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Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne

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Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne
Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne cover
Developers
Triumph Studios
Publishers
Retail Take-Two Interactive
Digital, original Triumph Studios
Digital, current Paradox Interactive
Release dates
Windows June 12, 2002
Reception
Metacritic 86
Taxonomy
Monetization One-time game purchase
Modes Singleplayer, Multiplayer
Pacing Turn-based
Perspectives Bird's-eye view, Isometric
Controls Multiple select, Point and select
Genres 4X, Strategy, TBS
Themes Fantasy
Series Age of Wonders
Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne on HowLongToBeat
Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne on IGDB
Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne on MobyGames
Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne on Wikipedia
Age of Wonders
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Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne 2002
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Age of Wonders III 2014
Age of Wonders: Planetfall 2019
Age of Wonders 4 2023

Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne is a singleplayer and multiplayer bird's-eye view and isometric 4X, strategy and TBS game in the Age of Wonders series.

General information

Official Discord for game series
Official Paradox Plaza forums
GOG.com Community Discussions for game series
GOG.com Support Page
Steam Community Discussions
AoW2 Heaven fansite

Availability

SafeDisc retail DRM does not work on Windows Vista and later (see above for affected versions).

Essential improvements

Patches

v1.20.0.3100 patch updates the game to the latest version.

Skip intro videos

Change settings[3]
  1. Open the game's setup executable (AoW2setup.exe).
  2. Uncheck the box labelled "Show Intro".
  3. Press OK.

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

System Location
Windows HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Triumph Studios\Age of Wonders II\
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/61510/pfx/[Note 2]

Save game data location

System Location
Windows <path-to-game>\Save\[Note 3]
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/61510/pfx/[Note 2]

Save game cloud syncing

System Native Notes
GOG Galaxy
Steam Cloud

Video

General settings (external application)
General settings (external application)
Gameplay settings (in-game)
Gameplay settings (in-game)

Graphics feature State WSGF Notes
Widescreen resolution
HUD stretches from 4:3. DirectDraw mode only has non-widescreen resolutions.
Multi-monitor
Ultra-widescreen
4K Ultra HD
Field of view (FOV)
Windowed
Borderless fullscreen windowed
Anisotropic filtering (AF)
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Anti-aliasing (AA)
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Vertical sync (Vsync)
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
60 FPS and 120+ FPS

Input

Keyboard and mouse State Notes
Remapping
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Mouse acceleration
Mouse sensitivity
Mouse input in menus
Mouse Y-axis inversion
Controller
Controller support

Audio

Sound settings (in-game)
Sound settings (in-game)

Audio feature State Notes
Separate volume controls
Sound effects, music
Surround sound
Subtitles
Closed captions
Mute on focus lost
Using Alt+Tab from a fullscreen (non-DirectDraw) setting will render a black screen, forcing a hard exit from the game.
Royalty free audio

Localizations

Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English
French
Retail only.
German
Retail only.
Italian
Retail only.
Polish
Retail only. Details

Network

Multiplayer types

Type Native Players Notes
Local play
8 Hot seat
LAN play
8
Online play
8 Does not have a native online lobby; used GameSpy Arcade for matchmaking.
Asynchronous multiplayer
Play by Email.

Connection types

Other information

API

Technical specs Supported Notes
Direct3D 7 [4]
DirectDraw 7
Executable 32-bit 64-bit Notes
Windows

Middleware

Middleware Notes
Audio Miles Sound System
Cutscenes Bink Video

System requirements

Windows
Minimum
Operating system (OS) 98, ME, 2000, XP
Processor (CPU) Intel Pentium II 300 MHz
System memory (RAM) 64 MB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 560 MB
Video card (GPU) 4 MB of VRAM
DirectX 7 compatible


Notes

  1. SafeDisc retail DRM does not work on Windows 10[1] or Windows 11 and is disabled by default on Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 when the KB3086255 update is installed.[2]
  2. 2.0 2.1 File/folder structure within this directory reflects the path(s) listed for Windows and/or Steam game data (use Wine regedit to access Windows registry paths). Games with Steam Cloud support may store data in ~/.steam/steam/userdata/<user-id>/61510/ in addition to or instead of this directory. The app ID (61510) may differ in some cases. Treat backslashes as forward slashes. See the glossary page for details.
  3. When running this game without elevated privileges (Run as administrator option), write operations against a location below %PROGRAMFILES%, %PROGRAMDATA%, or %WINDIR% might be redirected to %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore on Windows Vista and later (more details).

References

  1. Not Loading in Windows 10; this will break thousands of - Microsoft Community - last accessed on 2017-01-16
  2. Microsoft - MS15-097: Description of the security update for the graphics component in Windows: September 8, 2015 - last accessed on 2018-02-16
  3. Verified by User:Plok on 2022-11-27
  4. As odd as it may be for a pre-d3d8 2D game, it actually does seem to be using d3d7 for rendering in conjunction with ddraw. It might be for hardware-accelerated sprite rendering with alpha blending, since ddraw doesn't really support hardware blending.