Age of Wonders III Interview

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Written by BuckGB on June 6th, 2013

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SS: AI is a subject near and dear to the heart of many strategy gamers. What elements of your AI design do you think help you stand out as opposed to other similar titles, and how is your AI strategy influenced by differences in the selected game difficulty level?

LS & AW: With all core systems now implemented and the game being close to Alpha the AI is currently our main focus in terms of programming. AIs have different personalities this time around. In the design phase, we addressed AI weak points from previous games, such as transport ship combat which was easy to abuse by human players. For higher difficulty logic, the AI will calculate through a larger amount of scenarios, which is made possible with advanced CPU power and multi-threading AI routines. Our main goal is to have AI players that provide a meaningful challenge and entertain the player.

SS: Will we see any espionage mechanics or increased diplomatic options in Age of Wonders 3 in comparison to the prior titles in the series?

LS & AW: Age of Wonders remains firmly rooted in the fantasy realm, with camouflaged rogue units infiltrating enemy domains and magical scrying to tell what's going on at your rival's towns. Adding a Civilization style espionage system currently doesn't have a high priority.

We have improved the bartering system, with more trading options and we have increased interaction with independent towns and monster dwellings. In previous games there was an alignment check to determine whether or not an indie settlement would join you for the right amount of gold or if you'd needed to conquer it by force. We've now extended the interaction with these neutral settlements to include questing to gain their favor and rewards, which include cool rare monster units or monster mounts for your heroes.

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