Age of Wonders III: On Spells, Trade, AI, and Fonts

Between this quick write-up on IncGamers and this brief blog post on the official website (both of which come to us from Triumph Studios “town crier” Jimmy van der Have), we’ve been given a few interesting granules of information about the direction the team is going for the spells, trade system, AI, and UI fonts in Age of Wonders III. A sampling from each:

With AoW3’²s skill system and classes we’ve chosen to not allow players to trade skills, which includes trading spells. The thought behind this is that allowing this type of trades would muddle the class definitions, which we want to keep strong and focused. E.g. I’m in a multiplayer match and the Arch Druid that shows up on my doorstep casts Destabilize Mana Core. This issue will be especially apparent when human allies start sharing all their spells.

As a consequence, skills and spells will not be visible to other players. As far as diplomacy exposing other information, we are still looking into the details. So, this is one of those things which has alpha build in scare quotes stamped on it. The goal would be to expose nothing the player can’t find out. E.g. you can see cities that you have seen on the map, but not the items a player has.

Finally for the bit on the AI things are, a bit complicated. If like you describe the AI would reserve mana and casting points because you could cast Destabilize Mana Core there’s the risk the AI couldn’t cast any spell. That could actually end up worse than when it would cast spells and then fail to dispel the Destabilize Mana, i.e. you end up not casting Destabilize Mana Core in most battles and the AI ends up losing battles it could have won by sniping the last unit with a spell.

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Aside from all the very positive feedback we received from our fans and the games media, we are aware of some concerned voices about smaller issues. One of the arguments we heard on the forums was that some of you were worried if our interface was becoming too ‘˜modern’ and didn’t get enough of the fantasy treatment. Particularly the font we used received some criticism.

Even though changing a font sounds easy, there are a lot of requirements. It should not only be readable in many different sizes and formats, but also work for different languages that aren’t English.