Age of Wonders 3

[Edi]

Triumph Studios has announced Age of Wonders 3:

Triumph Studios AoW3 forum announcement

Eurogamer article

By Robert Purchese Published Wednesday, 6 February 2013

Dutch studio Triumph (Overlord) is bringing the Age of Wonders strategy RPG series back to life with Age of Wonders 3.

Triumph co-created the series with Epic Games in 1999. The last instalment in the series was Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic in 2002.

Triumph is targeting an autumn 2013 release for Age of Wonders 3 on PC, but won't force it if it's not ready. There are plans for a Mac version - maybe even to launch simultaneously - but these aren't set in stone. Later on, a tablet version may appear.

It's not a Kickstarter project - work began in 2010 before the Kickstarter boom - and it doesn't have a new-age business model. Age of Wonders 3 has high production values and will be sold on Steam and Good old Games and in boxes in regions where that's appropriate.

Who's funding it? That's a good question. I spoke to lead designer Lennart Sas and he told me the game's "big partner" is an announcement for a later date. Note the way he said "big partner" and not "publisher". I asked him to clarify this and he said "that would sort of spoil it [the announcement]".

Then I asked him if the "big partner" was Epic Games, given the studio's history with Age of Wonders and its presumably large amounts of money. I think I caught him off guard.

He laughed and replied: "You've been reading up! That's something for a later moment."

Epic Games has partnered with studios in a kind of publisher role before. Perhaps this also means Epic Games has acquired a stake in Triumph too, although that's just speculation.

In Age of Wonders 3 you'll attempt to lead your empire to glory. The leaders of each empire are varying types of stereotypical fantasy heroes: rogue, druid, priest, warrior and engineer.

As in the Total War games or the Heroes of Might & Magic games or the King's Bounty games, there's an explorable world map with oversized heroes/pieces that you move around. There's also a separate battle screen where fights play out.

In Age of Wonders 3, battles are turn-based. There's a simultaneous turn-based mechanic which means you don't wait to make moves and the battle is sped up as a result. You can auto-resolve - have the AI play out the battle for you - too.

Because battles aren't real-time, Triumph has been able to establish a play-by-email multiplayer mode - as well as a raft of fight-there-and-then multiplayer options. The play-by-email mode lets you take your turn and mail your move to your friend, inviting them to take their turn when they're ready. Video replays show you what happened turn by turn. You can have multiple battles with different people on the go at one time.

A scenario generator will be able to churn out limitless content, and there will be a toolset available to the community to build your own content with.

Post-release you can expect a more classes, races, city upgrades, units, heroes, magical items, spells, map locations, scenarios and story campaigns added as DLC.

If they get it out according to schedule, it'll be out late this year. I hope they do, but might take somewhat longer than that. Not fan of any decision to go down the DLC route if they do that, but such is life. The good thing is that apparently the game will be available from gog.com.

What with both this and Eador: Masters of the Broken World coming out this year, it's shaping up to be a good year for turn based strategy fans.

[Vendetta]

Play by Email?

Is that still a thing?

I mean it's not like asynchronous multiplayer has been solved better for ages by tablet software, it just syncs through a server and notifies you when it's your go again and you forget about it until then.

[Alferd Packer]

I remember that game! The original was a lot of fun. I'll be keeping my eye on this, most definitely.

[Edi]

Play by Email?

Is that still a thing?

I mean it's not like asynchronous multiplayer has been solved better for ages by tablet software, it just syncs through a server and notifies you when it's your go again and you forget about it until then.

Even those mechanics are often referred to as PBEM, since it is a refinement of that.

You'd also be surprised just how much demand there is for that sort of thing. AoW3 will, like its predecessors, support direct connection and PBEM both.

[Stark]

But will it support cloud-mediated asynch multi like modern games? Or just those trivial to implement marketing bullet points for the extremely large?

Anyway lets hope it's more Civ 5 than XCOM.

[Edi]

I expect that there would be support for that, but I don't know. The announcement is just a couple of days old and we'll no doubt hear more about the features as time goes by.

[Edi]

Another bit of good news regarding this game that Triumph Studios is able to do it without interference from publishers, thanks to the creator of Minecraft, who is apparently a fan of the series.

Eurogamer article

How Notch funding Age of Wonders 3 came about
Once upon a time...

By Robert Purchese Published Wednesday, 13 February 2013

Turns out the "big partner" helping fund Age of Wonders 3 isn't Epic Games but is Notch, creator of Minecraft, real name Markus Persson.

He's contributed to such a degree that Dutch developer Triumph Studios (Overlord) doesn't need a publisher for Age of Wonders 3, although distribution and co-publishing deals aren't ruled out.

Why is Notch doing this? Because he's a fan of the Age of Wonders series.

Lennart Sas, co-owner and managing director of Triumph, explained the unconventional way the partnership came about.

"We noticed Minecraft's random title-screen blurb mentioned Age of Wonders," he told me, "so I thought what the heck and I sent Notch an email.

"We had a demo for Age of Wonders 3 and talked to various parties including traditional publishers. There was certainly interest but the prospect of having Notch help fund was a dream come true, as he's a fan of the game and didn't insist on owning it like many of the publishers do these days when they fund development.

"It certainly didn't happen overnight," he added, "and he kept a healthy business sense towards the project. His biggest concern was that it would cost him a lot of time, so it helped that we made this sort of game before and were at an advanced stage of development.

"Notch is pretty much hands off. He's a super busy man, now even more so then when we approached him."

Age of Wonders 3, unlike so many resurrected PC series of late, has avoided Kickstarter and opted for a more traditional and probably more expensive development approach.

Work began in 2010 and the turn-based strategy RPG looks to already be in good shape. It's due out this autumn on PC. A Mac version is planned and may even launch simultaneously. A tablet version is on the cards as well but will take longer to make.

So this means that they can concentrate on doing what they have wanted to do and need not bow to pressure from corporate suits to dilute the game.

The music for the game is also made by the same guy who composed the music for the first and at least parts of it will be remakes of the music of AoW1 with modern tools.

[Stark]

'Dilute' the game? It's a niche game. What does it mean in this context?

I mean Notch certainly isn't going to insist on a decent interface. Or art. :v

[Edi]

They won't need to cut corners or axe features or change something at the insistence of publisher pressure. As far as the interface goes, they aren't exactly new to the business of doing usable interfaces, so I wouldn't be worried about that one.

[Edi]

*aummm!*
*raised thread from the grave*

Hee-haw! I just got an early Christmas present from Triumph Studios, who a week ago posted a competition for beta access to Age of Wonders 3. I tossed in an entry basically just for moral support (I think reading that may require registration) and on a lark, but it was one of the entries they picked.

Whether this means a full access version after beta is over I don't know, but doesn't much matter, since this game is on my buy list anyway.

[Purple]

Play by Email?

Is that still a thing?

I mean it's not like asynchronous multiplayer has been solved better for ages by tablet software, it just syncs through a server and notifies you when it's your go again and you forget about it until then.

Sure it is. We do it in CIV4 all the time. It really helps out when you want to play a MP game but just don't have the time to sit down together. Like say if your co players are in a different time zone.

[Edi]

There is a lot of material available (new videos, dev logs, some previews etc) related to this game and it is now available for preorder on gog.com and Steam. The Digidtal Deluxe Edition also includes the 2 hour soundtrack for the game.

[Edi]

So, this game has been out since March 31st and today the first patch came out. Reviews so far have been favorable, though there are some criticisms too.

For anyone who buys this, I recommend the Deluxe version because the soundtrack is pretty damned awesome.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I dunno. The soundtrack is probably my least favorite thing so far. I've heard a lot of raving about it, but I have to say I vastly prefer AoW2/Shadow Magic's soundtrack.

Everything else has been great though. I love the wizard customization. I'm already frothing at the mouth for whatever DLCs they can cook up. New (old?) races. New map layers. New things to explore and discover. New magic (actually, the current spheres feel a bit lacking compared to Shadow Magic's). I wouldn't mind a little nostalgia-DLC with a powerful Wizard class...

[Edi]

I found the AoW:SM and AoW2 soundtracks too much variations on the same few tunes. Then again, I always loved the original AoW much more than the sequels (both music and mechanics) and AoW3 has brought things back in that direction. Glad to hear you're enjoying it.

I would also like to see more races and a couple of new classes, but all in all, I'd say the launch has been quite a success. Especially considering all the massive expectations that people front-loaded on this game (whether realistic or not).

[Metahive]

Got in on release day and been quite satisfied with it. My only gripe is that some of my favorite factions haven't made a return. No Archons, no Frostlings (OK, they were just ice themed goblins, but still Giant Penguins of Death!) and no Undead. Shadow demons and Syrran not reappearing makes kind of sense since sealing their dimension away was kind of the point of the last game but still...

Well, I hope we'll some of those back through DLC.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I too was disappointed in not having (proper) Archons. They were my favorite race to play. The lack of frostlings also makes arctic terrain mostly-pointless right now. I'd like to see some stronger race customization; for example, there are frost dragons, but Draconians are locked into being "hot" dragons who like tropical and hate arctic and use fire magic, whereas I'd like to see some kind of pre-game customization of the race to be ice-themed instead of fire-themed. Perhaps tie it to a sphere selection passive the same way spheres give you greater mana from matching mana nodes: Taking mastery in a given sphere could give you "Ice Humans" or "Creation Elves" or "Destruction Goblins," or whatever.

Anyway, anything bad I could possibly say about the game is incredibly minor. The alignment system could use some work, some of the terrain/terraforming mechanics don't feel quite like they've maximized their potential, the spheres aren't very deep, some of the special powers and items from SM feel missing (like leaving a trail of terrain in your wake, for example), the unit progression feels a little bland (cheap irregular -> basic infantry/archer -> pikeman/cavalry -> racial elite, with very little variation from that formula, even if the units are otherwise nicely differentiated between races), and so on. All of these feel like utterly trivial things to complain about. Like Edi said, expectations on release were huge, but the game has absolutely measured up and scratched an itch that games like Warlock just weren't handling.

[White Haven]

It is, however, depressingly easy to shatter the first Elven campaign mission like an egg if you do things in an unconventional order. Loads of fun in spite of that, though.

[Coaan]

Picked it up a couple of days ago about the same time Whitehaven did and we've been playing it on and off/non-stop since. The game as a whole is very pretty and provides both nostalgia and enough variation on the old formulas from the first couple of games to make it interesting to play.

Allow me to say though, fuck tier 4 units. Fuck them with a rusty nailbat.

Currently the AI at tiers 1-3 is fairly well adjusted and will create units/armies that are well balanced with a myriad of different unit types, as well as make liberal use of strategic and tactical spells. The issue comes at late game when tier 4's become available because the AI will switch to simply spamming world ending units such as the manticore riders.

These units have been shown as able to wipe out full stacks of tier 3 units + heroes with just two of them. And the AI has a tendancy to spam them.

They really need to put some kind of limit on how many tier 4 units you can produce, if only to prevent the AI from just drowning you in hordes of endgame units.

[Edi]

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.

[Metahive]

I only played on small to medium maps so I didn't have much problems with late game unit spam but something else, the AI is trespassing like mad. Is this supposed to be a personality quirk of the AI to show their contempt to the player or is it a bug that they don't respect borders?

[Edi]

Something between a bug and a quirk. They don't respect borders unless they admire you and there have been some issues with the AI getting pissed off at you when it trespasses your borders instead of you trespassing on its. I think it's being looked at.

[Metahive]

I once beat an AI to its last settlement, it begged for peace which I granted but then it went right back to marching microstacks through my territory although I had several full stacks of mid to high tier troops still near that AI's borders. That's some sass and it earned it a beating to death.

Could it be that this is one of those old 4X quirks that also until recently affected Civ and Total War where clobbering a faction will make them hate as well as respecting you less? In older Total War titles it happened often enough that a faction reduced to its last tiny settlement would adamantly resist peace overtures because all the defeats made them hate the player. Newer titles also gauge relative military power when calculating diplomacy which reduced this from happening considerably.

[Edi]

No, it's not that. I'd need to ask Tombles (one of the devs) over at ageofwonders.com about how exactly the trespassing mechanic works with regard to the AI, when it respects borders and when it doesn't. You can probably find some posts of his there by searching for "borders" on the forum.

[White Haven]

When it respects borders -- how about never? Without some sort of mechanic that allows the player to say 'that, there, that border intrusion -- fuck you for that,' there's no way to tie it into a 'well, maybe I'd better not do that again' reaction from the AI. It's like punishing a dog a day after it eats your homework; it has no idea why you just yelled at it.