age of wonders 3 how to fight dreadnoughts

In any case, though, the big problem with the campaigns really that they're not updated to incorporate mechanics from DLC that came afterwards, so playing on the campaigns from the base game or the first DLC gave me plenty of jarring moments where I couldn't do something that I'd be able to do in a normal game. It's rather pointless since nothing carries over between missions (even your heroes get their skills reset), and turtling up to do it will give the opponents the chance to do likewise, but at least the option is there. If you want to go all the way to using your ultimate units/spells on the very first campaign missions, there's no arbitrary restriction on it. There's the main campaign mode, which deviates from the way that's done in other strategy games I've played (like Starcraft or Command & Conquer) in that there are no tech limits based on how far you've gotten in the story.

So, that all having been said, there are three ways to play AOW3 as a single player game. As mentioned, the live multiplayer community expects people to use autocombat resolution for fights against AI armies (which takes a lot of the fun out of the game, in my opinion), and while play be email (PBEM) is an option to allow for getting the full game experience, that can also mean literally taking one or two months to play one match, depending on how many (real) days it takes you to advance each turn, which ruins its appeal for me. Also, it's worth mentioning that I've been playing against the AI exclusively. I'm not a chess grandmaster or anything, but I can do a decent job of reading the battlefield and finding ways of exploiting synergies.

On the other hand, I do tend to be fairly solid at tactical combat, especially in a turn-based setting where APM is a non-factor. Whether we're talking about real time or turn-based, I tend to have a poor sense of balancing building armies, advancing tech, and expanding. Now, in the interests of full disclosure, it's worth mentioning that I'm pretty bad at playing strategy games, particularly ones with significant economic complexity, likely in part because I don't usually like them enough to stick with them.

Age of wonders 3 how to fight dreadnoughts