Roaming dragons can pounce on you without a moment’s notice, and there are also NPC cities to interact with. Not to the same extent as Warlock 2 perhaps, but there’s plenty of NPC spawn points, dungeons to explore, and resource nodes to clear. The Sorcerer can summon powerful units to field, and all of the other four races have their own specific play style as well.Īge of Wonders does a good enough job of making the world feel alive. Choosing the ‘Dreadnought’, for example, gives you access to a variety of powerful steampunk units, like musketeers, Golems and Juggernauts. Choosing a race gives you a general pool of units, plus one or two ‘special’ ones, but choosing your leader can net you far cooler benefits. The leaders are more than just figureheads, however. Heroes and Leaders fall under six different classes, and six races – Sorcerer, Theocrat, Rogue, Warlord, Archdruid and Dreadnought, while the playable races are High elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Goblins, Humans and Draconians. You can also hire on extra heroes to help lead your forces. He can lead armies, cast spells, and is generally a beacon for hope and glory to your people. Every faction – whether you’re playing a random scenario or the campaign – has a ‘leader’, who is represented on the map. This is where the game’s RPG elements come in. They can operate on their own, or be led by a special character. ‘Armies’ are comprised of six units, and can wonder the map battling other armies on a separate turn-based strategy layer. Same goes for Forts and cities too.īeing a war-focused experience, you’re going to need an army. Whoever can capture the tower controls it, and if you’re not careful you can lose control just as easy as you took it. You can build watch-towers, and sometimes the game world will spawn in ‘neutral’ towers guarded by an NPC army. There’s also the ‘Watchtower’s, which have no area of control and no defensive bonus, but can look out over a large area. They also act as a defensive structure, so any units on or near a fort that’s attacked gets to fight behind walls. ‘Expansion’ in Age of Wonders doesn’t just have to be about plonking extra cities down though – you can also build ‘Forts’, which have a more limited area of control, but they do collect any resources. ![]() Expanding across the different levels is interesting, from a tactical perspective, but so far I’ve not seen any ‘unique’ resources to either area – they’re both kind of the same, and apart from the fact that you have to keep an eye on any tunnel entrances/exits within your domain, there’s little incentive to actually expand onto the ‘other’ space.Īs well as the standard strategic interface, you can zoom out a bit to get this more stylised view of the grand map. Your starting city will usually be in a place where your race is happy to live. There is both an above ground space and an underground space with which to expand into, and depending on which race you are, your citizens will be more or less happy depending on where you set-up shop. Ultimately, this is a game of conquest – you have to fight until you’re the last faction (or last team of factions) standing. The 4X’s do apply here, although Diplomacy is a relatively minor thing. Age of Wonders III, the long awaited sequel to Triumph Studio’s classic ‘Age of Wonders’ series, has its own unique take on this problem, and is all the better for it.Īt its core, Age of Wonders is a pretty standard civ-esque empire-strategy romp. Warlock 2 – an upcoming game from Paradox – physically breaks up the worlds into chunks so you HAVE to move around and be creative with your city placement. ![]() Civilization, for example, gives you so much to do and so many enemies to fight, that you don’t really worry about it. Different games deal with this issue in different ways, of course. The problem with empire-based strategy games is that designing the experience around your cities is actually pretty limiting.
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