Age of Wonders 3 - Eternal Lords

First review Fami Gami 8.6 out of 10:

http://famigami.com/review/age-of-wonders-iii-eternal-lords-review-pc/

Explorminate's review on their new site: (Verdict: recommended!)

http://explorminate4x.com/2015/04/14/age-of-wonders-3-eternal-lords-review/

OnRpG: (4 out of 5)

http://www.onrpg.com/articles/editorial/age-of-wonders-iii-eternal-lords-reviewed-halfings-frostlings-and-tigran/

I'm definetly gonna get AoW III on a sale. Eager to play it but I think I have to upgrade the CPU before I play.

Those reviews sure came out fast. Make me wonder if they've played enough to do a proper review.

It's been in closed beta for a while, they probably didn't review it "after release" at all. Actually, on my steam it says it's not yet released.

Like with any other game, reviewers get access to the game early. This is to make sure there are reviews when the game is released.

The free update (1.5) is now live.

Look here for a list of all changes:

http://ageofwonders.com/age-of-wonders-iii-free-update-v1-5-is-live/

Major features:

Vassals: As your relations with Independents improve through better race relations and completing quests, you can convince independent towns to serve you as Vassals. Though they retain independence, Vassals have many benefits: they provide you with trade income, grow in population and maintain their own defenders. If they like you enough, Vassals will occasionally give you units for free, and you can demand tribute in the form of resources or units in cases of emergency.

Race Happiness: Relations are now tracked per race, making decisions about who you make war with much more important. Declaring war on an Elven city might give you a quick conquest, but don’t expect your Elven citizens to be happy about it afterwards. Something to take into account, as you can now expand your realm without warfare. In Eternal Lords, Race happiness will be further expanded with the Race Governance system and new victory condition.

Added diversity for Core Races: The Dwarves have doubled down on their defensive character, as well as the defensive strike ability that allows them to attack and guard in the same turn. Dwarven support units, such as Shamans and Apprentices, are now all armored. The keen senses of the High Elves, on the other hand, allows them to respond to attacks that would catch other races off-guard, all their support units now have the Total Awareness ability, meaning they cannot be flanked by attacks from behind. The Draconians have a host of new tricks, with the Charger being able to fly in tactical combat and the Raptor doing melee fire damage. These changes should make your choice of race more important than ever!

Diplomacy AI Improvements: The AI now uses personalities, with them adopting diplomatic, neutral or aggressive playstyles with accompanying alignment and specialization choices. The AI has learned more actions and feels less like a black box. For example there’s a set of new messages giving reasons for declined proposals. Settling near an AI’s domain, trespassing its domain or demanding a tribute are sure ways to provoke a response. Computer opponents now request alliances to take out a very powerful player and also learned new negotiating tricks like counter offering, demands and gifting.

• Added notify event when other player change their diplomatic state with each other.
• Improved Diplomacy AI open border requests.
• Improvements to AI trade analyzing code.
• Improvements to AI trade offering code.
• Added various relation modifiers and modified existing.
• Various improvements to diplomacy interface.
• Added support for viewing an accepted/declined proposal.

Random Map Generator Overhaul: Features include overall more geography variation, carefully crafted starting areas that fit your race, better structure distribution with higher level pickups now having defenders. For sessions with fixed Teams, maps now have more balanced starting positions. Of course the RMG has been prepared for the many structures Eternal Lords will bring to the table on release.

New Hero Join Interface: You can now turn down heroes you don’t like, and when available, a new hero of another class and race will spawn in the next turn.

Selling Hero Items: Strapped for some quick cash? It is now possible to sell excess items from the hero inventory in return for gold and mana.

Improved Overview Maps: New Map Glyphs and Labels for cities make the Overview map a lot more readable.

PBEM: Last but not least; the new “asynchronous” Multiplayer Mode. In PBEM games, a player takes their turn in their own time and then uploads it to Triumph’s servers. Once it is uploaded, an email is sent to the next player in the game, who may then take their turn. This allows players to play when they like, without needing to set aside a large amount of time with other people to play a game. We expect the PBEM service to stay free, but this is pending bandwidth usage.

We get release copies, and we play the game until the last possible moment. We had the release candidate I think about a week before release. Our reviewer is someone who was in the beta as well. If you read the review, it's right at the beginning of the review.

I've played about 30 hours of AoW3:EL and it is absolutely fantastic. The 1.5 patch really brings the game up too.

On Edit - The reviewer has hundreds of hours in the game and more than 65 for EL alone.

N/A

Just take my money already.  Will be interesting to see if this is the last DLC, seems like they jammed everything they could into it.

Quoting Primal_Savage, reply 7

So... EL or EL? 

They are different enough where one doesn't need to chose. I chose both!!!

And now it 66% off on Steam(13,59 €) and 33% on first expansion

Quoting Primal_Savage, reply 7

So... EL or EL? 

ha

The first big gaming site review:

Gamespot 8 out of 10

http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/age-of-wonders-iii-eternal-lords-review/1900-6416115/

The gamescouts 9 out of 10!

http://www.thegamescouts.com/2015/04/age-of-wonders-iii-eternal-lords-review.html

Press play media: 8.7 out of 10!

https://pressplaynews.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/age-of-wonders-iii-eternal-lords-review-pc/

Big red barrel: 5 out of 5!

http://www.bigredbarrel.com/blog/2015/04/review-age-of-wonders-iii-eternal-lords/

Techgaming.com 8.5 out of 10

http://www.tech-gaming.com/age-of-wonders-3-eternal-lords/

 Gamewatcher 9 out of 10!

 http://www.gamewatcher.com/reviews/age-of-wonders-iii-eternal-lords-review/12221

I love AOW3. I love the global events, frostlings, tigrans, even the necromancer isn't bad. I love all the new skills and items the DLC brought. And the race relations is "ok" but not good.

The thing is, each class is combo'd with every race, so for example if you play a warlord class and the frostling race, you get special frostling berzerkers (if you played gnomes, you'd get gnome berzerkers). So beyond the base racial units that every race get, they also need to add a multitude of class units to every race. Adding a new race or a class becomes a huge undertaking. And that's just scratching the surface of the depth of the race/class system - for example dreadnought class can research adding pistoliers to all cavalry units (and then you have to ask yourself what races has good cavalry units for pistols etc). 

Ultimately, I think this is the kind of DLC that mostly veteran players will think is worth the money. Because even though there's a lot of new content on the surface, you really need to understand the game's depth to realize how much is actually there. 

Fastest purchase ever on Steam.  

Or people with severe psychological problems, I bought it because it had a necromancer...

Tibbles, an age of wonders 3 forum veteran has created a unit database.

It's pretty cool.

http://ageofwonders.com/the-aow3-online-database-by-tibbles/

Or a direct link:

http://aow3db.tumblr.com/index

A must read this is. Explorminate has produced an excellent article, a reexamination of Age of wonders 3 with its expansions.

It centers around the question: Have the updates and expansions dealt with the initial criticisms?

The game was quite good to begin with, but is it really great now?

http://explorminate4x.com/2015/05/05/age-of-wonders-3-reexamination-1/

No, the game is far from great in my opinion.

I mean it sounds like it should be great, but every time I play it I just get bored and go back to Endless Legend.

I honestly don't know what it is about AoW that sucks the life from me, but everytime I get excited to play it, and then start playing it, within like 30m it starts to become a chore to keep going.  I can't put my finger on it though, but it's there.

This review, together with explorminate's second look, is the most in-depth look at eternal lords I've seen until now.

You have to read this one. The reviewer has put more than 100 hours of gameplay in it.

Spacespector 9 out of 10.

http://www.spacesector.com/blog/2015/05/age-of-wonders-3-eternal-lords-review/

Summersale on GoG.com.

Age of Wonders 3 now -75%

Expansions -33%

https://www.gog.com/games##search=age%20of%20wonders&sort=bestselling&page=1

Age of Wonders 3 free update version 1.6 has been released!

There is a new tutorial included for new players.

Lots of improvements (especially the random map generator), fixes and balance changes.

http://ageofwonders.com/age-of-wonders-v1-6-launches-includes-new-tutorial/

The developers of Age of Wonders 3 at Triumph Studios are doing a survey on their site.

They are thinking about what to do next, another expansion, another game?

They are interested in what you like about Age of Wonders 3 and what you think they can improve upon with another update/expansion.

http://ageofwonders.com/triumph-net-plans-survey/?paged=2

I finally have all 5 dragon types under my control....  Will play again.