Yup, the Swarm Darters are supposed to work like that. They use homing mosquitoes, according to the lore.
So then follow up question: why play anything but Goblins?
Their good cavalry doesn't arrive until they develop their Tier 3 infrastructure for the Big Beetle, which hurts their ability charge & tie-up opposing support / caster / artillery units. Darters are great against conventional forces, but fall-off in damage potential as opponents get Blight resistance (which is extremely common) and have T1 hit points, making them extremely vulnerable to nukes.
I'd say Goblins are good for anyone who enjoys long-range combat with squishy units. You'd pick a different race if you wanted, say, a heavy duty front line that can absorb a lot of punishment / eat charges (humans & dwarves) or a charge-oriented high offense army (orcs & draconians).
I think though by the time anyone gets around to units that effectively handle Darters you should have access to several different races and your class stuff to plug the gaps. In the meantime you get a T1 unit requiring no infrastructure that actually has an impact on the game in the small window where you only have the one set of racial units and few if any class ones.
I haven't tried blitzing the AI early with darters yet; you might be totally correct that it's imbalanced (I imagine darter + wasp swam would be a pretty cheese rush combo). I think you'd have trouble against nukes, though, and I'm a bit skeptical that a rush strategy is viable on medium or larger maps (could be wrong).
Having played AoW3 abit, I like it alot but do have some issues with it. Specifically, it feels like some of the really cool areas of choice have been removed. Like domain means very little now as far as I can tell, you can cast spells anywhere you have line of sight. I really don't like that much, it makes domain feel pointless.
Also, it used to be that mana vs research was a give or take to each other. With it now being separate, I have way more mana than I can spend. Same with gold so far. The last thing I'll mentions the way research works. In the past it was divided between spells and skills. It seems like it basically still is, but its all on 2 pages and all jumbled together randomly. Just feels kind of chaotic and hard to know what to go for.
I am having a ton of fun though, and hopefully this stuff might be sorted out in patches or mods. The core of the game is very solid, just needs tweaks IMO.
Steam Profile | My Art | NID: DarkMecha (SW-4787-9571-8977) | PSN: DarkMecha
I tested the darter blitz; it's more or less what I expected:
Playing on a Normal map, Standard progression, 6 AI opponents:
Against the very first AI I encountered - a Dwarf Theocrat - I managed to just barely eke out a throne kill against the Knight AI (no cheats, no bonus units). The darters are a glass cannon, and archers on the wall outrange them - but if you bring 3+ stacks, you can outshoot the defenders on a flank, collapse it, then take the other flank.
The 2nd Knight AI I ran into - a high elf mage - was a one-sided massacre in their favor. High elf archer kill darters in a single volley; you can't even get in position for a full salvo against the defenders. On top of that, the opposing faction leader nuked down stacks in 2 shots.
Against higher level AI, I really doubt you'll even snipe the first one you run into.
That being said, darters are absolutely fantastic for rolling neutral settlements if you want to just grab early towns instead of waiting for quests.
I feel the change is pretty necessary, given that the domain is no longer attached to your faction leader.
Hrm I also noticed it seems to cost double to cast combat spells outside your domain (Either that or it was because my 2 heroes had been killed. It said something like "no leader, costs double!"). So nevermind, that's not a bad change at all. I just like some kind of restriction on casting, makes the idea of projecting your domain feel wizardly.
DarkMecha on
Steam Profile | My Art | NID: DarkMecha (SW-4787-9571-8977) | PSN: DarkMecha
You can summon adjacent to a city or adjacent to a hero. I don't think you can summon to a point in your domain that doesn't meet either of those conditions.
So the neutrals that wander the map: do they ever get more involved? it's usually just a few bandit types.
It depends on the map seed - scoundrels are spawned by bandit camps, monsters are spawned by monster dens and undead are spawned by undead camps that I don't recall the name of.
Listen, Merlin. You and I go way back. To, like, AoW1. I was willing to play ball. We had a Peace Treaty, right? It wasn't an Open Borders agreement, now was it? I know the only bridge to your goblin city was in my territory, but them's the breaks. You want access to the bridge, you gotta pay extra.
But no, you didn't want to pay extra. You just kept violating my sovereign territory. And now a swarm of heroes, succubi, elvish longbowmen, and various charmed units overran your throne, and you live in the goddamn void permanently. Are you happy now, Merlin? ARE YOU?
I was interested in this, until I found out it's got another bullshit login account system to unlock a part of the game (multiplayer). I'm not going to jump through hoops to unlock a part of the game that's sooner or later going to go tits up simply due to the devs not upholding servers or whatnot (as is nearly always the case with these proprietary extra hoops).
Compatibility
WQHD / QHD (up to 2560 x 1440 / 2560 *1600) native resolution display support (the Black & White boxes and blurry text should disappear). Fix has been verified to work up to and including a resolution of 2560×1660.
Fixed an issue for people using Intel HD Graphics – specifically for HD4000 and Surface 2 Pro – in combination with certain driver version, that caused a crash when opening interface screens – e.g. starting the game, opening options menu, skill book, etc.
Performance
Fixed frame drop when armies were selected.
Fixed decreasing frame rate occurring during extended play, particularly in longer battles.
Fixed a memory leak when Windows was locked.
Optimized a feature effecting maps with water, which should now show increased framerate.
AI Improvements
Fixed some cases where the tactical AI would come out from behind the walls of cities and fortresses too soon.
Stopped the AI spamming disjunction, so players can now use global magic more easily.
Fixed an issue where the tactical AI would cast a resurrection spell on an invalid target.
Made 'squire' AI easier to beat.
AI settings for players were changed to compensate for this change, to keep the same level of challenge on normal difficulty.
Using the 'restart' option in a campaign map now returns the player to the briefing, allowing map difficulty to be changed.
Scenario & Campaign
Campaign: Heroes being mind controlled no longer causes you to instantly lose a campaign map if you rescue them by the end of combat.
Campaign: Heroes which are protected by the 'resurgence' effect – e.g. the theocrat's 'rebirth' spell – can now die in tactical combat without causing you to lose the campaign map, as long as you win the battle that they die in.
Blightmouth Crater: Closed a gap in impassable mountains.
Blightmouth Crater: Removed two superfluous hearts of the blight.
Blightmouth Crater: Fixed the behavior of independent armies.
Elven Resurgence: Player 6 now starts with more gold mines, making the starting positions more balanced.
4th Elven Court map: Independents no longer interfere with one of the starting quests.
4th Commonwealth map: Fixed a message that missed an icon under specific circumstances.
5th Commonwealth map: A 'defeat leader' quest no longer reveals that leader's position.
5th Commonwealth map: Fixed a story message that had overlapping lines of text.
6th Elven Court & Commonwealth maps: Prevented story characters from dying when you are victorious.
6th Elven Court and Commonwealth maps: Added a few building upgrades to starting cities to give the player a better starting situation and more options.
Other Fixes
Fixed settings – e.g. graphics settings – not being saved when using the 'guest' profile.
Fixed an issue when logging in with usernames of two characters.
Fixed the stack confirm movement button being disabled in some situations when a stack was auto-moving.
Fixed a rare crash caused by a player razing a city with a heart of blight, tropics, etc in its domain
Fixed an issue where a backstab bonus wasn't being correctly applied. This led to situations where a unit could backstab a target without flanking it.
Fixed a crash triggered by clicking on a "You lost your throne city!" event.
Fixed a crash triggered by selecting a 'Egg has hatched' after loading the save game.
Fixed the 'Remove army from event list' shortcut key function so armies are properly removed from the list.
Fixed an issue where the 'Protect your leader and throne city' quest failed to complete on victory.
The game now ignores controller input, to prevent camera drift when a controller is plugged in.
'Spring of life' now rewards units when explored.
When creating a new custom leader, the field for setting a name is now left empty by default.
Balance
'Shrine of smiting' is no longer 'Devout', nerfing 'Shrine of smiting' doom stacks which relied on stacking 'Devout' bonuses for the 'Smiting prayer bolts'.
'Shadow stalker' now does cold damage. This fixes an issue where rogues had limited options vs. blight immune troops.
Increased the research costs of skills to slow down progression through the skill tree.
Increased cost of racial tier 3 unit building to 300 gold and 100 mana.
Decreased the base production of cities.
Fixed issue with 'Libraries' and 'Observatories' generating too much knowledge.
Features
Added buttons on either side of the city name that cycle through cities owned by the player.
We added a quick save option, bound under CTRL+S by default.
Added extra text to the preview popup when attacking a city wall. Players can now see the hit points the wall have remaining as they plan their attack.
In the middle of an extra huge map as a female high elf rogue, Vanessa the Virgin-Stealer, and I have been really cheesing the diplomacy AI. I'm large and powerful enough so that the remaining three opposing powers on the map don't want to go to war with me, but they're all pure good and I'm irredeemably evil. I keep offering my bodythousands of unneeded mana crystals in exchange for towns in areas where I want to expand to; the AI seems to really overvalue mana. I got an high elf dreadnought opponent that hated my evil whore face to make an alliance with me, and all of my opponents are constantly at war with each other because of my unrefusable offers.
I had a massive cold war like this on the main continent between myself and the orc warlord. After taking out one of the two major underground powers, I started giving my hateful ally (who was himself down to just his throne city) underground cities so he could carry on his ill-contrived war with the goblin theocrat.
Just for kicks (and because I was bored with buying towns), I broke the peace with the orc warlord (his griffin riders had been trespassing through my territory for ages and he'd been plundering maybe half the treasure sites I'd been trying for), and, predictably, I lost six cities to griffin riders the next round as my cold war economy spun into hot war troop generation. Of course, I have the giant, undead, dragon, and fairy dwellings on the map, so we'll see how much time it takes to re-take everything I just lost and crush Colm the Lucky under my stiletto-heeled boot.
Okay, I like Rogues a lot, but I just started a Draconian Theocrat, and I'm really liking the researchable upgrades. The problem with the Draconian Elder Support units is that they don't have Healing, they just have a Draconian buff, which is limited-use if you're not using the dragon guys exclusively. Theocrats, though, can get an upgrade that gives Healing to all Support units.
I also had fun cheesing my wizard's Healing ability. A Dwarf Warlord spawned basically right underneath my throne town, and as soon as I went into the cavern layer, he had just settled a town with my cave entrance in the domain. I didn't want to fight him, so I offered him 300 mana crystals and a crossbow to give me that town. As I mentioned before, the AI seems to over-value mana, and he gave it to me. The next round he declared war on me. Guess he regretted selling his people to a religious fanatic.
There was an immediate scuffle, resulting in the dwarf warlord getting thrown into the void. I go to the next cavern over, where his throne was, and I attacked with everything I had on-hand, because war with an Emperor AI when I was just starting off was something I needed to avoid. My entire army except for my wizard was taken out, but my wizard would back off, heal, then step in again to fire spirit bolts. That fight actually ended in a draw because it reached the time limit. My Theocrat did gain FOUR levels from the fight, though, and the last two units didn't stand a chance the next day, especially since one of my upgrades was Convert. Those Dwarven Deepguard looked deeply into my Eyes of Evil and turned on their former allies.
This game is fun, but it still needs some balancing. Mana is far too plentiful; my Elf Rogue game ended with me having almost 40K mana even tossing way thousands at a time to buy towns. Even just starting off, there's no way I could spend mana faster than I gain it, and the AI thinks that it's solid gold in terms of trade value.
I'm still searching for my undead war troll experience.
This game is fun, but it still needs some balancing. Mana is far too plentiful; my Elf Rogue game ended with me having almost 40K mana even tossing way thousands at a time to buy towns. Even just starting off, there's no way I could spend mana faster than I gain it, and the AI thinks that it's solid gold in terms of trade value.
Just so you know: It's been fairly fixed. The patch gives you a cap to mana, based on research and buildings. Also the frequency of mana generating world map buildings got hit with the nerf bat. While this means a well developed empire can support a huge vault of mana, overall it's alot more scarce. A lot of the other balancing issues have been tweaked as well; base production in cities, shrines of smiting no longer being devout (doom stacks of shrines no longer gives Devout bonus to itself and each other), and research takes a little more effort now. My sorcerous lizards can no longer reliably spam 1 tech-unlock pr turn after the first few turns.
Also, city-spam is a little harder now, as the hit to growth becomes a little more like a Civ-game; a big hit to growth that can easily get you negative city size if you spam settler.
Full patch notes are here: http://ageofwonders.com/huge-v1-1-patch-unleashed/
These are the stories of Dwarf Fortress. Legends have been forged there, and meticulousy gathered in one mighty hub: http://dfstories.com/start-here/
This game is fun, but it still needs some balancing. Mana is far too plentiful; my Elf Rogue game ended with me having almost 40K mana even tossing way thousands at a time to buy towns. Even just starting off, there's no way I could spend mana faster than I gain it, and the AI thinks that it's solid gold in terms of trade value.
Just so you know: It's been fairly fixed. The patch gives you a cap to mana, based on research and buildings. Also the frequency of mana generating world map buildings got hit with the nerf bat. While this means a well developed empire can support a huge vault of mana, overall it's alot more scarce. A lot of the other balancing issues have been tweaked as well; base production in cities, shrines of smiting no longer being devout (doom stacks of shrines no longer gives Devout bonus to itself and each other), and research takes a little more effort now. My sorcerous lizards can no longer reliably spam 1 tech-unlock pr turn after the first few turns.
Also, city-spam is a little harder now, as the hit to growth becomes a little more like a Civ-game; a big hit to growth that can easily get you negative city size if you spam settler.
Full patch notes are here: http://ageofwonders.com/huge-v1-1-patch-unleashed/
Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the link.
Added new Rogue city upgrade “Shrouded Altar”. Monster units produced at this city gain an additional medal Rank. This upgrade requires the Planar Gate.
Cool. That was bothering me. There was no way for Shadow Fiends to start off with a medal upgrade before.
The campaign is okay. I did the first mission just to get acquainted with the controls, then I did a few random maps to get some experience in before going back to the campaign on Hard.
I'm now on the fifth or so mission and the one thing that bothers me is that your secondary heroes are instant mission fails if they die, so you're stuck in this tricky quandary where you need to use the heroes to level them so they're not so fragile, but you don't want to use them too much, because then you have to reload when they die (and it's not always possible to save them, depending on how much of a dick the computer is).
Also I keep it on Classic Turns when I'm playing single player, because it's fucking obnoxious when the computer interrupts your turn by barging through your domain.
+1
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
Stupid question: how do I build new towns? I build some kind of builder unit, but it only has options for roads, some kind of defensive structure and a watchtower.
Settlers.
Interesting tip. If you build a fort or stone fort with a builder, then build a city on that fort, you get the wall upgrades automatically.
This game has been filling my evening with joy lately.
...Does anyone know of a way to force the AI into larger open field battles? I find I get the most enjoyment out of non-siege battles, but end-up with a lot of back to back sieges because the AI will just fortify themselves on their crown city if they sniff any power at all in the stacks you're fielding.
This game has been filling my evening with joy lately.
...Does anyone know of a way to force the AI into larger open field battles? I find I get the most enjoyment out of non-siege battles, but end-up with a lot of back to back sieges because the AI will just fortify themselves on their crown city if they sniff any power at all in the stacks you're fielding.
One of the best tricks to use is to wait for an enemy AI's city power-blob to have one stack shuffle just outside of town, but still adjacent to several other units. If you attack the unit that's outside the city (i.e. the center tile and six surrounding tiles), you can drag it and its adjacent stacks (even those that are within the city "suburbs") into an open field battle. I use this trick to whittle down unbreakable defensive forces.
I should get back to my game. I am 15 turns into what appears to be a sort of climactic battle in the campaign, and I occupy the center of the map, with like seven enemy players along the edges. My main wizard has a bazooka and a King Griffon, so I fly him around on his own picking off enemy units while my other heroes have been rampaging around with armies. In all the excitement, I forgot which city my tower was in, and also to defend it. So after turn 15, one AI player sent a full stack of Tier II/III units after my wizard and another AI player just walked one guy into my capitol, making me lose the scenario. I tried to do the turn over twice, and lost to slightly different circumstances each time. May have to restart the map, but that's a daunting proposition, since I play Classic turns and the AI can take several minutes to do each round. Also I had just gotten the fairie and giant dwellings on the verge of productivity.
Although my heart will always be with my Draconian Archdruid and her Raptor / Serpent / Spider cavalry charges that blitkzkrieg through everything, I must confess to growing an affection for my new Grand Inquisitor and her fanatical legions of crusaders.
Charging right up the walls without hesitation while protected by Martyr shields & led on by the cleansing fury of my Fire Dragon generals feel so appropriately pure. I could see myself doing this for a while.
Although my heart will always be with my Draconian Archdruid and her Raptor / Serpent / Spider cavalry charges that blitkzkrieg through everything, I must confess to growing an affection for my new Grand Inquisitor and her fanatical legions of crusaders.
Charging right up the walls without hesitation while protected by Martyr shields & led on by the cleansing fury of my Fire Dragon generals feel so appropriately pure. I could see myself doing this for a while.
The Draconian Theocrat is pretty damn badass. Getting Healing on your Elders makes them so valuable. Drac Theo is also the best character to run a one-race game. My last run with a Dragon Mother razed or turned out the populations of all non-draconian cities she encountered... with the exception of the town founded by some dwarven settlers that found themselves very convinced by Mother's conversion attempt. Those guys got it, you know?
with the exception of the town founded by some dwarven settlers that found themselves very convinced by Mother's conversion attempt. Those guys got it, you know?
While I was disappointed the first expansion is adding Halflings instead of Frostlings, I actually like the Luck mechanic they are using even if it does paint a huge bullseye on them in terms of obvious strategy for defeating them by debuffing their morale. Plus we're getting Dread Monkeys to go alongside the Dire Penguins.
The new Disjunction system is a Godsend (you also get it with a free update to the game if you don't want to buy the Golden Realms, but w/e, it's part of the same rollout). No more instant shut-down of your big globals. You thought maybe Armageddon perhaps wasn't here afterall? Wrong, motherfucker. Beg for salvation!
New neutral site additions are boss. Playing the game on Empire Builder mode is legit interesting now.
The new Seals mechanic is actually kinda lame. The sites themselves are too well guarded to be worth taking; you're just better off wiping cities out and grinding down opponents, just like always (especially true since the AI can now surrender! Yay!)
Halflings are garbage. I'm guessing nobody's surprised at this.
Wild Magic is very, very swingy & frustrating to play against. The polymorphing spell has too much potential power behind it, because there are so many Goddamn T3 or T4 monsters it can turn a damaged unit into.
The AI update is hardly noticeable. It still uses lots & lots of cheating as a crutch to stay competitive (which is fine in books), and makes mediocre to poor play decisions on the tactical map (also okay in my books).
So, just some thoughts to get off of my chest after a nice & long campaign:
Theocrat feels like they need some upward adjustment. They lack a selection of hard hitting high tier units because they concept is that you'll be churning-out a lot of low tier troops and then applying so many damage buffs via Armageddon, Holy War & Denounce City that you just mow through the enemy ranks, easily replacing lost Crusaders & Martyrs with reinforcements because even small cities can pump them out 1 per turn.
I enjoy this concept a lot, and for the most part it works really well (in the best case scenario you can actually just charge right up the enemy walls with ladders, using Dragons to tank some hits). But it has some really large problems associated with it:
- The cost vs reward on the buff spells is too high. Armageddon is absolutely necessary in the mid-late game because the units at that stage have massive pools of hit points and substantial resistance to Spirit damage, which is what you'll be stacking. it cost 5 turns to prepare it when you have 120 casting skill - and if the opponent breaks it with a Disjunction while you're in the middle of a push, you're hosed - a single counter-attack while it's down will completely blunt your offensive. It's better now with the new Disjunction system, but it still needs a lower cost, and maybe a special boost to it's reinforcement.
- The class is too reliant on access to special dwellings; if you cannot locate and secure a Dragon, Giant or Naga dwelling immediately, you'll be at a significant disadvantage during the mid-late game. You do, thankfully, have the tools to secure these dwellings pretty early if you can find them, if they are even on the map, but it's a bummer to scour the corners of a medium map looking for a crucial Dragon dwelling only to find that the cheating AI has taken it already, and you'll have to fight through the bullshit infinite fireball glyph to try and take it back.
- The cheating AI really diminishes the idea of out-producing an army of superior quality with your great burning fist of righteous Crusaders. On the highest difficulty, AI players will pump out T4 units as easily as you can produce Crusaders, and super buffed Crusaders are still not much of a match for full stacks of Manticore Riders or Dreadnoughts.
I feel like I had to cheese it to win, which is a shame.
Price was cheaper than I expected too, plus it's on sale currently. I was expecting 14.99 as the base price but for 20% off 11.99 I didn't hesitate to grab it.
Haven't had a lot of time to put into it yet though.
Went ahead and grabbed it too, as I'm a big fan of these kind of games.
Semi-random: Is it sad that the main changes I'd make to AoW3 would be adding an Necromancer class, making the fireball spell do area damage (1 hex radius), and the option to enable music from AoW2/SM? I miss my skeleton armies, aoe fireballs, and that awesome music. Still, AoW3 is pretty damned great and if they keep adding great DLC like this, can only get better.
DarkMecha on
Steam Profile | My Art | NID: DarkMecha (SW-4787-9571-8977) | PSN: DarkMecha
Went ahead and grabbed it too, as I'm a big fan of these kind of games.
Semi-random: Is it sad that the main changes I'd make to AoW3 would be adding an Necromancer class, making the fireball spell do area damage (1 hex radius), and the option to enable music from AoW2/SM? I miss my skeleton armies, aoe fireballs, and that awesome music. Still, AoW3 is pretty damned great and if they keep adding great DLC like this, can only get better.
You can sort-of kind-of kit together an undead empire if you secure the Archon dwelling and have enough Tombs in your territory to activate the Shrine of Reanimation in your primary cities. If you play as Rogue, you can even pretend that your Succubi are vampires & your Shadow Stalkers are Dread Reapers.
There's supposedly an Undead faction in the works that will eventually be released as extra DLC, so look forward to that.
Posts
I haven't tried blitzing the AI early with darters yet; you might be totally correct that it's imbalanced (I imagine darter + wasp swam would be a pretty cheese rush combo). I think you'd have trouble against nukes, though, and I'm a bit skeptical that a rush strategy is viable on medium or larger maps (could be wrong).
Also, it used to be that mana vs research was a give or take to each other. With it now being separate, I have way more mana than I can spend. Same with gold so far. The last thing I'll mentions the way research works. In the past it was divided between spells and skills. It seems like it basically still is, but its all on 2 pages and all jumbled together randomly. Just feels kind of chaotic and hard to know what to go for.
I am having a ton of fun though, and hopefully this stuff might be sorted out in patches or mods. The core of the game is very solid, just needs tweaks IMO.
I feel the change is pretty necessary, given that the domain is no longer attached to your faction leader.
Playing on a Normal map, Standard progression, 6 AI opponents:
Against the very first AI I encountered - a Dwarf Theocrat - I managed to just barely eke out a throne kill against the Knight AI (no cheats, no bonus units). The darters are a glass cannon, and archers on the wall outrange them - but if you bring 3+ stacks, you can outshoot the defenders on a flank, collapse it, then take the other flank.
The 2nd Knight AI I ran into - a high elf mage - was a one-sided massacre in their favor. High elf archer kill darters in a single volley; you can't even get in position for a full salvo against the defenders. On top of that, the opposing faction leader nuked down stacks in 2 shots.
Against higher level AI, I really doubt you'll even snipe the first one you run into.
That being said, darters are absolutely fantastic for rolling neutral settlements if you want to just grab early towns instead of waiting for quests.
Hrm I also noticed it seems to cost double to cast combat spells outside your domain (Either that or it was because my 2 heroes had been killed. It said something like "no leader, costs double!"). So nevermind, that's not a bad change at all. I just like some kind of restriction on casting, makes the idea of projecting your domain feel wizardly.
It's a pretty big adjustment from AoW 2, but I like it.
(Also, I like how the late game in AoW 3 doesn't just boil down to 'spam field-killing aoe spells. GG before opponent can even move.')
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
It depends on the map seed - scoundrels are spawned by bandit camps, monsters are spawned by monster dens and undead are spawned by undead camps that I don't recall the name of.
But no, you didn't want to pay extra. You just kept violating my sovereign territory. And now a swarm of heroes, succubi, elvish longbowmen, and various charmed units overran your throne, and you live in the goddamn void permanently. Are you happy now, Merlin? ARE YOU?
Compatibility
WQHD / QHD (up to 2560 x 1440 / 2560 *1600) native resolution display support (the Black & White boxes and blurry text should disappear). Fix has been verified to work up to and including a resolution of 2560×1660.
Fixed an issue for people using Intel HD Graphics – specifically for HD4000 and Surface 2 Pro – in combination with certain driver version, that caused a crash when opening interface screens – e.g. starting the game, opening options menu, skill book, etc.
Performance
Fixed frame drop when armies were selected.
Fixed decreasing frame rate occurring during extended play, particularly in longer battles.
Fixed a memory leak when Windows was locked.
Optimized a feature effecting maps with water, which should now show increased framerate.
AI Improvements
Fixed some cases where the tactical AI would come out from behind the walls of cities and fortresses too soon.
Stopped the AI spamming disjunction, so players can now use global magic more easily.
Fixed an issue where the tactical AI would cast a resurrection spell on an invalid target.
Made 'squire' AI easier to beat.
AI settings for players were changed to compensate for this change, to keep the same level of challenge on normal difficulty.
Using the 'restart' option in a campaign map now returns the player to the briefing, allowing map difficulty to be changed.
Scenario & Campaign
Campaign: Heroes being mind controlled no longer causes you to instantly lose a campaign map if you rescue them by the end of combat.
Campaign: Heroes which are protected by the 'resurgence' effect – e.g. the theocrat's 'rebirth' spell – can now die in tactical combat without causing you to lose the campaign map, as long as you win the battle that they die in.
Blightmouth Crater: Closed a gap in impassable mountains.
Blightmouth Crater: Removed two superfluous hearts of the blight.
Blightmouth Crater: Fixed the behavior of independent armies.
Elven Resurgence: Player 6 now starts with more gold mines, making the starting positions more balanced.
4th Elven Court map: Independents no longer interfere with one of the starting quests.
4th Commonwealth map: Fixed a message that missed an icon under specific circumstances.
5th Commonwealth map: A 'defeat leader' quest no longer reveals that leader's position.
5th Commonwealth map: Fixed a story message that had overlapping lines of text.
6th Elven Court & Commonwealth maps: Prevented story characters from dying when you are victorious.
6th Elven Court and Commonwealth maps: Added a few building upgrades to starting cities to give the player a better starting situation and more options.
Other Fixes
Fixed settings – e.g. graphics settings – not being saved when using the 'guest' profile.
Fixed an issue when logging in with usernames of two characters.
Fixed the stack confirm movement button being disabled in some situations when a stack was auto-moving.
Fixed a rare crash caused by a player razing a city with a heart of blight, tropics, etc in its domain
Fixed an issue where a backstab bonus wasn't being correctly applied. This led to situations where a unit could backstab a target without flanking it.
Fixed a crash triggered by clicking on a "You lost your throne city!" event.
Fixed a crash triggered by selecting a 'Egg has hatched' after loading the save game.
Fixed the 'Remove army from event list' shortcut key function so armies are properly removed from the list.
Fixed an issue where the 'Protect your leader and throne city' quest failed to complete on victory.
The game now ignores controller input, to prevent camera drift when a controller is plugged in.
'Spring of life' now rewards units when explored.
When creating a new custom leader, the field for setting a name is now left empty by default.
Balance
'Shrine of smiting' is no longer 'Devout', nerfing 'Shrine of smiting' doom stacks which relied on stacking 'Devout' bonuses for the 'Smiting prayer bolts'.
'Shadow stalker' now does cold damage. This fixes an issue where rogues had limited options vs. blight immune troops.
Increased the research costs of skills to slow down progression through the skill tree.
Increased cost of racial tier 3 unit building to 300 gold and 100 mana.
Decreased the base production of cities.
Fixed issue with 'Libraries' and 'Observatories' generating too much knowledge.
Features
Added buttons on either side of the city name that cycle through cities owned by the player.
We added a quick save option, bound under CTRL+S by default.
Added extra text to the preview popup when attacking a city wall. Players can now see the hit points the wall have remaining as they plan their attack.
I had a massive cold war like this on the main continent between myself and the orc warlord. After taking out one of the two major underground powers, I started giving my hateful ally (who was himself down to just his throne city) underground cities so he could carry on his ill-contrived war with the goblin theocrat.
Just for kicks (and because I was bored with buying towns), I broke the peace with the orc warlord (his griffin riders had been trespassing through my territory for ages and he'd been plundering maybe half the treasure sites I'd been trying for), and, predictably, I lost six cities to griffin riders the next round as my cold war economy spun into hot war troop generation. Of course, I have the giant, undead, dragon, and fairy dwellings on the map, so we'll see how much time it takes to re-take everything I just lost and crush Colm the Lucky under my stiletto-heeled boot.
I also had fun cheesing my wizard's Healing ability. A Dwarf Warlord spawned basically right underneath my throne town, and as soon as I went into the cavern layer, he had just settled a town with my cave entrance in the domain. I didn't want to fight him, so I offered him 300 mana crystals and a crossbow to give me that town. As I mentioned before, the AI seems to over-value mana, and he gave it to me. The next round he declared war on me. Guess he regretted selling his people to a religious fanatic.
There was an immediate scuffle, resulting in the dwarf warlord getting thrown into the void. I go to the next cavern over, where his throne was, and I attacked with everything I had on-hand, because war with an Emperor AI when I was just starting off was something I needed to avoid. My entire army except for my wizard was taken out, but my wizard would back off, heal, then step in again to fire spirit bolts. That fight actually ended in a draw because it reached the time limit. My Theocrat did gain FOUR levels from the fight, though, and the last two units didn't stand a chance the next day, especially since one of my upgrades was Convert. Those Dwarven Deepguard looked deeply into my Eyes of Evil and turned on their former allies.
This game is fun, but it still needs some balancing. Mana is far too plentiful; my Elf Rogue game ended with me having almost 40K mana even tossing way thousands at a time to buy towns. Even just starting off, there's no way I could spend mana faster than I gain it, and the AI thinks that it's solid gold in terms of trade value.
I'm still searching for my undead war troll experience.
Just so you know: It's been fairly fixed. The patch gives you a cap to mana, based on research and buildings. Also the frequency of mana generating world map buildings got hit with the nerf bat. While this means a well developed empire can support a huge vault of mana, overall it's alot more scarce. A lot of the other balancing issues have been tweaked as well; base production in cities, shrines of smiting no longer being devout (doom stacks of shrines no longer gives Devout bonus to itself and each other), and research takes a little more effort now. My sorcerous lizards can no longer reliably spam 1 tech-unlock pr turn after the first few turns.
Also, city-spam is a little harder now, as the hit to growth becomes a little more like a Civ-game; a big hit to growth that can easily get you negative city size if you spam settler.
Full patch notes are here: http://ageofwonders.com/huge-v1-1-patch-unleashed/
Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the link.
Cool. That was bothering me. There was no way for Shadow Fiends to start off with a medal upgrade before.
I'm now on the fifth or so mission and the one thing that bothers me is that your secondary heroes are instant mission fails if they die, so you're stuck in this tricky quandary where you need to use the heroes to level them so they're not so fragile, but you don't want to use them too much, because then you have to reload when they die (and it's not always possible to save them, depending on how much of a dick the computer is).
Also I keep it on Classic Turns when I'm playing single player, because it's fucking obnoxious when the computer interrupts your turn by barging through your domain.
Interesting tip. If you build a fort or stone fort with a builder, then build a city on that fort, you get the wall upgrades automatically.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
...Does anyone know of a way to force the AI into larger open field battles? I find I get the most enjoyment out of non-siege battles, but end-up with a lot of back to back sieges because the AI will just fortify themselves on their crown city if they sniff any power at all in the stacks you're fielding.
One of the best tricks to use is to wait for an enemy AI's city power-blob to have one stack shuffle just outside of town, but still adjacent to several other units. If you attack the unit that's outside the city (i.e. the center tile and six surrounding tiles), you can drag it and its adjacent stacks (even those that are within the city "suburbs") into an open field battle. I use this trick to whittle down unbreakable defensive forces.
I should get back to my game. I am 15 turns into what appears to be a sort of climactic battle in the campaign, and I occupy the center of the map, with like seven enemy players along the edges. My main wizard has a bazooka and a King Griffon, so I fly him around on his own picking off enemy units while my other heroes have been rampaging around with armies. In all the excitement, I forgot which city my tower was in, and also to defend it. So after turn 15, one AI player sent a full stack of Tier II/III units after my wizard and another AI player just walked one guy into my capitol, making me lose the scenario. I tried to do the turn over twice, and lost to slightly different circumstances each time. May have to restart the map, but that's a daunting proposition, since I play Classic turns and the AI can take several minutes to do each round. Also I had just gotten the fairie and giant dwellings on the verge of productivity.
Charging right up the walls without hesitation while protected by Martyr shields & led on by the cleansing fury of my Fire Dragon generals feel so appropriately pure. I could see myself doing this for a while.
The Draconian Theocrat is pretty damn badass. Getting Healing on your Elders makes them so valuable. Drac Theo is also the best character to run a one-race game. My last run with a Dragon Mother razed or turned out the populations of all non-draconian cities she encountered... with the exception of the town founded by some dwarven settlers that found themselves very convinced by Mother's conversion attempt. Those guys got it, you know?
Minds too small for doubt.
Bless them.
Wonder when we will see a new class added.
And I guess the Gluttons are cool too.
EDIT: Oh, September 18, nevermind. I should try to finish my campaign by then.
Sigh. Such a terrible time to be alive.
The new Disjunction system is a Godsend (you also get it with a free update to the game if you don't want to buy the Golden Realms, but w/e, it's part of the same rollout). No more instant shut-down of your big globals. You thought maybe Armageddon perhaps wasn't here afterall? Wrong, motherfucker. Beg for salvation!
New neutral site additions are boss. Playing the game on Empire Builder mode is legit interesting now.
The new Seals mechanic is actually kinda lame. The sites themselves are too well guarded to be worth taking; you're just better off wiping cities out and grinding down opponents, just like always (especially true since the AI can now surrender! Yay!)
Halflings are garbage. I'm guessing nobody's surprised at this.
Wild Magic is very, very swingy & frustrating to play against. The polymorphing spell has too much potential power behind it, because there are so many Goddamn T3 or T4 monsters it can turn a damaged unit into.
The AI update is hardly noticeable. It still uses lots & lots of cheating as a crutch to stay competitive (which is fine in books), and makes mediocre to poor play decisions on the tactical map (also okay in my books).
Theocrat feels like they need some upward adjustment. They lack a selection of hard hitting high tier units because they concept is that you'll be churning-out a lot of low tier troops and then applying so many damage buffs via Armageddon, Holy War & Denounce City that you just mow through the enemy ranks, easily replacing lost Crusaders & Martyrs with reinforcements because even small cities can pump them out 1 per turn.
I enjoy this concept a lot, and for the most part it works really well (in the best case scenario you can actually just charge right up the enemy walls with ladders, using Dragons to tank some hits). But it has some really large problems associated with it:
- The cost vs reward on the buff spells is too high. Armageddon is absolutely necessary in the mid-late game because the units at that stage have massive pools of hit points and substantial resistance to Spirit damage, which is what you'll be stacking. it cost 5 turns to prepare it when you have 120 casting skill - and if the opponent breaks it with a Disjunction while you're in the middle of a push, you're hosed - a single counter-attack while it's down will completely blunt your offensive. It's better now with the new Disjunction system, but it still needs a lower cost, and maybe a special boost to it's reinforcement.
- The class is too reliant on access to special dwellings; if you cannot locate and secure a Dragon, Giant or Naga dwelling immediately, you'll be at a significant disadvantage during the mid-late game. You do, thankfully, have the tools to secure these dwellings pretty early if you can find them, if they are even on the map, but it's a bummer to scour the corners of a medium map looking for a crucial Dragon dwelling only to find that the cheating AI has taken it already, and you'll have to fight through the bullshit infinite fireball glyph to try and take it back.
- The cheating AI really diminishes the idea of out-producing an army of superior quality with your great burning fist of righteous Crusaders. On the highest difficulty, AI players will pump out T4 units as easily as you can produce Crusaders, and super buffed Crusaders are still not much of a match for full stacks of Manticore Riders or Dreadnoughts.
I feel like I had to cheese it to win, which is a shame.
Empire Quests change up the game substantially, Nagas are awesome, Wild Magic is sort of overpowered, and everything is better.
If you liked the base game this is really just a refinement, it's a pretty damn good one, though.
Haven't had a lot of time to put into it yet though.
Semi-random: Is it sad that the main changes I'd make to AoW3 would be adding an Necromancer class, making the fireball spell do area damage (1 hex radius), and the option to enable music from AoW2/SM? I miss my skeleton armies, aoe fireballs, and that awesome music. Still, AoW3 is pretty damned great and if they keep adding great DLC like this, can only get better.
You can sort-of kind-of kit together an undead empire if you secure the Archon dwelling and have enough Tombs in your territory to activate the Shrine of Reanimation in your primary cities. If you play as Rogue, you can even pretend that your Succubi are vampires & your Shadow Stalkers are Dread Reapers.
There's supposedly an Undead faction in the works that will eventually be released as extra DLC, so look forward to that.