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I looked at this thread because I loved the original Age of Wonders, and then discovered that I happen to own a completely different game because I was insane enough to buy Elemental. After the reviews came in. Please make a good Age of Wonders game. I've missed the genre, and Elemental so does not count. 
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May 29, 2013 05:25
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 11:02 |
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While the latter games had better balance and intricacy, I can't get over the style and campaign of the first game. Too good.
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May 29, 2013 19:06
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What worked in AoW 1 and fell down flat in AoW 2 was precisely that sense of character, world building, and choice involved in the campaign. In AoW 1 you had a bunch of branching paths - all of them together showed off all of the content, offering replay value, yet your choices in any specific playthrough mattered, since they affected the story and capabilities of your character. I lost interest in AoW 2's campaign awfully fast in comparison, since the game offered no choices in favor of shoving all the content into a single playthrough. I didn't particularly care about anything happening to the characters or world in AoW 2.
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May 30, 2013 21:31
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There's no reason Frostlings should have been cut. Everyone else I can see, but come on man, PENGUINS. 
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Aug 23, 2013 20:08
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LordSloth posted:Don't worry, word is dire penguins are still in, and even march in neat formations. Excellent.
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Aug 24, 2013 01:39
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Oh wow, this is actually coming up soon. I can't convey my excitement properly in words. AoW1 is one of my favorite games of all time, and I've always wanted a modernized game in the series (in terms of UI and graphics) so was stoked when I first heard about AoW3. Didn't realize how close it was to release though; time flies!
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Feb 8, 2014 18:43
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I went and did it. I told myself that I wasn't going to, because I've been burned on preorders too often, but I preordered AoW3 practically at the literal eleventh hour. I did it because I want to believe. Age of Wonders is somehow something more than just another game - the original holds an almost mystical place in my memory for being so profoundly evocative. It's become far more than just a game over the years: it's memory has morphed into a vessel of imagination, an exemplar of everything joyful about gaming. And the little kid inside of me wants to believe again - in good, in evil, in dragons and magic and all the cliches of high fantasy. I bought in because I want to feel like the kid I remember being so many years ago when I played the original game. Nothing could possibly live up to that, not even the original in it's heyday. The rational side of my brain is hoping for a good strategy game once I return to my senses, and that side was sold on the game by watching the videos and reading in the thread about the tactical AI being not-stupid. If not for that, my rational brain would have thrown in a veto and I would have just waited to see how Endless Legend turns out. e: Side note on Stardock: I got more entertainment value out of the laughably broken original Elemental than I've gotten out of Fallen Enchantress. Original Elemental was the Plan 9 From Outer Space of computer games - so bad it was hilarious, and so broken it was fantastic fun figuring out how to optimally dismember the mechanics. Fallen Enchantress is just utterly forgettable. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Mar 31, 2014 |
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Mar 31, 2014 11:22
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Woke up this afternoon, downloaded it, and decided to take a quick look before diving back into work. Well that took longer than I intended. First impression is positive, though I may have to turn down the graphics settings.
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Apr 1, 2014 00:55
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Let it begin.
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Apr 1, 2014 23:49
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I'm having an odd problem, graphically. The game seems to run smoothly except that it sort of "pauses" for a handful milliseconds every second, in a clockwork pattern that makes the whole experience jumpy. I'm not sure it's just AoW3 on my computer, but it's the most noticeable with this game and I'm wondering what AoW3 emphasizes in resource use that might exacerbate this effect? (And thus help me hunt down the real problem.) I don't *think* it's my GPU, since all the ATI diagnostics are going around telling me that it's not ever being pushed to even 75% capacity or so (got an ATI Radeon HD 5850, I believe). I got a big fat sick of speedy new memory about six months ago, so I have trouble believing that's the problem either (especially when the system is telling me that I've got about a billion more acres of memory - 16 gigs - than AoW3 uses up). My suspicions are slowly coming around to my CPU now: it's a quad-core AMD CPU (AMD Phenom II X4 955, 3.2GHz). Aging perhaps? This stuff was all really good back when I put this rig together, but it was years ago now. What on earth could be causing this? I feel like it's progressively been getting worse, even in games that used to run fine before, but AoW3 runs into the wall more abruptly than anything else so far. e: Worth noting that when I start the game, even picking up from a previous save as long as I've just started the program, it runs smooth as butter for a while. And then it quickly goes all whack until a quit. That's why I kept thinking memory, but I don't know... Corbeau fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Apr 2, 2014 |
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Apr 2, 2014 23:44
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Gerblyn posted:Does the problem get worse when you have a stack selected on the world map? We're fixing an issue in the next patch related to that Framerate drops just enough to be noticeable, but no. This problem is independent of that one - the pausing thing is so bizarre in large part because the game's running smoothly between the tiny pauses (and at least Fraps' framerate counter agrees - I can be getting 40+ fps and still have it be jerky like crazy). Corbeau fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Apr 2, 2014 |
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Apr 2, 2014 23:53
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Sedisp posted:So is it just me or are underground cavern entrances incredibly rare? There's rare right up until you turn the underground layer on in map generation. I find it odd that it's off by default, but it is.
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Apr 3, 2014 04:22
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The soundtrack is exquisite. I've spent more on worse music, easily.
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Apr 4, 2014 00:18
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Yeah, the tech tree really needs some fleshing out. Tech costs in most 4X games don't just increase exponentially - they do it for a long time. It feels pretty awesome to look at a late-game tech early in Civ or Endless Space that would take hundreds of turns to research at your current pace, and then during the endgame you snap it up in half a dozen turns. That's progression, and right now the tech costs simply don't scale appropriately into the late game here. It feels like there isn't any endgame at all.
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Apr 4, 2014 08:16
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Gerblyn posted:The randomized nature of the skillbook makes that a hard thing to achieve. If a game has a tech tree then it's easy to fill it with filler crap (research this for +5% shields on all units!) but with our skillbook, we can't have too many things like that. An unlucky player would get an endless parade of +5 hitpoints, and +6% production in cities, while a lucky player would get fireballs and earthquake. So when we add new things, they have to be genuinely useful, which means they need to be relatively powerful, which makes them hard to balance and things. Frankly, I think the randomized skillbook needs a better algorithm. Because yes, it would be a problem, but so is not having scaling progression.
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Apr 4, 2014 09:45
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Gerblyn posted:That's a nice idea actually. In principle we could move some things to XML config files, I think the main problem with that is that we've promized Modding support and a lot of people might see it as a huge cop out... I'll make a note of it though. That is fantastic news!
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Apr 4, 2014 13:01
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Tried out the beta patch, and I must say that I find the research pacing to be vastly improved. I've found that I like the empire builder mode for random maps, since it gives a very good sense of progression (from fighting off hostile neutrals and founding a core of cities up to skirmishing with neighboring wizards and courting neutral cities, aiming at the eventual showdown with the rest of the map). The problem before was you could pretty much research everything you needed early without any trouble, and then once you had any core set of cities then even late-game techs were inconsequential to research. Now it feels like I'm making choices in my tech selection. That said, I haven't gotten far enough to really gauge the mid- and late-game research pace yet. But this is definitely an improvement already! Triskelli posted:To the person that said dire penguins need to be epic mounts: Oh my god this must happen.
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Apr 5, 2014 00:30
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I should have been asleep hours ago, but I just had to keep playing the beta patch. This game is a ton of fun now. I can't emphasize enough how much I'm digging the Empire Builder pacing on a Small size map: games have an early game, midgame, and endgame, and are even completable within a single evening's play!
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Apr 5, 2014 08:53
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When I've gotten to an overwhelming position compared to an AI empire, it'll start using scorched earth tactics and burn down it's own cities before I can take them.
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Apr 5, 2014 11:02
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Huh. Curse isn't a once-per-battle or even cooldown ability on Succubi. That's... pretty scary.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:25
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Also, here's to hoping for more races in the future. I'm really missing AoW1's crazy huge array of factions. The class system alone just isn't doing it for me. I want to play an Archon Dreadnought already! (Yes, I play Cryx in Warmachine.)
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Apr 8, 2014 02:33
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Okay, so this game isn't perfect, but... you guys did it. This is a modernized AoW1. I wrote right before release that I didn't think you could capture the magic, but you somehow did. Hell of a job. And the random map generator is absolutely boss, too.
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Apr 8, 2014 15:12
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I can't be certain 100%, but in my current game I've encountered two AI at war with each other and one of them owns a city of the other's race. On a map with no starting cities. That changed sides somehow.
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Apr 9, 2014 00:20
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On AI aggression, I should also note that I had the AI attack my throne city with a roughly equal strength (or slightly more powerful) army. I won under manual combat, but automatic combat rated the battle as close and the strategic AI still went for the attack. I think the problem is more that the AI won't take the same kind of risks that a human player will. Unless they're certain that their throne is totally, absolutely safe, it seems like they won't leave it. Which slows down their expansion and makes them reluctant to launch attacks unless they have such an abundance of strength that they think that they can win simultaneously on both offense and defense (regardless of the fact that their opponent can only be in one place at a time). The AI would totally have killed me last game if he'd brought his whole army on offense rather than leaving a majority of it behind in his throne city. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Apr 9, 2014 |
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Apr 9, 2014 03:40
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Yes, the endgame is a bit of a slog. But not really more so than, say, a Civ game, and I tend to count games that I know are over as a win and move on to building the next winning position. It could really use improvement, but it doesn't ruin the rest of the game.
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Apr 9, 2014 12:25
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Manufacturing a magic quiver for a ranged hero can be, uh, rather disgusting for that reason. I only tried it once, but it applied before all the +ranged stats from hero abilities.
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Apr 13, 2014 08:15
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The AoW1 campaign is fantastic. It's broken, but in the best of ways that expects you to use all of your tools to cheat right back at it.
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Apr 13, 2014 13:52
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I play on a small map with 5-6 players (albeit with the underground layer on for more space), empire building pace. Generally speaking my games are over, in practice, by turn 60. Sometimes it's in actuality as well. T4 spam isn't really an issue there, though I did take the time one game to build 24 Exalted and go throne sniping (that game ended around turn 100). It also helps if you make an ally out of one of the more powerful AIs left. Not because they'll help you - they won't because the AI is far too cautious to mount effective offenses - but because you don't have to spend more time killing them. That does bring up a point though: sometimes the AI needs to take risks. Including against each other. Right now they just compile huge armies and sit on them because everyone else is doing the same. Occasionally they ought to make strategic gambles for the sake of continuing their expansion. Right now they invariably stagnate against each other. As a human player I can accept some temporary strategic vulnerability and just go kill the poo poo out of a technically far more powerful neighbor because they're trying to protect everything at once all the time (and that's not even with the human edge in tactical combat - I've used auto-resolve exclusively for my last few games as a test). Corbeau fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Apr 14, 2014 |
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Apr 14, 2014 13:40
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Business Gorillas posted:I dont know about you guys, but I'd really appreciate an option to select what races heroes can spawn to offer their help to you. I just did an all goblin playthrough and I'd honestly really like if I didn't have to kill 80% of the heroes that offered their aid to me. Terraforming isn't exactly intuitive: it doesn't work like other spells. Specifically, it doesn't take casting points. Your only limits in the number of hexes that you can terraform are your dominion and your raw mana reserves.
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Apr 15, 2014 00:19
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I feel like if the AI was better at being aggressive then we'd see less talk of T4 spam and ICS simply because players trying to do that would get murdered by risk-taking AI players. That's certainly what a human would do if he knew that someone was investing heavily into economy rather than military.
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Apr 17, 2014 23:20
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I've only ever seen races the don't mind the underground (Dwarves, Goblins, and Draconians) spawn in the underground.
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Apr 21, 2014 00:36
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In random map play I've been commonly getting underground levels whose surface caves are inside walls. Not surrounded by walls, but actually inside the walls. Had an AI spawn down there with no way to ever get out (I had to go get a digging unit from the surface to go anywhere below, since every single cave was inside a dirt wall). Also it feels like the cave entrances get clustered up in one area of the map with none in the rest of the map. This is on the beta patch, but it's been happening in previous versions too.
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Apr 28, 2014 04:03
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I actually saw one Emperor AI murder another Emperor AI over the weekend. It's the second time I've seen AI-on-AI player elimination though, which really isn't that often.
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Apr 29, 2014 16:39
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Pretty sure I posted earlier that the biggest thing this game needs - though there are a lot of smaller things that I want - is more races. So I'm glad to hear that. Looking forward to seeing what you guys have in store.
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May 1, 2014 01:12
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Earlier today I played a game with the expansion for the first time. It's substantially improved, mechanically, particularly the seal and surrender mechanics. It made the game end not long after I'd achieved surefire snowball status.
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Sep 22, 2014 06:13
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I had an AI rogue ruin my poo poo last week. I went all-in to buy a dragon dwelling, and a dozen turns later the AI walks up and casts Incite Rebellion on it. Turns out it's really loving hard to deal with full stacks of revolting dragons.
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Nov 7, 2014 19:33
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Rookersh posted:Anyone know of a good hint guide for AoW1? I keep trying to get into it, and get stalled at the first Halfing mission. I end up grabbing some nonhorseback guys for the main hero army, and suddenly he can't move at all, and then I have another army of nothing but Haflings dicking around on the west side. Eventually, before I even make enough money to really grab all the initial towns, something like 3-4 armies of Goblins just descend on me and kill both groups with ease. Learn how to cheese the AI and never stop. Abuse flying units and global spells and enchants like mad. Be incredibly aggressive about grabbing resources, especially at the start of the game. Towards the end of the campaign, make sure you keep a laser focus on your objectives (but still go for resources early in a mission). And make sure your tactical combat is strong and that you're building units that work well in it: you're going to need to win a ton of outnumbered fights. I recall archers being central to the flow of tactical combat in AoW1. Unfortunately I played AoW1 so long ago that I don't have specifics to give you, only general impressions.
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Nov 27, 2014 22:15
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Also Lightning Strike is bullshit when combined with First Strike because you can stun anyone trying to hit you. I remember that particular interaction.
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Nov 27, 2014 22:31
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Theswarms posted:I always get summon dire penguin. I'd like that spell to changed to a battlefield enchantment that summons dire penguins every turn. You get the joy of dire penguins without the disappointment of summoning a dire penguin. Drown your enemies in murderous vampire penguins. Call it March of the Penguins.
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Dec 10, 2014 22:26
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 11:02 |
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I don't think PBEM works yet in the beta. I tried loading my turn, and it just sits there saying that someone else is taking their turn. Probably happened to the last guy too, since he timed out. e: Or maybe the last guy timing out is what's causing this, I don't know. It uses leader name, not player name, so I can't tell for sure whose turn the game thinks it is. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Mar 15, 2015 |
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Mar 15, 2015 20:53
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