So what is your favourite Age of Wonders song?

Mine has to be Perilous Quest. It's truly beautiful. Also when it comes to AoW 1 PBEM games, could someone PLEASE add the full soundtrack to the map, because I get annoyed hearing the same song every single time I load my turn. :P

So turn it off and play them on foobar2000

If you go into Settings and go to the sound options you can actually add whatever tracks you want to the playlist. You have to do this every time you load the map so it is annoying.

I have a very hard time choosing my favorite song because they are all so good. I know Love & Death and Battle Macabre are very popular, but I also really like Heartwood Forrest and Perilous Quest.

I don't like heartwood forest that much anymore because it's the only thing i get to listen to...

PRESS ALT TAB, PLAY THE SOUNDTRACK ON FOOBAR2000

Hard to choose because there are so many good ones but if you put a sword against my throat I will go for 'Love and Death'. Sometimes life and love is cut away far to early, but even in this most tragic of circumstances there is great beauty to be found.

You are most wise, Usama.

Defend and Love & Death always were my favorites, hope they reappear in AOW3.

I don't have a favorite track, as I greatly enjoy many of them for very different reasons.

If anyone wants to know a bit more about the music, Age of Wonders was the first game Michiel van den Bos ever composed professionaly, and all of the music is his creation alone. It's not his greatest work, however. He continued to hone his craft, develop his style, and polish his musical voice while he produced some of his best work not long after this first try. Of course, it's still a fantastic soundtrack, and I think it's astonishing that it was his first-ever professional achievement.

If you loved the game's soundtrack anywhere near as much as I did, you might want to check out this GOG Mix I created today that lists the other games available on GOG with his music, with each entry in the list providing a bit of history on how he came to compose the music for each game, and how much of each was his work.

Luckily, most of the major games he has composed for are available on GOG, and so the list is semi-complete and in chronological order, beginning with the first game he composed for (Age of Wonders) and ending with the last of his games currently available on GOG.

If you listen to much of his work, you'll find that the Age of Wonders soundtrack holds the seeds and prototypical melodies to many of his greatest-ever tracks, the iconic music of Deus Ex in particular.

For me the two best songs were the ones which appear in the battlefield. It´s a pity because I always play using the auto combat option

Defenders is amazing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjGJrLsaFgc
But outnumbered is my favourite, I just love this song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ4FffCG2JI

This is my favourite Michiel van den Bos´s work, even over Deus Ex.

It's technically impossible to disagree with this statement, and I'm certainly not going to attempt the impossible. Musical taste is extremely personal, and I think Michiel is happy that he did such great work throughout his career that virtually all of his soundtracks are people's favorites. It's awesome that his first-ever professional work is so loved even today, which is a bit like a musician's first album being widely regarded as the popular favorite, despite the artist continuing to evolve and improve their work over time. Though in that case, it's because the artist squeezed their entire life into one album, with little more to say upon achieving success. And that's really where soundtrack composition differs, as a soundtrack is never entirely about the artist's life in the first place.

For his part, Michiel seems to believe that his remakes of these Age of Wonders tracks in the yet-to-be-released Age of Wonders III is his best music ever. Yet I've heard much of the new soundtrack, and while I can't disagree that they're much-"improved" versions, I still prefer the originals - something I imagine many here will feel.

So while some of the tracks in the original Age of Wonders will remain personal favorites for myself and others, there's no denying that from a composition standpoint, Michiel evolved, improved, and honed his craft in his later work, and Deus Ex was certainly the apex of his achievement with tracker music, as he was more able than ever to focus on what he wanted to say, musically, to reconcile that with what he needed to say to the player, and to communicate that message to perfection in his own unique musical voice.

Most Age of Wonders tracks - both the originals and the remakes - reveal strong influence from great composers such as Maurice Jarre and Jerry Goldsmith (the Medicine Man soundtrack in particular), but the soundtrack for Deus Ex seems to pull most from Michiel's own previous work - such as Age of Wonders and Unreal Tournament - likely making it the most outstandingly original, "pure" work from his own internal voice that he has yet to produce. That doesn't mean it's going to be everyone's favorite, and the world would be pretty boring if it were.

For my part, I love both soundtracks - and the Unreal Tournament soundtrack - but each for very different reasons. And I could say the same thing about each track among them, too.