You are not missing much really, with AOW3 at least. My favorite of the series is still either AOW1 or Shadow Magic. AOW3 is better in a lot of ways and could be the best overall if I wasn't so burned out with the series, but it does have some things I really miss. In AOW1 I could build heroes in any way, and I liked to build an uber tank, uber healer, and uber damage hero, and those 3 guys with some other high end units could win the game in one dream team group. Apparently most people thought this was cheesy, but for me it was the most fun way of playing. I had to explore and gank everything one by one, and teleport my dream team back to cities to defend them if stuff came up behind me.
AOW2 nerfed the heroes so I had to play it straight with multiple armies vs multiple armies. It was fun and strategic but the end game could be a big chore because many cities with 5 stacks of units meant I had to attack with several full stacks of my own and hope they won and I had to do this many times to win which was a total chore and pain. But Shadow Magic made that much better because I could just spend several turns nuking the shit out of the town and them move in my armies to kill the weakened units.
AOW3 is kind of a mixture of both. You can't have a dream team that kills everything because the heroes are nerfed but also there are fewer uber spells like water skin that made you basically invincible to physical damage, so you have to use many stacks of units. And you can't nuke hell out of towns but you can do some nuke damage and some weakening and stuff. So it gets the job done. It has some nice new features too so overall is more or less as good as the others, but if I knew before had, I wouldn't have kickstarted it. I would have just stuck with AOW1 or SM. But I don't mind them getting my money.
