Hey guys

I'm playing the campaign of the first Age of Wonders game and I'm stuck in a dilemma. I'm currently at the mission "The Serpent River", evil campaign after having sided with the lizards. I decided to make peace with the races I didn't want to fight yet, i.e. Azrac, Dwarves and Humans, and I have units and cities from all three races. It appears i must destroy all the leaders on the map to win, but when i declare war towards any of the leaders their race instanly hates me. Soldiers desert and cities rebel, cuttign a big chunk out of my empire.

Is there any way aroud? Should I just let them rebel, destroy the enemy and then kill the desertes, re-capture the cities and migrate the population? Maybe I could make an alliance, but that doesn't seem to work and I don't know if that would even allow me to win peacefully.

Thanks for the answer. So basically my choice is to have half of my empire turn on me or sit on my butt waiting for the AI to get bored. I think I'll just use the win cheat, I'm controlling two thirds of the map already, so at this point victory is just a formality.

Forgot to respond to this. I'm sure you have completed the mission by now. You have a few options. One is to cast Tranquility if you have it. It makes all the other races like you more. The other thing is to migrate your cities ahead of time. For your existing units you would need to reorganize your stacks. As long as the stack is stable or better then none of the units will rebel no matter how much they dislike you. First time through I would say to grind it out, but yes it would be a formality.

What you can do as well is 'fortify' or upgrade towns. Fortify takes 2 turns and each fortified town gives + 5 to relationship with that race. Declaring war makes your relation drop by 20 I think. So if you fortify 4 towns at once, you can declare war in two turns. I know it's a bit cheezy to work around but I like it.

Right, fortifying four cities would make up for the betrayal. I already used the cheat though and honestly I wouldn't want it any other way. I mean, practically speaking I had already won, the rest was just building up three armies and pushing each race back into one corner at a time. This is a general problem with these types of games, the beginning and middle are the most exciting because you never know what's going to happen. Once you control most of the map though the rest of the game just drags on and you slowly grind your way to victory. Thankfully this game is still from a time when developers allowed us to use cheat codes if we wanted to.