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.)
