Manticores work for me, regardless of patches, as long as I have hardware video acceleration turned off. If you can't (or don't want to) do it in installation or in the game (it's been a long time, and I don't know what options other computers may have), you can do it manually:Run "regedit". (From the Start menu, choose "Run" and type "regedit".)
Navigate the tree to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/New World Computing/Might and Magic VII". (If it's somewhere else, use the "Find" function to find "Use D3D". Make sure you're not looking at the wrong game.)
Change the "Use D3D" value from 1 to 0. (Right click on "Use D3D" and select "Modify".)
You won't get blood splats, colored lights or tinting (which you won't need because the creature types will naturally look different) without hardware acceleration, and blocky creatures won't be smoothed, but you'll be able to target creatures much more accurately. (Hence, I prefer it this way.) And you'll be able to see (and kill) the manticores.
BV
