Age of Wonders III Dev Journal: Diplomacy Improvements

Triumph Studios has posted a new development journal for Age of Wonders III, this time detailing the improvements made to the game’s diplomacy systems, which will be patched into the game for the release of its first expansion, Golden Realms. Here’s a snippet:

AI Surrender

AI surrender is one of the new free features that will be released simultaneously with the upcoming Golden Realms expansion. We want the game to finish with a bang, so to reduce any tedious slog during the end game, the AI will now consider surrendering to you (if this option is enabled in map setup). We don’t want to cut out the .pic final battle’ so this will only happen in situations where the AI is substantially outmatched and just lost a great number of its forces in a battle.

When you accept the surrender the leader will join your army as a hero and you will receive his throne city, including its defenders. This will save you the time to do a mop up of his army and give you an edge when fighting other rivals. But if you really hate his guts and want to see his whole empire burn you can always just decline the surrender.

Trespassing

Another thing we’ve addressed is AI trespassing. How did we do that? Well, the AI doesn’t do that anymore. It will try to get an open border agreement with you when it really needs to get through your domain. That’s because trespassing is pretty scary now. When one of your armies is trespassing it can now be attacked without a declaration of war. Even when you are at peace with someone it might not be smart to just waltz into his domain if you don’t have an open borders agreement.