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.
Let me begin by saying if you buy this for multilayer you'll be fine. But if you're like me and you cant always convince people to invest in $45 games that can last most of a weekend for one campaign(and aren't as well known as say the Civ series) chances are you'll be playing with the AI a lot, Unfortunately this is baby's first AI program and it has ESP, increased production, increased research, increased city growth. And the ESP is the real kicker here. The AI will attack Cities they can't see, Cities they have never seen and yet they know EXACTLY what is in there and EXACTLY what to send to win the battle. It's great, its really really great because it turns this from strategy to whack-a-mole. Because I can't bluff the AI, or pull troops that are normally defending cities, or use camouflage(because it doesn't work against the ai) or else they'll just swoop in with exactly the right number of cavalry to take the city and then roll in with a larger slower force to occupy it. Or they'll decide to tortuosly move an entire stack of units one by one in my line of sight so I have to watch the animation six times in a row. My biggest problem with this game is I'm just trying to learn it and I can't bring myself to because of all this cheapness, its no fun playing a game where the entire thing is rigged from the start in such a blatant way. I want to like it, I can see a fun game in there somewhere, a game that could easily be a true successor to Master of Magic but until the AI at least pretends to play fair(at normal difficulty) I don't want to touch it.
