I still haven't played the campaign enough to know how true that is but it's complaints like yours that keep me away from campaign modes in similar games. Good thing Shadow Magic has a Master of Magic-style random scenario generator!

I respectfully disagree. If you can't handle that and need to approach several times, then you simply are likely just bad at this kind of TBS games. In my experience, knowing maps or CPU moves beforehand is not needed (indeed, complaining about the need to know that is silly); what's necessary is simply being familiar with the system and playing it smart.

Also, heavens forbid you play HoMM3, 2 or any other PC classic.

While I do agree that there is some trial and error involved, the situation is not hopeless. It just requires agressive scouting and vigliance. Knowing the enemy can strike from anywhere makes it kind of exciting. My advice is don't get too attached to low lvl units and don't spread yourself too thin. Also view you NPC allies as compeitors for resources rather than military helpers, since most of them will sit on their butts and do little to help you. In the the campaign for AoW1 you can bring units from mission to mission, I always picked a few flyers if possible to give me that early game scouting edge.

OP has a point.

The disjoint between story and game-play. You're presented as someone that knows the land, it is your land after all, but then you're being made to play it as if that is all irrelevant.

You are not supposed to know what the AI does next, if you knew it would be much less fun. Your problem is however that you don't understand the game mechanics good enough to expand or defend yourself. It is not really a problem however as when you get good enough to fight back you will really enjoy it. AoW is not a game that you are supposed to get through on just a few tries, but when you get a good grip on how the game works you will lose a lot less.

I remember when I was younger and I got the Heroes of Might and Magic II demo with the Broken Alliance map. I played it many times before I won it. I really dreaded the AI heroes with their troops. Now I find HoMM II too easy.
Age of Wonders was easier to learn, probably because I had learned a lot of tactics and strategy from HoMM II, but it was still a difficult game at first even on the easiest difficulty. Now I play on the highest difficulty (custom maps) and I usually win.

It is actually fun to lose sometimes. Especially if you use your fantasy and look upon the game as an unfolding story. You can enjoy your the triumphs of your people and mourn with their losses. This is very true. This is a problem in all turn based strategy games using total fog of war. (Not a problem in the fast RTS games as they aren't very immersive ;-)

Unless of course you are thrown into a part of the world where you and your men have never been before, this is often used story-wise but isn't very realistic with all the infrastructure you have at your command.

It is really a conflict between story\realism\immersion and gameplay. If you roleplay or view the unfolding game as a story you will have to block some parts of the gameplay out.

In a game like SMAC;

If you played one of the alien factions, you were given the map of Planet already, since they knew the planet.

I believe games can be more connected between the elements.

Of course, I'm not -too- bothered with it in AoW:SM :)

That's great. I've read so many good things about SMAC. It's one of the games that I have the highest expectations for. (Civ III and Age of Wonders is probably my favorite games) Since I have so many other good games to play currently, it is no problem for me to wait a little.
I hope it comes to GoG not too late as I prefer to that method to Ebay or the "Jolly Roger" way.

SMAC did not have the playable alien races, IIRC, the expansion ( SMAC-X) has the alien races. But, if GOGever gets SMAC, I'd assume the game would come with the expansion.

Well, as far as Shadow Magic goes... summon Gold Dragons. They are the answer to every problem. Every problem. >_>

I like AoW ... alot ... but I have the same issues with it. I have a hard time making a game last beyond 100 turns. I suspect my strategy is just wrong. I have no clue how long a game is expected to last. I found a good strategy guide online which mentioned heroes with attacks of 20 and so forth, which sounded to me that the pace of expansion is much slower than I had first thought. The map may be relatively small, but the time it takes to control must be a significant number of turns.

I've been playing AoW2's campaign and it has been very frustrating. There are so many options and few of them have borne fruit since past a certain point (turns 50-80) this humongous army group marches up from the south and that is that.

Do you build lots and lots of lower level units? Do you have ot man all of the resource centers and towers on the map? What are the general strategies that work well for you folks, cause I have not found any that have worked well for me. I'm playing at the VERY lowest AI settings and STILL losing at it. I love the game, but it is very frustrating.

For campaign missions you should build walls for all your cities, and try to build roads between them if possible. Leave minimal garrisons in towns without wizards towers and only guard critical structures like power relays and key watch towers. Ballistae are your friend. A small mobile force is important as it lets you intercept enemy forces and reclaim lost structures. If you try to be strong everywhere, you are strong nowhere. Invest heavily in heroes and level them up as much as you can. Spellcasting is probably the most important skill, but wall climbing, vision, leadership, and some form of ranged attack help round out your abilites.

Thanks greyhuntr, that helps me a great deal. I had read the ballista comment online as well. Eight ballista in a tower is said to be very effective as a defense.

I'm necroing my OP a bit because I just picked up Shadow Magic again and am having a similar experience as before. I'm playing on Easy just because I remembered how random and frustrating it could be. I can probably win the first map of the elf campaign if I play again, having lost it once and having some idea of where things are now, but some of the issues I have are the same as before.

The gold upkeeps are a bit brutal when you start the game with no resources and no real means of maintaining resources. I just hired all the cheap friendly neutrals that I could because it seemed like a generally good idea and it wasn't a lot of gold and I could get ambushed at any moment as far as I knew, but then a dozen turns pass with no combat, and those two windmills just aren't paying the wages. I eventually get attacked from the West by a small party, but not nearly enough friendly units die. While scouting elsewhere on the map, I find a city guarded by recruitable neutrals, but by then I don't have enough gold to hire them, so now I just don't have a city.

Eventually I go through a cave and get to a city in the snowy part of the map. Some drake rider asks if I know his friend the yeti. Unforuntately, he's way off on the other side of the map guarding mills, but I presume that if he were present, then I wouldn't have to pay 900 gold to hire these neutrals and gain, what, the third city I could have gained if I had known where everything was in advance and hadn't drained my economy on units I didn't have any way of knowing that I didn't need yet? So I send the Yeti on the long trek out to this remote city, but halfway there he deserts because my gold has been negative for a long time now. After my windmill troops all desert, I lose my windmills and I'm just really far behind.

Maybe I didn't read the initial prompt closely enough, but then again, there isn't a convenient way to review these things. But I didn't specifically know that I would need to save up money for bribes and that picking up a couple cheap troops for immediate self-defense was going to strangle my gold economy for the rest of the game.

I guess the lesson is that you can't get cities in the campaign without bribes, so don't hire neutrals?

But for all I know, the next map won't have any cities at all and I'll die because I didn't hire enough neutrals to fend off attacks.

These campaigns would be a lot less frustrating and random if you had knowledge of the initial layout (with land explored, but not actively visible, and maybe some rough idea of where the enemies are coming from). The type and extent of the asymmetry of the initial setup is anyone's guess as far as I can tell, unless it's the sort of thing where there's a secret handshake and if you've played HoMM enough then you already know exactly how the sequence tends to go or something. I just know that I hired a lot of troops because I thought I would have to survive fights and that I wasn't going to need to save bribe money, and exactly the opposite happened. From the very little information I was given, it was quite conceivable that the situation could have been such that my approach would have been appropriate: I could have gotten ambushed in the woods and barely survived, and then a couple turns later found a friendly city which was prepared to join me for free.

Replaying campaign maps is such a significant advantage - to the extent that I really don't see how you're supposed to have a comprehensive strategy taking all possibilities into account. I can see how playing a non-campaign battle map could be all strategy with reasonable use of fog of war, but the campaign maps are so random and disorienting that it's too discouraging to replay such a micromanaging sort of game over from the beginning of the map, taking hours to replay the map just because of random things of the type "clearly if I had known X was just around the corner I would have done Y instead of Z".

At least it looks like the non-campaign mode is a pretty intelligent and non-random game where, even if I'm bad at it, the missing information will be applied in a symmetric, controlled, and totally fair way, and the strategy will be more innate to mechanics of the game rather than centered around some campaign map design metagame intuition or whatever.

There are some very good pointers in the thread from others and I would second their recommendations to 1) not defend everything, 2) use ballista as defenders, and 3) maintain a mobile defense force.

Also, based on your notes about recruiting crappy neutrals - stop doing that! The only thing those troops are for is to serve as body blows and absorb the retaliation attacks of strong enemy.

This game is like any number of 4X style games. You need cheap scouts to find the enemy and then you need to build dreadnoughts (a dreadnought being a stack with three or more Level 3 units)! An army of little elven swordsmen are just free XP to a group of Orc Warlords. And Elven Iron Maidens will lay waste to castle defenses by phasing right past the walls and assaulting the ballista. :)

Also, increase your Wizards spell casting ability so that they can prep enemy troops for death. Your Wizard does not earn XP so you don't want to kill people with your Wizard. Instead, weaken them so that your heroes get all the XP and level up quickly. In particular, you really want a warrior with a very high defense. Attack is nice, but defense is crucial. Spells to buff your hero like stone skin are worth more than pile of gold!

Good luck and have fun. The campaigns are kind of annoying in that you need to follow certain paths to increase your odds of success. But think of them as teaching aids to force you to do things differently than you would otherwise choose. This is very useful when you start playing multiplayer and need to behave in non-linear fashion to surprise your enemy!