If you want the most variety the game has to offer (and it sounds like you do) you should get the previous expansion as well - it adds a plethora of new stuff, including specializations, a new race (Halflings), new adventure map locations to explore, all sorts of stuff. It was a huge update to the game, many folks felt the AoW3 + Golden Realms was the game they always wanted. EL is not stand alone.
I’m sort of in between games at the moment. I’m tinkering around with pillars of Eternity on Path of the Damned, but I’m not sure how long that will last. I gave up trying to do it solo. I could go back to my Crusader Kings II game I started in Ireland, but I don’t think that game is ever going to really grab me. I may be too hung up on the marriages aspect of it, which is not an interesting part for me.
I’m wondering if now is the time I should play some vanilla AoW3 so I can appreciate the changes they made during their free updates before I install Golden Realms (which I have) and Eternal Lords (which I’m sure I will have at some point). Like I’ve probably said 100 times in this thread and others have said, I liked the game at release but never went back to it. From the info I’ve read the free updates and DLC seems to have made it a more interesting game.
BBB over at the official forums was kind enough to link me the spread sheet that contained all the (current?) information for the Race Governance upgrades. I cleaned it up a bit (formatting) and put it as an image, which I will spoiler for those who A) don’t want to know what the race upgrades are until they play and B) don’t want to have a huge image load when they come into the page. Enjoy! I’m going to read through it for real now, I wasn’t really paying attention to it while cleaning it up.
Racial Governance Upgrades
Refresh me – do you choose a military or econ benefit, or do you get both?
You have to choose which one you pick, but you can make that choice at each “tier” so you can go military for Patron and economic for Protector, for instance.
Reading through the list, and holy balls are some of those powerful. Super glad they give cool abilities and not lame ones.
Yeah, they’ve put a lot of awesomesauce into this since 1.0.
I particularly like the kitty-cats in AoW3, while I did not find them that engaging in AoW2 and Shadow Magic (what little I played of the latter).
How often does the DLC go on sale? Also have they listed the price for the Eternal Lords expansion?
$19.99 for the Eternal Lords DLC - probably 10% off when it first goes online, just as the previous DLC was also on sale for 10% when it dropped. No idea how often they go on sale though, I buy them when they come out and kind of don’t pay attention after that. AoW3 (vanilla) seems like it’s on sale fairly often, though.
Can you play MP with people who don’t own the expansions and still use the expansion features?
I expect that the answer to that is no. The DLCs have mechanics that the base game does not, so it would be kind of hard for them to work together. Generally, MP games of anything with different versions between players is an invitation to trouble unless a player is running something that only changes the cosmetics for his own setup.
Hi Edirr, actually it has been our policy not to split the multi-player community over DLC. Vanilla AoW3 is updated to the same code base as the Eternal Lords expansion (benefiting all players from some of the general improvements to gameflow). The Host determines which features are present on the map per the DLCs in his or her possession. Although non-dlc players can’t start as Tigrans for example, they could conquer a Tigran town and still be able to play with the cats in this way ;-)
That’s very nice of you guys. I’d also suspect that it’s quite the nice advertisement to a player who is thinking about picking up the expansion.
Thanks for the chart, BTF!
Excellent! So in essence the DLC is an unlock code for features that have been updated into the base game. Then you’re doing things very right indeed, which is yet another sign of why people are right to trust Triumph Studios to live up to its reputation for quality.
Most things I have seen go kaputt unless everyone is fully on the same version (including all DLCs etc). Many more companies should do things your way.
Yep, it’s the same strategy Paradox uses in their modern games (CK2, EU4). It works really, really, well. I played a game of Europa Universalis with a couple friends a few weeks back. One of the friends owned the base game but not any of the DLC, yet we were able to play fine and he was able to play with all the DLC features (as long as I was hosting). He liked a lot of the features enough that he picked up the DLCs on his own, so in that sense it may have been a win for Paradox as well.
I’m really happy to see more devs follow this sort of model. Splitting up the playerbase is bad, leaving previous (non-DLC) versions of the game on older patch revisions is bad. I really hope more people pick up on this approach.
Yeah, guess who has two withered undead thumbs and is buying this game?
