Their unique units favor combined arms, with an emphasis on melee. They don't tend to rely on mana very much innately, but they do have a number of spells to squeeze a little bit extra out of their cities. Warlords focus on hefty armies, backed by buffs. Your class is your most important choice, deciding your army makeup, techs and spells, and your leader's clothing. There are other, additional perks and differences between the races that futher push them in different directions, but they are small, and often on a unit by unit, case by case basis, and will not affect playstyle very much. +Shocktroopers are among the strongest units in the game.

+Deal with underground terrain better than other races. +Firstborn are among the strongest units in the game. Every race is viable, and every race is strong. Since this is a beginner's guide, we're not going to focus on optimization. Most races add a small bonus to the growth of a city itself, but the primary benefit is in the units and stats you get for a specific race. Your leader's Race determines the race in the starting city, and the benefits you get. Once you have the settings you want, you can move on to the second page, which includes the ability to tweak the various AI's and add a few extra settings, such as if the map is revealed, if you can found new cities, hero soft cap, and how much you start out with. Treasures influence how much gold and such is simply lying around the map. Resource structures are things like gold mines that give you money and other resources if they're within your territory. Visit structures are shrines, and their ilk, things you go stand on to get their benefit. This only impacts cities owned by the main races, like humans and elves.ĭwellings influences how many 'monster' cities are on the map. Higher means more bandit camps and more bandits coming from them.Ĭities influences how many cities there are on the map that start out not owned by players. Roaming Units influences the amount of bandits in play. As most cities tend to spawn on a road, these act as a handy navigational guide as well.

Roads influence both the number of roads on the map, and the amount of places connected by roads. The various options for map types are a collection of pre-set playable maps aimed at different things.

Most of the options are obvious, city size, terrain bias, etc, but lets go over what the rest of them do. The first thing you'll be doing upon starting up a new random map is to give the map various traits, such as its size and terrain types.

Age of wonders 3 manual combat tips