Astrologers Proclaim the Week of CS2: 10 Skins to Mark the Heroes of Might and Magic III Remake
Ubisoft announced a remake of Heroes of Might and Magic III at Gamescom Opening Night Live. Same game, rebuilt from scratch: the fixed overhead view is gone, replaced by a proper 3D world with a camera you can swing wherever you like. The package includes the original alongside Armageddon’s Blade and The Shadow of Death, all nine factions, online play for up to eight, and the return of Hot Seat. The thousands of community maps built over the last 25 years are meant to work from day one. Release is set for 2027 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S — and Heroes III Complete turned up on Steam officially that same evening.
Heroes III has a habit of surfacing where you’d least expect it. The artist behind AK-47 | Consequence of the Jinn, from the recent Arabesque collection, said outright that Heroes III was where he first came across djinn at all. We pulled that thread and ended up with ten CS2 skins that line up with the factions, the heroes and the memes of one of the most beloved strategy games ever made. Let’s get into it.
AK-47 | The Empress — Catherine Ironfist
- Factory new – $302.45
- Minimal wear – $145.74
- Field-tested – $135.50
- Well-worn – $131.18
- Battle Scarred – $132.27
The design is built around the Empress tarot card: a fair-haired woman in a crown, framed by a pattern of radiating sunbeams. Catherine opens The Restoration of Erathia, sailing home after her father’s death, and hers is the face most of us picture when we think of the box art. The overlap with the card runs deeper than the imagery, too. The Empress rules by birthright, not because she got to a weapon first — which is precisely Catherine’s role in that first campaign, the heir a collapsing kingdom reassembles itself around. It also happens to be one of the very few fantasy AKs that doesn’t tip over into cartoon territory: the deep blue and gold reads as heraldry rather than paint.
P90 | Grim — Sandro
- Factory new – $1.28
- Minimal wear – $0.52
- Field-tested – $0.51
- Well-worn – $0.38
- Battle Scarred – $0.60
The body is left bare, with ghosts streaming across the raw metal in every shade of green from acid to near-black. Emblems and loose strokes pick out the rest of the gun, and the magazine is a flat, heavy dark green.
That is the Necropolis palette exactly — swamp green over bone white — and Grim hits it more squarely than any other skin in the game. The man who wears those colours best is Sandro, the lich from The Shadow of Death, who spends the entire campaign methodically lying to everyone: his allies, his enemies, and you. He’s the one hero in Heroes III who wins by out-manoeuvring the table rather than out-fighting it.
M4A4 | Royal Paladin — Christian
- Factory new – $317.99
- Minimal wear – $120.43
- Field-tested – $116.67
- Well-worn – $122.30
- Battle Scarred – $104.99
The centre of the receiver is plated in bronze under intricate floral engraving, the silver magazine carries its own patterns and lettering, and the stock and handguard are grey with a scatter of black diamonds.
It looks like a ceremonial piece pulled from a Castle armoury — white stone, gold trim, griffins on the banners. The hero it belongs to is Christian, the knight whose speciality isn’t the sword or the spellbook but the ballista. He’s the one who wins engagements not with a heroic charge but with a siege engine hammering away from the same spot, round after round, and a formal, finely engraved weapon is exactly what a man of that rank would have hanging on the wall.
SSG 08 | Dragonfire — Mutare
- Factory new – $498.56
- Minimal wear – $380.55
- Field-tested – $368.93
- Well-worn – $365.06
- Battle Scarred – $366.94
A dragon takes up the body of the rifle, flame pouring from its nostrils, in blue, orange and grey, with a stretch of the barrel wrapped in a geometric pattern in browns.
Dragons in Heroes III are the currency of winning. Half of every long game on a big map came down to who reached the Dragon Utopia first and walked back out alive. Nobody took the theme further than Mutare of the Dungeon: in the Armageddon’s Blade campaign she drinks dragon blood and turns into one herself. A dragon specialist who ends up becoming the thing she commands.
AUG | Chameleon — Lizardmen
- Factory new – $138.75
- Minimal wear – $110.81
- Field-tested – $105.02
- Well-worn – $119.67
- Battle Scarred – $113.79
Black body, a green scale pattern across the background, and a chameleon mid-hunt on the stock. This is the most direct match in the whole list. Lizardmen are the only ranged unit the Fortress has, and the swamp faction always played from the back foot: hydras plugging a corridor, gorgons anchoring the middle, lizards picking off whatever wanders in. The AUG runs on the same logic in CS2 — you don’t pick up a scoped rifle to push, you pick it up to hold an angle and stay perfectly still until somebody else makes the mistake.
P90 | Shallow Grave — Necromancers and the Cloak of the Undead King
- Factory new – $74.00
- Minimal wear – $51.83
- Field-tested – $39.95
- Well-worn – $39.59
- Battle Scarred – $35.46
A second P90 on the list is a coincidence, though a fitting one: the Necropolis takes everything it can reach. There’s a skeleton ringed in red flame on the body, a translucent dotted pattern layered over the top, and grey sections marked with rune stones — the same ones jutting out of every other hill on a Necropolis map.
The name does the work on its own. A shallow grave is a badly dug one, and whatever’s in it is coming back out. That’s necromancy in a sentence: every battle you win leaves your army bigger than it was, not smaller. And once you’ve assembled the Cloak of the Undead King, the combination artefact from The Shadow of Death, what claws its way up isn’t skeletons any more — it’s liches.
Glock-18 | Water Elemental — Elementals
- Factory new – $88.03
- Minimal wear – $26.59
- Field-tested – $26.00
- Well-worn – $26.35
- Battle Scarred – $25.22
The Conflux is the most contentious faction in Heroes III. It only arrived with Armageddon’s Blade, cramming all four elements into a single town, and the result is still switched off in lobbies to this day for being flatly overtuned. The red and blue arguing with each other across this Glock is the faction in miniature: fire and water standing in the same army, both pretending this was always the plan.
M4A4 | Tooth Fairy — Kreegans (Inferno)
- Factory new – $22.90
- Minimal wear – $8.19
- Field-tested – $4.91
- Well-worn – $4.90
- Battle Scarred – $4.19
Muted reds, greens and beiges, with the Tooth Fairy at the centre looking about as unfriendly as she possibly could. The bottom of the magazine is covered in handwriting, and insects and human teeth are scattered across the body. Inferno operates on exactly this principle — take something familiar and turn it inside out. Imps, devils, a three-headed cerberus: folklore pushed until it’s uncomfortable to look at. The Tooth Fairy is the same trick, a children’s story character rendered honestly, as a creature that collects other people’s teeth.
One for anyone who went deep on Might and Magic lore: the Kreegans aren’t demons at all, they’re aliens who arrived on the planet by meteorite. Inferno is, technically, a space faction.
M4A4 | Desolate Space — "Astrologers proclaim the week of..."
- Factory new – $118.58
- Minimal wear – $26.54
- Field-tested – $17.25
- Well-worn – $16.00
- Battle Scarred – $15.13
And here’s that space angle in full. A cosmic backdrop with a skeleton in a spacesuit, purple tentacles reaching up towards it from below, and a rocket on the handguard wrapped in the same tentacles.
The astrologers line is known even to people who never played Heroes III. At the start of every week the game would proclaim the week of some creature and double its population, which settled the question of who was running the game rather quickly: the Week of the Angel and the Week of the Peasant landed somewhat differently. There were plague weeks too, halving whatever your towns had waiting for you. This skin is about those astrologers — the ones who looked up at the sky and saw, not stars, but very bad news.
P250 | Cassette — Paul Romero's soundtrack
- Factory new – $0.53
- Minimal wear – $0.20
- Field-tested – $0.13
- Well-worn – $0.12
- Battle Scarred – $0.14
We’ll finish on the thing most of us carried furthest out of 1999. The skin is a nod to nineties cassette design: a grey slide, horizontal bands of yellow, red and purple, and white Japanese lettering across the middle.
The Heroes III soundtrack has had a life entirely of its own for a quarter of a century — people still put the Castle and Rampart themes on in the background at work without going anywhere near the game. Paul Romero wrote them, and he returned to the series for Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era as well.
Which is where the real nerve of this announcement is. Ubisoft is promising reworked audio with voice acting, layered tracks and new cues tied to combat and spellcasting. That sounds fine right up until you remember that almost everything in this game can be touched except the music. If something else starts playing over a Rampart map in 2027, that one won’t be forgiven quickly.
Alex
Alex is an author and esports observer with more than seven years of experience. He specializes in analyzing new releases in the world of computer games, gaming services, and in-game economies. Alex shares practical experience and an expert perspective on the development of gaming, helping readers understand complex mechanics and stay up to date with the latest news.
