Age of Wonders II Interview

Lead programmer Arno van Wingerden and lead designer Lennart Sas discuss Triumph's upcoming Age of Wonders II.

GameSpot: Thanks for taking the time for this interview. How is the development of Age of Wonders II coming along? What sort of things is the team working on right now?

	Age of Wonders II will have an improved campaign.

Arno van Wingerden: All the new features are working now and testing has begun. We are very excited about how things like the new magical domains have turned out. With a few months of development left, we are now spending our time mostly on finalizing the interface and tweaking the AI, the gameplay, and the random map generator.

GS: The sequel will feature a lot of interesting changes and improvements to the original game. One change that we found particularly intriguing is how different the sequel's single-player campaign game will be. What do you think will be the most important changes and improvements in the campaign?

AVW: You'll be much more immersed in campaign's storyline. This is not only done by better scenario mission briefings with animation, but also primarily with a new event-scripting system that adds a lot of extra gameplay and an opportunity to tell the story while playing--not just in between scenarios. You'll also notice that your rival wizard's characters are much more fleshed out.

Another change is that the campaign is divided by the spheres of magic, which you will need to master as an initiate to the wizards' circle of Evermore. Spell research and resource transition is no longer spread out over the entire campaign, but it's done within a magical sphere, addressing the original game's problem, in which powerful resources from earlier scenarios could make the later scenarios less of a challenge.

	Recruit new and powerful armies.

GS: Unlike the original game, the sequel won't tie you down to a single race at the beginning of the game, so you'll be able to recruit armies from different races much more freely. What sort of impact will this have on the base game? Can we expect to see lots of interesting strategies that involve mixing and matching units from different races? How will this change affect diplomacy in the game?

AVW: Yeah, you aren't tied down to a single race anymore. Now, this doesn't mean you can mix all kinds of races without penalties--orcs aren't going to like halflings in your empire (except for dinner, perhaps) unless your wizard has some special peacekeeping skills or builds city enhancements that lower unrest.

In Age of Wonders II, you will get more freedom to rule your empire as you want, especially in the larger scenarios. If, due to a couple of "accidents," you had to pillage some human towns, you could migrate your human cities to one of the races of darkness, for example.

GS: The original game let players fortify and upgrade their towns (to access higher units), and the sequel will have the same options, but it will also let players add additional buildings to their towns that may affect magic spells or unit abilities. Could you discuss some of the new structures in Age of Wonders II?

AVW: There are more then 25 city upgrades--structures you can build in your towns, as well as "chambers" upgrades for the wizard's tower, the most important new structure. Military upgrades allow the production of more advanced units, temple upgrades produce priests and increase happiness, shrines dedicated to one of the gods increase productivity town growth rate, and so on.

The wizard's tower upgrades are more magical in nature. The wall enchanter puts a protective wall around your city dependent on your magical sphere. Teleportation gates let you link cities, and a casting chamber gives your wizard more casting points when present. Far casters increase the domain where your magic is active.