There’s this one turn-based strategy/tactics game that took up as much of my time as Sid Meier’s Civilization-series games back in the day. That game was Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Restoration of Erathia and it was first released for the PC more than 2 decades ago in 1999.

I remember buying the game simply because I enjoyed playing Heroes of Might and Magic II which was released 3 years earlier in 1996. The gameplay for both games were similar and is divided into two parts. In the first part, players control their heroes moving about an over-world in the form of a beautifully drawn 2D map, repleted with buildings, resource mines, towns, treasures and monsters. The over-world is further divided into two parts, the surface and subterranean layers.

Towns are important as they serve as bases for the player’s heroes and contain among other things, structures to recruit and upgrade units, learn spells, earn resources and add to the defenses of towns. Resource mines and buildings can be captured on the overworld and they contribute resources to the recruitment of units and the building of town structures.

Combat is the 2nd part of the game, where the player’s hero’s units are placed on one side of the screen with the opposing side’s units arrayed on the other side. In this turn-based tactical combat mode, players aim to destroy the opposing heroes army with minimal losses on their own side with a combination of magic, tactics and raw numbers (in terms of number of units).

Depending on the map, each game can take quite a while with each turn representing a day. I just finished a game against five to six AI opponents (I can’t remember the exact number), and it took 9 months of in-game time to defeat each and everyone of them, and I even went about looking for the Grail artifact buried somewhere in the overworld. Yup, this game is a time sink in the truest sense!

So I playing the game exclusively on the Steam Deck and what I had initially was Heroes of Might and Magic III: HD Edition which is available for purchase on Steam. While the game had updated graphics and looked really great, the game didn’t had the expansions that came with the original Heroes III game, and it didn’t come with a random map generator. And I noticed that the A.I’s difficulty was dialed up to maximum.

I decided to get Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Complete from GOG.com instead. It doesn’t have the fancy upgraded graphics as the HD Edition, but it does have everything else that the HD Edition seem to be missing AND proper AI difficultly levels. In order to run the Complete edition on the Steam Deck I had to do the following:

  • Switched over to Desktop mode on the Steamdeck
  • Installed Lutris
  • Used Lutris to install the Complete edition from GOG.com
  • Run Heroes3HD.exe to generate the HD_Launcher.exe file
  • Add the HD_Launcher.exe to appear in the Steam Deck’s interface.

The game works like a charm. I’m currently on my third skirmish game. Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Complete deserves a spot on your Steam Deck’s library. Do check it out.