The idea of this mod is to give players new choices, while saving ideas and vibe of the vanilla game. All factions get instruments to build new strategies, but you can still use your favorite from the original game, because this mode ENHANCES the game, not turns it into something completely new.
Discord server of Enhancement Mod: Discord.gg
HeroesCommunity thread: Heroescommunity.com
Articles
Heroes IV Enhancement Mod update 1.2 overview
Download Heroes IV Enhancement Mod v1.2
Mod manager
Mod manager introduced! You can run it with "H4MS_Manager.exe" and choose what modifications should be applied on your game.
H4EM 1.2 comes with some plugins included:
- TurnOrderMod. Hold Shift or toggle Caps Lock to see order of turns in combat.
- H4EM FixPack. It includes only bugfixes and minor changes, if you want to play original Heroes 4 but improved you should, no, you must use this!
- H4EMAI. Improves AI and gives it some bonuses. It uses configurable "difficulty profile" system so you always can correct AI if you think it's too strong or too weak.
- EnhancedAdvObjectPack. It includes new adventure objects added in EM 1.2 as well as objects from Equilibris 3.55 and H4ObjectPack. Turning this plugin on will make your game compatible with most maps made for Equilibris even if you are playing original version of the game!
Advanced Classes
Lots of advanced classes got buffs and reworks to make them unique and strong. Some of them can change the way you play drastically!
New buildings
Phylactery Forge (Death town): Grants visiting heroes Immortality.
Requires: Armory.
Cost: 6000 gold, 10 ore, 10 sulfur.
Cave Lair (Chaos town): Allows to recruit Trolls, Evil Eyes and Troglodytes for free (works like weaker creature portal but creatures cost 0 gold). Replaces Thieves Gauntlet building.
Requires: Den of Thieves or Orc Towers.
Cost: gold 4000, ore 8, crystal 2.
Order Library (Order town): Adds 1 extra order spell on every level of magic guild.
Requires: Magic Guild Level 1.
Cost: gold 2500, wood 2, ore 2, gems 4.
Adventurer's Guild (Nature town): Allows to hire Order and Death heroes in the tavern.
Requires Tavern.
Cost: gold 1000, wood 15.
War Institute (Might town): University with Tactics, Combat, Scouting and Nobility skills.
Requires: Fort.
Cost: gold 4500, wood 5, ore 5, crystal 1, sulfur 1, mercury 1, gems 1.
Town Conversion
Heroes with Grandmaster Nobility now can convert towns to their faction.
More info about town conversion here: Moddb.com
New abilities for creatures
Positive Morale (Minotaurs): This creature's morale can't get lower than +2. It is also immune to Sorrow and Despair spells.
Corruption (Venom Spawns): This creature's attack reduces target HP by 25% and applied healing or resurrecting effects by 75%.
Tactical retreat (Nomads): This creature can retreat from battlefield together with your heroes or on their own.
Gate Destroyer (Behemoths): This creature deals full damage to the castle gates.
Terrain walk (Dragon Golems): Creature ignores terrain penalties in combat (including quicksand).
Strikes and shoots twice (Gargantuans).
Invulnerable (Zombies): Creature resurrects loses at the start of its turn (power of resurrection = 10% of current stack HP).
Changed adventure map movement formula
Creatures with low movement were useless not only in combat, but also on adventure map because they slow down your army. Fast creatures on the contrary make your army significantly faster, so after playing Heroes 4 for a while you start ignoring creatures like trolls, earth elementals etc.
Enhancement Mod changes adventure movement formula to reduce difference between slow and fast creatures: maximum movement limit remains the same of 30, but minimum increased from 12 up to 20!
New adventure objects
Diamond of Purity: Allows to redistribute all skill points of hero who picks this gem.
Onyx of Change: Allows to redistribute all skill points of hero who picks this gem, but hero retains basic levels of primary skills.
Phylactery Forge: Grants visiting heroes Immortality.
Fountain of Venom: Grants visiting heroes Poison Attack for one battle.
Fountain of Bless: Grants visiting heroes Bless for one battle.
Sparkling Fountain: Reduces cost of visiting heroes spells by 2 for one battle.
EM 1.2 also supports objects from H4 Object Package by Karmakeld and Equilibris 3.55 (including artifacts). It's more than 200 new objects!
Fixes
Lots of bug fixes and QOL improvements to make Heroes 4 even better.
GOG Running We Love Games Sale; 5 Mods For The Games We Love
Feature 2 commentsGOG is running a big sale to celebrate the Valentine's period, so here's five games we love from the sale and a mod for each!
Heroes 4 Enhancement Mod town conversion guide
Feature 3 commentsGuide on town conversion mechanic in H4EM. Town conversion is a new mechanic introduced in H4EM, that allows to change the faction of the town to the...
Files
Heroes IV Enhancement Mod v1.2.1m
Full Version 2 commentsNew version of Enhancement Mod includes the latest advancements in modding of Heroes 4. Brand new adventure map objects with unique mechanics, support...
Heroes 4 Enhancement Mod Release v1.1.0c
Full Version 1 commentFirst big update for H4EM, introducing Heroes 4 Enhancement Mod AI Module v0.3, as well as some balance changes and more advanced classes reworks. Fix...
Heroes 4 Enhancement Mod Release 1.0.1
Full Version 9 commentsFirst full release of Heroes 4 Enhancement Mod (H4EM) introducing new buildings, abilities, town conversion and more!
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This probably has been multiple times reported due to how many buildings are affected, but hey, just to stay on the safe side: certain town screen buildings (e.g. Asylum town hall) shift a couple of pixels to the side when moused over (the "highlighted state" sprite is misaligned from the normal sprite). Doesn't happen with vanilla heroes4.exe. Been running both executables with Verok's OpenGL wrapper 1.51 at 1920x1080 and 1366x768.
Most melee creatures have an attack distance of 1 tile, but in a cramped situation they will sometimes come up close and attack at point blank. Is it at least theoretically moddable to somehow highlight this attack distance around creature stacks on the combat grid?
Smaller creatures seem to occupy squares composed of 2x2 or 4x4 tiles but larger ones are more tricky: they have a 6x6 base minus the corner tiles, so kinda circle. Is it moddable to highlight the tiles occupied by each stack at all times?
Is it possible to highlight a stack's destination tiles under the mouse pointer when ordering a stack to move? Precise stack positioning is extremely hard without the destination footprint clearly visible, especially due to how the combat grid is warped because of the pseudo 3D terrain.
These things are probably the biggest factor that made H4 so unpopular: there's no reliable way of knowing if a stack will end up in an enemy's melee range which exceeds a stack's footprint by 1 tile, and a stack's footprint itself is not even perfectly square for the larger creatures.
Thank you for your feedback and ideas! Heroes 4 battles are the most underdeveloped and unclear part of the game by far. Clarifying it is one of the goals of this mod, and some things you mentioned are in development.
Always highlighting a creature’s tile footprint in one color and its melee range in another would revolutionize this otherwise underappreciated game. A destination footprint shadow under the mouse pointer would be a godsend, too. The combat grid could be simply made of tiny crosses at the intersection of tiles, not this massive checkerboard with 50% of battlefield obscured by the darker squares (playing with the grid turned off is a mess!)
Please also consider streamlining the extra dwellings, like optionally allowing building both L2s for the AI and human players while disallowing the rest. Sadly 90% of the time the L2 choice has to be a tank because the L1s alone just have too little health to hang on. Also nearly all L2s are iconic, amazing and great to have both. With both L1s and L2s available, there’s more tactical freedom to picking just one L3 and L4. Currently the choice of L2 kinda nails the choice of L3 and to a lesser extent L4.
Moving guards break the AI on higher difficulties, the game is said to run a modified H3 AI and they never coded in an awareness of the neutral armies’ ability to move. Forcing stationary guards at all times greatly improves the AI’s survivability at higher difficulties where otherwise it tends to shoot its foot.
Thank you for your hard work. I’ve been missing the wacky style of H4 for so many years. It has these really archaic medusas with legs and horrifying visages like those on the pre-classical Greek pottery and minotaurs not dressed up like power fantasy LARPers. Also not everybody is wearing as much armor and bling as possible and those ridiculous gaits look almost like postmodernist art in 2024. Compared to the average fantasy setting of, say, a Ubisoft title—this is a goddamn gem.
Can AI use the extra town dwellings?
If so, it stands to reason to make just L2 dwellings mutually non-exclusive — otherwise the balance will be toppled.
Is there a way to edit the module so it only allows an extra L2 dwelling but no L3/L4 AND it’s possible for the AI to build and use the extra dwelling?
P.S. The new town buildings seem like the only bad idea in the entire mod, turned them off immediately.
Can You implement auto combat? Like in H3 hdmod.
Some maps, like Sea Politics, can't be opened when the H4EM plugin is applied. Error message "File Sea Politics is bad." The map loads correctly when the plugin is not applied, or if the game is launched from its original .exe.
Hello, I tried opening Sea Politics and it worked just fine. Can I ask you to give more details here or in EM discord: Discord.com
I'm using the GOG version of Heroes 4. It's a clean install and no other mods were applied before or after installing Heroes 4 EM.
I tested it with all plugins enabled, and with all plugins except H4EM disabled and it always gives me this error on Sea Politics and a few other maps, that I don't remember right now.
I tried it both with an edited options.json and the default options.json, and the error persists.
If I try often enough, sometimes the map does load correctly and let's me play. I then have no issue saving and reloading the file, but if I go Options>Restart Scenario, I also get the "File Sea Politics is bad." error message. If I try often enough, it will let me restart the map.
I tested it also on Ice Age (by spamming Alt+R=Restart Scenario), and here it always worked (spammed it for multiple minutes). On Demonary of Doom, it worked way more consistently than on Sea Politics, but every now and then I got the file is bad error still.
I also found this thread on heroescommunity dot com viewthread.php3?TID=10331 which talks about a similar issue when the Emerald Longbow and Nomad Blackbow were in custom artifacts.
Longbow and Nomad Blackbow are fixed in 1.2 version, if you have FixPack enabled it's not an issue. I'll investigate further, you can try turning on and off some parameters in options.json maybe it'll work. Does it crash when you move "h4em_tables.h4r" from "Plugins/H4EM/assets" somewhere else?
Yes, but much less so. It was ~90% crash chance and now it's like ~10% crash chance (not actual numbers, but it rather going by feeling).