Age of Wonders 3 SG

[MJW (ya that one)]

That's a good reaction Bob.

In case you are wondering that Goblin Theocrat (who is just noticed is MiA) didn't die on my watch....

[Bobchillingworth]

That's a good reaction Bob.

Heh.


This is going to take a bit longer. After spending an hour-and-a-half moving our ridiculously scattered and ill-composed forces into position, the game decided to crash, which has utterly killed my spirit. Thankfully the autosave feature means I'll only have to replay maybe 30 min, but I'm still in absolutely no mood to touch the game at the moment.

[MJW (ya that one)]

I might that was a good post so I couldn't say anything about it. It sounds better than saying "nice post!".

I admit I made sacrifices to kill everyone other than Henna before you started. Including making that naked bootleg with our leader at the end. Were did you get the name 'Ahr Bee' while we are talking about him?

Are you making use of the unit cycle hotkey?

[Bobchillingworth]

Say "Ahr Bee" aloud


There's a unit cycling key? That could have saved me a bit of time, although I still would have needed to reorganize everyone.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Say "Ahr Bee" aloud


There's a unit cycling key? That could have saved me a bit of time, although I still would have needed to reorganize everyone.

I did but I have no I idea what Arby's has to do with this...

To view keyboard commands click "options" from the main menu and then "controls". The default for cycling is "n" or "." (both work).

[Bobchillingworth]

I did but I have no I idea what Arby's has to do with this...

[MJW (ya that one)]

I get it now it's RB.

[Bobchillingworth]

Set (and game) complete. Report tomorrow.


Let me know if anyone wants the final turn

[MJW (ya that one)]

I do; if for the steam achievements if nothing else...

[Bobchillingworth]

T90:

No need to be nit-picky- we own 90% of the world, and my only objective is to gather forces and throw everything we’ve got at the last remaining AI.

Well, one small nit :P :





When our units are all strung out in tiny little armies like this it makes it a huge headache to organize them. That they all have go-to orders and include some frankly lousy unit groupings (a Golden Dragon with 5 T1 fodder units?) means I have to spend an hour this turn just sorting stuff out.

Actually it looks like what happened was someone decided to take all of the garrison units we had sitting in cities and make armies out of them? Why??? Those units were all terrible and good only for camping behind city walls and buying time. Now they’re all mixed in with decent units and I have to micromanage them while my computer overheats from having to keep track of so much stuff.

Why are all of our best armies now broken up? A unit of 6 T3 & 4 units is great. A unit of one Horror and two Swarm Darters is garbage.

I’m sorry for all this complaining, but as I type this I’m seriously considering dumping the game. This is horrible.

It gets worse…

Cities where I had left garrisons are now empty, meaning I can’t declare on the last AI for some turns, lest she do something like take this portal down and start capturing our underground core:





THOSE CITIES HAD GARRISONS. NOW THEY’RE EMPTY. In fact, WE HAVE ALMOST NO UNITS UNDERGROUND AT ALL.


Finally, after literally the worst set I have ever had to play for any game ever, the turn is over. IT TOOK AN HOUR AND A HALF TO PLAY, WITH ZERO COMBAT. I DO NOT USUALLY TYPE IN CAPS. I AM WRITING THIS AS I PLAY AND AM VERY UPSET.


T91:

Henna declares. Whatever bitch, let’s get this over with.

Captured:





And then… the game stopped working. Error in the middle of a battle. Which means I have to play everything over again.


T91 Redux:

Thankfully the autosave features means T90 was saved, which is good since I would have performed a genuine rage-quit otherwise.

Alright, I’m writing this two days later, so I’ve cooled down. Sorry for yelling at you MJW, I was very frustrated when I saw how much organizational work our empire required. I much prefer attacking with a small number of very elite armies, instead of the carpet of random stuff you left me- but we’ve both gotten great results. It’s good that multiple approaches can succeed in this game.

AI declares as usual, city taken as before.

Otherwise I just get units in position for a major assault next turn. Henna didn’t move her troops exactly the same way this turn, so the game-crashing battle didn’t occur.


T92:

For the record, this is why I left garrisons in many of our underground cities:





I’m not sure what to do about this. Hopefully some of our surface troops can reach her in time, or we’re going to lose cities.

Henna did abandon this city to go underground:





The AI will generally turtle up and await death in the face of overwhelmingly superior opposition, but they’ll pounce if you leave a glaring enough opening. They do appear to cheat and have permanent, full map vision.

Thanks to some hastily built combat roads, I’m able to get a couple armies in place to interdict Henna:





And… we lost it.





13 troops, 7 elites, pointlessly lost. God-fucking-dammit. I should have cast Chaos rift (1 free temporary unit a turn + lightning strikes), but I thought I could get away with Stasis (freezes enemy units in place). Stasis didn’t freeze a single one of her units, and I didn’t have enough mana to follow up with a Chaos rift. She did.

Thankfully I’m able to avert a complete disaster.

One crappy army of units which should have been garrisoning the underground in the first place is able to reach her surviving hero:





Wiped out without damage. Moving next to the last two survivors of her expedition, two Dwarven Firstborn, takes up the remainder of the stack’s moves as a cohesive unit- but not the two mounted units inside. So I have them attack, which pulls the entire stack into battle:





We win, with loses. Surviving units will garrison the nearest city, like they should have been from the start. I still need to track down her mounted stack running away to the north, and have absolutely nothing in the area to stop it save a couple Dwarven Axemen I started building as soon as I took over.

All of this stupid, completely avoidable crap makes me want to kill something, so I send a giant fuck-off army to wipe out some stupid city:






The gormless weasels manning her walls die in electrostatic agony as I revel in their screams. One of our units of Elf Priestesses dies, thereby helping weed the weak and craven from our forces. We capture a hero in compensation.


T93:

First things first:





The last remnants of her invasion are destroyed, although we lose a lot of T1 and 2 units in the process. Thankfully the Horror I was compelled to summon survived. That Chaos Rift spell is a killer- one bright side though is that she might not have the points to cast it again, for this round of city assaulting.

After moving everything I find that I can’t assault any cities this turn- either I can’t reach them or they’re defend too well for the units which can. Next turn should be spectacular though. Here’s the overview map:





Henna’s forces have pulled back, but what she has left are strong units. Still, there’s no possible way she can turn back the tide, as I have powerful units rolling out every turn from several cities. The only question is how much longer it takes to beat her down. All of the lines you can see are roads we built, at least in my case mostly for combat purposes. I have five Builders constantly roading further into Henna’s territory. The AI really needs to learn how to construct civil infrastructure.


T94:

Henna actually takes one of our island cities with a couple of Horrors she had hidden in the fog:





Still managed to somehow lose a unit though.

Doesn’t matter at all however, because I can kill both her and her capital this turn!


Stumpy first:





Not much can withstand so many T4 units.

With Henna out of the picture (for three turns, anyway) she won’t be able to cast that damnable Rift spell to save her capital.

Speaking of which, I’m going to hold off attacking it for a turn. Current forces aren’t getting a great match-up, and I’d rather close out this game with something epic.


T95:

Final turn

This is complete overkill (Henna deleted a bunch of units, presumably due to being broke), but dammit I want this to end with a bang! Riding his mighty battle Wyvern into battle, Emperor Ahr Bee assaults the ancestral homes of the Dwarves with a mighty host!









Hell yes.

Lightning strikes the leaderless foe, as the skies darken with portentous portals!! A flight of Golden Dragons and Horrors consumes all those who wave the white banner of the Dwarves!



(this was supposed to have been a picture of one of the neat lightning strike effects, but I hit the screencap key a second after the animation ended)


Ahr himself strikes the final blow!





Victory!












Thanks for playing, Bacchus & MJW! And thanks to everyone who read along!



I’ve got a few final thoughts about the game, what areas are excellent and where it really needs improvement:


The Good

• The AI is fairly competent, as far as 4X games go. It casts spells intelligently, generally conducts research in a sensible manner, uses combined arms, understands how to group troops so that its armies support each other and often makes the player really work to take its core cities. The AI handles ocean terrain far better than the computer in Civ 4 or FFH. It is fully capable of quickly settling islands and conducting intercontinental invasions. The computer also knows a few mean tricks- notably, it will attempt to raze its own cities if it knows it can’t hold them (this process often takes over a half-dozen turns, so you usually have time to beat it- Henna tried to burn one of her core cities the turn before I eliminated her).

• The game looks really nice. Different terrain types interact in neat ways- an underground river of lava will have steam coming from the edges of hexes it shares with water tiles.

• It’s not 1UPT. Trying to play the game as though it’s Warlock or Civ 5 will result in disaster.

• It has several mechanics from Civ 3, which is awesome if you’re like me and think that Civ 3 was the greatest 4X game ever produced.

• Both ICS and a few Mega Cities are viable tactics. The game doesn’t railroad you into playing a certain way.

• Nothing is too unbalanced, except for poor Rogues, who are kind of screwed by T60 thanks to being massively front-loaded.

• The morale system is neat, at least in conception, although in practice it doesn’t have a lot of impact unless you’re either doing terribly or trying to use Revenants as a Good leader.

• There’s no AI rubberbanding nor moronic Apostolistic Palace-type victory condition. What you see is what you get- if you’re winning, the AI cannot steal a victory out from under your feet unless you completely screw up militarily.


The Less-than-Ideal

• The tactical AI needs some work. It didn’t happen in this game, but I’ve had the AI cast Aoe healing spells on a single unit of theirs surrounded by several of mine, overwhelmingly benefiting my troops.

• The strategic AI appears to not understand how to build roads, which is an issue considering how massively important mobility is in a game where every unit has the equivalent of the Commando promotion.

• The diplomatic system is utterly broken. I believe we documented fairly well in this thread what’s wrong with it, but in summation the problem is twofold:

- First, penalties which should apply against the AI are instead inflicted on the player. Every time an AI declares on the player, the AI affixes the player with a “you declared war on us!” malus, even though they were the aggressor. These penalties are inexplicably shared with all AI the player has contact with, making positive relations with any opponents impossible once hostilities have begun with any one personality.
- Second, the AI does not have a minimum time cool-down between declaring war and accepting peace, making it elementary for the player to shut down hostilities, provided they meet an (unspecified) force threshold.

It is important that *both* of these issues be fixed. If a minimum-time-to-peace delay is added but the shared diplo penalties are not removed, then the game will likely become impossible on the higher difficulties.

• Alignment is similarly broken, as you can farm peace treaties for tons of “Good” points.

• Age of Wonders has a dearth of troop options, especially if you’re not playing as a Warlord or Dreadnaught. By the late game you’ll likely only be using racial T3 units, a couple class units and possibly some support troops. Contrast with FFH, where an end-game AI-busting army could easily include a dozen unit varieties.

• Having to kill every AI to win is obnoxious. Supposedly a major content patch will fix this.

• There isn’t much in the way of city specialization. You essentially have two kinds of cities: those with enough production to be soldier pumps, and the rest. Soldier pumps get military infra- other cities get a storehouse, builder’s hall, laboratory and possibly nothing else.

• Battles are very time-consuming. Selecting “quick combat” is just begging the AI to get a couple of your valuable units killed.


Thanks again, everyone! Special thanks to the developers, one of whom may or may not have been reading this thread

Apologies again to MJW for the ranting- I wrote this report over the course of about a week, and my attitude improved over time & as each turn took less and less time to complete.

Hopefully PBEM mode arrives soon!


Final save is HERE.