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Which Age of Wonders specifically? It's probably closest to Age of Wonders 3 because AoW3 is closer to a real 4x (although with drastically simplified city management) than AoW2 was.
Comparing AoW3 and FE:
Age of Wonders 3 is more war focused and less on the city management and eXpand element of 4x. It's a tight game for all of that. AoW3 probably has better tactical combat mechanics, despite some strange gameplay choices.
Fallen Enchantress is bigger, more ambitious and deeper, with better RPG elements, solid tactical combat (again, with some strange choices in mechanics that were presumably made to prevent excessive time spent in combat bogging down the strategic game). FE is better written, has a lot of quests and a huge variety of enemies to fight, and all the units and heroes you can use can be fully designed and customised. Even your most basic soldiers can have a choice of weapons, armor, items and so on in order to maximise a specific role in combat.
It's got more depth than AoW3 in my opinion but they're both amazing games, both well worth owning and significantly different to one another.
However it does have some flaws, although Stardock are still updating this game and have worked out most of the serious issues now.
TLDR: AoW3 is a good wargame with fantasy elements. FE:LH is a better 4x game. Both are excellent.
That said, the polish and general lack of bugs is a big, BIG point in favor of AoW3.
I really like how even in the first hours there's already a ton of stuff to do and take care of. This is exactly what I miss in "real" 4X games like Civ. They take a long time to get exciting, and even then you can have entire campaigns where nothing ever really happens as long as you stay ahead of the curve.
I guess my main problem with most 4X games is that diplomacy doesn't matter one bit. I don't know what's the deal with that. Diplomacy used to be the coolest thing in Master of Orion 2, Galactic Civilizations 2 and Alpha Centauri. It's as if devs all over the world have collectively unlearned to program enemy AI. This game seems more promising. At least so far I am playing alongside a set of nasty neighbors who seem very fond of each other. I hope that it will soon devolve into some complicated intrigue.
It seems like Both Triump Studios and Stardock have been making Space Games for the past 4 or 5 years and no real A+ title 4x games have come around except for some indie 4x games. Of course I also did like Warlock 2 but that company Ino-Co Plus seems abandoned and probably no more sequels from that game.
The only thing I liked about Age of Wonders 3 was there is a underground meaning 2 worlds and I think Legendary Heroes should do something like that or maybe have another shard world or more to explore and conquer instead of just 1 map. That is why I loved Warlock 2 because of the fun exploration of exploring shards and seeing the enemy pour out units through the portal gates to explore and contest against you and others for control of the shard. Legendary Heroes a future sequel needs to take the best of Warlock 2 & Age of Wonders 3 along with Legendary Heroes and make a great sequel utilizing all the fun aspects of all 3 of those games into one good sequel.
It would be nice if some other companies got into the scene of making A+ title 4x games and to see Stardock and Triump Studios get back into making fantasy 4x games. There is plenty of room to build upon.
I did overhear Slitherine is going to make a actual sequel to Masters of Magic as they have the rights to do it now so that should be a great future game.
You can read about it here:
https://www.matrixgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=93389
I will admit, though, that the campaigns in AoW3 are a bit flawed; in the second scenario
of any campaign, you have to basically relearn the same techs that you perfected in the first one, which I find particularly annoying. Also, the difficulty level ramps up significantly as the campaign goes on.
But there are also extended scenarios which can be tweaked to eliminate that problem.
Mind you, I also enjoy FE, and have been playing it a lot more than AoW3 recently.
You might also check out Endless Legends, which combines aspects of both FE and AoW3. There are different major races, and also minor tribes that you can either negotiate with, or just subdue and absorb. You can hire Champions and design heir gear.
Also, the tech tree is a lot more complicated, and you actually have to make choices. It's not possible to learn every tech, so you have to pick what you think will be the most valuable. At least part of your choice will depend on your major race neighbors. If you are near a more aggressive, warlike expansionist race, you had better get more military tech than civil development.
You can also pick various types of terrain. Just be warned, the AI is weak if you pick an island scenario. They tend not to expand to other islands; they just sit on their initial island and go nowhere, making them sitting ducks. In any other scenario, however, they can get quite aggressive.
Also, they did a bit of "what if" to make the Aztecs viable against European powers. "What if Aztec ritual magic actually WORKED?" Yes, the Aztecs can conduct various rituals to increase the crop harvest, or make their warriors better in battle.
As for AoW3, yes, the campaigns are no good at all. But that series has always been about random maps and custom scenarios. I've played over 100 hours of those since the game came out, and keep returning for more. Which is why I really like Fallen Enchantress for some variety.
Diplomacy is as difficult to do right as the AI is. The main reasons being that when done badly it allows the player to leverage massive benefits (getting them to declare war on one another knowing they're not scripted to ever make peace is one example) and swing the game in their favour with little effort, with the other end of the stick being that it's useless and ineffective and has little bearing on the game beyond being some buttons to hit and fancy dialogue options. They can, and often do, throw all other game mechanics out of whack.
FE is somewhat better than most I think: on the plus side, diplomacy here avoids allowing you to trade techs directly (usually not a great idea in 4x but that's a divisive topic with most of the better games now allowing tech trading as an option to please both camps) and instead allows you to trade tech points. I really like that system, because it lets you get a boost to your research without the CPU just brokering off their research gains to all their friends (that could be a big problem in Master of Orion etc). On the other hand,
There was an interesting conversation going on recently over at the eXplorminate.co discord recently about this very topic: some people think 4x can't get around it's focus on war and diplomacy should exist to work around that major mechanic (this is hard to argue with, since combat is at the centre of almost every 4x game I can think of in one way or another). There are others who think 4x games could be less balanced around war and that'd make diplomacy more important, but nobody seems to be able to figure out quite how to make a game so strongly focused around diplomacy work: the Paradox grand strategy games are perhaps a step in the right direction but even those are really too easy to cheese for massive benefit.