Age of Wonders III Dev Journal: Necromancer Class

While the Golden Realms expansion for Age of Wonders III was released only last week, the team at Triumph Studios is already thinking about the next one, and posted a brief development journal on one of the classes that will be included in it: the Necromancer. Here’s a snippet:

When we started AoW3 and developed the concept of the leader class system, the possibility of a Necromancer class quickly dawned on us. We think implementing Undead as a class has more potential than as a race, because this way we can model a gradual transformation of the leader, the population and the racial units to the undead state. The more they transform, the more powerful they gradually become.

We soon realized that the Necromancer would be the most work of all the classes, so this is why we saved thinking about it for an expansion. Not only will this class need all sorts of reanimation skills, but the effects of Necromancy on the population also need to be modelled. How far do we take this? How will the starting population of the Necromancer’s cities change over time? How are the base racial units affected do all race units get turned into undead? How do we visualize all this? What sort of bespoke undead units does the necromancer summon and how are they different from turned racial units, and the existing (archon revenant) undead units? Lots of questions, but we are super excited about the possibilities and eager to start answering them.