So you have just installed Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic and you want to start playing online with people, but you don't know where to start when it comes to mods, finding people, or what have you. First of all, congratulations on making the best turn based strategy game investment possible, grand journeys await you! To get you started, I have included instructions on mod installation as well as port forwarding and online sites to meet players. Please note that some of the links may expire over time. If so, please let me know by commenting and I will do my best to update. If I don't, you can always google the name of the download .

STARTING OFF

After you have installed Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, you need to install the Unofficial 1.4 patch. Most, if not all mods require this to be installed. If you haven't installed 1.3 by other means (such as a CD crack), it will prompt you to install this twice. The first install will patch it as Upatch 1.3, and the second install will patch it as Upatch 1.4.

After that, Download and install the following two Mods, or any other mod you would like to play. These mods are currently the most played among online gamers.
1) Strange Lands
2) MP Evolution
These two mods will create their own game starting icon, so unlike other mods where you have to launch setup to select resources, these you leave the resources at default and launch the game with their dedicated icons.



STRANGE LANDS

Step 1: Install 3 in 1 pack

Step 2: Install Strange Lands from one of the 4 links below.
Mirror 1
Mirror 2
Mirror 3
Mirror 4

Step 3: Install Strange Lands Update

Step 4: Play using the Strange Lands.exe

More details about this mod can be found here.

MP EVOLUTION

Step 1: Install MP Evolution

Step 2: Play using MP Evolution.exe



Some other popular mods include, but are not limited to:
MP 1.7
MP 1.8
Brave New World (BNW)
Gandalf's Mod
CoMA SE
Dwiggs 5.0
AoW1Mod

and many more, most of which can be found here.


FINDING PLAYERS
To search for online players, there are three popular methods.
1) 02.chat.mibbit.com/#AoW is currently one of the more popular places for online players to meet and play games. It's a free browser-based chat room, and you do not need to register or download anything to use it. ***NOTE*** It is highly recommended that, rather than stopping in to see if players are there and then leaving, you should leave this webpage open on a separate tab. I swear, about 10 people daily come in and leave after a minute because everyone else is in a game, and if they stayed around they would be playing!
2) Hamachi is a program you can download that creates a LAN between you and other players. You can download the program here (get unmanaged) and meet players in the following rooms: AOW2rus (password same as name) aow2rus (password same as name). There are others, I just don't know them. Post in comments if you know more.
3) Gameranger is another program you can download that launches the game for you. It is similar to gamespy. You can get it here


TO PLAY ONLINE
Unless you're on a LAN (whether physically or virtually), you're probably going to join via IP address. If you are hosting the game, and you are behind a router, odds are you will need to open ports. Go to your router's homepage and log in, and open ports 6073 and 2302. I will not post instructions on how to do this, since every router is different, and it would be a whole forum itself!

You'll also need to know your ip address for other players to join. you can find this here.


This is a bit rough, and some repetitive of other posts, but my aim here is to put all necessary information in one convenient location, and I hope it helps!

[This message has been edited by KingChaos (edited 12-15-2011 @ 07:06 PM).]