Hi, was thinking of getting this but was reading somewhere the A I is a little on the broken side, is this accurate or was ? Thanks

I don't consider AOW:SM's AI sufficient for standard single player scenario's unless you are looking for something noob, or enjoy the... independent's locales like dungeons. If you want an AOW2 challenge, at least for newbie, consider playing the Wizard's Throne campaign.

Thanks for the input, I took a look at Wizards Throne and it says no random world generator, thats the bigger selling point for me. Anything else you can recommend ? I been playing Heroes of Might and Magic 3, thats fun and Civ 3 but the micro management in that is brutal.

I don't know how casual of a gamer you are; you sound like you have not done much gaming. SM's AI might be sufficient for you. I can't imagine it's AI is worse than a game from 1999; I think Triumph didn't drop the ball on AI, it just wasn't as developed at the time.

If you are looking for more TBS besides Age of Wonders you should be sure to have played Master of Orion 2 and Alpha Centauri. The former is a simpler game in my opinion, and shouldn't confuse anyone, and the latter is similar to Civilization but more complex. Otherwise, I have a number of games I haven't bothered to play that I would like you to try and convince me to play. Or if you are interested in RTS I could talk about that; I thought Supreme Commander was a stupid game.

Hehe, been gaming since 1979 starting with pinball machines > atari 2600>nintendo etc.... =)
Past 12 years or so been playing mmo's and now thats come to an end ,I'm looking at all the pc games I missed .

Some of my favs are the command and conquer series, age of empires 2 was huge for me as well, romance of 3 kingdoms is a blast to. Just trying to get some ideas, I been watching some youtube vids of Shadow magic and seems ok, has that look I like as well.

Since you like RTS you should play the original StarCraft.

Like you, I played the heck out of the HOMM games (2-4). AoW requires the same amount of management with less ability to put 897 Vampires as one monster slot. The Random Map Generator in AoW:SM is nice, but the best maps are all created by people and stored over on HeavenGames.

This is the first turn based strategy game that I ever tried playing against other human players and that is where the game really shines. Skills like concealment only come into play against people. Likewise, the AI will always do the expected while a person will walk around your well defended choke points (usually ) and go straight for the game winning kill of your Wizard.

Purchase any one of the three games in the series and play the campaigns. That will take you quite a while and get you up to speed. Then play some scenarios that ship with the game or from HeavenGames above. Save the Random Maps in SM for playing against people. They are not very well balanced, but that's why they are called random.

When you're ready to stretch your legs and play a person, drop any of the active players a PM for a 1 v 1 game to try it out, or just sign up when a game is posted.

did you ever consider a career switch? You'd make a great recruiter :)

Thanks for the tip on choke points by the way. I was always mistified by how you bypassed my forces but now I know ;)

You get extra attention from me in all of our games. I'm still pissed about the horde of frogs with water concealment you used to sneak up on me over a year ago. You took out a whole bunch of buffs and global spells when you killed my Wizard. Thank goodness you put all your eggs in that basket and didn't account for my back up tower. ;-)

Ah! Yeah I thought I had you there, no clue you had that backup tower already. Good thing is you learned what concealment is all about. That game would have been mine by the way, had you not turned the Orcs against me (the Orcs I neglected to finish off of course) :)

Ah well, water under the bridge. I have fond memories on the games we played, even though I lost most of them - the most spectacular being that game where you choose your sphere and the map is divided the first 10 turns or so by a shadow rift. I was much stronger than you, but you had your wizard in a balloon and sailed past my armies, razing my towers. I was shocked :) The AI would never come up with that, hahaha