Edit: This only relates to Age of Wonders 1, 2: Wizard's Throne and Shadow Magic. Not the recently released Aow III.

Hi guys;

I know GOG have had a sale on recently and there are a lot of new Age of Wonders players around. So I thought I would do this post for those of you who're new to the game and are interested in playing multiplayer. The Age of Wonders games really come into their own when played against rational, thinking human beings. The AI is really good, but it's nothing compared to a human! It's great to sneak a unit with 'concealment' into your friends territory and inexplicably start stealing all their mines or something (the AI never does that!).

So you've got Age of Wonders, Aow2: Wizard's Throne and Aow: Shadow Magic. They all have exactly the same multiplayer modes. Direct play (as in a live online game) and Play by Email (where the game is sent as file attached to an email). Both have their advantages and disadvantages. The main thing you'll come up against is that these are OLD games and internet/email technology has moved on a lot since they were made, but don't worry the games just need some help.

There are many things you can use but in my view the path of least resistance is a couple of programs that you can download for free. If you want to do direct play then you need and if you want to play by email you need the [url=http://aow.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=1122]Age of Wonders Email Wrapper . Both are quite easy to set up and use.

Hamachi works by making a virtual private network between you and your friend's computers so that the old code in the game is fooled into thinking you're all on a local area/home network together and thus it works as originally intended.

The Age of Wonders Email Wrapper works by pretending to be the old type of email server the games understand (which are no longer in commercial use). The game sends the email to the Wrapper and the Wrapper then sends it out using your GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo or any modern email account.

The advantage of direct play is that the pace of the game is nice and quick, turns will be completed quickly and you can get a lot done. The disadvantage though is that you have to organise to get everyone online together and all giving their attention to the game at the same time. Age of Wonders games can last for up to eight hours or so and many people can't afford to dedicate that kind of time to it. This is usually not a problem if you're just having a two player game, but four and upwards it often starts to become an organisational/time problem. So it's been my experience that a lot of direct play games do not get finished. But don't let that discourage you!

With play by email (PBEM) you don't have to organise everyone to all be online together because each person can take their turn at completely different times, and in different time zones. You are basically sending a file from one person to the next in a loop for everyone in the game (each game day is one full loop). The advantage of this is that this tends to be a lot more doable for people because the time commitment is so much less. It also has another in that you can have many games going on at the same time, which keeps it varied. The disadvantage though is that the pace is slower, often people will play their turns when they get home from work or before going to bed etc. So you have to wait maybe a day or so for each game to come around to your turn. But don't let that discourage you! It's been my experience that play by email games usually always finish too.

I hope this helps people. Any more questions, feel free to post below.
Dave

Very helpful post mate.

Thanks for this.

One thing though, I faintly remember someone mentioning the AoW games having hotseat support? Isn't that true?
I'm still stuck on the first one, but that has no such thing.

As a side note, I'd like to mention Evolve. It's a rather nifty gaming social thingy, but it does the virtual LAN stuff much more elegantly than hamachi.

Hi everyone, I just thought I would mention that I can be contacted on IRC (https://chat.mibbit.com/ or irc.mibbit.net:6667). Channel #AoW. If you need help with the Wrapper.

There is hotseat multiplayer in all three Age of Wonders games. Just choose scenario - single computer - and then choose more than one human player in the map options.

Question: Is it possible to have the PBEM games automatically moved in a certain folder in your email inbox? (for example my hotmail) And if so, would the wrapper still find it?

The official line is that the Wrapper only looks in the main Inbox. But that is only really is relevant to IMAP servers. Hotmail/Windows Live is a POP3 server and it may be that all emails regardless of what folders you put them in under the Hotmail interface will all appear within the POP3 Inbox – which would mean the Wrapper would find them. I would suggest test it and see.

The wrapper did not find it, unfortunately. But that's okay.

Hello guys,
my friend recently bought age of wonders and so I decided to buy it too.
Now we're trying to play together, but it just won't work.
I'm not a big fan of hamachi and I wrote a little commandline program to easily connect to an vpn.
So I set up vpn in my router, my friend connects just fine, he starts a game of age of wonders, I can see it ingame, but as soon as I click "Join Game" the game freezes for a few seconds. Afterwards the screen refreshes and I see my friends available game again.
He has his local firewall off, but as soon as I turn my firewall (Windows Standard Firewall) off, I can't even find his game anymore. I already added age of wonders to my firewall, but that didn't help either.
So if anyone could help, that would be great!

Play by email using Dave's email wrapper instead. Much easier to coordinate and then you can join the rest of us too! No experience needed. My second AoW:SM game ever was a multi-player that we started in February and I'm one of the few remaining players still alive. Beats the heck out of playing against the computer. Senteria (above) is always looking for AoW1 players too.

I haven't tried it for any of the AoW games, but Game Ranger works wonders for the Infinity Engine games like Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate. And it claims to support AoW. I found GR to be way more effective and easier to use that Hamachi.

http://www.gameranger.com

Only for SM or have you tried other games too?
Maybe it just doesn't like your e-mail. I had to use hotmail one as it wasn't able to work with my czech one.
And are you sure you have provided all authentication details to Wrapper?

Anyway, while I am not able to help much, you will do best if you try to send PM to Dave. I think he doesn't frequent this forum anymore much so PM is much more likely to catch his attention than this and he is probably the best person to help you.

Did you install the AoW:SM game to /program files which is the Gog default or did you put it in a non-windows location like c://games/ ? The email wrapper often does not work if the games is in the program file folder in Win Vista, 7 or 8.

Also, Vitek made a good suggestion re: email host. Many of us created a gmail or hotmail account just for this game as our preferred provider or self hosted email doesn't work well.

When in doubt, uninstall everything and try again too!

Hm, I'll have to try this with the other games, then. Sadly I can't really install to "C:\Program Files(x86)\", since the windows system is on a small SSD. Nearly all of my programs, including games, are on a second, larger hard drive and I only have ~4 GiB left on C:.

The email adress I'm using is from GMX, which is a major german mail providet. The wrapper was able to automatically fetch the details, so that should not be a problem.
If nothing helps, I'll probably send him a PM.

Thanks :)

Go through the documentation that comes with the wrapper. It's only 20 pages and pages 9 and 18-20 have some great suggestions for tweaking the email settings.

Good luck and let us know via PM when you're ready to come play a multiplayer game. No experience or skill needed. Vitek is willing and able to lose to anybody. :-)