Age of Wonders III Dev Journals Return

As anticipated by a post from earlier last month, Age of Wonders III’s development journals have made a return, and the first of these new dev journals is dedicated to the upcoming seals of power victory condition. Here’s a snippet:

Seals need to be discovered and are usually placed quite some hexes away from your starting position. Seals are usually heavily defended by elemental guardians. We have expanded on the concept of the original 4 elementals to include more variants (so yes, there will be new units associated with this feature!). Once a player defeats these guardians on a new TC map, he will own the Seal and begin to accumulate charges. Other players are notified that someone is beginning to break the Seal, and its location will be revealed.

Players will need at least one unit on the Seal at all times to keep ownership of it, as the Seal’s magic actively resists anyone leeching charges from it. The Seals of Power, even after being conquered and owned, are still dangerous however! Periodically a Seal will spawn a new army of elemental guardians to attack the player occupying it. So players will need to keep strong armies on the Seals in order to keep control over them.

Usually there are multiple Seals on the map, and we’ve found that contesting over seals is most interesting when there are less Seals than there are players. If you manage to grab two Seals you will accumulate charges twice as fast, but the other players are likely to try and take them from you. You can track everyone’s progress in a new Overview, which appears on any map that has the Seals of Power victory condition enabled. There are more things in the works, like new, unique rewards for taking a Seal for the first time, and empire-wide bonuses for occupying them. Seals become highly contested areas, with alliances likely to form to stop players from winning. Of course the current victory condition of killing a leader and taking the throne city are still in place, so watch your back!

It’s also worth noting that a Mac port of the game is currently in the works and will probably be released together with the first expansion:

The tech team is working hard on porting the game to Mac (and likely: Linux). Already did most of the graphical side of things; the release will likely coincide with an expansion.