Age of Wonders 3

[Matalarata]

Nahw, sensitive little bitches go on discharging autism in pointless wall-of-text. Truth is you have no idea what you're talking about. You're the son of an age where everything is nicely packed, written in a guide, "discovered" for you. I started playing such games when they were mainly a solo affair. No community to spill the meta for you, no guides or tutorials, single player as they should be. When I play as clacks in MoM I'm purposely gimping myself to have a different interesting game. As I do when I choose Dwarves or Halflings in AoW:SM.
Dominions, one of the best multiplayer strategy games ever, is an unbalanced clusterfuck, what that means actually is that masterful players and even clever newbies can surprise you with an unpredictable strategy. Thanks to a little known artifact or spell, you can totally fuck a perfect strategy and the game has literally hundred of those with little or no care for balance. Hard counters, soft counters, units that summon other units or with rare interesting skills. That's different from autisticly learning the couple dozen variables a game like AoWIII has. Again if you think there's some skill involved in that you must live a very sad life in that basement, even LoL players are better than that.

Here's a nice easy list of games YOU should play before talking such shit on the codex. Fortunately old grognards know their place better than young cucks that think bringing out neogaf makes them part of the Kool Klub

Master of Magic (Start from here)
Age of Wonders (Previous titles)
Heroes of Might and Magic (Various, but II-III are the best)
King's Bounty (Just the older ones, thanks)
Fall from Heaven (Mod for Civ IV)
Master of Orion I-II (Maybe you heard about it?)
Master of Orion III (When there's nothing left to play)

 

[Nirvash]

Multi balance for grand strategy only make the games worse, see paradox.

And how many actually play multi? the 0.something of the userbase?

 

[Absinthe]

Matalarata wants to pretend he isn't being a sensitive little bitch, but his entire post (with the exception of the Dominions subpoint) is practically e-posturing and trying to establish cred. Alright kid, I'll play your game.

I started playing such games when they were mainly a solo affair.

Well aren't you special? Wait. No. You're not.

No community to spill the meta for you, no guides or tutorials, single player as they should be.

Wrong. Usenet and BBSs existed back then, as did PBEM. People posted guides back in the day too. But you also betray your shortcomings in assuming those things were key to getting good at a game. My strategies rarely come from strategy guides or shit. I just analyze the game. Always did.

Dominions

Heard about it. But never played it. Don't really know shit about it, tbh.

That's different from autisticly learning the couple dozen variables a game like AoWIII has. Again if you think there's some skill involved in that you must live a very sad life in that basement, even LoL players are better than that.

Thank you for proving you don't understand tactical complexity or skill levels. And for demonstratively proving that you even have a sneering contempt for the concept. Also, don't try to brag about what a man you are for going outside while you're writing a defensive post that's trying to establish nerd cred. It's rather pathetic. Maybe going outside is an accomplishment for you, but it isn't for the rest of us.

Here's a nice easy list of games YOU should play before talking such shit on the codex.

Didn't play King's Bounty. I have MoM, but haven't properly dug into it yet. Played the entire AoW series. Played the early HoMaM series. Also played HoMaM V, which was boring as hell. Didn't play Fall from Heaven (don't have Civ IV, did play Civ 1, 2, 3, 5, and Call to Power, as well Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri). Didn't play MoO either. Also, you should try the Disciples series (fantasy TBS). Am I cool yet?

Fortunately old grognards know their place best than young cucks that think bringing out neogaf makes them part of the Kool Klub

Wow. That is some seriously tryhard e-posturing there. You might as well add "DO I FIT IN YET???" and "I'M OLD SCHOOL, HONEST!!" in there, for all the subtlety you've got. Also cuck is mostly a channer meme, kid. Unless you're actually referring to cuckoldry or beta-ness, we don't really use the word cuck.

And I'm done with you.

------------

Anyway, I feel like discussing some mechanics shit about AoW 3, so let's get this thread back on topic. So, I discovered something rather interesting the other day. In the AoW 3 game engine, there are 4 types of attacks: melee attacks, ranged attacks, touch attacks, and spawn attacks. My guess is that touch attacks are attacks that trigger when touched (ie. static shield, fire aura, frost aura, shield of light), and spawn attacks are basically everything else that is not a melee or ranged attack (spells, call lightning, sabotage, thunderstorm, you get the picture). As it so happens, Bane of the Unnatural (Creation master) and Fire Halo (Fire master) affect all four attack types. So if, for instance, you had a RG5 Ice Queen with Frost Aura and gave her Bane of the Unnatural, she would do +4 spirit and +4 fire on her attack, get hit, then do 5 frost + 4 spirit + 4 fire from her Frost Aura just for getting hit. Now if you have a Sorcerer and throw a Static Electricity for that mass Static Shield on top of that, she would do 5 frost + 4 spirit + 4 fire and another 5 shock + 4 spirit + 4 fire for hilariously ridiculous amounts of damage. However, the Ice Queen will not do the extra damage through her Dome of Frost ability, because it's a damaging debuff (like Immolated) applied as an aura instead of the Ice Queen herself doing the damage. Incidentally, if you have a Sorcerer hero in the battlefield, his spells, like Chain Lightning or Chaos Rift or Cosmic Spray, will indeed also do +4 spirit and +4 fire damage to applicable targets. Interesting stuff. Fire Halo only adds a mediocre +2 fire damage, but at least on units with fire/frost/static/light aura, it becomes a bit stronger.

A while ago I also mentioned that at 100% weakness you auto-fail resist checks as a special rule. If you happen to have elite Frostling Ice Queens (ie. playing a Warlord) with Inflict Freezing Cold, you can use Degenerate with the Ice Queen's Dome of Frost to give an enemy 100% frost weakness, where the ice queen is 100% guaranteed to inflict freeze on the enemy. Unfortunately freezing the enemy grants +40% frost and fire protection, so you don't necessarily get a full-blown freezelock until it dies. Given that the Ice Queen's inflict chilling (+20% frost weakness) is also guaranteed to hit, the enemy would be left with 80% frost weakness until it unfreezes. If, however, you first line up an Ice Queen next to an enemy then have a White Witch attack to Inflict Chilling, and then finish it off with the Ice Queen's attack or Ice Nova ability, it will be frozen and have stacked double chilling for 100% frost weakness even while frozen, guaranteeing a freezelock from your Ice Queen. It will most likely die before the Degenerate wears off, but on the off chance it isn't dead by then, it will probably still have 100% frost weakness from the accumulated chilling stacks anyway. Anyway, the ability to guarantee a frozen condition with a Degenerate without any resist check (as long as the enemy doesn't have any frost resist) should be pretty useful. The short of all this is that Wild Magic adept should be extra useful in the hands of a Frostling Warlord.

Another side note on the 100% weakness front is that when Theocrats have Armageddon active, a single casting of Shield of Light will punch all enemies without spirit resist and who are neither Devout nor Dedicated to Good into -100% spirit weakness, making them instant prey for conversion by Evangelists or guaranteed to become dazed from the Shield of Light itself (you could run around like an idiot and provoke AoOs to daze everything into uselessness, but in that case you might want a Martyr to absorb punishment). Alternatively you can use Degenerate, which is a single target debuff and doesn't provide the dazing aura, but will let you convert even Tigrans, Devout, and Dedicated to Good units to your side.

Other elements you can get to 100% weakness are blight with Goblin Blight Doctor's Weaken and Degenerate and 100% fire weakness with a Skin of Oil and Degenerate debuff (but I'm not sure that's worth 2 turns of spellcasting). The only way to get shock or physical weakness at -100% is probably a lucky Pandemonium debuff from Wild Magic master.

On another note, building a base with a Wizard's Tower Ruins in its domain lets you build an Arcane Catalyst, which gives all units summoned inside your city's domain +1 rank and Supercharged (combat summons a random lesser elemental on death - the elemental only lasts until end of combat). While this is generally useful for summons, especially in the hands of a Sorcerer whose class building gives another +1 rank to units summoned inside the domain, letting you summon units at veteran rank and thus begin unlocking extra abilities, that supercharged perk is also abusable when combined with expendable T1 summons. Grimbeak Crows that can suddenly capture cities by flying over walls and turning into lesser elementals on death add some great extra utility to Rogue players. The most obnoxious summons to use this with though are probably Spy Drones (which explode on death) and Lost Souls (which have undying) in particular. Yes, the undying Lost Souls spawn lesser elementals on their first death. This makes Lost Souls stupidly powerful since they can still resurrect after you collect your lesser elemental in combat, and if they die twice you get a second elemental from that 1 Lost Soul. But we're not done yet. If you feel like it, you can even throw in Reanimators to reanimate your lost souls after their 2nd death, but that might be a wasteful use of reanimators when you can just throw in more Lost Souls instead. You can actually creep extremely effectively with these Supercharged Lost Souls and if you suicide them your stack can take on T4s and win.

 

[Matalarata]

Thanks for another wall of text proving my point, little one. I can almost picture you running out of your basement:

"Mom, mom! I won at Age of Wonders III again! That means I'm clever, right?"

 

[thesheeep]

I think the primary complaints of thesheeep and matalarata are rooted in the fact that they are bad players and thus do not understand and refuse to acknowledge that there exists a strong discovery process in well-balanced competitive play.

Dude, I can beat about 95% of players in every single game if I put my mind to it just a little. As many around here can, I figure. It is easy for me to get better at games, except racing games interestingly, not sure why. I guess some are just born with it. I actually assume that most people here are above-average players in general.
But I don't see a point to spend more time on any game when I'm done with it and have discovered all there is to it and all that would be left would be the last finicky details - which in most cases I simply don't care about.
I choose not to, because I already know that I could - so what's to gain by actually doing it?
Admiration of my peers? Money?

I know the amount of time that is necessary to really train and stay competitive. Been there, done that.
It was horrible. Not because I sucked (I didn't, I was at a point where professional gaming was a valid career choice) but because I realized I was wasting my time on a single game instead of just dropping it when done with it and experiencing the next one.
That competitive shit was about to ruin my enjoyment of games - guess that's where my hate of competitive balancing where it makes 0 sense comes from.

The one truth that you failed to address in any post here is that you are blind.
Blind to the truth that you are an utter minority.
Blind to the truth that games should never be balanced for an utter minority.
Blind to the truth that many games still are, because that minority is extremely toxic and vocal - just like you.

You go on and on and on about minor details within details as if it mattered to most people. It doesn't. It does to very few, and that's fine. So have your discussions about why that very specific necro skill TOTALLY breaks the game. But don't go around claiming that everyone must share your need of competitive balancing.
Most simply don't - and those peope are who games like AoW are made for. NOT you. Them.

 

[Matalarata]

I can beat about 95% of players in every single game if I put my mind to it just a little

Woah, stop there bro. He knows that when a unit reaches 100% resistance vs a damage type that means 0 damage. Any number -100% means 0, figures! Pretty neat, uh?

Meanwhile, to learn how to play Dominions we just had those thousands of units/spells/artifacts to refer to.

 

[razvedchiki]

Well I didn't like aow3 because it broke with the classic fantasy stereotypes,all races could become all classes instead of locking them per race like the dreadnought one could only become the dwarfs or humans etc.the same with alignment- goblin crusaders wtf.
Also you could intergrate orc settlement to your dwarf empire,,that's beyond heretical and immersion breaker for me

Any mod that locks classes to races?

 

[MilesBeyond]

Are you guys seriously out here dick-measuring over how good you are at games? How old are you?

You are completely missing the point.
Why not have a bunch of units that are generally barely built, but have a very small niche or are just fun to play for some people?
You are judging everything based on how viable it is in a competitive environment.
Fuck competitive environments, we have more than enough of that.
What we need are more interesting games that allow people to play how they want, including trying out hilarious "nonsense" just for fun.
Games where players can figure out what is viable and what not - but what is still fun to play for some - are interesting precisely because of this discovery process. Does that lead to clearly superior strategies in a competitive environment? Sure.
But who cares? Only the small, very vocal minority of competitive players.

I mostly don't play these games in a competitive environment. I do, however, feel that it detracts from a game when units are broken and either don't do what they're supposed to do, or do what they do too well. Niches aren't a balance problem (generally). Take, for example, Age of Empires 2. In that game, Skirmishers are a niche unit. They're there to hard-counter archer units, and to fight in trash wars. This is not a balance issue. Now take Fire Ships. Fire Ships are supposed to be a niche unit there to hard-counter Galleys. The problem is, they don't do that. They lose to Galleys. Galleys are faster and have longer range, which means they can beat Fire Ships with just a bit of micro, and they come an age earlier, which means that that Galleys will outnumber the Fire Ships to a point that this micro often isn't needed. Now consider that AoE 2's naval game is based on a rock-paper-scissors: Galleys beat Demo Ships, Demo Ships beat Fire Ships, Fire Ships beat Galleys. But because Fire Ships don't beat Galleys, Demo Ships are no longer needed to counter Fire Ships. This means that the entire naval game is thrown off by one weak link in the chain. And sure, the naval game as it is is still fun. But I really don't get how balancing that, and making Fire Ships more viable, makes the game less fun.

And this is what I've never understood about complaints about balance. Sure, when balancing the game means making everything more similar and bringing it closer in line, then yeah, I get that. That's no good. But when it means taking a game and tweaking it so that things that don't do their job start doing their job, I really don't see how that could possibly make a thing less fun. You're literally just expanding the options available to you and adding more diversity.

See, here's the thing. You say that it's all about the discovery process and allowing people to play how they want, but that's what asymmetrical balance is all about. Unbalanced games discourage allowing people to play how they want because there's plenty of strategies and builds that the game just drops a big old-fashioned NOPE on. And the problem is that it's illogical. Yeah, there are plenty of things that a game should screw you over if you try. Accommodating literally every single strategy and approach is impossible, and probably isn't good design anyway. But the problem is that in an unbalanced game, certain ways of playing the game just arbitrarily don't work because certain aspects of the game are broken.

I guess I just never have and never will understand the mentality that says "Whoa, this thing is totally useless! That's so cool! If this thing ever had a purpose, the game would be worse!"

I think the point was that SC2 has a "meta" - quotation marks-, while MoO has a real meta. That's how I understood, anyway.

Right, but my point was that SC2 and BW have a rigid meta because they're so mechanic-heavy, not because they're balanced.

 

[flyingjohn]

Hate to break the autistic showdown,but can anybody recommended some good mods for age of wonders 3?
It is hard to find anything that isn't something like "now units wear ties and here is Mordor modded in"

 

[Sranchammer]

Hate to break the autistic showdown,but can anybody recommended some good mods for age of wonders 3?
It is hard to find anything that isn't something like "now units wear ties and here is Mordor modded in"

That is the state of modding in 2017

 

[MilesBeyond]

Hate to break the autistic showdown,but can anybody recommended some good mods for age of wonders 3?
It is hard to find anything that isn't something like "now units wear ties and here is Mordor modded in"

Empire Building mod and Racial Heritage mod are pretty cool. The former adds in a collection of new buildings and abilities to make the city-building aspect of the game more interesting. Racial Heritage gives each race a choice between two sub-factions within the race, with each sub-faction giving different new units - e.g. Wood Elf vs Dark Elf heritage for High Elves, Firedrake vs Lizardmen for Draconians, etc.

 

[vota DC]

Hate to break the autistic showdown,but can anybody recommended some good mods for age of wonders 3?
It is hard to find anything that isn't something like "now units wear ties and here is Mordor modded in"

Food chain mod is a full conversion with different lore and really different factions, I am working to make them even more different and unique.

 

[Absinthe]

Thesheeep, no one gives a shit about your life experiences and I doubt anyone believes your amazing self-reported professional skill level either. You have not discovered The One True Path of videogaming or whatever the fuck. You don't speak for all casuals either. Get your head out of your ass. Your entire position thus far has been nothing more than you whining that competitive balance is just bad for games, which is pretty damn ridiculous. And you sound like you somehow have a personal grudge against competitive gaming. My position has been that you can make games that are fun for casuals and possess varied options while maintaining competitive balance, and that to some extent competitive balance is necessary to keep it fun even for casuals so that ideal paths do not make other options worthless in the game and so that the game retains some sense of accomplishment when you actually do come up with a strategy instead of feeling like you were sitting on enough ways to break the game that it no longer really matters what you're doing anyway.

Well I didn't like aow3 because it broke with the classic fantasy stereotypes,all races could become all classes instead of locking them per race like the dreadnought one could only become the dwarfs or humans etc.the same with alignment- goblin crusaders wtf.
Also you could intergrate orc settlement to your dwarf empire,,that's beyond heretical and immersion breaker for me

Any mod that locks classes to races?

I don't think there is a mod like that, but you could just manually set all the AI and human players to fit the race/class combinations you prefer. That said, you're playing the wrong Age of Wonders game if you were hoping for a solid fantasy setting. All the text blocks are ridiculously cheesy anyhow and you probably shouldn't play the main campaign either. You'd be much better off playing the first Age of Wonders game. Also, I've mentioned this before but it's worth repeating since you sound like you would do this: Orc Warlords are actually pretty bad. It's a crippling overspecialization into the Warlord's strong point (melee physical damage) that didn't need any help, while hurting the Warlord's ranged combat and resistances and it doesn't contribute any other functionalities or perks either. Orc Dreadnought can actually work though, if you put the Orc's racial governance bonuses into economy. That way he can build Flame Tanks in one turn and Juggernauts in two.

And on the note of immersion-breaking shit, the Theocrat class actually bugs me a lot. I wouldn't've minded if they actually implemented a proper religion system, but instead the entire class revolves around the Judeo-Christian All-Father crud, which works for humans well enough I suppose, but for the other races that clearly have their own religious traditions, it's a really ridiculous class. If AoW 3 had an actual religion system and supported things like religious conversion and wars Theocrats would be pretty damn fun, but we don't really have that here.

And for what it's worth, thanks to the Racial Governance system, there's a strong pressure to migrate all cities to your race, since you'd be screwing yourself out of valuable racial governance upgrades otherwise. Almost every upgrade (Draconian RG3 economic is the slight exception: +10 casting points to leader and all draconian heroes) is limited to your own race's units and cities, and you get racial governance experience based on how many happy cities of that race you own. This is also part of what fucks with the alignment system, since you lose alignment points for migrating cities to your race (and for declaring war, I think), which fucks with the Keeper of the Peace specialization a lot. Maintaining a good alignment can be a pain in the ass.

Are you guys seriously out here dick-measuring over how good you are at games? How old are you?

I'm actually not. I want to be clear on the fact that the second half of my post up there has fuck-all to do with showing off my "skill level" or whatever the fuck (game skill focuses much more on strategy, not just mechanics). I'm getting the impression people have been misinterpreting that shit, which is a bit annoying because I really did just want to discuss a bunch of interesting and useful shit I found out about the game. If people gloss over that part of my post, it'd be a damn waste. The upper half you can safely ignore though. I was just passing the time with some good old shitflinging.

Hate to break the autistic showdown,but can anybody recommended some good mods for age of wonders 3?
It is hard to find anything that isn't something like "now units wear ties and here is Mordor modded in"

All I remember is that Garresh made a pretty interesting Variants Arsenal mod. It adds a couple more interesting class units to the game like the Legionary and Mageslayer. I think it's only available on Steam though, and it's not in active development anymore.
Link: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=516172401

 

[thesheeep]

Also, reading the original timeline, I now want a Age of Wonders mod for CKII.

With or without sending halfling concubines around to spread your influence?

 

[Matalarata]

Your entire position thus far has been nothing more than you whining that competitive balance is just bad for games, which is pretty damn ridiculous.

Nope, his position (and mine) is that 4x grand strategy games are not competitive in nature and that balancing them for you and your ~95 buddies is stupid. Various examples have been made by me, him and other people. You were the first going ad hominem since clearly, whoever thinks AoW is a limited and unnaturally forced multiplayer experience must be an unskilled moron. While you make your mom happy with all your victories!

Spoiler

Pssst... you could actually go to the MP subforum and realize that yes, both me and thesheeep are talking from direct experience, we do play worth multi games here.

I find your gameplay analysis otherwise very interesting, but I think there are better games to crunch if you want a satisfying multiplayer game. That said, to each one his own.

 

[Galdred]

Here's a nice easy list of games YOU should play before talking such shit on the codex.

Didn't play King's Bounty. I have MoM, but haven't properly dug into it yet. Played the entire AoW series. Played the early HoMaM series. Also played HoMaM V, which was boring as hell. Didn't play Fall from Heaven (don't have Civ IV, did play Civ 1, 2, 3, 5, and Call to Power, as well Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri). Didn't play MoO either. Also, you should try the Disciples series (fantasy TBS). Am I cool yet?

wtf is wrong with you? You should play MoO instead of arguing about balance.

 

[MilesBeyond]

Nope, his position (and mine) is that 4x grand strategy games are not competitive in nature and that balancing them for you and your ~95 buddies is stupid. Various examples have been made by me, him and other people. You were the first going ad hominem since clearly, whoever thinks AoW is a limited and unnaturally forced multiplayer experience must be an unskilled moron. While you make your mom happy with all your victories!

Again, I just don't get this mentality. Good balance makes the game more diverse and more fun to play. Balance tends to target MP simply because that's where you'll most often see people going up against opponents of comparable skill level.

Yes, bad attempts at balancing the game lead to everything feeling more same-y and streamlined, but those are bad attempts.

Let me put it this way: Balance was one of the major reasons why TWT sucked. The races could pretty much be divided into thirds: Four of them were god-tier, four were average, and four were shit. Let's see if I can remember... holy hell this was like fifteen years ago. I think Humans, Elves, Draconians, and Archons were god-tier; Tigrans, Dark Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves were average, and Undead, Halflings, Goblins, and Frostlings were shit. I may have misremembered a couple things. But the important point is that a big thing SM did was even out this imbalance and make the races closer to each other in terms of power (while simultaneously kinda throwing it off with the new races but whatever).

My question is this: Do you feel that this made the game worse? Do you prefer the balance of power in TWT? After all, while the changes improved the whole game, they were mostly in response to the complaints of the MP community. SM was a case of balancing the game to the MP.

 

[Matalarata]

Yes, it makes the game worse. Half of the game is discovering how and why those races/units are OP. You're talking, again, from the point of view of someone used to have the 'meta' spilled for him. And even once I've discovered all the interesting combos I could still choose an undepreforming civ to challenge me and play differently, or select an OP civ myself and have the AI control 6-8 instances of an underpowered one. An underpowered civ could be uber performing vs specific civs or in specific maps, again adding diversity and replayability.

Balance is nice but you know what's the problem with it? It's not feasible. Much like perfection balance is unachiavable, unless everything is the same gray sludge. It's an uphill eternal battle between different credos and opinions, ultimately ending up in a subpar product every time. This is exacerbated by the multiplayer-unfriendly nature of 4x games. They are aleatory, with huge variability that tends to snowball an early advantage into late game dominance. How many times have you read something along the lines of "You won just because the lair of the flaming pedo was 3 hexes closer to your start than mine". I have, lots and lots of time before deciding it's ultimately pointless to try and balance such games. How about having a window of opportunity because of an early advantage in the form of a strong basic unit, how do you balance potential of conquest vs the number of cities you can actually attack before your advantage wanes? In a single player that's an interesting conundrum, in multi an endless source of butthurt. Go play chess instead. Or Diplomacy!

The only way to make a truly interesting multi experience is to have so many options as to create a truly unpredictable environment (again, see Dominions). Many other examples of good, asymetric and inbalanced games have already been made, could you please name an interesting 4x you deem balanced?

 

[Forkrul]

Empire Building mod and Racial Heritage mod are pretty cool. The former adds in a collection of new buildings and abilities to make the city-building aspect of the game more interesting. Racial Heritage gives each race a choice between two sub-factions within the race, with each sub-faction giving different new units - e.g. Wood Elf vs Dark Elf heritage for High Elves, Firedrake vs Lizardmen for Draconians, etc.

Do these 2 mods work together?

 

[Galdred]

Yes, it makes the game worse. Half of the game is discovering how and why those races/units are OP. You're talking, again, from the point of view of someone used to have the 'meta' spilled for him. And even once I've discovered all the interesting combos I could still choose an undepreforming civ to challenge me and play differently, or select an OP civ myself and have the AI control 6-8 instances of an underpowered one. An underpowered civ could be uber performing vs specific civs or in specific maps, again adding diversity and replayability.

Balance is nice but you know what's the problem with it? It's not feasible. Much like perfection balance is unachiavable, unless everything is the same gray sludge. It's an uphill eternal battle between different credos and opinions, ultimately ending up in a subpar product every time. This is exacerbated by the multiplayer-unfriendly nature of 4x games. They are aleatory, with huge variability that tends to snowball an early advantage into late game dominance. How many times have you read something along the lines of "You won just because the lair of the flaming pedo was 3 hexes closer to your start than mine". I have, lots and lots of time before deciding it's ultimately pointless to try and balance such games. How about having a window of opportunity because of an early advantage in the form of a strong basic unit, how do you balance potential of conquest vs the number of cities you can actually attack before your advantage wanes? In a single player that's an interesting conundrum, in multi an endless source of butthurt. Go play chess instead. Or Diplomacy!

The only way to make a truly interesting multi experience is to have so many options as to create a truly unpredictable environment (again, see Dominions). Many other examples of good, asymetric and inbalanced games have already been made, could you please name an interesting 4x you deem balanced?

I don't think so:

While I agree that balancing things for MP should usually not be a top priority in a SP game, I really doubt imbalances make games better.
If things are really badly balanced, then there is nothing to discover because it is obvious that Elves roflstomps goblins.
Not trying to balance them at all makes them much worse than spending too much time trying to balance them:
Even in SP, it makes the job of the AI much harder if you did not bother to cost the units and spells appropriately.
It also detracts from coolness if the spell of ultimate doom you spent half the game researching is crap compared to spamming your level 1 spell, or if your dragon loses to lvl 1 peasants.

The same argument can be made for everything: perfection in game is unachievable, so let's just churn out stuff that can sell instead of aiming for the stars.
That's how you end up with ewoks...

Of course, SP do not need balance to be as tight as in MP, but that does not turn imbalance into something you should actively seek.

If learning the imbalances becomes dominant, there is very little left to learn in the game after you have watched a few Youtube videos or read a Steam Guide (which is more or less the main criticism against Darkest Dungeon), because the other elements will only provide tiny increments compared to that.
Or it will shoehorn your strategies to the same "build order", and make most of the content of the game meaningless.
On the contrary, you need balance to make sure that there are several viable options, so that the game does not always play the same way.

Dominions had a lot of balance pass when I played it (but I played mostly Dom 2, ages ago), and the game has been refined for over a decade. It also has a lot of viable builds so I don't know how it can be considered an exemple of imbalance done right.

Even MOO and MoM are hardly as imbalanced as some make them sound, and the patches that recosted the starting perks certainly did not make the game worse IMO.
If you want to handicap yourself in MOO2, there are a lot of other ways that do not require the game having fewer "useful elements" (ie techs, and items that you might want consider purchasing in some situations), like playing with a single starting planet, or not taking all the racial starting perks, or taking perks that offer no synergy (lithovores with food production bonus!) without butchering the base game.


A recent exemple:
When I was playing the beta of Slitherine's Armageddon 40k, titans and superheavies were overpowered, while guard tanks and infantry were borderline useless.
It didn't take much time to figure out, and instead of combined arms, we end up with a mono dimensional force that is the best at urban warfare, long range fighting, and jungle warfare, with all the units having the same role.

How is this an improvement about trying to find a niche for every unit?

Balance is what allows you to experiment with cool things without handicaping yourself (because if the game is balanced, then everything has a purpose, even if it is a narrow one).

 

[Matalarata]

don't think so:

While I agree that balancing things for MP should usually not be a top priority in a SP game

Your post could end here. Obviously any game needs balancing. What are we, dense now? Should we redefine what gaming means each time and lose ourselves behind the eternal "what is an RPG" dilemma? Really?

The argument is explicitly MP balancing. Which means that each civ or class should be equal vs every other civ or class. If you go back a couple of post you'll see the argument started around some specific undead skills in AoEIII but similar arguments could be done for many games. Dominions gets continuous balance passes. Illwinter is one of the companies that keeps working on its titles for years. Point is, each of those balancing affects some Up/Op units or spells. Sometimes a whole civ is brought up or down a notch but there's never been a project to make each civ or school of magic equally viable.

Imagine any Age of Wonders champion having to play as an UW civ, or having to conquer an UW civ as a land based one. Try and imagine the cries about balance...

 

[hello friend]

Hate to break the autistic showdown,but can anybody recommended some good mods for age of wonders 3?
It is hard to find anything that isn't something like "now units wear ties and here is Mordor modded in"

Haven't played in a while but these are some mods. Don't remember what all of them do, I was using most of them together but not all. Some of the mods are somewhat unnecessary but a few are really worth it - particularly the ones relating to map generation. Movement Orders First is a good quality of life mod. Somewhat Impeding Mountains is also pretty interesting.

AGE OF WARDROBE
AOW REVAMP
BLACK DWARVES
CAVE LIGHTING CHANGE
CENTURIO
CHAREDITUNLOCK
CHAREDITUNLOCKDLC
COAT OF ARMS EXTENDED COLOR
DECODENCE
DECODENCE RMG INTEGRATION
DRAGOON
DWELLINGS REDUX
DYNAMIC STRUCTURE GENERATION
ETERNALDIMENSIONS
EXTENDED SETTINGS
HOUSES B-GONE
MORE UNITS
MOVEMENT ORDERS FIRST
PREFERRED TERRAIN MOD
RACIAL REFRESH
RACIAL WATCHTOWERS
REVIVED MAGIC
REVIVED MAGIC PHASE II
SOMEWHAT IMPEDING MOUNTAINS
SUPER DYNAMIC MAP GENERATION
VARIETYMOD
VMODS PANDORABOX

 

[Galdred]

don't think so:

While I agree that balancing things for MP should usually not be a top priority in a SP game

Your post could end here. Obviously any game needs balancing. What are we, dense now? Should we redefine what gaming means each time and lose ourselves behind the eternal "what is an RPG" dilemma? Really?

The argument is explicitly MP balancing. Which means that each civ or class should be equal vs every other civ or class. If you go back a couple of post you'll see the argument started around some specific undead skills in AoEIII but similar arguments could be done for many games. Dominions gets continuous balance passes. Illwinter is one of the companies that keeps working on its titles for years. Point is, each of those balancing affects some Up/Op units or spells. Sometimes a whole civ is brought up or down a notch but there's never been a project to make each civ or school of magic equally viable.

Imagine any Age of Wonders champion having to play as an UW civ, or having to conquer an UW civ as a land based one. Try and imagine the cries about balance...

Fair enough, but one could argue that the underground in SM and the astral plane or whatever it was called were toned down versions of that (as some races had bonuses that were only relevant there iirc).
That said, MP balancing does not really require every class being equal to each other. Many games have a slight RPS balance even among races.
One could argue that Starcraft, one of the best balanced game has Zerg>Protoss>Terrans>Zergs.

There also is an esay way to balance asymetric race dynamically:
Have players bid for each race.
Several board games do that:
instead of letting players choose, or pick randomly, each bid an amount of starting in game money, or ending victory point to pick, and voila. The game is auto-balanced with asymetric races.

Something else that comes from the world of asymetric tabletop games is to have balance through victory conditions:
Germany usually only need to secure its home country until 1945 to win in WW2 games, while the allies usually need to take over Germany.

 

[Matalarata]

One could argue

One could also argue we're talking 4x turn based in general and AoW in the specific but whatever. I'm not saying there shouldn't be multiplayer oriented games. I'm saying that by their nature 4x are multiplayer unfriendly, and that balancing them for the 0,01% of the user base actually playing MP is, quite frankly, moronic.

Board games are a totally different beast, even a complex one like Eclipse* is over in 10 turns, that means you'll get a total of ~30-50 individual actions. 10 turns and 50 clicks if transposed to a PC game (more or less) that's not enough for the aleatory nature to escalate as much as your standard 4x. But what do I know, I'm clearly afraid of playing competitive strategy


*Edit: Eclipse, which is one of my favourites ever, is also unbalanced as fuck.

 

[Galdred]

One could argue

One could also argue we're talking 4x turn based in general and AoW in the specific but whatever. I'm not saying there shouldn't be multiplayer oriented games. I'm saying that by their nature 4x are multiplayer unfriendly, and that balancing them for the 0,01% of the user base actually playing MP is, quite frankly, moronic.

Board games are a totally different beast, even a complex one like Eclipse* is over in 10 turns, that means you'll get a total of ~30-50 individual actions. 10 turns and 50 clicks if transposed to a PC game (more or less) that's not enough for the aleatory nature to escalate as much as your standard 4x. But what do I know, I'm clearly afraid of playing competitive strategy


*Edit: Eclipse, which is one of my favourites ever, is also unbalanced as fuck.

Actually, 4x might be tournament unfriendly, but they are among the most interesting MP games IMO, because of the very reasons you quoted (the games evolve very differently).

But balance is a problem in Eclipse:
The plasma missile tech is the only useful weapon tech, so not having it cripples you, and getting it is more important that every other tech. The game would clearly be better if it were not the case. It resulted in 5 different fixes being implemented in the expansion.