I just wanted to post that I have this title working correctly on Linux/wine.
To get networking working, I just had to grab winetricks from here:

http://winezeug.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/winetricks

then sh winetricks directplay. Just make sure you have cabextract installed.

EDIT: This is for Age of wonders 1. I posted this before the sequels came out.

Thanks for the heads-up.
Which wine are you using? 1.2--somethingsomething?

Thanks, that worked perfectly. I do get a black screen when I launch the game, but Alt-F4 will kill the black screen and reveal the game, windowed. It plays just fine. :)

I can't get this to work for me and my brother. Before we installed winetricks nothing happened when he pressed the button for a LAN game. After he installed winetricks he gets further, to where he can choose to host a game or listen for games in progress. Hosting a game doesn't work for him and if am hosting he can't see the game.

He is using Ubuntu with Wine and I am using Windows XP SP2

Clarification: We were trying to play Age of Wonders - Shadow Magic.
(Each game should have it's own sub-board.)

We gave up trying to get it to work on the LAN and played hotseat instead. I hope I can convince him to fix Vista on his dual-boot system for the next holiday. Messing around with Linux and an annoying router is not the way to spend Christmas. Wine is not good enough for multiplayer yet it seems. Dosbox is great though.

The reason why multiplayer doesn't work with AoW:SM is that it uses an old Directplay protocol which hasn't been made to work with wine.

A list of apps that are affected by this bug are shown here:

http://appdb.winehq.org/viewbugs.php?bug_id=4066

Yes, It´s true.

Ah, thank you. Perhaps someone will fix it in the future. Hotseat was good fun though.

Unfortunately for AoW 1 hotseat is just as good as LAN or better in my opinion. This is because Triumph coded the game in a bad way so that if you play a LAN game with simultaneous turns the game pauses for all players when you fight a tactical battle. Either they see your battle or they see nothing, they can't resume the game until the battle is over.

This can be solved by only using quick battles against the computer or only quick battles at all but I think that is no fun so for me hotseat is better.

It's great that this was solved for AoW 2 and AoW - Shadow Magic. Simultaneous turns is a slightly flawed but from a time management perspective a great way to play TBS games in multiplayer.