- A reference guide and manual in Russian for Heroes 3.

I've long wanted to determine the impact of various skills and spells on the damage dealt in combat. To find out which skills and spells are beneficial and which are not, why 15% defense is stronger than 30% attack, what the benefit of luck is, and so on. Various issues have been touched upon in different forum threads, but it never went beyond 1-2 isolated examples. I performed the calculations using the total damage formula D(sum)=[D(bas)+MD(bas)+M(of)+M(luck)]*[1-M(def)], as presented in the "Physics of Might and Magic" guide. As a basis, I took the Attack and Defense skills, the chance of Luck occurring, and spells of the 1st level that increase Attack, Defense, and reduce Damage (all at the Expert level). I did not consider spells that affect the base damage D(bas) – they are individual for each monster. I did not consider the Ranged Attack skill and spells that affect ranged damage, as well as spells of higher levels – they act similarly to simple melee spells. I considered 4 combat scenarios: - The attacking and defending monsters are the same, attack = defense, i.e., the damage modifier = 0; - The attacker is weaker than the defender by 28 units (attack – defense), i.e., the damage modifier stops decreasing further; - The attacker is stronger than the defender by the same 28 units; - The attacker is stronger than the defender by 60 units, i.e., the damage modifier stops increasing further. For clarity, I took monsters with the necessary parameters (and, as a hero, some mage with zero combat skills, and for cases of hero specialization – with skills of 10-10, which is equivalent). And I made one condition: since the base damage modifier MD(bas) depends only on the parameters of the monsters and is always present, I took it as a conditional unit of damage (100% - highlighted in red in the table), and calculated the influence of other factors relative to this value (without rounding). Relative changes in parameters in each of the 4 scenarios are shown in blue. The detailed results of the calculations are presented in the attached table, all values are in %. The calculated values may differ by 1 unit from those produced by the AI in combat (probably due to rounding). And here an interesting point emerged, not noted in the "Physics of Might and Magic" guide (may AmberSoler forgive me, I asked him this question). Luck is indeed affected by the MD(bas) modifier, but only if it is negative. That is, if a Fairy attacks an Archangel, with a modifier of -70%, the damage will be 30% of the base, and luck will bring not 100%, but also only 30% of the base damage. A similar situation occurs with a negative modifier for the Attack skill – M(of) will give an increase only to these 30%, i.e., 9%. At the same time, if you change the modifier, for example, by casting Bloodlust, then both parameters – M(of) and M(luck) – will increase accordingly.