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It's the sheer amount of that content that I love—there's just so many spells and unit types. I will also always have a love for that kind of 2D graphics. The factions are set and therefore highly distinct with all kinds of unique features. The spheres of magic are also more intuitive, with a school for each of the elements, life magic, etc. And the soundtrack consists of music for each of those spheres, with my personal favourite being Life Song. So yeah, it's a great game.
But a lot of people are remembering it with rose-tinted glasses. There are all kinds of features that Shadow Magic doesn't have, like leader customisation is very limited and hero customisation is non-existent. Personally, I'm not about to return to Shadow Magic when I can play AoW 4. You might also have difficulty playing it anyway: the Steam version is just terrible, and even the GOG version can mess up on Windows 10 if you attempt to adjust any of the graphical settings having installed it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Q7dTKQaPs&ab_channel=SorelyFrigid
Imagine this.
You are a wizard.
You specialize in life magic.
You can turn the land into a lust land, heal your troops and ressurect the dead.
Or meaby you are a earth wizard why raises mountains, lowers mountains, increase gold income or increase travel speed via roads.
It is an old game in whichs orcs are evil warmongers, wood elves love all race's and dark Elves are the master race.
With other race's like shadow demon(incest hive) archons(holy men) tigrans, frostlings.
Every race while sharing some basic units had there own strenght and weakness.
Your summons where powerful.
Your offensive spells where powerfull.
One of my favorite memories is turning a desert map into a sea.
Combat wise it is a lot more lethal.
As there is a lot less healing and armor buffing.
But stuff like chain lighting and hail hurt.
Healing rain was a valued spell to have because of how rare healing is.
You could also choice to go cosmic wizard.
Giving up high level spells for a lot of low level once's.
You can also trade spells with your fellow wizards.
Mountains and rivers needs special units to cross.
Making them a valueable wall for your lands.
The game is old.
And many of the things we take for granted arent there.
But despite its age it is argueable the best in the serries because it was still a game that focused on having powerful spells, transport ships and unit diversity.
Age of wonders 3 was 5 step forwards 2 step backs.
It added more racial uniqness at the cost of powerful spells and units turning into boats.
The 3 new races have a more unique unit roster. Every race got a new t3 unit.
Instead of picking cosmos or only 1 sphere you could invest 6 points into spheres.
A 3rd layer, the shadowrealm, where move cost is halved, but most races have drastically reduced stats aswell.
I think there is a total of 15 races, with more or less different unit rosters.
In general your leader just sits in his tower and tries to look good. Because the wizardtowers decide how far you can cast. And bigger and more towers mean bigger domain, which means your global spells to annoy enemies get more annoying.
To this day I still think Shadow Magic is the best/strongest standalone title in the Age of Wonders series - and sure, there's essentially no leader or hero customization. You can make a custom leader with a portrait and character model drawn from a preset list, and then you can give them a custom magical affinity/spell selection and a faction race to start with, but otherwise the only thing you get to customize is the equipment you can make with the item forge. Those are not huge problems, given how solid the gameplay is.
Yeah the terraforming abilities are cool in principle, but I don't know how many people actually used them that often, which I think explains why they've since been toned down. I remember freezing water so that my armies could cross a river in Shadow Magic, but I did it more because I thought it would be cool rather than because I had to. I also remember spending a ridiculous number of turns turning land around a city into a desert to make some tigrans happy—probably too much micromanagement for modern gaming. Such magic also tends to be highly exploitable too: in the first Age of Wonders game you could brutalise your opponents by trapping them with mountains etc. I think it's just something that's really hard to balance right.
Pros:
The world seems.... alive. The maps have sense (they are handcrafted), the ennemies you encouter are much more varied and makes more sense (a flying unit fly, you cannot hit it with a melee fighter for exemple). There's a lot more to do with your units and you do not fight only clones till the late games. Also the rosters are much more varied.
The magic system is way more interesting and give a real feeling of power. You have a lot more spells which can be very very powerful and whatever the situation there's always one useful be it in combat or on campaign. Even the enchant system unit by unit is more interesting.
Magic domain is a much better expansion gameplay that civ like tiles
Cons :
Outdated graphics. The art is beautiful but still in low res by today standard. It shows it age
The interface is a bit clunky and some simple actions are tedious (firing with an archer require 2 clicks)
Speaking of combat the RNG hit and damage system is really a bit too much random
The economy system is better in 4 (except for mana and research)
Concerning running it on windows 10, no special issue with the community patch (included in the gog version). Warning though : the game do no work very well and is laggy as hell with DEP enabled. Just disable it to enjoy
For me it was the atmosphere. Presentation, gameplay and soundtrack created a very immersive total package. The campaign and handcrafted scenario maps were both very good and played into that.
Sound design and especially animations were top notch. Shadow Magic had some of the prettiest spell animations I've ever seen in a video game. Later AoW titles can't hold a candle to that. Graphics look outdated in 2023 but I still love them. They create easy to read, dramatic worlds. The difference between a domain of death and a domain of life is night and day in terms of colour palettes, graphical assets and background sounds.
Add to that that you could cast global terraforming spells. It was insanely cool to have that clear border between your domain of life and the AI's domain of death, and to turn their domain into yours tile by tile after conquering their wizard tower. Again, immersion.
You didn't get the wealth of costumization of later titles, but with all the races and magic schools, the choices were plentyful enough and what you had always made a lot of thematic sense. Races had a clear identity in terms of visual style and unit roster. Good races hated bad races. might seem stereotypical from today's perspective, but it helped immersion.
So yeah, atmosphere and immersion I'd say. More than AoW III and later. The newer titles have costumization and cool / funny interactions going for them (AoW III halfling party Golems, lol) at the cost of overall immersion. All are very good games imo.
Yeah, I can see how this can cause problems balance wise, but for singleplayer experience this seems fun. What I miss in AoW 4 is that there is no terraforming for deserts and swamp terrain (yet), but in the character creator there are traits for desert and swamp walk. Hope they will add them soon.
You were effectively the god of your faction, smiting your enemies from on high. By end game you often barely used your actual people's units, because summons were that good. You could flood the world or burn it, raise mountains, and so on.
Also the entire struggle was to control mana nodes, not really anything to do with mundane resources. You had to find nodes, clear out the often strong guardians, and then attune the node, and ideally convert it to your mana type (Yes, nodes had elemental types and you'd get little or no benefit from one that was the wrong type).
The "I win" spell consisted of taking every mana node on the entire map and making it belong to you, and converting their type to your element.
Like I said, it was a game about wizards engaging each other in a proxy war using their units largely only as hapless pawns to capture and defend mana nodes so they could get stronger spells and eventually subjugate the world.
What would your opponent do in your domain ? They ask for problems, you gave them. Seems fair to me. They would not have any if they just stayed at home.... or if they had come prepared to counter it with a spellcaster hero.
All in all that was just one way among many to get rid of an invading army without fighting.
And that the way it should be : you're a powerfull wizzard and they are on your territory, not some peasant waiting for them to ransack his house !
Just to add that any global enchantment (including elemental mastery - the one that gave you the mana nodes) could be dispelled. And the dispell spell was exactly a wizzard war : it had no static cost, rather you invested an amount of mana in it, your opponent did the same to resist it.
Yes, AoW4 returns to that godlike AoW2 theme with faction creation and the "Godir". It's why it makes sense to have all those AoW2 Wizards make a return in the story realms of AoW4. :)
It has. Funnily enough I remember AoW2 being a disappointment when it released (I'd loved the original), Shadow Magic basically saved it.
Probably not many. The issue AoW had, and to an extent AoW 2, was that you were entirely dependent on your wizard. The obvious and easiest strategy therefore was to just spec a hero (or your own wizard if you felt brave) as an assassin, hunt down the stack with the enemy wizard in it and off them. AoW 2 was slightly more similar to 4 in that you also needed to conquer their towers, but the AI was a lot less adept at defending it's cities, particularly early game.