1641

How do you recognize spawning camps and can you defeat them to eliminate spawning? Because I never noticed one and kept getting attacked over and over again by undead stacks.

1642

Red flagged neutrals and red flagged camps.

1643

Typically they’re little camps glowing red with enemy units sitting on them. They don’t provide resources or anything, so don’t confuse them for Inns or Treasure camps you might see with units or resources icons attached to them.

The easy ones will have low teir units like Scoundrels, while the harder ones will look like giant dead dragon skeletons laying on the ground, with a stack of undead units sitting atop–these latter ones can spawn Tier IV Skeleton bastards if you don’t find them and kill them early enough. Think of them like barbarian camps in CivV, take out the camp and stuff stops spawning. But if you ignore (or don’t find) the ones in AoWIII for too long, certain ones will start becoming incredibly nasty later on, making settling or passing through those areas especially troublesome.

If one of your cities has an excess of random independent roamers (undead or anything else), scout around for a small camp and take it out. It’ll glow red, and when you clear it you’ll often get weak->mid tier units or small treasure items as a reward. These camps don’t respawn, so once they’re gone they’re gone, so you don’t have to keep scouting the same areas all game long if you need to focus on a front line or something (this may not hold true if there’s some new cosmic event that plops a whole bunch of these suckers down, I don’t know much about all the cosmic events available yet, they do some strange stuff, when enabled).

Although enemy stacks will be present on stuff like towers and resource nodes from the beginning of the game, unlike camps, those things won’t spawn additional roamers; with an exception being made for Seals you’ve cleared at least once (if you enable Seals victories). But Seals are a different story, and those spawns will typically stay confined to the area of the seal it’s trying to defend, and not worth worrying about for this discussion.

1644

Here’s a page that lists most of the map locations … look under “Spawns” and you’ll see some of the things that spawn wandering monsters. It doesn’t seem to be updated for Eternal Lords, though. (E.g. it doesn’t list Necromantic Circles.)

1645

Thanks, very helpful info.

1646

There are more now with the expansion. A necromancer circle and… others I forget.

1647

Wow, with resurrect hero you can get back all your dead heroes with multiple castings. I though it would just bring back the last one that died.

1648

So how does the AI gauge your strength when you offer than an alliance and they say they like you but want to focus on stronger allies? Is it based on what they see, or do they magically know your troop levels, cities held?

1649

About 60 turns in, medium map, 3 AI and me. I’ve found 3 of the 4, and just ran into what was either the 4th (had a drone out looking for him) or an independent. Anyway, the point of this question is this, I have heroes at like 6 or 7 level, this Arch Druid I just ran into was level 15. So I’m running around with guys sporting 60-70 health on my heroes, and this guy, he was over 1000. Is it unusual to run into someone who so outclasses you?

Because right now my main strategy is to say the hell away from this guy, haha. I could send every unit I currently have and lose against this one unit.

1650

Not sure but they’ve obviously changed how the AI determines if it wants to make an alliance or not. I usually butter up one empire for an alliance while playing AoW3, but the game I’ve been playing using the 1.5 patch (No Eternal Lords) I haven’t been able to make an alliance yet. My buddypal’s got a really high opinion of me and I sweeten the deal with magic items and hundreds entering thousands of gold and mana but nothin’ doin’, which isn’t how it used to be.

Might be a good thing since it was admittedly PRETTY damn easy to get an alliance before. Might be they’ve got it set so if you’re close enough in power it doesn’t want to ally and instead wants to try to get a solo victory. No idea.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a unit/hero with that much health in AoW3. It’s not unusual for the AI to have higher level heroes than you (At least in my case. I play on lord which I thought was the non-cheating hardest difficulty but maybe it isn’t) but I don’t think I’ve seen anything with health near that high. Even the big tough dragons and giants and shit only get a couple hundred I think.

1651

Yeah, that doesn’t sound right - Dragons only have like 110 or something. Anything over 150 is really rare, usually a high-tier unit that’s leveled up a few times past Champion medal rank. Bug, maybe? easytarget, could you post a screenshot? I’d be interested in seeing that.

1652

Yeah, got to admit I’m a bit worried about every attempting to take this guy out. I’ll send another drone and take a look at what he is and pray he’s an independent I can just leave be. I’m playing on the easiest level btw, having never played any AOW3, I’ve got a lot to learn first.

So far it’s a complete blast, I’m loving this game. But I’m also a bit freaked by the idea of encountering a 1000 HP unit when I’m running around w/ heroes with maybe 70 at this point. There must be a hell of scaling for HP as you level up to get there, at lev 6’s and 7’s unless the bounce you get on HP starts to go completely vertical shortly I would never have any hero at 1000, ever.

Update: whew, I mis-read his XP for his HP, never mind. He’s 60HP. I feel better now, worse thing I’ve run into are bone dragons which I thought were bad enough, which is why just before my drone died and I lost the picture on this guy I was worried by it. And after I looked again, confirmed he’s an independent.

1653

HP (And stats in general) become prohibitively expensive for heroes in AoW3. A +5 HP boost costs 1 point cumulatively, and you get 5 points to spend every level with a hero. Might be getting boosted higher via items and maybe enchantments but I can’t think of anything that would get something up around that. I can’t even think of anything that gives a percent bonus to HP, and most other buff spells are in the +5-10 range.

1654

My biggest problem with this game right now is I can’t stop playing it. And my god, the replay-ability of this is mind boggling.

1655

I’d be interested in seeing a screenshot or something to satisfy my own cuiosity. I’m still exploring the expansion, so who knows what’s happening, but I’m also thinking that there’s a chance you might have accidentally mixed up the unit’s earned/required experience for the hit points. While I don’t know experience requirements for level 15 units off the top of my head, 1000 doesn’t sound out of the realm of possibilities to me. Typically both are displayed near the top of a unit’s info panel in a couple different places, depending on where you’re looking.

Edit:
Here’s an example of a level 20 (found randomly on the internet, not mine), you’ll notice that big 2000/2200 exp number at the top. It’s possible you’re seeing something similar when inspecting level 15 enemy units

hQFtp83.jpg640×550

1656

Yep, I edited my above post with an update, I mistook XP for HP, didn’t have a long look at it as the drone that revealed it was killed by it. Sent another to take a 2nd look and confirm, he had 60HP, no big deal. False alarm.

But while I’m about it and posting here, quick question on diplomacy, I’ve had one of my rivals raise the issue of an alliance not once but twice, both times just to test how earnest he was about it I made a request of one of his places on the map he had snagged and got turned down.

So, question is, anyone ever get alliances while also asking for something, or is this just always going to be my polite way of saying no? And also, if I form an alliance with someone, and the victory conditions ultimately require I destroy everyone, will I ultimately have to turn on them I assume? This alliance is going to be a thing of convenience between us while we focus on others, yes?

1657

He has a thousand health on his heroes? That’s a bug.

1658

There is allied victory. You might be able to disable it (One thing AoW3’s really good at is giving you a lot of options to fine tune the rules) but by default alliances get shared victories. It’s a little wonky with the seals victory (And I assume unification) in that the seals counter is still based per-kingdom instead of pooled by the alliance, but if anyone in an alliance gets enough seals to win then the alliance wins. You can even get shared victories with enemies, in situations where two warring leaders both hit the seals limit at the same time.

One thing I have to grumble about that they still haven’t addressed, really wish it would paint “Last known domain” borders in to the fog of war on the map. It’s not really a big deal but since they’ve touched up similar small things (Like putting the city names on the cloth map) I kinda wish they’d do that too.

1659

I’m still on my first game (I think about 80 turns in) on a medium map. Medium maps are actually still fairly large! I just declared war on AI #2 after eliminating #1. My relationship with the last AI is very friendly but they still won’t ally with me because they say I’m too weak. I found a dev post that says this means it thinks it can take me militarily. I still don’t know if it magically knows exactly what my strength is or it is just basing it on what it sees.

I have to admit I start getting battle fatigue. If I could just fight 1 stack vs 1 stack I think I’d be OK, but the multistack battles just drain me for some reason. I guess this is a good reason to install Golden Realms so I could try for a Seals of Power victory and avoid some of the large city assaults. How do you guys prefer to win? Do you just duke it out with everyone, go for seals?

1660

Seals, definitely. I’ll usually clobber the other empires and take a city or two but I almost never knock empires out completely any more. Doubt I’d really go for the unifier victory either, I’ve always been a fan of control points.