Age of Wonders 3

[octavius]

Reinstalled Shadow Magic earlier after many many years. Wow, what a horrible horrible MoM clone. Well atleast it had native 1080p support, which is about the only positive aspect.

It seems like it's impossible to like both MoM and AoW. Those who "grew up" with MoM consider AoW a shallow copy (despite having lots of new things), while I found myself longing for AoW when I recently tried MoM for the first time.

 

[Zeriel]

Reinstalled Shadow Magic earlier after many many years. Wow, what a horrible horrible MoM clone. Well atleast it had native 1080p support, which is about the only positive aspect.

It seems like it's impossible to like both MoM and AoW. Those who "grew up" with MoM consider AoW a shallow copy (despite having lots of new things), while I found myself longing for AoW when I recently tried MoM for the first time.

I like both. I like MoM more conceptually, but AoW has given me many more hours of entertainment because MoM was a one-off game that was barely patched, had basically no AI, etc etc. MoM is the better foundation for a game, with better ideas, but no one ever followed through on it, so there you go.

That said, I consider it a crying shame that most people discussing AoW in the gaming press have zero clue what MoM is and compare AoW constantly to HoMM and Civ V.

 

[Raghar]

Elven court mission 6 is brutal. I'm at turn 15 or is it 25? And I kicked out that beatle from dragon city, captured archon city, and now I'm pushing towards west. While main character is runing around in the east trying to avoid stacks of doom and find that honcho from Comonwealth. So far he hid himself well. AI is going crazy with expansion and in 10 turns it would churn out massive stacks of units from everywhere. Also I never seen as many goblin spiters.

 

[CarnivalBizarre]

Elven court mission 6 is brutal. I'm at turn 15 or is it 25? And I kicked out that beatle from dragon city, captured archon city, and now I'm pushing towards west. While main character is runing around in the east trying to avoid stacks of doom and find that honcho from Comonwealth. So far he hid himself well. AI is going crazy with expansion and in 10 turns it would churn out massive stacks of units from everywhere. Also I never seen as many goblin spiters.

Is that the last mission? I thought the last was the easiest, just go total offensive and capture everything, leave no garrison, your heroes should by now be one man armies and can just pass by heavily protected cities and just grab the ones behind that are less protected so that their economy fails and you can mash their big army afterwards.

 

[Raghar]

Finally found the L. He then ran away to his throne city, so when I'd attack him it would fail the mission.

That push to the west worked brutally, the elf burned its own cities left and right before I arrived. Then I stopped pushing and concentrated on building dragon lair and Archons. Now he's rebuilding them and he went wild with rebuilding. Also Griffin riders are everywhere.

Also I thought main character shouldn't be killed, and then when one opponent moved three killing stack at her, I had PRETTY hard time. Then before I moved, the SECOND opponent attacked with two stacks of goblin untouchables and swarm darters. Main character and horned were quite wounded and main character had blight vulnerability.

Then they attacked fairies where was one firstborn as a garison, two griffon riders against one. He survived barely. Then they attacked with one griffon riders and three militias. There was a fairy already with him, so it was one to 4 (or was it 3). But he was still wounded, he and fairy won both wounded. Meanwhile they attacked Archon's dwelling, and S was killed by tripplecasting poison blades, three Griffon riders nearly wiped whole dweling however after I stopped shooting on that shielded grifons it went considerably better.

Now I have a fire dragon, and would need to have some talk with Giants that declared war on me just few turns after I received right of passage through theirs territory.

Getting your cities conquered by fliers isn't as nice as it might look like.

BTW you need to build cities at least 6 away from each other. It doesn't look like AI is doing that.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Finally found the L. He then ran away to his throne city, so when I'd attack him it would fail the mission.

If there are multiple stacks in the city, initiate your attack on any stack other than the one in the center hex. That way, when you kill everything and win the battle you don't auto capture the city.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...ing_brought_Age_of_Wonders_3_back_to_life.php

It’s been awhile since we’ve seen an Age of Wonders game -- roughly 11 years, I think. What happened?

We were very busy with Overlord for a while, and we’re a small studio so we can really only focus on one project at a time.

Also, the games market has really changed. In 2004-2005 the console market was really booming and the PC market -- you know, when digital distribution wasn’t as developed as it is now -- the PC market was really declining. Every publisher we talked to said “give us a console game!” so that’s when we started looking into making a strategy game on consoles.

When we came out of the Overlord deals we saw that the console market had drastically changed. It was late in the lifecycles of both consoles, it seemed very hard to launch new IP, and there was a financial crisis going on.

At the same time, we saw that digital distribution on PC was really booming, with lots of smaller studios and indies moving towards digital distribution and self-publishing.

So we said 'hey, Age of Wonders is an old game we always wanted to go back to,' and creatively speaking we were loaded up with new ideas after all these years off. So we decided to try and bring the game back, since we were still very fond of it: we had kept our websites alive through the years to keep interacting with the Age of Wonders community.

But we were also a bit scared of going back to Age of Wonders, because after we released Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, we said we’d added -- how do you Americans say -- 'Everything but the kitchen sink'? It was fully complete, and it was sort of [our] zenith. We were worried about failing to meet people’s expectations; we were really sort of scared of our own shadow.

But we started conservatively planning and laying out what kind of sequel we could do, depending on what kind of funding we could get, and I’m happy to say we were able to make the game we wanted to make and spend 39 months on development.

So how did you find that cash? How did you approach your inaugural attempt at self-funding?

The Overlord project was fairly successful -- we sold the IP -- but we maybe stayed a bit too long trying to chase more console deals, which didn’t work, so we had to scale back the studio. It was the only time in our 17-year career as a game development studio that we had to do that, but that reduced our burn rate a lot and allowed us to invest in a prototype for Age of Wonders 3.

We didn’t know how to finance it yet, but the rights for Age of Wonders sequels reverted to us in 2009 or 2010, so we were able to self-publish those games on Steam. We were quite pleasantly surprised by the revenue that generated -- of course it was a small amount, but for ten-year-old games it was still quite impressive, and it allowed us to finish that critical first prototype.

So when we reached a certain point, when we had that first playable, we went the traditional route of talking to various publishers; it was definitely a buyer’s market back then so people were asking for lots of sequel potential, sequel options, that kind of thing.

And then by pure chance -- this was in 2011 I think, right before Kickstarter became really popular -- we noticed that Markus Persson had written something on the Minecraft splash screen that talked very favorably about Age of Wonders.

Of course we knew about his success, and so we figured that if he was a fan we should send him a note and see if he wanted to do something with us.

This was before Markus became super super busy, and he said 'Well, let’s meet so I can see the game. Come to Sweden!'

So we flew over to present the game, and we agreed to work together on this. I mean, he didn’t really work on it, but he made a significant financial contribution to its development.

(excerpt from GameBanshee)

 

[Raghar]

BTW in commonwealth 2 mission. When these two dwarves would do nothing, and I would by accident find stuff, and then would be swarmed in hordes upon hordes of big beatles. It's normal, or a bug?

 

[Snozgobler]

I will admit, I was disappointed to see that hero units I mind controlled in one map didn't carry over to the next one. Specifically, gear does carry over, but only on heroes who carry over, so anything equipped to a hero gained through mind control/charm etc is lost when one campaign map ends. I also felt it was a little strange that when you move to a new map, and as a result one of your existing heroes becomes your leader, you get to "respec" your new leader's skill picks, but none of the other heroes.

Spoiler

Specifically, I started the Elven campaign map 3, when I did I lost the dwarf and orc I had mind controlled from leaders on the previous map, and I while I was able to re-spend all the skill points for my goblin theocrat, all the skill points for my Elf and Orc were already spent.

It just seems odd to me that some things are fixed and carry on between maps and other things don't.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

BTW in commonwealth 2 mission. When these two dwarves would do nothing, and I would by accident find stuff, and then would be swarmed in hordes upon hordes of big beatles. It's normal, or a bug?

Normal.

Spoiler

You only have to find the special item on the map and then go to the dwarf capital. The enemy AI wizard is set up to be nearly unbeatable so you can just ignore him and also ignore empire building for the most part on this map.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

I will admit, I was disappointed to see that hero units I mind controlled in one map didn't carry over to the next one. Specifically, gear does carry over, but only on heroes who carry over, so anything equipped to a hero gained through mind control/charm etc is lost when one campaign map ends. I also felt it was a little strange that when you move to a new map, and as a result one of your existing heroes becomes your leader, you get to "respec" your new leader's skill picks, but none of the other heroes.

Spoiler

Specifically, I started the Elven campaign map 3, when I did I lost the dwarf and orc I had mind controlled from leaders on the previous map, and I while I was able to re-spend all the skill points for my goblin theocrat, all the skill points for my Elf and Orc were already spent.

It just seems odd to me that some things are fixed and carry on between maps and other things don't.

if someone changes from hero to leader or vice-versa he gets a respec, otherwise he doesn't

 

[Snozgobler]

I will admit, I was disappointed to see that hero units I mind controlled in one map didn't carry over to the next one. Specifically, gear does carry over, but only on heroes who carry over, so anything equipped to a hero gained through mind control/charm etc is lost when one campaign map ends. I also felt it was a little strange that when you move to a new map, and as a result one of your existing heroes becomes your leader, you get to "respec" your new leader's skill picks, but none of the other heroes.

Spoiler

Specifically, I started the Elven campaign map 3, when I did I lost the dwarf and orc I had mind controlled from leaders on the previous map, and I while I was able to re-spend all the skill points for my goblin theocrat, all the skill points for my Elf and Orc were already spent.

It just seems odd to me that some things are fixed and carry on between maps and other things don't.

if someone changes from hero to leader or vice-versa he gets a respec, otherwise he doesn't

Yes, absolutely, it just seems weird to me that this is the case. I suppose I understand as spending skill points on extra casting points for a hero and a leader has different worth (leaders getting a ton extra from cities/research), but it just seems odd. I'd have preferred either 0 respecs or respecs for every hero.

 

[Emily]

It is very logical and you just said the reason yourself
You only get re spec cause of casting points

 

[sser]

http://ageofwonders.com/huge-v1-1-patch-unleashed/

Patch strikes at infinite city-spam and fast-Tier4 units. Haven't tested it out yet, but they hit both aspects pretty hard. Also changed the AI so they wouldn't beeline for the stronger units.

 

[Zeriel]

Meta of multiplayer: Rush is too strong, game never reaches late game.

Solution: Slow down the move to late-game, and make rushing even stronger! Make the most irritating thing in the game (independent scoundrel spam) even more irritating with sprint attacks!

If everyone plays with continents/oceans turned on I guess I can understand this, otherwise it's just hilarious.

 

[Raghar]

Who cares about multiplayer. Single player game is what matters the most.

They screwed assassins. Passwall and sprint stuff were removed.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Meta of multiplayer: Rush is too strong, game never reaches late game.

Solution: Slow down the move to late-game, and make rushing even stronger! Make the most irritating thing in the game (independent scoundrel spam) even more irritating with sprint attacks!

If everyone plays with continents/oceans turned on I guess I can understand this, otherwise it's just hilarious.

Indie developers like triumph have a habit of listening to the wrong forum shitposters unfortunately. They let themselves be guided by writing style and volume of text rather than vetting the individual posters for credibility.

 

[Suicidal]

Who cares about multiplayer. Single player game is what matters the most.

People with friends do.

 

[Dreaad]

Hotseat for the win.

 

[Raghar]

You should see me in commonwealth mission 4. I lost that city of giants three times, then I went for him. He assaulted my throne city, so before he managed to get there I went for his cities. I lost my throne city second time. You wouldn't believe how I conquered all three, 9 turns for absorbing was quite bad especially when he went for my other cities as well. Then that sorceress recovered and maneged to beat him up when he was on only one city.

 

[Absinthe]

Assassins got nerfed? I know they were a bit strong for a Tier 2 but frankly Rogues don't really get Tier 4s either. The new Shrouded Altar might help (with the right upgrades your units come out with +2 medals) but for the most part Rogue units are rather weak.

I wonder if this was done to address multiplayer early rush strategies.

 

[Zeriel]

It wasn't a rush-specific strategy. Was part of trail-running and the way combat starts way too close in AoW 3. Basically you could attack with 6 assassins and take out 1/2 or more of their entire stack on the first turn before they had a chance to even take their turn.

More info: http://steamcommunity.com/app/226840/discussions/0/540739861285785518/

Other major combat exploit that has yet to be addressed is the mass stunnage provided by sorcerors with apprentices and the stun upgrade. Of course this is available to other classes from stuff like Warlord end-game spell that gives max rank on recruit + Storm Sisters, or heroes, but the sorceror can do it from the beginning of tier 2, which is pretty absurd.

 

[JohnTheRevelator]

Did they make maintenance and price on T4 stuff higher? IMHO that was the biggest problem, you simply could afford way too many of them, they should be prohibitively expensive since you will want some anyway considering it's best you can get and amount of units in a battle is limited.

 

[Raghar]

It's high enough. 32 per turn when you have income 300 would allow at most 10 units, and you need money to build some buildings as well.

They also take quite a while to heal up after heavy fight if you don't have hospital. Considering they can fight three stacks of units, and considering trebuchets and some T3 can make hard time for them... Druid and sorcerer can't spam them, they need at least three turns per summoning of theirs most powerful units.

Basically you could attack with 6 assassins and take out 1/2 or more of their entire stack on the first turn before they had a chance to even take their turn.

On defense actually. And defender needs every help they can get because they can't retreat. So they would slaughter some units and then archers and cavalry would hurt them a lot.

 

[Raghar]

Always found the "Defender can't retreat" rule absolutely ridiculous.

Everyone with a brain finds this rule absolutely ridiculous. There is no reason why cavalry can't outrun infantry on plains when they want to retreat. They implemented it to prevent defenders trolling.

And I think they should do that differently.