Mysterious NETLODR.DAT file

Heroes II has a mysterious file named NETLODR.DAT, located in the Data folder. By its name, I always thought it contained some game data used for network games, but my curiosity led me to the point where I opened it in a hex editor.

The file starts with E8 05, then there are a lot of 0s, then some FFs, then more 0s. After the zeroes there is a string "Suffer Now" and the rest of the file seems to be some binary data.

The file is also present in H1, and it has the same contents as the H2 file. In fact, the H2 file was saved in May 1995, which probably means that it is the same exact file.

Project Ironfist actually has a nice decompilation of the original game, but neither this decompilation nor the disassembly of the game contain the string "NETLODR.DAT", meaning that the game never opens this file.

Anybody knows the purpose of this file? The game works fine without it (both theoretically, in the code, but also in practice). Is it some kind of easter egg that NWC left for us? But if yes, why both in H1 and H2?

ahahaha Search for some more years, and the "Suffer Now" will make perfect sense.

Joking... I didn't know there were such "unused" file.
Nice catch, @DarkAtom

If I recall correctly Heroes II is build upon Heroes I which may explain the file appearing in both. Heroes II contains a number of files directly from Heroes I as can be seen in point 1.10 in this nice Thread. Thus, if the file has a use it would have already been intended in Heroes 1. Maybe it, as you said, was about some network multiplayer test for loading data sent between computers

Ok, found it! So, indeed the file is intended for networking, but for the DOS version. If you try to connect via NetBIOS without the file, the game shuts down and leaves a string "Error opening file data\netlodr.dat", followed by the DOS prompt (when I have the file, it says "NETBIOS not found", because I didn't configure DOSBox for NetBIOS).

The file is not needed for the Windows version, because it is using the Windows 95 API to connect to NetBIOS.