Age of Wonders 3

Or just get the game from The Pirate Bay if you don't want to pay the fair asking price.

 

Yes, obviously.

Yes. If you start a campaign in online mode, you can only load those saves in online. If you switch to offline, you have to start new. If you want to avoid this, start singleplayer in offline. Of course you can't play multiplayer that way.

 

Gah, the AI is dumb as a nut.

• if I turtle it starts spamming level 4 units and hero stacks out of nowhere every turn even if he has only one dumb village.
  
• if I rush I get no fun because the AI is too dumb to provide a challenge in early turns. And I hate rushing in single player.
• It cheats with no shame, have never seen such blatant cheating in a game. Its worse than dragon age 2's enemies dropping on your head, except that was in real time.

Also:

• level 4 doom stacks are overpowered as usual, shrines are just broken.
• defense and resistance are either broken or useless by design.
  
• whoever thought that squads with one remaining unit should deal the same damage as full squads should have his/hers tin checked. Either do it the HoMM way or just keep single units per army slot.
• I find most maps too small.

AOW:SM is a superior experience in every way, even from a graphics standpoint, units look generic and its difficult to assess unit type at times unless hovering to see the description.
Game needs balance patch ASAP.

Edit: Yay, first post.

 

Exactly. If the original comment had been accurate, the proper phrasing would've been entirely different. So I'm simply using the way the question is phrased to illustrate why it's the incorrect interpretation.

 

Yes, I found the game looks much worse than I expected.

 

I don't really know what to say about this game, it's basically Age of Wonders which itself was a flawed Master of Magic clone. Early game units are still shit, the races are too similar to each other, too many sieges, units aren't broken down into individual soldiers. But on top of that the AI sucks, the campaign isn't as well designed and there's less content. It's like um ok, I've played this before. MP could be good though.

 

Guess waiting for the release was the right thing to do. I was almost overtaken by hype. I feels really bad to know that the games of the "oldschool renaissance" like Shadowrun, AoW 3, M&M X turned out to be not as good as their predecessors.

 

M&M X is good, if only because it copies a game (M&M5) that's 20 years old so it has to be an additive experience.

 

So I gather the game is bad? Can you guys go into more detail?

 

Most opinions I've heard claim that the game is still not as good as M&M 3-5. Might check it out if it's superior. Haven't finished World of Xeen yet and I hate playing inferior sequels before finishing the beloved originals. Makes me feel like a guy reading a comic book spinoff of some tv series he never watched or game he never played.

 

Funny, so far, I'd say this game blows SM out of the Water. Better hero system, better spell research trees, functional diplomatic model.

If you thought SM had better AI than this, you seriously need to replay it.

 

Got my key as well. Took them 7 hours.

 

I see no reason to play this game over the aow:sm:

- the AI is worse than the previous installments, actually its downright crappy:

- he can spawn hero stacks and level 4 stacks from the fog of war EACH TURN.
- banishes enchantments each turn with no chance of failure.
- summons high level units each turn with no penalties.
- concealing units is useless against it.
- ignores other enemy AI units in order to attack you, sometimes to comic effect: enemy leaves castle undefended to attack my scout, another enemy AI, two steps from his castle, captures it.
- doesn't attack defended structures on the map, even if two steps from his castles.
- lots of other dumb stuff that I can't be bothered to write.
​

- combat doesn't take advantage of the 3d environment(while in SM trees, buildings, walls and hills could hamper ranged attacks).
- units are copies from the previous games or generic additions.
- full unit companies to the same damage as companies reduced to one unit, I had a hero killed by a single assassin in my second fight because I wasn't aware of this, its just dumb design.
- attacks never miss.
- ranged is useless, and because of that flying units are now land units in combat...
- lots of abilities are useless(some stats too).​

 

Making the units into squads was dumb since a unit with one figure hits just as hard as a fully packed one, and when squads fight it's a visual mess with hard to see swings. It's not explicitly bad, it's just a drag, like how it's hard to see how many units are in a stack from the banner

 

filthy total war influence

 

In TW, when a squad went up few levels in combat and was damaged to 1/3, then rested, then attacked another squad from behind and went up another level. It kicked ass.

 

Sounded like he was complaining the AI was too difficult. It was basically easy in SM. Haven't played 3 yet, so I can't comment, but I generally despise ruthlessly cheating AI. Resource cheating is fine (infinite resources to spend in facilities they own), but mechanic cheating (popping units out of thin air) isn't.

 

But in TW, dead soldiers do not fight until their whole unit is wiped out.

 

No, they run through a roman legion like ghosts, then skate across a river and fly into the sky screaming great gibbering madness.

 

This is kinda hard to describe but I wonder if I'm the only who's perception gets messed with by the button graphics?



When the buttons are not in the focus of my eyes (looking to the side a little for instance) it's almost as if the left and right borders of the button graphics go 3D / pop out / overlap in the corner of my eyes. Should I be seeing an eye doctor?


Another minor graphical thing that stood out to me as odd was that little icons come after the numbers:

Usually I expect them the other way around, Icon before number.
Older games in the Series did it that way, too:


I also tend to agree with the whole 1 soldier should not be dealing as much damage as 10 thing. It was counter-intuitive to me at first and the only reason why some units are represented by several soldiers seems in an attempt to make battles feel more epic visually. It makes no difference for in-game purposes if your unit consists of 1 big soldier, 10 small ones or 2 small ones from originally 10.

Aside from these little graphical things I haven't played enough yet to form a real opinion on AoW 3. From what little I've seen and played I liked it.
I'm just a bit sad that the variety in the troop department is lacking. Each race has pretty much only 1 semi-unique unit aside from each races' equivalent to Melee/Ranged/Flanker/Caster/Pike/Cavalry.
The professions thankfully make up for it a little by bringing more diverse things to the table both in terms of spells and several unique units.
I just feel like the races could have had at least 1 more semi-unique unit to make them feel a little more different from each other. Right now it doesn't really feel like it matters which race you play and diversity comes mostly through the profession you choose, not the races themselves.

 

Probably the best way to sum it up for me, without thinking about it, would be that it's a good game, feels pretty much like an AoW game should, but needs a couple patches and an expansion to get up to the content of AoWSM. It plays like an AoW game should, but enough of the little stuff is different, that it feels off.

That said, I just spent the last couple weeks replaying AoWSM, so I'm a bit biased towards its approach.

 

Hurr durr. They should have kept 1 unit instead of 1 squad as it is now. I know its visual and it fools my brain cause my common sense tells me that 1 soldier left should not have the same hitting power as 10 soldiers next to them. Freaking annoying.

While the hype lowered, my impressions so far are "meh". Think that we'll have to wait till AoW3: Shadow Magic 2 till there's a great game. Feels they played too safe like they did with AoW2. Maybe its just me, but its kinda like I've played this game before.

 

Shiit, without reading your post I saw the picture first and it made me dizzy ) That menu is horrible!
Ok so far the game doesn't sound good at all, I hate cheating AI =/

 

At what difficulty level does the AI start to cheat where it becomes a significant issue?

Im playing on Lord and havent noticed anything bad yet. Still early game though.

 

No I'm not complaining the AI is too difficult, the reverse, it is down right dumb, without those cheating spawns you'd go through battles like a cookie cutter. You can play most maps two ways: rush the enemy as soon as possible(before the spawns begin to appear) or turtle and fight for every tile against cheating full hero stacks or l4 monsters.

Multiplayer might be ok, but atm it has connectivity issues, at least for me.