It's okay to dip negative for the first few turns, but typically you'll want to get it into + territory pretty quickly, so you can have passive gold generation instead of a constant race to keep your units from starving. Over on the top bar, you'll see your gold expressed as something like '250 (-36).' Mouse over that to see what's giving you income and what's costing you upkeep. So I really get the impression I'm missing something. And even if I DO attack a neutral and get something from it, eventually wandering groups show up that are more than enough to handle me in my now weakened state.Īnd even setting my starting city to produce market goods or whatever doesn't seem to add to my income. Building the city doesn't give me any cash inflow at all, so I can't up my army size or hire the hero that's hanging out at my starting zone.

I can explore a bit and find some gold here and there, which is sweet, but doesn't stop the flow so much as buy me 4-5 more turns total, and I have not yet managed to find more than one pile in my starting area.

And even that's not a sure thing and likely to leave me with only a unit or two left if I'm lucky. So I picked up AoW3 and its expansions as part of the Steam Sale, and as 'story' mode is less interesting to me than campaigns, I went right to a random map and 'Empire' mode for a more classic 'start with a settler and go from there' sort of beginning.Īnd how the hell do I do anything? My starting army is too weak to manage more than one of the random neutrals.

Age of wonders 3 strategy guide