ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 177. age of wonders 3)

[Revier]

Well I was unaware this place had an effortpost on FFTA. I would like a link to it.

[Integrity]

parr can dig it up or not but i'm pretty sure he did a lp that didn't quite complete

[Parrhesia]

I won't dig it up but I did also 100% FFTA1 several years back - this is substantially less legwork than 100%ing FFTA2 because the vast majority are dispatches. My takeaway is basically that it doesn't hold up nearly as well, there's just a lot more pain-in-the-ass stuff (it even has its own needlessly hard-to-beat lategame dispatch!), the Law system and low accuracy and high time-to-kill and taking Ages just to play makes the core gameplay experience kind of a chore.

It's pretty and it's charming, and I prefer it a lot to TO: Knights of Lodis which always felt bizarrely soulless to me. I'm still really fond of it and it'll always have a place close to my heart. It was a Forever Game that could actually keep my attention when I was a hyperactive kid, before epilepsy medication made me permanently mellow out. But I couldn't recommend it.

Though I guess having 100%ed both FFTAs and completed FFT and Fell Seal, and got like to the 3/4 mark of both Tactics Ogres... do I need to go back and clear those, now? Reborn fixed most of the issues with TO Original at least, it seems. Sure as hell won't be 100%ing them, though. Reborn seems to have serious Forever Game aspirations.

[Revier]

TO Reborn is...weird. It makes many improvements over the PSP version. But, at the same time, it still keeps a lot of its mechanical bloat, and also overcorrects in some particularly cruddy ways. I would say it's a good SRPG that was almost great, and the fact that it sabotages itself out of greatness frustrates me plenty.

At least we can mod a decent portion of it now, which means it could, theoretically, achieve greatness someday. When that will happen, though, is anyone's guess.

...I am hoping they will do a better job with the FFT remake, though I understand that there are certain core aspects of it that don't hold up today, and that, being a popular game, it's likely going to come under fire if it attempts any drastic changes. Square Enix could very well surprise us, however. We will see.

Edited September 4 by Revier

[Dayni]

Didn't know DOOM had official releases this recently. Not much to say beyond that as someone who's Doomless.

If I were to take part in checking an old favourite, I'd probably be picking something on PS2 and that's a little limited at the minute. Maybe NFS:U as a pretty straightforward title in terms of length and structure, first thing that came to mind.

15 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

The Bazaar

Reading this, I'm kinda relieved I didn't get into this beforehand.

15 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

your sad-clown Wandering Anime Jew

Why do I feel like I need to tug my collar awkwardly reading this?

15 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

FFTA1 is a subversive masterpiece if you are 15 and have just discovered TVTropes and have made this everyone's problem.

Guilty as charged /s

 

[Integrity]

AGE OF WONDERS III (TRIUMPH, 2014)

Finished: 6/9/24 (heh). Playtime: 220.5 hours.

This one has been in the works for a long, long time. I was trying, on-and-off, to 100% Age of Wonders 3 back in 2016, long before the bug truly bit me. We'll get to why, but this is a case of it actually taking me ten years to polish something up, not just a game from 2014 I picked back up for some reason.

Age of Wonders is an interesting little franchise. I've found that the 4X / grand strategy space is generally separable by how much goes into their battle systems, and the strategic gameplay is often the inverse of that. At one extreme, you've got games like Europa Universalis, where combat is completely abstracted and influenced only by your behind-the-scenes numbers and maybe some very light army building. On the other extreme, there's Total War, with a nominal strategic game wrapper to give context to the in-depth real-time batttles. There's steps along this chain, of course, like modern Civilization being a step more tactical in combat than a Paradox game and being a bit lighter on the strategy, and opposite that's where Age of Wonders slots in. The step more strategic from Total War is games that have a bit more empire building to do, a bit less conquest to do, and zoom in for turn-based tactical battles. Heroes of Might and Magic almost typifies this, but plays more like a weird RPG in practice and belongs more with Total War; the proper exemplary forms in my opinion are Master of Magic, Age of Wonders, and Endless Legend. This tends to be my favorite gender of 4X overall, fun fact, so it's nice to finally get a representative on the shelf.

The strategic gameplay of Age of Wonders 3 can be described, without being too uncharitable, as Civilization lite in a fantasy world. You've got a set of races you can be, neutral races you can conquer or befriend, and a bevy of summoning and enchanting spells to augment your cities and armies. City growth is straightforward and based chiefly on in-city and capturable on-map structures rather than having access to rivers or anything like that, and empire growth is largely confined to building cities and connecting them with roads. Exploration involves fighting lots of neutral monsters, including raiding tombs for hard fights and hefty rewards, very much in the vein of 1994's Master of Magic, and those tombs become high-value things to settle cities around. It's a little deeper than Total War, but certainly not the game for you if you preferred Civilization 2 or 4 over 5 or 6.

The tactical combat of Age of Wonders 3 is where the meat of the game lies. Units can be grouped into stacks of up to 6 in the strategic map, and every combat outside of tomb raiding involves the attacker, the defender, and all stacks adjacent to the defender. Quantity can be a substitute for quality, but the game is eternally lurching towards an inevitable endgame of spamming the top tier units into big stacks. It's, regrettably, a game that's often over before it's done, but the midgame is very enjoyable to compensate. I won't get too into the various mechanics of the combat itself, but it's a very satisfying turn-based (player/enemy phase, not per-unit) affair that has a lot of beef to it and deeply rewards mastery. All units can level up very significantly to gain new abilities, higher stats, and sometimes even promote into stronger variants; on top of that, your heroes all have bespoke gear and skill point systems to build up as they level. It's very fair to say that the battles of Age of Wonders 3 feed into each other significantly, but in a way that's usually appropriately satisfying and rarely unfair. Some combinations of factors can get degenerate, but that's a bit part and parcel for this kind of game.

Getting into game modes and getting into achievements go hand in hand here, so we're going to interweave them a bit. Age of Wonders 3 is not a fun game to 100%, but is a very fun game to, say, like 94%. The lion's share of the game's 74 achievements (I'm talking, like, 60 of them) are just stuff you will naturally accumulate by playing literally any mode. There's six classes (Dreadnought, Rogue, Theocrat, Druid, Sorcerer, Warlord) that your leader can be, with a seventh (Necromancer) via DLC, and there's an achievement for winning a full game with each. Over the course of those seven games, there's dozens that will just show up as long as you're exploring the gamespace. Winning a game as each alignment (good, evil, neutral) and summoning the final monster of each type, creating a custom leader in the surprisingly-robust character creator, having an Elite unit, fully equipping a hero, researching everything, making the AI surrender, so on and so on. There's probably 40 achievements like this that you'll hardly have to think about doing. There's a few you'll have to go very slightly out of your way for, like to use Invoke Death (low% chance to kill a unit instantly) to kill an enemy leader or to win a Unifier Victory (basically the game's culture victory, in a game about conquest), but nothing that will take any particular effort if targeted and all fit inside those seven required maps. There's a single secret achievement called Mine Crafted to recruit the random hero Per Notchson, because now-known fascist Notch was a huge financial backer of Age of Wonders 3. That's aged pretty badly, but this was 2014.

Online games are where the fun of Age of Wonders 3 is, and by that I mean co-op compstomps with your buddies and not actual competitive play. I've put a hundred hours or more into this game just playing it with good buddies Jim and Parrhesia, not thinking about any kind of achievements. Before Total Warhammer 3, I'd say the Age of Wonders games were the ultimate hang-with-buddies strategic compstomp games. The title's gone, now, but it's still a respectable second. The achievements do come up here; everything earnable in that first paragraph can come from a multiplayer game just fine, and a total of about five more achievements come from the process of winning 30 online games and 1 play by e-mail game. That hundred hours above only actually constituted ten victorious games, so this is one to get a buddy and pad if you're actually gunning for it. Thanks, as ever, to Parrhesia for this one. I wonder how much of his life he's spent doing banal shit to finish games off for me.

The reason Age of Wonders 3 has taken so long is those last eight achievements. Age of Wonders 3's campaigns take their cues from good old Heroes of Might and Magic, in that they are absolutely oppressive fast-expansion tempo-fests where losing a battle or falling a bit behind can turn the game into an instant and horrible slog. They're exhausting to play, they're not very good, and to top it off beating them isn't enough. The base game shipped with two campaigns, the Elven Court and the Commonwealth, and each of them comes with a binary decision to betray your chosen faction and play an alternative final map. Each path has an achievement, for four across two campaigns. These campaigns are pretty easy, if dull, but that's the baseline going forward.

There's two more campaigns in the two DLCs. The Halfling campaign is the first "for experts" campaign, and I think it's the most reasonable of the four, not least of which because it just requires a single run through. It skews a bit brutal at times, but I nearly enjoyed it overall. Its big problem is that Halflings are the biggest, bullshittest, stupidest fucking race ever added to a strategy game. See, the deal with Age of Wonders is that your roster is determined by a combination of your race and leader class. Every race has the same loose loadout of units - irregular, swordsman, archer, pikeman, support, cavalry, elite - and these can vary hugely. The elves have a traditional archer who attacks three times at long range for heavy damage, while the humans have a lower-powered archer who's wearing actual armor, and the dwarves have a heavy crossbow unit who can only shoot one time but for heavy damage. Your class units vary wildly from class to class and do not map onto each other one bit. Some classes are heavier on the summons, while the Warlord has exclusively mortal units built from cities, for instance. For each of these, a certain racial adjustment is performed. With Human Crusaders as a baseline, Elven Crusaders might have lower health, higher damage, higher resistance, and a weakness to Shock damage; while Goblin Crusaders might have lower health, lower defense, but +1 Blight damage on melee and a resistance to Blight damage. It does create interesting decisions between races and there are absolutely clear winners and losers depending on the combination you're using (Goblin Monster Hunters what's up!) but overall I like it a lot.

Halflings are the wrench in this entire thing. The major Halfling racial adjustment is to take a 20% weakness to Physical damage, which is utterly crippling, and in exchange they get Lucky. Lucky is simple: it's a 10% chance to ignore any attack. The mathematically astute among you may note that this is a simple loss, considering how much damage is physical. The mathematically shrewd among you may be inclined to ask about hits-to-kill thresholds; to the unit with 20 hit points, being hit for 10 and 12 damage is often exactly the same thing, after all, so this could actually be a strict upgrade. Neither is quite right: it's a problem of variance. Given that the campaigns are a hellish tempo war where the AI is always bringing in more money than you possibly could, you cannot afford to play around Lucky at all. This goes back to my big old wall about Fell Seal's accuracy ratings: the chance to "miss" is so low, the pace of combat is so fast, the unit counts are insufficient to have contingency plans, so a lucky set of "misses" from an enemy is usually not something that you can maneuver to exploit, and an unlucky set of "misses" from you is something that can just ruin a fight instantly. Having two lucky procs in a row is only a 1% chance, but given the hundreds and hundreds of attacks you're throwing out in a campaign, you're inevitably going to run into that situation and have blown a third of your army's action economy on a sure kill and gotten nothing from it, and that's a situation that's really hard to recover from. You can't rely on it, and you can't budget around the enemy having it. It just fucks you both ways. Anyway, back to the Halfling campaign: I got through the harder maps by just replacing my Halfling cities with forced Goblin resettlement.

The final DLC, and final campaign, is the Necromancer campaign. This campaign is completely in the tradition of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. It is an absolute and total ballbuster. The maps are enormous. You're always either given undead units that require necromancer support or heroes to heal at all and then only given one necromancer hero, or you're given a majority of living units for your living heroes but you still have the necromancer kicking on as your strongest hero and none of his shit works unless you get him some undead units. It never works. It's always hellish multi-front warfare. Worst of all, the early turns of the (even bigger than the last ones) final map presents you two binary choices: ally with the Big Neutrality to destroy the other necromancers, ally with the other necromancers and rule together, or tell both to fuck themselves and go to war with everyone on your own behalf. All three of these forks have their own achievements, and the choice is in the first ten turns of what will turn out to be 100+. It's grueling. The campaigns in general are the reason that this took so long, but this campaign in specific has been the only thing left to do for achievements in this game since May.

A big part of this, to follow up on the Halfling thing, is how Necromancy plays in the game's ecosystem. Necromancers as a class are unique: while they have their own set of class units like all six others, they also modify their base race completely. Every race can be Ghouled (Ghoul Humans, Ghoul Frostlings, Ghoul Halflings, etc.) to turn a city undead. Undead cities are unique in that they don't grow passively at all unless specific buildings are made to make that happen, and they only grow via conquest - a portion of all living units killed gets sent back to the nearest undead city as new citizenry. Undead cities, themselves, produce the same vast variety of racial units as living ones, but Ghouled. Ghouled units take on all the quirks of their living counterparts, but carry precisely the traits you'd think the undead would: immunity to morale and mental effects, a weakness to fire and light damage, a resistance to blight and cold damage, and they don't regenerate at all in the overworld unless there's a necromancer or necromantic support unit attached to the stack. They're fiddlier than the living, but can snowball really horribly, and honestly so far so good.

Bret Devereaux wrote in a blogpost about Game of Thrones' armor that, loosely paraphrased, the next weapon any culture is going to invent is always the weapon that lets them defeat their own armor. This summarizes, with incredible brevity, the problem with Necromancer mirror matches in Age of Wonders 3. Necromancers focus on doing a lot of blight and cold damage, a lot of plagues and diseases to debilitate and destroy the living, and a lot of fear and panic abilities. All of that is resisted or no-sold completely by any Ghouled unit, and all Necromancer units are Ghouled. There are mid-level Necromancer hero abilities to mind control enemy undead, but then there are high-level Necromancer hero abilities to make your undead immune to enemy Necromancer mind control. A top-end Necromancer vs. Necromancer duel is a duel entirely of passive buffs that gets settled by the ordinary numbers of their units. Ghoul Draconians are great at this because they're Ghouled units who contribute a good amount of fire damage to basically everything they do! Ghouled Frostlings are horrible because they get extra cold damage and a bonus to their already-good cold resistance.

Your Necromancer is a Frostling, there is no Draconian faction in most (any?) of the maps, and, to tie it back, all three forks of the final map will throw you into at least one mid-lategame showdown as a Frostling Necromancer against a Halfling Necromancer.

Still, perseverance wins the day! This won't be the last time you see Age of Wonders in this thread, or even the other two pillars of the subgenre I listed earlier. Master of Magic's surprise 2022 reboot was weirdly fantastic, Endless Legend is a long-term stretch goal, and there's two more games after Age of Wonders 3 that are all Steamworksed up. There's a straightforward sequel in 4, which is an updated version of the same concept they've been doing since 1999's Age of Wonders, and there's the franchise's own Alpha Centauri in Planetfall. That's a hell of a lot better than Beyond Earth was, though, thank God.

[lenticular]

  

On 9/6/2024 at 11:56 PM, Integrity said:

Age of Wonders is an interesting little franchise. I've found that the 4X / grand strategy space is generally separable by how much goes into their battle systems, and the strategic gameplay is often the inverse of that. At one extreme, you've got games like Europa Universalis, where combat is completely abstracted and influenced only by your behind-the-scenes numbers and maybe some very light army building. On the other extreme, there's Total War, with a nominal strategic game wrapper to give context to the in-depth real-time batttles. There's steps along this chain, of course, like modern Civilization being a step more tactical in combat than a Paradox game and being a bit lighter on the strategy, and opposite that's where Age of Wonders slots in. The step more strategic from Total War is games that have a bit more empire building to do, a bit less conquest to do, and zoom in for turn-based tactical battles. Heroes of Might and Magic almost typifies this, but plays more like a weird RPG in practice and belongs more with Total War; the proper exemplary forms in my opinion are Master of Magic, Age of Wonders, and Endless Legend. This tends to be my favorite gender of 4X overall, fun fact, so it's nice to finally get a representative on the shelf.

The strategic gameplay of Age of Wonders 3 can be described, without being too uncharitable, as Civilization lite in a fantasy world. You've got a set of races you can be, neutral races you can conquer or befriend, and a bevy of summoning and enchanting spells to augment your cities and armies. City growth is straightforward and based chiefly on in-city and capturable on-map structures rather than having access to rivers or anything like that, and empire growth is largely confined to building cities and connecting them with roads. Exploration involves fighting lots of neutral monsters, including raiding tombs for hard fights and hefty rewards, very much in the vein of 1994's Master of Magic, and those tombs become high-value things to settle cities around. It's a little deeper than Total War, but certainly not the game for you if you preferred Civilization 2 or 4 over 5 or 6.

Yeah, I find all this stuff fascinating. Especially seeing how different approaches will resonate differently for different people. I definitely tend more towards the abstracted combat end of things, personally. I've been playing a bunch of Victoria 3 recently, which is even further towards that end of the scale than Europa Universalis, and I've been really digging it. EU4, incidentally, can actually have some highly tactical combat if you're willing to slow the pace of the game down to a crawl and pause every day to issue new orders. It's completely unrealistic, degenerate, gamey nonsense, but it is there.

Civ combat is weird and doesn't actually make any sense when you think about it for more than about half a second. Basically because it's operating on multiple different scales at once. We're supposed to see each hex as being hundreds of miles on the map, but also a typical medieval archer can happily shoot their bow two hexes away. It works fine from a pure game mechanics perspective, but is garbage when it comes to flavour and immersion and all that stuff.

The Age of Wonders/Total War way of doing things where you switch down to a smaller scale to resolve the actual combats makes so much more sense, but it generally doesn't work for me for gameplay reasons. Part of it, I think, is just that the constant switching back and forth tends to break up flow, but I think it's also a balance thing. If I do well on the strategic layer then that means that I have an advantage on the tactical layer, which then means that it's... kinda boring? Who wants to play a game where the odds are constantly stacked in your favour? But if you just auto-resolve the combat, it will always do worse than it should. I'm sure it's an absolute blast when the two different game modes feel in sync with each other, but it's never worked for me.

On 9/6/2024 at 11:56 PM, Integrity said:

There's a single secret achievement called Mine Crafted to recruit the random hero Per Notchson, because now-known fascist Notch was a huge financial backer of Age of Wonders 3. That's aged pretty badly, but this was 2014.

Oof. Yeah. That has aged poorly. I both love and hate that this is the second time in a matter of weeks that "Notch is a fascist tool" has naturally come up as part of this thread.

On 9/6/2024 at 11:56 PM, Integrity said:

Bret Devereaux wrote in a blogpost about Game of Thrones' armor that, loosely paraphrased, the next weapon any culture is going to invent is always the weapon that lets them defeat their own armor. This summarizes, with incredible brevity, the problem with Necromancer mirror matches in Age of Wonders 3.

So many games seem to fall into this trap. And yeah, it makes sense that a fire elemental would both deal and resist fire damage, but it makes less sense when it comes to wizards inventing magic spells that would do the same. If I'm a wizard and I'm trying to create a spell that will make me resistant to fire, I'm also going to make it so I can do water damage or cold damage or whatever else fire creatures are weak to in that world.

On 9/6/2024 at 11:56 PM, Integrity said:

There's a straightforward sequel in 4, which is an updated version of the same concept they've been doing since 1999's Age of Wonders, and there's the franchise's own Alpha Centauri in Planetfall. That's a hell of a lot better than Beyond Earth was, though, thank God.

Incidentally, have you seen that actual Alpha Centauri has made it onto Steam now? Sadly, no achievements, or Id' totally take it up for "100% an old favourite and see if it holds up".

On 8/30/2024 at 3:09 AM, Integrity said:

Sometimes a game is so huge that you just, like, what the fuck do you say about Doom? This is a high that players and designers alike have been chasing for over thirty years. Hell, some of the guys who made Doom haven't really moved on from Doom. It's difficult to conceive of a game this influential even with all the evidence staring you right in the face. It's insane.

Yeah, it's got to be right up there in terms of most influential games ever. Possibly behind the original Super Mario Bros? Or some of the real foundational games like Pong or Space Invaders? But even as a non-FPS-enjoyer, it's hard to deny just how much Doom has shaped video games. I am tempted to start a separate thread just about this.

[Integrity]

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

But if you just auto-resolve the combat, it will always do worse than it should.

i do agree with a lot of what you said about the balance often not quite working on aggregate, but it's worth pointing out for this that more recent games of this type have done a few neat things to make "just autoresolve the boring ones" a lot more palatable. total warhammer 3 gives you a preview of if you'll lose any unit cards from autoresolve, and as i recall age of wonders planetfall (and 4, i think) actually let you seamlessly rewind and manually play out the battle if you're unhappy with how autoresolve turned out. it's not a perfect solution, mind, but i do think it does a lot towards focusing your attention on The Big, Meaningful Fights that the subgenre is nominally built for

 

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

Incidentally, have you seen that actual Alpha Centauri has made it onto Steam now? Sadly, no achievements, or Id' totally take it up for "100% an old favourite and see if it holds up".

i haven't! a lot of that old microprose fare is there, so i'm not too surprised. it's real interesting to see the ways in which master of orion 2 is still kind of untouched in the genre

[Revier]

I've not played the Age of Wonders, but I have played their great great grandfather, Master of Magic. I greatly enjoy it, and still play it from time to time, but it's definitely not a well calibrated game, lol. Would be interesting to see how they expanded on and mutated the formula into its own thing.

Edited September 10 by Revier

[Integrity]

aow3 is (imo) the single closest game in overall vibe to master of magic (1994, the best game ever) that's ever been made. i don't know what it lands that fallen enchantress, the other age of wonders games, etc. don't, but something is there.

[lenticular]

On 9/8/2024 at 3:10 PM, Integrity said:

i do agree with a lot of what you said about the balance often not quite working on aggregate, but it's worth pointing out for this that more recent games of this type have done a few neat things to make "just autoresolve the boring ones" a lot more palatable. total warhammer 3 gives you a preview of if you'll lose any unit cards from autoresolve, and as i recall age of wonders planetfall (and 4, i think) actually let you seamlessly rewind and manually play out the battle if you're unhappy with how autoresolve turned out. it's not a perfect solution, mind, but i do think it does a lot towards focusing your attention on The Big, Meaningful Fights that the subgenre is nominally built for

Oh, that is good to know! I might have to give the subgenre another look at some point to see if it agrees with me more now than last time I played it. Maybe I'll pick up Planetfall next time it goes on sale or something.