Age of Wonders 3

[Coaan]

One of the things that seems to lead to the T4 spam is that people turtle up too much, which allows the AI to build up to a ridiculous strength. XL maps have issues, but smaller than that and more aggressive play helps. Game settings also have quite an effect (e.g. turning off city building and adding relatively more cities to a map).

The newest patch already addresses some of these issues and many others are being worked on. The new research costs already push Tier 4 units to a lot later in the game than they were initially, for example.

The problem with their approach is that it cripples the player far more than it does the AI, the main offender when it comes to massive tier four spam. They have fallen into the age old trap of giving the higher difficulty AI's boosts to gold and production times, with each higher step giving larger progressive bonuses to their respective resource incomes.

So increasing the time it takes to produce these units does absolutely fuck and all to fix the issue of harder AI's just filling it's ranks with ungodly powerful units in a fraction of the time it will take you do to so, for a fraction of the cost.

One of the better suggestions I've seen to fix this problem is to have a hard number cap on tier four units so that you can only have a few, or in some cases, one of them to ensure a balance of units - tier 1-3 are still very valid unit choices right up until you start getting hordes of Tier four critter armies.

I honestly think this would go a ways to fixing the issues with the AI.

Also? crippling some of the better/more enjoyable features of the game just so the AI will fight fair seems like a retarded solution.

[Lagmonster]

Mild necro with a question: How robust is the co-op element of this game? My friends and I are always on the lookout for something turn-based we can run while doing other things at home (at this moment, the current champ is Civ, which we've played to death).

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

You can comp-stomp, yeah. Just turn on Allied Victory, ally with one another, and fight as many AIs as you care to.

[Edi]

What Brother-Captain Gaius said. Allied victory on and allows team games and there are also scenarios where you have preset teams so that you are allied from the get-go. Don't remember if you can set that up for random maps from the get-go, but co-op games are very much a possibility and pretty robust compared to many other offerings.

[Edi]

AoW3 Deluxe Edition should be on some sort of sale on GOG.com in the next two hours or so, it's listed in the Coming Soon section. Part of their summer sale, but no idea how much it will be discounted.

The earlier versions are also on sale.

[Thunderfire]

Mild necro with a question: How robust is the co-op element of this game? My friends and I are always on the lookout for something turn-based we can run while doing other things at home (at this moment, the current champ is Civ, which we've played to death).

It is possible to co-op but it is to easy to beat the AI. I defeat both AI opponents in a 2vs2 SP game before my AI ally fights one battle against them.

[Coaan]

As usual, AI can not compare with proper human players.

However, with coop, you can always have multiple AI's verses your human team for added challenge, and there are maps designed so you can have, say, four verses two.

[Edi]

The Golden Realms DLC and the newest patch both came out today. The DLC has a new race, the Halflings, a three campaign scenario and some additional goodies to the base game. The patches so far have significantly altered several things and mechanics so that the game is quite a bit different with regard to city building, empire progression and win conditions than it was when it first came out.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I haven't picked up the DLC yet, but I'm 2/3 through the High Elf campaign in AoW3 and I can't recommend it more. Aside from the obvious graphical upgrades, the mechanics have been greatly improved over previous games, and they fixed all my pet peeves of previous AoW titles, like the crapshoot nature of landing a shot on high-defense units and any strategic considerations playing second fiddle to simply ganking the enemy leader in their throne city. The tactical AI is excellent, and until you get the hang of the combat system, it will probably exploit flanking attacks better than you. Entertainment for dollar, this could be the best money I've ever spent.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

My only real complaint is that the depth and scope of Shadow Magic isn't quite there yet. I have high hopes it will be eventually, and Golden Realms is a big step in the right direction, but it currently feels just a wee bit shallow and formulaic. Now, that's a pretty minor complaint as the game is very well put together, but I've found myself playing it less and less while I wait for them to patch and DLC in more features and more races.

Units are a particularly glaring culprit: Golden Realms made some progress on this front, but for the most part units are all carbon copies following a very simplistic progression scheme, with only minor racial variation. You get your crappy Militia, then you get your Basic Melee and Shooty Guy. Then you "upgrade" to the questionably-effective Pikeman and slightly more effective Cavalry. And so on. It doesn't yet feel like the races actually have different, asymmetrical arsenals to sling at one another in a huge fantasy brawl, but have rather slapped a High Elf sticker on a pikeman unit to throw against the largely similar pikeman unit with a Dwarf sticker slapped on it.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

That's true, but given all the race / class combinations and each class having its own units, summons, abilities and spells that play differently with each race, I feel like there are plenty of meaningful choices. Previous AoW games had more races and units, but defense was so all-important that I always felt most of the apparent depth was an illusion and there were really only a few winning combos. I would argue that Shadow Magic had a lot more breadth, but AoW3 has more depth where it counts.

I also think the units are more varied at second glance than they first appear. The progression might be similar, but the goblin swarm darter and dwarven crossbow, for instance, are very different units that necessitate different playing styles in the early game. I would hate to defend a city against orc infantry with dwarves just as much as I would hate to go against them in the open with goblins. This is coming from someone who felt that previous AoW games never really lived up to their potential, so YMMV.

[Edi]

Necroing this thread because the Eternal Lords expansion for the game hit the market a few days ago.

Adds the Necromancer as a class and two new races, Frostlings and Tigrans. There have been a ton of changes to mechanics so that the races no longer all play the same, there is race based diplomacy, special victory conditions, new specializations and a lot of other stuff.

So Age of Wonders 3 now is quite a different beast from what it was at release, in case anyone is thinking about going back to it. You'll need to relearn most balance stuff from the ground up.

[Coaan]

What has always bothered me about this title and with the genre in general is that lower tier units rapidly become obsolete in the face of higher tier units. As Gaius said, you start with the basic units and for a while, they are decent. Then it's time to upgrade to the next 'tier' and suddenly those basic units aren't holding their own anymore.

This basically continued until end game in vanilla until you have armies of nothing but tier 4 critters that require tier 4 critters to counter with any kind of success - it rapidly becomes about who has the largest block of tier 4 horribleness.

Does anyone with the expansions know if they implemented a way to prevent end game unit spam, or to make lower tier units useful still?

Failing that, have they added some kind of progression/customisation beyond the woefully lacking medal system?

Hell, I'd settle for more unit variety with the races if nothing else.

In short, is it worth getting?

[Edi]

Yes, it's worth getting, since the expansion and the prior patches address almost all of those concerns.

The race units are now quite different from each other, there are more special abilities, you need more infrastructure (i.e. expensive buildings) in addition to research to get Tier 4 critters and lower tier creatures are also more useful for longer. Especially if you can get special structures, since special map locations open up special city structures when located in domain. Quite a few lower tier units also evolve to higher tier ones (e.g. human cavalry evolves to knight if it survives long enough and gains enough experience).

You don't even need to get the expansion, just patch the game and these things will be included. You can see how the balance has changed without paying anything and if you like it, you can then get the DLC. The expansions unlock the new class, races and specializations for you to play.

If you play multiplayer, the available stuff in-game is determined by the host, so people without a DLC can still conquer DLC content race cities, for example, but they can't start with those races. It allows multiplayer between players even if they don't all have the same DLC packs.

it has been our policy not to split the multi-player community over DLC. Vanilla AoW3 is updated to the same code base as the Eternal Lords expansion (benefiting all players from some of the general improvements to gameflow). The Host determines which features are present on the map per the DLCs in his or her possession. Although non-dlc players can't start as Tigrans for example, they could conquer a Tigran town and still be able to play with the cats in this way

That's the head of Triumph Studios over at Quarter to Three forums elaborating on the feasibility of multiplayer between different versions. He practically got standing ovation.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

What has always bothered me about this title and with the genre in general is that lower tier units rapidly become obsolete in the face of higher tier units. As Gaius said, you start with the basic units and for a while, they are decent. Then it's time to upgrade to the next 'tier' and suddenly those basic units aren't holding their own anymore.

This basically continued until end game in vanilla until you have armies of nothing but tier 4 critters that require tier 4 critters to counter with any kind of success - it rapidly becomes about who has the largest block of tier 4 horribleness.

Does anyone with the expansions know if they implemented a way to prevent end game unit spam, or to make lower tier units useful still?

Failing that, have they added some kind of progression/customisation beyond the woefully lacking medal system?

Hell, I'd settle for more unit variety with the races if nothing else.

In short, is it worth getting?

That's actually not quite true. Maintenance-wise, you can field 8 Tier 1's for every Tier 4, and with the right buffs 2-4 T1's can take out most T4's. Single-player games can descend into T4 spam, but if you try to play that way in multi you're going to lose.

[Coaan]

To clarify, I have absolutely no interest in the game's competitive multiplayer - my only interests are single/coop against AI

Would it be fair to say they didn't actually fix the spammability of tier 4 , they've just made the process of getting full stacks of doom units take longer? I would have preferred it if they had added a hard cap to the numbers of tier 4 units a faction can field and made each end unit more special/unique instead.

I'll still give it a look though and see how dramatic the changes are.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Picked up Golden Realms on the most recent Steam sale for $8, and the Halflings are my new favorite thing in the universe. They're not as fragile in a straight-up melee as you might expect, and their Lucky attribute is awesome. I can hardly count the number of times I've made a bone-headed positioning move that opened my irreplaceable unit up to a fatal flanking ping-pong and gotten ready to shout a horrific stream of curse words at the monitor only to have that wonderful four-leaf clover pop up and save my ass. Along with the fireworks that deal nice damage and allow your melee to wail on the enemy without retaliation if they get dazzled, the poultry-chucking pikemen, and irregular units that can pelt T3 and T4's to death with their Monster Slayer attribute, the wee folk seem to be packing a surprise dick punch no matter how well the enemy thinks he's protected his loins.

I am just finishing up the first of 3 campaign missions, so I can't rate it as a whole, but I am thoroughly enjoying the first one and would say it's probably better than anything I've played in the base game. There have definitely been gameplay changes, and although I am not observant enough to catalog each one individually it does seem that even more effort has been spent to make the system less probabilistic and more deterministic, with more secondary effects in case targets pass the saving throw so that it's not such a crap shoot (ie. either the most powerful enemy unit fails its save and berzerks against its own team thus guaranteeing total victory or passes and your most powerful unit wastes its turn and is exposed thus guaranteeing total defeat and load-game). As someone who once designed a PnP RPG system and still makes mods for strategy games, I really appreciate when designers "get it" and pull my hair out when they don't (like every time I encounter another god damn percentage-based system in this day and age, haven't they learned?).

From what I hear, Eternal Lords is even better but as a spoiled modern Steam gamer I always wait for the sale and in the meantime Golden Realms is worth the price of admission many times over. As they say on eBay, A++++++++!!!

[Edi]

Changelogs:

Changelog for patch 1.4 (Golden Realms was released at this time as well, so the additional content from that too if you got the DLC)

Changelog from 1.4 to 1.5 (plus Eternal Lords, with Frostlings, Tigrans and Necromancer class)

Patch changelog for 1.5 >> 1.555

Not inclined to dig up changelogs for versions 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, though those were big too. That last 1.5 changelog is hilarious if you read it in its entirety. The comments interspersed with everything else, I mean.

"If you're reading this, please send help!"
"I don't know how long I can hold on. They have me locked down here without food and water, writing endless patch notes" (or something to that effect).