I also bought HOMMIV, but I didn't like it and reverted back to playing HOMMIII, which first brought me into the franchise, until HOMMV came out at which point I converted to that. With Tribes of the East, especially, it is a very good game.

I also missed out on the original King's Bounty for the same reasons you mention (plus in 1990 I was too young and my family did not yet have a computer). I have actually first heard of King's Bounty: The Legend purely by chance on a HOMMV-oriented forum and it got glowing praise, so I quickly downloaded the demo and it's great. I hope to buy the full version.

You know, my family didn't have a computer until HOMM3 came out, either. I got to play Heroes at friends' houses and that worked out well since you can do smaller maps in a couple of hours.

This game really is great, though the best connection it has to Heroes is the battle system, but even after passing through publisher to publisher and amazingly remaining somewhat intact, the developers of Heroes never seemed to quite be able to fix the cheap qualities of the battles. Computer AI abusing spells and abilities, overpowered factions and unbalanced cost vs strength of hiring and building are just a few of the major problems with the Heroes series. Some people refuse to play HOMM3 with the Armageddon's Blade expansion just because of the Elemental castle. The second, third and fourth level creatures in that town are all classified as fourth level creatures in Heroes 2, and the Heroes 3 expansion essentially took the stats from the previous game for the elementals and put them all in the same castle.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that King's Bounty seems to have managed to take the Heroes battle system and fixed it to make it much more fair. The Scouting skill also gives you a good idea of whether you'll be able to win or not, and it's pretty accurate. While it isn't an online multiplayer game, there are other heroes wandering about the map, and some of them play roles in certain quests, but others are just there to beat and take their artifacts, just like in HOMM. You can also siege certain castles, but you don't actually "own" any of them. Instead, you can get a reward by having a new person take the castle and sell new goods and troops to you. Or, you can make mistakes that impact your game negatively or make you miss out on some bonuses. If you've played the demo, you probably have a good idea on what this game is like: it's basically a long series of fetch quests and treasure hunting, so if you like that, you'll love this. There are also a ton of battles to fight, and they don't come back, or at least they haven't as long as I've been playing. I consider that a good thing as well.

I did answer in your thread asking about DRM, but I'm not 100% positive that the game doesn't have online registration. It would be a shame, but at least in my case, I got it as a gift. However, as you see, I play games as old as Heroes 2 in the present day, and I will be very sad if I go to install King's Bounty on a completely different computer 5-10 years from now and it won't let me play. :(

My family got our first 'real' computer around 1994/1995 (I no longer remember precisely), but that was long past the original King's Bounty and I was not aware of the HOMM franchise at the time. Ever since getting HOMMIII, however, this has been pretty much a family game for us and I played hotseat games many a night with my sister and cousins. Ah, good memories... :)

Yes, Conflux was very unbalanced. It was too easy to win when playing the Elemental side and we made an agreement that nobody will play that particular castle.

Yeah, I really liked what I saw in the demo. This game seems to be very good indeed.

Yes, I found your answer - thanks!

That's precisely why I refuse to buy games with online activation. I sometimes like playing some games even after they are 10 or more years old. 10 years ago 3DO was still going strong, but where is it now? Dead, gone, defunct! If their games required online activation, their online activation servers would now be down and we couldn't play their games any more. That's precisely why I refuse to buy any game that has online activation, although the game may be excellent in other ways. :(

BTW: I hear that DRM might have been completely removed from the Russian version in a patch. Hopefully, we will get the same treatment with the English version and online activation (if it exists) will be removed. For now, we can only envy the Russians! I suppose they made the game, though, so they do deserve it first.

I can now confirm that the game does not require online activation and have bought the full game! :)

Some people even take it a step further and won't install Armageddon's Blade at all to prevent randomized players ending up with the Conflux. I always consider it an extra challenge when the AI gets the elementals, but I'm nutty and finished a lot of HOMM2 maps on Impossible mode. I can't say I finished ALL of them, though!

If the DRM gets removed completely, that would be good, but I don't really feel a need to run the game from my harddrive as opposed to the DVD drive. However, I think they did this because many players are having problems with the game detecting the current patch as an emulator somehow. That's why I haven't installed the patch yet, but they may need to remove the DRM to fix it. For whatever reason, it's a plus in my book.

How about Pyramid Natasha:)

Well, if we played random races, then we would restart if somebody ended up with a Conflux. This was the case, even though we tended to play cooperative games against the computer, rather than against one-another.

Yeah, after finding out that King's Bounty: The Legend does not have online activation and does not have limited installs, I am no longer concerned about whether the DRM will be removed completely or not. I don't have a problem with disk-checks either, so I am happy with the state of the game as it is now!

The russian patch seems to remove the drm. I ended up using it because of frequent crashes and the english patch not being available. I've not applied the english patch (and it seems that atari is not supporting the game - but the developers are - so big plus to the developer and huge negative to atari).