Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Age of Wonders 3 First impressions

[quote name="Mischief Maker"]Probably not going to go into detail for a while -Xulima and all- but this popped up on the gog flash sale for deep (dick) discount, so I snatched it up. Age of Wonders is a fantasy 4X series with heavy emphasis on tactical combat, like Heroes of Might and Magic, but without stacked armies in tactical combat. Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic was a game that probably would have had a permanent place on my hard drive but for a small design choice that ruined the game for me: to-hit rolls. In Heroes of Might and Magic, every army attack hits, the random number generator determines how hard. In AoW 1-2.5 the RNG determines whether you hit at all, and this had two effects: one, it made tier 1 (even 2) units completely worthless to build because their chance-to-hit was so low they'd never output any damage anyway; two, it completely undermined the strategic maneuvering aspect because all your brilliant formations could still come to naught because the RNG said "fuck you." The utter RAGE of watching your hero doing the sword swing animation three times in a row to no effect made me drop the game for neo-King's Bounty even though I dislike stacked armies. Thankfully AoW 3 switched to the HOMM "always hit" system. Armor and range and obstruction penalties reduce the damage dealt. Statistically your units deal damage at the same rate as the old system, but you won't feel like you're being bent over the table by the RNG. Also, battle XP doesn't only go to the unit that lands the killing blow. Just doing stuff like healing now gives XP, which along with the guarantee to now deal <I>some</I> damage makes strategies other than a mad dash for the Tier 4 units viable. The game ships with 6 races: Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Goblins, Humans, and Draconians, though arguably you could say it ships with 12. Your main hero picks one of six classes and each class brings with itself a selection of skills, units, and spells in addition to what the race brings. There's a $12 DLC that adds hobbits, and the next DLC adds frostlings, cat furries, and the necromancer class. I imagine this game will pile up 4 or 5 expansions before it's back to Shadow Magic levels of content. Wizard towers are gone, your main guy is now a traveling hero directly participating in combat who gets resurrected at the capitol if he dies. Sadly, while this engine is higher tech than Shadow Magic, they chose to go with a Peter Jackson-y golden brown tint to the graphics instead of Shadow Magic's riot of color, so it's not as pretty. My first impression is it's an almost total improvement over its predecessors with the exception of the art direction. Whether the thing will earn $60 for DLCs remains to be seen.[/quote]