fheroes2 game engine for Heroes of Might and Magic II gets even more AI upgrades

Fully playable but they're not done yet. The team behind the Heroes of Might and Magic II game engine reimplementation continue to improve it even further for playing it on modern platforms. This free and open source reimplementation is simply awesome, the best way to play the classic.

Version 0.9.17 was released recently with these highlights:

• Further audio improvements: add a sound for Freeman's Foundry, fix delays in MIDI music, fix many issues and crashes related to audio
• Expand initial Evil Interface to another in-game dialogs and elements
• Add huge AI improvements: add Courier role for heroes, AI defend castles more aggressively and hires heroes efficiently
• Add ability to change hotkeys within the game
• Improve Polish, Ukrainian, French and Norwegian translations
• Fix several places related to logic on Adventure Map
• Over 40 bugs are fixed since 0.9.16 release

Giving a little more information to us over email, one of the developers gave us a longer explanation of the changes:

Audio was significantly improved since the previous release. The team fixed issues with MIDI music playback delays on Adventure Map, multiple possible crashes with audio synchronization, extra sounds appearance in castle's window and etc. Such cases were very rare but nobody likes a buggy game. As a bonus Freeman's Foundry now has its own ambient sound on Adventure Map. Walk your hero nearby it to hear!

"Evil" interface finally got some proper attention. In the original game this type of interface was applied only to a limited number of dialogs. The list of dialogs was expanded and now some windows to have a proper "evil" look.

AI has been greatly enhanced in this release. The team added a new Courier role for AI heroes to focus on supplies delivery for more stronger heroes. AI now is smart enough to use Adventure Spells efficiently and also to estimate the number of needed heroes for the kingdom. Lastly, AI will defend its castle more aggressively instead of leaving them empty and defenseless.

As per many player requests the team added an ability to change hotkeys for in-game events within the game. Now you can set any combinations to improve your gameplay skills.

Besides this the team fixed multiple places with logic on Adventure Map, closed some visual issues with dialogs and improved translation for multiple languages. As usual more than 40 bugs were fixed since the last release.

Available to download on GitHub. You do also need to grab the data from GOG.com which it requires to run.