Just emphasizing this. Never overlook the easy to cast buffs and leaving your stack permanently buffed if you can handle the upkeep. Another good technique is using a decently strong summoned unit to add to your early exploration and resource grabbing. When no longer needed you can kill the unit off. And finally, take utmost advantage of any benefit the units of your faction have. If you roll around with a lot of ranged units, use slow, binding, fumes, etc on your enemies. Conversely, if you roll around with heavy melee troops of destruction, haste yourself, blind your opponent, etc.
As you learn the units/spells/skills, you’ll understand the combos that become available. Take advantage of as many as you can.
It’s funny you say that because I completely agree, I’m not even sure what I’d want in the next one, this one is so well made in its attention to every detail.
Perhaps they could pull a CA and head the opposite direction, whereas CA went fantasy w/ TWW they could perhaps go historical or something other than fantasy. Whatever it is though, for this dev team I’m on board.
I can think of a couple things that would fall into a “nice to have” category:
Better diplomacy.
Better subterranean map design/generation. Improved strategic AI and other features/specializations that better utilize water tiles/maps.
One or two new victory conditions.
A reworked stealth vs AI system so specializations like Partisan aren’t 33-50% useless in single player skirmish maps vs AI.
I have a long list of things I would want changed/improved lol.
What’s are good settings for a noob skirmish? Map size, # of opponents, etc.?
Medium map, you play as Human Sorceror, Knight opponents.
Humans have few drawbacks, get a production bonus, have healing supports, have strong Knights.
Sorceror is very forgiving, and you can make a lot of mistakes and still win. The basic, easiest strategy for this combo is to focus on summoning, and tech your cities up to Knights.
Also, I really enjoyed the campaigns. Some were tough and a bit gimmicky in that to work you had to know what was going to happen, but they were still better than most other strategy games with campaigns. I was extremely invested and attached to my main characters.
I would have been too, I was really hoping they would at least sell DLC packs with new races and/or heroes, or even just new map scripts, treasure, spells to research, and the like. Shame. If I understand correctly the problem is the game’s memory overhead is too large for more “content” to work out, or something. Hopefully Age of Wonders 4 is a 64-bit game. :)
32 or 64-bit won’t make any difference with AI. Multithreading can help speed things up in regards to turn times, which might allow a dev to implement extra routines he/she normally wouldn’t have.
The vast majority of how good an AI is going to be comes down to the skill of the AI developer and how much time/effort is put into that aspect of the game. It’s not a hardware problem, it’s a project priority problem. Civ6’s diplo AI isn’t atrocious because they need a better engine, it’s atrocious because they clearly didn’t spend any time on it.
I thought AOW3’s diplomacy system, minimal as it is, is okay. Civ VI’s problem has me concerned though. I was super excited about it for MP but… bad diplomacy in SP is also bad diplomacy in MP.
If there is a wart on AoW 3, its the diplomatic AI. That is one thing that has seriously hampered my fun in the game. Time and time again, I am winning, and there is another AI that is fairly large and powerful (less so than I), and it will refuse to ally with me, which just turns into a long, drawn out conquest slog.
One of the things I’d have liked to see would be better surrender behaviour. Sword of the Stars is the only one that has really nailed it - frequently in the late game in SotS, I would convince an AI to surrender by transmitting data on where all my planets were. Once they saw how many existed, they’d often fold!
I had an AI surrender to me in my current campaign, they only held one city, so quite small, I didn’t initiate this request, they just hit me up and said we surrender. It has been awhile since I’ve played so I forgot what happens when an AI surrenders to you, amusingly I discovered you get that city and they and their army join you (which was nice for another reason I had not anticipated, their hero had a good dozen items I inherited which I got to distribute around to mine!).
Yeah, I like teams as well. And seals help give the AI’s something else to focus on, but it looked like the last time I had them on the AI could even get a bit fixated on them and stop doing a proper job of defending cities at the expense of chasing seals.
Regardless, the number of settings for a campaign have helped immensely for replay-ability and fitting the game to each players unique tastes, every time I fire this one up I’m pleasantly amused by all of my options scattered throughout almost every aspect of the game and campaign set up.
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Yeah, I like teams as well. And seals help give the AI’s something else to focus on, but it looked like the last time I had them on the AI could even get a bit fixated on them and stop doing a proper job of defending cities at the expense of chasing seals.
[/quote]Yeah, this is something I noticed when I last played. It was often trivial to start taking seals, then not defend them, and flank the AI cities while they camped the seals.
Hey @Scotch_Lufkin - thanks for your video - it helped me figure out a couple of things I’d been missing.
I’m still not good at AoW3, but it’s holding my attention more than a 4X game has for a long time. I haven’t quite figured out a class and race combination I like.
