这是《奇迹时代》系列自1999年以来的变化总结。涵盖主题包括：种族、地图层级、战斗、城市、外交、单位、领袖、胜利条件和剧情。还提供了包含游戏画面的视频版本。 简介 这是我制作的相关YouTube视频的脚本。由于视频时长较长，我认为大家可能更希望有一份文本手稿，以便能随时浏览。

Introduction: Hello. Since Age of Wonders 4 has been released, I thought this might be a good time to go back through the previous games in the franchise and talk about how the series has changed over the years. One of the things that I love about Age of Wonders is that each game has some significant gameplay differences. This means that Age of Wonders 2 didn’t replace the original Age of Wonders; it’s not just the same game but better. Instead, each game provides a unique experience, and the older games are still worth playing on their own merits. I discovered the Age of Wonders franchise shortly after the first game came out in 1999, and I have played every Age of Wonders game that has been released. The video guide will be divided into parts with timestamps in the description of the video. We will be looking at how the following things have changed throughout the series: the races available, map layers, the combat system, city development, diplomacy with neutrals or other players, leader creation, unit enhancement, map creation, and victory conditions. Finally, I will very briefly touch on the major story points that connect the games. The story section will contain spoilers for the campaigns of the first three Age of Wonders games and their expansions, so if you don’t want spoilers for the older games don't read the last section. Conversely, if you found my guide because you want a summary of the story events of the older games and don’t care about the gameplay changes, feel free to skip to that final section. One final point before getting into the details of these games: in this guide whenever I say “Age of Wonders 2” I am referring to both the original Age of Wonders 2: The Wizard’s Throne and the standalone expansion Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. If I am referring to something that is unique to one of those games specifically, I will be calling the games “The Wizard’s Throne” and “Shadow Magic” rather than “Age of Wonders 2.” For most purposes in this guide these are both the same game, so I will mostly be referring to both of them as Age of Wonders 2. Races The first Age of Wonders game included 12 distinct playable races. The four neutral races are the Humans, the Azracs, the Lizard Men, and the Frostlings. For good we have the Elves, the Halflings, the Dwarves, and the pure good High Men. For evil we have the Dark Elves, the Orcs, the Goblins, and the pure evil Undead. While there are certainly some similarities between the races of Age of Wonders 1, the differences are still very important. For example, every race has 4 tier-1 units. One of those units is a basic melee unit, one is a basic ranged unit, and one is a siege unit, which for most races is the same generic battering ram. Finally, the fourth tier-1 unit is a unique unit that often lets the race do something that other races cannot do at the tier-1 level. However, even within this basic setup, an orc swordsman and a goblin spearman are very different units; the former having the highest damage of any tier-1 unit in the game, and the latter having first strike and one of the lowest gold costs in the game, beaten in cost only by two other tier-1 goblin units. A similar pattern can be seen with the tier-2 units, with each race getting a cavalry unit, a priest unit, a ballista, and a catapult. It’s not until tier-3 and 4 that the units start to really diverge in form and function. Age of Wonders 2: The Wizard’s Throne also had 12 races. These are mostly the same as Age of Wonders 1, although 2 races did get replaced. The Azracs were replaced with the Tigrans, and the Lizard Men were replaced with the Draconians. I suspect that the Azracs were replaced because “desert humans” was too similar to “humans” so they added a cat-people race instead. As for the fan-favourite Lizard Men, their innate swimming ability was probably seen as problematic from a balance perspective, so the water lizards were replaced with a dragon-themed fire lizard faction. Or at least that’s my speculation. Shadow Magic added an additional 3 races to the roster, bringing Age of Wonders 2 up to a total of 15 races, which is the highest the franchise has ever seen. The three new races are the neutral Nomads, which are suspiciously similar to the previously displaced Azracs, the good Syrons, and the evil Shadow Demons. The Syrons and Shadow Demons are both natives to the Shadow Realm and are immune to the effects of Shadow Sickness that plague other races that visit that place. Since dragons are innately immune to Shadow Sickness, the Draconian race was also given this immunity, presumably so there would be a neutral race that also operated normally in the Shadow Realm. Age of Wonders 3 caused a bit of outcry among the fans when it was announced that the series would be cutting back to 6 races on release. These were the Humans, the Draconians, the High Elves, the Dwarves, the Orcs, and the Goblins. I also remember seeing one comment in particular complaining about how of all the races to keep, the developers decided to keep both the Orcs and the Goblins. To me, this was a “Tell me you’ve never played an Age of Wonders game without telling me you’ve never played an Age of Wonders game” moment, since the Orcs and the Goblins have always been two extremes of the physical prowess scale in this franchise and couldn’t be more dissimilar. Age of Wonders 3 got two DLC expansions that added additional races to the game. Golden Realms added the Halflings, while Eternal Lords added the Frostlings and the Tigrans. Eternal Lords also added back the Undead using Age of Wonders 3’s class system, and in my opinion having a leader specializing in Necromancy was a far better way of handling the Undead than having an Undead race. Finally, Age of Wonders: Planetfall, exists. While I’m personally a big fan of the game, it being a sci-fi spinoff to the main fantasy series makes its inclusion in this guide feel a bit weird for some of the topics I will be covering. I’ll still mention it in this part for the sake of completion, but Planetfall will be more relevant when it comes to gameplay mechanics, especially since Age of Wonders 4 looks to have taken a lot of lessons from Planetfall. The base game of Planetfall came with 6 factions, and rough parallels can be drawn to the fantasy races, as well as the classes of Age of Wonders 3. The Vanguard are the most Human faction, for example, while the Dvar are basically space Dwarves and the Amazons are space Elves. The Kir’Ko are an enslaved insect race, which is kind of like a role-reversal for the Shadow Demons. The Syndicate are a sneaky diplomatic faction which borrowed a lot from the Rogue class of Age of Wonders 3, and The Assembly have a number of mechanics that would feel right at home in an Undead race. Despite the parallels, each of these sci-fi factions do bring some unique gimmicks to the table. The Invasions DLC added the Shakarn race, which are a sneaky alien lizard people faction built on the sci-fi trope of aliens infiltrating humanity. The Shakarn’s affinity for water was probably a callback to the Lizard Men of the first Age of Wonders. Finally, the Star Kings DLC added the Oathbound, which are basically paladins that ride in mech suits. They’re pretty cool. Map Layers While it’s possible to play on a single surface layer in every Age of Wonders game, most maps had conflicts spanning multiple layers. In the first Age of Wonders there were actually three possible map layers. You had the surface, the underground, and the depths which was an underground to the underground. The depths weren’t used much, but I think it’s interesting that they were an option, and I vividly remember the first Dwarf mission of the campaign where you have a multi-layer underground conflict with the Goblins. No future Age of Wonders title had a depths layer, so that’s something unique to the first game. The Wizard’s Throne removed the depths layer, so the game was confined to the surface and the underground. Shadow Magic then added in the Shadow Realm layer which had a bunch of interesting global properties. First there was the Shadow Sickness; races and creatures that weren’t native to the Shadow Realm suffered a significant decrease to their stats. Also, movement in the shadow realm took significantly fewer movement points, which made the entire realm into a sort of fast travel system if you had distant locations of your surface empire that contained shadow gates. Shadow Magic was the only game in the series to have a Shadow Realm layer. Age of Wonders 3 goes back to just having surface and underground, and Planetfall even removed the underground layer, making Planetfall the only Age of Wonders game to always be confined to a single map layer. The Combat System The combat system is considered by many to be the meat and potatoes of the Age of Wonders franchise, and over time significant changes have been made to how combat works. Let’s discuss the differences. In the first game your troops would spawn quite far from the enemy in battle. It often took multiple turns to get your units into formation and advance enough to engage with the enemy. Units had to choose between moving and using an ability. The only abilities that could be used after moving were melee abilities like strike, healing, or seduce. This means that your archer units could not move and shoot; if they moved even a single tile, they were unable to attack that turn. Action points weren’t added until Age of Wonders 2. This means that the number of attacks was dictated by the ability being used, so a strike was always 2 hits regardless of how far the unit had moved before attacking. The lack of action points also meant that it was impossible to burn through a unit’s retaliations in the first game. If you surrounded a strong unit with 6 melee attackers and attacked with all of them, that unit would potentially get 12 retaliation strikes throughout your turn and then be able to act normally on its turn. Walls were more powerful in the first Age of Wonders than in any subsequent game. If your city had walls, opponents could not attack it unless they had at least one unit capable of bypassing the walls. There have been many times where I’ve had or seen an undefended walled city and watched armies walk past it without taking it. Wall Crushing, Wall Climbing, and Flying are all examples of abilities that would let you bypass walls. Amusingly, the Goblin Bomber’s self-destruct ability is capable of damaging walls, even though a single bomber is insufficient to destroy a wall segment. If a city is undefended, I guess the bombers are smart enough to put the bombs down before detonating them, since a single goblin bomber could conquer an undefended walled city on its own. Age of Wonders 2 made a lot of changes to the combat system while still keeping the core Age of Wonders identity. To speed up combat, armies were placed much closer to each other at the start of battle. This allows the defender to attack the attacker’s units before the attacker even gets an action. The general consensus seems to be that armies were a little too close together at the start of battles in this game, so future games all ended up in a middle ground between the distances of the first two Age of Wonders games. This was also the game to introduce the action point system. Now most abilities like strike or archery did one attack per remaining action point, with units starting each round with 3 action points available. Moving would reduce your action points based on the percentage of your unit’s movement that remains, so faster units can move further than slower units per action point spent. This greatly improved the usability of archer units. They were always good, but now they felt a lot better to use. Another big change in Age of Wonders 2 was the addition of gates to fortified structures. Every unit with a melee attack can now attack and damage gates. This means that dedicated siege units are no longer necessary to take walled cities. Gates do naturally funnel attacking units into a choke point, so walls are still a good benefit to the defending player, but they aren’t nearly as impenetrable as they used to be. Finally, wizard domain is probably one of the most iconic features of Age of Wonders 2. Your wizard exerts domain around himself, and he can cast spells in any of your battles that take place inside this domain. If your wizard is parked inside a wizard tower in one of your cities, and you definitely want to do this, you extend an even greater domain around every wizard tower you control and your heroes all also extend a pocket of domain around themselves. Age of Wonders 2 was the only game to use this system, but it’s a really thematic take on the wizard leader that feels different from anything I’ve seen in any other strategy game. Being a powerful wizard who manipulates the world from the safety of a tower is probably the main reason to go play Age of Wonders 2. It’s a lot of fun. Age of Wonders 3 removed miss chance from the game. Previously, a unit’s attack was compared to the target’s defence, and the odds of a hit landing would increase or decrease depending on the difference between those values. Damage was a separate stat and if an attack hit it would then roll for damage separately. In Age of Wonders 3, attacks have a base damage value, and that value is modified up or down depending on the difference between attacker’s attack and defender’s defence. Obstacles no longer reduced an archer’s chance to hit, but instead significantly reduced the damage that the archer would do with their attack. Unit facing now matters. Attacking an enemy from behind will give a flank bonus to the damage of the attacker and prevent the defender from retaliating as effectively. Defense mode was also added in this game. Now, when you end your combat turn, all units that didn’t attack or do a non-movement action will enter defense mode and take significantly less damage from attacks during the opponent’s turn. Defense mode is quite powerful. There are times where I’d move a melee unit up to my opponent and then defend in their face in order to force the opponent to deal with me. Defense mode also makes the unit immune to flanking. The flanking mechanic took a bit of getting used to, and the orc black knight unit got a bit of a reputation for being a hero killer in the early days; as a mounted unit with a polearm and the charge ability, black knights had a lot of movement, hit hard after doing a lot of movement, and had bonus damage against other mounted units, which included all heroes. Also, being an orc, its base damage stat was on the high end. The AI would gleefully exploit holes in your formation to charge into the backside of your hero units with these things. Age of Wonders 3 was a game with an incredibly high skill ceiling when it came to tactical combat, and learning how to avoid enemy flank attacks was a critical part of the learning experience. Planetfall largely uses the same combat system as Age of Wonders 3, but since it’s a sci-fi game the focus was pushed heavily in favour of ranged attacks. This is also the area where a significant change was made: miss chance was added back into the game. This upset a lot of people, but I personally think that the new graze system is the best part of both worlds. Graze was a 25% leeway on your hit chance where you’d do half damage instead of missing entirely. Let’s say you had an attack with a 60% chance to hit. This means that you have a 60% chance of doing full damage, a 25% chance of doing half damage, and a 15% chance of missing entirely. This also means that as long as you have at least a 75% chance of hitting you are guaranteed to do at least half damage to your target. Melee attacks had a base 90% accuracy, meaning that you wouldn’t miss in melee unless you were suffering from a debuff such as being blinded. Another notable change made in Planetfall was the division of casting points into tactical points and strategic points. In previous Age of Wonders games casting a spell on the world map or in battle used the same casting points. This meant that casting a spell in battle would effectively increase the number of turns that your enchantment or summon spell would take to cast. In Planetfall, since your operation points are automatically divided into two categories, doing an operation in one place wouldn’t affect your ability to do an operation in the other on the same turn, provided you had sufficient resources to do both. City Development I really like that in the first Age of Wonders game you can’t build new cities. You can rebuild razed cities, but the map’s starting conditions dictate where cities will be throughout the game. This makes every city feel impactful, since you’re gaining territory on a map that has a predetermined amount of value. Cities also had a size of one to four tiles, and the size of the city was also set at the start of the map and couldn’t be changed. This city size dictated the highest tier of units that you could produce, so finding and controlling larger cities was important if you wanted to produce anything other than basic units. Sometimes there’s an elegance in simplicity, and I think that this system really played to Age of Wonders’ strength as a tactical war game. Cities themselves had limited development options. You could unlock new units, build walls, or upgrade the level of your city. Upgrading the level of the city allowed you to unlock the next tier of units. That was it. Produce gold and produce units. Maybe build walls. That was a city in Age of Wonders 1. If you migrated a city to another race, you would keep your walls and city level, but you would lose any unit options that had been unlocked. This was even the case if both races built the exact same unit, such as the generic tier-2 ballista and catapult units that most races produced. Sometimes I’d keep a hostile race in a city just to produce these siege engines for me, but since hostile non-mechanical units suffered from negative morale and hostile cities required a garrison to keep order, most of the time it’s better to migrate hostile cities to a friendlier race. Age of Wonders 2 added a ton of stuff to the city development process. First of all, pioneer units can now be built to settle new cities. This alone changes the game dramatically. On top of that, cities now have a number of different structures that they can build. There are structures that unlock units, produce mana, increase production speed, and do other things. One nice thing about this is that if you migrate a city that contains a war hall, the new race will also have a war hall, meaning that migrating developed cities actually allows you to make use of the existing infrastructure. Another change in Age of Wonders 2 is city population. Cities now grow over time, and a city’s base income and production speed is determined by its population. Each race also had a specific bonus to one resource type. Newly settled cities need to increase in size category once to be able to do more than build simple wooden walls and the most basic unit the race has access to. Age of Wonders 3 adds the concept of domain. Cities have domain up to a certain radius around the city center, and structures such as gold mines must fall within the domain of one of your cities in order to be worked and provide you with any economic benefit. Your armies can no longer simply flag your opponent’s mines in order to immediately start giving you income. City domains increase as population increases, and several structures can also increase the domain of a city when built. There are also a lot of different treasure sites that have special effects when within the domain of your cities, so city placement is very important. These effects include unlocking unique buildable structures that can give bonuses to certain units and allowing the production of entirely new units. Planetfall implements the district system. As your population grows, you can annex nearby regions to attach them to your city. You can then develop those regions by having them focus on a particular resource type: food, production, energy, or knowledge. This implementation makes it important to specialize your cities, since it’s more efficient to have multiple districts of the same type and cities are limited to 4 districts outside of the central district in most cases. Two other changes in Planetfall are the food sharing system and the way that your population produces resources. Rather than spend their food to grow their own population, cities can choose to export their food to the rest of your empire. This is useful if you have a food focused city that has hit its population cap. The citizens themselves can be assigned to work on particular resource types, and having districts of that type often makes citizens working that resource more productive. To be honest, I mostly just leave the citizens in a balanced distribution and let the game fill the slots automatically, but that degree of micro-managing is there if you want to pay attention to it. Diplomacy (with other players) Diplomacy has always been pretty basic in the Age of Wonders franchise. Let’s start off with the options you have with other leaders, before getting on to diplomacy with neutral forces. With other leaders, you are at war, at peace, or in an alliance, and it’s pretty obvious how each of those relationships plays out. Alliance is the most complicated. In an alliance you have shared vision with your allies, and if one of you gets into a fight and the other has some units adjacent to the battle, the ally will reinforce with their units. In Age of Wonders 2, if you are allied with another wizard you can cast spells inside their domain as well as your own. Age of Wonders 3 added an additional option for diplomacy with other players: open borders. This lets you travel through the other player’s territory without incurring a diplomatic penalty. This mostly matters with the AI, although I suppose it could also serve as reminder of a formal agreement between players. Open borders agreements can be one-sided, so you can allow someone access to your territory even if they aren’t reciprocating the agreement. Since alignment is no longer determined by your race but is instead determined by your actions, peaceful diplomatic options give you points towards a good alignment and aggressive options give you points towards evil. Finally, Planetfall adds a few additional diplomatic options. You now lay claim to sectors that are adjacent to a sector that is already under your control. You can agree to allow other players to build on your claimed sectors. Building on another player’s claimed sectors or moving units into their territory without an open border agreement will give that player casus belli against you. Casus belli can be used to declare war on someone without incurring diplomatic penalties with other players or neutral factions, and casus belli can also be traded away or forgiven when making deals with other players. Planetfall breaks peace into two separate states: non-aggression and defensive pact. If you declare war on someone with a defensive pact, their pact mates will be pulled into the war. There are also a few additional agreements that can be made in Planetfall. Shared vision is no longer assumed but is instead something that friendly players can negotiate. If you have relays set up to allow fast travel of your forces, you can also agree to allow allies to use your relay network. You can even travel from one player’s relay to another player’s relay if you have an agreement. Finally, there is the intelligence sharing pact. This will raise both players’ resistance to enemy covert operations, but simultaneously makes the players more vulnerable to covert operations that they may wish to do on each other. All of these pacts can be one-sided, so if you want them to be mutual, make sure that you are both offering and demanding the pact when engaging in diplomacy. AI leaders in Planetfall now have personality traits that will influence whether they like you or not depending on the state of your empire. This makes them slightly more predictable, which is a nice change. War declarations now no longer feel quite as arbitrary. Diplomacy (with neutral forces) As for neutrals forces, diplomacy has a little more nuance than you might think. In the first game your alignment dictates your relations with each of the races that are present on the map. For example, halflings, a good race, will be friendly with all the other good races, neutral with the neutral races, and hostile with the evil races. The high men and undead, who are pure good and evil respectively, start hostile with the neutral races, with the exception of high men and humans who start friendly for lore reasons. If you are friendly with a race, neutral towns of that race will offer to join you for gold. You can still attack them if you wish, but you aren’t required to do so. If you are hostile with a race, towns of that race will have a chance of rebelling against your rule every turn. This will revert the town to a neutral force. Having a garrison can oppress the rebellion, preventing it from succeeding. One interesting nuance of the first Age of Wonders is that races will remember your actions. If you commit atrocities against a neutral race it will turn hostile. It is even possible, though inefficient, to invest in a race enough to change a hostile race to friendly. I remember one map where my elves had a bunch of orc towns near my start, and by occupying them and oppressing them while building walls and infrastructure, and by migrating any other evil towns I conquered to orcs, I was eventually able to make the orcs friendly with me. Once I defeated the orc player, this allowed me to buy all his remaining towns quickly without having to fight for them. It probably wasn’t the most efficient way to do things, but I appreciate that the game let me do it. Age of Wonders 2 works similarly to the first game with regards to neutral factions, although one big factor is which races you have within your empire. I am currently playing the Age of Wonders 2 campaign on my YouTube channel and on the second mission my humans were forced to settle new towns at the start meaning my human population was tiny. I quickly conquered a large orc town, and suddenly my leader’s alignment flipped from neutral to evil since my empire consisted primarily of evil races. It later switched back to neutral as my human towns developed, but it was kind of funny to see. This allowed me to buy up some neutral defending orc units early on, which helped my early game. I guess they respected my strength for conquering one of their cities. Age of Wonders 3 made every leader neutral by default, and races found out on the map can be of any alignment. I’ve personally come across a surprising number of evil halfling cities. Your alignment changes depending on your actions, and generally neutral towns will be more receptive while you have a good alignment. Neutral towns will offer you quests periodically, and completing those quests increases your standing with that town and might even lead to the town becoming your vassal. Vassals give you a portion of their income every turn, and you can request troops and resources from them. They also maintain their own garrisons, so you don’t need to pay the troop upkeep. Neutral forces on the map no longer care about your alignment and will always need to be fought to access whatever resources they are guarding. Planetfall adds influence as a new resource and has powerful NPC factions that will dramatically affect how the map plays out. You can use influence to purchase units and upgrades from NPC factions, and on maps with multiple NPC factions you will often see AI players integrating troops from one of these factions into their armies. These factions will offer you quests with rewards as well, and repeatedly doing quests for or buying from an NPC faction will increase your relationship with them. None of them like each other though, so doing quests for one faction will hurt your relationship with all the other NPC factions. On the other hand, if you decide that you really want some resources guarded by an NPC army and decide to fight them, you will need to declare war on the faction as a whole. This will cause the NPC faction to periodically spawn raiding parties to harass you. The peaceful alternative is to spend influence to get the NPC army to give you the resources they were guarding, but this means not using that influence to get units or increase your relationship with the NPC faction. I love the way these NPC factions were handled, and I think it’s the best neutral system in the franchise up to this point. Unit Enhancement While all units of a type will have the same base stats in Age of Wonders 1, they can differ in two important ways. The first is that they individually gain experience in battle. The unit that gets the killing blow on an enemy will gain experience, and units can level up twice. Silver medals give health, attack, and defence, while gold medals, the second level up, give more health, damage, and resistance. Units with certain abilities will also gain additional perks, such as archers gaining marksmanship or priests improving their turn undead skill. Experience given to gold medal units is tracked but does nothing, so it’s effectively wasted. The second way to improve your units is to cast unit enchantments on them. These need to be researched by your leader and cost mana every turn to maintain, but they can be quite powerful. Age of Wonders 2 adds a town structure that gives units a medal rank when they are created, making your armies more effective even without real combat experience. There are also leader skills that can affect your armies, such as by increasing their movement points or decreasing their maintenance costs. Age of Wonders 3 increases the total number of upgrade ranks from 2 to 4, and a lot of units get very powerful abilities at that 4th level. On top of that, units that continue to gain experience from that point will eventually gain champion ranks which increase their health. This can be done repeatedly, although it’s probably more impactful to give experience to heroes and inexperienced units instead. It can be satisfying to build an absolute beast of a unit though. Unit enchantments were replaced with combat buffs in this version. While some of these spells can be powerful, they now need to be cast every battle that you want to use them in, which makes them significantly less impactful than they used to be. Neutral structures that are explored and are inside the domain of one of your towns will also let you build unique structures. For example, the Ancient Ruin lets you build a structure that increases the damage of all pike units built in that city. Finally, a number of empire research skills can provide important bonuses to your units. There are lots of ways to increase unit strength in Age of Wonders 3. While units still gain experience for killing enemies in battle, units now also gain experience from attacking, from being attacked, and from using abilities. Generally, the more you use a unit, the more experience it will get. You no longer need to focus as much on getting kills to improve your units. In practice, this change helps your non-hero units to level up while your heroes still get as many kills as possible to accelerate their own leveling process. In Planetfall the mod system is the most impactful way to improve your units. Each unit can have up to 3 mods equipped, and these mods drastically change and increase the potential of your units. You can even change the type of damage that the units do in some cases. Mods can be applied to units individually, so even if you are fighting two of the same base unit, they can end up feeling quite different from each other. Mods are expensive though, so early on you probably won’t be using many of them. Most of the other systems from Age of Wonders 3 exist in Planetfall. One important change is that you can now build structures in your towns that give permanent bonuses to your units even if you haven’t annexed any special structures out on the map. This means that there’s a constant temptation to put off making units since future units of the same type will be superior, but sometimes an average unit now will be more impactful than a superior unit later, so that’s a call that commanders will have to make for themselves depending on their circumstances. Planetfall also changed the way that units gain experience in battle. Battles are now worth a set amount of experience based on the enemies you are fighting, and this experience is evenly divided among all participating units. It is no longer possible to focus on levelling up heroes or specific units by getting the final hit on an enemy unit with them. Leader Creation Leaders were overpowered in Age of Wonders 1. Hero units are always good in this franchise, but the first game was ridiculous. When creating your leader, you get a number of skill points that you can invest in stats or skills. Some skills are only available on creation, so if you really want your leader to spit poison at people you better pick that from the start, or play the Lizard Men I guess. Heroes gain experience like other units, but since they have a much higher level cap and you get much more control over their growth, they are almost always the units that you want to feed experience to in battle. They can also benefit from unit enchantment spells. One other important choice you make at the start of the game is which spheres of magic you want to specialize in. You can’t pick opposite spheres, but you can pick the same sphere up to 4 times, increasing the maximum tier of spell of that sphere that you can research. The exact number of spheres depends on the map, but the maximum number is 7. Life opposes death, fire opposes water, and earth opposes air, so you can have at most three different spheres of magic available. Selecting the spheres is only the beginning though since you will also need to research the spells of those spheres once the game has started. Age of Wonders 2 takes a radical departure from the classic hero formula and stands alone with its wizard concept. Honestly, this is my favourite thing about Age of Wonders 2. Your wizard no longer gains experience. Their power is instead increased by spending mana to research spells or develop personal skills and by building additional rooms in their wizard tower that have specific functions. Spells in Age of Wonders 2 are more powerful and impactful than in any other Age of Wonders game, barring the victory condition spells of later games, so despite not gaining stats or experience points, you will definitely feel your wizard getting more powerful over the course of a map. Wizards in Wizard’s Throne choose a sphere of magic from the six elements of the first game, or they can choose the generic cosmos sphere. Cosmos gives access to all magic spheres, but given that your research options are random and limited, this can make pulling off a specific strategy difficult. In Shadow Magic, when selecting the cosmos sphere you no longer get forced to take one of every sphere. Instead, you have six sphere slots that you can fill however you like. For example Julia, the elven warrior and de facto mascot of the franchise for the first two games was a life mage in Wizard’s Throne. In Shadow Magic she is a cosmos mage with 4 life spheres and 2 water spheres. A cosmos mage can take a maximum of 4 spheres of the same type, and more spheres means more spells available to be researched of that type, but a cosmos mage will never get access to all the spells of a sphere in the way that a specialist mage with 6 spheres of the same type would. Unlike in Age of Wonders 1, oppositional spheres no longer restrict each other. In fact, one of the campaign villains of Shadow Magic, Phobius, has 3 life spheres and 3 death spheres as his loadout. Heroes in Age of Wonders 2 are simpler than in the first game. When they level up they are presented with 3 random options and you pick one. They still get quite strong, but you have less control over the exact stats of your heroes this time around. Age of Wonders 3 introduces the class system, and your class is way more important than your race in this game. An orc warlord and a halfling warlord will have more in common than an orc warlord and an orc sorcerer. There are seven classes in Age of Wonders 3: Warlord, Archdruid, Rogue, Sorcerer, Theocrat, and Dreadnaught, which is a class focused on technology such as muskets and cannons. The seventh class, Necromancer, requires the Eternal Lords DLC. Your class determines your research options in the spell book as well as which skills you have available as your leader or hero levels up. Additionally, you pick 3 specialisations for your leader on creation. These specialisations will add additional research options to your spell book and will also give you small starting bonuses. Some specialisations, such as the elemental magic spheres or the alignment-focused specialisations have two levels, so you need to dedicate 2 of your 3 specialisation slots to these if you want to get everything they have to offer. You can dabble with them by only taking a single slot in them if you wish to do so. Planetfall takes the class idea and rebrands it as secret technology. This functions in the same way as the class system of Age of Wonders 3, although the secret technology is hidden from other players when you first meet them. It’s pretty obvious what technology someone picked though, since units, mods, and operations will give away what your technology choice even in the early turns of the game. The secret technologies are: Promethean, focusing on fire to purify the planet, Synthesis, focusing on machines and AI improving society, Voidtech, focusing on the manipulation of time and space, Xenoplague, focusing on genetic manipulation and improvement, Celestian, focusing on diplomacy and gaining respect, Psynumbra, focusing on despair and nihilism, and Heritor, focusing on reviving an ancient space cult and enforcing its views on everyone else. Heritor requires the Revelations DLC. Aside from the secret technologies being different in concept to the classes of Age of Wonders 3, heroes and leaders largely function in the same way in both games. There are no specialisations in Planetfall, so leader creation is simpler in that regard, although you do get to pick a number of perks that modify your starting conditions slightly, such as by determining your leader’s starting equipment. Random Map Generation Shadow Magic was notable for adding a random map generator to the franchise for the first time. I don’t really want to get into the particulars of the map generators here, but I thought that the addition of a random map generator was a significant enough change to warrant its own section. This is the primary reason why I’d recommend Shadow Magic over Wizard’s Throne for anyone looking to try out Age of Wonders 2. The algorithms used by the random map generator have improved over time, but aside from overall quality, I can’t really think of any changes to the generator itself that are worth going into. On games with multiple map layers, you can choose to disable certain layers when making a random map. Victory Conditions The first game had two victory conditions, and they both revolved around conquest. The first was to defeat all of the enemy leaders. Once a leader is defeated their remaining empire reverts to neutral towns and armies. If allied victory is enabled, it is possible to win without having to defeat your allies. The second victory condition is basically the same as the first. When making a game, you can choose whether or not you want the leaders to be on the map. If leaders are not on the map, then instead of defeating the enemy leaders, you now have to defeat every single town and unit that the player has. Some scenarios and campaign missions will have specific scripted victory conditions as well, such as the second mission of either campaign requiring you to conquer a specific town within a time limit. Age of Wonders 2 is similar but slightly more detailed. Defeating an enemy wizard will send that wizard to the void. As long as a player controls a wizard tower they can return from the void, so to defeat a player you must send them to the void when they don’t control a single wizard tower. Age of Wonders 3 takes this concept, but instead of having a buildable wizard tower structure that could theoretically be built in every town, you now have a single throne city. Defeated leaders return to their throne city in a couple of turns, so conquering the throne city and defeating the leader will eliminate that player. Throne cities can be relocated, but this takes time and prevents the city that the throne is being relocated to from doing anything useful in the meantime. While there isn’t a tech victory in the strictest sense, Age of Wonders 3 does have an ultimate spell for each class in the game. If these spells seem overpowered, it’s because they are. They are what I call a soft tech victory. Casting your ultimate spell gives you an absurd power boost. If you and your opponent are in a stalemate, these spells could tip the balance one way or the other. On the other hand, if you are being defeated and manage to cast your ultimate spell when you only have a city or two left and no army to speak of, it isn’t going to save you. This is why I call it a soft victory condition. The Golden Realms DLC adds the seal victory, which has to be enabled during map generation if you want to use it. This generates a number of guarded seals of power around the map. Occupying one will give you points every turn. Once your accumulated points from your seals of power reach the required value, you win the game. Playing with this victory condition makes it harder to turtle, since a larger territory with more seals will gain points faster, and the only way to stop an opponent from winning a seal victory is to take all their seals from them. The Eternal Lords DLC adds another victory condition: unification. If you reach a certain level of racial governance with a race, you can build a beacon in a city of that race. Build and light a set number of beacons and you win the game. The exact number of beacons required is set during map generation. You can only have one beacon per race at a time, and you need to develop a race for a while before they qualify for a beacon in the first place, so this victory type favours players that build up empires defensively. While the victory is called the unity victory, the mechanics of race development encourage you to limit your empire to a number of races equal to the number of beacons required. More races means spreading out your governance experience, which means it will take longer to qualify for beacons with any individual race. In addition to contributing towards victory, these beacons also provide you with an economic boost and a significant hit to the global happiness of your opponents. This makes them powerful economic tools even if you aren’t using them to win directly. Capturing an opponent’s beacon will destroy it, forcing them to rebuild it if they want to achieve a unity victory. Planetfall has 5 victory types. Last Man Standing is achieved by defeating all opponents. Like with Age of Wonders 3, this is done by defeating their leader while they do not control their HQ base. Domination is achieved by controlling a set number of province sectors. The exact number depends on the size of the map. The Unifier Victory is achieved by maintaining a virtuous reputation, acquiring friendly NPC dwellings, and then convincing the AI Planet-core network watching over the galaxy that you should be put in charge of things. It’s a diplomatic victory. Doomsday is achieved by researching into your secret technology, building sites within your empire to prepare for the coming event, and then doing something horrific to the planet. It’s a tech victory. Finally, a Score victory is awarded to the player with the highest score if no victory has been achieved by any player after a preset number of turns. From what I’ve seen of online discourse around this game, many people seem to like playing out super late game situations and therefore disable the score victory when creating the map. Story There will be spoilers for the stories of the first few games, so if you don’t want campaign spoilers stop reading the guide now. There won’t be anything else in the guide after this section. Before Age of Wonders 1, the elven wizard king Inioch ruled over the Valley of Wonders. Then humans showed up and killed him. The game starts with the elven survivors separating into two factions: the Keepers, or wood elves, and the Cult of Storms, or dark elves. Inioch’s daughter Julia ends up with the Keepers, and his son Meandor ends up with the Cult of Storms. The Keepers seek reunification and peace with the humans, while the Cult of Storms seeks vengeance. A lot of stuff happens in the first game that I’m sure is important to the people living through it, but as far as the big picture stuff is concerned, the first game was really simple. The Cult of Storms seeks to resurrect Inioch, set up a new world order, and exterminate the humans. There are many endings to the game, but the ending that is probably the most canonical is to side with the Keepers, remain loyal to them throughout the campaign, and thwart the Cult of Storms in the finale. As an aside, the first Age of Wonders game has the most interesting campaign structure in the entire franchise. It’s fantastic. At certain points in the story you get to make significant choices that will affect the ending you get. For example, the Cult of Storms campaign gives you a choice once you finish the initial goblin missions. The choice is between whipping the orcs into shape or seeking new allies and trying to recruit the lizard men. The campaign branches sharply from here, and each choice locks you out of certain endings. I also mentioned earlier how you have 7 spheres of magic in this game, but in the campaign you actually only get 3, and the point where you make this choice is also when you increase your spheres up to 5. This means that even if you are done all the research up to that point, you still have new things to research going forward. Anyway, the canonical route is probably going with the Keepers, choosing the Dwarves, and then choosing the Elves at the end. Wizard’s Throne introduces you to a concept known as the Wizard’s Circle. This is an administrative body of 13 wizards, 2 of each sphere, ruled over by Gabriel, who is of the cosmos sphere. The Wizard’s Circle broke up and the wizards all abandoned Gabriel for their own purposes. Gabriel then recruits Merlin, a human wizard, and instructs him on each sphere of magic while guiding Merlin to rein in the other wizards. It turns out that the spirit of Inioch was offering power to the wizards if they resurrect him, so they planned on using Julia’s body as a vessel for Inioch to bring him back. Shadow Magic reveals the threat of the Shadow Demons. These creatures feed upon mana and are attracted to Athla and its powerful wizards. Phobius, a human, has created an empire under the banner of the abolition of magic, and he persecutes the old races. Meanwhile, the wizards continue to muck about with powerful forces and some even seek to use the Shadow Demons to further their own power. Merlin is trapped in the Shadow World fighting the Shadow Demons, and so he communicates with allies through the spirit Teryn. Eventually the empire of Phobius is broken, the enslaved Syron people are liberated from their Shadow Demon captors, and the leader of the Shadow Demons, the All-Devourer, is defeated. At this point, a lot of things happen between Shadow Magic’s campaign and the start of Age of Wonders 3. Meandor takes a large group of dark elves into the Shadow World to do battle with the surviving Shadow Demons. The Archons also leave Athla. You could say the Archons left to fight the Shadow Demons, but my personal suspicion is that the developers thought that the new class system would make the Archons redundant since a human theocrat is essentially an Archon in terms of how you’d expect the Archons to play out. The shadow gates are then sealed to prevent the Shadow Demons from returning. Essentially, Meandor, the wizard kings, the Archons, and everyone else who left for the Shadow Realm went on a one-way trip. At this point Julia married a dark elf by the name of Seridas and the two performed a ceremony that reunited the wood elf and dark elf peoples. This explains the new high elves that are the only elven race in Age of Wonders 3. They had two children: a son named Thannis, and a daughter named Sundren. Meanwhile, Emperor Leonus rules the Commonwealth, promising equality and prosperity to all. Somehow though things don’t seem to turn out all that great in practice. The campaign starts and Thannis dies. It turns out that there’s a conspiracy afoot trying to turn the Commonwealth and the elves against each other. The conspiracy is pretty successful, too, and Sundren, princess of the elves, and Edward Portsmith, one of the Commonwealth dreadnoughts, end up forming a group together knows as the Torchbearers which is dedicated to preventing the war that the shadowborn conspiracy is fomenting. They, with the help of Julia and Merlin, force Seridas and Leonus into a peace treaty. The shadowborn aren’t done yet though. They move on to the next part of their plan: breaking the seals on the shadow gates and bringing back the wizard kings. The final DLC of Age of Wonders 3 ends with their success. This heralds the return of the wizard kings and once again exposes the world of Athla to the Astral Sea and its inhabitants. And that brings us to the fourth Age of Wonders. I will see you there.