What I was trying to say was that we should be cynical about this game, because there's always the strong potential this game will be terrible, especially given past precedent with games such as this.

Wait at least until the reviews come out and people have had the ability to judge the full and complete game. Yes, the game could be awesome, and if it is, I'll be genuinely happy for it. But blindly pre-ordering it and buying into the hype simply because it's from Triumph and it's an AoW game puts right back to where we were with Gearbox and A:CM.

The lucky part was merely sarcasm. You feel ripped off even on the lower half of the price spectrum, I said you were lucky to further emphasis on how ludicrous the price is.
I do play a lot of strategy games, I know quite a lot more. I play simple stuff like Age of Empires to highly complex strategic simulations like Hearts of Iron. AoW3 just seems to be a somewhat decently presented turn-based strategy game. While it does look good, it looks neither unique nor that interesting.

Is Triumph forcing you to buy the game or something?

Seriously, everyone knows that the game will go on sale in a few months for at least half the price. That's the way things work. Games are always expensive on release day. If you are not interested in buying it at day one, then don't, no one is forcing you to do so.

I completely understand the complaints against regional pricing, even though i don't agree with all of them. But bitching about the base price of the game in the US is kind of silly in my opinion. The game's price is normal for a new release.

Yup...i sure am glad i relocated to Russia...
I don't mind the cold weather and prices are great !!
To quote gog:

That explains why La-Mulana, Giana Sisters, Unepic, FEZ, and oooh wait. No, this is basically the most expensive game to date and its nothing more than a pretty TBS.

You seriously want to compare games with completely different scopes and production values? What's next? GTA V is too expensive because i can buy U$5 games made with RPGMaker on Desura? What a fucking joke. AoW has a much higher budget than any of the games you mentioned there. Wasteland 2 is on early access and it's more expensive than AoW3. Why don't you call it a rip-off as well?

By the way what's wrong with TBS? They can't charge U$40 just because it's a TBS? Just don't buy it, it's THAT simple. As far as i'm aware Triumph is not holding a gun to your head and forcing you to click on the "buy" button, is it?

Excuse me while I laugh at the idea that a bloated budget makes a better game and 'higher production values' while I set up my University Colony in what is still one of the best turn based games and what I use as my ruler to compare with others, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

Which was a high budget title that cost ~$50 at release....

High budget, but not laughably bloated. And its actually worth every one of those 50 dollars. :V</obvious bias>

How do you know one budget is high and the other budget is bloated?

Did you not notice the </obvious bias> bias tag? I hadn't heard of Age of Wonders as a series until it appeared on the front page.

At least I heard of SMAC back in the day.

Right, you like Alpha Centauri and the other one has a bloated budget because you've never heard of it.

Exactly! :P

You are aware that Alpha Centauri was sold at U$50 on release, right? And i'm not even taking inflation into consideration (U$50 back then was worth much more than today).

By the way, please stop using the strawman fallacy against me. I have never said that bigger budget = better game. I'm just saying that is unfair to compare the price of a game with a high budget to a game with a low budget. It's that simple. You may find Fez to be a much better game than GTA V, but it still doesn't change the fact that GTA V took millions to be made, Fez didn't.

Most of the games here on GOG were big budget full priced titles funded by big publishers (EA, Activision, Interplay) back in the day.