Age of Wonders series mods recommendation thread

[covr]

Recently I wanted to replay AoW saga, starting from the first part.
Could you recommend me some mods for 1, 2 and SM? Are there any valuable mods for the third part? I've played all vanilla versions when they came out.

Also, a note to future me: ask regarding mods for Planetfall in 2021.

 

[Lagi]

for 1 interesting was Age of Wonders Enhanced, remember the units have a sensible variation of stats (goblin demolisher). On the other hand there replace icon GRP with too much artistic pictures, that are not clear what suppose to represent and sometimes dont fit to the unit.
I also make custom key setting for AoE1

 

[catfood]

There's the 1.4 (1.5?) patch for AOWSM. It fixes a lot of things, I don't know if it counts as a mod to you.

 

[Suicidal]

AoW SM: Brave New World. It's a very unbalanced but fun mod that adds a lot of new units and even new faction IIRC. I remember I played with it a lot in multiplayer.

AoW 3: basically everything from here. The collection includes several mods, one of which adds the ability to specialize cities into different areas (gold, mana, research, units) and more city buildings, another adds subfactions for each faction (e.g. elves have wood elves and dark elves) that each come with its own buildings and units, another adds over 300 new units, including something that I've always wished the game had from the start - race & class combo units (so for example, a goblin technocrat will have different class units compared with an elf technocrat) and is updated almost on a weekly basis. There's also a bunch of visual enhancement mods I don't care about. All of them work together.

Keep in mind that both my suggestions completely overhaul the game so if you're planning to play anything other than random maps then it's not a good idea to use them. Also keep in mind that the AoW 3 mods need both DLCs to function.

 

[The Red Knight]

Age of Glorantha total conversion (the setting of KoDP).

- 15 new races spread across Elder-Neutral-Tainted range, with relevant race relations and preference to tech level (tribal races getting boosts to economy in smaller settlements, more civilized ones requiring more buildings to get all units and not everyone having tier 4 units)
- loads of new sprites and Glorantha lore put into unit descriptions
- most units are represented as squads, which is also reflected in their stats (makes low tier units more relevant)
- some units have only ranged attacks, which makes them very vulnerable in melee (but doesn't drain their action points), some ranged units have use limits to their abilities, and the range of most ranged attacks is reduced
- various balance shifts because of abilities given to units; especially more units with physical/magical immunities or resistances, but also easier access to magical damage types and AoE attacks
- also more units getting an ability or two with experience
- changes to spells (mostly new summons, but schools are now Fire-Air-Earth-Darkness-Law-Chaos)
- Shadow Realm = Heroquesting, but unfortunately it's not touched upon in the two maps included with the mod
- Dragon Pass scripted scenario

Useful additions:
Wall/Gate patch to boost their HP because of damage output changes.
Shadow Magic maps converted to AoG.
A scenario for AoG.
One more scenario by AoG's dev.
Putting KoDP soundtrack into the music folder.

_____________
For AoW3 I enjoyed unit changes from "The Wrong Kind of Balance", though it breaks Frostlings (hacky taking damage outside of snow + AI not accounting for it). It is compatible with some other big mods but I've lost my modlist that had it included so I can't help with compatibility.

 

[Citizen]

Empire building mod for AoW3 is monocled. Here's the MANUAL

It adds buildings, new units for each race (one is t1 to t2 upgrade, other is a new t2 and alternative version of a t3 unit), more skills for heroes depending on class and race. All the changes are pretty modest and fit the game perfectly, so it doesn't feel like a cheap modding attempt

Also works with balance mod, that fixes some stats and adds cosmetic differences to class units and watchtowers depending on a race

 

[Lacrymas]

If you are just playing the campaigns, I wouldn't recommend any mods tbh. I haven't found any strictly technical mods either (widescreen mod or better UI stuff). A lot of the popular mods drastically overhaul the game and I think they are better used when you've already squeezed the vanilla game to the max. AoW3 is significantly different now from what it was at launch, so if you've only played it at launch you'll notice quite a lot of (good) differences and won't need gameplay mods. I know there's a balance mod out there as well, however I'm not sure if that wasn't only for PBEM games and whether it's worth using for games against the AI.

 

[vota DC]

AOW 1 and 2 has some nice full conversion mods.
AOW 3 has tons of balance mods and mod that improve a little standard game. For full conversion they are doing a TES mod.
Also there is food chain mod http://aow.triumph.net/forums/topic/modwip-food-chain/

 

[BING XI LAO]

aow2's mpe mod makes it very easy to mod the game further yourself.