadow for Berserk has visual artifacting at Master level

  Devil luck bonus right-click text is attributed to "spells"

  Destroyed war units are reported as post-combat casualties

  Defending heroes in garrisons may retreat, but not surrender

  Arenas do not have additional right-click info text

  The AI does not respect the stat requirements for Arenas

  The AI still upgrades Horsemen to Crusaders at external Stables

  Universities may not offer a full roster of four skills

  The status bar hover text for artifacts is incorrect on the Kingdom Overview screen

  A sound effect is still played when clicking on dummied-out buttons on the main menu

  The World Map screen uses the wrong icon for the button to toggle between map layers

  The Quest Logs header is the same as the status bar hover text for the "Dig" button

  The Map Editor still uses the old positioning for warnings about landlocked Shipyards

  Enabling "HD+" mode in the HD Mod launcher will cause some setup menu text to appear incorrectly

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				    8. VERSION HISTORY & FUTURE




---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Version 1.0f (July 25, 2022)

  The Wisdom skill of defending heroes is now correctly checked instead of always the attacking hero

  Pantheon (+) now has the correct requirements (Mage Guild III instead of IV)

  Serpent's Buckler and Targe of the Mad Ogre now have the correct stats

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Version 1.0e (July 24, 2022)

  Updated the .dll patch for the current version of HD Mod

  Three Kingdoms - minor aesthetic improvements

  Fixed a minor formatting error in the Printme

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Version 1.0d (July 07, 2022)

  Fixed a bug from the last update that prevented unsetting "stables visited" flags on week rollover

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Version 1.0c (July 07, 2022)

  Fixed a bug from the last update that permanently disabled the stack split button in the hero screen

  Converted the formation and tactics buttons in the hero screen to act as stack-splitting shortcuts

  Tavern dialogue ("tip of the day") now updates daily instead of weekly

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Version 1.0b (July 05, 2022)

  Fixed a rare/obscure crash with the spellbook (that was likely also causing other problems)

  Moved all "dig for grail" edits into the main patch (only the Oblivion Portal edit now uses the DLL)

  Replaced the "move hero" and "wake/sleep hero" buttons with "next town" and "activate" buttons

  Rearranged the main UI buttons (i.e. the ones above) into a more intuitive/user-friendly layout

  Added an option to disable automatic map scrolling (replaces the slowest setting)

  The Wizard's Hat no longer has an incorrect value of 0

  Cleaned up more right-click text

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Version 1.0a (July 03, 2022)

  Fixed a crash when mousing over Watering Holes

  Human player's team is now randomized when clicking "Begin" from the map selection screen

  Clicking "Back" from the team & player settings menu now returns to the map selection screen

  Shortened the timeframe for double-clicks on the map selection screen to prevent misclicks

  Menu buttons on the main UI are no longer greyed out when not currently applicable

  Cleaned up some right-click text

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Version 1.0 (July 01, 2022)

  Initial finalized release

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					FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
					------------------

The most obvious omission from the finalized 1.0 release of Another Heroes 3 Mod is the campaigns: there
are only standard (single-scenario) maps. This is because I put a great deal of work into every map that
I edit for this hack, and thus the campaigns will be a massive undertaking. I've accomplished everything
that I set out to do from a mechanical/coding standpoint, however, and thus chose to release AH3M as-is.
A higher priority than the campaigns are more single-scenario maps, which I will continue release as I
find the time to do so. I hope to get the final number up to around twenty or so (from the initial ten).

Another concern is the random map generator, which is unchanged in AH3M and possesses several flaws that
I would like to address at some point, as well as creating new/better templates.

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				    9. CREDITS & CONTACT INFO




---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

	TESTING	& QA		DEVELOPMENT ASST.	GRAPHICS EDITING	NEW SOUND FX
	------------		-----------------	----------------	------------
	Cassie (<3)		AlexSpl			Raics			Might & Magic VII
	Cross			Maurice
	DanDaCheerman		Phoenix4Ever		UTILITIES		SPECIAL THANKS
	Deschain		RoseKavalier		---------		--------------
	Makiki			Strigo			Grayface		Serity
	Mattrick_
	Xujhan		      EMAIL: btb@abusemynipples.biz
			    DISCORD: https://discordapp.com/invite/bsuKp5A
			   FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/ah3mod/

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	I'm afraid that's all we know, gentlemen.
