I edited later. Sorry about that. ;)
also 75% off on Steam now.
Did they ever update the game so you could get tooltips on structures and stuff on the main map after revealing it but don’t currently have it within line of sight? There are a variety of structures and I didn’t want to memorize them. I submitted the suggestion and he sounded like they would do it, but I haven’t seen an update that actually did it.
Y’all!
There’s a giant mod, the Empire Building Mod, that seems awesome. Played around a bit with it and it’s not quite an expansion’s worth of new content, but it’s a very welcome rebalance with a ton of new units and a hero skill progression rework. Super cool stuff. It even has a manual!
Also, Triumphant Heroes is pretty great. Needs the compatibility mod to work with Empire Building, but they go great together.
I frickin’ love this game all over again. Which is good, because, ahem, a 4X hasn’t come out that’s really stuck with me in quite a while.
(@robc04 nope, they never did. Which is dumb, but oh well.)
Thanks. Crap, one of the devs told me that they should be able to do it. I really should play this again. It has the best tactical battles in a game like this. Cool that people are making big mods for this too.
Normally, I’d wonder why bother rejiggering everything in a game as thorough as Age of Wonders? But it looks like the guy who made the Empire Building Mod approached it with a very specific overarching design idea instead of just throwing in stuff because “wouldn’t it be cool if…?”
I mean, anyone who can justify a mod with this:
Great find, Adam. Let us know how the mods hold up.
-Tom
Mod looks like it has some neat gameplay changes as well - tones down heroes some.
and I’m with Adam on AOW3 making the other TBS’s in the genre feel substandard. Civ VI just hasn’t been that interesting, and GalCiv3 is just comptetent to me at this point (though I see potential, it might take Crusade to do it)
The only real knock on AOW3 is the ancient engine- which is why I want an AOW4, even if it was just AOW3 done in 64-bit.
I recently played the game again for a week or two and noticed that AIs became more aggressive. If a year ago they were storming seals at around turn 60, now they start around turn 45. Anyone else feels like the game is too short? I mean, I have a build order for the first 30 turns for my capital, so it’s mostly the execution of a predetermined strategy…
Re: recent TBS games and AOW3’s position in this hierarchy
I was under the impression that Endless Legend was a bit better than this one?
Nope. AoWIII is a game that works best for wargamers and tacticians. Endless Legend falls short here. What EL offers is a fuller diplomacy experience, but I find the rest of the game unegaging thanks to everything else AoWIII does better.
Thanks for the feedback. :)
It really depends what you’re after. The battles in AOW3 are probably the best in any recent game like this. The 4X trappings to me are lighter than many 4X games. I think exploring, finding loot, and fighting to level up until you’re strong enough to go on the offensive is the focus.
Endless Legend is more of a typical 4X game, albeit with its own twist on some things. The tactical battles are not very good. Each faction is pretty unique and offers a quest chain in addition to the usual victory types.
Really, they are both very good at what they do, but they do play pretty differently than each other.
Endless Legend has better music, graphics, world building, narrative, ‘flavour’, and obviously city building and planning.
Age Of Wonders 3 has better tactical combat, tactical combat AI - and because of the heavy focus on tactical combat, a much better AI overall. It’s probably better balanced and much faster paced.
I’d agree with robc04 that they’re both very good games, but they’re hard to compare because they set out to accomplish very different things. I do think EL and AoW3 are way ahead of the competition at this point. I used to fault EL hard on its AI, but it appears to be a genius compared to Civ VI most of the time.
Well said. While on the surface they should be easy to rate against each other (both being fantasy 4X), they’re very different games and what is “better” really depends on what you want out of a strategy game at the moment.
And while the tactical AI in AOW3 is great, it does cheat via map vision on the strategic level, which really helps it. It knows exactly what cities are lightly defended and where your armies are, which can get pretty annoying to me.
Age of Wonders 3 is the only 4X I return to regularly and then have an absolute blast each time. It helps the AI knows how to play the game (though I’m worried this new and very cool mod/expansion that @inactive_user pointed out may be breaking the AI a little, just because I wonder if it knows how to build the new buildings and level up heroes with the new skills?)
Regarding Endless Legend, for some reason I can never really get into that. I love the art style, but it’s just such a plodding game with little happening turn to turn (where as in AoW3 holy crap I have a massive checklist of things I want to accomplish every turn and the action starts immediately with a decent grouping of low- and mid-tier units and a couple of heroes). I’ve only finished one or two games of Endless Legend despite trying to get into it and buying most of the expansions multiple times, for some reason I keep bouncing off that one.
AoW3 is timeless for me, at this point it’s the best 4X game out there. The biggest problem is its existence diminishes all the other 4X games that aren’t really pulling off even half of what this one is doing. Even great games like Civ VI, Stellaris, and Conquest of Elysium 4 are excellent in their own ways and do some (or even many) things very well, but fall short in at least a few categories over what Wonders 3 pulls off.
I am closing in on my first victory (wussy King difficulty, 4p FFA, medium random continents, High Elf Warlord) with the mod and it seems to be holding up pretty well.
The new units are indeed thoughtful, and not just because I was struck by the same diagram @tomchick pointed out upthread. They offer actual choices - doubling down with a tier-2 elfy super-archer sounds awesome, but…man, do you really want to give up Unicorn Riders? Because they’re much-needed speedy beef in a lot of cases. (Sidenote: Man, Unicorn Riders are awesome.) And the tier-1 longbows are really quite badass already, do you really need the upgrade?
But the tier-2 super-archers are complete monsters. So…figure it out ;)
I actually think the pacing changes are more interesting and add more to the game, though. City growth slows down by 50/turn every level past Outpost, which means you really do need to invest in Store Houses and Public Baths (+100 pop in the mod) to grow big cities. Not sure if research costs more or if it’s just a function of the slower overall growth, but I’m on turn 46 and haven’t even researched Manticores yet, much less cleaned all the riff-raff lesser spells out of my research tome. This is a good thing!
As for the AI, well, I picked a game setup that I knew from previous experience that the AI is relatively easy to manipulate on (FFA/play as good, unless you run into dedicated evil dudes you can maintain peace pretty easily until it’s clobberin’ time). And I steamrolled the first dude with a mad rush on his cap early, so I knew the game was in hand by turn 15 or so. So my guess is the strategic AI is no different than ever.
They definitely do use the new buildings and units and such, and crank out the usual mixed stacks of support/infantry/cavalry/ranged. If anything, I would suspect that the pacing favors the AI’s tendency to over-develop its cities at the expense of early military, and it’s certainly doing a fine job of clearing lairs and such in its own territory.
Heroes aren’t really “toned down” with Triumphant Heroes. They’re more specialized, because you can’t just grab the same four skills on every dude and call it good. You have to pick, uh, let’s call them keystone skills to unlock things like most of the army buffs and the better hero-only abilities, and they’re distributed relatively thoughtfully. The keystones give you things like +1 defense and +1 ranged, though, so they never feel like wasting a level-up. Also the straight stat buffs all start at a 4 cost (except HP), which makes them pretty much suckers’ bets. This is cool!
…But man, yeah, a few items and a couple levels and you should have a pretty badass killing machine on your hands as usual. But it’s kinda more fun to get there, so I’m thumbs-up on the Triumphant Heroes mod so far for sure.
(Sidenote: I have played a TON of AoW3. I would have been shocked if I were seriously challenged by the AI with these settings. This is not an indictment of the mod.)
(Also: Sweet Christmas, I love how every race/class combo has its own things that feel like cheating in AoW3. High Elf Mounted Archers are absuuuuuuuuurd.)
(Furthermore: I’ll do a more challenging game - Emperor/2v2 locked/medium - next, I think, and see how it feels. Theocrat/Goblin, because all will fall before the Swarm.)
I like doing 6 player FFA on a large map but I set each player to their own team to disable diplomacy and turn it into a pure wargame. I just love it.
If only you could agree to do MP with mods- but people would argue over the mods.
That sounds pretty sweet Adam. Thanks for the writeup.
Wow, I have well over 300 hours according to Steam, although when I reviewed it that probably 30 extra hours due to writing stuff down while playing. Figure another 10% due to me letting the game sit while I was away from the computer.
AOW3 is one of those games that make me wonder why the heck I spend so much time chasing new shiney things. I haven’t played this since May 2015! It’s a hangup on my part I wish I had better control of. But, when you find something new that is good it feels wonderful. Even with the bad diplomacy AI in Civ VI I had such a good time playing those 6 games.
Man I love AoW3. Thanks for this bump and the mod suggestion, Adam! I remember a few other mods for other AoW games in the series, so one this broad isn’t uncommon. It sounds like the unit and hero specialties make for more fun trying out all the races again though.
This is my answer to that issue, which isn’t uncommon against high level AI in AoW: expand, expand, expand.Your initial hero needs to get out of the city and get into as many crypts and spots of power as possible. But you really need to expand quickly for a few reasons. First, the AI guns for anything undefended. Second, the AI will focus on weak things to a fault. Keep a couple of cities well defended, and you’ll know where the battles are coming (the weaker cities) and you can expect to hopefully ambush hero stacks as they approach if you are careful. Always have a backup city so your production from one doesn’t kill your whole game. You also need time to get your first and subsequent super stacks to get mid and late game going. You know, those stacks with 1-2 heros and very upgraded troops with good experience and spell buffs.
At least that’s how I play. I know there are tons of other methods. My games go in this order: explore, expand, build-build-build, super stack creation, culling the weaker enemy factions, taking over the last remaining enemies.