This game is absolutely incredible. It stays true to the style and feel of the previous games in the series, while also embracing some of the more modern elements in the 4X genre. Some may find the game a bit "simplistic" compared to other 4x games, but this is misleading. While this game is very easy to learn, and keeps most of the numbers and math pretty simple, there is an incredible amount of strategic depth to this game, and even after over 500 hours played, with 90% of that focusing on just *one* class, I am still learning new things.

The game itself takes place on about 3 different levels. The most prominent level is the tactical combat itself. This is unmatched by any other game in the 4x genre. In truth, it's more akin to the Total War series than anything, except turn based. It is not an understatement to say that this is the best combat system in any of the modern 4x games, bar none.

The second level is strategic movement. Many reviewers and players alike who only play this game for a bit do not understand just how much thought goes into something as simple as moving troops around. Each hex has different movement costs, which affects how fast units can move across them. But the movement costs are variable based on race, unit type itself, and even what the player has researched. Furthermore, different types of units may benefit from terrain features, such as Druids and Rogues who have units with Concealment. This allows some of their units to be rendered invisible in forest tiles. Compounding this issue is how classes and races interact. For instance, Dwarven Rogues are the only combination in the game with access to mountain concealment from the beginning, and this allows for some rather unique strategies involving raiding parties in the early game. While many will say that the tactical combat in this game is what stands out, at the intermediate skill level, the strategic level may actually be more important. After all, you can't actually GET to tactical combat if your enemy utilizes terrain to outrun you, or to reach your cities before your main army can get there to repel them.

The third layer is the empire management layer. This layer is pretty much what your typical 4x player expects to be the bulk of the game, as games like Civ largely ignore the first 2 to focus entirely on management. To those who have played and enjoyed the Civilization series: be warned. Age of Wonders 3 handles city management *vastly* differently than most other 4x games. The key difference lies in how cities work. Unlike civilization, there are no wonders or structures that can be built in cities to give them a specialized role. But don't worry, there absolutely are ways to make cities unique. Where this game differs from most others is that cities are largely defined by the terrain features within their domain. This creates a very different feel to empire management than other 4x games, in that the single most important factor of a city lies in where it is placed. In fact, a city placed on the right structure can often unlock units that cannot be accessed normally, or allow unusual and powerful modifiers to your armies. Some even give massive bonuses to income, or research.

While each layer is important, it is worth noting that this game is still very much different from many other 4x games. The focus is of the game is, at its heart, a wargame. While the diplomacy is functional, the predominant strategy will always be to crush your enemies, and annex their cities. Make no mistake, though. Although the goal is the same in every game, the methods are as variable as your imagination.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that there are players in the multiplayer community who have reputations for using an iconic style or strategy, that is almost entirely their own. The sheer number of options in character creation means that a player could very well run a strategy that is truly unique.

So if you're looking for a fantasy 4x wargame, you will not find a better one out there. Age of Wonders 3 is simply the best at what it does.

A game with admirable depth, complexity and variety.

I'm a fool for the big map game so that's what I play on and it makes for a LONG playthrough. Wonders III allows you to pick once of several different classes to play (ArchDruid, Warlord, Sorcerer, etc.) and each has it's own unique troop tree. You also have different races, from Draconian to Elves, that provide different strenghts and weaknesses.

You build your city, draft your armies, explore the map and interact with other AI players for better or for worse. The AI seems predisposed to dislike you, which is kind of nice if you are used to games where it's easy to play "politics" with the AI oppoents through a little gift giving and pocket lining. Takes a bit more to win a friend in Wonders III.

The armies rank up which means keeping your troops alive and training them up becomes important. If you treat everthing like fodder then you'll fall behind as more "professional" armies start taking the field.

The game has a little bit of everything for the turn-based gamer, the role-player and the city builder. Right up my alley, anyway.

It has been almost one-year since release, I've been playing this game constantly for almost the full year. Incredibly addictive coupled with vast replayability and a veritable smorgasbord of options, units, spells, structures, and game mechanics... and the developers have only expanded on the deep content with Golden Realms and the upcoming release of Eternal Lords. I am not normally a review-writer or poster but this is hands down the best game of the genre I've ever played, including Master of Magic.

Only a few fairly minor issues - mostly having to do with requested features such as added victory conditions, more customization options, and more gameplay options have been addressed by the developers or are in the process of being addresed. Kudos to Triumph. They've certainly earned the name.

A long-time player of other 4 x games I would enthusiastically recommend this for any fan of the genre. I definitely encourage anyone on the fence to try it out!

The people who are saying you cannot play the game without a Triumph account are wrong. You can easily click the "offline/guest" button and play without an account. If you want to get online and play multiplayer, then you will need a free account that I have not received any spam associated with. This account thing is a non-issue, most people won't need one anyway.

As far as the gameplay and mechanics, it is the best example of a Heroes of Might and Magic style in a long time, and in my opinion, much better done than any of the recent HOMM actual games. The gameplay is involved but not overcomplicated. The maps can be randomly generated to provide for continued interest, you can customize your races and classes in a way that makes the strategic play exciting. I highly recommend this game as someone who likes 4x and strategy games, I play this far more than Starcraft, Civ 5/6, Endless Legends, Gal Civ, or Endless Space.

Although Age of Wonders III features story based campaigns and scenarios (many of which are obviously balanced for multi-player), the real meat of the game IMO is the Random Map mode. This is equivalent to the default mode of most 4X games like Civilization, and that's what I'll talk about here.

Unlike most 4X games which start you off with a single settler in a mostly empty undeveloped world, the default mode (normal game flow) of AoW3 starts you off in a populated world which already has roads, cities and armies. In these games you can get stuck into the action quickly and may not need to build any cities at all, just capture existing ones. These games can be a lot quicker to play than other 4X games.

However, the random map games are extremely customisable, much more than Civ. There are three other preset modes - Battle, Empire Building and Adventure - which provide very different game experiences. Better still, go into the advanced setup screens and you can tweak the details to your heart's content. You can start with nothing more than a settler and a leader in a completely empty world, just like Civ, if that's what you want, or you can fill it with as much or as little of the different options that are available. You can also tweak the geography, altering the quantities of different terrain types that will appear on the map.

The graphics are superb, they blow away the old AoW games and are better than most current 4X games IMO. The music is excellent too, one of the best soundtracks I've heard in a game, making it well worth getting the Deluxe version for the 2 hours of music, not to mention the huge 8 player scenario Dragon's Throne.

The huge variety of units in the game, and the many different unit abilities and spells, provide for an awesome variety of strategy and tactics. The game is far more detailed than previous versions, and while the older games were great in their own right, AoW3 takes it to a whole new level. I can't go back to the old games anymore. It's a game you can get sucked into for many, many hours of your life.

The two expansion packs - Golden Realms and Eternal Lords - are real expansions, not shallow cash grabbing DLCs like in many games these days. They add a lot of real content, not just new races and campaigns, but many new rules and game mechanics.

I highly recommend this game, one of the best 4X games ever in my opinion.

EDIT: Two and a half years later, this is still a great game! I expected it to be great before it came out, and when I played it, it was even better than I expected! Guess which category I nominated this game for?

Review based off of playing the Closed Beta. (Which is voluntary, and invites were sent based off of forum participation.)

I like TBS games, generally ones with interesting combat systems, and the last one I genuinely liked was XCOM. I've spent the past years lamenting every TBS game that came out, because of the combat systems that resolve the battle in damage exchanges on the World Map. So I was excited about Fallen Enchantress, and I played it for a while, but it had no multiplayer which inevitably killed it for me.

So, I was overjoyed to hear that Age of Wonders was returning with all the Tactical Combat and multiplayer features that I so loved.

I've played each of the games in the series, I thought that AoW1 was excellent, AoW2 was abysmal and Shadow Magic was great. For whatever reason, I actually expected to be disappointed by this entry and was considering not buying it. After playing the beta, I can see that my initial instincts were unfounded.

There are obvious graphical improvements, and I can't really fault them, beyond what I feel is an issue with the change to lower tier unit parties. Though each of the models is well detailed, because they are stood together in a tight stack I feel the units lose a bit of their definition, this might be because of the level at which I zoom out to, but at the end of the day I need to do that to see a practical amount of the battle.

I think the time it takes to enact tactical combat is good, there are speed settings to allow you to increase unit movement and attacks if you're in a hurry, and I generally am. The game ran smooth for the most part, and my biggest issue, which is fairly minor, with the combat is that the hitting animations don't feel particularly visceral in terms of sound, graphical action and reaction. (Some do, but for the T1/T2 melee clashes I didn't feel it was as brutal as the earlier games.)

I prefer the combat system to any TBS that I have played in the past years, and it allows for larger scale battles as well in beautiful settings. (When I compare it to HoMM, which I dislike, or XCOM's, which I loved, or Civ's, which I found boring as I'm sure I would Warlock, etc.)

Each of your Heroes/Leaders has access to a number of upgrades when they level up, leveling up is fairly easy and painless compared to the earlier games (where you had to get the final hit to get the exp) so your heroes become quite strong, quite quickly, but still steps below higher tier units until they reach higher levels. Each hero has it's own class, which grants it access to class specific upgrades, but they all share access to basic upgrades to upgrade stats like Defense, Attack etc. which are fairly straight forward.

Each Hero can become a spell caster, and each class has its own subset of spells, though only one spell can be cast a turn (regardless of how many spell casts you have in a battle) which prevents the issue of your army getting instantly destroyed by a barrage of spells in the first round.

Your heroes have items slots, and you can get items from exploring dungeons etc. You can also make your own items if your city is advanced enough. I felt that there the items available were interesting, particularly the range of mounts (which unlike other gear displays graphically) that allow you to fly about, in the case of wyverns or manticores, and offer other abilities.

I thought the leveling system for heroes was quite good, I found myself often upgrading the default stats and I didn't feel that there was much variation between each hero class type, though there were some cool melee orientated abilities for the Warlord and some interesting ones for the Theocrat, as well as the Rogue. A lot of abilities amounted to global damage reduction to your party, and so the differences amounted to a change in damage type.

The class you choose for your leader (which has its own levelling/point allocations and is quite similar to a hero) will determine what research/units you will have available to you through the game, as well as three sub-specialitions you can choose when creating your hero which can give you access to new schools of magic, or more practical exploratory/empire building skills. In that regard I thought that there was a good variation of research/summons/units across the six classes and the sub-specializations added extra replayability/variation to that.

Unfortunately, I haven't had time to play the multiplayer.

I thought that one of the campaigns was excellent, and that one of them was good, I had some issues with it, but I expect those will be resolved before release. Both of the campaigns were a cut above any TBS campaign I've played in the past, featured interesting protagonists, solid writing, and excellent voice acting.

Each campaign has a text, voice-acted prologue, and an epilogue for each mission, and throughout each mission there are text pop-outs for dialogue from your enemies and allies. In both campaigns there is a branching point where you have to choose sides so I believe that would result in at least four different endings, though I'm not sure.

Either way, there should be a good amount of replayability and entertainment value from the campaigns, and I'm sure that there will be more to come (both from the developers, and users using the editor), and the excellent mechanics of the games themselves (combat, beautiful world design, variety of units and strategies) will add to the enjoyment of those campaigns.

There are currently six races, each has different benefits/negatives to its racial units, there are some instances where lower tier units are quite similar, but I think that's to be expected. Overall, I thought there was a good range of units available and that each of the races/class combinations offered a good variety of choice. Across the campaign you play multiple leaders (races/classes) though your main character always sticks with you, either as the leader or as an accompanying hero.

I would recommend the game simply for playing the campaign, or for playing the scenarios available or using the random map generator. If you enjoy TBS games then you'll probably like this one, and it should provide you with hours of entertainment. I intend to play the multiplayer when it comes out, and I imagine it's going to be fun, but as I haven't played it I can't really say for sure.

Finally the perfect game to scratch my TBS/4X itch! I have a feeling that in 15 years or so I will still be playing Age of Wonders 3. I make this prediction because once in a while I still play the original AoW and it came out in 1999. So unless they come out with an AoW4 or standalone expansion that is even better in every aspect I think this game will stay on my computer and my next computer and the VR headset after... a long time.

My favorite part of AoW3 is its focus on tactical combat while still including all the 4 Xs (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) plus RPG elements. There are cities to form into an empire, heroes to level up, spells to research, dungeons to loot, resources to manage, etc... On top of it all players are engaged in battles early and often. The battles are killer fun tactical experiences that take place on their own maps separate from the primary strategy map. When a hex is attacked on the strategy map the armies/stacks in that hex and all neighboring hexes get pulled into the tactical battle. This means there could be 42 units (7 hexes x 6 units/hex) in the same battle and they could even belong to several different players! The combat mechanics like attacks of opportunity, flanking, guarding, and 3 action points to use for movement, multiple attacks, or multiple reactions are very well done. When playing single player I almost always choose to fight each battle manually because they are so much fun, but there is an option to automatically resolve them if you wish.

The only bad thing I can say about AoW3 is that it feels like the morale systems need to be flushed out a little more. My wish for morale is that your starting/ruling race should have more influence on the morale of your cities and units and diplomatic relations with independent cities. It was important in past AoW games. These things will probably get improved with some patches, and should not stop anyone from buying the game.

There was a period of years where I played a lot of Civ4 and some Civ5. Eventually I found myself thinking - I wish there was more action in these games and battles were more realistic like... Age of Wonders. Before AoW3 was announced, I searched for recent games with gameplay similar to AoW but nothing seemed to be on the same level. Warlock was too simple and too Civ-y... Total War just didn't draw me in... Others didn't even look worth buying. Age of Wonders seems to fill a special niche that no others do.

edit: Forgot to mention one of the things that makes AoW games so replayable - the races. Past AoW games had at least 12 races, but AoW3 is releasing with 6 which is a little disappointing at first glance. However, this is made up by the new class system which did not exist in previous AoW games. The developers have done an amazing job making both race and class matter. An elven archdruid feels different than a draconian archdruid or an elven warlord. Thus, instead of having simply 12 races to choose from you have 36 race/class combos (6 races x 6 classes). There are also specializations/spheres that further customize your leader and playing experience, similar to previous AoW games. I expect more races to be added in DLC or an expansion and am fine with that.

It's difficult to follow up a classic. It always feels like something is lost when a great game from years ago is brought into the modern age. Things get prettier, bigger, and more streamlined, but many times it feels like some essential chemistry is lost. Some of us blame nostalgia, others simply write the developers off as appealing to the largest audience or the lowest common denominator. Sequels always lose something.

Which is why Triumph Studios had no right to produce such a perfect game.

This is the perfect sparkling bouquet of what made the original great, combined with the streamlined production quality we've come to expect from a quality modern game. It's asymmetrical and unfair in the most balanced ways possible. Whether you're outfitting your heroes or designing your player class, you'll find great satisfaction in trying to break the game. You'll be very good at some things, and very bad at others, but it will always make sense and it will always feel right.

The unit design deserves special mention. Each unit is deeply well-crafted and unique, even when comparing racial units of the same role. The attention to synergy is unmatched, both between units of the same race and in the way that race and class combine to make a whole. Leveling up often provides interesting new abilities that also tend to synergize, instead of simply providing better stats.

This game has a lot of everything, and all of it affects everything else. You'll build cities, research and cast spells, and train units. You'll command armies on the beautiful strategic map, and when you explore dungeons or fight another army, you'll go down to fight on equally beautiful tilesets. Tactical combat is reasonably simple but very deep. This game has not been casualized. The A.I. is maddeningly clever, and you won't take this statement seriously until you've experienced it. You'll fight skirmishes in the woods with bandits, and you'll fight in truly massive sieges to conquer cities. Your heroes will explore dungeons, find and equip items, and lead your armies into battle.

You will build your strategy, and then get excited about other strategies you think could work. They probably will. Your race, your class, and your specializations all fundamentally change the way you need to approach the game. It takes a long time to bloom into a full understanding of how the various parts of the game work together, but the journey is pleasant, and you can absorb it by playing.

The campaign probably deserves it's own review. It's gloriously cheesy golden-age high fantasy. The campaign follows branching questlines, so you can end up doing different missions. The base game has two campaigns of eight missions. Eight does not sound like a lot but you can easily spend an entire day playing one mission. They're huge. Think of them more like chapters. The expansion packs can add another two campaigns.

There are also a number of scenarios which are like competitive missions for X players. The "real" Age of Wonders though is in the procedurally generated random map mode, where you can fight other players or the AI. There are a huge number of random features on the maps, such as "dwellings" where you can purchase units from a non-player faction like Giants or Pixies. You'll need to play many games before you've seen everything you can find. Also of note, Age of Wonders has an underground map, full of caves, tunnels, and the cities of the Goblins and Dwarves.

Triumph is confident enough in the mastery of their game to give the player enormous freedoms to explore how to play. Their own mastery is evident in the careful design of how every element acts together. If you find anything this game does interesting, play it for that reason, but be prepared to fall in love with the rest.

This is what a strategy game should be.

10/10

(buy with all DLC)

Very good 4x game. You recruit heroes, run around with a group of units, kill stuff and capture cities. All units gain experience, levels give them stats and some cool abilities. Cities build units and generate mana to cast spells. Combat is turn-based, happens on a large grid and has quite a lot of depth.

PROs:
- very involved combat, each battle can end VERY differently depending on what you do;
- a lot of different classes (with their own units and spells), leader specialisations (spells) and races (different bonuses and basic units);
- long campaign (play on hardest for challenge) - plenty of maps to battle on;
- AI is not brilliant, but competent enough.

CONs:
- the map does not really play a major role in the game, the challenging and engaging gameplay happens pretty much exclusively in battles;
- no matter how many turns a battle takes, it's one turn on the strategic map - you can be attacked and killed out of nowhere (you learn to appreciate being able to react to things after playing Civ5).

300 hours and I still play this game from time to time. This game clearly has less $$ put into it than something like Civ, but it's really cool - check it out! :)

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