Could anybody help. I've downloaded the game from gog and it's setting itself to ridiculously hard straight away for all difficulty settings. By turn 20 all resources will be destroyed by individual armies and the opposition will turn up with a 24-26 strong army made up of advanced unites. If anyone knows how to stop this it would be verrrrryyyyyyyyyyy appreciated.

Thanks :)

lol...what are your game settings? also to be quite frank, age of wonders 3 is a game with a pretty decent AI, which is good! but that also means you get murdered if you don't understand / abuse the concept of positioning, range, cover, flanking and are generally poor at decision making in terms of city build orders.

also what are your map / scenario settings if you use the random map scenario (main meat of the game).

Looks like my requests for a hard option were not ignored.

Hah, oh blaneck. :)

It's age of wonders shadow magic I'm talking about! I've got a good grasp of tactics it's quite literally giving me no chance to do anything. Wondering if it's bugged or what as it was easier in normal than it was in beginner! quite literally bizarre

AoW has always about blitzkrieging and taking over enemy positions as soon as possible to strip them from income and towns that make units, and getting them for yourself. That's what I've always done in AoW 1 and it seems to work here as well. Lots of town things you can install, but that's pretty useless when you have to run fast across the map.

That's where things falter in AoW 2/SM. In AoW you can immediately start building units, or install the units without having to install 3 or 4 things in your town for a lot of turns.

What map, scenario, or campaign are you playing? If you are new to AoW:SM, you should start with the tutorial campaign. It will take you along slowly and hold your hand during the learning curve.

If you want to play a map, pick any of the ones that ship with the game and set your opponents to the lowest level of AI smarts. That should ease back the throttle. For example, play "Winning Bridge" which is a small two player map in which the AI will give you time to build your army.

I made a post detailing what bonuses the AI gets in our main forums, I'll copy/paste it here:

Squire – No bonuses
Knight – +25% and +10. +100 empire happiness
Lord – +50% and +20. +200 empire happiness
King – +75% and +30. +300 empire happiness
Emperor – +100% and +40. +400 empire happiness

So, if you have a city with 30 gold income, the King AI would get:

(30 * 1.75) + 30 = 82

This bonus is applied to all income the AIs cities have (except happiness and population growth). I believe the AI starts off with a larger starting army as well, but I don’t know how that works.

Anyways, we are going to retune the difficulty levels. I think we were so used to playing our game, we never realised what it would be like for newer players. We are going to make it so “Knight” is the AI that doesn’t cheat, and make Squire a more relaxed AI that should allow people to play without having to worry about the AI building enormous doom stacks on the other side of the map.

Difficulty settings for the upcoming patch (from here):

Squire - Does not cheat, has been made a bit more stupid. Will not cast global spells in 60% of turns. Can only perform one task at once. Will not build cities as fast.
Knight - Does not cheat. Will not cast global spells in 40% of turns.
Lord - Gains a 33% cheating bonus to Gold and Production. Will not cast global spells in 20% of turns. +5 flat bonus.
King - Gains a 66% cheating bonus to Gold and Production. Gains a 25% cheating bonus to Mana and Knowledge. +10 flat bonus
Emperor - Gains a 100% cheating bonus to Gold and Production. Gains a 50% cheating bonus to Mana and Knowledge. + 20 flat bonus

(The post doesn't say anything about "empire happiness".)

I wonder if "does not cheat" really means "does not cheat", or if it just means "it still cheats in some ways (e.g., ignores fog of war or some other cheats), but does not get a 'cheating bonus' for gold/production/mana/knowledge".

What difference does it make? Stupid is stupid.

Perhaps does not cheat for example - total map vision even past fog of war. I tested this by moving a unit out of a city deep into my territory, I had all the areas covered, on the look out for enemy scouts. The very next turn the AI sends a unit towards that city.

I would <i>really</i> <span class="bold">love</span> it if the AI was good enough that it didn't have to cheat with respect to visibility (fog of war, concealment, invisibility, etc.) but I don't want to get my hopes up.

Guess it was a good thing I didn't get my hopes up.

I would prefer they kept the cheating to quantitative stuff (gold/mana) rather than qualitative (AI bypassing all visibility rules). It would also be better if they let us set the bonuses ourselves so we can tune the difficulty to our own personal likings rather than being stuck with a fixed set where one level may be too weak and the next level up is too annoying. (And it might be nice if they let those bonuses also be set on human players so in a human vs human game such bonuses could be used as a handicap system.)

Just kill it, then it won't matter.

Just out of curiosity, isn't this exactly what a player (AI or human) should do to see into a city and check if an army is laying in wait? You said the AI sent a single unit. That unit is by definition a scout. In all strategy games involving fog of war, scouts are extremely important and the AI sending a scout is a smart AI not a cheating AI, isn't it?

Also, from a return on investment point of view - Sending scouts who happen to take over undefended cities to acquire resources for a turn or three is worth losing scouts. It's super annoying and pays for itself with ease. :-)

The original poster was actually asking about AoW:SM which did have "cheats" such as the AI being able to see concealed units. This was fine since the AI was stupid and needed the help. Since IBM Watson isn't our opponent, giving the AI production bonuses is appropriate for AoW:3.

So far I have not found that to be the case because I reloaded the game and kept my city guarded - that next turn and several turns after that no scout was sent.

I just tried the old save game again and still I get the same results.