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Age of Wonders is an odd title. It's not overly flashy, it's not a clone in the Flavor-Of-The-Month genre, and it can't be said to be overly derivative of any one game. Instead, what developers Triumph and Epic have done is synthesize elements from some of the best fantasy strategy titles ever to grace the computer screen, and create an excellent package of their own.

The game can best be described as a hybrid of Warlords 3 and Master of Magic, with its own twists thrown in. To refresh your memories, I'll describe a bit about these two games.

Warlords 3 (like its predecessors) had a map with all the cities pre-built. These cities produced various units, depending on the race of their inhabitants and the size of the city. You took these units, along with the occasional "Hero" unit, and took over other cities in an attempt to conquer the map. Combat was handled on a purely statistics-based level. You walked your stack of units into an enemy stack of units, and the results of the combat were simulated and displayed to you. Your heroes could get quests at the various cities, which were things like "Kill X number of this unit", "Explore X ruin", or "Go to/capture/raze X city". It also featured campaigns, ever-more-difficult scenarios which you could carry over your heroes between.

Master of Magic concentrated more on city management and tactical combat. You could build new cities anywhere with settler-type units, and each city had a variety of different buildings you could create. Food and morale levels in each city had to be watched, like in Civilization. Again, though, each city's primary function was to churn out armies to conquer the map with. However, you were actually playing the role of an overseeing wizard, which gave you access to the magic system. You chose which spells you wanted to research, based on the character you created at the beginning of the game. These spells could be used to affect the overland, your cities, or units in combat. Unlike Warlords 3, Master of Magic had a tactical combat system. You could take control of each army, moving them across a battle map, taking advantage of terrain features and spells you cast to get an advantage over your opponent in a way that statistics simulation could never show.

So what do these two games have to do with Age of Wonders, anyway? Gameplay:

Age of Wonders combines Master of Magic's spell system and combat system with Warlords 3's overland system. Cities are pre-built, thus making them strategic points to hold. Level 4 cities are extremely valuable, as they can eventually produce their inhabiting race's best unit. However, even the small Level 1 cities can create an almost constant stream of archers, swordsmen, and wallcrushers, as well as providing a source of revenue. Some cities are also placed to block passes between mountains and lakes, for instance, and controlling them with a powerful stack can cut off enemy advance towards part of the map. Unless, of course, they cast a spell to walk on water, fly, or change the mountains to flat plains...

Each city produces gold, assuming its surrounding hexes are of an appropriate type to create farms. For instance, Human cities cannot build farms on wasteland, while Undead cities thrive upon it. Gold is also produced by certain structures on the overland if they are controlled by a leader.

Cities and units have a morale rating, based on the strength of the occupying military force (for cities), your relation with the city/unit's race, their alignment compared to yours, and the terrain the city/unit is sitting on. Frostling morale is increased on snowfield terrain, and most morale ratings of "good" races are decreased on wasteland terrain.

If you don't like the race controlling a city, you can use the "migrate" button. This is less of a migration than an ethnic cleansing, as the old population of the city is completely wiped out and replaced with another race of your choosing. This makes the replacing race quite happy with you, and the replaced race quite unhappy.

Each unit has a gold cost, called its upkeep. If your total upkeep is greater than the amount of gold you are bringing in, you lose money from reserves. If your reserves run dry, units will desert, turn independent, and possibly attack the city they were just defending! Units can also desert if their morale gets too low, and if a city's morale gets too low it can rebel. So keeping track of morale and gold is important.

You generate a certain amount of mana each turn, based on structures you control, but mostly on the Spell Casting rating of your heroes. It is important to increase this skill as quickly as possible when your heroes gain experience levels, as spell casting can turn the tide of otherwise overwhelming odds.

Age of Wonders features a tactical combat system such as was found in Master of Magic. While combat can be simulated if you don't want to deal with it, it is usually better to fight it out, as the automatic combat AI can be quite braindead, especially with spellcasters involved. Each unit has a certain set of abilities, which come into play in tactical combat. Mounted units get a bonus when they attack, spearmen always strike first, and flying units can pass over walls and are untouchable by units without ranged attacks.

Hero units are obtained, if you are lucky, during the game, either by offering to join you or being summoned/animated by a spell. You also have one hero always, which is the leader of your particular faction. The leader can be incredibly powerful, however it is very important to protect him, because if he dies you lose the scenario. This also means, though, that if you can take out an enemy leader in combat, that leader's entire race becomes independent, and they are out of the scenario. Strategically sneaking a force behind enemy lines and assassinating their leader can be an excellent tactic if all else seems lost.

In a touch I wish more games nowaday had, Age of Wonders can run windowed - and quite stably! This means you can be otherwise productive while waiting for turns to execute, and the game will obediently chug away in the background.

The AI is occasionally stupid, and will sit back and let you conquer the map with little interference beyond defending itself. However, more often than not it will actively try to conquer the map, much as you are, and in this case it can be a very dangerous opponent indeed.

Multiplayer is handled just like it should be, with the other players taking the role of opposing leaders, and can either be handled in realtime over LAN or Internet, or by email.

The story behind Age of Wonders is quite deep, and you explore various aspects of it depending on your path through the scenarios and the campaign you choose. It can be quite fun after you've beaten one side's campaign to play the other side's campaign, and reach a scenario where you're one of the races you had to defeat the first time around!

Longevity:

Each of the two campaigns in the game forks in various places. Each fork represents a different race you choose to lead for that portion of the campaign, and by choosing a different fork, you reach different scenarios. This provides an extended replay value. Playing through any given campaign once will take a good 10-30 hours, with some scenarios being more difficult than others. The well-implemented multiplayer feature and the single scenarios provide even more gameplay. Age of Wonders certainly provides enough game for your dollar. It receives only an 8 in longevity, though, due to the fact that it occasionally becomes quite frustrating, and as such isn't always tolerable for extended stretches of time (over two hours or so at once).

Controls:

As mentioned elsewhere, every window in Age of Wonders is resizable however you want. Help on most things (including online help for all special abilities) can be obtained by right-clicking. Movement is accomplished by clicking on a stack or unit and double-left-clicking on its destination. It's a very intuitive interface. However, in simultaneous turn mode, it can get somewhat annoying, as your input can be lagged out of existence at times. For instance, if you click to queue building another unit in a city, and the computer is executing other moves, it can take several seconds for your action to be recognized, if it does at all. If you try to queue up several things at once, sometimes only the first and last entry will actually go through. This has caused me to become quite frustrated at times, especially on maps with seven AI players.

Spellcasting can also be annoying. Instead of being able to call up a general spellbook, you have to go find the stack with your hero in it, click on their picture in the stack to get their ability list, then double-click on the Spell Casting ability to get the spellbook.

Graphics:

Information is conveyed well through the interface in Age of Wonders. Each area of the interface is actually a window, and can be resized as you see fit. Unit stacks are displayed outside of combat with the most powerful unit in the stack shown, and a flag denoting the owner of the stack and the number of units in it. This can be deceiving at times...a stack with an 8 on it and a Gold Dragon in the lead can strike fear into your opponent (until he views the stack, and realizes the other seven units are basic swordsmen...). In combat, each unit is displayed with a circle denoting their leader, and a hit point bar. More detailed information can be displayed in another window by clicking on the unit.

The graphics may seem excessively small at first glance. However, there is excellent attention to detail for the size. Every different unit has its own unique look, and the scenery on the battlefields and overland is quite well drawn. There are even different looks on the same battlefield for different parts of the map, depending on the terrain types of each of the map hexes involved. Each spell and ranged attack has its own unique effect, though you don't get to appreciate them for very long. A lot of time was spent making this game look good, and it shows. If I had to find something I wanted in the graphics, it would be a zoom and rotate function so I could take a closer look - sometimes it's difficult to see, and therefore select, units behind/on other units/walls/scenery.

Sound:

The sound effects are adequate, but not amazing. There are distinct sounds for general types of events, like "someone other than you has taken something over in your field of vision", "someone got healed", or "someone cast an overland attack spell". However, it doesn't get more specific than this, so you have to check your Events window when you hear that sound to find out exactly what happened. (This, of course, is only horribly relevant in Simultaneous turn mode.) There are a few different unit sounds as well, such as a generic female and male "I've been hit" sound, a dragon roar, or an arrow/ballista bolt firing. These sounds tend to lag behind a bit from the actions which prompted them, a disturbing trend in recent games. The sounds do a fair job, but could have been much more diverse.

The music, on the other hand, is quite well done. The songs have an excellent fantasy feel to them, and there are enough that they don't get repetitive, even after a couple of hours of gameplay. You will get to remembering all of the songs, though, eventually. There are specific songs for each race, as well as generic songs, and these play constantly in the background. Each song is 3-8 minutes long. If you don't like the songs for some reason, they are all provided in Impulse Tracker format (which is supported in Winamp, if you want to listen to the songs outside of the game), so you can easily replace them with your own .it's or ones you've selected off the Web. Battle Macabre is particularly appropriate to a fantasy wargame, and well done.

Installation:

Nary a problem to report here. The game installed and ran without a single hitch. It creates a 300 megabyte footprint, not unreasonable compared to some games.

Overall:

Age of Wonders will appeal to any fan of a good turn-based strategy game. The variety of units leads to many different strategies that can be used. The graphics and music are first-rate (though the sound effects are not) and help draw you in to the well-written story. The fantasy setting is also a refreshing change from the seemingly endless parade of machine-gun troops and tanks in other recent strategy titles. To put it succintly, every fantasy wargamer should own this game.