Age of Wonders 3

They always go after them aggressively in my games. I’m using the beta branch, if that makes any difference, but they certainly don’t wait for me!

I think the AI is actually too laser focused on seals once those start ticking high - you can abuse that focus by basically bypassing their armies camping the seals and taking all their stuff.

Probably the same thing with Thraeg’s experience above - the AI got caught up on the seals and didn’t do anything about the pending unifier victory.

What is mod support like in AOW3?

This beta patch just dropped today and, given the numerous complaints about the AI and alliances, thought I’d highlight this section:

The AI now pays less attention to the size of your armies when considering if it will accept an alliance (this should make it easier to get alliances on higher difficulties, where typically the AI will refuse alliances because it thinks you’re too weak)
The AI is now more likely to offer an alliance to a player if its in trouble, even its relation with that player isn’t very good

Added missing drowning and incineration icons, so you now have a nice picture to look at after unequiping your mount at the wrong moment.
Totally have never done that. Really. Never had that happen to me. Stop looking at me.

Very cool, thanks for the call out, was wondering what of significance was in this patch I saw drop today.

I am not sure they really got the problem unless there was a misplaced decimal somewhere. IE: If you have 2x a large army as they do, they still refused. IF you owned 50% of the map and they owned maybe 15%, they still refused. If the aforementioned conditions were true and they were at war with everyone but you, they still refused. So, I hope this was more than just a “tweak”.

So I’ve read the Beginner’s Strategy Guide for AoW3 and have been playing, but I’m currently in the “playing-but-not-sure-how-well” phase (where I could be lagging massively behind the AI and I don’t realize it. Are there any suggestions on some deeper strategy guides, or some way to see how well I stack up to the other AI players? I hate to invest 30-50 hours into a 4 player game and realize I’m doing it wrong.

I doubt any game would take 30-50 hours, to be honest. Just play it - you’ll pick things up and develop your own strategies, and if you lose, you lose, no worries, start a new game and take what you learned! If you win, bump the difficulty or change up the game/map set up a little! The only thing I recommend you’ve done - beginner’s guide to ensure you have a decent grasp of how the mechanics work, such as flanking and upkeep and such. A 4-player game on medium will only take about 3-6 hours, give or take. And if you’re really behind the AI, it will take a lot less time! I think at any time you can also surrender to get the post-game graphs, but I wouldn’t worry about them too much - I’ve won games where I was lagging well behind in many categories.

I have to echo what Mr. Freak said. That being said, to me “doing it wrong” is part and parcel of the strategy game experience. I love the “ah hah!” moments or “Hmm, I really got beat bad by X, I’m going to try Y and see how that does”. So maybe it’s best to ignore my opinion on this. :)

Agreed with the above. Once you have the basics down, the best bet is just to learn by doing. The games play out at a reasonable pace as long as you stick to medium or small maps.

And regarding the post-game graphs, in each of my games I’ve been well behind on them until after conquering my first target. I think the AI gets enough economic bonuses that you can’t really keep up directly, but have to leverage better strategy and tactics instead.

If you want to see how you stack up with the AI players, pick a fight with them and see what happens!

No I think this says it all about strategy games, I love when I totally get cleaned by the AI then regroup try a different approach and still get destroyed lol, but in the end I refine my strategies some more and just kick ass…priceless.

Woohoo, kindred spirit! Glad I’m not the only one. :)

One of the things I wish 4X in general did better is communicating to a player why they’re losing. I mean, obviously the stack of dragons bearing down on your throne is the instrument of your doom, but it’s so hard most of the time to figure out the root cause of that stack of dragons showing up with nothing available to oppose its rampage through your empire.

It’s a tough problem, and I don’t have any grand ideas to solve it neatly (and if I did, I’d be pitching them internally and not posting them here probably heh). But I must believe that we can do better than the old “Pliny’s Rankings of the Most Advanced Civilizations on the World” popup, which I don’t think has really been done to date.

If you’re getting spanked by AI, some sort of Observer mode or setting an AI as a teammate so you can see what they’re doing can help, so those are two features I always like to have.

I’ve definitely run into the problem you describe, Adam. A player needs information and feedback to work from. Like you, I don’t have a silver bullet on how to communicate that kind of data to the player better, outside of what I mentioned initially. I struggled with that in Star Ruler 2 recently. Okay, yes, I got beat, but it was difficult to determine where I went wrong. Did I expand too quickly? Not quickly enough? Research techs very inefficiently? Etc.

I think the poster child for this is/was Sword of the Stars 2 - you had almost no idea how good or bad you were doing, until you were attacked by wave after wave of enemy ships after 50 hours of playtime.

And thanks for the advice, I am forging onwards.

Question to Pros:

When setting up a random map game, how do I ensure my empire and the AI will randomly choose from BOTH the original and my customized leaders? While I hope “Random” already covers this, it isn’t clear.

In AOW3, that’s usually a global event.

Yea, “Random” will choose random leaders from the default and custom pools for both you and the AI.

If you choose Custom/Select Leaders from the drop-down then YOU will be be able to customize/select your OWN leader from either pool, but the AI will continue to get a random leader from either pool. But if you then check the “Include AI leader” box just beneath the drop down then you can customize/select the AI leaders too.

Okay, thanks for the clarification.

So anybody here have some customized faves or basically a potent combo not already crafted in the original set of leaders worth passing on (best yet if a combo you’ve seen the AI really use well)?