I strongly encourage you to start without the Tempest expansion. It introduces a number of new features, some of which can mess considerably with balance and gameplay - and some of the mechanics are particularly frustrating for newer players.
AoW3 has the best tactical battles by far out of any 4X, so that aspect is stressed more than the other Xs. Even though I tend to like less combat focus in 4Xs, it works for AoW3. It’s kinda like the other Xs are there to support the great battles.
I did manage a single 50+ hour campaign with everything enabled without any real difficulties. I’m just cautious that I won’t play many campaigns so don’t want to bank on enabling things in future playthroughs. I liked what I saw of the Tempest sea stuff though. Perhaps my only observation was the Morgawr was a tough adversary compared to the others. That doesn’t really bother me to be honest!
That’s exactly how I saw it! The tactical battles were delicious.
Check again, if you hit add all to your cart for CK2, you’re talking closer to 300 than even 200. Yes there are some music stuff in there but the bundle is definitely over 250. Some of the expansions have questionable quality, not that it’s bad content so much as… did it really improve the game or just add more stuff. I felt AOW had quality and notable additions which added to and imrpoved the game, both times.
I mean there use to be a running joke on Paradox titles, about them releasing a game and everyone waiting a year for them to complete it with DLC and bug fixes. It’s not as if they didn’t earn that rep. Now they have cleaner releases at least so you don’t have as many people saying wait for the real game to release.
Well to be fair, that’s just one article, there were several and not everyone liked his half-time show. You’re not suggesting music doesn’t have a problem with people demanding things for free right… i mean, we’re talking about an industry where you can download their work in seconds and… Napster, torrents…Taylor Swift literally coming out and saying they, musicians, shouldn’t be asked to work for free… or that time every music track was .99 and someone dared break that ceiling.
I know I’m probably alone, but what I’d love to see from Triumph is a new Overlord game.
They would post a 0.0 scored review that is just a video of a monkey peeing in his own mouth though.
But would they take a thread about video games and steer it towards a completely different industry and a link to a monkey peeing in it’s own mouth? Gamers!
:)
Oh wow. Okay, I laughed.
I’m not, no.
We moved on… and I also need to play a lot more AOW3 and EL. Anyway, about the quote, it happens. They have no one to copy from and a million fan requests that aren’t that good of an idea or that easy to implement in an interesting way. Not to mention plenty of people love the satanist horse silliness.
If the absence of dev diaries means CK2 is done, that’s probably for the best, though, there’s only so much torture you can do to a code base.
At the end of the day, if they’d go back to bigger sales after a year or two, there would be no point in nitpicking about their content bundling choices.
Then she should read the contracts she signs and go elsewhere, like many musicians have done for the past decade and a half.
I don’t think you’re familiar with the Apple issue I am talking about; it wasn’t just her. I mean it was all over the news, 3 months no pay, she was speaking for the indies more then the multi millionaires.
Any way we can take the evils of DLC and other discussions somewhere else please?
I usually din’t care when things get off track for a bit but this is getting ridiculous.
It would bother me more but A) we don’t have anything else to talk about in this thread so far and B) whatever gets announced will get its own thread which hopefully will be focused on talking about it.
(though yes, this discussion should probably move elsewhere at this point)
In an attempt to rerail the thread, what would you guys want in another expansion, or an Age of Wonders 4?
be as vague or specific as you like.
For me, not an exhaustive or detailed list:
-
More races, with more assymetry, including some “wild” races, e.g. Draconians with no cavalry or machines etc, including a race that does not use cities, shadow Demons fits the bill here easily.
-
Expanded adjacent hex rule with a reinforcement radius (so armies outside the immediate vicinity can reinforce a battle if they have mp, but will arrive tired, disordered etc.)
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Combat that doesn’t stop other players movement, or at least lets players queue up city improvements etc whilst a fight is going on.
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Scale-able mechanics, especially combat, so if you start with 6 unit stacks, this can be upgraded to 8, 10 and then 12 by the end of the match (so you can move more troops with the same number of clicks. Combine with point 2 for battles that get organically bigger as the game goes on.)
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Some sort of anti city spam incentive, and, related to this, an option to have fixed city sizes in the map settings, so you can specify that your random map, with for example 8 players, will have a total of 8 metropolises, evenly spread out. Alternatively, some sort of governship mechanic/resource which is used to upgrade cities, or failing that making cities extremely expensive to upgrade (like 2000 gold and 1000 mana in the current normal game economy,) so that metropolises etc are naturally few and far between.
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Linked to that, higher tier units linked to city size. A natural effect of this will be markedly less “spam” of any single unit.
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Unique resources, that not every race will need, e.g. mithril that only Dwarves can mine.
Point 6 and 7 are intended to create conflict spots on the map, areas of high interest that are worth fighting over.
- A magical magic system, with spells and counterspells galore, and the possibility for players specializing as magic users to become seriously powerful, with drawbacks ofcourse.
Which brings me to:
- Keep the class dynamic, it rocks, but vary it a bit, so that some race/class combinations don’t work (e.g. the fey as a race shouldn’t be able to be Dreadnoughts!)
9.a. Add Warlocks as a class.
This one is very desirable. My guess is that an AoW4 wouldn’t have more races than AoW3 does, but I’d like another AoW3 expansion.
I’m one of the few who prefer smaller battles, so I would like this rule to replace the current rule where all adjacent units get pulled in. That way the units can participate, but the battle size stays small.
I wouldn’t mind the ability to upgrade to 8 as long as my version of your rule 2 went into effect :-)
I would like uhhhhhh what you posted LOL.
I very much agree with a lot of @BloodyBattleBrain ideas but I don’t want larger/longer battles as the game goes on. Maybe if high end units take additional slots in a stack?
Age of Wonders wishlist:
Ability to choose the summons I get from spellcasting. I believe a mod on Steamworkshop has fixed that, but all the same.
Better developed underground. I’ll admit that area would normally be disabled or completely ignored in my games.
Expanded races. Basically what you were saying @BloodyBattleBrain about the asymmetry.
Better city development. AoW3 with expansion really shined in terms of specialising cities for certain unit production. I’d like to see an option to adjust the landscape better around the city.
I’d love a lot more maps, especially ones the AI can play on for MP games.
@Scotch_Lufkin I should explain what I meant a bit more clearly.
Basically, when the game starts, fights with 6 unit armies are fine, and it’s quite challenging to get 3 stacks together and face off against another 3 or 4, and usually that will win/lose your first war. In other words, that first big battle is fairly decisive.
if you win you take over the first opponent.
After this however, the number of units in play goes up, but you are still controlling armies of 6.
By the time you hit your 6th and 7th opponents, you can easily be fighting, using 4 stacks against 3, or vice versa, several battles in a turn and making barely a dent in the enemy, especially if they are an Emperor. (and a warlord or dread…!)
You might need to fight 6 battles a turn for 10 turns before you get to the throne and actually win.
And this is against a backdrop of you knowing you can’t actually lose these fights, unless you mess up, because by that point you are well tuned into how the AI works.
What i am proposing is that the late® game tedium gets rolled into fewer, larger and more decisive battles.
As for high end units taking up more slots, that’s one way of doing it.
Another is a command rating like in Dominions.
Another is map dependent limiting factors on recruitment, which i favour personally as it incentives fighting over the map. In this category I mean things like cities limited in size, and size being important in recruiting higher end units.
Ditto special resources for units. Special armour for certain T4 units etc.
Item 10 of wishlist:
a (totally?) revamped city siege mechanic.
I didn’t want larger battles either. I mean, I’d be OK if it went from 6 to 8, but I don’t even like when other stacks get pulled in. That’s why I liked his reinforcement idea. If they entered as units died, I’d be cool with that.
What you said would be good though. If slots increased, but higher tier units took up more slots to keep the number of units about the same I’d good with that - as long as the number of low tier units didn’t become too many.