In What Age of Wonders is Superior to EWOM
Elemental Forums
elements that make aow superior to elemental:
1 Movement: units MOVE in that game! they don't just go by 2 or three squares. in one turn one has the impressin to accomplish something and there isn't that horrible frustration to keep clicking over and over on that end of turn button. For example a hero with 30 movement points can move by 10 hexes on a road (one road hexe costs 3 points). Boats too can move by 10 hexes, since their speed is 40 and one hexe of waters costs 4 movement points. A decent speed also allows the AOW community to have a succesful Play By Email mode. While in EWOM it would make no sense to keep sending turns to the other players after having just moved by a couple ofd squares and done nothing most of the time. In fact the whole ratio between movement and speed of unit creation is different and more fun. One can move and actually accomplish something during a turn, AND units can be built much faster. That is another element that nerfes heroes, since armies are really built by the dozen in AOW and no hero can possibly hope to take one city single handed. Heroes are still very useul, but they are not invincible as they are in the latest EWOM versions, and armies can quickly become huge!
(to be honest I yet have to understand how movement works in elemental! entering a wood tile should cost 2 movement points, I believe; yet with the last one movement point left, a player always seem to be able to enter a wood (another bug?)... Units "eject" from cities... (EJECT? What are they falling airplanes?) jumping a few tiles away... hey they do "eject" after all ahahaha!)
2 Not just any spell can be researched. One is forced to research only the spells that the whimsical book is in the mood to offer every day. that forces players to make compromises and adapt to the situation, thus forcing to vary one's strategy. That gives variety to the game experience since you cannot just research in every game the same sequence of spells, but you have to make a strategy (sometimes researching stuff you don't need just to make space on the book). In AOW spells are very useful, so a strategy can really vary a lot depending on what you can get.
3 MULTIPLAYER God I pity those people who consider themselves players of strategy games but have never experienced a turn based game against other human players. The excitement to open your turn every day (in Play by email) and see what the enemy has done! In AOW there are units that move faster through woods, other than can pass mountains, others that are very weak but can fly high and explore the enemy territory, and some that are invisible in woods! All that is useless against the AI, but when you are playing a person, the spirit of competition gets very high and there are lots of tricks one can apply to win a war! Also each race has specific abilities, like the elven cities that are invisible in the woods and finding them can simply drive you crazy. The fact of seeing the enemy is so important in warfarewhile gainst the AI that is useless! But in AOW sometimes I reached an enemy capital by moving through thhe enemy blind sposts, calculating the view range of each enemy towers and approaching by stopping my armies each turn is some blind corner. SEEING THE ENEMY IS ESSENTIAL IN WARFFARE!
Of course the teleport function would spoil all that, since in Elemental any lousy player could just teleport back is ubestack even at the last second. But in AOW teleport is optional, so we can have a realistic warfare experience, in which visibility movement and speed are often more important than sheer strenght!
I have recently re installed AOWSM and I'll keep you posted on other things that I find so exciting in that game. Maybe that will be of some help to the Stardock team, who don't seem to know that game too well...
