News


New VCMI 1.0.0 was released!

vcmi logoAs a base for modding support, portability and even with two types of AI. Read the original news and download at vcmi.eu.

WE’RE HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE A NEW RELEASE!

Several years have passed since VCMI 0.99 and it’s about time for a new release. Tons of changes, improvements, and fixes have been introduced during that time, so it’s hard to recall all of them. However, we’d like to highlight several major changes.

GAME ENGINE

Lodestar grail finally can reveal all the map! We were working hard to track down and fix crashes that severely affected VCMI gameplay. Now they are rare beasts but if you manage to find one do not hesitate to report it!

ADVENTURE MAP

Hero exchange window has got a few additional buttons and keyboard shortcuts to ease army and artefact exchange. If you do not see them after installing the release make sure you have the latest VCMI extras mod installed.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

You are welcome to try an alternative AI algorithm called Nullkiller which shows itself well on small and medium sized maps. For larger maps you should better go with classic VCAI computer player which was also significantly improved. From the launcher settings you can always choose the AI you like and enjoy the most.

MODDING AND NEW TERRAINS

VCMI was built for modding, but with this release we significantly enhanced the mod system. Among various gameplay tools we introduced support for adding new terrains. It is a natural evolution of new town support as they need to have unique terrains, battlefields, mines and map objects. This feature required deep refactoring of the game engine so unfortunately saves you made before release 1.00 will not be compatible. It’s a good reason to make new ones!

RANDOM MAPS GENERATOR

RMG also has undergone huge changes. First of all, normal and island water options are supported now. Secondly, as mods can introduce new terrains and objects, RMG has got powerful algorithms to generate new terrain patches and to place new objects provided by mods. And finally, we improved the generator in terms of aesthetics, obstacles placement and stability as well.

LAUNCHER

Good news! We reconsidered our release policy to make releases more frequently and introduced an update notification system into launcher in order to make everybody aware about new features and fixes. In addition to that, launcher works now with our new mod repository on GitHub that will be used to follow for updates in your favorite mods too!

JOIN US!

The project is now actively maintained once again. There are several active contributors working on new amazing features. Not everything made it into this release so stay tuned for next announcements!

On top of a shorter release cycle we also want to announce that we slowly started using GitHub built-in tools for bug tracking and project management. Now development activities and release milestones will be more transparent. As always we are open to all contributors who wish to help us move VCMI forward. You can help with both programming or contributing new mods to the repository. Let’s make VCMI better together!


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Dragoness: Command of the Flame

Dragoness: Command of the Flame was released at 1st Sept, present reviews are positive, albeit scarce. It's indeed having part of hommlike mechanic, most similar are battlefields but rest is closer to King's Bounty. Game stays on its own, there's 10% sale ongoing till 8th Sept, so you can go yourself and check.

  • You are getting your own base, from which your are fulfilling missions. You have one hero and army. (Campaign map is huge, there are seen more bases, in each region one.)
  • Units can be merged to be stronger, in each battle all sides are getting "shield points", so if you are not damaged behind that, you have no actual losses.
  • Both, hero an units can cast spells. Hero is otherwise not taking direct part in the combat.
  • Objects are supported, like "Healing Tent", "Cursing Tent" etc..
  • There are very nice loading screens, similar to KB.
  • It's a story based but, apart from authors, nobody knows now, what it will be. It all started with two Dragons clash.. (So there likely will be 'many' recruitable dragons later, in the game)
  • In your base there's very nice town management.
  • If your only and one commanderes die, it can be ressurected in the town, in three differents forms. Each of them is best at something else. 
  • Not spotted yet anything like campaign/map/mission/modding editor. Most likely won't be presented.
  • Controls are simple, not noticed keyboard shortcuts in the combat thoughs. Neither autocombat.
  • You need to keep your units fed, otherwise your army is weakened. The army can survive without any food supply for 8 days.
  • Very nice music, thumbs up!
  • Movement on the map is quick for me.
  • There's demo available and after buying the full game, you can continue from where you started.
  • FAQ if you would need more answers
  • Check our tag, if would like to know more, like minimal requirements.

dragoness

dragoness2

Spellforce: Conquest of Eo

Another fantasy game in the development, in this case it will be similar to Master of Magic, so it could be bit akin to our audience. This is Spellforce: Conquest of Eo, worthy of check. Known is quite more atm. Thanks Blake & Vicwaberub for info!

1C Entertainment to Fulqrum Games

After aquisition by Tencent, polish videogames group 1C Entertainment changed its name to Fulqrum Games. Read a notice.


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  • Pick the bolded text, to jump to the whole blog entry. And see  texts also in German or Polish languages.

Combat is what Heroes do the best

Now let's look at what knights or barbarians (wizards too!) like the most - combat! In Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Board Game, it is played on a special 5-row combat board. Each player, at any time during their turn may deploy their army within the two back rows. After the battle begins, the Hero can no longer rearrange their formation (unless they have a Tactic card).

Rush, rush, rush to build a capitol! ;-)

However, this reduction does not in any way detract from their value. Without skillful resource management, it is impossible to succeed in "Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Board Game."
homm 1x1 blog karty jednostek castle

It is impractical to expand towns without resources - otherwise you wouldn’t be able to build these structures:

  • City Hall (do check if "rushing" a City Hall in the board game is more profitable than "rushing" a Capitol in the computer game), Citadel (without it, you cannot increase your army),
  • Mage Guild (mandatory for wizards),
  • Creature dwellings (a starting army is not enough),
  • Unique building for each faction (check them out).

The wealth of the original

The cult-classic Heroes of Might and Magic III is a computer game full of diverse factions. Do you prefer the strength and solidity of the Castle or the wizarding tricks of the Dungeon? Or maybe you like the approach of Sandro and his Necropolis the most - Where others see peasants, I see an opportunity?
homm 1x1 blog sentinels shield

The factions, however, are only the beginning; after deciding on one of them, the player has to choose a hero. Here is another pleasant dilemma - to play the hero of Might or the hero of Magic? Which specialization should you choose? There are many other elements during the course of the game - leveling the hero, speccing your ability tree, choosing artifacts and obtaining the desired spells, and of course, maintaining high morale in the army…


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The Dragoness: Command of the Flame is the new homm like game, with rogue twist, which is scheduled for 1st September. Created by polish developer Crazy Goat GamesThe game already passed all testing phases and it's fully ready. Check the "dev blog" at Steam News page.

Interesting interview with Producer Maciej Struzyna and Designer Janina Wojciechowska is available at ScreenRant.com. It's also worthy to check the other one at rpggamer.com, which brings in some additional sparks of info.

The game should be about:

  •  Heroes and Tolkien inspirations
  •  Myriad of Monsters
  •  Perfection - like shield mechanism, to prevent unnecessary losses in the battle
  •  Chess like battlefields
  •  RPG driven story
  •  Quick save and leave "aka father's mod"
  •  Cute pangolin guide
  •  "We had time to polish it, and this is the baby we wanted to make."
    (I never heard that from Ubisoft.. )

Give it a try and let us know!

You would like to win it? You can, if you visit heroes3wog.net, which run 10th Years Anniversary Contest with many prices, and this game, among them. Certainly recommended! angel

Create 3 miniatures in Hero's Forge Editor, submit them and do that till 15th Sept. The contest is only valid if 10 or more Heroes 3 miniatures are created.

Fingers crossed Liso1, this the huge amount of work and time invested into the site. CH is joining the congratulation, lets do some party, gremlins rushed to your palace! applause

The editor is relatively clumsy, when there was M&M Showndown, the drawing part was in some aspects more creative. What requires praise, even if I cannot add more hands, is grimace editor - that's funny enough. Eyes are somewhat unfinished or you need subscription to Pro. This is kickstarter project and indeed not bad.
Yes, this is Winged Naga. And it does feature a very small tail and some defensive thorns on the back, which are not visible from this angle.

naga heroforge


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ezgif 77

Dear supporters and fans of Heroes of Might and Magic 2!

Today we are excited to announce a new release of fheroes2 - 0.9.18! This release is a bit unusual in terms of visual representation but it contains a lot of important changes.

The first thing which the team was fixing is audio. As you remember we made significant changes in the code to push audio on the next level. In this release we polished things to make it even better. Windows OS players were facing a lot of issues related to MIDI music: fading sounds, inability to restart songs where they being stopped, or even crashes on Windows 8. We added new sound font package to fix all these issues so you can enjoy music in full power. This applies only for SDL 2 build.

The second thing which closed over 40 bugs is a new rendering system for Adventure Map. Old rendering system was full of issues such as heroes being visible through mountains, boats being rendered over other objects, monsters being seen over fog. Now most of these issues are gone.

This new rendering system allows us to progress towards new map format, in-built map editor and also to easily add new objects on Adventure Map.

We also fixed multiple issues with amount of monsters in objects, their distribution during battle, Diplomacy rules and other small but important logical situations. The team updated Polish, Bulgarian, Russian and Hungarian translations.

We hope that you enjoy this more polished release which is very close to 1.0 release.

You could also support the project development on Patreon.

You can discuss fheroes2 here, as well as to check previous releases.


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It sure took some time, but we can finally present you with our interview with the one and only David Mullich, director of Heroes of Might and Magic III.

The interview actually turned out nicely in the end, even though we had to overcome some audio syncing issues as well as straight out audio cuts (thank you Discord).
Hope you all enjoy it as much as I did having the chance to interview Sir Mullich!

 


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newshornHello Folks!

CelestialHeavens.com is migrating to a new hoster.

IF you see this you landed on the new site.

New site is currenly locked, once new NS spread, it will be opened. With old site locked instead and updating about new content - posts, articles

Migration is completed, forums unlocked and re-indexing should be finished soon. Enjoy!

New site IP: 78.128.43.103
Old site IP: 67.222.10.191

Thanks for understanding,
celestial yours your CH Staff :D


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There's new roadmap, check it, it's in pic format only but "sounds" very confidently daring.

SongsOfConquest Roadmapv1220627

Oh, and there's 25% discount going as well. :D

Unveil the full news here.


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From June 23 to July 7 Steam have a big summer sale in their shop, of both old classics and newly released games, giving gamers the opportunity to find gems to play at lowered prices.

Among the deals available are:

Happy browsing and shopping!

Steam Summer Sale 2022 Banner


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Dev-vlog #45 - Sim turns, game balancing and much more!

This is one of hell important updates.

Also I cannot resist idea, that we are looking at Heroes III future alternative. The map scenery is really well done. We will see if there will come anything like ERM, to script the impossible. :D


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