Also: What are some of the better musics? I noticed that one can sort of setup a play list, and I think I'd like to expand beyond the 2-track Halfling and Elf themes.

1. You can keep ending turns to research all magic in the book and maxing hero levels
2. Good call, the vision is very useful though.

All of them, seriously. Not even joking. :D

1) What, precisely, does Haste do? I cast it, and it didn't double movement in the way I expected (giving me 2x move points). Instead, I think it has cut move point costs in half. Same effect, different implementation. However, I'm not sure that the cheap move costs aren't coming from another source (a number of tiles seem to be costing ~2 move per hex).

2) Also, if you want to quick level a hero, then deck him out with the highest defense you can get, and disband groups of cheap units next to him. Kill them for experience. Heal with your other hero as needed. Rinse and repeat for very rapid experience gains; you don't have to hunt for stacks of enemy units, and you lower your upkeep costs at the same time!

3) Did You Know: Not all independent stacks are actually allied with each other. When I assaulted a neutral stack consisting of an undead horror, 3 clerics (dwarf, halfling, elf), and a dwarf axeman, the single independent dwarf axeman in the hex opposite me jumped into the fight as well. The undead horror started by running away from my two heroes, the solo dwarf ran toward my heroes, and the undead beast promptly chomped up that solo dwarf while my heroes looked on in horrified amusement. I quickly slaughtered the beast in case it had designs on the rest of my xp, then turned on everything else.

Indeed.

This is most noticeable when dealing with Cave Crawling units in the underground: suddenly, those stunty Goblins and Dwarfs are *fast*.

And that's before you consider units like Giant Beetles and Karachs. You haven't seen speed until you've seen a Karach charge your battleline from half the map away. And that's before you cast Haste on it.

Yup, thats how southern won the last PBEM game.

44 movement points is a thing of beauty. Is anything else in the game that fast? And Stoneskin seems slightly OP in general, but on low/mediocre DEF, High ATK/DAM units it's disgusting.

That is why aow 3 made battlefield buffs only last the duration of combat.

I enjoyed a fast and hard romp right over some frostling heads in the small 1v1 Dwarf v Frostling map. 8 days to almost fully complete the map and achieve victory (only one large-ish goblin town wasn't conquered).

The dark elves show up alongside the frostlings in the next map, and there is actual honest-to-goodness resistance! Also, I despise Trail of Darkness with the passion of a thousand burning suns. On the flip side, my current three favorite spells might be Haste, Water Walk, and Bird's Eye.

Oh, and I checked to see why one might not raze every node that doesn't align with you to the ground: 1) You need a certain amount of unit force on the node's hex to do it at all, 2) You lose the (small) area of vision it grants, and 3) some Independents will spawn to express their displeasure with your action.

Indeed. This goes for all buildings, too, and the strength of the neutrals depends on what you destroyed. Razing a Builder's Guild won't require many forces and will only result in a few humans attacking you. But razing a teleporter might get you an angry Syron coming at you...

These features didn't make it to later games in the series, and I miss them a lot. In AoW3 in particular it's way too easy to have a single scout roam around destroying every fort and watchtower it finds. (Though teleporters and nodes can no longer be razed at all in that game.) The AoW1 solution is much more elegant.

Not true. This mechanism is alive and well in AoW2:SM. I've never had anything super powerful spawn as retribution, but that may be because it almost always takes a full stack of strong units to raze a building. Much better to sell off the buildings one by one. ;-)

I wish the other games had Altars!

Perhaps they could have also retained overland unit enchantments in aow3, but balanced them

-increase the casting initial cost

-more mana maintenance when cast on higher level troops

-more mana maintenance when multiple enchantments active on the same unit

-add a negative side to enchantments such as fire weakness for 'Liquid Form', reduced resistance etc

Or some combination of the above.

Hmm... or maybe limited durations?

If you could buff a unit for, say, 3 or 5 strategic map turns (like with the current Mark of the Heretic spell, but positive) you could have the added flexibility and strategic options of investing in buffing spells for your units, but it would be much harder to create an "uber" stack-of-doom like you can in old AoWs.

Or you could do just that, but would need to keep investing casting points, leading to considerable opportunity cost because you can't spend those casting points elsewhere.

I'm on the last map in the good campaign, and I've decided I'm not playing a turn based strategy. The other enemy leaders don't know it yet, but my three heroes are playing Hide-and-Seek with their leaders.

Edit: The humans weren't very good at it. Hiding in the one underground hole in the middle of your swarming forces isn't a good hiding place.

A bit late... but I assume now their forces have to find their bodies? Evil campaign now? :D