Age of Wonders III

I've really been looking forward to this one, but after the first 3 campaign missions I lost interest (for the moment). The game basically is good, there are a lot of features
I like. But there are some "features" that really bug me.

• Missing overview for cities and their production. I just want a nice list of my citites showing what they are currently producing AND how long it will take. I really don't understand why something that simple hasn't been thought of. Or have I missed this out?
  
• Missing unit overview in battles. In battles I just want a nice overview of all my units showing health and spare movement points. Currently I need to click through all units to get a feeling of how the battle goes. For enemy units I'd like to have the same. Sure, it's not that easy to design a decent GUI as there are possibly a lot of units in a battle…
  
• Too many units in a battle. That's clearly personal taste and I'm sure many of you like having large battles with a lot of units. For me it's too much if you have 6-7 armies with more than 40 units. It simply takes too long. I help myself by just building super armies being much stronger than the enemy and do Auto-Combat. For sure that isn't the way AoW should be played and in fact I like smaller battles with ~10-15 units a lot.
  
• Missing hero skill tree. Perhaps it is somewhere and I haven't seen it, but currently I don't have a certain plan when I skill my heroes. I just chose the skills that sound great for the moment, so I'm sure I'm missing some actual great skills that I never see because I don't have enough skill points or the appropriate prerequisites. This is even more annoying as I'm…
  
• Being forced to reskill my heroes when they switch from leader to ally in a new mission. I understand that this is because of the game mechanics where only the leader is responsible for mana pool and spells/research. But for me this is a HUGE design flaw. I wanted to plan and build my hero(es) through the campaign, to get the feeling that the hero grows and gets more powerfull. This immersion is broken when I need to reskill. It's even possible to build very different strength and weaknesses. Instead of an archer you may have a melee fighter.
  This really should have been designed differently, involving changes to magic and research.

My main issue is I want to play online, but almost all games discourage or outright disable tactical battles, which is understandable for fights against trash but you really feel cheated when someone takes your city with autocombat as is their choice. I feel cheated out of the opportunity to win through superior tactics!

The other problem is people hosting random maps stacked in their favour, which you can't tell from outside. If their race likes one type of land and hates another they don't put their disliked lands in the generation at all.

I played against some of the devs and even they hosted an islands map and then rushed people with Wisps. I held out for a while but I couldn't beat an army of flying, cone attacking Tier4 summons while trying to pack boats with units and sail over as an orc warlord.

Yeah, I'm just bad, whatever, but I wish I didn't buy it now because I've already put it down.

How much different is AOW3 from AOW2 & AOW: SM ?

I just completed it. It's not quite as good as AoW1, 2 or SM, but it's still a very good TB strategy/RPG. It takes a while to get into, but once you do it certainly has the same addictive "just one more turn" feeling that the previous games had. However, it's a bit messy at times, as classes aren't quite what you expect. I would've preferred simply selecting a class in the start, instead of swapping around depending on who leads each mission.

Anyway, my main issue with it is actually that it's too short. It's fairly obvious they intend to make expansions or something similar to SM though, so that could still be remedied in the future.

Ah well, it was worth the money.

Oh, should have updated here too. I got back to it and finished it 2 weeks ago. I really loved the game during the final map. I most likely used a wrong strategy here, but kept going, so it took me 50+ hours to complete this map alone.

So for me it wasn't too short (100+ hours in total), but the "end" bugged me. As Maylander said, there will be a DLC continuiing the story.

Morrandir said:

So for me it wasn't too short (100+ hours in total), but the "end" bugged me. As Maylander said, there will be a DLC continuiing the story.

Click to expand...

Of course there will I added a new news-bit on the front- page with news about it.

Then we’ve got lots new features and content in the works. The first new race (one with –ling in the name) is nearly complete with others in development. New races are a lot of work: core units, class unit variants, leader and hero assets, City and TC graphics, new abilities, balance, etc). We also have an exotic new dwelling, new monsters, music, classes and a new campaign in the works. We’re also testing some exciting new mechanics that include new victory conditions and a new type of quest.

Click to expand...

Looks like we will be getting new factions introduced as dlc first though.

Couchpotato said:

Of course there will I added a new news-bit on the front- page with news about it.

Click to expand...

The news-bit contains general information aboput an expansion. I said, the expansion will continue the story. That's not necessarily the case with an expansion.

Morrandir said:

Oh, should have updated here too. I got back to it and finished it 2 weeks ago. I really loved the game during the final map. I most likely used a wrong strategy here, but kept going, so it took me 50+ hours to complete this map alone.

Click to expand...

Took me an hour or so I think. Each campaign was probably 10-15 hours, so I'd say about 25 hours in total.

As for the final map tactics:

Morrandir said:

So for me it wasn't too short (100+ hours in total), but the "end" bugged me. As Maylander said, there will be a DLC continuiing the story.

Click to expand...

Looking forward to future AoW3 campaigns. For some reason, I've always found the setting and story in the Age of Wonders games very interesting. I don't really know why, as it's pretty straight forward fantasy, but it's always managed to keep me hooked.

Oh yeah, and the music is excellent in all AoW games, including this one.

This one is currently on sale... Any of you guys have further comments now DLC etc have been released?


Thanks

I got the first expansion the one that added Halflings. To me something is just missing from the game. Maybe it's because Shadow Magic was so good but AoWIII could not keep me hooked. Not enough to build in cities and the Tech Tree is really lacking.

My main complaint was the game difficulty settings. I think normal for me was so easy and then I moved it up one and it was just one massive fight after another. So either I just rolled thru the maps or I was bogged down defending my territory. Maybe if there was a difficulty between the two I would have played more.

In my opinion the strategy level is weaker and very different than in AOW1. But the tactical level is hugely better in AOW3.

AOW1 had kept something of the Heroes of M&M approach and in my opinion had succeed make it big with a very interesting AI and design of maps.

AOW3 totally gave up on that approach to build a strategy gameplay much closer to classic 4X at exception that economy, diplomacy, production are very simplified in comparison of classic 4X, to favor the armies, units and pure war aspects. It's well done and for me this shift in comparison of the more classic 4X blueprint is very welcome it's a change. But the AI and maps design is good stuff, nothing noteworthy as in AOW1.

At reverse the tactical combats are great, and the AI is pretty interesting. That aspect is a lot better than in AOW1 in my opinion.

The problem is I think there's just too many combats to make them all, and the auto resolution can generate very surprising effects from both aspects, make you win when that would have been difficult, or make you loose when you wonder how it's possible.

So the strategy gameplay ends be the core of the game and it isn't the best aspect. But it's good enough in my opinion. Worth it for the tactical combats and the original approach focused on armies and war and much less on economy, production, diplomacy. Also worth it for it's unique or very 4X blueprint, if you know you don't get the classic blueprint, it can be interesting to discover a different approach.