Movement around the map | Information about gameplay Heroes III HD Edition Guide
Last update: 11 May 2016
Moving around the map is, without a doubt, the most important aspect of gameplay, without which one wouldn't be able to defeat enemy units, or capture other cities. Because of that, it's important to understand how this mechanic works.
Each hero receives a certain amount of movement points at the beginning of each day - thanks to them he's able to move around the map. The amount of movement points a hero has is influenced by a number of factors:
- Visiting certain places / buildings, such as Stables, which increase the amount of movements points your hero has for a certain amount of time;
- Skills and artifacts - there's a number of skills, like Logistics, and artifacts, like Boots of Speed, which increase the amount of movement points;
- Type of units your hero "carries" with himself. The hero receives an appropriate bonus, or penalty, depending on the speed of his units.
The most important factor is the unit speed, of which existence a lot of people have no idea about - the type (or to be more precise, the speed) of your slowest unit directly influences the amount of movement points your hero receives at the beginning of a day. This looks like this:
Unit speed | Amount of movement points |
1-4 | 15 |
5 | 16 |
6-7 | 17 |
8 | 18 |
9-10 | 19 |
11+ | 20 |
As you can see, carrying slow units can be a bad idea, especially when you want to have a highly mobile hero. Obviously, the table shows the values of a hero without any artifact and/or skill influencing his movement point pool.
Additionally, the type of soil your hero moves through has a huge impact on the range he can travel, which looks like this:
Type of soil | Influence on a single move point |
Cobblestone road | 50% |
Gravel road | 65% |
Dirt Road | 75% |
Dirt, Grass, Lava, Subterranean | 100% |
Rough | 125% |
Sand, Snow | 150% |
Swamp | 175% |
To better understand the table, we can use an example. If a hero has 16 movement points, it will, in normal conditions, while travelling on the grass, allow him to cover the distance of 16 fields. If, however, the hero moves on a Cobblestone Road, he will be able to cover the distance of 32 fields (because moving to each field costs 50% of movement points), and while moving through swamps he will be able to cover the distance of 9 fields.
A thing worth noting, is the fact, that moving diagonally costs 1.5 movement points per field.
The last thing influencing the hero's travel speed is a mechanism called "native terrain". It means, that each city (units coming from that city) has a "favorite' type of terrain - heroes from this city will move around that terrain as if they were moving through the grass, without any penalty to movement speed, while "foreigners" will move in accordance to the above table.
Below you will find a table representing the type of terrain, together with the fraction, for which a given terrain can be called a "native" one:
City | Native Terrain |
City | Grass |
Rampart | Grass |
Tower | Snow |
Inferno | Lava |
Necropolis | Dirt |
Dungeon | Subterranean |
Stronghold | Rough |
Fortress | Swamp |