Age of Wonders III's evocative, intricate, lovely world without end

Actually in the campaign you more reasons to keep playing till the end, the plot, you wanna see how it will go, who and what will say, and revenge, since the enemy will start with an advantage most of the time, "remember when your dragon almost wiped me out in the beginning, because I do, EAT GIANTS! GIANTS EVERYWHERE!".

As for no end, I'd have to disagree:

Firstly, there are plenty of games that don't have an end, getting a space victory in CIV and quitting the game in AoE are the same, except you get a cutscene in CIV.

Secondly, in AoE 3 the AI will figure out that he can't fight you in the open and he'll fortify at the capital, it won't save them when you have map control but it usually tends to set the scene for a battle of epic scale, even more then every other battle until then, one last great battle to claim victory as opposed to the last boring breaths of other 4x where you are just waiting for the arbitrary turns before you get the victory cut scenes.

So cutting 2 points off for not having a boring, wait for a timer that cannot be stopped, ending is just hypocritical, especially for a game where tactics matter just as much strategy, where you can get overconfident and have your main army destroyed and your cities open to attack in what was supposed to be a mop up operation. Sure it is going to be more boring then the early struggles for map dominance, but you can still be surprised, which is not something you can say for most of the other 4x games, where map dominance cannot be lost.

True, in Shadow Magic you had to finish the AI, or other human players as well as in AOW 3. The fun for me was in discovering all the beautiful things on the map, and battle your openents in tactical AI. But I have to admit to sometimes not finish a game. If you've seen most of the map and get so strong that it's only a mop up job it becomes tedious. But I never stopped playing the game. And it did not stop others from playing the game even after ten years. That is quite an accomplishment. I feel that the lack of an endgame in the game's current state, gets to much of an emphasis in your otherwise nice review.

I have really enjoyed this game for over 30 hours so far, with a lot of it being in the random map scenarios and even then Tom isn't wrong. The end game can take a while, even the allied victory condition doesn't seem to work (I have a game where I bought off the last two powers who controlled less than 20 % of the map and I cannot get the win.)

I will not argue with the rating. But as a fan of the tactical strategy genre I can easily say this game is worth it to me and much less tedious than late game total war games have become.

Tho an option to end early when you have obviously won would be nice... Waiting for that patch.

You didn't. Warlock 2 is a pretty fun game.

At least the problems with this game sound like something that can be fixed in future updates, unlike other games that are more fundamentally broken.

Corrections:
"I got [to] the point where I was even sketching out maps"

WTF with you, fuckin bitches? They not pay for review? Just hate and fuckin Civilization comparisons, same as shit IGN-Gamespot reviews. Dam shit text!

The simplest way to avoid mop up is to start with on AI Ally on max difficulty vs all other AI on max difficulty.

The AIs are much more tedious about taking every single piece of landscape, but once you steamroll, your AI ally will swarm around and finish everything you missed, no muss, no fuss, no 100 turns of mop up.

Age of Wonders SM is much more fun 2v6 with an AI ally. Still learning AOW3.

the fuck ? there is a endgame, and it's simple : kill the leader, take his capital. If he is dead and can't rez at his capital, then he lose. you don't have to go find every town he own. only his biggest, and his head.

Necro thread.

I don’t think Tom ever updated his review to reflect the many changes that came in the patches and expansions, including new victory conditions etc.

Tom doesn’t update his reviews. That said, I believe he did cover this game’s later state after the last expansion.

Edit: Here http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2014/10/02/golden-realms-fulfills-promise-age-wonders-iii-adds-hobbits/

Yeah, Golden Realms and patches really improved the hell out of AOW3 and directly addressed Tom’s One Complaint to Rule Them All (the endgame).

I can’t think of another game that improved so much from release to its end-of-life state. I tend to agree with a three-star “solid but not quite great” rating for AOW3 at release, but nowadays it’s more like “best 4X ever.”