In Christmas 2021, I got Age of Wonders III. I kind of loved it at first, as Michiel van den Bos's musical score was lovely and I was having fun with its 4x-lite aspects. Unfortunately, I quickly got frustrated as my turtling-instincts ran up hard against the second or third scenario.

So I thought I should start over at the beginning and make my way through the franchise and try to train myself to play the game the "correct way". I force myself to get through the first scenario. I find thinking of the game less as a 4x and more as a tactical RPG, and aiming to level up my hero, really helps.

So I succeed on the first scenario for the Halflings and I am onto the second scenario. I have a choice between two scenarios--"Subterranean Path" vs "Northern Trade Route". I go for the subterranean path, where your hero and any armies he's assembled have a 20-day limit to make their way through caverns. I know I have this limit but I really try to hustle.

Today (20230110) I make my way through the caverns and I miss the exit and the time runs out. No sweat, I revert to a previous save state and don't take that detour and I make it to the surface. Only...there's a town I have to reach, it has been conquered by orcs, and apparently I cannot even take the town because it is fortified and I do not have a catapult.

So basically, if I wanted to win this scenario, I would have to replay it from the start and either make my way more quickly (presumably before the Orcs capture it and I can enter it) OR try to get a catapult somehow.

AOW was not playing fair with me. It set up the player to fail the scenario the first time they played it, so they could replay it with the knowledge of the quickest path to get through the caverns. The scenario is not terribly long, but here's the thing: the tactical combat has its charms, and I am getting more into it, but there is a lot of drudgery involved. A lot of the time, the tactical combat involves having to move one's units around, covering vast swathes of space to get your guys into position to attack the enemy. So I am not excited about replaying this scenario.

This experience calls to mind Jimmy Maher's essay on the "14 Deadly Sins of Graphic-Adventure Design." Now, AoW is not an "adventure game" but some of the sins he identified--"locking the player out of victory without her knowledge" and "actively misleading the player about what she needs to do" applies here. And I get that in the 1980s (and presumably 1990s) there was a culture of game design where this kind of stuff was acceptable.

Reading around, I see some AoW veterans advising newbies like myself to not choose Subterranean Path but the alternative second scenario, "Northern Trade Route". But the game has broken my trust in its ability to treat the gamer fairly, and on the second scenario to boot. What the hell is it going to do later on?!? My OCD sometimes compels me to be a completionist, but here I think I can overcome it. I think I will try AoW2 and hope the designers grew out of 1980s game design culture.