1821

All I’ve discovered thus far about diplomacy is you need to throw money at them and get them to really friendly before they’ll even consider it. Then in most cases they just say they don’t want to anyway. To me it feels broken.

If you want to experience something even more broken in my opinion, turn on the unity victory condition, it should be re-named the Total War condition, all I saw happen was universal declaration of war by the AI against me (which in the latest patch also means the AI’s will not attack each other over it btw, just you) and I magically had high level 6 unit stacks teleported repeatedly on top of my main city.

1822

BleedTheFreak, when you set up teams, does that mean everyone is always at war? I’m wondering if the diplomacy features aren’t baked enough to really play with diplomacy. I tend to do the same thing each game. I make nice with others as I meet them and get my relationship to the max category (friendly I think). Then I keep exploring and settling, and finally build up some armies. Then I pick 1 empire to go after, send an army to each lightly protected city and blitz them. They usually bow out pretty quickly. Then I keep the peace until I’m ready for the next one. I’ve got my legs under me now after winning another on Lord.

I played the High Elves and I really like having their longbowmen. It sure is nice not having the range penalty. Other than a favorite 1 or 2 race units each game I tend to stick with the class units. In general they seem so much better. I guess with the elves I also like making a couple armies of griffen riders, flying around and taking out lightly protected cities. It seems like the AI in general doesn’t protect their cities enough. Do they do a better job with this if you play with teams (assuming your always at war)?

1823

Yeah, if you set teams there is no diplomacy (except with your teammates, you can gift resources and request them though I’ve never done it with the AI before, you might be able to trade with your AI allies). It’s fun to set up an 8 player game and set each of the 8 players on their own individual teams, imho.

If the AI isn’t defending their cities well, it’s probably because of fighting on other fronts. Having teams helps there, too. Sometimes in a traditional non-team game, I end up winning because the AI takes each other out. That’s where a 3v3 map or a 2v2 or something can feel a little more balanced.

1824

I think my favorite feature added since release is actually the vassal system. Being able to expand your domain without being responsible for building the units to defend it, or micromanaging its development is a great addition. I think this would tie in nicely with the race governance in Eternal Lords (not sure since I don’t have it). Of course the seals of power are a close 2nd favorite feature. I had taken 75% of the map without taking a seal. The AI took a seal a good 8-10 turns before me. But their troops were tied up defending the seal and their throne city. Once I made them a non threat I went and took the other 4 seals for the victory. It saved me from having to slog through their last city.

I’m curious about Eternal Lords. I think race governance would make the game more interesting and maybe my favorite feature of that expansion. I tend to play nice with the independents.

I found a lot of times I skip over the legendary and the other hardest of the treasure sites, because by the time I’m strong enough I’m already starting to take over the AI. I think I need to turn down the frequency of those sites to make each one feel more special.

1825

Bleed,

I’m currently in a team campaign where I’ve got one AI on my team against 3 on the other side. The AI has taken out one and I’ve taken out one, we’ve got one left. If I understand your comment about teams and diplomacy there’s no point in attempting to reach out to this remaining race via diplomacy and convince him it’s hopeless as between me and my ally we control nearly the entire map, it will require taking their capital city, right?

Btw, I’ve rather liked this team campaign, it was nice having an ally in the campaign, and a rather effective one I might add.

1826

Yeah, though the AI will surrender to you if he feels it’s truly hopeless, especially if you do some damage to his territory.

1827

Race Governance is actually a lot, a LOT better for evil/monoculture type empires. You blast up to Deity pretty quick, and those bonuses apply to your whole stinkin’ empire!

My evil Tigrans were so freakin’ awesome. SO awesome.

1828

Off the top of your head, do you know of any unintended consequences by changing some of the default settings? For example, I’m thinking of changing the frequency of resource and treasure sites down 1 notch so there is less resources which hopefully leads to smaller armies.

I just realized this would also nerf the Theocrat Sanctified Sites strategic spell because that gives the target city +40 morale per treasure site.

Any other setting changes that would probably lead to smaller battles without throwing other things out of whack?

1829

You were spot on, I took one of his two remaining cities and when I massed some armies on the border of his capital city he offered to surrender.

1830

Really, the smaller the map the smaller the battles. I can’t see any way in which large maps don’t end up being decided by a few 3v3 or so brawls in the endgame.

1831

Bummer. I like having at least medium sized maps, but like to keep battles 1 stack vs 1 stack. I like the progression to more powerful units and abilities.

1832

Have you guys found a listing anywhere of what all the settings do on a random game setup? With no manual I’ve got nothing to refer to as to the impact each setting has and since you were discussing one aspect of it I wanted to interject and see if you’d found video/pdf/forum thread on what all the settings do.

I’m struggling a bit in setting up a new game and have thus far been stuck really just going wing and a prayer to see what happens with some of the criteria.

1833

Honestly, man, you might just be playing the wrong game. Once midgame hits on medium+, things are going to start escalating into 2v2 and 3v3 and such. That’s just the game.

And it’s a good thing, because boy would the stack of doom (aka rush whatever highest-tier units you can, forever) utterly dominate the game. It’s trivially easy to take minor or no attrition against a force 60% or less of your strength, and the strength of a single stack gets pretty out of control as you start stocking up on T3s and leveled/equipped heroes.

Removing army adjacency would require a dramatic re-envisioning of the entire unit progression system in order to not suck. And I don’t think there’s an easy way to go in and mod unit stats; poking around it looks like most of the data is baked and needs a tool of some kind to unpack.

1834

In the dark times of AoW3 1.0 there was a more marked difference between the power of different tier units. It was a rush to get as high of a tier as possible and to build them as fast as possible because tier (Especially tier 4) mattered more than anything else. It’s certainly a hell of a lot better now, where tier still indicates general strength but tier 1 remains useful throughout. If nothing else than because it presents you with more options in combat based on your army composition instead of just firing broadsides/lightning breath with each unit

Although even that didn’t keep things entirely 1vs1 stack, since the economy was wonky enough in 1.0 it was easy enough to keep multiple tier 4 stacks rolling. Especially since you could inexpensively make a “No upkeep for units under this leader” magic item (Or half upkeep, I forget) and stick a hero in each stack. Not even sure if you can still make that, last time I was making magic items I didn’t notice it.

1835

Also what Squee said.

1836

easytarget, did you have any questions about particular map settings?

My biggest suggestion for random map settings is that (if you’re a Civilization player) you should choose a map size one smaller than you’d normally play in Civ. AOW is so combat heavy, and the map is so resource-rich on the default settings, that you’ll get plenty of gameplay out of a smaller map.

In the same vein, don’t turn the Underground layer on unless you’re sure you want it - it adds about 1/3 to the map size. (I usually only turn it on if I’m playing dwarves or goblins, for flavor.)

Other tips:

  • If you’re having trouble finding just the right difficulty setting, don’t forget you can set the difficulty for each specific opponent as well. So you can have, for example, half the AIs to Knight difficulty and half to Lord.
  • If you want a shorter game, turn City Founding off. (I never do this, but some people swear by it.)
  • If you want to fool around with the advanced settings, set the amount of Roads to High. This speeds things up considerably (and the road-building part of the game isn’t especially great anyway.)
  • Once you get get a few games under your belt and you know how things work, set both the number of Neutral Cities and the number of Dwellings to Random. The early part of the game is considerably more interesting if you don’t know what you’re going to find.
  • When in doubt about any of the settings, just leave them at the defaults - they’re pretty well balanced.
1837

For some strange reason, as a TBS fantasy fanatic, I never played any of the AoW series (I know, right!?). I just grabbed AoW 1 from GoG and like it so far. I don’t mind the graphics, but had to lower the resolution just to tell the tiny battle units apart. That threw me off a bit (but not too much as I spent a lot of time with Dwarf Fortress graphics years ago), and I also had some trouble getting into the battles, maybe due to the chaotic nature of combat hits and misses. I just spent about 100 hours in Warlock 2, so that may have something to do with it.

That said, is there a good AAR? I always love to see how other people run their empires in games (in this case, what to do with cities in general). Everything I Google seems to be either AoW 2 or 3. Thanks for any help!

1838

Thanks for the response and all the suggestions you made, I’ll work on implementing some of them. As for what I was looking for was really just a listing of what each option does, that way you could mix it up a bit intelligently on each campaign. For now I’m just going trial and error, which is still quite fun, just wrapped one up with teams that was a blast, so much fun in fact I’m doing it again with 2 x 4 (me and one ally against for opposing AI). This time I’ve turned on seals, not sure I got the number right, put it at 75 for a large map. Trial and error like I said.

Bottom line: I’m an old schooler I guess, I like having a manual to refer to, and that’s just not going to happen. No matter, having a blast playing the game, I’ll just keep using different combos if for no other reason for the element of surprise and to long term find what works best for me.

1839

I have a tendency to talk about the things I don’t like, because that is the thing I’m trying to fix / avoid. So for the record I think Age of Wonders is a good game, that’s why I’m putting this much effort into it to try and get it right for my tastes.

It didn’t seem like I was too far off of what I was looking for, so I thought it was worth pursuing. It has only been near the end of my games where I typically have to worry about combat with multiple stacks. Sometimes I am able to avoid it by not attacking the throne city or not attacking a Seal the AI already took. I’ve been playing my games with everything on default except for:

  • Lord Difficulty
  • Medium Map
  • No underground
  • Starting Town: Outpost
  • Enable Seals Victory
  • Enable Allied Victory
  • Starting Skills: None
  • Enable Empire Quests

My games have been ending somewhere between turn 90 and 110 I think. I usually am getting to the point where I have some of the highest tier skills, but there isn’t much game to really use them. Some of them seem really cool: Armageddon, Global Assault. Even mid tier skills like Network of Scrying Eyes is cool.

In my games, my empire’s late game armies are typically higher tier class units. I usually have some trebuchet’s too. Sometimes a race has some base units that I like using the entire way through, like the Elve’s longbowmen. I love being able to launch death from afar. That’s also why I like the Adept of Air Seeker Enchantment.

1840

You could try increasing the points needed to trigger a seal victory. That’s what I ended up doing to make my games with fairly similar settings last a bit longer. The shit tends to hit the fan with the other empires once you start getting some points, but having a higher point total gives you more time to fight over the seals with your high end stuff. IIRC I’ve been playing with 70 point goal recently and that’s been ok (On a medium map with no underground and 4-5 empires total).

I’d also recommend autoresolving piddling to relatively even encounters. Doing auto battles in AoW3 may seem like heresy but I found that only playing relatively key battles myself helps me avoid burning out, plus the auto-resolve in AoW3 is better than most games. You might lose a unit or two more than you would if you played yourself (Over the course of a game. The few times I experimented with auto-resolve by playing a battle out myself and resolving and comparing the results auto-resolve rarely threw units away needlessly) but by and large it’s good at easy fights.
Won’t make your games last longer obviously, just figured I’d mention it since it’s something I picked up by playing Total War games and even though auto-resolve is far worse there it’s still generally worth it just so you don’t get tired of fighting battles every damn turn.