For millennia, I crafted my undead legions, preparing to crawl out of the caves and rock and wage war on the evil in the world. As it grew, I built it with the bones and rotting corpses of the subterranean dwarven kingdoms. But I won’t blame you for giving up far before you reach that point.I founded my empire in the depths of the earth.
Persevere and you might find yourself conducting diplomatic negotiations between two warring orc factions at three in the morning. Age of Wonders III flubs basic user interactions, and as a result is a chore to get started. Once you actually get into Age of Wonders III there’s a great tactical combat game and a fairly good strategic level to entertain you.īut getting into Age of Wonders III takes patience and resolve-more than any 4X game should require in 2014, considering that the fundamentals of the genre haven’t changed in years. I actually think Age of Wonders III is probably a deeper, better 4X game than its recently-released, also-fantasy-themed counterpart, Warlock 2.
In a real match, however, this isn’t an issue. The campaign is also weird in that you’ll switch characters between levels, requiring you to redo a lot of the research you’d already uncovered. The light RPG elements add a lot to Age of Wonders III. It’s a neat system that gradually changes the game over time and allows you to create a custom play style, but like most 4X systems you probably won’t know what’s actually useful or important until your second or third time through the game. As you win battles your hero will level up, adding abilities to armies he or she controls-for instance, the ability for all units under a hero’s command to scale walls with no movement penalty. Your army is fronted by a hero, who is basically just a superpowered unit with a name and some light RPG elements. Autoresolve is probably going to be too costly to win a campaign with in the long run.Īnd then there’s the hero to pay attention to. Not too surprising, but it’s annoying if you’re tired of directing your troops around by hand.
AGE OF WONDERS III MANUAL
I’ve fought battles with manual combat and come out with every unit intact, only to reload and autoresolve the battle and find half my units wiped out. You can also autoresolve combat, though the game seems to overly punish you in the process by killing off some of your best troops. (Ranged units feel a bit overpowered, especially in the early game.) This is the mode where Age of Wonders III shines most, despite a couple of small but exploitable balance issues.
Still, it feels great when you pull off the victory against overwhelming odds through expert use of cover and flanking. More than that, and I started making dumb mistakes trying to rush through battles. I found that a solid 15 versus 15 battle was about the sweet spot, at least as far as my patience was concerned. In fact, 42 units gets a bit tedious as you micromanage each individual move on every turn. Elves, orcs, dragons-somebody started a war and somebody else felt betrayed and on we go. The infodump nature of this method makes it hard to care about anything the campaign has to say. Most of the story is told through lengthy interludes between chapters, presented to you through one of the slowest text scrolls this side of Star Wars. Vital tactical techniques, such as the game’s reliance on flanking, are left to these text explanations, so it’s easy to lose the game’s relatively easy battles early on without understanding what you’re doing wrong.Īge of Wonders III’s story is delivered in big walls o’ text. Most of the tutorial hints are presented in text tooltips lengthy enough to have been written by Proust. You can feel like a decent strategist without delving too far into the game’s mechanics, even if there’s a lot of room left for you to improve.Īge of Wonders III throws up roadblocks. While 4X games are always complicated-there are a ton of systems to learn-a game like Civilization is good about giving you the small victories up front. Age of Wonders III simply neglects about a decade of improvements in user experience, resulting in a game that feels opaque and unintuitive up front. Getting started with Age of Wonders III is a hostile and intimidating experience, and not in the Dark Souls-esque “purposefully obtuse” way. Click to enlarge all images in this article.
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