Acanthus » Reviews » Age of Wonders III
View Store Page
View Community Hub
Find More Like This
278 people found this review helpful
18 people found this review funny
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 694.7 hrs on record (639.4 hrs at review time)
Posted: Oct 28, 2014 @ 5:54pm
Updated: Apr 23, 2015 @ 10:23pm

Edit 04/23/15: So I've done some multiplayer testing. The game is still super snowbally and overall, the mechanics still kill fun. I do, in fact, think the single player is alright now though.

Again, keep in mind that I'm going to focus on the multiplayer aspect only. I didn't play civ to play by myself, and neither did I buy this with that intent.

Old content/Base game (This is now current 04/19/15):

First, the positives:
  • Tactical combat: This is what the game sells itself with. The concept, how it's designed is actually quite fun on its own. If you like Endless Legend's combat, you would like this.

  • Race/Class combos: One of my favorite things for the longest time was the different race and class combos would actually cause you to play differently based on what race you put with what class. The developers have indeed succeeded in improving parity some in 1.5.

  • Map generator: More often than not, I enjoyed the randomness, aside from predicible positioning of capitals. Powerful treasures, like production materials/scrolls are now guarded.

  • Diverse Units: Units are diverse, and even units from the same class may have differences between races.

Now for the bad.
  • Balance: Dear god, balance. Heroes have always meant to be powerful, and that is fine. But the majority of experiences players you meet will use heroes as spell casters. This doesn't sound so bad, right? Well, spells, in tactical combat have infinite range. If your hero is on the battlefield, it can hit anything. Your leader can do it even if he/she isn't there for double cost. The majority of matchups will be determined by spells. If not that, you will see tactics such as run and heal. In short, play to the utmost efficiency.

  • Scouts/city mechanics: Scout wars are still annoying, and the flying ones are especially capable of taking cities, particularly the incorporeal ones. All units in any amount or strength are capable of burning any city in 2 turns, and any fort or watchtower instantly. I cannot emphasize this enough, the most central mechanic to continuing the game is the LEAST secure. This will turn your disadvantages into a landslide.

  • The community: The community has become somewhat insular now, as 90% or more of the lobbies are locked. Join a steam group or the forums to try and get in, don't try to meet people in lobbies.

  • Autocombat: To be frank, to manually do every battle yourself is not feasible in this game in multiplayer. Unlike Endless legend, which is very fluid about its manual combat for the most part, manual combat in this game stops all other action for every player that is not in combat. You either get to watch or not depending on what the host decided before the game starts. So you have to use autocombat... except that the AI in autocombat tries to resolve things as quickly as possible by having both sides rush at each other, tactics be damned. Therefore the losses are always higher than they should be, and unless you've played for as long as I have, you shouldn't expect to accurately predict the results, which to my knowledge is not a common skill.

  • Fog of war: Once you initially explore the map, it shows everything happening except units. You see all changes and spell casting locations without vision if you're attentive. While this is a skill, it's not much of a fog.

Patch 1.5:
  • The new vassal system is actually pretty cool. You can now relinquish control of a city to the independents (vassalship is also the step before actually owning the city, too, so you can get it back). When you do this, the independents will pay you a portion of the total income and occasionally give you tributes ranging from resources to a small army (whose strength is based on the current size of the city). The vassal will also keep their city defended, which makes vassalship the answer to the player who lacks the ability to defend from silly things like wisp spam or something. It's not all good though. Much like burning a city, you can make a vassal out of any city in 2 turns no matter the size of the city, and after those two turns, the city will instantly spawn an army relative to the size of the city. Too much, too fast.

  • Guard breaking: Now a thing.

  • The new race governing and race happiness system adds a bit of flavor to the game that causes the way you play to have an impact on the people in your empire, and thus affect you. Now, if you migrate for optimization, it doesn't just impact your (ignorable) alignment, you've made one race pretty happy, and really upset another one. Good luck making use of them when their units are starting out unhappy. I have nothing but good things to say about this system, although I haven't had the time to explore every option with every race.

  • Cosmic events: Adds random events to the game, which are mostly status modifiers. Some are positive, some are negative. Some only affect certain people. Some affect everyone. Fun in theory, but I find that I'm often annoyed by the results since it can cause damages to your empire through no fault of your own. The appearance of the boss drastically affects one person. The encounter is around legendary difficulty, and it roams the map. The items if you win are powerful, but I wouldn't lose a city temporarily or lose 4-5 units to secure it (in auto-combat). Overall, I think I would play with cosmic events off with other people to keep the frustration levels down for us all.

Expansion content (yeah, I bought it to review):
  • Necromancer is actually a rather nice addition to the game. It turns the class system a bit upside down because it has completely new mechanics added to the game (happiness and morale isn't a thing when you're dead, rushing causes your undead puppets to be destroyed instead, presumably because it's hard to rush and keep things safe, you also get population from killing things, which is kind of awesome). In practice, it plays a bit like a combination of theocrat (healing), sorcerer (supports are very important for more than just healing, and you get a decent spell selection), and warlord (with emphasis on debuffing rather than buffing, but you DO get some pretty nice battle enchantments like a warlord would).

  • Frostlings: They play a bit like a combination of draconians and humans (I'm approximating), my two favorite races, so naturally I like them. They lose physical power in exchange for doing frost damage. Their pikemen are amazing (and tier 2). Love the race overall, but frozen flames (their support buff) will be op until it doesn't have fire resist (normally the race weakness), especially when used on frostling necromancer reanimators. (It also gives +2 fire/+2 ice damage to melee/range and inflict chilling, which is -20% ice resist/-1 defense.) Huge upsides in exchange for no healing.

  • Tigrans: Poor Tigrans. Has the exact same weaknesses as orc (with even less healing!) with almost none of the upsides. -1 resist, no healing except support once per fight self-heal, who then lose their range for the rest of the battle, low range damage on archers in exhange for bleeding (in fairness, units do more melee damage to bleeding units... but no healing). You need considerable skill to make use of their unique talents.

  • Halflings: Fun little race. They scale a lot on unit happiness. They have -20% phys resist in exchange for Lucky. A mechanic that makes every offensive ability have a chance to miss them. Seems not worth it at first, but it includes spells and such, and actually net decreases incoming damage. They lack elemental damage though.

  • Specializations: Their themes are essentially chaotic magic, neutral good, neutral evil, and balance/anti-unnatural. They offer really nice tools that can offset racial and class weaknesses.

Literally out of space, so I hope I wrote enough to help you guys make your own impressions, guys.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award
38 Comments
< >
Acanthus Dec 18, 2015 @ 4:18pm 
@JavaJoe: When I have the time, I still enjoy a good game of Civ V. But work and school keep me too busy to sit in a game for 6 hours.
JavaJoe Dec 17, 2015 @ 10:25pm 
Almost 1 whole month playing this game day and night and the consensus is "not recommended" ? Is there any game you've played this long that you really enjoyed to continue playing...if so please let us know. Also, how were you able to play that game while spending so much time on this one? Thanks in advance...
Renato Malachite Apr 17, 2015 @ 11:51am 
I have more than 1k hours of play on Awesomenauts, but if you ask me TODAY Ill not recommend it because the game used to be fun, but now its just laggy.
Moving_Target Apr 15, 2015 @ 9:50am 
if you have some perks make you have more mana limit to cast spells every turn, then you certainly can build some powerful battle units to conquer your enemies, and these units of course, even you try to spend all your mana to cast damage spells on them in this turn, most of them will not killed by you, you can image which one you will focus on your war to win. of course, you can summon powerful creatures to join your army(like ice drake, besilisk, gold dragon, great chaos...etc), that is more help than any battle spell, believe me.

about raze building, as i know in AOW1 and 2, you at least need 3 or 4 low level battle units to do that(or 2 advanced units or 1 highest rank unit). and if you raze a building, instantly there will spawn some berserk independent units and try to revenge after this turn. this means if your razing army doesn't have enough power, they will in danger.

so....AOW3 changed so many things?
Moving_Target Apr 15, 2015 @ 9:49am 
well....i admit i only played AOW1 and AOW2...but i still remember that every turn your wizard(in AOW1 and 2 only wizard can be leader) has a limited mana to cast spells(depend on your wizard's perks), if you cast a spell that over this limit, that spell will spend over 1 turn to cast!

obviously this make spellcasting tactic on battlefield harder than you think, especially when you only have 20 mana limit to cast spell in every turn in begining.
i know your heroes maybe also are caster, but their mana limit will lower than yourself(you are wizard and they are not!).
another bad condition is that many combat harm spells are weak than you think(in AOW1 and 2), only work fine on cheapest units, and any area effect damage spells spend many mana to cast, if you only have 20 mana limit to cast spells every turn, you can't cast these powerful spells. so depend on spells to fight every battle is very bad idea in AOW1 and 2...
Acanthus Apr 14, 2015 @ 9:34pm 
@Emperorike: Forgot to mention because Tuesdays are busy for me, but Alliances (allied victories) are possible if you start a free for all, or you can lock teams you and your friend vs the world (or you and your friend vs each AI FFAing).
Joe_Mayo Apr 14, 2015 @ 5:59pm 
why do fan boies troll the thumbs down section?
Roccdrummer Apr 14, 2015 @ 4:33pm 
575 hours but not recommended??? WTF! HOLY SHIT!!!!!
Acanthus Apr 14, 2015 @ 12:09pm 
@Emperorike:

The AI when I last played actually tends to retain cities and forts, but burn watchtowers. Otoh, the AI often didn't attack with the most efficient forces, occasionally attacking with 2 units at a time when it could use 6, or even solo heroes. Hopefully they made the AI smart enough not to do this with the patch. I'll be checking it out in the next few days.
V wie Falko Apr 14, 2015 @ 11:48am 
Complaining about the review giving a thumbs down even though he spend 500 hrs with it...why is it that half of the steam community is made up of dip*****? If he had spent only 20 hours on the game people would have been crying about that, too. It's a well written review from somebody who extensively played the game and knows what he's talking about, ffs...