Age of Wonders III

General Advice

• Always be fighting. You're not playing Civilization where you hit end turn until something happens, you should be constantly moving your armies around killing independents to earn EXP and collect resources.

• Don't forget to have scouts (you start with 1 or 2 units you can use for this) who can grab unguarded pickups, locate potential new city building sites and find independent cities for you to conquer/bribe.

• It's most efficient to give each hero their own army as the army-wide buffs they can give do not stack with other heroes.

• The game tracks your relationship with each race separately. If you plan to make use of a race's units and cities, it pays to be nice to their independent cities so you can earn more governance points. Otherwise murdering them is fine.

• It takes time for your units to heal from battle damage, but there are two ways to speed this up: Hero Skills (Archdruid and Theocrat have them) and having units in your army with healing abilities (like the human priest). Faster healing = More fighting = More loot.

• Each race likes one or more types of terrain and dislikes/hates two. You can see what they like by mousing over the race's name in the unit panel. Try to avoid placing a city for a race in disliked/hated terrain as its economy will tank badly. You can use Migration to change the race of a city to something more appropriate.

• Some specializations have spells that change terrain so you can avoid disliked terrain penalties, such as Cleanse Lands in the Creation Adept tree. Especially useful if you want to stick to one race.

Campaign Advice

• Being aggressive tends to work better than turtling as the enemy usually starts with more cities and will out-produce you in the long run if you don't even the odds in time.

• Don't immediately reload if an essential hero dies in battle, all of your heroes have Resurgence in the campaigns, meaning they'll auto-revive at low health after every battle for as long as you win.

• Artifacts and levels carry over so getting as many as possible before finishing a map is a good idea. There's a level cap on each map, mind.

• Try to get flying mounts such as wyverns for as many of your heroes as you can, having a squad of flying heroes speeds things up immensely. Keep an eye out for a spell that allows you to summon random mount eggs as it's the most reliable source for them.

• Your leader hero often changes between scenarios which also resets all the skill points on both heroes affected, remember to reassign them.

• You'll eventually hit a story branch (on the fourth map in both of the original campaigns) which affects how the story, ending and last couple of maps will play out. It's pretty obvious when it happens, so make a separate save there if you want to see both versions.