Age of Wonders 3 SG

[Bobchillingworth]

Bacchus, I can totally understand if the turns are taking too long to play- I think MJW & I can finish this off ourselves if that's the case, or just call the game quits now.


MJW is correct though that you don't need to bother shadowing the enemy stacks trespassing through our land. We will have a turn to prepare if any AI declares, plus they're all so terrified of our power that I doubt you'll need to worry about them coming after us.

[NobleHelium]

How do dungeons work, anyway? Do they respawn after a certain amount of time? Do new ones spawn during the game? Are there other neutral stacks to fight besides dungeons?

[Bobchillingworth]

Dungeons are just tougher-than-normal map features to clear, which award 1-2 item (or unit) drops and have particularly good yields when worked. Once you clear them, they're gone for good. You can still equip all of your heroes with gear, but you'll have to forge it yourself (which works pretty much the same way as building units- expensive units).


Most neutrals on the map are stationary and just sit around defending forges, gold mines, watchtowers, etc. Some roving packs of hostiles will spawn from special enemy lairs and wander the map, sniping units and even poaching cities if you get careless. They can spawn some pretty nasty stuff, and I've read reports of games being lost when players didn't purge nearby lairs quickly enough, only to find undead hordes at their doorstep. Clearing lairs will also award items. Hostile independent cities will eventually get around to sending troops to harass players, but it takes them forever. You can also end up with hostile neutrals by having your own troops abandon you due to low morale, or attacking deserters from other players.


The items you can get from busting lairs and dungeon-diving are generally better than what you can forge for yourself, with the notable exception of melee weapons. The +4 ice swords you can make are significantly better than even the best "Mythic" items (the highest quality you can obtain from a dungeon), because only like 3 (very rare) units resist ice damage.

[Bacchus]

Rage quit is a bit of an overstatement, but yeah, I e-mailed the save basically as soon as I wrote the post We inherited some Arcane Forges, by the way, in the human cities on the surface, so we can really get crafting. I had a look at the options, but wasn't immediately struck by anything, as most our heroes already have some decent gear. We can still improve it, though.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Anything else interesting happen?

Bob-- he actually quit on turn 77 so I'll just try to play 13 turns to get us caught up.

[Bacchus]

Our south-eastern cave entrance leads into the core of Laryssa's lands. There is a city immediately next to it, usually barely defended, but she can bring a large army with multiple knights, node serpents and eldritch horrors pretty fast to counter-attack, as I found out

[MJW (ya that one)]

Well I won't brother doing a report this time because I'm owning everything. The only notable things are that I'll just play to turn 90 and see what happens after I hand in the save to Bob and I built a bunch of store houses to get more population the biggest source of our power.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Well I killed everything on the map expect Henna. The only other thing notable is that I'm building a hospital in Umboku so it can 1-turn bug beetles for the rest of the game. (The happiness from the hospital bonus gives extra production--our empire is unusually happy right know so we are 1-turning them briefly). I think Bob should play until he kills Henna and wins the game. I'm going to upload the save soon.

Playing it was not that bad but totally pointless as it's obvious we won the game. This is what happens when you don't tack on an artificial anti-snowball mechanic to the game. It needs the AI to react aggressively (in CivRev and Shogun 2 everyone declares war on you when you get too big) or something really painful like the city maintenance system in Civ4. Bob and Bacchus got off to a great start crippling the only other underground leader and that allowed us to take over a huge part of the map without any real opposition. Of course sometimes you get really powerful but don't know how to use it. Me getting that dragon city and spamming dragons from it solved that problem. No anti-snowball means the game is over in the first 50 turns ether way unless diplomacy is allowed. That might be good for an MP game (I don't consider teamers and duels to be "real" when 90%+ players only play SP which is FFA) were it needs to end as quickly as possible for it to be playable but not in SP.

I think Goblins might be the best race, on a standard map, because of the underground start. There are less leaders so you can pick up a bunch of extra cities. The races are homogeneous enough that nothing can overcome that. The extra population and -10% gold and least makes the goblins close enough to the other races that they can get carried by the underground start. And lets not forget how easy it is to use the other races.

I can think of playing a non-variant game where we try to beat it on the highest level without using "exploits".

[MJW (ya that one)]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hhwctlag4tc7ix...%20bob.ASG

[Bobchillingworth]

Nice summation. Only thing I would disagree about is rating Goblins as the best race- I'd actually place them somewhere near the bottom. Having low health and being reliant on blight damage for ranged attacks makes them noticeably more fragile and easy to counter than everyone else. Of course class units and those from cities captured from other races can easily make up for any shortcomings, as this game has amply demonstrated. Generally speaking, I would place the Orcs in first- they also usually start underground (albeit not quite as frequently) and every single one of their units is quite good (even the supposedly weak "razorbows").



I'm glad that the game doesn't have much by way of AI rubberbanding or other artificial measures designed to force the player through a grueling end-game. Just mopping up the AI takes enough time as it is- having to deal with a permanent dogpile would be infuriating. Plus it's not like the AI didn't declare on us constantly during the early and middle portions of the game. The AI's tendency to pull its best stacks back to defend its capital during the final stages of an invasion does mean you'll at least get one reasonably epic battle per opponent you defeat. Of course the fact that you have to kill everyone off is an issue in-of itself (and least on the higher difficulties where the AI will refuse under most circumstances to accept an alliance). Thankfully the upcoming major patch will supposedly add a peaceful win condition.



I'll finish this off for us over the coming days & write a final report.