I finally played Age of Wonders 3. And basically played it to death. As in, I played the basic minimum to death. I never really did much of the tactical combat and I'm sure there are all kinds of intricacies that I missed out on but I got a good look at pretty much the whole thing.
It's basically the best elements of Age of Wonders 1, 2 and modern 4X games mashed together and the result is pretty damn good.
My first ever game I played some random class and lost horribly. I rectified that by deliberately picking an Orc Warlord class who started with a powerful army and proceeded to dominate. My third ever game I foolishly picked an extra large map and played as a human dreadnought. Loved the Dreadnought class for all the machines and gunpowder units, really fit with my idea of the Humans in Age of Wonders, tech savvy.
There are achievements for playing most races, so I did so. None in particular were particularly exciting to play, and I see
Race relations don't matter so much any longer, I was often a Orc or Elf or whatever running a cosmopolitan empire with no difficulties. I was also playing on the easier difficulties so maybe that changes a lot.
Most games devolved into just sending 2 or at most 3 powerful stacks around and clearing out independent structures without rhyme or reason. The occasional lair would provide some nice items to equip my expanding roster of heroes and my leader who I usually risked in the field anyway. The AI players seemed content to just muddy around and expand slowly enough around their own realm. Every game I'd have the most cities and biggest economy and would even settle a few cities. Every town would have a garrison and I'd usually rush them out and replace them whenever I needed to rally the entire military to attack another player or seldom for desperate defence.
You can customise your leader to a ridiculous degree including their faces and features in general but I usually passed on that. Maybe I'd mess with their pose and 1 of the handful outfits offered. Like in AoW2 you can give yourself certain traits but they don't seem to game-breaky and unfortunately or perhaps fortunately you can't edit your starting skills to make classic dominate-lightning strike badass heroes with max defence.
You level up over time and with battles as do your heroes but I'm sure there are all these nuances and skill synergies but I just increased defence, resistance and hit points initially and later I would buy the nice boosters like 'Forge Aprons' which grant all units in army 40% fire resistance and so on as they are nice damn boosts and helpful for buffing non-hero units.
Leaders die and go to the 'void' and return 3 turns later in the throne city you start in so one thing from Aow2 they kept and improved on. Leaders are also mounted and capable of being badasses again. I like having my leaders and heroes in the field rather than sitting on some wizard tower to spread my domain (looking at you Aow2).
Units no longer have descriptions, instead have quotations. I miss the descriptions of AoW1 which were very nicely done and sometimes very obscure but provided some worldbuilding. The quotes are still good though and capture the units well, the Nymph for example is a good story.
I didn't cast many spells other than some of the summon spells for the achievements like summon Dread Reaper and so on. I would allow my guys to cast spells in combat if offered in automatic.
Cosmological events were good some you could just passively ignore ones that boosted stats or penalised aspects of empire depending on whether you were good or evil and so on but some were more active such as spawning armies of independents. Thankfully I usually had the walls and garrisons to deal with this craic as they would always attack in the background of my empire where it was safe, never really near my 2-3 exploring stacks.
Most battles I played automatic and overwhelmingly in my favour but I gave the tactical combat a go. I sometimes did tactical if the odds were incredibly against me (likely defeat) as automatic had a bad tendency to just have all my guys die instantly and no casualties to enemy. In tactical, even at max speed and auto battle, my units seemed to bloody the enemy or even win sometimes. Sometimes outright slaughter the enemy.
Editor - I gave this a spin and did make most of a Necut map but I dunno it soured on me quickly. Just too 'debuggy' for my liking a lot of editors are like that now. I'm sure I could get over the hump and just finish the damn thing and maybe learn a thing or two but who has the time. Maybe I'll return to it but again slightly separate issue but Necut has advanced beyond simple global maps, in AoW3 anyway more zoomed in continental maps would be better served for Necut rather than zoomed out world maps.
Achievements - most of them are easily attainable through regular play. There are no real obnoxious ones like play 10000 games or anything. There is one that is win 30 online games but I can do that eventually... cheese or no... There are also <10 to do with the campaign and the dlc campaigns, I'll do them one day but I've shelved Aow3 for now.
It's a good game but I dunno the heart seems to have gone. As I said I'd mindlessly build units for garrisons and then just build random buildings and it would all work out. Maybe at higher level play there are all these strategies but I still had fun. Cities would get a little tedious later I'd just have them loop build merchandise eventually. Increasingly horrible cosmological events and independent armies I felt pushed me to end the game sooner and kill the enemy usually.
But yeah I gave the seals and unifier victories a go and they slightly changed gameplay but not too much, I am somewhat intrigued to play seals again - capture and hold a point for a certain number of turns - especially if I play a map with multiple seal points not just the one I had in my 2 games. As a certain article said somewhere, it really forces you to dilute your strength and play in non-optimal standard AoW ways, stacks out in front of the 'Back' (rest of empire, quiet cities w/ and w/o garrison, away from enemy).
Unifier was painful as I had a map with 10 cities on it and I controlled 9 and the enemy had 1. I had him boxed away anyway. I then had to juggle the happiness of my empire between the Orcs and Dwarves, make both happy enough with me to build and then light these beacons that declare I am the unifier of the world or something and win. You build a beacon and light it and the AI declare war on you and the independent spawn big armies to stop it. That's all fine. What wasn't was how awkward it was to get the race relations to the amount to get it started. Spent maybe 150 turns playing that game but maybe I'm just an idiot and did it in an awkward fashion. I won anyway, eventually.
All in all as I said the best of the past combined with modern 4X elements make AoW3 very playable but I'm sure there are plenty of 4X games with may more heart than this. By that I mean I just don't care you can re-skin the different races and units and they are still laregly the same, most games are the same in the end.
I'll return again to play through the campaigns I am intrigued by what may be in them but at the same time I just don't have the time or patience for campaign style games most of these games offer nowadays.
