You're the Keeper of Wisdom indeed. My hat's off.

just some heads up for you, dwarf fortress is one of ... if not THE best (fantasy) simulation game, the content is overwhelming and if you get past the initial learning curve then you can expect hundreds of hours of fun, but new players can get turned off quite quickly by the difficulty (which to some degree mainly stems from the quite bad UI and no real manual besides the wiki).

also one thing i forgot, when you use the starter pack i linked (strongly recommended) then you have to manual rebind the keys for zooming in / out (which are normally at the mousewheel, but after all the mods, the mousewheel is for changing the elevation level now).

also one of my favorite illustrations about dwarf fortress:
[url=http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/v0.31:Stories/Bronzemurder]http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/v0.31:Stories/Bronzemurder[/url]

..and remember to have FUN

Edit: another very important tip: NEVER ever sell elves wood! in dwarf fortress lore trees are their kin and if you sell them wooden items or even wooden barrels / boxes where your merchandise is stored then they get angry and can / will declare war on you after some time. of course that is also part of the FUN. killing some elves and using their bones to carve bolts to kill more elves is quite economical :D. if you want to sell them goods then select the items individually instead of the wooden container (which would select the whole container with items which is easier but in terms of elven trader tends to get you at war with them).

I was talking about the elvish harlot showing "sexy" poses on main menu screen. This "Jeanne d'Arc"-style elvish female warrior is neither from main menu screen nor resembles a harlot.

I don't have an elvish harlot doing sexy poses on my main menu screen. The main menu screen displays whichever leader you played as last, so I think right now I've got a rat-faced Goblin Rogue giggling madly on my main menu screen.

I'm disappointed in my expectations for this game, cause I never imagined I'd get so addicted.

Jedem das Seine.

Although I cannot say whether I agree with the OP's assessment since I have never played the new AoW, I can identify with some of his general comments. The overall trend in the gaming industry being putting the depth into the 3D graphics instead of the game? I have never pre-ordered a game. I would rather wait until a good while after the release, after the price has been reduced and the game has been patched and there has been some testing of time. I also have trouble with online drm management. Re-makes are hard to resist. It sounds like you are old school. :) I played some Fantasy Wars, but did not finish because then I discovered Genesis. I put a lot of time into Genesis, but have trouble finishing because I put too much time into trying to make 8 level 30 heroes on a tiny shard, wondering how long it will take to finish. I am not sure what the other two games you mention are like.

Currently I am learning how to play Master of Magic on any level, and the original Master of Orion on Impossible.

I played the original Age of Wonders and I like the story, but have never finished. Maybe I should do that this weekend, just as the good guys.

Do the people here think I should try to pick this one up on a sale?

Yes, pixel-voxel-mania and MMO-orientation. But the main trend, how I see it, is to offer complete worlds, finished worlds.
To clarify, let's see on Mass Effect e.g. or something similar. No need to turn your fantasy ON. This world is planned and made to the last detail. Your role is only to push buttons YES or NO in necessary moments.
To the contrary, let's see on Master of Magic. No history for this world. I can barely see the contours of units. My fantasy is ON. I turn into the co-creator of this world. I draw the units, cities, events in my imagination. It became my personal story in my personal world. That's why I like old graphics and old games in overall. The pinnacle would be text RPGs or ASCII-roguelikes. It's hard but I try to get into them :)

See above.

This imagery makes me think of Starflight 1 and Starflight 2. You have a little bit of pixel-graphic representation, but you have to imagine yourself being in a spaceport preparing for the next launch, or in a spaceship exploring the galaxy, or in a terrain vehicle exploring the surface of a planet. They made if fit on two 5.5 inch (140mm) floppy disks.

Although there was not much strategic depth to the game, the sandbox aspect was great! There was so much to explore. I would only recommend it, however, if you played it 25 years ago - and then you would not have my recommendation, but your own.

The era I like best is just when sound moved away from the PC speaker. Now the game can include real music, set the atmosphere, and augment the imagination. It is also a reason why I like fantasy games better than space games.

Fantasy music > Space music

They're sleeping in my library until better times. Times when I would have more time... :)

I think this is the point that has been missed by every game that has tried to use MoM's mechanics: MoM is so great because every time you play it generates its own story.

I was turned off by the controls, not the difficulty.

I wanted to like Genesis, but it was somehow... too full of itself. Like, you need an Excel spreadsheet to tell you when you can do things because of the thin line between things you can two-shot and the things you can hardly damage at all. It's so immensely "balanced" around tiers making other tiers completely useless regardless of numbers or tactics. It doesn't really help that it shipped in "lolol, easy mode? Die n00b" state.

As far as the OP goes, I have felt something like that before about other games, but I can't really take anything home from it without more effort at making an actual case for what about AoW3 is different and why that hurts the game. I really liked AoW1 except for some AI and balance issues, and I thought AoW2 added too much research stuff that bogged the game down when there was already enough depth.

I will probably eventually pick up AoW3 on sale. I can't right now, but I do want to know what I'd be getting into.

The only thing I don't like is how the units are now represented in tiny armies of pixelguys you can barely see when on low health, how healthbars are now 30x10 wobbly pixel banners that are even harder to see than the brown pixelguys on the brown ground and how they removed all the cool shit like freezing your entire domain so you can walk over water, removal of terraforming units and generally making "ultimate units" boring as fuck (in shadow magic, the humans had a huge blimp as their ultimate unit. In aow3, it's a knight and you have to spend like 50 turns unlocking him. Whoop dee doo) and a complete lack of interesting races. Seriously, I can get the holy champion ability which deals bonus damage vs undead and there isn't even the freaking undead race in this game.

It also seems they have even removed racial perks so your draconians won't research faster, your goblins won't get that huge boost of population growth and the not-even-in-the-game tigrans woudn't even get their bonus gold.

The removal of teleporters just leads to you turtling more and exploring less and binding casting spells to your main leader means you will cast a whole lot less spells in battle because you either attack with your leader and as soon as he attacks -oops- there goes your ability to cast spells or the leader isn't in your army which doubles the spell cost so good luck casting that big 70 mana spell that would turn the tides of battle.
All your all-powerful warlock self ends up doing is casting buffs on your cities which raise stat X to X+1, cast domain buffs which raise stat Y to Y+1 research, summon units if you even have anything worth summoning and shoot guys in the face with your not overpowered in any way at all musket+bow.

So basically, they gave shadow magic the system shock 2 -> bioshock treatment and streamlined the hell out of it, for the better and the worse.