So what's your verdict?
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Age of Wonders 4
So what's your verdict?
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IMO:
>It was 7.5/10 on release.
>It'll be 8/10 once a few of the annoying bugs are patched. The biggest one was already patched so it's looking good.
>It has the potential to become 9+/10 when they add some more content.
if they stick to this game in the long term it will easily be the best fantasy 4x ever
Ok to pirate or if someone gift it.
too many pronouns to choose from
Alright but feels a bit shallow right now. Even compared to launch Planetfall.
it's better than launch Planetfall
It's fun
More unique playstyles, like there is not enough pirate yoho feeling.
Typical modern game
Unironically GOTY material. The story is uninteresting and the setting is pretty much meaningless, so it lacks the singleplayer soul of the old AoW games, but the gameplay is already better than any other game in the franchise. And the way it's set up, it can only improve as they add more shit.
It's not going to be a popular opinion on this board, but I genuinely hope they go the Paradox route with this game and keep adding DLC forever. Bloat is meaningless when more content just means more options to choose from and autistically build your ideal fantasy faction. This game has serious potential to become the best fantasy 4X game ever.
I don't know that it's better than planetfall is currently, or shadow magic, but its certainly better than launch PF or AOW2 without SM.
A bit of rebalancing/adding spice, some more content like hybrid tomes, multiple T5 options, some more cultures and this could be some really solid shit.
My ideal fantasy faction is one guy fricking dominating without no need for an army. This is not possible with the amount of bland homogenisation that AoW4 does and the Paradox route would turn up to 11.
In what games is that possible? Certainly not the AOW series.
> In what games is that possible?
It’s a thing in Total War: Warhammer to make a one- man Doomstack. With the right setup you can just about change genres to being a Dynasty Warrior
>warhammer dynasty warriors
Would be kino
It's possible to get 100% physical resist on a hero in AOW3, and there are some army compositions that will just get obliterated by that, but it's very hard.
Well, how about the granddady that all these games are spawned from, Master of Magic?
But MoM does not frick around with its spells. When you cast the most basic strength buff on your shitter unit, it's not going to be a +10% damage, it's going to double it.
Incidentally, this might be while playing with different spellbooks in MoM is a wildly difference experience, whereas everything in AoW 4 feels very similar.
>MoM
>playing as a single character with no army
lol
lmao
You can absolutely solo shit with a rushed Torin or any sufficiently blinged out high tier hero.
Warlock 2 has a dragon start. One man army is a very good gimmick.
Forgot pic.
Why did everyone shit on that game? i thought it was great.
In dominions 3 one of the stronger strategies in the later part of games was to get strong singular units and give them items that covered their weaknesses and let them solo armies, also known as making supercombatants. That strategy got nerfed pretty hard in the later games, but you can still start with a pretender god that's naturally tough and can roll into indie defended provinces and take them early on (only a few god types can do that since dominions is the kind of game where 12 peasants with sticks can be a threat to 20 foot tall demigods). You can't stick with one guy for the whole game since early on you don't have the resources or research, but I think you can still rely on SCs if you're playing against AI. Players have too many tools at their disposal that wreck single targets for that to be viable in multiplayer in dom 5 and 6.
Thugs and SCs are still perfectly valid strategies even in Dom5. There's just ways to counter them like powerful single target spells or enemy thugs.
only game i can think of is Shadow of Annihilated Empires. If you went RPG mode you could make your hero unstoppable and just smash through armies. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4800/Heroes_of_Annihilated_Empires/
Wait for the start with no city and can't build more cities game settings to be added. Then wait for the faction trait that massively buffs up your hero units and you'll totally be able to live it out.
But it won't happen, because in order to make races and such bland enough 'to give players choice', Triumph had to borrow from the Paradox playbook of leagues-wide and puddle-deep. The flexibility of the custom options means they're all toned-down. This appeals to a certain kind of easy-to-please audience that thinks in terms of stat-based min/maxing, but has zero aptitude for strategy: the Paradox and Warhammer audiences, basically. The price of every choice being viable 'to give players choice', is nothing can be allowed to stand-out. I'll keep checking out gameplay from time to time, but for now I've refunded and don't expect anyone out there to do anything interesting with this game.
>It’s a thing in Total War: Warhammer to make a one- man Doomstack
Achieved by making the vast majority of units worthless and without purpose, a fact disguised by the number of them to 'give players choice' to no-effect in gameplay. You bring chaff or you bring the most cost-efficient unit. The only gameplay remaining beyond all the noise if stacking stat effects on top of each other, making the one-man doomstacks viable in some cases. This used to be a game series inspired by Sun Tzu, now it caters to the kind of dolts he was trying to prevent making foolish mistakes.
What is your ideal game that has a balance of strategy, depth, and choice?
An ideal is exactly that: an ideal. It doesn't exist and it's not supposed to: it's an idea to strive towards knowing the result will earnestly fail. This is much better than successful and rounded mediocrity. It's why the buzzword 'sovl' is used.
This is not possible with modern game design, because that's based on existing game templates. Pointing to an already-existing game as an ideal is a trap; it restricts vision to what is already there. Most games now are inspired by other games, where the dated but sovlful games of the past weren't based on other games, but the real-life experiences of people or literature or non-game stories they enjoyed.
>Zelda = Miyamoto playing in the woods as a child
>Metal Gear
Cold-war propaganda, including spy-fiction
>XCOM reboot
A designer enjoyed keeping an ant-farm as a teen
>Civilization
Basic education
>Deus Ex
Uses 'what if all conspiracy theories were true' thought-experiment as a premise, but the structure is reminiscent of Robocop: main character does the job they're made for but it starts to unravel on-contact with evidence
>Populus
Peter Molyneux wants people to know what it's like being him
>Early RTS
All based on Dune, or based on things derivative of Dune. I remember the Crypt Fiend in Warcraft 3 quoting "The sleeper awakes": someone at Blizz knew where the genre came from. Now all modern RTS feel like mobile-games; farm numbers and don't expect the game-world to be interactive beyond a surface level.
That's kind of my point
Anon was being a doomer about 2 different games in 1 post doesn't seem like they can enjoy games for what they have
My astral wizard was able to clear dungeons by "himself" with the following:
>perk which starts you with a wisp familiar
>perk which lets you summon an elemental 1/battle
>ability which lets you cast an extra spell 1/battle
>empire skill which lets you cast during the 1st turn
>perk which lets you reset 1/battle abilities
>spell which summons a random astral unit and does damage
Basically I was summoning monsters faster than the enemy could kill them. It felt like I could beat any single army with just the wizard, but I needed to bring backup to go up against multiple armies.
>The story is uninteresting and the setting is pretty much meaningless, so it lacks the singleplayer soul of the old AoW games
This part is what I think is a real shame since it removes something that made AoW stand out a little among these kinda games and copies one of the weaker elements of Planetfall. The realms and pantheon just takes away from it. Game is still pretty fun though so who am I to complain.
Does anyone know how this plays on PS5? My PC is old and I don't feel like upgrading just for this
I’ve heard it’s actually really good with controller
Add more tomes and make cultures more distinctive and you have a near flawless game
Generic fantasy generator 4
They took what Planetfall did well and applied it. Pretty fun game, looking forward to playing more on my weekend.
So what's the current culture tier list look like?
So far it seems
Barbs (outpost creating scouts secure all of the map while you have access to great t1 skirm spam)
Feudal (great early game economy and good late game scaling damage bonus, bannermen are a great support unit.)
High (Decent early game damage bonus from awakening with some minor utility later. The production bonus at neutral alignment is fantastic for getting your feet off the ground)
Mystic (Lack of archers doesn't really matter when battle mages fulfill a similar non-physical role. Star blades are a pretty good damage boost. Going heavy into battle mages buffs a lot of your units)
Industrial (Prospecting scouts are amazing but map dependent. Your tier 1 archer is actually quite great for maneuver warfare and the t1 shield unit taunt is fantastic. Otherwise bolstering is a pretty unimpressive faction mechanic, and their tier 2 support is supremely mediocre. They basically have to spend 2 turns to heal and apply strengthened when a barb war shaman can do it in 1)
Dark (Relatively niche ability now that it's only the weakened status effect, doesn't make up for the lack of support. Dark Knights and warlocks are good though)
The scariest thing about barbs is the berserker. Legitimately a unit that wouldn't be out of place in a tome, super scary, especially when you start applying enchantments and racial transformations
I don't think any other culture unit except maybe high archers scale that well
The only unique thing about high archers is an extra range and +2 damage from awakened, which is a bonus straight out of the gate and doesn't scale. I will say barbs and high culture both probably have the best start out of any faction. Maybe Industrial if you start next to mountains or underground.
you go for high culture to get the spell that applies awakening to zephyr archers obviously not the base archers you get
I was thinking about that exact scenario and still that's not really a scaling bonus. It's arguing technicalities but it's still flat scaling unlike something like the feudal 20% damage bonus. Which works amazingly with zephyr archers. And yeah High zephrys are amazing too.
being able to hit enemies without them being able to hit you is always overpowered
Whats good about barbarian archers? They just seem generic.
Looking at the fury, its got slightly more health, 2 more damage than the pursuer or feudal archer, but the pursuer applies weakened and the feudal archer with stand together can match the fury for damage. The fury can get a racial mount though, so giving it the spider's web attack or unicorn's teleport probably gives it the edge, plus makes it easy to have a fast moving stack.
Took Spider Riders as a racial trait for my barbarians, and had a cheep few scouts following my army for those sweet AoE alpha strikes + immobolizes. Fun times
IMO
Barbarian=Feudal>High=Mystic=Dark>Industrial
Dark has better units than Industrial and Mystic, also it allows you to ignore stability for most of the game.
I'm enjoying it a lot, feels like they really did learn from Planetfall and are moving the game in a direciton that improves upon 3's foundations while also keeping it fresh and also familiar to other newer 4x mechanics at the same time. Kind of agree with other anons that if they did just support 4 for the next few years instead of moving on to 5 I wouldn't even be too mad. Just as long as they stop before they reach adding absurd mechanics that really just bog the game down and don't make the game recognizable anymore. I get what some people are saying where if every single element of your empire is customizable, it's not really the races/factions that are unique as they are vehicles for unique tome combinations, which might matter to some people.
Additionally what is everyone's thoughts on timings to hit in early game? I'm seeing people say to focus on expansion first, and not even worry about clearing stacks and wonders until almost 20+ turns in. But since independent stacks grow in power relatively quickly it obviously seems like you should clear as much as you can before they get too strong.
Redpill me on Skirmisher units, particularly the barbarian ones. I'm the anon in the last thread who had issues with the barbarian orc race and I felt like skirmishers are kind of squishy one trick ponies to apply their status debuff ranged (single hit) attack and hopefully not get mowed down afterwards. For barbarians in particular I thought it would be best to get to Fury units ASAP for my ranged DPS since they can attack multiple times.
In general for skirmisher units, the game also gives them Slippery and the tooltips says they're hit and run units so it makes me think they want me to run in and melee, and then next turn run away and get ranged. I like to play that backwards, get into a ranged position, maybe a flanking position since no matter how far I move I can only hit once, and then next turn I can run in for melee and hit 2 times.
I usually use them as counters to spears. Use them as ranged unless an easy flank appears, don't give a single frick if i get engaged since i an either hit back, or if their retaliation is strong i just walk back and chuck a ranged at them. Ranged units hate being engaged, melee units hate having nobody in ranged. Skirmishers aren't as good as either (except the T3s) but manage to do both.
Another nice thing about skirmishers is they do their full ranged damage after moving - sure it’s only one hit and not as much as a dedicated archer that didn’t move, but excellent for harassing an enemy frontline and breaking their formation while making them waste action points trying to tie the skirmishers down, or even better getting in the face of the enemies dedicated range
Which also means you can circle foes and get flank backshots.
What mechanics are there in game to balance stability? Haven't played for too long but there was one thing in the order tree and then buildings which provide it but... what else?
not expanding
special province improvements don't have a stability cost unless otherwise stated.
>what else?
Check zeal, glades, paradise tomes.
High is top tier. Bonur range just OP, spider mounted t3 very good too.
Barbs for rush, and rush well rewarded in this game.
Dark is about doomstacks of shock cav. they start slower than barbs, but at 25-30 turn their stack is better in all terms.
Industrial is about sustain. Mounted bastions with 3 AOO and ferocious is fun.
Mystic is worse version of high since range and acc > dmg, but can outperform high in some cases.
Feudal is worse version of dark, only really good is warlord trait.
>Dark is about doomstacks
True 3 warlocks with 3 inquisitors(mark of wrath) can melt everything
How do you get mounted bastions?
By take racial mounts...
Racial mounts? Is that a culture trait?
It's racial trait anon, not culture.
>Bolstering is unimpressive
Most of my starting stack is at 10+ armor most of the time.
i had a lot of fun with dark warlocks stripping the bolstering away and making them debuffed
oh, i'm the guy with the grudge against the molekin and i finished my greentext about that game should i post it here or continue on the old thread?
Yeah, but they only stip as much as they would have given in sundered so id rather 0 bolster than -5 sundered
you aren't getting more than one stack a turn, with how fast fights can be enemies can focus down your units before they bolster enough. Of course you can buff your defense beforehand and weaken the enemy. But at that point you're not really relying on bolstered defense are you? That's why I said it's mediocre, it's only a nice little bonus. The tier 1 shield unit's taunt does far more for industrious than bolstering does.
don't forget barb t1 melee has shield bash
Can you genocide fantasy races in this game? If not, no buy.
Sure, you can even declare a jihad against all knife-ears via a vermintide. The world is your oyster
Yeah, i'm thinking GOTY
Yes you can also trial of tears them LOL, when you force migrate them it turns your alignment more evil and like 5 pops die in the migration.
I think it's very good
I think there need to be more tomes before it's great
they're meant to be how you're differentiating your playstyle, but you need to take the same ones every game for an alignment to get to t5, and you get the same ones at t5?
Yeah I dont know about the tome mechanic. It seems rather forced.
You don't actually
Society traits, culture, and hero skills all provide affinity
You can very easily reach T5 without investing in more than one or two tomes of that affinity
In many ways this system was design around not requiring you to hard line an affinity
All it needs is one or two traits for every race that makes them flavorful without pigeonholing them. Feels like they went over the game near the end and someone shouted "Oh, no, it's gotten too complicated!" so they threw out racial traits to make the imbecile in charge shut the frick up.
That would be just the devs giving themselves more work at this point because they already committed to this decision and did so ages ago, otherwise there would be fluff written for every variation of race*culture at the start of the game. Even Stellaris does that with the default species templates.
I'm watching a stream right now, and the guy is mid-battle. All he's doing is counting numbers and calculating modifiers; nothing is designed to be intuitively understood, the game is being played entirely through the tooltips. This is what games were doing before graphics could produce readable info, and we've regressed back to that.
>He doesn't just perform reasonable tactics such as flanking maneuvers and scorched earth to win battles without even looking at unit statistics.
ngmi
>Scorched earth
Some kind of magma spirit enjoyer are you?
It was easy to tell.
Besides magma spirits, flamewalking etc there's only a few tactical spells that leave burning ground right? Pyromancers don't do it?
I haven't used them much, usually using other units. Honestly they seem pretty decent if you aren't chasing another T2 battle mage or doing something like mystic horde to abuse T1 mages.
Its a shame white witch isn't great, but then again its the lowest tier reliable freezing unit you can get, snow spirits have frick all chance.
White witches are pretty shitty when used against you since their freeze pretty much guarantees at least one of your units gets mulched. It's one of those units that's not great when you use it but really annoying with the AI.
I'm not sure what you mean, what game has both depth and things are made clear without having to look at tooltips?
If units are custom or gain abilities from another source, how could you possibly just know by looking at the unit's model? At least a lot of the transforms/enchantments have visuals that help clear things up, though sadly too many of them end up being used for that to be totally reliable.
Best track from AoW4
?t=3295
vs
Worst track from AoW2
?t=1624
4 never stood a chance.
i fricking love life song though
it's the same composer so either he just did an amazing job with aow2 or he got some shitty influence from pdx
don't sleep on the aow3 soundtrack either
if aow4 becomes moddable (on AI and other things) i'll buy it - and we can throw all the osts together 🙂
The good tracks from 3 are just remasters of tracks from 1.
I think Effortless Expansion is a genuinely beautiful piece of music though. I'm really enjoying the AoW4 music. It's rare that I play these games without watching or listening to something else, but the OST just really compliments the game.
?t=5840
Missing some form of Battle Macabre.
Shadow as an affinity in general needs some buffs
The nerfs to the Dark culture was too much
They have the tomes that are the hardest to splash as well as some the the least useful
And their tree kind of falls off pass the magic origin trait
Materium could also use some sprucing up for their eaely tomes and their affinity tree
I find dark the easiest to play because frick stability, shock unit T1 is very useful, archer applying weakened is okay i guess. They also get plenty of research.
Thanks, but the superior AoW already exists. I genuinely don't feel any need to play any other AoW game since SM came out. AoW2 is fine, too, but SM has random map generator.
Fingerlicking so good. I can see a lot of potential for growth as well. They could just pump this thing with content. Feels a bit like a skeleton at the moment. Still enough there for a few hundred hours.
Utter shit, as usual, btw frick off and stop shilling this crappy game.
>Utter shit, as usual
Oh you silly goofy anon
>Gold Golem
>Stuns when it hits, stuns when it gets hit, tanks, damage dealer, earns me 360 gold average per battle.
Yeah I'm thinking based.
It's a T5 mythic unit, it better be good.
Can't take transformations or enchantments though, so you can't buff it as high as a good T4.
I thought it was a T4 mythic, is it T5?
It comes from a T4 tome, but it's a T5 unit. I think the only T4 mythic is the Astral one.
You can enchant it with the thing that makes it respawn on death.
>set undead realm
>set high infestation scaling/invasions
>get raped by Reaper spam
welp, learned never to do that again
also, allies/vassals need to be able to attack independently
Vassals send war parties occasionally, but they aren't enough to take a defended city. Allies seem to attack people plenty just fine in my game. They are just usually cautious of enemy giant stacks.
I'm not really talking about ruler wars(though they are pretty passive in invading along with me), but when an infestation is rimjobing their territory and they don't do shit about it
Oh. I tend to see them do them a ton early game, but then lategame they just stop giving a shi. They become too focused on their wars.
Its honestly pretty difficult to be sure which city an AI is going to try to siege, and due to the lengths of the siege you can probably lift it before the battle happens unless you are basically fricked. I 90% like the siege system but the one thing i will say is i wish fortifications had a minor economic benefit. They are only going to be useful very occasionally, so building them feels like setting yourself back for something you might not ever get use of. Or maybe instead of an economic benefit a minor "combat in domain" bonus.
I'm 99% sure one of my vassals is on 0 gold and there's a "vassals cant mismanage their economy that bad" rule or something. It has no units but the ones i gave it via rally and in 40 turns has not repaired a single ruined area.
>enchanted archipelago story map
>do literally nothing
>within the first 20 turns one of the friendly AI factions steamrolls Nimue
>by the time I was building my 3rd city they were already rampaging across her last city domain
I could have walked in there at like turn 30 and finished the map with my shitty unit spam but I just had to drag this on to turn 60.
The interesting thing is that they programmed the support AI factions to be unable to besiege the enemy throne city.
Do the Mystic Astral Echoes respawn or are there only a specific number per game?
Also tell me your israeli secrets, it's bullshit that i cant trade my mana for gold with other dudes, only the other way around.
You can trade it the other way around too but only if that AI is willing. If its not showing up it means that they are desperate for that resource and won't give you shit.
>Shrine of smiting kills 6 units in one attack
I was wondering how the hell the auto battle lost this battle jesus that thing is a horde deleter
>Dark is too weak guys
>Meanwhile im getting 300 mana and knowledge per turn from its crypt/prison buildings
Seems good to me
You can get the same and more by investing into astral affinity. Managing the soul economy is a pain in the ass, you generate frick all and there's never enough of them around.
To me, the undead economy does need a rebalance. If you get 2+ lost crypt wonders its basically easy, if you get none then soulwells just aren't enough. I only get around 80 souls per battle, i could get more but I'd have to use the "soulbind army" spell. Harvest population is alright but it shows up way too late to be useful.
Astral Affinity's "knowledge per magic material" bonus is just outright busted. Truly insane. Anyway you can have both astral AND the dark crypts, nothing is stopping you anon. I did shadow/Astral as my primary 2 this run and it worked really well, finally cleared mission 5.
It's still like 4 days since release, so everybody is still on the honeymoon period. Wait till they realize how all the strategy is gone, customization is toned down(despite the illusion of more customization) and that every playthrough end up the same and you'll realize how literally all the shills and moron here that says the game is good is downright moronic.
Oh and to all the newbie lurkers:This board is filled with Paracucks so not surprise you'll see morons clamoring for more bite-sized DLC.
>t-they'll turn on the game any second now!
im a newbie lurker and i read half of what you said and from what i can gather youre a troony
What strategy is gone? In what ways is customization toned down?
My experience so far is that every game has definitely not played the same except for maybe the very early game, once you get T3+ units the game feels like standard AoW
Nekron has finally attained the cosmic orb and will defeat Captain Athlan
I think Vessels of Chaos turned his skull red? No clue.
Speaking of undead. If there's one thing that sucks, its necromancers and bone golems. Early on its too hard to get the souls for either of those units. It also feels like necromancer's support skill should be on a cooldown, not OPB.
I'm looking for ways to generate potentially infinite mana income for each of my cities, to then convert 75% of that to all other yelds.
To do this, do i go:
>Astral (for the Echoes)
But do they respawn or are they set at mapgen and that's it?
>Dark (for the Crypts in any city)
Can i just suicide my own heroes to bolster my economy? Or are Crypts and their bonuses working only if i have enemy heroes inside? How many heroes can i have in a Crypt at most? Do heroes cost upkeep while in a prison/crypt?
Your own heroes do not count. However, you could invade a vassal, vassalize it, then declare war on it again once its heroes are back i think? If you fight the AI you should get lots of hero corpses anyway.
I feel like you are probably better off just making uses of mages guilds/conduits there are a lot of "special" conduits and you can build those anywhere so stack like 5 of the adjacency bonus having special conduits in a circle on each city.
As long as there's no cap on crypt...able enemy heroes and the AI can keep creating them i guess i'm good.
If Astral Echoes respawn however i'd be better on the long run with that i guess, depending on frequency.
The idea is "in THEORY you can scale your economy forever!" rather than efficiency, that's why i'm asking this in particular.
And given that mana can translate eventually to everything else, that's what i need to scale forever.
You can just raze over and over with chosen destroyers the AI will resettle cities they are not clever. Ez infinite.
tomes feel like there is no semblance of balance at all and i wish i could pick more tier 2 tomes instead of the tier 3 tomes which almost all suck ass
Can't you eventually get all the tomes, with enough affinity?
You can only get one T5 but after the T5 yeah you start just plowing through old tomes for more casting points and affinity. Honestly i think the lategame needs repeatable techs or something.
yes but im thinking about the early game
i thought the button is just to access the library for future planning
time to break the game completely then since i feel like the tomes past t2 are way weaker
You can do that, but on selection screen you have to click "show library" and select lower tier tomes from there. Not very intuitive, I would say.
>Can make stone LotR runic/stone dwarves
>Can make disciples snow dwarves
>Can make warhammer/AoS fiery beserker dwarves
>Can make D&D dark dwarves
>When the gunpowder expansion comes out, will be able to make warhammer chaos dwarves
Must feel good for dwarf fans
Any tips on the Chaldea mission? Judging from the fire and permanent state of war I need a build with fire resistance that can pump out units fast.
abuse the spell you are given to completely trivialize everyone except the last enemy
If you have the "chosen destroyers" unlocked, use that and raze shit constantly. If you don't, make sure to get at least 1 order affinity, that way any vassals you conquer can be kept happy with the "+300 relations on conquering a free city" so they won't dip below tributary and attack you again. You can't get their relation above tributary though.
Your whispering stones can be used on your own cities for extra stability, use that so the 1 you start with isn't doing nothing.
Take the racial for status resistance, the constant berserk is a pain in the ass so that racial will help a lot.
Use the Mind Thread spell and complete the quests to autokill like 3/5 of the enemies. Depending on your playstyle, you might want to go for the magic victory though so you don't have to travel accross the whole map whilst constantly at war. Adept Settlers is pretty good for more city cap, since you won't be able to get a lot out of vassals.
Pick industrial and make 10 scouts. That's it. Half the map is mountains so you now have infinite production, gold and items.
>a scout is 50 gold to produce
>each scout would basically need to prospect 2 mountains to double their profit
anon no
That mission each of my scouts prospected every turn since the map is a massive ring of mountains.
60 turn game each scouts earned about 1000 production, 1200 gold and 10 items.
That specific mission makes them broken.
like the first anon said, use the spell to do at least your two closest neighbors' quests, you can get them as heroes.
if you feel like berserk is really busting your balls, you can go for the tier IV order tome that turns you into angels. though that's probably way too late to help realistically
>Chaldea
lol fate/go reference!
More likely a biblical/historical reference, or a wordplay on caldera.
>Someone tries to siege my vassal
>Drop 5 castings of blessed reinforcements on them per turn
Lets see you siege that!
just finished my first game
it's fun, if they fix the bugs and add some more content it'll be a truly spectacular 4x
Do the first story realm, shouldn't take you long. Will unlock sundren for you.
I love the transformation system, it's great to see how your avatar and your people evolve over the course of the game
why yes, corruption and transformation are some of my favourite tags how could you tell?
Send some of your favorite works related to your favorite tags then
I'm at work, but here's a Ganker pic I have saved on my phone for some reason
>why yes, corruption and transformation are some of my favourite tags
Unimaginably based
I'm planning to go nature as my main affinity next run. Someone give me the low down on any nature tips they have, like "I found this unit really broken" or shit like that.
>Desert adaptation is a trait
>Can't make deserts
>Swamp adaptation exists
>Cant make swamps
Whyyy
another annoying thing ive ran into constantly is the ai grouping up their units on top of their city close to my borders and never actually attacking
im stuck in a stalemate where i cant go clear other parts of the map because they can siege my city if i leave but i also cant beat them in a straight fight so im stuck doing nothing
Players would do that to you too anon. The AI is actually in the same situation, its keeping its units there to guard its city because if it sends them elsewhere you will siege its city and it assumes as a player, you are very smart and can use your army well to beat it.
they had 5 stacks and i had 3 so id assume they would attack me with such an advantage but instead they just drained any will to play the game by sitting there doing nothing
Only 3 of their stacks can be in a single battle. The others are just reinforcements. If your stack is higher tier or has more enchantments, shit all they can do.
what they can do is make the game enjoyable by doing something instead of having me quit the realm because pressing end turn forever is not what i would consider gameplay
You being too shit to break the stalemate is not a fault of the game. You can't complain about bad AI when you're doing literally the same thing it is.
the ai is shit if the game is unfun to play end of story
give them cheats to have more armies to make them aggressive not this stalemate dogshit
There is no stalemate, you can attack them whenever you want, but you're too shit. Giving them more armies wouldn't solve the issue, because the issue is you. That said, you can always change the game like that yourself by increasing the difficulty if you want. You're clearly a shitter so I know you're not playing on brutal/v hard AI settings at the moment.
you cant choose brutal in the story realms you passive aggressive Black person
I'm not passive aggressive, just regular aggressive. Something you could learn from. Your whole issue is that you're too scared to attack the enemy, but you also possess such little self awareness that you can complain about the AI not attacking you in the same breath with a straight face.
AI is far too passive, even it was counting down towards my victory they tried attacking once and then started shuffling back towards their own empire
They definitely need to get more suicidal during the countdown. Like even if they don't kill your stack, they might weaken it enough the AI invaders win.
>evil empire of people who turned themselves into demons about to unleash the Age of Chaos
>sky turns red
>walk right up to their borders
>"my feet hurt, lets go home" - AoW4 AI
Diplomatically, the AI works. It will break off its defensive pacts with you and declare war on you as soon as it can. Its just still playing the "long game" in terms of combat when that no longer makes sense.
Your picture is relevant.
>5th story mission
>Play as wood elf OC.
>Start next to another wood elf
>We buddy up right away
>Take out Melinis undead elves
>Both fighting Arachne together
>Meandor starts the age of darkness
>Wood elf ally immediately allies Meandor and declares war on me to try and be a part of his victory
I mean I RP'd it as him being a dark elf plant all along and betraying me, but goddam game. That's AI that's too smart and goes for the easiest win which ends up looking dumb.
have you tried using universal camouflage to set up ambushes?
tfw I fought an enemy ai with forest camo and for my entire campaign against them I became terrfied of trees.
I would have definitely gone full flamelord and burnt down everything.
Alright how do i cheat and unlock the entire pantheon in one fell swoop?
Use cheat engine to give yourself infinite points.
Man the map generation is great. This map felt great. I was the top left green and the end goal was to make my way to bottom right.
Huh, I just realised there's no choices in the campaign this time around. I like being able to play my own faction, but that's a bit of a shame. Choosing which paths you were gonna take was great in all the previous games, but I guess it sort of makes sense because the choices usually lead to which race/class you were going to play as or against.
There are sorta some. In the first mission you can tell sundren to frick off and go kill her. You get to see a glimpse of the kind of person she is.
I believe you can choose whether to ally or to kill nearly everyone on the eternal court map too, but arachne hates you and meandor is burnt out on undead drugs.
its funny i'm raiding this free city's tiles with 1 spider scout unit and they don't sally out of their city to stop me.
Just finished the story realms, what are the "fun" non-story realms ? Tried the demon prince one and got instant cancer (no army regen outside of your domain and 95% of desolation terrain lmao)
Do people actually use alternative victory conditions to domination in strategy games like aow?
Combat is at least 1/3rd of these strategy games (and things like civ) so going for research victories or points just feels like turtling and building a base while mostly ignoring AI (except for maybe trade)
most people dont go for any victory condition after they reach a point where they feel like they cant lose anymore and just stop playing
But isn’t that from having overwhelming force or map control?
Like i wouldn’t imagine people go “oh only 15 more turns until i win from diplomacy/research victory, new game time”
>having overwhelming force or map control
yes but in most 4x games you lose right at the start or never lose so once you stabilise the starting area and get some proper units going the game gets boring
non conquest victory usually only matters if you play a huge map and want to see the victory screen
Really? I always thought military was just a cheesy way to win. Frick doing the objectives ill just knock everyone else out of the race.
I guess that is a way of looking at it. But you have to be ready for the AI to blindside you. I’ve definitely been screwed by going to war with one faction and then when i’m close to beating them 2 others declare war on me and rush my base.
Maybe i’m just going for other victory conditions wrong. Such as victories in games where you just need to build a specific wonder. From what i remember it felt like a lot of dumping as much as you can into economy and hoping no one forces you to make units
In theory, if you go for a special victory and all the enemy factions combined are incapable of stopping you it means you had the power to crush them all anyway. Going out and actually crushing them all one by one is just a whole lot of busy work after the first couple.
I always quit strategy games long before a world conquest, because when you're the clearly dominant power the game is already won. Alternative victories (when they're done right) are just a formality that make it more satisfying in singleplayer, or less disputable in multiplayer.
Why does spawnkin only affect your height and not limb length, looks so fricking goofy. Also it sucks that it's a better option than the growth one, I hate having midget races.
The tome of the hoard is just OP in general. It's perfectly synergistic with itself and it's bonuses are higher than average.
God damn, Planetfall is so fricking ugly. Like, what were they thinking, all the previous AOW games were beautiful.
Sci-fi setting that tried so hard to be unique and different it looped back to being generic.
100% a testbed for new stuff they couldn't risk killing AoW for, like that shitty tech tree, and the upgrade system that totally obliterated unit readability. Neither returned, thank God.
compared to aow3 everything in Planetfall was better besides the world setting and weird teal color tint which pisses me off everytime i try to play it
>weird teal color tint
I take that over obsidian's obession with yellow color tint
I think the unit upgrades in planetfall are fricking brilliant. It's expected that a science fiction 4x will allow you to customize your unit roster, but the usual method of doing it reduces all the units to spreadsheets and removes any reason to build any unit other than the mathematically optimal one. Planetfall's system lets you have the advantages of truly diverse unit rosters with meaningfully different abilities and weaknesses as well as the fun of customizing the army to fit your preferences and strategic needs.
It's good but I've completely ruined my taste playing AoW3 with several huge mods that all add a bunch of shit, I'm used to my games having thousands of different units now and everything else feels like it's missing something, my latest AoW 3 run has around 30 active mods, I'm sure we'll get the same here given enough time tho
Why are strategic spells so fricking weak and worthless? I still haven't found a strategic spell worth using on an enemy army. Woah -5 morale for one turn? Amazing. 20 damage that gets affected by resistances? Woah that's like 15% health of a tier 1 unit, really appreciate making a wizard king for this.
>he doesn’t know how to use condemn on entire enemy armies
ngmi
There's a dark spell that makes all enemy units have a 90% chance to get stunned for 2 turns.
It completely turned the tide for me multiple times.
Ritual of Somnia i think it's called, but it's tier IV.
I think what you're trying to say is "why are low tier spells weak"?
Also the lowly Tier II Burden of Guilt reduces an enemy army’s movement by 50%. Great spell for keeping the AI pinned ; if just one of their armies can’t reach you then they’ll often choose to just castle.
A lot of low tier army spells are still pretty good because while not doing a lot of damage they usually lower enemy resistances or give them a debuff or something.
in the endgame with your affinity improvements built you can also spam those low tier anti-army spells
last game i basically deleted half of three stacks by spamming blizzard repeatedly
it was only 18 mana 18 casting points
and i had almost 2000mana and 320 casting points.
anyway don't cast the affinity spell too close to the endgame, i did it only for fun hoping to get a score victory.
i had first place in territory, armies and magic and ended up in fourth place
the AI all got allied together and skyrocketed in the diplomatic score while mine tanked brutally.
is it just me or the score table is kind of hard to understand?
Tome of the Horde is so loaded for a Level 1 Tome.
Battle seeker training for +20% damage
Spawnkin for +20%
You can summon your level 1 dudes to double your production.
Run Feudal and now you get another +20% damage and your tier 1 guys evolve.
All right from the start goddamn.
You don't really want those guys to evolve though because then they lose the extra damage. Defenders are okay, but aren't amazing.
Mob Camp is a decent source of early game econ though and you didn't mention that, more draft, less gold per unit. Really lets you crank em out. Houndmaster is okay if you use tome of beasts.
>the AI insults you once
>you gain enough grievance to declare a justified war on them
kek
talk shit get hit
The whole insult someone to have them be encouraged to start a justified war against you worked much better in planetfall where having a justified war didn't hand your opponent a fat stack of the most valuable resource in the game (imperium).
>Triumph says that there is no story campaign in marketing
>There actually is one in game
Turns out you have to personally defeat (or ally) the pretenders for it to count in the Fallen Kingdom scenario... if they get defeated by another AI it's reload time
literally says WHOEVER DEFEATS THEM WINS
you may want to read every other special realm condition too anon
nta and I see how that can be lame
>kill two of the yuge ais with their advanced starts
>someone kills the third
>could have just been finishing them off after you did the hard work taking out their army
>no win for you XD
What's the best way to play aggressive and conquest without being super evil? While it's technically more productive to vassalize cities rather than raise after defeating an enemy... they sometimes are in the way and I want to remove them (such as if there's a wonder in their territory) but I don't like incurring the -20(?) alignment shift (I need that alignment to declare wars and things)
TL;DR: how do I stay good/neutral so I can be evil in war
make a strong stack which makes neutral guards try to run away and let them run for +5 every time
this is dogshit compared to getting xp but the only real way to do it
How come Yaka gets statues in all of his provinces.
Also champion give +20 stability
Yeah it means non darks can mostly ignore stab tiill lategame, whilst high and faith tomes can reap the benefits.
>pick high culture
>do every evil deed imaginable because im too lazy to manually buff awakening every fight
Fricking excuse me. The 5th story map is kind of wild. Not really sure how I'm supposed to deal with that this early.
>turn 47
>early
Do you not understand the difference between "early" and "this early"? It's the mid game sure, but that's still a lot of 6 stacks and a tier 5 unit.
I had a lot of trouble with that map as well, but I finally beat it by basically playing super defensively until I had 4 decent stacks of my own. Settle up to your city cap asap but DO NOT settle in the direction of the enemy (i.e. the outside of the map) and DO NOT conquer or vassalize any of the cities in that direction. Settle in the ddirection of your allies. This doesn't completely stop invasions, but it'll slow them down to a manageable trickle instead of a constant flood. Then once you have your 4 decent stacks, keep one of them at home as protecion, and send the other three to attack enemy cities one by one. Never let them get separated because the AI loves to mob lone stacks, but as long as you keep them together you should be able to handle anything the enemy throws at you and just go from city to city fricking shit up.
Also, I would strongly recommend a Nature build for this map. Nature has good sources of Blight damage which all of the angels are weak against, so it works great. They're also weak to Cold damage so you could get some of that, but a full Shadow build is a bad idea because necromancy really sucks on a map where everything deals Spirit damage. In my winning game I used an archery-focused build with Tome of Roots and Tome of Cycles for bonus Blight damage.
>DO NOT settle in the direction of the enemy (i.e. the outside of the map) and DO NOT conquer or vassalize any of the cities in that direction
Aha woops. I think I might actually be ok though. I've scrabbled together 3 more stacks and the AI is doing some fricking shit and won't commit to sieging any of my cities.
Yeah if you can handle their doomstacks it's not a big deal, but it seems that owning any cities too close to them is what triggers them sending in the doomstacks. If you stay away far enough they rarely bother you.
I won on the map as full necromancy. Its fine if you get 2+ lost tomb wonders so you can turn the 500 heroes they send at you into so many souls you just outsummon them.
>Don't restart to get a better start
>Scrap together 5 stacks and push on
>Every 10 turns Have to face 4-5 stacks of suped up T3-T5 angel units with flying leaders that 1 hit all of my units then get a 2nd turn and kill another
>Keep pushing
>Keep summoning
>Keep spamming magic
>Siege is going to take 10 turns
>Have to do 3 defenses while sieging
>In the end have to do the siege with just 2 stacks
Goddam that was fun. I forgot that 4x is at its best when you don't reload every mistake and roll with the punches.
Frick that was insane
how to build necro?
Should you build your city on a province with resource like Gold Mine, Pastures or Haste Berries or is it better to later claim them by expanding city?
Always this same fricking question with every 4x
depends on what you want from the city and which special buildings you have
special buildings can be placed on any shit tile so for example if you have no conduit locations you can use a special conduit building anywhere to get access to buildings that require a conduit
if i have no research outpost or conduit locations near the city i will not settle it on top of one of the resources that allow me to build those but otherwise doesnt matter
You have outposts for some reason.
name???
I've wanted a Stellaris-type fantasy game for a while but it saddens me they had to do it with Age of Wonders. While it's true that in previous game each race was kinda generic they all had unique units that were staples in their roster, like halfling eagle riders, goblin blow darters/bombers/scarab riders, frostling ice witches/mammoth riders... Now there's none of that. The game lost a bit of the its soul with the faction creation system.
Plus, the racial traits feel too shallow. I think there should be a third, non modifiable racial trait for each race giving them some uniqueness, or at least the existing traits should have some disadvantages to them instead of all being positives.
Any tips for story realm 3 on hard?
I realize I got carried hard by my vassals in realm 2 and that I actually suck at the game if no vassals allowed.
It's chaos world?
Don't reveal opponents (and free cities) early, kill them one by one.
pick industrial culture and shit out scouts
the entire map is surrounded by a 4 sector thick mountain range so you can completely break the economy with scout prospecting
-Focus on the quest missions and don’t reveal yourself too quickly - I went in a clockwise circle. The enemy lords have some crazy gear, so it’s not advised to face them directly.
-You can give yourself more building room by using Earth Shatter in the Tome of Terramancy ; also terraforming the land helps immensely near the caldera.
-Take traits and racial transformations for status resistance. Free city races can also can have major traits and transformations already on them to make the berserk trivial.
I tried pushing up aggressively to outpost but quickly realized my mistake.
>be feudal
>setup army
>defender front
>pikemen flanks
>bannerman center
>archers flank back
>everything boosting each other fine
>clear for a while
>suddenly pikemen turn into defenders
Why? Pikemen and defenders are the opposite kind of unit. And the defenders you get are neither cheaper in maintenance nor have any experience to start out with, it's just worse.
Also why can't I give my hero a bow? Let me at least craft some basic equipment.
What causes hero to die instead of getting imprisoned? Is this just an RNG check, or is there a way to intentionally imprison enemy hero?
so what exactly happens if you lose population?
city borders don't shrink, so do improvements stop working? or do you take a hit to production and draft?
I encountered a bug wherein my archer's unit icon became a zoomed in image of a halfling foot.
It's present in my game as well.
Me too. In my game and I also saw it in some youtube gameplay. Seems to be common bug. I don't know why they didn't fix it.
same happened with my feudal human archers
>foot
Is it just me or the wonder variety is extremely shallow?
There are like 4 extra units combined among all silver and bronze wonders.
The blessed/corrupted soul, Ogres and snakes.
Oh and pixies.
Wonders are very weak and dont change how you play yeah.
Does anyone feel like the game is too easy?
I am playing on hard, around 80 turns in, and I am steamrolling the map.
the ai is too passive
most realms were over in 40 turns so i dont know how the ai behaves later
Yeah, for sure. I never got one of my cities attacked once.
You can try realms with advanced AI starts.
In 80 turns you can win game by magicvictory.
I can't tolerate to play much of it the way it is now which is bad, but what I can tolerate is creative, new and overall kind of ok even as is. I'll play it every now and then for a long time and may yet remember the game fondly one day.
>today I will play with respawning infestations
free exp
rip
>zombie units
>respawning infestations
>large number natural ones
>lots of ruined cities
If they do this right the realm editor will be blessed by offering more control to editing scenarios for users. Though I think the game needs more unit variety.
Any way to speed up AI turns?
I play with max players, is reducing their numbers the only way?
AI moves units between stacks which leads to long turn times. So the same stack ends up moving 3 times.
Simultaneous turns? Just remember to manually save at the end of each turn since manually saving at the start of one would have all the other players already acted.
press rmb every time a unit moves
Don't look at them. No seriously. If you move camera away to the side of the map the turn goes quicker.
this. even with force fast animation on, the sped up animation will still play if their units are in view. if you aren't looking at them, they just teleport to their destination
Zooming out as far as possible let's you look at AI movement while also speeding up the end turn, as there are no animations you just see their banners moving around
What the... gotta try that, definetly.
It's pretty great as far as 4x games at launch go. I already have like 40 hours and finished multiple games (My playtime for planetfall is 37 hours total).
Most of my complaints are pretty much typical launch shit that's probably going to be fixed with mods and dlc. Like, there needs to be way more loot and quests. I wish the hero units got more flashy shit. The pantheon system has potential but I wish they went all out with it. Like, as your level gets higher unlock more fricked up worlds but also let me bring in shit I normally wouldn't be able to have (like starting with racial transformations or bringing in old heroes). They way they advertised it I thought it was going to be like planet fall.
What kind of mods can be integrated?
More cultures
More backgrounds?
More tomes??
More models???
Bigger breasts.
More skimpy outfits.
More tomes is the easiest
The devs even made some trial mods showing that making tomes is very much possible
More tomes isn't so much the issue, its making different tomes work together. Generslly you just pick the same affinity tomes since they work so well while having little reason to diversify.
UI mods
Apparently you can just ignore the objective and do your own thing in story maps
I just couldn't take any of the AI's cities because they had like 30 stacks running around and since the map doesn't allow alliances, nobody came after me lol.
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i posted my first campaign experience in the previous thread if anybody cares to read it.
>Finally finished my first campaign in custom frozen shithole of a realm with blizzards everywhere so no regeneration for anyone
>I played as Cannibalistic Barbarian Snow Elves. I was opportunistic so ended game as Evil
>For a change of atmosphere I decided to make my next campaign in some Desert Realm and where I will be purely good
>I got the idea for some Generica Badlands style campaign
>Twist is that trope about Orcs who dindu nuffin (at least mine)
>Main enemy will be High Humans, with tome of Order but with both traits for evil. Shrek style Prince will be leading them.
>I made all other factions either Orcs or Goblins. Uruks - industrious and grey, lotr inspired. Generic green Orc Barbarians. Some smaller White Orcs with Dark culture and with Tome of Horde. Hobgoblins as large goblins with more human like skin. Goblin spider riders and Feudal Orcs too. And for the sake of variety added those premade hedonistic elves so there is more evil in the world
>Chose Realm trait to make City States like conquest and for a lot of Ogres and Trolls to spawn too. I wanted also that trait that makes City states bigger, but those two combined made it impossible to increase allegiance with cities
>I will be playing as some exiled girl from this Human nation trying to fix Greenskins and then take down Prince Charming. My faction are red-skinned High Orcs starting with tome of Order and mana addicts.
>Since first campaign was easy I put everyone on Hard, except for Prince who is Very Hard. The idea is for him to be the strongest and ultimate main villain to take down. I disabled all other victory conditions other than Conquest
>I start playing and it's pretty atmospheric and cool for some time
>Suddenly I discover Human city state, and of course, Prince next to me
>Fugg, I wanted for me to be surrounded by Orcs and for him to be far away
>Soon after he starts simping, instead of being hostile
I did not expect this outcome
I read it
damn anon he's down bad for your princess
but that's not quite so anticlimactic
you can roleplay playing friendly as buying time and ammassing power trying to challenge his rule of evil and liberate the humans under him.
he's still going to be the ultimate challenge but it's up to you when to make it happen
in war sides switch quite easily and betrayal is just beyond the corner
I can fix him
He looks like jerma
He sure wants that chocolate huh?
>That tummy
The strategic map soundtrack gives me massive Civilization V vibes
There has to be an expansion that will make underground not completely pointless right?
>if you dont control the underground
>gobbos attack
What tome or specific spell is your favorite so far? Which tome or spell you found disappointing?
I only played like two games, but I like tome Tome of Artificing. +30% Critical Hit chance to all non-magic units is nice. Bolt repeaters feel so good during siege. Siege magic makes sieges shorter, as well as iron golems, which are pretty good tanky units (unless your opponent got lighting damage). I also liked Tome of Subjugation with its tyrant knights, intimidation aura and final ultimatum, which I think might be the only spell in the game that lets you permanently take control of enemy unit, but I might missing something. I wonder if with a proper build focusing on lowering morale you could use it in the middle of the battle instead of at the end when all enemy units are routing.
And for specific spells I meteor arrows from Tome of the Crucible. Archers with aoe attack are great and there is no friendly fire as I feared.
From the disappointing ones, I have to pick devastator spheres from Tome of Devastation. They're just so slow. It takes three turn for them to roll to walls. I don't get what's the point of destroying walls with them if you can just use that one siege project that does it. Maybe if they finally get to enemy units they deal a lot of damage. I don't know, I didn't have occasion to check it, but they replace bolt repeaters and I like them more just for the fact they can damage opponent in the first turn.
>3rd one was left borked
>4th one is the same
Coding quality is garbage almost in every fricking industry, but I'm still buthurt about it.
And I will complain about it in every thread too.
And it will change nothing.
Baah.
I tried it and didn't like it
after 30 hours it just started crashing randomly
updated my drivers, the hotfix branch made it worse
shit's fricked
Yeah this is unplayable, I'm crashing every turn now.
I'm not coming back here until they fix this shit and I seriously doubt they will.
I'm so tired of games being completely fricking broken on release.
Eternal court is crazy map.
In my capital was 16 research posts.
based tummy enjoyers, more anons should be posting their waifus
here, just wish there was a way to increase boob size to be honest
Is there a way to start the game as an undead hero?
there are visual options that make your faction leader (and maybe regular heroes too) kook undead, ghostly or otherwise inhuman, but to get undead tag you need the major transformation spell
I don't think so, but don't let that stop you from achieving Lichdom
Is it me or are the unit icons way too fricking huge? They cover up a lot of space
Managed to beat the T5 demon prince map.
I realized that cave start can just pop an outpost in the overworld turn 1 and expand quite fast.
I wish you could dig bedrock with the spell that flatten mountains tho
Yea, caves need some overhaul - having the river paths next to lava is a bit absurd. And earth spells should definitely be able to terraform down there
Is there a way to lower the game's resolution? I want to run it in windowed mode but I don't see any resolution options in the menu.
Just booted it up for the first time, fiddled around for about 2 hours. Quick thoughts
>graphics are nice but the ui is cluttered at times. I was hovering over an encyclopedia term which opened a popup explanatory page that also had another term right under the initial mouse position and opening another popup for it too
>movement feels a bit clunky or unresponsive at times
>good amount of races amd I love the option to create a new one. Have knly tried one, I hope there are tangible differences between them other than a reskin. Great potential for mods here
>town management is your basic civ/warhammer total war like experience, overall is good and has lots of building options
>diplomacy is lackluster. Specifically the fact that there's like 3 different levels of vassalage until you can annex but all they do is provide a slightly bigger +% bonus from tier to tier
>combat seems alright, again it is executed well but nothing innovative
>I HATE that armies can only be made of 6 units. In heroes you had like 9 but they were all different unit types so there was variation, here it is just 6 units which is not enough. Also makes it prone to abuse building 5 of <insert strongest unit> + hero and winning everything - heroes mitigated it somewhat by having unit growth numbers which this game doesn't
>magic system seems pretty in depth, i like it. There's also a nice inventory menu and plenty of research options
>the most uninspired story of all time. Looks like the kind of game you just play custom map skirmishes vs ai, there barely is any story here
Ocerall I am happy with it. It has everything that makes a 4x strategy game good but also does not really excel at anything and also doesn't bring anything new to the table. However the gameplay is fun, could see myself pouring 40hrs in it. It all depends on how different the factions feel, I hope this is an area the devs will expand upon.
What are some way to permanently mind control units besides the spell Final Ultimatum?
How are people using heavy cavalry type units?
I'm finding their big single hit doesn't kill on the charge and then they get stuck in melee with one attack and no charge bonus from there.
Anyone used them successfully?
>single hit doesn't kill on the charge
you can use other units too, you know
especially when you just removed their defence mode and retaliation...
You use them to engage or flank.
really homie you don't know what cavalry are supposed to charge the flanks?
Astral is so goddamn powerful in battles. I was struggling getting an economy going but then when it came to the battles. I can just sit back and bombard them with summons and spells and reliably win pretty much any fight. Feels proper wizard.
I'm a little bummed you're kind of punished for playing tall/one city only but I did find out that as long as you don't have the "can't found new cities" restriction you can make cities and then just release them as vassals and that's pretty cool.
Am I missing something, or is it literally impossible to enter an underground passage if an enemy unit is blocking it?
I'm thinking of plugging the couple of entrances to my underground base and forgetting the rest of the world exists. I can build the victory condition and frick the surfacers over without even bothering to fight them if this works.
Yeah I think so. You'd need to plug every entrance though and your economy is gonna be stinky doodoo compared to the surface dwellers who might just magic victory before you do.
Damn, going underground might genuinely be strong then. I'm already the most powerful faction, just thinking about the best way to defend while going for the victory.
I've been plugging the entrances for ages with just single T1 units on each one for a while now, it has definitely prevented neutrals from coming through and the cost is negligible. If it works on hostiles too I've won for sure.
You'll still have to defend against the spawn armies, but you should be fine.
I wish there were more shadow tomes. I want to be an edgelord with the tome of the doomherald/oblivion but with my current build I'd need to grab 1 more shadow affinity somehow to get oblivion and I don't feel like splashing necro/cryomancy is worth it
The game could definitely use some more variety, right now you basically have a "main" tome theme and then a side tome that constantly changes, unless your nature affinity which is constantly plants and animals.
>surround enemy
>he takes 4 attacks just so he can walk to my archer to finish him off
>then he dies
oh, so it's this kind of game huh
alt+f4
uninstall.exe
I cannot tolerate game where attacks of opportunity are completely meaningless and the AI will just eat them so they can kill your guys. Why even have ranged units and frontline guys if every enemy will completely ignore your frontline to rush your ranged?
Sounds like a skill issue tbh
If 4 melee units literally surrounding an enemy isn't enough to lock down that enemy (and the enemy doesn't have any special skill to teleport or stuff like that), then that is a gameplay issue not a skill issue.
If you know he can get out, why is your archer somewhere he can be hit unless you can reliably get off a kill? Sounds like a skill issue.
>If you know he can get out
No, I did not know that attacks of opportunity are worthless in this game until now. That is a gameplay problem.
Even if I had not lost any unit, seen an enemy unit literally just walk out of a surround so they can do what they want is moronic.
>I did not know
Well now you do and you can use that information to avoid skill issues. Imagine thinking you should succeed on the first try at everything you do.
Me knowing that there's a gameplay issue doesn't suddenly make it not a gameplay issue.
Attacks of opportunity being worthless is bad game design.
Except they aren't you just don't know how to make use of them. Don't worry, you'll get there. I have faith you're not a quitter.
If they can't stop an enemy from walking out of a 4 unit surround they are garbage.
Also passive aggressive insults aren't arguments, and you're not a woman so stop posting like one.
Just because attacks of opportunity don't work the way you want them to, doesn't mean the gameplay has an issue. Ranged is very strong in this game. If you could stop melee units dead, it'd be a cakewalk. The game works different to what you are used to, get over it.
Maybe they should balance ranged in a way that doesn't require making attacks of opportunity garbage like this.
Or you could just get used to it and not need to have every game play the same way.
This shit makes battles feel awful to play. Makes melee tank units worthless.
Melee tanks cannot reliably do damage with retaliation attacks unless they're being attacked themselves and have multiple of them. They're good for blocking areas and buffing nearby unit's defense, as well as surviving hits themselves. If you want to explicitly use attacks of opportunity to kill people then take the racial ability for it next time. Also melee tanks usually have useful crowd control abilities too.
There's zero reason to ever put tanks in your army if they can't hold the enemy down. If an enemy can just walk away after being engaged by a tank, why the frick did you even bring the tank in the first place?
Just from my brief time with the game, the shield units all have some kind of crowd control like a taunt or a stun.
If they do that works but the shield units I saw so far haf just aoe buffs that encourage you to bunch up so the ai hits you with aoe spells.
Right yeah, high is kinda weak in that regard. With high archers though you can sometimes just kill them before they even get to you.
What culture has tankd that can actually hold the enemy? If the problem is high cultures i might just abandon them forever
If you need a tank, just do a quick dip into the Tier 2 Tome of Artificing for the Iron Golem.
High is amazing as an all-rounder, but is about setup and momentum.
But if you're deadset on tanking, just play industrial - they have arguably the best Tier 1 tank in the game with that damn taunt. And it's easy to get them to insane levels of innate physical resist
Ok, I'm just gonna not use any tanks that don't have cc or taunt. Those units might as well not exist.
Also ob another note how did they not learn from the kirko bugs from planetfall that bufs that encourage grouping up are bad
From what I've seen, High seems to be about trading. Have a lot of heals, sustain and buffs. So they just take the hits to the face and hope they deal more damage back. The tactics seems to be in your set up and spell order. You definitely want Industrious from the sound of it. I really enjoyed playing them as a slow tanky formation.
Barb T1 shield has shield bash which stuns and Mystic T2 shield has aoe stun and Industrious T1 shield has taunt. Also if you have something that you consider as a weakness in your culture, you can supplement it with culture spell or get a tome. Dark's base tome has a slow. Tome of warding has static shield which can stun people that attack your units. Tome of roots has vine prison. Cryomancy has slows, etc. There's plenty of early was for some basic crowd control.
>unit in defensive stance
>pins enemies who enter its hex stopping movement
>enter
Enter, not exit.
It still protects your ranged units generally. The whole point of polearms is they get bonus attacks on defensive. You can move them up and put in defensive with ranged units behind them and the enemy will have to wrap around to hit.
>they/them
How to deal with units that use steadfast? Any way to dispel it, or a workaround?
the assassination skill for your heroes can just kill steadfast heroes directly based on hp which is 99% probability if they're down to 1hp.
otherwise just block them with a shield unit in defense mode for the two turns it takes them to die.
It’s got a very solid basic skeleton.
Player character is great.
Game dynamics seem good.
Game readability is good.
Seems accessible enough for even those who haven’t played 4x.
Pretty solid for the most part.
The issues:
Mainly the map. Which is weird to say because it’s a fairly good looking game map.
But I think it’s still weak in some respects.
Underground seems very underdeveloped. (No pun intended)
The city expansions all look the same.
Make a farm on grassland, it looks the same in desert, snow, even underground.
Maybe you could argue readability, but I think they need to be a bit more unique.
Yeah that's all fair I think. They've made a great foundation, now they could work of it for a few years to make an amazing game. They probably won't though. It's usually just 4 expansions and done with Triumph. Still that should add enough. I played a lot of Planetfall at release and then came back to it about a month ago and it felt like there was a lot more than I remembered.
What exactly is the penalty on surpassing the city cap? It says economic but I'm over the cap now and it definitely feels like having more cities out paces whatever this penalty happens to be.
Iirc -25% to all income for each city above the limit. You can check it in the library under "city cap".
How do you use outposts effectively? Mostly I've been only building them whenever I want them to become a city eventually. Leaving them just as an outpost doesn't seem to be worth it, because you are paying an upkeep.
Yeah I'm the same. I guess you can use them to cuck other people, but I always forget they exist once I hit city limit and then I usually only increase my limit to conquer other cities.
I used them on the caldera story map so I could have teleporters reinforce me instead of having to walk around the lava pool.
grabbing a far off wonder or magic material, I guess
Putting them down to secure resources is more than worth the upkeep.
I started to put them next to every resource I need and which is in danger of getting captured by enemy. I then put Outpost wherever there is the best place for a city, ecen if its close to another. I upgrade this optimal Outpost into a city and then release it as a vassal, unless I need to govern it myself for some reason. Once city grows large enough that it can claim this resource, I delete unnecessary Outpost
There doesn't seem to be any downside to having vassals, only upsides. They can defend themselves on their own, pay me in mana, resources and money, expand without me spending any money on them etc. I can even get access to units I otherwise don't have through this rally mechanic. There are many techs and traits to improve them and gain additional bonsuses as well. I just got a spells that gives me +5 Imperium for every vassal. At this rate I will reach singularity lol
How the frick do you get Artica in your clubhouse for the achievement? All the other leaders join you through the story maps, but not her. Also beating her unlockable scenario doens't seem to make her join you.
She's already playable right? So surely just winning as her on any map would put her in your pantheon.
Oh jeez, it can't be that easy can it?
I think it might be. Also I hope they add more unique loreful leaders. Yaka looks fricking great. Nimue as well. They put a lot of effort in their designs.
>it really was that easy
>Kick all these Black folk out of my pantheon because I dont accept losers
>Didn't realize there was an achievement behind it
the real loser was me all along
You can get them by winning a quick match as them.
And you can win by fighting a 1v1 and immediately starting a war with the other guy and surrendering becoming their vassal.
When I trade with a Free City for a city-specific resource like production, which city does it go to?
>edgy horse mounts
>rainbow horse mounts
Pegasus mounts when?
>Angels on pegasi
We have to go deeper.
>Halfling with wings on giant eagle on pegasus on griffin on wyvern on dragon.
I'm sure you could throw a winged centaur and pony in there too somewhere.Seriously though, it'd be cool, winged horses always felt like a proper "hero" mount.
Starting with flight may be a bit much, but I really hope they can change the transformations that give you wings so that they give them to your mounts as well.
Perhaps, but they could also just be a mount you find, a transformation like you say or some other upgrade you get along the way.
Wasn't that a thing for the Wyverns in 3? I forget.
>materium got the only 4 tier caster
kek
Unfortunately its tier Tier 5 is rubbish for what you need it to do if you actually reach that point
I find the "hurt everyone on the battlefield" spell to be fine and summon titan is okay too. Nature gets literally 3 researches in t5 what the frick
Only battle mage. Horned God is a caster mythic and Druid of the Cycle is a T4 support. Honestly i want to like the transmuter but it just doesn't seem great.
Fricking demon guy on the demon prince realm is sending ten warbreeds at me. The rest of the stack is t1-2 units but ten warbreeds is a huge pain. People gush over the tyrant knight but the warbreed seems flat better to me.
>Enemy has supergrowth +1 retaliatoin attack
>Its a cavalry or other unit with a opt attack
>Has racial trait for extra retaliation damage
They literally hit for 280% on hitting back compared to hitting you on their turn frick
I find I almost never bother hitting enemies from the front in this game. Flanks or defensive stance.
That strategy works well for some builds, others can afford to be the one who frontal attacks. Especially if you take the +6 vs retaliation racial trait.
I don't know if you guys have noticed, but this screenshot shows 2 different races, draconians (aow2) and long extinct lizardmen (aow1)
Are you sure it isn't just a different head type available?
But yeah thats weird, i figured draconians would be a transformation. Like you get horns, scales etc when you cast it to become half dragon, and lizardmen+draconian transformation would be the "old" draconians.
You can't choose head types for your race, so it's possible, but they all follow a general shape which is completely different from the hero. It's still totally possible though. I'm just keen for lizardman though. Only animal race I like in fantasy.
that would be really against the lore, as draconians are NOT lizardmen in any sense, and in the corner it says lizardfolk. so I believe the race is lizardfolk(lizardmen) but the wizard king visuals are of draconian (their skulls are totally different, lizardfolk are more like humanoid crocos)
Well, they're Lizardmen, not Crocodile men. They're simply giving different types of reptilian heads to choose from instead of just crocs, and some lizards have horns as well so it's not that far-fetched. Just because the leader is a wizard doesn't mean he can't be of the same race, and his body looks exactly the same as the dudes behind him.
I still strongly believe that Lizardmen will be a race and Draconians a transformation. It fits best with the DLC's description which mentions only one "reptilian form" unlike the Primal Fury DLC which explicitly list "forms" as a plural, and "use draconic magic to evolve your people into dragon hybrids" is an obvious reference to Draconians.
It's possible I'm wrong, but the evidence doesn't point that way.
Yeah I think the horns are just a head variation or maybe a "hairstyle" option for lizards. The regular troops in the back don't have them.
>The regular troops in the back don't have them
I agree that it probably is a hairstyle, but
>wizard king
>physical form slider
maybe not the same race
When is dlc releasing anyway? This lizard/Dragon dlc seems mostly done and like a cut content and I want it in-game already
they say q3, so autumn I guess
According to this, we get one DLC every quarter.
>Empires & Ashes not releasing in the Fall
>Dragon Dawn not releasing in the Summer
Its so over bros, they fricked up entire color scheme
How the FRICK do I stop AI's from obsessively forward settling me.
I'm trying to play good here but if an outpost drops within 6 tiles of my capital genocide commences.
You don't. Also if they do that, you get a justified war so its not evil.
Become a Russian. Submit to paranoia and strike first before they strike. Build outposts on their land first.
This but unironically, AI wont care about distant claims but will think a bit more carefully about close claims. An outpost can give you a real claim.
>be dark but pure good human
>meet and greet elven queen
>4 turns later asks me for wiz bond
>a few turns later she asks me open borders
>10 turns later demands an alliance with me
>a few more turns later there are many many elven cities around my base
>now i'm getting non-stop events with elven refugees wanting to live to my empire because i treat my people very well
>can't turn them away cuz that's evil
umm...guys should i be worried that my kids and grandkids will have pointy ears?
Depends. Can your species interbreed or not? You created them, you should know.
they are human so ofc they can
Depends if we get adult mods
Lithyl porn when?
>it's just Sundren in disguise
Worst twist ever.
I like the way they foreshadow it a little bit if you let her die on eternal court or kill her in act 1.
Also if you reunite her with the ghost of her father in mission 4 she'll be like "Yes father I will save the world... No matter the cost!" which kinda foreshadows that she's going to do some shady stuff.
WAT. Frick I shouldn't have requested porn before I finished this campaign. I was interested to find out what her deal was. I do kind of like that they are using characters from the previous games still even though the setting is wildly different.
Generally speaking the justification for the old characters is that Athla was full of powerful ass dudes, so most wizard kings are from Athla. Other realms are weak b***h ass realms for which a single athlan wizard is an existential crisis.
I'm very keen for Punished Edward to come back in the Dreadnought expansion. He didn't die in AoW3 right? I never fiinshed the stories in that game.
Sorry anon he sacrificed himself for elven pussy.
Probably
I don't remember, AOW3 was boring to me.
He didn't die but the AoW4 story mentions the old empires were destroyed when the wizard kings came back. He does appear as a premade leader option, but I don't know how canon that is.
He also gets mentioned in a tome/spell description somewhere. I remember something mentioning he was the last of the Dreadnoughts. So he sounds pretty past tense. Still, I wanna see a cutscene of angry old scarred steampunk man shooting wizards.
And then he constructed a world eater, gobbling up small realms at first until more and more material was added to his own Dyson sphere kind realm with floating islands orbiting around a mana battery central star.
Sounds like he will come back in steampunk dlc
She's a rogue so it makes sense where the FRICK is the rogue stuff?
>Beat campaign
>Don't unlock lithyl
I mean technically i sort of already have her but what the frick i unlock the archon's b***h but not lithyl?
so what characters can you unlock, and how to unlock them?
Playing the story realms seems to unlock them? Some of them might be pantheon level, can't tell. But as far as i can tell, you unlock everyone who was in a story mission when you complete that mission. Enemy or ally. Most but not all of them get added to your pantheon, all of them pantheon or no are in the "library" not custom section.
For people looking for "old" leaders, Artica, Nimue, Yaka, Sundren, Meandor, Ham Binger, Nekron the Risen, Werlac, Melenis, the red lady i forget her name, Arachne are the ones i can remember off the top of my head. The lack of Julia was the only surprise.
>Get staves of warding
>Get bannermen, nymphs, Skalds or War Shamans
>Free resistance everywhere
The AOE supports just shit on the single target ones. Druids of the cycles T4 my ass.
I really can't stand how generic everything feels. Races are just sprites, units are all the same, spells are some filler. No soul at all.
And its ugly as well. Weird blocky shadows, everything looks like it's low resolution, and generic art direction.
go back to your hole, you fiend
so i watched few streams and people just auto resolve massive fights, same problem as aow3 combat in theory is tactically deep but happens too often and big fights are very tedious.
Imo homm3 struck a perfect balance between tactical combat and tedium, with deeper empire building and actual diplomacy it would be perfect 4X game.
Honestly, Auto resolving a few fights isn't so bad. Anwyay i just had one where i only inflicted 3 casualties before losing, did it myself and whilst it took a while (something like 30 turns of combat) i managed to instead take out half the enemy army.
One of the most fun parts is doing defensive sieges against overwhelming odds. Especially if you have those fun buildings.
Part of the "problem" is that autoresolve is too fair. Which is a good thing, but it reduces the incentive to spend 20 minutes fighting the battle yourself when autoresolve can get the same or almost the same result in 3 seconds. Personally I only do manual battles when the outcome is close or if it looks like it'll be an interesting battle. Most of the time it's obvious to see whether you'll win or lose so I don't feel the need to actually play the battle, but early on if I lose like one or two units in autoresolve I can be like nah I can do better than that, and later on when it's doomstack vs doomstack I can do some fun stuff manually and let autoresolve handle the mopping up.
Even if the combat was super good, there's simply too much of it to bother with every single fight. So the choice is between battles that are short and simple enough that they don't take up much time, or battles that are tactically interesting but take up too much time. Given that there's always the option to play manually if the battle is important or interesting enough, I like this approach more than just simplifying it for the same of convenience.
>autoresolve is too fair.
the underlying issue is big fights are too time consuming and happen too often, making auto resolve worse would make it even more annoying cause you would need to manually fight even more.
People autoresolve those big battles? I play all big battles since AoW 1 cause I enjoy the combat system a lot, I do auto small ones tho
So I'm 45 hours in and just figured out you can capture enemy provinces. What the frick, why is the button for doing it so hidden, I just randomly found it
>you can capture enemy provinces
wait what?
I never thought to use that button on an enemy province. Definitely needs to be made clearer.
Yeah that's pretty bad. Do you need a pop to fill it or can you just steal them all?
Not sure about the pop requirement since my cities are full and have no space to expand, so no idea if you can freely streal without a free pop.
>Protag of AOW3 became the prequel to BLAME!
I don't know how to feel
What the fugg
I don't know why this game has good UI at some points, and then kind of shits the bed big time at others.
So now it begs the question, when to raze, when to annex, or now just when to transfer providences.
You what? Where?
Huwhaaaaa? Is it the transfer province/turn it into another building button whilst occupying them? That would make sense i guess. I don't have any cities adjacent to an enemy. Tell us your secrets anon
>Play astral
>Pop the "5 knowledge per magic material" thing
>Immediately double my research at minimum
That shit really needs to get toned down hard.
>When you break the enemy's morale and they rout in a big battle
Feels so fricking good.
Its a shame outside of subjugation and doom herald there isn't a lot of morale breaking stuff. I'd definitely love a few more sprinkled around.
>Vassal AI is fricked
>Vassals created mid game or through conquest don't use their AI properly, sometimes no AI at all
>Only peacefully obtained vassals that started on the map work properly
>Crashes and desyncs are priority #1 so probably wont be fixed for like two weeks
Maaan
>Mines can become draft through materium and/or dark
>Foresters with barbarian/smiths guild make tons of draft
>Early special tome quarries boost draft a lot
How do you like to get your draft anon?
Enpire horde tree skill that gives 3 tier 1 units per city for a pop, and Empire skill that gives a 50% chance to get a unit each fight.
I haven't played AoW3 in years and I was thinking of the characters I made there and the fact the two I remember the most are an evil elf dreadnought lady and an evil elf necromancer lady
this just made me realize that a disproportionate amount of characters I make are just different shades of "evil elf queen"
Don't worry I make disproportionate amounts of good elf queens so it evens out.
don't worry I make a disproportionate amount of ugly orc men
Eh, we all have our preferences.
>Goblin girl
based(but should be green)
She's a Gothlin, not a Goblin.
should still be green, just paler...
I refuse.
Not even my Orc is green.
true shit
after playing warcraft making orcs red just looks so much better
I make them all gray for that LOTR larp
I tried playing AoW3 and it does the same disgusting camera jumping that Spellforce Conquest of Eo does.
Fricking around with the mod tools I found this mesh of the original? moleman head that looked more appropriately molelike
Age of Wonders 3 looked like this in 2014, why the the fuk is this one looking like it was made in unity by a two men team? Have they spend all the budget on meme faction generator?
then don't play it if you don't like it man
I never liked the look of aow3. This one is prettier
i still dont understand why this game has such insane pc requirements looking barely better than game from 2014
I'm not graphic prostitute, but I can't stand half arsed efforts. Age of Wonders 1 looks fantastic, even by today's standards. This crap is just ugly.
those tree sprites aren't even oriented correctly
Don't know about you but I like the look of this game.
At least it's not snow biome. Snow forests are green for some reason. Snow mountains are brown for even weirder reason. Also, why does everything looks so low resolution, are they running some kind of ssa that can't be turned off?
did they change art lead after 3 or something? 4's visuals have all the same problems as PF
>Made an underground goblin faction
>Find a spider mount
>Find a beholder in a cage
>Summon a big worm
Goddamn this is a thematic start. This game hits all the right RP spots.
>want to edit a faction but don't want to play it right now
>edit it, then enter a game, then exit
>the changes aren't saved
It's moronic that they don't have a faction creating/editing/saving option in the main menu. Hell, maybe even add an import/export option so people can share their creations more easily.
You can get around the issue of edits not being saved, but it's a bit of an awkward method:
>make a new game
>create a custom map
>go to advanced settings
>click on the mystery homie portrait
>select your faction, then click edit and add it to the game when you're done
Instead of editing the original faction, this creates and saves a copy of your original faction, you can then go back and delete the original. There may be an easier way to do this but this was the method that worked for me.
How is necromancy in this game?
Good. Hard at the start because it's hard to get souls to produce units, but one of their final spells lets you raise every dead unit on the field.
Pretty shit. Spells are low impact and have soul costs, a currency which is difficult to get.
You get 4 units that use the soul mechanic and one of them can't even be owned by you.
It starts out a bit weak, but quickly ramps up as you gain better access to its unique resource.
>conquer and assimilate a developed city
>conquered race thinks they’re being spared by their new necromancer overlord
>little do they know they’re actually just being used as an efficient renewable resource
It's good when you get the hang of it, and potentially strong as frick if you get lucky with certain wonders in your game.
I feel most diehard Necromancer fans are going to be disappointed though, both because you can't start as a skellyman, and because up to a certain point Necromancy is mostly supplental to the normal stuff instead of being a separarte playstyle of its own. There are several good ways to get souls in the mid- to lategame, but you won't get enough souls early on to actually focus on necromancy and while skellies are cheap and quick to produce, you won't be pumping out hordes of them. The main draw is that you have a third resource to spend on troops and magic, instead of just gold and mana, so you can get your skellies and still have the funds to make a normal army with recruits and summons. But if you want to go full Necromancer and just drown the world in skellies, that's not really going to happen until quite late in the game, at which point regular skellies aren't very relevant anymore.
>supplental
supplemental*
>How is necromancy in this game?
A bargain bin summoner.
It's complete garbage in comparison to AoW3's. Even inside the constraints of 4, Druid feels more like playing a Necromancer than using the actual dark tomes.
>can't revive/turn enemy units undead, just as shitty tier I units
>Spells massively gimped, can't raise cities or steal population any longer
>Soul currency is massively taxing, especially in early game
>Most expensive unit in the game, with one unit costing 150 souls
>Chaos can create its strongest unit by targeting an enemy city and reducing its population by two. Necro's can get 60 souls by sacrificing your own or a friendly's population...
>no permanent summons in combat. Every skeleton or zombie you raise dies at the end of combat
It feels like shit.
Which is fricking sad, considering being a bonelord is my thing whenever I can.
Is this project as bad as it first appears? Their attack does no damage.
its +10 to fortification damage and it knocks off defense mode in aoe. sounds more interesting than just flat dmg, but I never had to use it myself, so it's hard to say
By that point you already have the ability to wipe out all their structures, so the only defense left to overcome is the defenders shield walls.
>third mission
>decide to finally try to achieve victory through quests instead of just killing everyone
>create a good-aligned industrious dwarven civilization just for that
>economy is crazy good, but combat is crazy boring
>the quests are bullshit "travel to the opposite corner of the map and enter the underworld just to kill one camp of monsters"
>finally do all the side quests by turn 70
>in about 10 more turns do the main quest
>it bugs out, showing picrelared but not actually ending the game
>still have to spend 40 - 50 turns killing everyone, with every turn taking a shitton of time because of dozens of stacks every ai spawned
Pacifist playthrough, not even once.
>AoW goes from Heroes, but tactical minis combat, to fantasy Civ, but for coomers
>Goes to... for coomers
Fake fan detected.
>Point
>(You)
>Both of (You)
There is a solid chance I was playing AoW before either of you homosexuals were born.
Good you'll die sooner than me and I can enjoy the tactical combat of the originals and modern ones.
Don't bully boomer anons we'll be there ourselves one day
There's as solid chance you've got early onset dementia.
Bruh? One of the AoW 1 units was a dominatrix.
What's the best move very early game? Should I dump the imperium into insta leveling the population of my main city? Should I build a new city ASAP? And how far away?
Previously I rushed pop and food related stuff just by instinct from playing a lot of these games, but the more I play the less valuable I think it is. -5 stab for every province annexed is way bigger of a penalty than you'd think, and the majority of resource income barely depends on pop at all.
At this point I think optimal play is to soend as much imperium as possible absorbing cities/raising city cap, maybe founding cities if you're a coward.
Why not vassalize and use the imperium to found cities? There's always decent spots I find
There are "story realms" with lore and missions but they're not as defined as previous games since the maps are generated
Alright, thanks. AoW3 was the only one I didn't play. I wonder if I should give it a try
I enjoyed it and think it's fun. Also modded to shit by now, but it'd give you something to wait for until 4 goes on sale or whatever if you're unsure.
Dreadnoughts and general industry stuff was also fun in 3 and that's currently not really in 4.
Settling cities just seems like a waste of imperium to me, when compared to absorbing which costs the same and means the cities already have a bunch of stuff pre-built. I conquer up to cap and then vassalize from there (while saving up for more cap increases).
That said, I'm not 100% confident. When I've vassalized early game the income has seemed like a pittance, and the penalty from doing it militarily means it stays that way a long time. I find vassals only start becoming really worth it once I get the spell that makes them give me imperium, and even then that's only because they end up letting me absorb more cities directly. There are affinity traits and things that mitigate/change that calculation though, and obviously the big assumption is that you've always got more valid target cities you're confident you can take.
Save the imperium to get another city up and running ASAP while using scouts to look for free cities. The game actually rewards you for having your cities sharing borders, as special projects can benefit from the provinces of bordering cities. Having at least one other hero in the early game is extremely useful as well
Just finished my first real game as a mostly pure astral with some nature thrown in just because I wasn't sure what else to go for. Astral seems like it ramps up pretty hard towards the later part of the game when you start casting spells like crazy, but I imagine the other tomes also do that as well.
Hopefully this game gets a lot of support since this is one of those games where more variety is pretty much always better.
One that note are Vassal's Aggressive enough to be useful? I've got to the point in my first game where I'm finally starting to have 'real' 3v3 army battles and I'm wondering if it's more effective to liberate enemy cities and let them do their own thing or spend the imperium increasing my city cap to outright annex them.
Nah, they'll defend themselves if attacked (and only if the city is attacked directly, they rarely give a frick about their sectors getting raided), but that's really the only thing you can expect of vassals. You can use them as a buffer zone between yourself and the enemy and as a source of income, but never as a military ally because they simply won't act.
Kind of. It has 5 "story realms" but no actual campaign mode. You just pick the story maps like you'd pick any other map.
Can anyone tell me does this have the story campaing like the first one with Meandor and Julia?
Not really no, there is a story but it's more Planetfall, less like 1-3.
I think the reasoning was that only few people completed the story in 3 according to statistics.
Yes but I can't beat it because my game suddenly started crashing out the ass halfway through the 3rd mission.
Seriously frick them for releasing this shit in this state. I mean, there's no fullscreen and you can't even change the resolution. It just defaults to native.
Can't run the game smoothly at your native resolution?
Want to run it in a smaller window?
go frick yourself 🙂
The declaring war penalty feels a bit weird to me. I am in this map where I'm stuck between enemies and declaring "unjustified" war on them would incur more penalties but I also can't move anywhere else..kinda awkward, guess I'll try another map
Just be evil, who cares?
That's probably what I'm going to do from now on tbh
Cities and wars are really easy when you have a plan in this.
You can buy off peace with a big enough war chest so if you've been at a long standing war with a bunch of people, once you're built up enough you can just buy peace with the weakest ones, and focus your entire push on the strongest without having to go to war.
I love the Siege system and how the city isn't fighting back like Civ bullshit most of the time.
Really makes calculated bumrushes and diplomacy more fun.
Can end up in a 3 man war from all sides and shift the table to your advantage.
Evilness isn't the problem, the Imperium penalty is. It's worth paying off grievences and fabricating a claim I think rather than taking that penalty.
Just fabricate a grievance and take one out
>Stayed up all night playing a game
>have work in 7 hours
>Really tempted to go another round
frick I havent had this much fun in a game in so long.
It's gameplay reminds me of what I like from Mount & Blade, just a mashup of a few different complimentary genres of strategy/action.
I fricking love this kind of shit.
>tfw just finished the next game and won
>tfw clock in in 20 minutes
>Tfw no sleep
Has anyone purposely set up a closeby triforce of cities yet in order to minimize the distance in provinces between your pillars?
Haven't had a good spawn for that yet but I really want to try setting up a mosh pit at one second of the map where I just have a deathstack of units defending 3 pillars touching.
Do your custom race/rulers show up in games? I've just fricked around a bunch and made a ton and I'd be kinda sad if they don't
yes
I can see people are having fun with the game. But what is the verdict, for someone who hasn't played the others but got disappointed with Planetfall, as interesting as it was -- play now or wait?
It's good, but whether you'll like it depends on why you didn't like Planetfall, since AoW4 takes just as much inspiration from PF as it does from AoW3.
Depends on what your issues with PF were. As someone who didn't really like planet fall because the random ass monster lairs were more of a threat 90% of the time than the other players they've *mostly* fixed it but if you had other issues game still might not be for you.
It's dull, it's sterile, it's ugly, and it's got no story. All the budget went into make your own faction creator. And they already have milking plans with dlc's in the pipeline.
This poor AI was inside a underground tomb and never bothered to dig themselves out the entire game. Honestly looks a little comfy.
I will say Brutal AI at least makes some units, still loses to good tactics and their outpost spamming just gives me an excuse to take all their souped up cities. Also an ally of mine wanted me to declare a pact of friendship with my player vassal but you're not allowed to do that so that was funny.
Brutal AI just conjures up entire stacks out of thin air.
They can replenish like 6 stacks in a single turn
Imagine living underground all your life, not even aware of anything outside of your cave, when suddenly you get a message that some homosexual you've never heard of has cast a magic spell that makes him king of the world.
>medium graphics
>armor looks like it's from a PS2 game
>cape is still super detailed
Anyone has their sound stutter when clicking on units or making them do anything? Doesn't look like they've acknowledged the issue yet.
A friend of mine had similar weird audio issues, I think he fixed it by messing with V sync for some reason.
The one comment I saw on steam about it said that apparently Planetfall had it as well, so I'm not particularly hopeful about it being fixed.
I messed around with vsync settings previously but it didn't work for me.
>going from elves who just happen to like nature to full blown nature rape
So fricking kino, I love this transformation mechanic
>4 elves look more like Tolkien knockoffs than the ones in 3
Not sure how I feel about this other than annoyance at having to completely redesign my elf sorceress from 3.
>sorcerer class
mystic looks too arabian nights so I switched to high and colored everyone's armor silver (looks sick btw)
>wild magic master
closest thing is one of the later chaos tomes but that also comes with demon summoning n shieeet
>creation adept
took it for the terraform spell, functionality decently mirrored in a nature tome
>young face
No option exists, they all look like movie Galadriel with minor changes
>bawdwear
would have to be a wizzer for that
>transformation mechanic
sometimes I don't cast transformations simply because I want to keep my race pure and not turn them into a bunch of furries with evil sorcery
For me it's spawnkin. +20% damage is so good, but do I really want to condemn my race to be midgets?
It's so horrid, right. You need to play a wizard kang if you're gonna go tome of the horde so you can avoid manlet leader.
>finally I am a true champion of my race
>for my first act, everyone is a midget with a tiny dick
I wonder if the devs were aware. Like here is the most OP buff and you can get it right at the start. But in return, you will be a hideous manlet for the rest of the game. I'm quite happy to not take it unless I'm playing gobbos, in which case it's sorta hard to tell they have spawnkin.
For me it's casting supergrowth on my race and spawnkin on all of my lesser, servile races
I like it.
Also just on the final pictures. I love it so much. At the end you get to see what horrid abominations your race has become. My frost dwarves were so aesthetic for most of the game. But by the end they were covered in steel, gold, rock, particle effects and all giants.
Amazing game
Almost as good as shadow magic
I had more fun with AOW3 but it is better than planetfall. Races shouldn't all be the same and I miss the fun abilities units would gain with experience.
This, but we'll see how it develops, maybe some of the stuff will come back as they update stuff.
I mostly just hope for the dreadnought stuff proper again, which seems to be one of the DLCs.
I think I like this city management and the province system a bit more than 3s growth, it's a bit more controlled.
Mostly though I still think the art style for units and to some extent cities took a hit from 3. Much as I like not!Rohan, it's missing full armor knights and infantry and most of the other cultures look very hit and miss. The industrial angle armor in particular is not great. Would've hoped for say three or four sets per culture to go through for customisation at least.
>Races shouldn't all be the same
yes, but the truth is, cultures are new races, and tomes are a new class system, which is much more flexible. so overall I don't complain
sadly most of your complaints seems to be from them trying to balance niche multiplayer, and as always, singleplayer gets a hit
They could have given all of the races one fixed trait and one or two changeable ones and it would have cut down a lot of the criticism. Racial units modified by class was a much more fun system than "pick a class then arr feel same but you'll be using tome units anyway"
Necromancy in 4 feels like an overreaction of it being a really powerful in 3. Worst part is, is that Necromancy in 3 wasn't even that massively powerful in comparison to the other classes.
In 4, it's so much worse than every other "class" that it's sad. I played Materium and Nature-based builds before I did Dark. Dark was so much worse than the two in almost every way. Druids can raise their dead, summon hordes, and sustain their troops far more effectively than a goddamn necromancer.
Honestly just something like skellies having zero upkeep but being capped to shadow affinity would likely sort them out.
I swear the hotfix they pushed out just made the game crash more often instead of fixing anything. Guess I'll play AoW1 or something for now and hope for the best.
I fricking hate the 3 armies per battle limit. I am playing multiplayer with friends and I want to swarm these Black folk properly, every war takes fricking ages since we need to do a new battle constantly since we always have more then 3 armies each.
Having armies have 8 or 10 units would help so much. I hope we get a mod soon at the very least.
I hate the lack of contrast of modern games. Fought some pig-like creatures in a farmland field, could barely distinguish them from the crops.
Just lost a game as Barbarian Tome of the Horde, in 2 more turns I would have cleared the capital of the ruler who beat me by a score victory. I assume the proper play style is to amass quickly and not worry about casualties because you get a lot of opportunities to replace your units, but at some point I just amassed so many promoted T1's that my upkeep became too great and my game stifled because I couldn't afford new city improvements or units, and I didn't want to delete entire promoted army stacks. I guess that's when the enemy empires overtook me with tiers, modifications, and enchantments. Shows that every turn counts.
Also won beat an empire that was much stronger than me while losing a majority of the fights, love this game
>Notice underground frogs have a doom stack running around the surface
>Peak onto their city and notice it's unguarded
>Suicide so many forces into their doom stack just to get the leader
>Throw as much siege points as possible so I can nab undefended city in the 3 turn window
Raiding the province upgrades of the other cities is a great source of gold to keep your huge army rolling while also fricking up the progression of other players.
Do you know if razing a city with none of the providences razed gives you the same gold as razing a city if you raze all of the providences beforehand? I feel like it's related but not sure. Also having trouble deciding when to raze a city vs vassalize vs go over city cap.
Yeah it was an 8 player map, but there was an extended period where I was just standing around clicking end turn trying to desperately bring my reserves back so I could get T2's and new spells because even though I had 6+ stacks of T1 units, it only gets you so far, especially since wonders only allow 1 stack. I make this mistake every 4x game.
Barbarian is a rush faction, score victory shouldn't ever be something you have to worry about as you'll have won or lost way before then unless it's an 8 player map
>4th story mission
>meandor has such a research lead he's calling magic victory by turn 50
>neighbor elf who, story-wise, hated meandor immediately breaks our pact so he can ally with him
>melenis stops her war against me to ally with me
while having other victory options in the story missions is neat, this is some shenanigans. also that melenis wanted to war with me when I was trying to do her quest is bogus, too
I just started that mission yesterday and I’m about 20 turns in. I rejected her quest at the start because her description made her sound evil and deceptive as frick and I’m supposed to be a covenant agent. With the free draft I got from that I got 3 houndmasters instantly and just beelined to her capital and fricked her up. Now I’m just deciding if I go straight for the boss dude or frick up the other elf guy first for talking shit to me.
Finished three games so far.
9/10 game , with minor issues that could be addressed with patches (balance and UI) and DLCs (missing features).
It has that "one-more-turn" feeling that's rare these days.
Can anyone tell me how this is fun? Seems very generic and extremely time-consuming.
Is this like Heroes of Might & Magic? I don't know if I should sink a few hours and let it grow on me.
I tried to customize a faction but nothing looks appealing so I went with generic Imperialist/Raider humans. Why would I ever want to play a rat race, a frog race, or fricking halflings? Lmao. The styling is so vanilla. They should have done something unique or make it edgy like WH40K. A minotaur race would have been cool, something unique. I think I'll actually make a Frog Necromancer empire for the lolz
Furries have become a large enough video game audience that it unfortunately pays to cater to them. A lot of them like rats for some strange reason. Minotaurs would have been cool but all races must be equal even in fantasy in current year so they would feel even more out of place. That is part of what is so frustrating about the race homogenization, you are no longer able to realistically do cool things like minotaurs unless they are human sized and boring.
Battle toads are cool and you shouldn't complain about them.
>get wightborn
>leader goes skelly
uhh, how do I go back?
There's no shame in being wight. Have pride in your wightness
but all the chosen destroyers and ritualistic cannibals are telling me wightborn don't have any culture?
I've just had the thought, they should put turning off transformation effects in the leader's appearance customisation, so you can be
>evil leader who signs his followers up for profane transformations but respectfully opts out himself
>good leader who enlightens and ascends his followers
anon... there's a check box when you cast a transformation spell to opt out for your leader
Only if you're a wizard kang
>wightborn
>Population still increases
So all my skelly people are still being born?
Are they having skeleton sex?
the growth timer is just how long it takes for them to find the right kinds of bones to assemble a new skeleton friend
Now that you mention it it'd be cool if wightborn had city growth determined by sacrifices and kills in combat.
I think that's how 3 worked, kills in battle added some growth to your nearest ghoul city.
Honestly, that's already represented by ritual cannibals. I kinda like that wightborn is very simple and doesn't delve too deeply, so it can represent whatever undead type in what mix you want.
It's a major race transformation it doesn't need to be simple.
THE CITY CAP INCREASE STUFF CAN BE BOUGHT WITH IMPERIUM SEVERAL TIMES WTF
Took me 40h to see it
What? No way
it says it's repeatable when you hover over it
the imperium cost increases exponentially each time though
i want to go full economy, which race and society traits are best suited for this?
I'm also a sucker for terraforming, eventually turning every map tile into utopian YELDS. Regarding this, does terrain affect yelds at all? Or are Arctic and Swamp terrain the same, aside from what you can build on them?
Finally, can water or lava tiles be terraformed? And is the Fishery bonus society trait good?
Terrain only changes what you can build on them, yeah. Go Industrial with materium and nature for big gains.
Nice quads, and thank you.
Arctic has the same terraforming bonuses as grasslands, but maybe you can't build shit on them? The tome does get quite earlier than nature's equivalent, but still, i should try it out with Arctic Adaptation.
Any tips for traits? Are there ways to "create/make spawn" ancient wonders/magic materials? If yes, the traits with boni to those can become huge. Same for fisheries if water tiles can't be otherwise improved better.
Yeah I went arctic adaptation and industrious for my snow dorfs, and it was pretty great. Covered the map in snow and still had plenty of food.
No way to spawn wonders. Materials you can spawn one with an astral perk far up the tree I think.
VERY interesting about the material, gotta find out, since it'd make the society trait excellent.
Nice frozen dwarves by the way, and unrelated question, but can you build multiples of the magic victory improvements? (heart/seed of the various affinities).
I don't think it's a repeatable perk though. So you can probably only spawn 1.
I see, thank you again.
Sorry for the myriad of questions, but what can you build on water tiles aside from fisheries?
Since you can't convert them to land (or can you?), they seem kinda underwhelming, or can you build any special improvements i missed over them?
Absolutely nothing. They are very underwhelming, but the devs seem to be aware of this and made that choice. So dunno if they will focus on them more later or just decide to focus on land. Also I recall them freezing or going to freeze water tiles in the first stream. I never got the chance to try, but the flashfreeze spell might do it. If not, that spell doesn't exist any more. So water is basically there to divide stuff up.
Unlike planetfall that had multiple naval units, naval combat terrain, naval wonders and their "free cities" equivalents were sometimes on the water, naval sucks here. The two good aspects are fisheries are pretty decent if you take the trait especially and there are LOTS of pickups in the water. Building a single quick navy of ram ships can usually blaze around murdering independents for items and resources.
nature empire upgrades also give food bonuses
Theoretically, if you build the fisherman's guild its also one of the guilds you can easily get the most provinces of too.
Yeah I just loaded an old game to get a look at what fisheries can give you if you fishmaxx. If you get the seafarer background, the empire nature upgrade, and the seafarer's guild you get pretty great income from each coastal province. There are also plenty of special tiles with either another +10 food or gold. Takes awhile before you get the guild is the main drawback.
>Takes awhile before you get the guild is the main drawback.
The main drawback is that fisheries boost nothing and don't get any unique improvements. They're nice to have on an island map but I'd pick a land tile over a water tile almost any time. Unless it's a hut tile. Frick huts, worst building in the game and the sole reason I always take the nature terraforming tome.
Clearly such cities are not going to be production centers. They can still be good earners with high pop/draft/gold.
>They're nice to have on an island map but I'd pick a land tile over a water tile almost any time
That's part of the deal, you work with what the map gives you.
You can build 1 of each I think from memory. So 1 seed of astral, 1 seed of materium, etc. So yeah you could have I guess a total of 18.
Give me some combos to make each racial mount useful.
Unicorns and spiders are pretty universally useful. No need to explain them
Nightmare mounts combo well with tyrant knights and any other kind of morale play
Wolf mounts give pack hunter and an aoe that applies weakened, good for dark culture
I also think they each give a certain kind of resistance? My gobbo got 4 frost resist from her wolf mount
Finally, you should check to see what units get mounts when you take racial mounts. Furies turn from lackluster T2 archers to mounted ones, for instance.
Frick I didn't know racial mounts turn some units into cavalry. Here I thought they were lackluster since there aren't many mounted units in the game.
Is Golden Horde strictly worse than Summon Irregulars?
You could just cast summon irregulars 6 times for the exact same effect, and it would be cheaper.
It’s far superior, as you can precast the spell and keep a full stack in reserve for when you need it
I guess that's the theory, but how often does that come up, really?
I had it sat ready for the entire last game I did, complete waste of research and mana. Whenever my real armies took losses, Summon Irregulars did the job reinforcing them more efficiently. And if I ever actually lost my real armies, the last thing I'd want to do is summon a single T1 stack, that'd just get deleted too.
I've also never seen a raiding party strong enough to need more than the 2-3 SI I could afford in a turn by the time I got GH, yet also weak enough to be dealt with by a single 6 unit GH. That's a very very specific level of threat for which GH might be the best answer, if it had to be responded to instantly. Any greater or weaker threat and SI is better again.
I don't think I'm going to bother with it at all next time, it's crazy that SI comes from a tier 1 tome and GH is tier 4.
I can't seem to make enough gold to produce units in all my cities, what am I doing wrong?
Not producing enough gold.
Start a new game, let the AI take control of your city and set it to Gold production, what it does will be a good lesson on the basics
Keep in mind if you start as a wizard you will be gold constrained. It is much easier to manage the economy as a champion.
Paradox wouldn't let them launch a game without big DLC plans
>Paradox wouldn't let them launch a game without big DLC plans
based moron
it was triumph who demanded that the dlc will be announced beforehand so there is no chance for paradox dlc milking
>launching without gunpowder so they have something guaranteed to sell later
ok anon, I'm sure paradox had nothing to do with it
>Heroes a mage
>Squad of mages
>Enter a battle
>MAGE BREAKER ALL MAGIC IS BANNED
fug
Damn my roleplay armies
Anyone else think magic is kinda stupid and just wants to steamroll with muskets, cannons and tanks?
Our time will come, anon. Patience.
DLC, but also what 3 was about.
i hear you brother
This game is such a hot mess at the moment. Who thought releasing it in this state was acceptable? Should have been delayed a for a couple of months for play testing and bug fixes.
Works on my machine. Just live in the southern hemisphere. It's cold here right now so the hotter my computer, the better.
How is a colder climate supposed to stop your GPU from maxing out on the campaign map? It's not supposed to behave like this, just hover over a lava lake and tell me this thing runs like it should. I can't play for longer than 5 minutes without crashing to desktop after the latest "hotfix" and judging by the forum posts I got off easy. People are crashing so hard their PC reboots.
It's clear that the game was supposed to get more time in the over before being released, I'm guessing Paradox got involved since release dates are usually left up to the publisher. Now they're just scrambling to duct tape it all together.
It's forcing me to play at 4K, capped at 60fps, and makes my GPU scream so I exit the game and do something else. How the frick is there no resolution settings or fps settings in the menu, W T F is going on with new releases? Nothing is worth buying any more
bro just change your desktop resolution to 1080p every time you want to play AoW4 so that it defaults to that resolution lmao it's that easy
God I hate this shit. Even garbage japanese console ports run better and have more graphics options. I'd like to know what was the thought process behind not letting you change screen resolution because that must have been some impressive mental gymnastics.
I got around that using the AMD Radeon super resolution, it automatically lowers resolution when I open the game and then upscales it. I believe nvidia has a similar feature, you could look it up.
I move the camera over a lava lake and then alt tab and work for the day feeling the comforting warmth of my GPU. And there's nothing you can do to stop me.
Putting that much constant stress on your GPU isn’t healthy for its lifespan, Anon. Unless you just have money to burn to replace it
I have treated my 1080Ti like absolute garbage since 2018. I only have air cooling, I've dusted inside maybe 5 times and I've never done anything like change the paste in my computer. It's hot, dusty and unloved in there.
I'm still using mine too with about the same treatment. Mined eth with it for awhile. AOW runs great.
It's so impressive. Easily the best card investment I've made. These things were built to perform and last.
Runs great on my 1070 as well. When it isn't crashing every time I press a button in the game that is.
Not sure what the deal is. PC runs it with only a couple crashes in about 40 hrs. Old gaming laptop gets by but it I have to just turn it off when I'm done because it locks up every time.
I've been expecting crashes but haven't had a single one in the 60ish hours I've played so far. No end turn lock ups, no UI bugs that lead to crashes, pretty much nothing. The only things I've had are some weird visual glitches caused by unit transformations. Wightborne in particular really fricks up some units.
>view a lava lake
>feel the seething heat
now that's immersion
Huh, you can make Warhammer beastmen easily enough. You could probably RP your ascension to proper chaos demons.
Khorne
Nurgle
Tzeentch
And Slaanesh. I have a lot of fun in the encyclopedia.
Feudal furies with animal kinship and spider mounts?
Feudal Tormentor knights with animal kinship and nightmare mounts, Guess you should have one eagle rider for the morale bonus.
I have a harder time making units in this game than in planetfall.
Does anyone else feel like expansion victory is extremely lacking? I feel like it's a half-ass version of military victory but by the time you've met the criteria for expansion victory you might as well have just done a science victory since you've most likely got a tome 5 first, or you're steamrolling early enough why not just go for a military victory.
I get it's there for I guess good runs where you become supreme lord vassal or some shit. Just wish it had a more unique identity for triggering it that isn't just paint the map cause military victory is already that.
Literally feels like it's only there for the times you feel like doing a run where you rush max pearls and zerg scouts spending all your early game imperium on boosting free city vassals. Which is cool I guess it's added but still wish there was something a bit more there.
especially because if you're doing the zerg rush vassals and max out the order skill tree you'll have enough free $$$$$ to just buy every one of your vassals 6 stacks of full armies so itll literally be painless waiting the 15 turns.
Can you make something close to night elves from WoW? Don't have the game yet but really considering it.
>elf form
>purple skin colour
>Go up nature tree and maybe a bit of astral
Easy. The only thing is that you'd have to go all in on what you want them to all look like. For example druid of the bear would be easy to make, but they'd all be beefy and hairy.
Here, just threw this together. No beard for elf form though, which kills it a bit
Frick
No bear or tiger mounts sadly, but you can definitely do dark mystical tree elves
Also keep in mind that one of the DLCs is gonna be Druidic/Fey shit, so it will be even easier.
Browsing through the workshop. Already some handy mods up. For those that want to keep aesthhetics, looks like someone has already made a mod to pick a non-visual option for each transformation
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2972938217&searchtext=
>Sign a teleporter pact because who cares with the underground people
>Build a teleporter on a newly conquered city to help bring my armies to fight the rest of that empire
>Underground bro suddenly shits out 6 stacks through my teleporter to charge the enemy
I like these pacts
anyone know what the skulls mean? difficulty level?
I think so, but if that's the story mission, not in that case.
when melenis gives you the quest, you just need seven affinity of anything to clear it
Yep, that's exactly what it means. That 4 star one is a trick though. It's just some story stuff.
The skulls are usually accurate but honestly some variants of certain wonders are just way easier or harder. Also sometimes build matters. If you get the winter court variation of fairies, your army of frostlings is going to suffer.
my Human Female(evil) looks fricking CUTE
top
>watches cute cats videos on youtube
bottom
>watches cat crush snuff videos on dark web
so basically:
top
>/wsg/ fan
bottom
>/gif/ enjoyer
This, but the opposite.
tfw no chaotic major demon transformation good aligned waifu.
Bottom is what all girls look like without makeup (before age 28)
least evil female
there's a unicorn back there, she's really not that bad, I can fix her you'll see
that unicorn belongs to the bearded fella and it's so he can go faster and rip people apart easier you see
he's just a friend haha
Made for gentle loving and procreation
t.angelic human man
The chin and lips remind me of a certain Habsburg prince and I can't unsee it any more
Are heroes affected by unit enchantments or only a few of them?
I want to try a game where i only have hero units.
Enchantments don't go on heroes. They get their enchantments through skills you pick on level up. They do get your race transformations though if they are the same race.
I see, are max level heroes better or worse than t5 fully enchanted units?
I love me an uber powerful doomstack, regardless of costs/upkeep
>t5
>enchantments
pick one and only one
Welp heroes it is, thanks lads.
Better I think. I've encountered some scary heroes that just fly around deleting shit.
All the random skills you get from leveling and items give you far more bonuses than what unit enchantments would, and most enchantments have equivalent skills with the same effect that heroes can take anyways. So yes, they're far stronger. In my experience melee heroes with two-handers especially can just run around the battle deleting units from full HP after you stack up some combat buffs.
Just had a 175 turn slog on the 3rd campaign map. By the end I researched every tome tier 2 and up
So if you skip T2 tomes and use the library to take more T1s, its easy to take poison weapons, frost weapons, flaming weapons and lightning weapons. As these are T1s its not even a lot of knowledge required. That's -8 fricking physical damage. You can remove your physical damage. Frick defense.
doesn't that delay your progress to T3?
Who cares you no longer deal physical damage, you have transcended the need for T3. Wait shit a barbarian warrior is still 10 and most units are 11-12 damage. We need more physical reducing enchantments damn it!
That's pretty cool you can do that. Hope your opponent didn't go max resistance
its probably only ever worth it against industrious, because they tend to be very high defense low resistance That said, it would also get you relatively high damage very quickly. Grab Tome of Zeal for another +2 spirit damage, then finally go into T2 for tome of revelry for another 2 damage.
Your defenses won't be ideal I don't think any of these tomes do much for you there but if you take racial traits to be tankier and two stacking +rank society traits so you get +20% extra HP out the gate you should be fine.
Probably makes more sense to focus on archers than the melee weapons i guess, but then no zeal/revelry.
>skip ench and ampli for +2 dmg
moronic idea.
Still a bit early into the game but is there any way to "integrate" another race into yours? Like making them have your racial traits? The game started me on snow because I lapred as Norscans and the units I got from quests and shit lag behind because they don't have the snow-walking trait.
Is there anyone that isn't playing this game as a warhammer race? You can migrate your own pop there if you want but manifest destiny is "evil" in this game
Yeah, I made the Hoburgers from Dominions/Conquest of Elysium. Fat halflings, feudal and spawnkin. My leader had golden armor and I started with 2/2/2 Materium/Nature/Order affinity.
that's just the disadvantage of going heavily into a racial transformation build compared to full enchantments. You'd need to find their AI controlled city and then absorb it into your empire to be able to change them.
Although now that I think about I think all my freespawn units have been entirely generic who don't actually exist as cities in the world.
If you have majority ownership of a race and it isn't someone else's starting race you can apply race transformations to them. You might be able to change someone else's starting race by defeating them and absorbing their cities but idk about that
So how do the pantheon characters work? I've only played story realms so far, and I assume they don't show up there.
Is there some random quest to get a pantheon character as a hero? What about the 'ruler' toggle? I don't get how it is different from the rulers at the start of the game picking from the preset list?
>wizard kings came back so no guns
Uhhh wizard kings used firearms heavily tho? I fricking still remember fricking necron of all wizards sending cannon stacks at me in the second game, first game had muskets, mortars and flame tanks, humans had airships for fricks sake complete with weapons on board, followers of shadow in the previous game included Dreadnaughts who used entire gunpowder armies, where did my technology go?!
Hidden in dlc.
Also, humans in feudal age, you need w8 two or four hundred years until they step in firearms age.
>you need w8 two or four hundred years until they step in firearms age
Anon they discovered it in the first game
In different world i sure.
>where did my technology go?!
It's hiding in an expansion. Buy the expansion pass now!
I hope it's not like AoW 3 where we had to wait for the eternal lords DLC for ages to get necromancers
from their release estimates, we are getting 1 dlc every 3 months or so and its the second dlc
We're getting scalies first in a few months and then gunpowder a few months after that
What I really want to know is where's my rogue stuff
We're not getting shadow affinity content until the first major magic update at least.
There's already plenty of stuff supporting a rogue build I just need
>knife hero weapon, can attack at range and melee, bonus flanking damage
>sneaky stabby homies either as a culture or tome unit
>shadow tomes relating to underhanded tactics, enhancing your vision while obscuring others', and some vassal stuff thrown in
>more chaos tome stuff about rebellion and revolution (assassinate is a chaos affiliated hero skill)
Maybe as a bonus there could be a spying/thievery system where you assign heroes to other peoples' cities and frick them up from the inside
there is an assassin's dagger hero item, bonus against heroes and flanking. You can get it from a shadow affinity node I think and you can combine it with a crossbow as primary.
Other shadow affinity nodes are infinite vision + camouflage + assigning whispering stones to enemy vassals so that's also covered. It's just an assassin unit that's missing.
That's like saying you can make skeletons so necromancy is covered.
I was responding to specific points like assassin's dagger item which already exists. Of course there could be other stuff added for rogues which was not yet listed.
For necromancy you can also make zombies, summon ghosts and reanimate enemy heroes, what else would you like to see added?
>Play evil barbarian
>No one wants to be friend
I can't say i didn't expect this
But also, being an evil raider really doesn't make me feel the protagonist
More like the mid-game boss fight for others
>But also, being an evil raider really doesn't make me feel the protagonist
>More like the mid-game boss fight for others
Be the filter that stops the goodie plebs from beating the game.
Personally I like to play as if this was the unofficial Dungeon Keeper 3 I always dreamed of but never recieved.
Is there any way to trade wonders?
I want to grab an ancient wonder right next to my city but one of my allies grabbed it
can you trade provinces with allies period? Like without the diplomacy menu?
I think if it isn't claimed by a city you might be able to
I honestly don't really know how province trading works as it only shows up occasionally, which is kind of stupid because they had nice system for it planetfall that let you trade anything you want
I should add that in planetfall you could even trade outposts which is something I really hope they add back in
This feels like animal abuse.
lazyass has got wings too, what a dick
Reading through this official modding guide makes it seem that it's possible to pretty much mod everything. And all programs are in game files already
has anyone made a mod to decensor Artica and glade runner yet?
Also to unlock all the hidden premade factions.
Based, they do know the importance of modding for these sort of games, we've had some great mods since the very first AoW game so I'm not surprised
Trying out necromancy, shit seems so fricked early on.
To summon the most basic b***h skeleton you have to:
>find enemies
>spend mana to soulbind them
>kill them
>spend city recruitment points and turns to actually produce the skeleton
Congratulations! You now have the weakest level one unit in the game that:
>Costs mana to upkeep
>Is sitting at your city, instead of being summoned directly into your necromancer's army, so you have to spend more turns delivering it to the frontlines
You can also spend even more mana, time and casting points to upgrade your skeletons into the worst level two unit: bone golem
>Which costs even more mana to upkeep
And in the end you have:
>a weak ass army you have to spend a shitton of turns to assemble
>no mana to cast actually useful stuff
What's the point of all of this? Is it all somehow justified in the lategame?
going fully into necromancy just isn't viable right now and exists purely to supplement a regular army. For that reason it does suck that skeletons cost so much mana upkeep it's a bit weird and dumb.
>What's the point of all of this? Is it all somehow justified in the lategame?
The "justification" if you can cal it that is that souls isn't gold which means you're spending nothing to make units
This justification falls apart the moment you take a second to think about the fact that you use mana as upkeep, and upkeep, not upfront cost is the true limitation for armies.
Even if he had infinite souls, a necromancer's army wouldn't be bigger than a regular summon lord army.
Furthermore, all the cool spells you can cast, like the undead heal or the corpse explosion?
Cost souls too. Which means if you make units, you will suddenly find yourself without being able to use your best spells.
I think it scales well. It's an extra resource you earn on top of gold/mana and it just numerically allows you to get more stuff. Early on your use it to supplement other units but later on it snowballs and it becomes pretty easy to transition to full armies of summoned undead. But like with other strategies the tier 1-3 are not full replacements for your culture units.
works on my machine
>numerically allows you to get more stuff
No it doesn't. Your mana upkeep isn't going to allow you to keep up many undead, specially if you use any sort of enchantments.
It does relative to paying mana upfront for summons and spells in addition to the upkeep. Less mana required is less mana spent. Souls are free.
Eventually you will max out your upkeep regardless of you summoning or using souls.
The upfront cost is never what limits armies in AoW.
Sure. Souls are still a numerical addition to your mana and gold which you get more of the more you fight. This upkeep argument only works if you assume infinite turns under which you need to sustain your armies, when in reality you can run a deficit for some time utilizing your secondary resource: having more fights and more armies around, either to get more resources, more strategic advantages or straight up win the game.
Compare on the one hand the summoning spell from Astral for a tier 2 creature for 100 mana + upkeep, with the 150 souls summon undead army from the tome of the eternal lord. No upfront mana cost and you can suicide them the same turn softening the opponent army up and getting some of the soul cost back.
Again more (free) resources is simply more resources. Just use them.
The problem is that it's not "free resources". The opportunity cost of taking the tome of souls instead of another tome has to be taken into account.
People are complaining because it is completely underwhelming for about 50% of the game, only to turn kind of ok in the late game once you accrued a ton of souls.
Meanwhile, it's way better to get a tome that boosts your early game so you can snowball even faster.
If you get units from souls you need less draft, which means you can waste less production and gold building up draft, or less mana summoning units. Wasting less production and gold means you can build up your gold or mana production more, and thus increases the size of armies you can upkeep. Wasting less mana means you can cast more spells, although to be honest I didn't find up-front mana costs to be much of a big deal either.
You talk about wasting resources a lot when in reality a lot of units or spells provide better value point per point than their necromancy equivalent.
Sure, then necromancy may well be weak then. I'm just arguing that paying for units with a seperate currency is in fact valuable, even if it's upkeep and not up-front costs that are the limiting factor. Personally I summon 99% of my units with mana, leaving basically all of my gold for econ build up. Souls can serve the same purpose.
that is very debatable. How do you even make this comparison when necromancy points are earned passively and in a different way than other resources?
Gold and mana are earned far more passively than souls, and your tier 1 10 soul skeleton is pretty bad as far as tier 1s go as an example.
Oh boy I can't wait for the extra animal races dlc.
You guys made me realise that aside from the industry necromancy also got keked, in AoW 3 it was as easy askilling armies, making ghouls and summoning all day long
One other small advantage of skelly summons that was not mentioned is that they benefit from your racial transformations while regular meatshield summons do not. Racial transformations also don't have upkeep, which is why they are generally more powerful than enchantments.
Why the frick is the dismiss unit button so fricking small and hidden
How do you setup simultaneous turns?
Started a story mission, started and realized now that I haven't seen the option at all for single player.
you do it in the advanced options in custom realms
i dont think you can in story realms
lame
There's some units that seem to exist just to annoy human players.
>Mana serpent
>Flying
>Low repeating dmg
>Whenever it takes a hit, even in retaliation, it gets stunned and becomes invincible for 1 round
This unit only exists to drag fights and force damage on your units no matter your tactics
It's best to use shock units against them
The army caps are fricking stupid. If I want to bring 30 skellies into a single battle I should be able to.
Materium magic victory is pretty chill once you get the heart and this.
>ai is 100% focused on killing your units over it's own self preservation
>To the point they will take 4 attacks so they can go kill a t1 unit
>That includes summons
Why dud they program the AI to do this
Not only is it unfun to have your archers murdered but it also makes low tier summons incredibly overpowered in single player since they basically alow you to freely manipulate the ai
I once managed to kite a stack of enemy units with my one scout, just to then walk with my main stacks to their city and conquer it
>Map says its gonna have lots of water
>Make a sea elf racd ready for some naval combat, gonna grab water tomes and sheeit
>There's no water tomes
>There was very little water or swamps
>All my bonuses were worthless
Fug
I kinda hate how "Water Adaptation" doesn't actually make your dudes aquatic, it just makes them swamp-dwellers. And unlike underground, desert and arctic, you can't really plan for having swamp terrain so it's a complete crapshoot. Water Adaptation has my vote for worst racial trait in the game.
i think water got the worst deal at game start
you can't even recruit the water elementals.
but once they get some hydromancy tomes that combo with cryomancy is going to make both so op it will risk breaking the game.
also freezing then killing enemies leaves cool ice statues.
I feel like Triumph is genuinely angry that water even exists irl
They are Dutch, so they have a racial bonus vs water.
Water will probably get more content later down the line, AoW 3 seas didn't get good till later when we got a lot of stuff and even then modders made stuff to make it better before the update, I still remember the old man and the sea mod
Does the AI cheat vision? They attack my solo lord with a ring that is supposed to conceal him
They might've had true vision
I don't know, I don't see it on the unit card but the ring of concealment seems to have no effect.
Honestly game is much better than expected. Straight up the best 4x game of the last couple of years.
Is there a way to make an ai empire stop rivaling me? I'm on story mission 4 and this elf Black person who is suppose to be happy to see me declared a rivalry right away
You probably have opposing alignments and/or affinities.
Not much you can do about it. Just kill him if it bothers you.
Well I went for magic victory and, despite all 4 factions joining an alliance as soon as I started the countdown, they all just stood in their bases and let it happen so it all worked out in the end
this last story mission is fricked and I don't think I can do it on hard. like, the last missions in 3 and planetfall were hard, but this is just unfair. at least you could dispel melenis's age of death, you can't do shit to the auto-condemn
It took me 4 attempts to get it, but it's definitely not impossible. Try playing defensively in the early game and expand towards the middle of the map, staying away from the edges as much as possible. Then you can either build up your strength and take out the angel gay's cities one by one, or just turtle and grab a magic victory. It helps if you grab some sources of Cold and/or Blight damage, since the angels are weak to those.
Playing aggressively worked for me on most of the story maps, but it's what repeatedly got me fricked on the last map. I'd start strong, take one or two cities, and then got ground down by the angel stacks that seem to get triggered if you get too close to the edge. Playing defensively, at least at the start, is a much safer option and allows you to catch up with the boss somewhat before trying to tackle his doomstacks.
>Playing aggressively worked for me on most of the story maps, but it's what repeatedly got me fricked on the last map
that must be my problem. usually rushing is the answer for the campaign maps; I needed to on the previous map to counter meandor's insane research speed.
>Cold and/or Blight damage
sounds like roots and cryomancy should be my first tomes
just wanted to say turtling worked. lithyl's rite, and especially vine prison, also greatly helped, and as soon as I had just three dark knights I was able to take the orc angel's closest city. during the siege he threw most of his army at me.
I've pretty much won at turn 64, just marching on his capital out of spite. I doubt I'll get a military victory before nimue pulls a magic one though.
surprisingly, ydgaard took out meandor, which was a nice surprise.
>pick trait with +3 status resistance
>condemn instantly negated
wow
Which AoW game is best to start with?
the first one
>a bug yoinks your palantir
t-thanks triumph, not like I wanted to make a contact with a free city on a ruined realm anyway