The theme for this post is to round up some of the more popular 4X titles that we all know and love, and break down how they represent the players population and growth and how that fits into the game’s mechanics.

This theme will be broken up into a few different posts, some to examine games that where the player is managing population in scales of cities or single worlds. Others will examine games where the populations are on a larger scale of planets or galaxies. Some of the specific characteristics of these systems that I will look closely at are how they are graphically represented, how they scale over time, and how the player interacts with the system on micro and macro levels.

Let us begin with Age of Wonders 3 by Triumph Studios. This is a 4X strategy game with a fantasy setting, one of the hallmarks of the genre. If you’re not familiar with it yet, it leverages many of the common 4X game mechanics, but adds extra layers for detailed turn based combat and hero management. An amazing amount of depth to unit varieties, skills, spells, quests and other fantasy standards that give a great sense of building a fantasy empire and taking it to war against others.

At the core of managing your empire in AoW3 is of course building and developing your cities and their infrastructure. Cites in AoW3 provide a lot of room for strategic choice and variation, and one of the strengths of the game is how well integrated they are to all of the other games mechanics.

Population for your cities in AoW3 generally increases from turn to turn as it does in most games, but here you have some interesting ways to impact that growth and leverage a cities population for your benefit or at the expense of an enemy. The cities are broken up into tiers ranging from an Outpost all the way to a Metropolis. As they make their way through the ranks, their domain (area of influence you see surrounding it) grows along with its production and income. The city also has a happiness characteristic, which represents a combination of factors which will influence how suitable a city is for growth and prosperity, or how close they are to penalties and revolting altogether.

The game does a solid job of making the city growth mechanic relatively easy to understand and manage, while also keeping it in the foreground as something that different strategies or play-styles will rely on. Time isn’t spent on a micro level ensuring people are optimally the tiles nearby it, or specializing the population to carry out a task. Instead it’s spent determining options for cities as a whole such as how to use it defensively against your enemies or the best way to hinder an enemies city’s growth.

In a sense the city mechanics are where the games many systems really converge and show off the depth and creativity a player can utilize in an empire of their design. There are different options at various stages of the game which align nicely with the games role playing background and can be used in compelling ways. Play as a bloodthirsty Warlord who can quickly amass a large army of units early on by sacrificing his cities population. Prosper with an Arch Druid who can leverage nature’s bounty and cast a spell which increases its population growth for a jump start. Later on more powerful spells like Earthquakes will directly damage enemy improvements within cities and reduce their population. Less direct approaches involve transforming the area around your cities to make them more suitable to your people and more dangerous to specific enemies to assault.

Over the course of a game you will visually see these aspects and choices of the game represented on the map which adds to the immersion and cohesion of the game. Races look unique, scale is represented and will all develop over time as your populations grow and spread out. A game played out with an expansive hero may even give you a sense of truly conquering not only the enemies and monsters in the world around you, but also the world itself!

It’s obvious that a game of this level of scale and detail required many dedicated hours of thought and design, and that direction is very clear when it comes to the growth and population system of AoW3. Next time you load up a game of AoW3, spend a little more time and effort thinking of ways you can leverage those systems as part of your strategy or role playing experience!

The growth and population system of AoW3 grades for me at 9 out of 10, only really losing a point for some balancing issues that can crop up later on in the game. The system is enriching, somewhat unique, and leaves plenty of room for strategic and role-playing choices to be made. Spamming productive cities all over the map isn’t the focus of the game, nor is it generally feasible considering the games mechanics. Well done Triumph!