Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic

This is a purely bragging thread, I apologise in advance.

I just completed the final mission of the campaign without checking any walkthroughs. When I had completed it I then looked at a walkthrough to find out how much of a meal I'd made of it, see what I was doing wrong.

It turns out the walkthrough suggested they spent 1,100 turns on the last mission. I was a bit flabbergasted and loaded up my near to the end save and saw that I'd completed it in 260 turns, and I'd been faffing about no end.

For those of you who've played it, what was your strategy for victory and how did you get a turn time quicker than 260?

It's a great game but I just did random maps and the single maps. Did not finish campaign did some of the campaign maps but did not get to end.

I stopped the Campaign halfway, as I didn't like the story at all - less and less as it progressed.

No idea, it's been ages. I do remember that I spent a lot of time on the initial missions of every campaign to build up my heroes (perfect crafted gear, completed all research etc), so the rest of the missions was generally a breeze. Cheesy, I know.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I stopped the Campaign halfway, as I didn't like the story at all - less and less as it progressed.

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The story is indeed appallingly bad, it's no joke that a 10 year old could have come up with something more appropriate. It's lucky the story only forms 0.1% of your game time.

The opening narrative to one of the missions was to "kill Vorsair" or was it Phobius? Not entirely sure, but anyway, so… progressed the mission and got a very long way in, so far in that one of the AIs, the frost wizard, had almost achieved total domination. I didn't mind as I was at peace with them, all I wanted was Vorsair's head. Leaving all my castles virtually defenceless I launched an all out assault on Vorsair and killed him good an' proper. The mission did not end. Turns out I had to do an Allied Victory, not just kill Vorsair… well thanks for that 'story writers'… needless to say I started it again and did what I should have been told to do at the start, what with it being a 'strategy' game and all.

The half-way point in the game is marked by a really stupid mission, possibly where both you and Hastar stopped. The mission dialogue asks you to kill 6 enemy heroes for victory. Sounds ok. You start the map and you're in an impossible position. Without knowing exactly where the enemy heroes are you cannot win, you'll just get overrun in about 20/30 turns or less. I restarted the game about 10 times before going on-line to find out where the heroes were. As soon as I knew this info the mission only took a few turns to finish. It's a classic case of either (as close as it's possible to be) impossible or piss easy, the only determinant being map-knowledge.

It's mostly just enjoyable turn-based strategy combat of the very enjoyable variety which happens to base it's structure on traditional fantasy, to which the variety of units available is a joy to behold.

Maylander said:

No idea, it's been ages. I do remember that I spent a lot of time on the initial missions of every campaign to build up my heroes (perfect crafted gear, completed all research etc), so the rest of the missions was generally a breeze. Cheesy, I know.

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I think that's what you're supposed to do. Once I got the hang of what everything does that's exactly what I did. However, I suddenly got stuck on the second of the last set of three missions, I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. Then I remembered I'd forgotten to fully milk the previous level for artifacts, which is why my heroes kept dying so easily. I went back and spent 100/150 turns pressing end-turn while my artifacts got made and then had no real trouble in the next mission.

The last mission, however, is a standalone mission, there's no means to prepare for it like that, which is why it's more complicated than all the others. You have to find a way to defeat established huge armies of Tier 10 (or whatever the max tier is) monsters from a position of virtually nothing. I restarted it four or five times before I found something that worked. I was close to giving up, especially as the on-line walkthrough just kept bleating on about Gold Dragons, something I didn't even have, need or used.

It's one of my favorite games, honestly, though I've never played through the whole campaign - something in it made me stop and I forget what. My wife and I played this for hours and hours on huge multiplayer maps, just taking over the world and restarting to do it again on random maps.

I haven't played AOW III yet - but AOW SM is still one of the best games in the series in my opinion.
Only topped by the first one because of its more role-playing appeal.

Yeah, there's definitely something very ideal about Shadow Magic, like everything just clicks so well that the imperfections are mostly excused. One of those games that's very close to being perfect, as in, a close as anyone'll ever get league. I'm so glad it was recommended to me.

I often wished there was a way to get that wooden UI look back from AOW II into AOW SM. That would have been perfect for my personal taste.

I'm currently about a third of the way through II, and while I'm not enjoying it as much I must admit I've not drawn notice to any difference between the UIs apart from SM allows you to cast your spell from the notification news whereas in II it doesn't.

Well, at that time when the game was new I really didn't like everything to be dark.
A change ? of taste that's more or less going on until today.
Oh, how much I depised SW BFII because of that colour change ! - They did everything right with that game - apart from the colouring. The whole game looks like a pizza being far too long in an oven ...