No such release exist. HoMM II: PoL is an expansion pack and will not work without HoMM II: The Succession Wars already installed.
What you have described here really would fit into HoMM: Compendium Edition (DOS/Windows hybrid edition of HoMM 1 CD1 and HoMM II The Succession Wars bundled with Price of Loyalty expansion pack on a single CD). This edition was released a year after HoMM II: TSW (1996) and half-year after official PoL release. It was the last HoMM release with MS-DOS compatible HoMM 1/2 editions. You can use DOSbox to run these games. Also it can be played on old PC running Windows 98 or XP without problems.

This compilation is called HoMM Platinum Edition and was released in 2002.

CD-Audio will not work on Windows 10, AFAIK (only lossy audio). It explains the difference in soundtrack that You're hearing. You need Windows 7 or earlier system to get CD-Audio w/Opera working properly.

Didnt know that :), maybe i just buy it with 2,99 now to test. One question that somebody presented in the comments was about the low bitrate on the PoL soundtrack... would it be possible to somehow get an update on that? I mean, that's the one main reason why im here on the post chatting on this game :D. The Homm2 audio aahhhh :D. Gonna wait and see if you work your magic

TARNUM you know it all it seems :P Anyways, that is the pack i have, the compendium edition, And i know it should work with dosbox etc its still pain in the ass for some reason. Not usually with dosbox but with homm2. :/ MAybe i just try the gog version, its on sale, and coz im that lazy now!

*some necromancy is appropriate for this thread*

Thanks for the walkthrough and all the tips. First time I decided to look this up for HoMM 2 Gold (I beat the Roland campaign without walkthrough nor cheats of course). My attempts so far had to stop as I could tell I was screwed no matter how I sliced it. That's despite getting the Knight castle in the north-west and feeling like I was doing well, even getting some bone dragons, but Red being eliminated by Green around the time I consolidated the north-west meant Green became way too powerful.

Thing is: have any of you beaten this scenario WITHOUT the Elven alliance? Because yeah, I took the short cut here (not in the Roland campaign, I got the Dwarfs on my side there)
And I feel like I need proof the Elves aren't needed before I try this again :P

Technically I had the alliance but I didn't manage to get the elves in the north before the enemy killed them, so yes, it is possible without the elves. It's just one of those annoying hide-from-the-enemy-until-you're-ready kind of scenarios.

Good to know, thanks!

Given this another go in past half hour, making a dash for the north-west corner to get the goodies is REALLY not easy:
1) enemy (Blue) usually comes down in this valley, so far best result out of 3 is bypassing first Blue hero in swamp and getting to artifacts - but another Blue hero caught up just after and was impossible
2) last artifact still requires resources to acquire which I didn't have (2500 Gold needed, + 3 ores); ironic as on my previous blind playthrough I did get it but only significantly later
3) one of the artifacts is protected by a Black Dragon! what the hell

EDIT: so, my conclusion is this scenario - or at least this north-west rush strategy - relies too much on luck, and if you don't have the Elven alliance, then you won't have the force to deal with the black dragon guarding the artifact (in the context of that rush). I might try again later, best outcome so far was successful retrieval of artifacts (except black dragon one) and retreat to south-west... but then the Blue faction sent 2 heroes to my base (apparently chased by the Red) and that was game over.

EDIT2: finally, I won! and while I did apply the north-west rush strategy (only the black dragon artifact was collected later from defeating a Green faction hero), and got lucky the enemy didn't rush me, I did NOT attempt to 'flee' to the north-east and work backwards: I did it the straightforward way, one castle at a time. Later, Sir Gallant or whatever slipped through my 'net' (evaded my main hero) and started conquering my western castles while I finished them off in the east... once I had full control of the east, it was easy to finish the Green faction off including Sir Gallant - then build up the necessary forces to defeat Kraeger.
I had way over 1K skeletons by the end of the game, pretty epic!

Finally, I completed the Price of Loyalty campaign!

That final scenario against the Necromancer 'cabal' was epic but also kind of bullshit. Once again, luck is a decisive factor (the Red faction managed to teleport insane stacks onto the main landmass to the south-west, something which forced me to 'farm' for weeks while making use of that 'block stone liths portal with any hero' game exploit), although (as I've just explained) you can strictly speaking make it if you have enough time on your hands (whereas in the Betrayal's End scenario - the only one from HoMM II Gold for which I needed a walkthrough, luck is truly decisive as, if you're unlucky, you will lose no matter what).

Not sure if this is intended or not but Red, Yellow and Violet never left their land and never stepped into that 2-way portal, which made the mission manageable.

True, there is one Red super hero (for me he had 500 liches, 150 vampire lords, 47 bone dragons and some other units) but there is that great "feature" of AI in this game that they split their army every time they capture a castle. This is so easy to exploit - simply use Dimension door and conquer a few castles as quickly as possible, town portal back home and let him recapture each one. He left all bone dragons and vampire lords in one castle (no hero there, captain with 0/0/2/2 stats, so even those dragons and vampires are no match for your good hero), then 100 liches in each castle. So when I finally attacked him in his castle, he only had 200 liches and went down pretty easily.

This splitting of army in all castles is really the biggest flaw of AI and abusing it makes almost every mission quite trivial (though some fights and stunts can still be pretty epic and fun :-) ).

Red is "intended" to stay locked in their zone - except for that one hero in the southwest corner - but if they learn Dimension Door they can sneak out. This also means you can use it to sneak in to conduct raids and then town portal back out with the artifact.

Getting them to divide their forces seems to be the only reasonable way to defeat the red side. Whether they meant for you to do that or to spend eternity gathering troops to equal them is anyone's guess.

In Heroes 3 they no longer split their stacks in every town but this usually means they leave them mostly undefended so it's not much better. The devs never really figured out how to craft interesting challenges in this series. They just began to focus more and more on linear "quest" progression and forcing the player to stall for time. Then we got Heroes 4 where the "challenge" is just putting one way portals outside every town for the AI to use, which is easily countered by just keeping all troops in town and running around with overpowered heroes by themselves.