My feedback from playing AOW3, fan of the original and Shadow Magic:
1. The most weird and infuriating thing about this game is that it completely hijacks the screen and the controls constantly. CONSTANTLY. Every thing I am trying to do gets rudely interrupted. Finally decide where to spend points on a hero? Just as you are about to click it... Fuck you, we are closing that window and moving across the entire map because a wolf took a windmill.
Or you finally find the unit that was taking all your shit, so you get your army in place. You catch up, you are right next to it! Now at the start of next turn all you need to do is click your unit and click on the bad guy and life will be good again. Next turn starts, nope fu again, a bird attacked a watchtower so we need to move all your shit to there and the bad guy just runs away. Your throne city could be surrounded by enemies, and at the start of next turn it will still drag you away to a distant outpost being attacked by a pigeon. This whole thing is madness. Was this really what you had in mind for this game?
Possible solutions: There are a lot of things you could do to fix this but really... I think this game needs MTG style phases within turns. So the players get to do all their management shit at the start of each turn. And then there will be a battle phase.
Alternatively you could let the player choose priorities for the next turn. No matter what happens, all this snatching of the screen is weird and terrible, like a crime against gaming. At the very least you should have a pop up showing a battle that the player needs to deal with before they can do anything else. But it shouldn't close whatever the player was doing and drag their camera away and stop them clicking things. Events should show as pings on the map and the player should be able to just click the ping to go there and see. I don't need the screen being taken to a city across the world because it compelted a damn merchandise. Also stopping the player from clicking things because the controls are locked while something is happening, is just weird and wrong. I will split this in two.
2. The UI is treacherous. First off, I don't like playing any game where I can't just quit the game whenever I want. In this game if a battle is underway it stops you from doing anything. Even if you decide you want to reload a previous save or close the game or whatever, fu, this battle is playing out and you can't do anything. There is a button to surrender but it doesn't appear until your turn again, so you might have to watch 50 enemy units play out until you do that. But you can't even press escape and close the game or anything during this time. It locks up the controls and everything... You would have to End Task if you really need to go.
The player is deciding on what to spend those hero points on, you finally decide and start clicking on the thing, and the whole window gets closed and the game moves across the world because of some stupid event. This should NEVER happen. Learn how to make windows or don't make any more games, you lazy, programming noobs.
Also related to this, the player should be able to drag and drop things. The queue of units? If you want to move something up the queue you currently have to cancel everything, queue what you want and then queue all the other shit after it. You should be able to just drag the order... Even a Flash game would let you do that but Flash is far more powerful than whatever this goofy engine is.
Also, managing inventories of heroes etc is a so ridiculous. We should be able to see all our heroes and the inventories should be universal, and we should be able to drag what we want onto whoever... It is currently a joke. I can't even give an item from one guy to another in the same army. I have to click the item, then click a button to drop the item to the ground, then click the hero I want, click the item on the ground etc. And if a pigeon attacks while you are doing that? Well then that item is sitting on the ground because the UI and controls were taken away from you for this far more important pigeon. The whole thing could be done with a single drag and drop. Or right click an item, Send To Bob.
Other anti player eg's: You scroll down your hero list of skills and find the ones you want. But each one you click it moves the list back to the top so you have to scroll it again and again. Why am I the only person who brings stuff like this up? The game is a fucking chore to play because of things like this and it is completely unnecessary. Learn some QA.
3. Related to the above, managing cities is boring and a chore. I usually have a few cities producing units and then all the others I want to make a temple and then just mass produce mana / research. But I have to manually click all this shit on every city, one by one. The game could let players make a template build order and then apply it to multiple cities on one click. The idea of a template would be so helpful, but it would also highlight how cities are mostly the same... A problem that was supposed to be addressed with the various map buildings changing what you can build etc. But in reality it doesn't make much difference. Maybe if there's a Flowrock I'll produce some catapults from there. Some high production cities I'll use for making big units. But mostly cities are just bland copy paste nodes and not having a template is lame. What would I really like? I'd like cities more like Civ where you have some focused on farms or whatever. And really I'd like cities to do stuff for me instead of the other way around. If each city had a mayor or something and I want to say build roads from here to the following cities, and have him deal with it using a builder. Or build a stack of 6 archers and send them to the capitol etc. Civ let you send units and they navigate themselves. Or have units exploring etc.
Also related to this, Civ2 lets you trade maps. So if you explore a lot your map will be valuable. This game is crying out for map selling.
4. All the notifications should have options when you right click. Such as Don’t notify about this again.
5. The green “Click to end turn” appears when you moved your peeps, even if you have lots of important things left in the notifications, like a domain invasion, city join offer, or someone disjuncted my spell. That green button is a nuisance…
6. Exit game should exit the game not take you to main menu. Ideally there should be a button to do both... Does that need to be a DLC?
7. The trading sucks, and the diplomacy. It’s all so basic and undeveloped. If an AI is near my shit I should be able to threaten it and explain why. Likewise if I walk through an enemy's territory, they ask why are you tresspassing?! But you can't respond... Maybe I was fleeing from angry animals! Or maybe I go where I please and next turn I plan to take all your shit. Either way there should be some kind of communication between the players. Ideally in this age of real AI, the game AIs should at least have personalities like devious treacherous, trustworthy, etc. And the player should be able to interact with them, at the very least through RPG style dialogue options.
Currently they are basic and dumb. He wont sell me a cloak but will die next turn. And allies kinda suck, they just take everything you haven't got to yet. And in the end it turns out badly. AOW3 adding the team victory was a good idea... But I still don't like allies. The seals idea is better but I tried it once and didn't like it. I'd prefer some RTS style thing where the players team up to build a huge unit but the other players have a chance to disrupt it.
8. Magic needs to scale with the game and not be fixed numbers. You can't just have damage spells that do 15 damage and heals that do 20. Because 15 damage early game kills an archer but late game I have heroes with 180 hp. 15 damage or 20hp heal is a waste of a turn. Related to this, one magic spell per turn? So much for Age of Wonders. More like Age of Blandness, one spell per turn. This really sucks, it is a big deal. My hero heals a guy and now I can use no spells in the entire battle? Epic decline.
9. Armies need banners with logos on. Currently there are armies with red banners on a dark red background, or dark red banners on light red background... I can't tell! Give us logos. Also the flying numbers is a shitshow in battles. They obscure what's going on. Nice idea instead of a battle log but I need to actually keep track of shit so I can't just have numbers all over the place that disappear a few seconds later. Ideally I would like to see the HP of all my units in the battle in a UI so I can see who needs healing the most etc. 20 units with hp bars floating and then getting attacked by another 20 units with floating hp bars... You just can't see shit. Takes a lot of micro management and zooming in just to keep track of the basics like who is dying or not.
10. The 4X / tactical map side of the game is kinda weak. For a start it could do with some lore. I hate reading and stories... but this game basically has none at all. Instead of 100 dungeon nodes, maybe some could be hidden and revealed by quests or lore hints. Also if your ally dies, currently just a little popup says “Bob died" on this day. It could do something like, a note arrives, “If you are reading this Bob is dead, you were a good ally, I left you some gold in x location.” Or, “If you are reading this Bob is dead, you were no help at all and now I will return as undead for revenge!”
Cities still don’t feel different or unique. I only really make some cities that are just shrine cities that generate mana each turn, and some cities make units. That’s pretty much it. You should be able to build more interesting things and they should be more exclusive. So if you make a magic city it can’t make troops or something. They should look different too.
It also needs more than just merch, research, housing, or mana. There could be illnesses and some cities could work on medicine, etc.
11. Removing all the fun magic from the tactical map is just sad. If the magic in Shadow Magic was too powerful, it just needs some balance, not removing completely. How about have it so that cities could be built to do combat things. Like a city could be built to fire pestilence at attackers. It doesn't make units or anything else, all the citizens just prepare vats of pestilence for when it is needed. Then if you are attacked or you want to attack a distant enemy, you have this 1 city that can send a blob of pestilence anywhere on the map. But you only get 1 blob per whatever. Same with the large nukes and things. Limit them to one of each and have them be rarely used. They should be like the Tactical Aids in C&C Generals. The player should have a few defensive buildings/spells lined up for emergencies. Or for a big advance.
12. The scenarios in 3 are much weaker than the previous games. I'm not talking about campaigns, just the maps themselves. The basic scenarios. I loved the earlier games with huge maps and interesting events happening. Like a giant undead invasion coming through the middle of the map which is surrounded by mountains and protected etc.. Scenarios like that were far better than anything in AOW3. Also they were bigger maps too.
One big problem I've had in AOW3 took me a long time to figure out... I feel like the game forces the players together more than the previous games. In the earlier games I liked playing for a while before I even met another player. And when I do I get into battle eventually and might defeat him eventually. Then I meet someone else, and there are still more who I haven't met. And they were all at different stages of development. In AOW3 it seems like I find everyone early in the game and they all kill each other and are too much on top of each other. And by the time I get some units exploring, everyone is dead and there's just one or two big AI left who absorbed everything.
I found a solution to make huge random scenarios with more distance between players, fewer cities but more resources. It lets players spread out more which makes for better late game.
13. The random scenario maker is a game changer. If it wasn't for that I would probably only play AOW1 or Shadow Magic. But I've played all those scenarios so many times, I know them inside out. So being able to have new maps made on the fly is amazing. It does a pretty good job too! But I wish it defaulted more to what I said in the previous point. I also wish it could make some more interesting scenarios with giant events planned. A giant flood. An asteroid. An undead invasion, etc. AOW3 does have global events too but I don't like them. Armies of creatures spawn all over the place and attack everything. It's aritifical and annoying to have to defend every city. It would be better to have something more like the earlier games, a real event the players can work towards dealing with. And it makes interesting maps like the giant circle with undead in the middle.
Also the geography should play more of a role. Some cities should be surrounded by mountains, some should be on the coast, and these should be more key locations in terms of gameplay. Like some cities should be hard to attack because they are behind mountains. Currently it just takes 1 extra turn to walk over the mountain... I want to see larger more significant mountains, and characters on a mountain is weaker or something. And mountains could block line of sight of things like the previously mentioned pestilence. So a city could be good just because of the natural layout of the land, not just because of what gets built there.
Likewise cities on water should be a bigger deal. I don't even use boats currently. I hate that they require 1 less unit from the stack. I prefer to just have stacks that can fly or we walk the long way. But a city on the water should have a gameplay impact. If you build ships they should be able to help defend against land units. And attacks from the sea could be a problem too so it forces anyone with a city on the sea to consider how to defend it.
14. I don't like the good and evil thing. Evil is much better, you just attack every city and everything you can see, MINE ALL MINE! Get big and rich and strong. The good players lose alignment if you attack shit so you are supposed to flirt with them and then they gradually warm to you over time. It takes several turns until they offer you a quest or something and then several more to become a vassal, and several more before you finally get anything from it. And if you deviate you ruin your alignment. Meanwhile evil players are capturing the whole map... It also kinda sucks that the AIs only really judge you based on alignment. Another evil aligned AI will worship me. A good aligned AI will hate me even if we never met, and even if he is about to die to someone else and I would have been willing to ally. I like that it's like an ideology but it's based on nothing but a tick box at character creation. I wish these things were based more on what goes on in the game. And really, a game that's all about capturing cities and defeating all who are in the way, when anyone bitches at me for being evil it just seems silly.
Also, worrying about being a good guy means not slaughtering 1000s of little creatures at all the various treasure sites and missing out on having a high level hero. So it's a no brainer. It's not that strict, you can get away with a lot. But it's a pain to play goodies. It doesn't really make sense.
A lot of ranty feedback but it comes from a place of love. Also I think if you took the good bits from 1 and 2 and 3 and left behind the weak bits, and put it together in a decent 3D engine, I think it would be a killer game. I like all 3 games but all of them have things I miss from the others.
It is way worse than PF's mods on the "great potential, meh execution" scale. At least mods were genuinely great and rich system on paper and you can come up with bazillion great and cool combinations. It's just that it didn't really matter in game.
