|
It's got a sci-fi spinoff sequel coming out next year but you should really give Age of Wonders 3 a shot now because it's an amazing game that a lot of people slept on. Age of Wonders 3 is the latest in the Age of Wonders series. There were other games before it but I never played them and who knows if they're good or not. I don't. This game is good though. It's a lot like the now-ancient Master of Magic. You're going to do 4X building and exploring and conquering and capturing mana nodes and all of that good poo poo, but you're also going to choose a race and a class for your main character. This 2 degree axis means that you can be the more stereotypical wizard elves or the warrior humans, but you can also be the goblin dreadnaughts (tank and steampunk guys) or the halfling druids or a dwarven rogue or anything in between. Class not only affects your main hero but also the kinds of buildings you build and units you can produce bring in to battle. Battles are turn-based hexmap affairs where you play against a surprisingly decent AI to eke out the advantage with the units you have. Unlike Warhammer: Total War (a game I am currently very in to) it's much harder for the computer opponent to run away and prevent you from engaging with it, so you'll have more interesting and even fights. Your heros will level up, you'll find magic items, you can become friends with dragons and then build dragon units and command a fleet of dragons to go gently caress up a guy. It's good poo poo. Each class also has wildly different ways of affecting the main map. Mages can summon up powerful and interesting units right to the board, the dreadnaught can enhance their building's productivity, the warrior can get big buffs so even their chaff-y frontline units own bones. Rogues can buff their units and reduce enemy happiness to get an economic advantage. There's a DLC that adds halflings and jungle maps and one that adds the necromancer class. The necromancer is very different from the other classes and I recommmend loving around with it. Because of the wild customizability of the classes the races take a tiny step back. They still make a big impact, especially earlier in the game before you've customized as much of your army, but they're not as wildly disparate as the races in Warhammer: Total War I or II. Despite this you'll find that you're constantly finding new ways of thinking about fighting as you change up your strategy with different class/race combinations. Some of them are more powerful than others but none are truly broken. There's also a PBEM option so that you can play with your friends. There's still an ongoing tournament community fighting today. If you like Warhammer: Total War but want a different type of combat that's a little more x-com and has more of a focus on unit abilities this is your game. If you want a 4X with big stacks of units and high customizability you want to play this too. It's not shy about being a war-focused game, unlike say the endless series of games, which means that it's quite good at delivering interesting combat challenges. It's also on sale for really cheap a lot of the time - look for it in the upcoming steam sales. There are some degenerate strategies at very high levels of play. I suggest you don't look them up unless you want to spoil some of the game for yourself. You don't have to do them to beat the very hard AI - they're really there so that tournament people can high-five each other. There's a campaign but I never played it. I find campaigns in these kinds of games to be boring compared to the sandbox mode, which in this game is very good. Especially with the "portal control" objective added in later patches, which gives a kind of king-of-the-hill showdown near the end game, perfect for big army match-ups that allow your end-game units to have something interesting to do instead of just slamming through low-tier enemy garrisons. If this sounds familiar it's because Total War: Warhammer II basically exactly copied it (which is good. It's a good way to keep these games moving later on.) If you like it I recommend checking out the Age of Wonders: Planetfall thread on here, which is about anticipating the next release, which will have an x-com-y cover system and carry over the class/race customization factor but now in space.
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2018 23:38
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 15:37 |
|
|
Old World is very EA but the bones are really strong bones
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2020 04:51
|
|
|
God I want a modern Magic Carpet game
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2021 09:43
|
|
|
hey if you haven't tried it yet Phantom Brigade on the EGS store is Extremely Good. It's like a blending of Battletech and Laser Squad Nemesis
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2022 21:57
|
|
|
Assessor of Maat posted:suspiciously low funding goal, ai generated artwork, and pretentions of being starcraft; I'd say approximately 250% chance of it being vapourware it looks rough for a few reasons but idk if the artwork is ai generated
|
|
#
¿
Aug 19, 2023 05:15
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 15:37 |
|
|
The thing that feels bad is that 4X's love to introduce systems where the proper assortment of doodads allows your zoop points to get really high. But, oh look! there's a secondary systems of spy dingles that you can use to temporarily suspend an enemy player's doodad assortment matrix! How fun, to shut off someone's zoop points in a clever way! But, oh no! The AI player does not interact with the doodad matrix, and instead gains zoop points along a set interval depending on its difficulty rating, rendering the entire spy dingle system useless. This is all secondary to whether or not the AI should cheat. of course it should. it doesn't have time to think about its moves while eating a sandwich and commenting on a twitch stream in their second monitor. it only knows what it already knew. But the civ lineage of 4x's likes to present a false image of a boardgamelike competition between the player and the ai, where neither is truly living by the terms of that agreement. (The AI by "cheating" and ignoring the subsystems, the player by gaming the AI's quirks.)
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2024 21:38
|
|