Alright boyz, here we go!!! Age of Wonders III first impressions & tips thread!
 

Mar 31 release date.

Itching to get into another game but won't have time to play it in the next couple weeks. Please post your reviews.


Reviews

http://www.pcgamer.com/tag/age-of-wonders-iii/

Age of Wonders III - GameSpot

March 2014 - IncGamers.com | IncGamers.com

http://www.rpgwatch.com/#26457

Oh sure, on a Monday. :mad: Look forward to next weekend!

I'm expecting Dynasty Reports from you all :)

I am off tomorrow so will have impressions up soon. :)

I usually don't buy games until they're less than $30 but this one is awfully tempting

Curious what type of specs are needed to really run it especially graphics card.

Well the recommended requirements are

"Graphics: nVidia Geforce 460 1GB or AMD Radeon HD 6850 1GB"

I thought it was out today but can't seem to download it on Steam. Anyone playing it yet or does it actually release at midnight tonight?

I read in the video games thread Mizzourah said 11am CST. so perhaps 75 minutes more

Thanks! :)

"Game will unlock in approximately 1 hour"

Is this like Heroes of Might & Magic?

Yes, they are historically very similar games.

In the Heroes' series, 2 and 3 are the best of the bunch. By the time Heroes 4 came around, AOW 2 and then AOW Shadow Magic were probably the better games. Given the past 10 years of Heroes' mediocrity, there's high hopes that AOW 3 captures the magic of the past AOW games.

Ah, gotcha. It sounded so similar, I was wondering if it was the same company.

I really, really liked the early versions of Heroes, so much so that I was wondering if they might be on Steam (maybe I'll still check). This is even though I was generally pretty terrible at them. I never seemed to be able to keep up with the grow in power of the other factions, or even sometimes the creeps.

Anyway, looks interesting!

I'm an hour in and really really love it thus far. I'm just doing the first campaign since I'm an AOW n00b.

The combat is just freaking so much fun - I might spend more time thinking my strategy then I do moving around the map. :)

i7, 8GB ram, geforce 650ti, everything on high, looks and runs great!

The earlier versions of Heroes can be found on GOG.

So any thoughts from those who got it? Can I assume that it is so great no one wants to take time to post about it? :)

I've been playing non-step except for family time. I don't want to post detailed impressions until I get into the game more but I'll post a few preliminary thoughts:

- This is a beautiful game. I have a new gaming laptop and with everything on ultra, it looks amazing and runs very smoothly.

- While I had some initial concerns that "waiting" for the enemy to get into range (which allows multiple attacks) was too powerful, that concern isn't as great as I've spent more time with the game. The battles feel well balanced.

- I love the research trees.

- I wish there were more campaigns included because this is a game I can't stop playing.

- I love the new classes in the game. Each one brings a distinct feel to my play style.

- Exploration is so much fun. The world has lots of surprises.

Diving right back into the game after HIMYM is over.

Agreed.. beautiful game. I've playing it for quite a bit tonight. The UI seems so perfect to me, the first campaign is a tutorial so to speak and it's just been an easy game to dive right into.

Are you playing the classic turn by turn or simultaneous EF? I like the classic turn by turn myself, but wondered how the simultaneous was.

I'm playing simultaneous since it was default setting. I'm enjoying it but it isn't drastically different than the turn based setting I recall from the previous version of the game.

Thanks.. I was wondering what the difference was or if it was even noticeable, in the battles do they all go at the same time?

Speaking of battles.. such an exciting part of the game, I could never auto battle. :)

Battles are still turn based. It is only the campaign map that is simultaneous.

Ahh.. ok thanks!

I can't believe more people are not playing/posting about this 4x game.

I am so engrossed right now.. it's totally pulled me into it's fantasy world. Just had an epic battle against the AI.. set my units up front to occupy the enemy and then flanked them with my fire units.. they never knew they were walking into a trap!

Only a few hours in but I got my butt whipped in my first play through. I have some learning to do, but I do like the game so far.

Some of us travel during the week and can't play until the weekend...

I fired this up for about 40 minutes yesterday.

It played really slow on my laptop at the "high" settings, so I turned it down and it ran better.

I really enjoyed the bit I played. Definitely had that AOW feel to it.

:)

What is the graphics card on your laptop?

Read something on Quarter to Three that for some folks the game defaults to your onboard video chip instead of your card -- might want to check the video options.

Plan on picking this up this weekend but don't know how much time I'll actually have to play it.

It's a NVIDIA 680M 4096MB GDDR5 DX11

Thanks for the tip. I will have to check that.

I was really surprised how slow and clunky it was playing.

I have had the laptop for about a year and a half and it's the first game I've played that showed any kind of performance issues and I plenty many more seemingly graphics intensive games.

Good review...

Age of Wonders 3 review: power fantasy | Polygon

This did the trick, btw.

I have an NVIDA graphics card and did the following:

1. Open NVIDIA Control Panel.
2. Select “Manage 3D settings”.
3. In the “Preferred graphics processor” drop-down menu, select your NVIDIA processor.

I fired AOW3 back up and it ran smooth and fine.

Same problem for me with an NVIDIA card, I had the graphics processor set to "auto-select" and it would select the onboard video chip for AOW3.

Now it's using the NVIDIA card it's much smoother, even on ultra.

I was wondering why my laptop could run GTA4 no problem with high settings, but was clunky with AOW3

This sounds interesting. How is it different (or better) than HOMM? One of those old HOMM games, maybe 2 or 3....was one of the best games ever. the newer ones, no so much.

I haven't played the newest AoW yet but I always thought that the Age of Wonders series > HoMM. You could always try the original Age of Wonders, you get can get it for $6 or less.

I've been out of town all week. Just got back and started installing it. Looks right up my alley.

I have steered away from most of the let's plays, so this should be fun just jumping in and going.

Thanks a lot assholes, another $40 to Steam.

I approve this message.... :)

The game is damn good though!

Just looking for an update - is this really worth purchasing at full price? I'm hearing "ok, but not great from quite a few other sources". Why do you like it (or not)?

QFT

You are a hardcore 4x gamer so I'm not sure.. for me, it's been great as I've never played the series before. Like most reviews, I'm more drawn to the 3d tactical battles than I am with the Civ style world movement. For me it's a tactical battle game with some 4x world style play thrown in to tie it all together.

I can see some people quibbling with the campaign AI, but I have found the tactical battle AI hard to abuse and as a result this is a highly enjoyable game for me.

They have a beta patch out for those with graphic issues as well as some other fixes/tweaks. Supposed to go live next week, but you can opt in for the patch now on Steam. I haven't tested it yet..

I've been playing this an awful lot. First couple of big games ended very swiftly when those Dwarven war engine thinggies (that look like Sandcrawlers) proved 10x tougher than anything I had.

One thing I still don't understand is how to unlock more of the race-specific units. For example right now I'm playing Orcs and if I look in the encyclopedia view of Orc units I see a whole range that I can find not build. Are these unlocked through research, or do units eventually progress to these unit types through earning experience/levels?

It's been all I've played in the past week and am enjoying it. There are definitely buildings that unlock unit types but just got an orc city recently and haven't had a chance to build it up yet.

Quests are great -- I had a dragon dwelling give me one to wipe out some Archon undeads three times -- first two times I got a Frost Dragon and third time they let me annex them and gave a Fire Dragon. So I have them going around clearing out lairs, watchtowers and the like.

My main problem is getting enough gold. There really aren't any buildings that help with gold and everything is so expensive -- once that dragon dwelling annexed with me it took 650 gold and two buildings to get where I could produce Fire Dragons myself (which also cost 360 gold).

Yeah, it seems that each race has their "unlock race-specific unit types" building, but each time I build it I don't see any other unit types?

Gold is an issue, but it's forced me to play a little differently. I only max out a couple of cities for starters, and specialise others so I have my military unit producing towns, and then towns where I only produce mana/research buildings. Secondly, I am smarter about where I position towns, making sure there's as many bonus tiles as I can find grouped together.

In combat I'm *finally* learning to play properly and not just use all out combat magic - keeping your guys alive with defensive spells is often better, as experienced units are invaluable.

Mopping up my current map with three six-army stacks of doom -- my best three heroes and three elite dwarf firstborn, a stack of two fire, two frost and two gold dragons and the surprisingly awesome flank army of fairies. Put those suckers on the flank of whatever you are going at and the fairy fire is wonderful for finishing off those weakened units from your dragon breaths.

I still have to remember sometimes that even if you have an enemy unit down to two points they still hit with full effect. Have lost a few nice frontliners due to forgetting that.

Also, man, these maps are huge -- playing on medium and still have about a quarter I haven't gotten to yet after like 10 hours.

Going to have some free time this weekend and thinking about getting the game.

What do you guys think now ... still fun, high replayability, kept your interest etc.?

I don't usually play this style of game so your experience may vary, but I've found it very tough. I think I'm doing fine and gobbling up the map, but as soon as someone declares war on me they suddenly have armies of units much stronger than anything I have. Haven't played it as much the past week, but it's something I'll return to.

I fired up a random map recently and have had a bit of the opposite happen. I did 8 armies. I forget what setting I chose for the AI - Knight? I think it was that.

So far, I've wiped out two players and almost have a third gone and have met very little resistance. My armies are larger, much better and much more experienced. I feel like I need to bump the AI up a bit next time around.

I played through the first two levels of the initial campaign and found the same to be true.

I do like how every time I declare war, the next round whoever I declared war on and makes an offer for peace.

I've never seen any AI ask for peace in the campaign - it all seems incredibly pre-determined which is a shame (ie. you have no choice but to go to war with specific opponents).

They just released a pretty sizeable patch with some significant changes:

http://ageofwonders.com/huge-v1-1-patch-unleashed/

I just ran into this problem. I was playing a game on the second-to-highest difficulty setting. I was doing pretty well, a guy declared war on me and showed up with an army of like 12 manticore riders. I wasn't really in any position to deal with that. At all.

Given their continued support of the game, I asked (and received) this for my early birthday present. I like to reward companies for doing the right thing and these guys have really impressed me with their support.

I've spent about a dozen hours with it the last 2 days. I got my ASS handed to me on the 2nd scenario until I figured out the trick of turtling and doing nothing aggressive until you have your cities totally built up. Then you can launch a massive attack designed to sweep up half the map before "reloading" and doing it again. But if you attack early, watch out. It's pretty rare that I get my lunch handed to me on regular difficulty on any strategy game, so that was refreshing.

I love the art style, the battlefields are interesting and the overall game feels pretty cool. I'm fairly impressed with the game, though I have some concerns. The spells, units, graphics, sound...all top notch. The gameplay is good, but it's not a city-builder by any means and that's a bit disappointing. It has much in common, strategically, with a real time strategy game, except turn based. Plunk down, build structures to build more units, build more units, rush enemy, repeat. Diplomacy is shallow (at best) and there's no real empire-building component. No structures that improve your gold, only a couple that improve happiness and everything else is either helping you build units, research or mana. That's all folks. As such, there's no city specialization and a real lack of viable choices in the strategic game. It's a Zerg rush, TBS style.

Given I like empire-building, AOW 3 is a bit of a disappointment on that end. But otherwise it's fun if you treat it as a beer-and-pretzels war game and not a 4X fantasy game. I'll play it quite a few more times before it's over and done with. I'll probably get 30-40 hours total out of it and that's not too bad.

stupid question time:

How do you move your units in this game? I thought it would be with the mouse, but double-clicking on something doesn't seem to work. I've made sure its in range (green movement "x"), but the unit doesn't move when I've selected it and double-clicked on the place I want to move to.

After you select the unit, right click in the space you want to move to.

I've made my way through the Elven campaign and now on the second map of the Edward campaign. Had to go back to a prior save because I didn't see the entrance to the main cavern at first.

Thanks OG