Completing Heroes of Might and Magic 3 – Island of Fire

Here we are again. This time we’re playing Island of Fire, which is from the base game. The objective is to kill a group of 40 Arch Devils on a lava island. The map has a mini-narrative about the Devils planning to invade the mainland, so your quest to kill them is like a pre-emptive strike at their leader. It’s a small map, but a pretty and well designed one. Something I like about these base game maps, which I feel can sometimes be lost in the DLC maps, is the simplicity and how they work a bit more cohesively. This means the maps are often easier – this one is – but that the experience of it is clearer. Anyway, without further ado…

For this map I had no option but to play as Rampart, but I was allowed to choose my starting hero. Because of the time limit on the map I chose Kyrre for her logistics specialty. Even at advanced level, it is just dumbfounding how far you can march across these smaller maps in a single turn. As you can see from the date in the bottom of the screenshot, I beat this map in FAR less time than it gave me. Maybe I should have pumped up the difficulty. I didn’t think the difficulty would matter much without another CPU on the map and the final fight being fixed regardless of it, but starting with the heap of resources you do on normal definetly contributed to how easy this was. After struggling with the Thousand Islands scenario, in my previous Heroes 3 completion post, I definetly overestimated this scenario.

My strategy was to get a tier 5 mage guild and use something ridiculous like implosion to nuke the stacks of enemy devils at the end, but I never did end up going back to my town after I picked up the angels: Quite early in the scenario you can find a blue key tent that will unlock the passage to 20 angels who will join your army for free. That made most the map a cakewalk. To my surprise, Devils were willing to join me. I got four small groups of them to join me without violence, hence the 28 of them in the army, and this further cemented the fact I could just brute force my way through the scenario without too much thinking.

There’s a whole lower portion of the map, which you can probably see from my mini-map, that I didn’t even explore. I didn’t have to. All the good artifacts I had spawned outside of town, and with that many tier 7 creatures I didn’t need the extra stats or experience that part of the map would allow me. It’s a bit of a shame, actually, since Kyrre was shaping out really well with the skills she got. It would have been fun to see her spiral and bask in the power fantasy, rather than dipping her toes into it for just a second and then winning.

I did record the final battle. Watch below if you so wish. Please ignore my tragic misclick, wherein I move my angels one hex and thus expose my archers. Let’s pretend I didn’t do that and that I’m actually a tactical genius.

This is a fun map. It takes thirty minutes maximum to complete, even if you’ve got your brain turned off on low difficulty. Going forward, supposing I don’t jinx myself and stop making Heroes 3 posts for another year, I will pump that difficulty up to normal.