Age of Wonders 3

Games
1960

I don’t try too hard to min/max (I mainly go for flavor and roleplay, basing characters off old D&D, CRPG, and EverQuest characters etc), but a couple suggestions I have is to avoid Water magic specialization if you’re on a dry map, and avoid Partisan specialization if you’re just playing vs AI. Neither one is outright broken (and both still offer usefull traits even if some of it goes ignored), but both are situational for different reasons. One example for water magic is that early on you may have spells like Kraken and Freeze Water taking up space in your spellbook–which is all fine and good unless you don’t have any water nearby, then it’s just dead weight and blocking something else useful. It’s not that huge of a deal now that you can reset your spellbook and draw new spells and skills to research, but they’ll still be in there somewhere waiting to pop back out and get in your way.

Now, several schools of magic offer spells that are situational, but Water magic just seems to throw a couple of them at you earlier on than the others, gumming up progress a little sooner than the others if you don’t need what it has to offer up front.

(As far as I’m aware, none of the following has changed in a recent patch, so it should still apply) As for Partisan, due to the way invisibility and stealth work vs AI in AoWIII, the entire focus of this specialization is more or less wasted everywhere but player vs player. In the most basic sense, it comes down to how the AI is allowed to see a player’s invisible units in order to compute pathing and and such–in addition to several other decisions that need to be made regarding taking and defending keeps and such. They’ll also see your units for several turns if you’ve moved across their field of view, even if you duck into a tile you’re invisible on and continue to move through such tiles. I don’t know the specifics of every single rule, or what and when it can see what it sees, but suffice to say, the partisan tree relies so heavily on these features that you’re more or less gimping yourself by choosing it when playing vs the AI because they’ll see right through it. You’ll be spending research for nothing, or at the very best, you’ll be playing a guessing game as to whether or not your moment to moment efforts are effective or in vain. And I personally hate trying to take the time to be sneaky if it’s all just gonna turn out to be in vain.

There are other skills and spells to learn from Partisan which are genuinely useful, but you’ll want to make sure the other schools of magic you choose for that game are such that they’ll be able to do most of the heavy lifting.

EDIT: I’m actually seeing a couple mentions in this thread (from yesterday) posted at the official forums that the Devs have been working on making it so the AI are more restricted in the units they can and can’t see, but at the moment this is just rumor. I don’t know specifics. Depnding on the changes they make (or have made) this would change the viability of several Partisan skills. Just something to watch for.

1961

Generally speaking the game is balanced well enough at this point IMO that there’s not any crazy advantage in mixing/matching traits. They’re really more about playstyle than anything else. I’ve had fun with all of them (Partisan excepted; even not knowing until kerzain posted that the AI ignores stealth in many cases, it’s just not my jam).

1962

While playing a 2v2 game with LG, I haven’t seen any AI-controlled units retreat from combat. Has anyone seen the AI retreat even a single unit? If not, is this working as intended?

1963

I’ve seen the AI retreat with heroes before, but mostly they fight it out… as do I. The only time I’ve really retreated effectively is during a city siege where I lost a siege weapon early and realized I had better wait for more reinforcements. There’s nothing stopping you from getting attacked after you’ve retreated, so I don’t think it would be an effective tactic for the AI to employ regularly. Might as well do as much damage as possible.

1964

You can also only retreat when you’re the attacker (a rogue spell and hero skill excepted, IIRC). And you take a morale penalty. And unless you’re fighting way at the ass end of your own deployment zone, you very possibly have no chance to make it out without getting wrecked anyway.

1965

This, plus the AI doesn’t attack if it doesn’t think it can win with acceptable losses, so why would it retreat?

1966

I’ve only seen them retreat feared units off the map.

1967

I’ve had the AI retreat at least a couple hero units I think.

1968

I’ve had the AI retreat at least a couple hero units I think during a failed attempt to take a walled city.

1969

What a fantastic game this is. I picked it up on a whim during the last Steam summer sale (curses Gabe!) despite having no prior experience with the AoW series or other turn based fantasy games like HOMM. The graphics are fantastic but the sountrack is just wonderful with one track in particular that conjures up a scene reminiscent of a panoramic helicopter shot right out of LoTR.

Some questions and observations.

I love the graphics but I wish the game had an Civ alt-r equivalent where you could toggle popup icons of resources and structures scattered about the map. It’s easy to miss stuff unless you’re really scrutinizing the map at a fairly close zoom. Another thing that’s bothersome is that once you uncover something you no longer get a tool tip of it if it’s out of visual range. Same thing with the cloth map, you can’t hover your pointer over a discovered feature and get a tool tip of what it is and the bonuses it confers.

Hero upgrades: I start out my first set of upgrades with bumping up the basics like hit points, defense, resistance, melee and range strength. After that I’ll look into the other upgrades I can invest points in but man there’s so much stuff to choose from and with so many varied opponents encounter you’ll encounter it’s hard to narrow down which skills are must haves and which are meh.

In my most recent game I went for a unity beacon victory but as I was going through the turns of lighting my first beacon a bunch of independent stacks appeared to spawn near my city which was located in the southeast corner of the map with all of the local terrain uncovered and all of the local red bandit camps cleared. Did these guys materialize out of thin air or is it possible I missed their camp? I had to save scum the hell out this part because there were like 4 o 5 stacks against this rear line minimally defended city while my main army was out and about.

I’ve yet to encounter a game where the AI declared war on me. This is on knight difficulty so far. I was expecting a Civ like experience where if you fall behind militarily the AI will come along and curb stomp you. So far I’ve been able to peacefully develop my cities despite having a puny army. Is this due to difficulty or the distance of AI from my cities? There’s a ton of starting options and one of them determines how close the AI starts to you. Is the AI more likely to declare war if it starts nearby your founding city?

I’ve been playing as a Draconian druid and the only tier 4 units I have at my disposal are ones that I can cast like the horned demon and a dragon (which are awesome). As far as I can see I can’t produce any tier 4 units in my cities. Are all of the other races limited to only spawning t4 units rather than producing them like you can with the lower tier units?

1970

Building beacons triggers random spawns of units that attack you. It might be described in the in-game encyclopedia, not sure. And it also makes the AI more aggressive, even if it hasn’t been aggressive earlier (aka it knows the victory conditions, and will play to prevent one). Not sure about overall aggressiveness though, havent’ really played with AI much on the recent expansion (most of my playtime has been campaign and PBEM).

And there are no racial T4 units, those are all class based. Some summon them (as you noticed, Archdruids fall here), others build them (e.g. Warlords).

EDIT: Oh, right, you can also get T4s from special independent cities (quest rewards, or buildable if you own them), and non-researchable spells from quest rewards (I think your dragon is such a spell)

1971

Building the Unity Beacon spawns neutrals IIRC, yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever actually won a Unity victory, though; they’re much slower than conquest or Seals.

Yes, no tooltips in the fog is really annoying.

You’ll read the map better with more playtime. I don’t have that issue at all.

Knight AI is hilariously bad. It might actually be hard-coded against declaring war on you. Bump it up, even if you’re still learning.

Tier-4 units are all class-based. Some classes build them (Dreadnaught, Warlord). Others summon them (Druid, Sorcerer). Each race gets the following:

T1: Archer, Infantry (T2 for kitties), Irregular, Pike (though pikes are more of like a T1.5 for most races, and T2 for goblins/frostlings)
T2: Support, Cavalry
T3: Racial special

Everything else is class-based.

1972

Yeah. I suggested that they add the tooltip for locations outside the fog of war too. Tibbles said that he would look into getting those tooltips added, because he agreed that it would be better. I didn’t hear back about that even after following up on their forum. Maybe you can mention it there too to see if we can get it back on the radar.

1973

Are they done with adding things to this? Can’t complain because I easily got my money’s worth, but I’m wondering if they’ve moved on to the next thing or well we get more?

(Would love to see a 64-bit AOW4 in 2020 or 2021)

1974

Picked this up a week or so ago, and been playing a little bit as the 4X urge takes me. Couple of questions that I could probably Google but am too lazy to bother, so I’ll ask the crowd here instead:

  1. Is there a way to keep “Choose production for <city>” from popping up in the things-to-do-before-ending-turn list? In some cities I might actually want Merchandise production, but even if I choose that manually, it still prompts me every turn to pick something else. I looked in the options but don’t see anything relevant.

  2. When you defend cities, you can put extra dudes around to help when the main city is attacked, which makes sense. But if the enemy attacks the extra dudes, then your main defensive force automatically comes out to help them. This can be a Bad Thing. Is there a way to stop this, or are you basically prevented from using the extra-dudes-around-the-city approach if you want your city’s defensive force to actually, ya know, defend the city?

1975

There’s a Repeat option for the queue, it looks like an infinity sign. Double-click on Merchandise to queue it up then click that button.

  1. When you defend cities, you can put extra dudes around to help when the main city is attacked, which makes sense. But if the enemy attacks the extra dudes, then your main defensive force automatically comes out to help them. This can be a Bad Thing. Is there a way to stop this, or are you basically prevented from using the extra-dudes-around-the-city approach if you want your city’s defensive force to actually, ya know, defend the city?

I leave my city defenders in a triangle, 3 stacks, and don’t put any other armies around them. You want each of the 3 stacks to be adjacent to the other two. Any stack that gets attacked will pull in the other two and have the city walls.

1976

  1. You can set the current production queue to automatically repeat, using the infinity sign to the left of the queue.

  2. Just make sure that each stack is in one of the seven hexes that make up the city, and are all adjacent to each other. This means that you can use a maximum of three stacks to ensure that none of them can be isolated.

1977

Ah, ok, I see my assumptions were getting the better of me. Putting a stack in the city’s center hex seemed obvious, but that prevents you from having the triangle formation you guys are talking about. Thanks, that makes sense. I’ll look for the repeat queue thing, too.

1978

You can still have a stack in the center and two more stacks in the outskirts in a triangle. Just leave the other hexes empty.

1979

The city center shouldn’t prevent the triangle, that’s the anchor point I tend to use. Including the center, there should be 7 hexes. I put my armies at the X’s below (sorry for the crappy ASCII diagram, didn’t know how else to explain it).


       X X       
      O X O
       O O

Or any combination thereof.


        O O
       X X O
        X O

Even if they attack the outlying X’s, the battle will take place in the city and pull in all 3.

What you DON’T want is something like this:


     O O
    x X X      <--- will only pull in two armies, but still take place in city.
     O O

-or-

     O O
    O x X X    <---- will only pull in two armies, and will take place in the field outside the city
     O O