Sure, they were adding a whole new race, but when it came to diversity and variety in vanilla AoWIII, classes always seemed so much more important and impactful here–especially with how similar some of the other races felt early on. I mean, I had no doubt I’d be picking it up day one, but aside from the new victory condition and the two new magic specializations, I didn’t get the impression the other features were going to do a whole hell of a lot to enhance the gameplay to any important degree. This expansion adds a fantastic amount of fun to the game for me, much more than I expected it to the first time I saw the feature list back when they first announced it. And now that I’ve finally been able to play Golden Realms, it’s safe to say I’ll be putting a whole hell of a lot more time into it going forward. I’ve owned the game since it was released back in March, and I’ve put a pretty hefty amount of time into it since then. I’ve been spending all my gaming time over the last couple days pretty much exclusively playing AoWIII: Golden Realms. There are also a bunch of new hero items. For example, there are Flowers of Solace that make the stack ignore morale penalties until the end of their next battle.
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I’m noticing more touches that the expansion adds - a bunch of new treasure sites, new resources, and new Haste Berry-like buffs. If I leave Empire Quests on (you can turn them off) I’ll probably want to up the difficulty so that the AI sometimes beats me to them. This speeds the game up, but also makes it easier if you’re the one ahead. As Adam B notes, they tend to make the rich richer by rewarding those who are already ahead. (And that’s where the Jester’s Dazzle ability comes in.) I’ve been using the Lesser Elementals that I summon as a Wild Mage to tank for my halflings and it’s been working nicely. But they also have 20% vulnerability to Physical damage, which means that enemy units can tear right through them (and the halflings’ Lucky ability doesn’t circumvent that, as sooner or later you’ll do badly on your Lucky roll.) So you want to deploy halflings at range, or only have them attack almost-dead units that can’t counter-attack. They have a variety of great non-standard abilities. Halflings get more interesting the more I play with them. Yay, the game finally remembers that I prefer Classic Turns now! Now improved with patches and DLC it a definite 85-90 scoring game. A metacritic score for the vanilla release of 80. It definitely has aspects of empire building but not as strongly as the other games mentioned. Totally agree with the part about AoW3 being more a wargame than an empire builder. Questing in FE is supposed to be more immersive for the player in a RPG sense, AoW3’s quests are more like map objectives that give a reward. Combat is far more larger part of the game than economic development or research.
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I like AOW3 better than FE, but it’s important to know going in that AOW3 is much more of a wargame and much less of an empire builder than FE. FE lets you design your own units, which some people love (but I kinda find a chore, because I feel obliged to design new units after every upgrade.) AOW3 has better map generation, and is generally more polished. Tactical combat in AOW3 is much, much better than FE.