Try the Teleport spell. I think you'll like it.

I think you missed his comment on teleporting;)

AoW > EWoM

I just can't get past the bad graphics in AOW.  What am I missing?

Age of Wonders Shadow Magic? I am not talking about the first AOW, but the 2003 version of the game: I really wouldn't call that bad graphics, it is 2D, yes, but it's actually pretty sweet. I do agree that EWOM has a better graphics: 3D with a full zooming support... But the way AOWSM works is amazing. That game is just as complex as this one and it is pretty much bug free, other than offering a thousand strategic tricks to overcome other human players: stealth movement, incredible spells, flying units for scouting.

Even AOWSM, though, in single player gets a little boring after a while. But guys, believe me this kind of games more than anything deserve to be played against people, the are REAL strategy games, not RTS! No AI will never be able to compare to a human opponent. Besides the level of competition and adrenaline you get after you play a game each day for months against other passionate players, man you have to try that!

Also I wouldn't say the city system is brain dead. It is less pretty than EWOM, yes, but it is very effective and the overall experience of the game gains a lot from its speed. Also battles are a lot more entertaining than in EWOM, you don't have to hit an enemy a million times to kill it.

Overall there are more units, they fight more often they die more easily and that helps the overall epic feeling, since you actually have massive armies (all adjacent hexes are involved in the same battle). In EWOM they seems to believe that slowness gives an epic feeling, but in fact that only bores you to death. besides what kind of army needs 9 seasons to be create? (9 seasons is more than 2 years to put together 3 guy dressed in rags?)... In the end you are bored you have no army and the few armies present in the battlefield just don't die unless you hit them a million times.

Also that makes heroes too much of a surrogate for armies, since you can just buy them anywhere by the dozen.

Hm, well different strokes, I suppose. The one thing I DO wish was in EWoM is a shared building/training queue. I always liked the tradeoff that went along with that.

I have it on good authority that Brad is putting this in just because you don't like it.

Armies need to be mass produced somehow, in fact I am moref or a system like the one in the new Total War Series (Napoleon Total War) where you can not only produce building and  armies, but if certain conditions apply to that specific city, you can also produce more than one army simultaneously each turn.

With heroes nerfed and kept under control in terms of the magic items they can carry, and mass produced armies that die a lot more easily, things will start picking up some speed and be more fun.

Still without multiplayer this game is doomed to stay in an obsolete league.

If you notice the first thing I mentioned is that stuff must go faster, units produced faster but also movement!

One rider in Age of wonders has between 32 and 40 movement points, which divided by 4 (one hexes costs 4 movement points) would be the equivalent of moving between 8 and 10 tiles in EWOM (ON REGULAR TERRAIN) - (Streets cost 3 movement points, while wood cost 8)

Armies take between one and 5 turns to be produced, depending on city size and their velue. You see why you don't need teleport: you have enough stuff to organize your strategy in a fun realistic way!

Truth is in EWOM everything is already there but to organize all that stuff in a functional, fun, way lots of tests should be made!

What I am sure of is that those numbers work, at least in AOW, and that game for now is far superior to what we have here.

I am old enough to remember when that game came out, I must still have the box somewhere ehehe.  Sure the Heroes series has such a complex and sophisticated magic system that I can see why they can just concentrate on the battles. Maybe that is a little too much for this game, but  why not, better than how it is now.

While I agree that the 2 move points in EWoM is a bit too slow for my tastes, I think your other points about AoW:SM are less than on point. To this day, I feel like AoW:SM is the weakest of the AoW series. Honestly, the random spell thing was super annoying, and while you may have a point that it forced you to tailor your strategy, it was also possible to find yourself severely outmatched simply because of luck. Comparing Elemental and AoW:SM seems a bit unfair to both games as they are really two very different titles which simply share a common ground. The AoW series are war games first and foremost with all other aspects being simply tacked on for good measure. This is vastly different that EWoM which attempts to be more of a fantasy simulator than a strict war game. Thus, any comparison is basically a matter of gamer taste.

You are expressing a fairly shallow analysis of Elemental. Elemental features a complex resource and infrastructure management system, a diverse city management system, and a complex multi-staged research system. While some on these forums may debate the relative complexity and diversity of these systems, they are systems which do not have direct corollaries in the AoW system. AoW:SM does have resources and basic city management, yet they are fair more simplistic and not readily comparable. Most aspects of AoW are built in such a way as to facilitate and augment the basic war game, whereas most aspects of Elemental only impact the war portions in so much as the player has decided to focus primarily on this portion. AoW is more or less akin to something like War Hammer FB or Axis and Allies, whereas Elemental attempts to be closer to the Civ series or MOO.

I have never played a battle in Elemental that has lasted a hour. This was something found more regularly in the AoW series when you could have 50+ units in a single battle. Honestly, this type of protracted encounter was one of the things that put a damper on AoW for me personally, and I have yet to have such an encounter in Elemental. In general, these types of mega encounters do not seem expected in Elemental, as you have the option like in AoW to simply auto-resolve the encounter.

To say that AoWSM has no bugs is fairly amusing to me. Play a game where you start with no cities and only pioneers, wait that is just silly since the AI won't build more pioneers. Now, as Frogboy has pointed out so frequently due to its true, AoW:SM had 2 previous iterations to balance spells and units ( though it was still fairly unbalanced in SM ), to clean up the UI, and to rework city management.