Age of Wonders 3 gets v1.09 patch. The game’s first official patch

Triumph Studios continue to gather feedback from their community to tweak and improve their new strategy title Age of Wonders 3. In this latest patch, which takes the game to v1.09, there are not only bug fixes but also performance tweaks.

The patch is similar to the beta patch that was released on 7 April but this time it’s official so a new number has been slapped on it so you know it’s the real deal.

If you’re still not sure the game is worth your hard earned cash then check out our review. Here’s your notes…

Compatibility

• WQHD / QHD (up to 2560 x 1440 / 2560 *1600) native resolution display support (the Black & White boxes and blurry text should disappear). Fix has been verified to work up to and including a resolution of 2560×1660.
• Fixed an issue for people using Intel HD Graphics – specificallly for HD4000 and Surface 2 Pro – in combination with certain driver version, that caused a crash when opening interface screens – e.g. starting the game, opening options menu, skill book, etc.

Performance

• Fixed frame drop when armies were selected.
• Fixed decreasing frame rate occurring during extended play, particularly in longer battles.
• Fixed a memory leak when Windows was locked.
• Optimized a feature effecting maps with water, which should now show increased framerate.

AI Improvements

• Fixed some cases where the tactical AI would come out from behind the walls of cities and fortresses too soon.
• Stopped the AI spamming disjunction, so players can now use global magic more easily.
• Fixed an issue where the tactical AI would cast a resurectionn spell on an invalid target.
• Made ‘squire’ AI easier to beat.
• AI settings for players were changed to compensate for this change, to keep the same level of challenge on normal difficulty.
• Using the ‘restart’ option in a campaign map now returns the player to the briefing, allowing map difficulty to be changed.

Scenario & Campaign

• Campaign: Heroes being mind controlled no longer causes you too instantly lose a campaign map if you rescue them by the end of combat.
• Campaign: Heroes which are protected by the ‘resurgence’ effect – e.g. the theocrat’s ‘rebirth’ spell – can now die in tactical combat without causing you to lose the campaign map, as long as you win the battle that they die in.
• Blightmouth Crater: Closed a gap in impassable mountains.
• Blightmouth Crater: Removed two superfluous hearts of the bligght.
• Blightmouth Crater: Fixed the behavior of independent armies.<
• Elven Resurgence: Player 6 now starts with more gold mines, maaking the starting positions more balanced.
• 4th Elven Court map: Independents no longer interfere with onee of the starting quests.
• 4th Commonwealth map: Fixed a message that missed an icon undeer specific circumstances.
• 5th Commonwealth map: A ‘defeat leader’ quest no longer revealls that leader’s position.
• 5th Commonwealth map: Fixed a story message that had overlappiing lines of text.
• 6th Elven Court & Commonwealth maps: Prevented story charaacters from dying when you are victorious.
• 6th Elven Court and Commonwealth maps: Added a few building uppgrades to starting cities to give the player a better starting situation and more options.

Other Fixes.

• Fixed settings – e.g. graphics settings – not being saved whenn using the ‘guest’ profile.
• Fixed an issue when logging in with usernames of two characterrs.
• Fixed the stack confirm movement button being disabled in somee situations when a stack was auto-moving.
• Fixed a rare crash caused by a player razing a city with a heaart of blight, tropics, etc in its domain
• Fixed an issue where a backstab bonus wasn’t being correctly aapplied. This led to situations where a unit could backstab a target without flanking it.
• Fixed a crash triggered by clicking on a “You lost your thronee city!” event.
• Fixed a crash triggered by selecting a ‘Egg has hatched’ afterr loading the save game.
• Fixed the ‘Remove army from event list’ shortcut key function so armies are properly removed from the list.
• Fixed an issue where the ‘Protect your leader and throne city” quest failed to complete on victory.
• The game now ignores controller input, to prevent camera driftt when a controller is plugged in.
• ‘Spring of life’ now rewards units when explored.
• When creating a new custom leader, the field for setting a namme is now left empty by default.

Balance:

• ‘Shrine of smiting’ is no longer ‘Devout’, nerfing ‘Shrine of smiting’ doom stacks which relied on stacking ‘Devout’ bonuses for the ‘Smiting prayer bolts’.
• ‘Shadow stalker’ now does cold damage. This fixes an issue wheere rogues had limited options vs. blight immune troops.
• Increased the research costs of skills to slow down progressioon through the skill tree.
• Increased cost of racial tier 3 unit building to 300 gold and 100 mana.
• Decreased the base production of cities.
• Fixed issue with ‘Libraries’ and ‘Observatories’ generating tooo much knowledge.

Features:

• Added buttons on either side of the city name that cycle throuugh cities owned by the player.
• We added a quick save option, bound under CTRL+S by default.
• Added extra text to the preview popup when attacking a city waall. Players can now see the hit points the wall have remaining as they plan their attack.