Triumph Studios Announces Age of Wonders 3 Thread - Dominions 3: The Awakening

Triumph Studios has finally announced Age of Wonders 3, the long-awaited sequel to their earlier games in the series.

Age of Wonders home site

Eurogamer article

For me, Age of Wonders has always been one of my all time favorite turn based strategy games and especially the first game in the series. Second only to Dominions in fact and it took a while for Dominions to supplant AoW1 in my regard.

I know I'm a little late to the party on this one, but I'm pretty excited about the news. Age of Wonders is one of those strategy games I always hear talked about, but I never got a chance to play it back when it was new, so hopefully AoW3 captures some of the magic of the original and I can get to see what all the fuss is about.

it'll be pretty different from what i've seen and read

Not that different in some key aspects. Obviously the switch to 3D is going to present some challenges. It is going to be more a mix of AoW1 and AoW2 (including SM) and anything that goes closer to its original roots is better. The music score is going to be better, since they're bringing back serious parts of the soundtrack from the original (AoW2 music was rather nondescript by comparison). They have the original composer, Michiel van den Bos doing the music and he said he's going to be doing a lot of AoW1 music with modern tools. I'd dig up the links, but the forum is down at the moment.

They also have independent funding so they are not tied to any of the major publishers/distributors and can retain the IP rights and take their time to do things right. For that we can thank the creator of Minecraft, Notch, who is a fan of the AoW series and has been funding them.

If you want to support Triumph Studios, buy the older AoW games from gog.com or Steam. It's been an important source of revenue for them since 2010 (not a massive source, but important).

I preferred AoW1 to 2, though SM was a significant improvement over 2. I think all three are fine games. I would actually be fine with them using the same graphical engine with increased resolution - it was beautiful, far more so than the 3d engines of similar fantasy games.

We'll see how it turns out. I hope they give a large selection of interesting heroes in the style of the Kohan games (and MoM of course).

I'm ~90% certain that there was a utility that allowed you to extract the sprite graphics from the .ilb files, but I can't seem to find it. Does anyone know what I'm posting about here? and better yet can someone provide a link to download it? (specifically AoW2 SM is the game that I own)

Would very much like to see if AoW unit sprites would work in a Dom3 mod.

There was such a utility for AoW1, but I don't remember if there was a similar one for AoW2. The best place to ask about that would be at the Age of Wonders forums at Heaven Games. They also have a download section where IIRC they have some of the extracted sprite libraries or graphics for the first game. Or the utility at least. I know I used the dump pulled from the ilb files to create a collection of Age of Wonders 1 forum avatars.

1, 2, and SM are all on sale over at Good Old Games right now. If I were to buy ONLY ONE of them, which would you recommend?

I`d suggest Shadow Magic. A few years ago it was unavailable anywhere except used on Amazon for like $80. It has significant improvements on AoW 2 and the user made scenario library is larger than 1 or 2 from what I found. Some of the user scenarios are really good.

I'd recommend the original one. That has a ton and half of maps and some of them excessively good. It also has less micromanagement and certain aspects of the magic system are much more appealing than the AoW2/SM system. Between AoW2 and AoWSM, the latter wins every time.

I would say that SM is the best. Specially for MP. AoW1 is unbalanced, the customizing of the leader and that he gains xp is unbalancing. But the campaign of AoW1 is far superior to any of the others, miles.