That map is the reason why I'm rushing levels now. O_o'
If I had to do it again, I'd just run to the Hall of Heroes ASAP, ignoring the rest.
So scary lol.

*SPOILERS?*

Ok, Highmen are KO too now.
Dark Elves are still alive, but they seem quite weak.
The human island is mine, but the king is hidden in a cave surrounded by catapults and 2 Syrons. :O

Ah, that map. Good ol' times. Just sent armies you can sacrifice there to weaken them potentially but the risk is giving them medals. xD

On another note, do you also let certain units or heroes give the honours of delivering 'the final blow'? :P

I'll just leave him for last and then attack with a 4 hero party, maybe plus some air galley :D

I usually don't have much choice for the "final blow", as heroes can fight entire armies alone lol.

Ok, finished! That last fight was quite overkill XD

I liked the game, but.. no final cutscene? Come on!
Also, the story wasn't handled very well.
It has been centered on keepers and elves during all campaign and suddenly.. humans.
And I'm not even sure why I had to fight Highmen too *shrugs*

Anyway, now I'll change genre a bit, and then I'll pass to AOW2 WT or SM.
(maybe the latter is the best to experience first?)

P.S: you can play the .IT game music with the good old Winamp + plugin ;)

Or use the soundtrack provided? :D

I'm done with mission 4, for Lizardmen. Well... Although the enmy had me like 3:1... A good old spread and then forcing them out played it's part. I could be there longer and see if I can't find another hero for my cause... but I decided "nah", cause my leader already hit level cap... again.

And... It seems I found a... bug? While going through new mission I was carring over my items. The Mace and Golden Sickle... the latter giving +2 att and +1 dmg, with strike/magical strike. And the first only +1att and strike/m-strike. And the mace costed me 90 points, while sicle only 10. Why? :D

Oh lol, you're right XD

Maybe it's a special good item.
I found some nice elven armor+shield that costed only 10 each.

Or depends more on a visuals. After all - killing things with sickle instead of a badass mace, well...

Hmm... It seems now I have a challange as I did not wanted. :D 3 enemies, sudden backdoor on me... whole 'army' was 'wasted' as cannon fodder so leader with my only hero could butcher the rest, still almost dying. RNG... but I wonder - when I will get more heroes? It would be nice to have another one, especially because, once again, I will hit level cap before I even see 1/4 of the map.

They randomly appear in towns, but I don't know why.
However, I had enough points to transfer a second hero only in the latest maps.
I needed the rest for a pair of good items.

EDIT: I forgot about the Hall of Heroes map.

The first hero seems preset in the campaign.

The others:
- 3 are found in a specific map, like the Hall of Heroes (for Keepers). I forgot about that, before.
- the rest randomly appears in your cities. I once reloaded a save before one showed up, and he never appeared again.

Thanks. :) Let's just hope he manages to appear before I kill everyone. xD

Honestly, good cutscenes are rare. Not to mention expensive. I prefer the written stories in AoW. That way, you can get all the different endings we talked about earlier.

As for the story: if you go back to the introduction cutscene and the screen where you choose between the Keepers and the Cult, you'll see that the story was always about the humans. The whole point of the conflict between the Keepers and Cult wasn't that they hated eachother (Julia and Meandor are siblings, after all) but that they differed on how to treat the humans.

The AoW1 story in a nutshell:

1] Inioch rules the world. Everybody is happy. (According to the Elves. Funnily enough, some other races disagree.)
2] The humans arrive. They disagree, kill Inioch, take over the valley and establish their own Human empire.
3] The fleeing Elves and other races split in two factions: the Keepers and the Cult of Storms.
___3a] The Cult wants revenge: Kill all humans!
___3b] The Keepers want to spare the humans... but they do want to stop the human conquest and get their valley back.
4] Campaign starts. The Cult, lacking the raw muscle to win, uses magic and trickery to cause all manner of mischief. They assassinate queen Elwyn, cause the earthquake at Deepmir, stir up the Frostlings and Lizardmen, and awaken the Undead. (The latter may not actually have been part of Meandor's plan, but people in the cult don't play that well with central authority, beign a bunch of backstabbing bastards.)
5] The Highmen appear. They have two missions:
___I] Stop the Undead from killing everyone and everything.
___II] Ensure the humans gain their rightful dominion over the world and remove all the other races. There's a whole complicated backstory explaining why they want to do this, but it's not terribly important here and doesn't appear in the campaign.
6] Everything comes down to a final clash between the five sides in the Valley of Wonders. The humans struggle for survival and to hang on to their empire, the Cult and the Keepers both make their play now the humans and other races have been weakened by all the abovementioned disasters, the Highmen try to fulfil their pro-human mission, and the Undead (lead by former king Inioch, now a zombie) try to zombie-apocalypse the world.

(I've skipped over a bunch of incidental stuff that doesn't really matter. For example, the Undead are actually awakened the first time a bit before the campaign. But you only find out about that stuff if you dig up external timelines and such from the website.)

I think it's a good story, but I agree that it isn't always told in the clearest fashion. The snippets of mission briefings can be a bit disjointed and sometimes skip over the larger picture. So the stuff about the Highmen motivation only really becomes clear when you join the Highmen, and otherwise it can be rather confusing what they and the humans are up to. (The Undead, at least, have the advantage of being rather straightforward in their motivation: it's "Brains!")

As for the next game: I'm personally not that fond of the AoW2 campaign. Shadow Magic has a better campaign, but uh... I never actually finished all of them. Truth is, AoW1 is the game I liked best in the series until AoW3 arrived. (And its expansions, admittedly. Before the DLC AoW3 was good but not great.)

Many players think Shadow Magic is the highmark of the series, and it is a very good game. There are a lot of differences in style, though, and I never liked it as much as the old game. Plus, Merlin is an annoying protagonist. But I'm sure there are plenty of players here who'll tell you I'm completely wrong, or at least who can explain better why they love Shadow Magic.

AoW3 combines many of the best elements of the first two games and adds a class-system and is the best of the lot where I'm concerned, though some people miss the wizard towers and such from Shadow Magic. But I imagine you'll see for yourself soon enough.

When it comes to story, though, the timeline gets even more confusing because there are big timeskips between games and none of them (except AoW2 and Shadow Magic) really have that much direct continuity between them. Oh well.

Thank you for the story explanation :)
Ok, I'll skip WT and play SM (later).
I don't have AOW3 for now.

It is unfortunate that in order to get the whole story you have to look up additional timelines, blurbs in strategy guides, and semi-official forum posts by the staff. Triumph could have done a better job presenting it in game. I do recommend playing TWT if only for the campaign. SW has everything TWT had for game play plus way more, so if you want to do random maps and scenarios that is the better game. I agree that AoW 1 and post DLC 3 are the best though.