1581

I have been watching Das24680 for a long time now. He mainly plays strategy games and prefers games with random map generators. He is mature, calm, and insightful.

He just started what I think is his fourth playthrough of Age of Wonders III with the new expansion yesterday: He is playing as a Frostling Necromancer.

-Todd

1582

Bloody Battle Brain (BBB) is doing an ongoing series, and he takes a pretty deep look at the gameplay mechanics and is generally smart about how he plays and decent at explaining things. It does make the play session a bit dry from that point of view, but if you are looking for information, he’s tough to beat.

1583

Also, an earlier Das playthrough for AoW3 is for new players, or those who struggle with big picture stuff, using a random map to explain strategic decisions and how to approach the game.

1584

Now that I had a few more battles, I agree that it is unnecessary to have extra details in the combat log for your own attacks. The pre attack information is good. For people learning (or relearning in my case) I still think it’s nice to have the extra info in the combat log for enemy attacks. But if it were added for enemies it might as well be there all the time.

Most of my difficulties with the game are probably self inflicted. I’m compulsive in wanting to know the details of everything and since there are so many different skills on units I feel the need to examine units all the time. It makes judging whether I want to attack an enemy army time consuming!

Don’t get me wrong, I really like the game. My compulsion for information just slows it down for me. With experience I’m sure that will improve.

1585

Yeah, I’m having a little of the same re-learning curve, especially with all of the new elements since the original launch. This is not helped by choosing a new race (the Tigrans) for my first game back. I think I played three turns in my first hour after checking out all the leaders and doodads.

1586

I have a tendency to not have enough lookouts. Now some independent army of spiders came and took my 2nd city. The bad thing is I had just completed a settler and of course it’s now dead. I don’t even know where they came from because I’ve scouted around but don’t see a source for the creatures. The city was easy enough to take back, but it set my expansion back a bit.

1587

I love that losing a city isn’t the kiss of death in AOW3 like it is in Civ.

And yeah, scouting is super important.

Also, I need to remember when Blood Moon is up. Lost freaking two more heroes. This is ridiculous.

1588

I’d like to click on a structure in an explored area to get info about what it is even when outside vision. Just basic info like what it is and what it does. No information on guards or if another player has claimed it, just non-vision sensitive stuff. I forget what the different sites do and I don’t recognize them by sight yet. I hate to send a unit over just to remind myself what they do.

Do you guys tend to put up watch towers to get some notice about when an enemy is approaching?

I wish maps weren’t so open and had some natural choke points. Since there isn’t much impassable land you have to kind of be aware of what can be coming in all directions. Movement rates are pretty high, so an army can appear out of nowhere quickly. Also since there are ways to sneak in guys into others territory, you can’t even neglect defending interior cities.

1589

I picked this up on the steam sale, having never played any of them, a couple of points and a few questions.

  1. I am old, my tolerance for reading and or trying to learn new things is at an all time low, is there a good series of lets plays etc I can watch?

  2. Is this basically Civ xxx with a different skin, or is there a substantial difference in the gameplay once you know what you’re doing?

  3. After putting the time into learning this, how happy were you that you did?

My basic forays into this have gone something like…get about 15 minutes in, get faced with a series of choices on what to build/research etc, and start muttering ‘get off my lawn’ and go do something else. I’d love to get involved in a game like this, as I have put an enormous amount of time into Civs at certain points. Guess the point is, if I’m going to sink some time into learning another one of these, is this the one?

Cheers!

1590

I’m far from an expert, but since I’m here…

  1. Tylertoo linked to this videoabove. I think other Let’s plays have been mentioned up thread recently too. I don’t really like watching video on games usually, but Das is pretty good. In case you can stomach a short read, BleedTheFreak linked to this beginners guide above.

  2. Some of the concepts are the same in a Civ game, but this is really much more focused on the well-done tactical battles. Combat zooms into a tactical map based on the strategic map hex it was initiated on. There is a lot of unit variety with different skills. If you’re not interested in tactical combat this game probably won’t be for you. There is research, but it isn’t a tree. You can choose from a random selection of skills based on your leader’s class and specialization. Some are spells that help your empire and cities, some are combat spells - damage, buffs, etc. Most features in the game exist to support combat. The city management is lighter than in Civ.

  3. I know there are a lot of people here who absolutely love the game. I like it and think it is well done, but I do get battle fatigue at times. I’m in the middle or relearning the game myself since I haven’t played in about a year.

1591

I find that the random map generator generally does a good job with chokepoints in general - they’re there, but there’s also lots of them in different directions and different “types” (mountain pass vs rivers vs bridges vs lakes). You could try turning up the mountains slider when starting a random map game?

And yeah, scouting is really important. That’s what I used alot of the T1 summons for - moving from mountaintop to mountaintop to keep track of my borders.

I should start playing this again.

1592

I notice sometimes when I click on a target for an ability it doesn’t do anything and I have to cancel and keep trying to reselect the target several times before it works. Anyone else have this problem?

1593

If you’re talking about tactical battles, then I’ve never had this problem, and I have a few hundred hours into the game. As long as you’re properly right or left clicking as required (I’m not saying you’re doing this, but I’ve heard a few people complain that they keep miscicking because they are used to control schemes from other games unrelated to the AoW series, as an example), and as long as your computer meets minimum specs and doesn’t have any strange drivers issues, I can’t think of a similar issue off the top of my head.

If you’re trying to do something on the strategic map, and you have simultaneous turns enabled, then the game may take a while to process certain actions like casting spells (or giving orders) on stacks of units (or cities) while it’s simultaneously processing AI moves. Unless I’m mistaken, most players keep simultaneous turns disabled (I think its initially on by default).

Normally I’d suggest searching the official forums to see if people have had similar issues, but the search features there are so utterly terrible, it would more or less be a complete waste of time. I love the game, but don’t ever, ever, try to search for anything on that forum unless you just want to manually scan for relevant threads page by page. It’s a painful exercise.

1594

Was it Frost Nova, by chance? I ran into something that sounds a lot like what ioticus describes in a multiplayer game, I think it turned out Frost Nova takes 3 action points to use, but unlike most abilities that require more than one AP, it doesn’t “X” out if you lack the AP to use the ability, giving you false sense you can use it but you really can’t, though the game lets you try.

1595

I agree that the map generator does a good job with mountains, rivers, etc to create sort of ‘soft choke points’ - non optimal terrain to travel. It’s that those things can be traversed, sometimes without much penalty (like flying), so they don’t really feel like choke points to me. So, you still need to be prepared for an enemy approaching from any direction. I imagine there is an impassible mountain slider that may increase the likelihood of more solid choke points.

1596

Not on the overland, but that exists in the underground. You could, if you wanted, disable over land map and ONLY have a massive under ground, though some races may have a bit of an advantage there (Dwarf, Goblin) with cave crawling, night vision units.

1597

Thanks for the idea, I hadn’t though of that, but I do like the variety in the overland maps. The lack of ‘hard’ choke points is one of the things I don’t like as much about space strategy games. I actually like it when space games use the space lane concept for optimal travel. Usually in those games there are pretty large scanner ranges, so you can see guys coming from a long ways away.

Maybe I just need to make use of watch towers better so I have more warning, so it could be that I just haven’t found the right balance yet of making sure I have eyes on the ground.

1598

Yeah, scouting and line of sight are incredibly important in AoW3 - building watch towers is a thing I don’t think of when I play, but it’s a great idea. I try to keep all the watch towers near my city under my control, though I rarely dedicate units to hold them. Having an enemy AI capture one is usually a pretty good indicator you’ve got incoming.

Last time I played as a sorcerer I had summoned wisps sitting on the edges of my territory to provide a little cheap vision range extender, and then if the wisp was attacked I could try to hurt the attackers with direct damage or even a well placed Arcane Binding. I’m sure that type of strategy works for most (if not all) of the classes. These kinds of strategic considerations are why AoW3 is great, imo.

1599

Yep, cheap scouts and/or watchtowers are an absolute must because of how quickly armies can move overland in AOW3. I usually hate that sort of thing, but I guess I’ve adjusted to it in AOW3 – it doesn’t bother me at all, it’s just another strategic objective I manage.

The Explorer specialization is really great for this. Faster, all-terrain-walking cheap Irregulars with extra vision range are wonderful scouts. As a bonus, lots of races/classes have really useful irregulars. Orc/Warlord/Explorer in particular works awesome. Spearmen are tough enough to be the backbone of many an army, and incredibly flexible. Then later you get Monster Hunters who are the true Swiss army knife do-it-all unit (who I don’t generally build w/o Explorer but that’s another story about how I prefer big beefy slow armies. I’m definitely much more tank battalion than partisan, heh).

1600

I’ve got a question about vassals. I thought they acted like allies, in that if their stack was next to your stack they’d participate in the battle. When I initiate an attack, the battle estimator doesn’t look like it includes the vassal’s troops. Do vassals join in battle?