Age of Wonders 3

It is my considered advice that you should NEVER touch the campaign for age of wonders 3, the early missions are boring slogs unless you blitz them and nobody is ready to blitz the campaign starting out. And eventually(by 4rth mission) they just become incredibly boring slogs where they just throw an entire map at you and say "The AI can see the entire map and has huge armies, we don't care if you know they cheat" I would consider the campaigns a disaster overall if the story wasn't interesting. There were also several times when the game would autosave at a point where I had already lost. However washing our hands of the single player campaign I can tell you about the meat of the game: the random maps. The random maps in this game are fantastic, and are completely the opposite of the campaign mode. This is the first game in existence where good, evil and neutral options make equal amounts of sense(in random maps) and playing them feels fairly natural. In addition to that since the game has released the developers have patched in balance changes to every race and class in the game and now they all play very differently. One of the better aspects of the game for me is the game is complex having all sorts of bonuses like +3 damage to x monster and whatnot, but its not hard to understand and there are very few hard counters. I think that deserves attention since a lot of 4x games like this obfuscate EVERYTHING behind made up terms and fluff. Age of Wonders 3 has a searchable wiki with the stats of everything built into the game. The last thing I want to mention is about that "there are no hard counters" thing. If you've played Starcraft 2 you know what a hard counter is, zerglings will never win against hellions without unreasonable levels of micro. AOW 3 has almost nothing like that, with the proper strategy you can take down a tier 4 unit with nothing but tier 1's and I like that a lot because it rewards being smart more than just building better units.

It plays similar to the first Age of Wonders. Expand your existing cities, found or conquer new ones, gather resources, create armies, destroy your enemies. In addition, you can research spells. Some of them will be used on battlefields, others on the strategic map. You can also research enhancements, which can improve your units or give other passive bonuses to your kingdom. Your enemies can try to disjunct spells you cast on the strategic map, thus aborting them. You can reinforce the spell so that they will harder time disjuncting it. You can also disjunct their spells. There is also diplomacy, although I haven't found it very useful against regular AI players. That may be because I've only played the campaign so far, where the diplomacy is probably scripted. However, the diplomacy can be useful if you want to negotiate with independent cities. If you want to make them join your kingdom, you can bribe them, conquer their city, or if they offer it, you can complete a quest for them. Each nation has it's own units, which is frankly better than in AoW 1, where the nations had many units in common. Some units are specific to your hero specification(e.g. you can train Scoundrels as Rogue). The graphics looks very nice and the soundtrack is beautiful. In addition to new tracks, there are also some songs from the first AoW 1. Michiel van den Bos have done good job in remastering them. There are two campaigns- Elven's and Human's. Don't fear, you will have the opportunity to command forces of all nations. I've played only the Elven campaign so far, but I can tell you it has good story. Besides, you will also have to made a decision, which will impact the later part of the campaign. You will play different maps based on that decision. I think the reason why we didn't hear much about this game in 2014 is the fact that it was released in spring instead of autumn, where all the big games are being released. In my opinion, this game is the best strategy of 2014.

Just bought this game. Not too sure what I actually own. It seems more like a demo. Asks for a key-didn't get one.

No Linux support, which is officially available on Steam.

Good AoW chapter, graphics are nice and up to date, gameplay is a bit different from the previous chapter but this is the point of making something new ;) Personnaly I like those changes and the new experience. I don't see any issue with DRM, I just don't log in, never had to create any account to play and enjoy the full game. All save games works perfectly. So it's your choice if you want to connect to play online, boast from your achievements or other social experience. Again, totally optionnal and I never had to create any sort of account or whatever. Since it's quite exceptionnal to see an AAA title without any kind of mandatory DRM I think we should applaude rather than wine :)