Hello everyone, with the Golden Realms Expansion out now, we’ll discuss how the Expansion impacts multiplayer. Are you worried you can’t play AoW3 with or against your friends, worry no more. All shall be explained below. People that buy expansions for AoW3 – such as the Golden Realms expansion – get their hands on all sorts of new goodies. Expansions can contain new races, classes, specializations, units, items, maps, etc. However, what happens if they play with people that don’t have access to those goodies?

In AoW3 you can enjoy the game without worrying who has which goodies. When people play together, all the goodies they have together end up on the map. For example, if you have the Halflings from the Golden Realms Expansion both you and your buddy – or nemesis – will be mugged by Halfling Scoundrels in the local Bandit Camp and both of you can loot the Crystal Skull from the Lost City. And, if you don’t have Halflings but your buddy does, you can go and capture his Halfling town and build some of your own. It just wouldn’t be fair any other way.

So to get down to details, everyone can make the Leader of choice with the goodies they have. So if you have Golden Realms you can select Halfling as your starting race, Wild Magic as a specialization, etc. If you don’t have Golden Realms you can’t select Halflings as your starting race, etc. So the long and short of it is that you can make or select any Leader in multi-player that you can make or select in single-player.

When setting up a multiplayer game, the person hosting the game determines the availability of any expansion features such as Seals of Power, Empire Quests or handmade Scenarios. So again, if you host a game you can set up a map for multi-player in any way you could set up for single-player. Just with some more people in it, naturally. And more banter in chat.

Then when the map starts – or is generated for random maps – the game checks which goodies everyone has and makes sure everyone’s goodies – new Races, Dwellings, Units, Items, Secret Spells, etc. – end up on the map. So if just one person in the multi-player game has Golden Realms goodies they can end up on the map for everyone to enjoy.

To make this possible everybody requires a part of the Golden Realms content. Because of this Patch v1.4 will include both the files needed to allow everyone to play together. So – in download size – expect a relatively large Patch and small Expansion. The download for the Expansion have the files needed for the Expansion’s single player features.

I hope this answers your questions about the Expansion and Multiplayer. If you have any left, feel free to let me know in the comments.