Cave Crawling, Forestry, Mountaineering, Extra Strike, Vision 1-4, and True Seeing are all useful abilities. Extra Spellcasting can be useful.

Extra hit points are also useful, to reduce the chances of sudden strong hits ending a hero's career.

Thanks, I've got ring of movement to cover movement feats. I'll take a look at extra strike, vision and true seeings.

Extra Strike is the most powerful of those abilities in combat, and well worth the 15 points. Definitely grab it to make battles with powerful enemy heroes and units go your way more easily.

Vision 4 is a lovely Quality of Life improvement, giving you a lot of extra warning and exploration range.

True Seeing is probably the least valuable of the abilities, at least in the campaign. The AI isn't very subtle with concealed units. You could consider leaving it and just going for more HP.

Movement hard caps at 50, but I usually only spend points on it up to 46 or so, making sure I can spend all my points.

Ah. I left it for last, since my hero usually was just mopping the floor anyway. I'll admit I never was a fan of Scouting in HOMM, but I got Vision 4 and wow! That's so cool. Very useful in dungeon exploring battles too. I also got True Seeing, because it sounded like something you wish you'd have in those few cases where you need it, but from what you wrote it won't be super useful. I'll take extra strike next level since I'm already capped at this one.

I'm thinking of also picking a ranged attack. I don't really need it since I can just kill them with counterattacks, but sometimes when I try to attack they don't even engage. Pretty annoying.

^"them" being flying monsters, like dragons.

The game will block the combat entirely if the attackers have no way to initiate damage on the defenders (can't break/circumvent the wall, etc). Generally, having enough mana to cast at least one attack spell will let a hero start the battle, and then you can just run forward and let the flyer(s) suicide on you (assuming they can't just spam ranged attacks at you).

I have an aow1 related question - why won't anyone play on my AMAZING maps, which many hjave said are the BEST EVER, any more? Is it the fake news conspiring against me? They have only the HIGHEST review and good, record download rates!

*Sigh* it's like HoMM4 on steroids.

I really hoped I'd enjoy the game more; my first thought was that it was a cross between Warlords 2 and a 4X strategy like Master of Magic, which I both loved, but the campaign is like neither of the two because of the overpowered hero.

Another thing which really sucks like HoMM4 is the fog of war, which was not present in other HoMM games nor Warlords 2. I get it that the designers didn't want you to see what's happening in enemy bases, but because of it enemies very often creep up on you it's annoying. One solution, which I mentioned about HoMM4 is to give the structures you control a bigger fog-of-war dispersal radius. Not exploration; just fog of war dispersal.
AoW1 is so much worse that HoMM4 in this regard because of the simultaneous turns. In HoMM4 you had to observe enemy units, so you did see them when they reached your base. In AoW1 quite often I wouldn't see a unit until it's taken over my city (I have since learned that you can press O to observe enemy movements).

But none of this matters because of the overpowered hero. In fact, for HoMM4 I still had an incentive to explore the whole map: permanent stats increases + storyline events. Not to mention the fact that often to win you had to capture all enemy cities.
In AoW1 there is no need to capture all cities; and there are no permanent stats increases, except perhaps for dungeons which might have good artifacts, nor any storyline event triggers, except for a sign or two. So once you find the main enemy hero you can just kill him.
The later levels which are supposed to be difficult consisted mainly of just exploring with my main hero till I find the main enemy hero. Sure I built up my cities and captured mines... etc to keep up the pretence that I'm playing a strategy game, but I really didn't need to.

And spells... they were so underused. I mean I understand it's normal that in any game you usually spend 20% of your spells 80% of the time. But in this one there was no reason to cast anything really, except for Haste and Fly. I cast Bless and Enchant Weapon for good measure. Plus the odd Rejuvenate around my towns as needed and a Town Portal or Summon Eagle. But the limit of 10sp/day meant I really couldn't cast those offensive spells. Sure I could specialise in casting, but why when increasing primary attributes and attacking was so much better.

The only thing I liked in this game better is the Lore. Nicely done, compared to the cheesy HoMM4. For what it's worth the story isn't half bad.

I understand that in HoMM4 and AoW1 the single scenarios don't suffer from the overpowered hero carryover, and do play properly like a strategy (plus in AoW1 in single player you can set it so you have to conquer all cities to win), but I'm really a campaign player.

I just finished one path so far. I'm still going to go for all the remaining ones. Hoping other AoW games are better in this regard?

Happy New Year Bookwyrm and all the good people at Age of Wonders forum!

Play maps with other humans and most of the frustrating aspects disappear. Heroes don't have time to become too overpowered, fog of war / concealment becomes a two way street, and strategies become a bit more creative. :)

AoW2:SM's story isn't as good, but the maps are fun and varied and have more triggers in them. You also can't run around as easily with 1-2 invincible heroes; levelups are a selection between 2-3 random choices, instead of instantly pumping DEF to max. So usually the invincible hero strategy in an AoW2 campaign involves a pack of many heroes; I had a stack of 8 superheroes in the Master of Chaos map I played in SP. Spells, abilities and such play a larger and more varied role in keeping them invincible. Retaliating is limited and drains movement points from the next round too.

Ja, the campaigns do get trivialised by this. I might do a playthrough of the campaigns sometime where I don't invest in melee combat at all, only spellcasting and utility, and where I try to beat the maps in as few turns as possible. But honestly I can't be bothered to play vs AI any more.

Annoying in singleplayer, but in multiplayer like Mimo says it is very fun. If you're willing to play PBEM with us just PM me the email you will use. It will take some effort to get the PBEM Wrapper program to work, or alternatively to manually send and receive emailed turns.

Multiplayer games can have some very cool showdowns against player leaders. In one game I caught Senteria's leader alone with a heavily enchanted Karagh that used Haste to move something like 17 hexes in one turn. In another my 50 Movement, hasted, concealed, Warp Party casting, Vision IV etc fully togged out leader was racing around razing and reanimating cities with impunity until eventually Bookwyrm caught me by Town Portalling an Air Galley nearby.

Ja, spellcasting and most spells are very underpowered with only specific exceptions which are mostly enchantments. Sadly it is not possible to mod Spellcasting to cost fewer levelup points. However, it is possible to make maps where everyone starts out with infantry-chassis heroes (5 hp, 28 movement) and give them high spellcasting. I actually went totally overboard with that in Xelm II and apparently people ended up using stacks of summoned dragons. It is also possible to mod the mana and research costs of spells.

I don't recall having a lot of issue with the FoW in the campaign, but one of my default behaviors is to put eyes in areas that might be important. A cheap unit to keep an eye on a choke point, for example. Also, it has been quite a while since I've played it without having some idea of the maps, so...

The fog is an important component of multiplayer, precisely for those sneak attacks. Longer dispersal distance makes sneak attacks much, much harder (which I suppose is the point of your suggestion).

I don't play simultaneous turns, so I can't comment. I always set it to Classic turns so I can watch enemy movement and to avoid any goofiness in armies crossing paths or something.

I enjoyed the story. I think I've already said, but my favorite was the Cult -> High Men path.

I seem to recall that you planned to do Keepers -> High Men first? You might find the last mission a little harder if you don't choose the High Men, since the Humans won't be allied with you and they have quite a few guys.

Yes and no. Wizards (your leader) don't gain levels, but heroes still do.

I'm working on the last few missions of the Wizard's Throne campaign now (I'm finishing up Death 1, leaving just Death 2, Death 3, and the last mission). It is a mixed bag. You can choose to put in the time to farm the first mission to make the later missions of each type of magic easier, or you can just win and move along. There is a partial block in each first mission (the more advanced spells of your magic don't unlock until mission 2), but you can still farm up a much easier path.

You choose different wizards in the Shadow Magic campaign, but the same principle applies. The missions come in groups of three, and you can either win and move on, or you can stay on a map longer and farm OP heroes, spells, and items. The last mission is a single mission with a new wizard, so you won't have any chance to pre-build any sort of OP-ness.

Happy New Year!

Mimo, southern, thanks. As I said, I'm more really of a campaign player when it comes to video games, but I'll be happy to play an AoW1 PBEM once I finish all the paths. Might take a few months depending on my workload after I'm back from the holidays.

@Bookwyrm, yes I view HoMM and Warlords 2 and many 4Xs more as "big-picture" strategic games where sneak attacks should be difficult to make except for units built specifically for that task (concealment, stealth... etc). AoW1 had even teleports exits that are a normal square on the map. You don't know a unit can attack from it until it does.

I actually finished Halflings-Dwarves-Elves first. I plan to do Halflings-Lizardmen-Undead next and then chose the one I liked better to do the Highmen from. I'll do the same thing for Cult: leave the common path till last.

On the Valley of Wonders level the Undead Empire lead by Somebody got defeated on Day 5. Before I even saw any enemies. Neutral encounter I guess? I had a Chronicles "wow! Because it isn't easy enough already" moment when I saw that.

Fair enough.

That's true. Teleporters in 1/2/SM all send the unit to a designated hex, and two way teleporters function by having a teleporter on that hex that sends you back. Chain teleporter target hexes together to get a chain of teleporters.

These one way teleports are also present in Wizard's Throne and Shadow Magic, and yes some of them are set up specifically for the AI to use on you.

That would be a Human Air Galley going for the Undead leader and assassinating them. The humans start with four or five of them, and the AI leaders mostly aren't leveled to deal with it. I think the Elves and Dark Elves are far enough away that the humans expand rather than try it on them, but poor Inioch is close enough to be subject to sudden death because he only has 50 mana (and no ranged attack) to kill the air galley.

Joseph leads the Humans, Julia leads the Elves, Meandor leads the Dark Elves, Gabriel leads the High Men, and Inioch leads the Undead.