Any Age of Wonders fans here? What do you think of the new game?
Favorite game in the franchise? I've been replaying 2 and even though it's really unbalanced and simpler than the others there's just something about it...
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The most impressive thing about the AoW series is that none of the titles are straight-up overwritten by later ones (in the way Disciples 1 is strictly inferior to 2, or HoMM 1 & 2 basically get invalidated by 3).
AoW 1 is a different experience from 2/SM, which is a different experience from 3, which is a totally different game from Planetfall. You can enjoy any of them on their own merits.
HoMM 2 is in no way obsoleted by HoMM 3. They play differently, the former is much less symmetrical and magic is actually all-around powerful in it, as opposed to being primarily for utility (debuffs, adventure map travel).
Glad someone else made a new thread so. Very keen for this game, and they're dishing out info at just the right rate to keep my hype levels maximum.
Most recent dev diary mentions that each culture has different scouts that work in different ways. Love that kind of shit in 4x games. Factions should play completely differently from each other.
Which AoW games should I play?
Are there widescreen or modernization patches for the old crap?
AoW 2.5 looks kind of neat.
Try em all. They're all good in their own ways. May as well start from 1 if you're gonna do that.
frick that
so old
If it turns out good i'll probably pick it up, AoW has never been a bad time so far.
3 was a fun game but planetfall felt bland and soulless
So much this.
Put a few hundred hours in AOW3, but Planetfall never hooked me. Couldn't say why. I liked the idea of modding troops, but never got past the starter campaign. Putting heros in OP tanks was very boring.
a lot of planetfall felt very samey. I'm glad they are going in the opposite direction again with all the variation.
>What do you think of the new game?
I can't say I like -everything- about it (for example, AoW4 seems like a step back from AoW:PF in terms of keeping early game units viable), and I do have some concerns that I feel haven't been sufficiently addressed so far (for example, how the AI in AoW3 and PF was too passive and pretty much incapable of pressuring a halfway competent player, which seems to be the case in AoW4 as well from what I've read), but as a whole it looks like it'll be a great game. Assuming the announced DLCs do a good job of expanding the game and enhancing the game's weaker aspects, it might just end up becoming my favorite strategy game in a very long time.
>Favorite game in the franchise?
Hard to say. In terms of atmosphere and "soul" the first one still can't be beaten. In terms of pure mechanics and multiplayer, PF is easily the best. In terms of which one I enjoyed the most overall, probably AoW3. I guess if I had to pick just one it'd be 3, because it's mechanically more interesting than the older ones while providing a better singleplayer experience than PF. I just wish it wasn't so poorly balanced for multiplayer, but at least there are mods for that.
>in terms of keeping early game units viable
Aren't they doing unit mods again but just with a fantasy flair? I kind of got that vibe from some of the Tome research option descriptions. Could be entirely wrong though.
I'm not one of the lucky ones who've actually gotten to play the game, but from what I've read the issue seems to be that tier 1-2 units become entirely useless once you get tier 3-4 units, and the racial transformations that make them somewhat useful again are tier 5, which means you'll also get access to the mythic tier 5 units at that same time. Since tier 5 units (almost?) all have mana upkeep and so do the racial transformations, your best units directly compete for resources with the ability to make your worst units better. There are lesser enchantments that kinda work like mods in Planetfall, but instead of applying them to individual units those apply to all units of a certain type as long as the enchantment is up. So for example if you maintain an enchantment that boosts pikemen, it'll boost your t4 pikemen just as well as your t1 pikemen.
This is all second-hand information at best so I might be off the mark here, but it does sound like a step back from PF to me which was pretty good at keeping low-tier units viable, and even had specific strategies that revolved around massing low-tier units with higher-tier units mainly being support (like Indentured spam).
Yeah fair, I was thinking this might end up being implemented like unit mods, but they will probably just do it the traditional way of casting the spell on your army.
Actually I'm kind of unsure now. Look at the wording for the spells. In enchantment you have several Unit Enchantments. But in Beasts, you have a Buff Spell. Maybe a unit enchantment is cast on the campaign map and buff spell is cast on the battle map? That'd make sense, but it could mean unit enchantments are like mods maybe. Doubtful though.
Also just realised
>Animal summoned depends on the terrain it's cast on
Neat.
Enchantments from the way they talk sound like those permenant doctrines in planetfall. Like you have x slots to use and they affect all relevant stuff.
Could be. Could also just be like the upgrade techs in AoW3 that just give some across the board upgrade to your units after you reaearch them. Like 1 Necromancer tech gives all your undead units life leech. That sort of thing.
too steamlined and rock/paper/scissory. fallen enchatress won
>fallen enchatress won
I think this game is going to be amazing for roll charts. You could run 2 separate roll charts. One for realm creation and 1 for faction creation. There's so many combination that I may have trouble making factions without a bit of random input.
The faction creation mechanics make my dick diamonds.
The possibilities of the faction creation mechanics, you mean.
Aow SM Is really cool, but for me, AoW1 Is the jam. A real tactical stg without all that geopolitycal bs AND stuff, i mean i get that stuff Is what people actually enjoy but for me aow1 Is perfect due its simplicity. You pick lizards, Rush flood. Pick orcs spam soldier and enchant weapon.
pick human and send in vertibird strike teams to assassinate the enemy leaders. that shit is so dope.
>stg
From what some anons have been posting around, it looks way more ambitious than 3, so it will probably be worth a play.
My favorite is 1 because it has the best graphics, music, races and campaign, and also due to nostalgia .
So now that most of the character creation stuff has been revealed (apart from the pantheon and affinity tree unlockables I guess), what kind of faction are you going to make for your first game?
I can't choose between these two:
>edgelord dark elves
>form: elf
>traits: spider mounts + underground adaptation
>culture: dark
>society: gifted casters + powerful evokers
>tome: evocation
>ruler: wizard king
or
>noble frog knights
>form: frog
>traits: strong + defensive
>culture: foedal
>society: imperialist + runesmith
>tome: faith
>ruler: champion
See https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/custom-factions-overview.1570824/ for a compiled overview of options.
Faith and Honor >>>>>>> thots
reject holes, embrace forg
>Industrial orcs
>Sneaky-stabby undeground evil gobbos
>Feudal frogs
It'll either be
>Goblin
>High culture
>Tome of swarm
>Champion leader that focuses on buffing
Or
>Orc
>Barbarian
>Tome of souls
>Wizard King that focuses on Necromancy and exploiting the orcs
>form: elf
>traits: ferocious and quick reflexes
>culture: barbarian
>society: ritual cannibals and fabled hunters or devious watchers
>tome: of cryomancy
>ruler: champion
Barbarian elves are cool
Second ones will be frogs and some magic focused culture. Probably mystic
Savage snow elves. Intradasting.
I wonder if their story scenarios force you to play a certain faction. I'm guessing they do, so I'll probably play through all of those first.
>form: elf
>society: ritual cannibals
You've played Original Sin 2, haven't you?
>Human
>Nightmare mounts
>Feudal
>Tome of souls/necromany lines
I want my spooky medieval skeleton knights.
>human (base traits)
>feudal
>adept settlers
>great builders
>tome of enchantment
>champion
Yep, it's gaming time
>human (base traits)
Base traits for humans are Fast Recuperation and Adaptable.
Adaptable makes sense to me because humans are often portrayed as such in fiction, but I don't see why they get Fast Recuperation. Automatic regeneration isn't really something I'd associate with humans.
Humans in this fantasy setting might have the best metabolism and scarring, moreso than goblins iunno.
What does fast recuperation do? Is it that you are actually regenerating? It could represent that humans recover from fatigue faster than other races, like the theories about ancient humans fastwalking deer to death or whatever. It could also represent humans taking better care of themselves, having more of a focus on medical technology etc, some of those like defensive tactics are more ways of thinking than physical traits. It could be that humans properly take the time to rest and recover, whilst orcs keep trying to exercise and hurt themselves more etc.
Probably +6hp regenerated per turn on the campaign map, like what Draconians have now in 3.
>What does fast recuperation do?
Units automatically heal 15HP after combat.
Seems like a strange thing for humans to have.
most things are fluffable, for that one i'd go with something like "Humans, having a shorter lifespan and an even shorter physical peak than other races, take particular care of themselves in the context of injuries and wounds."
have some chatGPT-3 generated ideas:
Genetic Evolution: Fantasy humans could have evolved to have a faster recuperation rate as a survival mechanism to quickly recover from injuries sustained during battles.
Magical Blessings: In a world filled with magic, fast recuperation could be a gift bestowed by gods or powerful magical beings.
Dietary Habits: A diet rich in healing herbs and other restorative foods could promote faster recuperation among fantasy humans.
Advanced Medical Knowledge: In a world where medical knowledge is more advanced, fantasy humans could have developed techniques or remedies that promote faster recuperation.
Magical Artifacts: Certain magical artifacts could boost the healing properties of fantasy humans, allowing them to recover quickly after battles.
Natural Abilities: Some fantasy humans could possess innate abilities that promote fast recuperation, similar to how some real-world animals can regenerate their limbs.
Cultural Traditions: Certain cultures within the fantasy world could place a greater emphasis on rest and recuperation, leading to the development of techniques that promote faster healing.
Physical Training: A specific type of physical training, like martial arts or yoga, could promote faster healing among fantasy humans.
Environmental Factors: Certain environments within the fantasy world could contain magical or natural properties that promote faster healing.
Supernatural Intervention: Finally, fast recuperation could be the result of supernatural intervention, such as a powerful witch or wizard who cast a healing spell on the fantasy humans.
Age of wonders doesn't really have an injury system like say, the Dominions series does so the idea of recuperating hit points can represent a wide variety of things. It's obviously supposed to represent humans having irl faster stamina regeneration and our general hardiness but obviously we can't regrow limbs or mend broken bones easily.
If there was an injury system then there'd be less room for our minds to wander, and we could mentally separate stuff like losing limbs or breaking bones from the HP stat. HP right now is just all-encompassing so we end up being autistic theorizing what fast HP recuperation means like we are doing now.
>fast recuperation
>humans
this is something a person with the beetus would wish.
I never like beastfurry races but the battle toads are really drawing me in. It will definitely be some variation of them.
High Orcs
Tome: Evocation with Lightning Magic
Wizard King
Transition to Mystics if that's possible via research
Not sure you can transition cultures. Surely that wouldn't make sense. Although I guess you could migrate cities to diff races in 3.
Well I would have made centaurs but they didn't add those back in in a surprise twist.
That'd be a neat tome thing. Like some kind of beast tome.
Or how about like, Tome of the Steppe or something like that. Loads of buffs for cavalry and an enchantment to turn your infantry units into centaurs.
Yeah that could be pretty sweet. Or just as a trait so you can add it to the base races.
Gimme an option for both the more traditional archer/barbarian centaurs and just knights or more late pistol cavalry and I would be happy. Something you could probably do with that culture selection they got.
You could expand that to other half races or chimeras too where certain combinations give you certain things.
Well, need to see, but quick reflexes and ferocious look too strong right now.
If ranged not so big treat, we can try just stack dmg buffs.
Feudal, stand together (+20% dmg)
Overwhelm tactics (+20% crit)
can give solid boost to dmg,
for melee we can add
Wolf mounts (+20% dmg)
for ranged
Keen-sighted (+20% hit)
for mages need to check what better, +15% to dmg or +20% to crit. Also, idk about star blades vs stand together, but star blades look too weak.
It's kinda hard to judge at this point since there's no reference point for how different modifiers stack up against eachother.
For example, compare Elusive vs Ferocious. Does +6 Defense compensate for +40% damage or not? Does the 40% get added after the 6 Defense gets subtracted, or before? Etc. Same with accuracy modifiers like Keen-Sighted or Quick Reflexes. Is -30% accuracy a lot or not? Are accuracy percentages additive or multiplicative? How does being harder to hit stack up against simply taking less damage? Does +20% accuracy directly translate into +20% more hits (and thus 20% more damage) or not?
Seeing a big percentage modifier on something definitely looks more impressive, but it's hard to compare in a void. +2 Defense doesn't look great but I have no idea how damage is calculated so it might be better than it looks. Not to mention it'll affect different units in different ways. +10 HP on a unit with 15 base HP is obviously a more significant bonus than the same on a unit with 60 base HP for example.
>It's kinda hard to judge at this point since there's no reference point for how different modifiers stack up against eachother.
Let's assume that they stack normally, like aow3/planetfall have.
>For example, compare Elusive vs Ferocious. Does +6 Defense compensate for +40% damage or not?
14х 1.4 = 19.6, it a little more than compensate for low level t1 unit w/o buffs. So we can say - not in most cases.
>Does the 40% get added after the 6 Defense gets subtracted, or before?
I not rem any game where bonuses add after damage vs protection values maths.
>Same with accuracy modifiers like Keen-Sighted or Quick Reflexes. Is -30% accuracy a lot or not?
For direct stacking
If unit have 100% chance to hit, it's 30% reduction damage.
If unit have 60% chance to hit, it's 50% reduction damage.
For multiplicative stacking it's always 30%.
Yeah, 30% or more it's a lot.
>How does being harder to hit stack up against simply taking less damage?
For hit reduction you can use covers. Idk with values, but should be enough good to use it.
For damage reduction? Well, you have 2 armor and 1armor+1 res options. Work vs melee also, but look like meh anyway since values too low compared to 20-30% bonuses.
>Does +20% accuracy directly translate into +20% more hits (and thus 20% more damage) or not?
Why it should not?
Btw, it's can be 20%, or 20% or more.
>Seeing a big percentage modifier on something definitely looks more impressive, but it's hard to compare in a void.
We have some unit's info, it's not void.
>+2 Defense doesn't look great but I have no idea how damage is calculated
Why it should be calculated in weird way instead of damage(+mods)-defense(+mods)=dmg taken?
>Not to mention it'll affect different units in different ways. +10 HP on a unit with 15 base HP is obviously a more significant bonus than the same on a unit with 60 base HP for example
We have t1 unit wih 60 hp/2 armor, lvl1 leader with 90 hp/3 armor, 3 unit with 100 hp/4 armor.
Wtf 15 base hp?
>Btw, it's can be 20%, or 20% or more.
Or less if unit have more than 83% hit chance already.
According to one of the pre-release videos I saw, it uses the same defense formula as planetfall, which was each point of defense/resistance reduces damage taken by 10% multiplicatively. So 1 point of defense is 10% damage reduction, 2 is 19%, 3 is 26.9%, and so on. Essentially every single point of defense is 10% reduced damage compared to the last one. This is a pretty important change, since it makes stacking defense much less effective than it was in AoW3 and before. Also will probably make multi-channel damage more balanced and less wonky.
There guys talk about btw
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/im-here-to-answer-questions-after-50-hours-with-aow4.1571900/post-28815800
Looks fairly interesting but I'll wait till it releases, my favourite is 3 but with DLCs, vanilla 3 was not nearly as good and was was probably the weakest in the series, now it's my favourite oh and it has some great mods, I hope 4 will come out stronger than 3 and I hope it'll be very modable.
Man, watching the trailer, I thought it didn't look like much of an improvement graphically over 3. Installed 3, and I did not realise how much it's aged. Like compare this to one of the Steam pictures.
Pretty massive difference. I also like that they did the hand painted look to the mountains. I've seen it a bit in recent strategy games, and it looks good.
holy frick I hate depth of field, motion blur, etc so much
Wow is that FFH for Civ 6?
It looks like they stuck to using 2D tree sprites in AoW4, which I like, because I doubt my potato PC could run it otherwise.
I really like aow3 it's one of my fav games of the last decade. Its graphics are terrible, though. The graphics are so bad that I don't like playing it on my laptop screen because I can't tell what is what. It's fine on my giant monitor but on a small screen everything just looks the same.
Yeah it doesn't look bad aesthetically, but the terrain can be hard to read.
I remember someone complaining about how Age of Wonders battles had become too small in the more recent games. I would encourage him to play a bit more. This shit is nonstop.
For me i prefer small battles.
It's hard to not lose units where big numbers included, and i hate to lose units.
This game is designed around losing units though, as all you lose out is a tiny amount of food instead of major economic growth like the other games.
I find the huge battles at that stage of the game to be a bit tiresome. I usually autoresolve them.
But there is still per stack limit that is equal all across the board.
And thats boring, i want to be able to field T1 shitty units en masse and overwhelm the enemy. Or maybe have some Tome that allows bigger stacks
Just use more stacks and move them as a group so they have to multi engage.
Same with Planetfall. Once you get to the larger maps, the battles between full armies against one another are immense and feel so chaotic. They take so fricking long too, and require so much micromanagement and coordination
Apparently they are a bit quicker this time. Not sure how they will make turn based combat quicker other than speeding animations like they already did.
I truly don't think it's a bad thing they took so long. It was a very gratifying experience growing from early small scale exploration squads fights native aliens to full scale devastating chaotic battles against rival colonial forces
The only one I play is AoW2/SM, so I couldn't care less about what's going with this series
Thank you for your input.
AoW2 still looks fantastic.
I don't love it, to be honest. It's much too busy and messy. AoW1 had much less detail but it looked better.
Agreed, AoW1 wins for readability.
>busy and messy
Made up buzzword similar to "cartoony".
2 simply looks better but AoW s very high in aesthetics as a series.
>aesthetics
Nice buzzword homosexual
>complains about "buzzwords"
>only counterargument is "it simply looks better"
Your IQ must be below 60.
I'd love a remaster of all of them. Not like a modern remake, but just modern resolutions and running well on modern machines. Last time I tried to play either of them, they were a bit fricked.
They get fricked if you try to alt+tabbing out of them. I haven't had issues when playing in a window. It's not extremely comfortable, but it works.
Yeah, I alt tab so much in games.
What's your favourite Wizard/Leader system out of every Age of Wonder games ?
1 and 2 + SM, sure. I could never get into the 3d-ones, they lost some of the magic
I hate it when there's no new posts in a thread after I wake up. Gimme something to read in bed, you fricks.
The game isnt out yet. At best you can read blogs of minor e-celebs to learn more about the game
https://explorminate.co/4xperiences-with-age-of-wonders-4/
Oh cool, he has his own website. I thought he was just some small timer youtuber that started being recommended to me. Good on him.
It's weird, I feel like the artstyle is starting to get back to that AoW1 style while still being 3D. It's kind of impressive. It's not quite there, but it looks really nice.
This is somewhat concerning. I thought the early game would be pretty different with all the choice we get, but seems like you run into that same problem as games with loads of customisation in that all the customisation is weighted towards the middle-end of the game.
>sieges are gone
I actually liked those, both in 2 and 3. That kinda sucks.
not sure what he's smoking as the only difference is now you have to spend over map turns to break the walls before you get to the battle rather than going straight to battle
I got mad at first as well and then remembered that they've literally shown footage of sieges with walls and ballista firing and shit like that. I don't actually know what he's talking about.
Case in point from the explorminate video. Now maybe he means that the walls are already broken down when you go into the battle. So few turns sieging on the campaign map to break the walls, then you go down to the battle map and they are broken. I dunno.
There's a new one??
I just started replaying shadow magic a few weeks ago
AoW1 has one hell of a vibe compared to the others, but the weird lower framerate issue makes mouse movement feel awful.
I like how surprisingly dark the game is.
Win as the good faction? Great, now the highmen will genocide you to make way for the humans.
Win as the evil faction? Great, now the undead will genocide you because they hate the living.
Out of all the endings, the Elven ending (Halflings->Dwarves->Elves) is the only one that's actually good.
>Elf ending: Peace is made between the factions, humans are allowed to settle under the guidance of the elven court. There's a vague hint that the Highmen and Undead are going to return in the future and stir up shit, but otherwise all is good.
>Dark Elf ending: You rule with an iron fist, but all your allies turn against you out of fear and greed. Meandor realized this was going to happen and just fricked off, so you're left on your own to grow increasingly paranoid and wrathful.
>"Good" Highmen ending: You're the last elf remaining, as all races besides humans and highmen either leave the planet of get disappeared. All your friends are dead, and you become a bitter hermit regretting your choices for the rest of your very long life.
>"Evil" Highmen ending: You're the last elf remaining, as all other races besides humans and highmen either leave the planet of get disappeared. You're cursed by the Highmen to become mute and marked as a pariah, and you become a bitter hermit plotting revenge for the rest of your very long life.
>"Good" Undead ending: Julia heals you as you kill her, cursing you to be the only living being in a world of undeath. You become a fearful fugitive whose only refuge is in your memories of a better world.
>"Evil" Undead ending: As Inioch's last living servant, you realize that nothing you do matters and death is inevitable as the world is ruled by an undead wizard king who has no interests but to watch everything turn into dust. The only thing left for you is to just sit and wait to die.
"Evil" Highmen ending is a really good vibe. They put a curse on you before they depart from the world, but it's not thoroughly debilitating enough to stop you from continuing to plot and rule from the shadows in their absence.
Except you are the only Black person in a world full of turbo-Black folk
I don't see that going too well
I don't remember the older games but the cities and colonization aspect in AOW3 was really underwhelming. Cities felt like unit factories and/or passive resource generators, there wasn't anything interesting you could do with them, just build the handful of necessary upgrades then set them to churn out units.
When you clicked on a city it never felt like something important and unique, that you could really customize to suit your needs.
At some point a ton of strategy games weirdly became less immersive and more board gamey. Not in the mechanics, but in the presentation. There's something that got lost in Civ VI and AoW3 in presentation for me.
aow3 was mostly tactical combat game, theres very little to town development is very streamlined (similar to wh40k gladius) its honestly closer to homm3 than civ but with more tactical combat (for me its too tedious when armies get bigger)
Anyone play Fantasy General?
>need to watch 10 different Twitch streams to unlock ingame content
I HATE MODERN GAMING I HATE MODERN GAMING I HATE MODERN GAMING
It's probably 2 edits in a cfg file.
why they even do that?
i lose interest instantly and just wait for pirated complete edition
Paradox trying to shill the game to zoomers by artificially inflating its popularity on Twitch.
I don’t understand how this works, do they stream hidden links?
A bunch of streamers (the only ones I know are PartyElite and PotatyMcWhiskey, but there are 10 in total) with early access got to design their own cosmetics to put into the game, if you want those cosmetics yourself you have a Twitch account linked to your Steam account and watch their stream for a certain amount of time (could be as little as 15 minutes, could be an hour or more), after that time you'll get the option to send the item to Steam.
The actual streams haven't been officially annouced yet so not much else is known. I only know about this because PotatoMcWhiskey spoke about it and showed off the item he created (a potato hat, picture related). It'll probably be a big event thing shortly before launch.
I don't know who these Black folk are but the ungrateful morons at Paradox and Triumph didn't give access to Dastactic.
>cosmetics
you would think this series is played by boomers who dont care about cosmetics one bit
>PotatoMcWhiskey spoke about it and showed off the item he created
Disgusting, maked just for shit and gigles.
I've no doubt all of the streamer cosmetics will be moronic and focus more on referencing the streamer themselves than fitting in with the game aesthetic.
Eh, it's a mixed bag. There's lame shit like the potato helmet and golden sunglasses, but some of them are kinda cool like a tricorn hat and a horned helmet.
very flavoursome but expect the game to be unplayable for any non-brainlets due to passive dogshit AI (already confirmed by testers) and little in the way of mods (gotta sell that DLC and founder edition garbage)
can any anons explain how you can enjoy this series of games in spite of the garbage AI?
the only good memories i have are playing the campaigns of AoW2 and AoW2:SM as a teenager and stuggling sometimes, before i was smart enough to realise turtle + produce is the key to victory in all situations because again, the AI is garbo
>in spite of the garbage AI?
What strategy games are you even playing if "bad ai" is a deal breaker for you? Only Starcraft and AoE2?
admittedly. my taste limits what i end up playing, very limited outside of competitive multiplayer, even though i'd prefer a good SP experience
posted in another thread, here's my stack:
Caster of Magic for MoM
ThinkerAI for SMAC
AdvCiv for Civ4
MNAI-U for FFH2 (for Civ4)
all of which at force me to play well or face actually losing the game, giving the AI minimal/no bonuses, and force me to play very well if i crank up the difficulty a notch and still have a decent chance of defeat
there's a few more ways i get my strategy fix in board games, and a few certain ones which have AI trained using ML, but they're coffee break board games and not fully fledged strategy games -
Roll for the Galaxy
Through the Ages
Shards of Infinity
honorable mention to
ICEMod for MoO2
RotP (MoO1 OS remake) - don't actually like the game but the AI is amazing and will destroy you unless you're actually good, with zero bonuses
i've also heard there's mod work going on the HoMM5 AI but haven't looked into it much
if anyone has any more suggestions of 'vst with good AI', especially TBS, then i'm all ears
fired up and played a bit of AoWSM yesterday thanks to this thread, reminded that the AI is braindead - on a 1v1 map vs 'lord' level, it didn't take its neighboring neutral city with 3 low-tier units defending it and instead captured a grand total of 1 mana node, and built several ballistas in its starting town (the neutral city starts with a wizard tower)...
It's telling that your list of games with "good AI" doesn't contain a single actual game, just a bunch of mods.
absolutely
the base civ4 AI was 'ok' but compared to other games that made it amazing, same for SMAC - in both games you could crank up the difficulty and actually risk losing, but that was always unsatisfying, since the AI wasn't smarter, it just got bigger bonuses
back to the point, it's why i'm always super concerned to see what will be available in the way of modding tools, and i am immediately pessimistic when a game like AoW4 doesn't seem to be mentioning mods or steam workshop integration in the promo content (please correct me if i'm wrong), and has a load of DLC out the gate
civ4 was built from the ground up to be moddable and lo and behold, nearly 2 decades after its release, it's still holding up and receiving new content - but i guess the corporation behind it makes no money from this and so has little reason to invest in it
post made me go look for evidence either way
there is hope for my sperging grognard brain
steam workshop integration, i just hope they expose enough of the AI's functionality to make it improvable
>steam workshop
oof, no wonder they didn't confirm gog release
>Modding AI in the creator engine
LMAO not happening.
Modding support =/= the devs actually showing people how to use their shit modding tools. Planetfall was leagues ahead of 3's, however that meant jack shit since they couldn't be bothered to release guides or actually show players how to navigate their moronic editor, mainly because not even the fricking devs knew how it worked. You can't even import music into PF since it's so fricked, if not impossible.
>Hurr there's guides!
Yeah, one video by some british c**t who zoom zooms through the basics and barebones webpage that covers literally frickall.
Be excited for the game, by all means, but every modder from 3 to PF is skeptical as frick right now.
>Want to mod in a new race? Cool!
>Have to make adapations for every single new system AND tome evolutions that they have shown so far
>Going to be triple or quadruple the .rpk and .clb files with a frick-ton of dependencies
By all means I could be wrong, but I'm not losing anything by expecting the worst.
>want to mod the game
>AIIEEEEE I HAVE TO ACTUALLY MAKE THE MODS WORK IN THE GAME WHY IS THIS ALLOWED?
Why are modders so lazy? Of fricking course you need to make your custom race work with all the tomes and shit, why would anyone want to play a race that doesn't even work with half the content of the game?
>Why are modders so lazy?
Because of the time investment it takes just to accomplish basic imports and assets, you would know if you had any skill in 3D modelling let alone the games engine, which clearly you don't.
As for the other shit, no-one wants to bother putting in the work in managing literally dozens of more dependencies only to have an update break the entire mod (in an unknown location), or worse, completely corrupt it because the paradox israelite segmented the game to milk DLC's. God forbid someone who is new to modding gets into the scene, enjoy not knowing what the frick to do at all.
>Pronouns, was//were.
>I don't want to do any actual work, I just want the computer fairies to magically take my idea guy bullshit and put it into the game
lol
lmao
Low effort bait, made me reply, here's your (you) moron.
This sounds like projection.
I'm being perfectly serious. You're whining about how it takes too much work to make custom races work with all the game's options. Never mind that we don't even know how AoW4 modding works or what tools will be available, it's completely moronic to complain about actually needing your mods to work with the game's own mechanics and then try and blame the devs for it. You're literally making up dumb shit just so you can feel sorry for yourself.
It's utterly pathetic.
>Too much work to make custom races work with all the game's options.
Says the moron who never touched the tools.
>we don't even know how AoW4 modding works
Same engine, same shit.
>completely moronic to complain about actually needing your mods to work
Most shit doesn't work at all, breaks down, corrupts files, crashes, and so on.
>Asshurt dev
>Corporate shill
>Genuine moron
Which one are you?
>Says the moron who never touched the tools.
Considering the game isn't even out yet, neither have you.
>Same engine, same shit.
>Most shit doesn't work at all, breaks down, corrupts files, crashes, and so on.
Meaningless speculation is irrelevant. You're literally pre-emptively inventing things to get outraged about.
>Which one are you?
Someone and who doesn't enjoy the endless whining of spineless worms.
Tools are same across 3 and planetfall based on the creation engine holy frick you are moronic. Past two incarnations of it were complete dogshit.
>Someone and who doesn't enjoy the endless whining of spineless worms.
Actual fricking toddler.
Don't know about Planetfall but AoW3 had plenty of mods, including stuff with custom models. Sounds like it's only too hard for you, not for people who actually make mods. Which makes sense considering how hard you were crying about actually having to make some models. Keep wishing for those magical computer fairies though. Maybe someday AI will enable you idea guys to actually make something instead of just complaining.
Ask any Age 3 modder and they will tell you the engine is shit, there's a reason the only mods being pumped out are stat changes and reworks, anything else let alone getting functional models or rigging outside of Maya is very difficult. By all means continue talk out of your ass, I got all evening.
>b-but it's hard!
Stop being lazy.
I graciously accept your surrender.
>be shitty gamedev
>make something which should be easy a massive hurdle
>be shocked when nobody mods your game
wow wow wow
also i love how the original post was about modding AI and you went into hurr durr models, as if that's the only problem with how not moddable AoW3/PF are
look at the total lack of mods which affect anything beyond asset swaps, i.e. actual AI mods like other games have
>half a week later
>still seething
not the same anon, weeaboo
i am the one who was complaining about poor AI earlier in the thread though
>a week later
>still seething
>everyone who thinks i'm a moron is the same person
>more than a week later
>still seething
how long has it been now
Not him but I wholeheartedly recommend you A.I war fleet command anon, that game is all about fighting the AI, galactic civilization 2 is also pretty solid in that regard, as for HOMM 5 heroes 5.5 does improve the AI significantly but I feel like you're quite competitive and I don't know if it'd provide the challenge you're looking for, I personally enjoy playing against it a lot but I'm more into big fantasy battles and building up my heroes so HOMM and AoW games are perfect for me.
In AoW3 at least I played a lot of MP. Both active and play by email. Even in AoW2 I remember the hardcore community mostly played PBEM MP games with each other.
I wouldn't call it garbage it's perfectly serviceable especially in later games I did play heavily modded games mostly tho, I usually start on vanilla and then add mods I play random maps with like 30+ mods on AoW 3 to this day as well as some nice player made maps for 1 and shadow magic, there's a lot of good stuff out there.
Oh yeah and turtling is a horrible idea usually as you always want to expand and explore, AoW games favour aggressive play idk how you can do good by turtling, ai will drown you in units and will make doomstacks if left unchecked
I mean it's a 4x game. You're ignoring 2 aspects of the genre if you're not exploring and expanding. In 4 sounds like you can quite easily play tall though. There's even a mode to set it so even can only have 1 city.
you're right, turtling is 100% the wrong word for the playstyle which just destroys the AI i was trying to explain
it's more 'expand over the map but don't attack directly until you can fully leverage your massive economic advantage', at least in AoW2
in the campaigns aggressive play is needed because of scripted bonuses the AI gets
what mods for AoW3 do you recommend? i have it but similar to that game i played the other day of SM, the AI doesn't take the neutral cities adjacent to it which means i just end up dominating economically without really trying - i wouldn't call this serviceable, i'd call it unfinished
I use all the ayalin mods, racial reskin mod, some race mods like archons and thieflings and insectoids, chivalrous intentions, desert expansion and a bunch of smaller mods, honestly I just crank up the difficulty but I feel like you don't like when the ai just gets bonuses and spams stuff at you, and yeah AoW 3 AI is notorious for doomstacking T4 units at higher difficulties but these games are mostly about combat so yeah other 4x elements aren't nearly as much in the focus
Come to think of it only the caster of magic for mom has truly a great AI among these TBS/4x fantasy games, I play it occasionally and I prefer AoW and HOMM but the very first game of it's kind is still at the top, AoW and HOMM are more about the battles and units and spells as weapons and heroes, mom is the true fantasy 4x game, I have yet to try the remake(?) or is it a remaster that released recently, also I feel like AoW games prior to planetfall fall more into the category of TBS with 4X elements than true 4X and HOMM games aren't even 4X at all I don't think
avoid the MoM remake, they did nothing to improve the AI from the original
i really don't know who they're trying to market to because anyone who likes challenges will play CoM, and anyone who likes shiny new things will play AoW3/4 or Civ6
Well that's a shame, all they had to do is hire the guy who made com
So what is the verdict for AoW4? It's Paradox, so I'm thinking it's a cheap CD key and creamapi, or pirate for me Not giving those fricks anymore money.
Just buy the $90 premium edition. Then your DLC is already paid for and you probably won't have to worry about buying any more for at least a year.
lol. What if they do a CK3 and literally not release any DLC?
That just means you didn't support them enough
Evil Toad Creation and Gameplay:
&
Ancient wonders Dev Diary:
>https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/dev-diary-9-ancient-wonders.1574196/
Give us beta version already!
What the frick do they say at 0:50, "?" system?
t. ESL
siege system
I think they are saying siege system. They are ESL too.
So you can capture hero, kill him and revive as undead. This looks like a fun for a necromancer
damn, didn't care about race but really wanted to see what mystic was like
Sold on toad skeletons
1:31:50
>only 6 armies/stacks in total can battle, with 3 on each side, but they can join from farther away
Not too thrilled about less armies being able to join, but interested in seeing how the range thing affects the gameplay.
I'm not too bothered by having 6 stacks max in AoW4 vs 7 stacks max in the older games, but the 3 per side limitation does change things quite a bit. No more surrounding a city with trash and having a 1v6 battle. On the one hand this potentially makes endgame battles a bit more balanced, but on the other hand it could also make the endgame more tedious by forcing you to fight more & harder battles. Also, this indirectly nerfs builds that like spamming lots of low-tier units. The extra reinforcement range does seem nice, especially since not having to be literally next to each other all the time means moving multiple stacks together will be somewhat less fiddly, especially if they have different movement speeds.
Overall I don't think I really like this change, but I don't think it's a huge negative either.
Apparently they introduced more steep upkeep costs as well as imperium upkeep cost to tier 4 and 5 units to balance out the whole low tier vs high tier things
Given how much imperium interacts with, that seems like a pretty big balancing factor that should keep horde playstyles fairly competitive
Guys, I must confess.
I'm hyped.
After yesterday's stream I'm hyped for this game like I haven't been for the past decade.
Me too. Very excited. The thing that really got me was how smooth it was. UI is real nice and all the transitions were so smooth, graphics are clean as frick. AoW3 was some janky shit.
The graphics screams “modern gaming” and not in a good way. Anyway they are serviceable.
>The graphics screams “modern gaming” and not in a good way.
That doesn't mean anything
It means that is bad because modern gaming is a degradation, Satan.
>it looks good, that means it's bad!
I am only bothered about the lack of campaigns. Campaigns in AoW were always fun, so I don't know why are they removing this.
Yeah, that's the main thing I miss. Also helped a bit with the AI issues since campaign maps give the moronic AI a huge starting advantage to actually pressure you a little.
You know you're in for a ride when game teaches you how to commit war crimes (which are a mandatory game mechanic) in the tutorial
Race affinity used to be more important in 1.
Is that still a thing in the next AoW games (Shadow Magic, 3, Planetfall) ? I only played AoW1 and I really liked that feature.
There are some mechanics present in 3 and PW to do with unit morale, but I don't remember units of a certain race straight up deserting you and switching over to another player of that race.
That's a shame, I really liked that. On the other hand, it's kind of understandable to not put something as extensive in games where you can create your own factions.
>This game plans to unlock in approximately 6 weeks
Still so fricking far away.
Thank god RE4 comes out soon.
>Watch the latest dev showcase
>The toads have breasts
lol
>Read the latest post
>The anon has breasts
lol
I'm really hopeful for this game, none of the systems they have outlined seems like a massive core issue
Are AoW 3 / PlanetFall worth playing?
Yes.
Though keep in mind the Planetfall singleplayer campaign is kind of bad.
Why is it bad?
The main issue is that there are no premade maps in Planetfall. Everything is randomly generated. This goes for the campaign maps as well, which means you don't get cool exploration or adventure maps like in the older AoW games Everything is basically the default skirmish setup just with different story events.
>Age of Wonders 4 will have a story which is told over the course of 5 Story Realms. Those Realms can be played by a ruler of your own creation and explores the conflict of the 4th Age. Part of the stories that mark this age are your own conquests as part of your own Pantheon, whether those are Custom Realms, Challenge Realms or Multiplayer Games.
so it seems there is something resembling a campaign in the game after all if only to catch you up on the new lore before throwing you into empire/pantheon mode
Yeah it seems to be similar to Planetfall's campaign but even more loose. Realms are just maps I think. So They are really just like Scenarios in older 4x games. It'll be a map either premade or with certain presets with some story objectives and events. Cool that you get to play your own ruler though. It does mean that the story will be pretty unfocused though and you won't really have much interaction with it. It'll probably be like factions are fighting, choose one to help.
I'm hoping the maps are more hand made and guided than the open ended story maps in Planetfall. Quest objectives in Planetfall could be extremely painful depending on the randomness of them like being told to conquer a random city and it's in the middle of another continent on the other side of the ocean, often the decision path I took for a mission was based on convenience not what I really wanted to do.
Endless Legend was kind of like that too now that I think about it, if the quest is too annoying just ignore it and kill the map.
Considering you don't play a set character in the campaign realms as far as I can tell, I can't imagine the maps themselves are hand crafted. Probably just some set factions and modifiers with some story events and choices sprinkled in.
>if only to catch you up on the new lore before throwing you into empire/pantheon mode
The story realms are part of the whole pantheon system. Every time you choose a realm to conquer, you can choose whether you want to play a Story Realm (narrative missions), a Challenge Realm (non-story missions with fixed settings and challenges), or a Custom Realm (a mission where you choose the settings manually). All of them contribute to your overall pantheon. I believe even multiplayer games contribute to it.
The DLC they have lined up
>Dragon Dawn – Embrace the power of the Ancient Dragon Lords in the Age of Wonders 4 “Dragon Dawn” content pack. From your Dragon Throne, forge empires inhabited by reptilian minions and use draconic magic to evolve your people into dragon hybrids. This content pack includes a new Dragon Ruler type, a Reptilian Form, and New Tomes of Magic, and will launch in Q3 2023.
>Empires and Ashes – The empires of mortals resurge after the devastation brought forth by the Wizard Kings! In the Age of Wonders 4 “Empires and Ashes” expansion, players fuse magic and steel to unleash devastating war machines to drive the Godir back into the Astral Sea. This full expansion, slated for launch in Q4 2023, includes a new Culture, new Tomes of Magic, new Empire Building options and a new Story Realm.
>Primal Fury – Channel Nature’s Spirits in the Age of Wonders 4 “Primal Fury” content pack. Create races using new beastly forms and a primeval culture, with new Tomes of Magic that tap nature’s hidden powers and the Fey realms. Your surroundings will be able to contain new forms of wildlife, creatures and bountiful resources. Primal Fury will become available in Q1 2024.
>Eldritch Realms – The Age of Wonders 4 “Eldritch Realms” expansion opens portals to realms filled with arcane marvels and unspeakable horrors. New forces threaten the rule of the Godir of Magehaven. With new strange monsters, new racial forms, magical realms and locations, this full expansion will bring a new dimension to the game in Q2 2024.
Seeing as Wizard kings have combat bonuses, and Mortal Champions have diplomagic bonuses, I can only assume Dragon Lords have economic bonuses. The rest is about what I expected, more tomes and more cultures
>Create races using new beastly forms and a primeval culture, with new Tomes of Magic that tap nature’s hidden powers and the Fey realms.
It'll be furries but come on centaurs and other fay stuff
100% chance it'll just be humanoid animals so they can reuse the same costumes and animation rigs for the new models. Something like centaurs would be cool but impossible to do without completely remaking all customization options, animations, etc. which they're simply not going to do for one DLC.
Probably, but hey, I just wanna hope.
So, tl;rd:
>Dragon Dawn: Small expansion with Dragon stuff.
>Empires and Ashes: Big expansion with Magitech stuff.
>Primal Fury: Small expansion with Nature and Fey stuff.
>Eldritch Realms: Big expansion with Arcane stuff + Shadow Demons.
Sounds like it. Empires sounds fun. Now if only they just launched the game with all that already.
This kind of spoils the story. It's like the whole narrative set out.
>all of them contain new tomes
Good. This seems the be the games most interesting feature and they need to go ham with it. Shame only 1 pack looks to have a new culture though. We need more of those.
Oh wait I read both of those wrong. 2 have cultures and 3 have tomes. Although who knows if they all won't contain them anyway and the descriptions just don't mention them.
You think they'll go the Planetfall route and move on to a new game after the planned DLC is done, or the Paradox route and keep making more DLC as long as it sells?
Most likely all depends how well it does, but I can't see them doing more than 4. I think planetfall did really well, but I'm not so sure its DLC sold well. I never really saw much interest in it. Kind of like the situation with Three Kingdoms total war.
>I never really saw much interest in it.
That's just it. The customization in planetfall was only skin deep, as all the races basically played the same. This resulted in the game being bland and with no replayability, so no one cared about DLC.
The big question is whether modders can add tomes with meaningful content.
'New Dimension' makes me think they're going to add a secondary upper layer in the outer realm similar to how there is a secondary lower layer in the under ground
In second game there was some edge realm layer, just like layer for underground. This is definitely it
new stream today/tomorrow finally covering mystic culture, wonder what else they will show off
Mystic is probably the least interesting to me. I guess it might be ok to do an Arabian Nights map, but other than that, dunno what else to do with it.
stream
Thanks anon. Here's the dev diary they've mentioned:
>https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/dev-diary-10-heroes-warriors-governors-story-characters.1575417/
I find it kind of annoying that some stuff can apparently carry over from game to game through the pantheon system but that don't tell you what exactly or how it works
I still want to to know if you can keep heroes you like and carry them with you to other maps
If it's 1 to 1 planetfalls empire system, then leaders from your old games can join you as heroes in the future, but their gear is relegated to their starting loadout and their starting level is based on some meta-progression level rather than the level they actually had when you last saw them.
In today's dev diary, they showed an event where a former leader was offering to join as a hero in a new game, but they didn't show their stats or anything, so it's hard to come to a conclusion if levels and gear carry over.
From what we've seen though, and given the fact that the pantheon system is always-on, I think the past-game heroes will just look like and have the same starting equipment and affinities as your old heroes. They'll probably also scale as the game goes on and get their own gear like other recruited heroes, with their "role" staying the same, so shock infantry starting loadout heroes will always be recruited with shock infantry weapons.
Brung brung, calling from your last campaign.
that's a leader, not a hero anon
It's a hero now, b***h.
And also irrelevant to what I wanted to know
Good work anon
I only deal in irrelevancies
Oh you meant heroes other than leaders. I highly doubt it. They've specifically and exclusively referred to leaders as being part of the pantheon system for some time now. You can customize your heroes appearance and name in the middle of a game though, so if you find one of the same race you could just remake them.
>Pronouns
I'll allow it, you can play as (presumably hermaphroditic) frog people.
Holy shot, I didn’t notice it. I guess Americans gave up immersion long time ago.
Damn, sure is nice knowing that anything and everything is american.
Why do europoors even exist?
To consume American slop
True, someone has to
>Americans
It's a Dutch developer and a Swedish publisher.
And who are the majority of their consumers? the ones who actually larp as lgbt friendly conquerors? Name them.
Unironically check out their official discord, like flies on shit.
>discord
>full of homosexualry
wow anon, you going to tell us water is moist next?
Surprisingly yes, it is.
>kills off lizardmen for the lols
wizards really have no sense of right or wrong
>virgin Nimue realizes she can't stop the humans from killing the lizardmen, so she kills the lizardmen herself and joins the humans
>chad Yaka realizes the azracs are fricking cringe, so he kills the azracs and creates an entirely new race of egyptian catgirls
water is wet, not moist, idiot
Hey guys, did you know that in terms of male human and female Pokémon breeding, Vaporeon is the most compatible Pokémon for humans? Not only are they in the field egg group, which is mostly comprised of mammals, Vaporeon are an average of 3"03' tall and 63.9 pounds. this means they're large enough to be able to handle human dicks, and with their impressive Base stats for HP and access to Acid Armor, you can be rough with one. Due to their mostly water based biology, there's no doubt in my mind that an aroused Vaporeon would be incredibly wet, so wet that you could easily have sex with one for hours without getting sore. They can also learn the moves Attract, Baby-Doll eyes, Captivate, Charm and Tail Whip along with not having fur to hide nipples, so it'd be incredibly easy for one to get you in the mood. With their abilities Water Absorb and Hydration, they can easily recover from fatigue with enough water. No other Pokémon comes close with this level of compatibility. Also, fun fact, if you pull out enough, you can make your Vaporeon turn white. Vaporeon is literally built for human dick. Ungodly defense stat + high HP pool + Acid Armor means it can take wiener all day, all shapes and sizes and still come for more.
oh God....i can already see the elf female(male) joke right now....
>tfw it's no longer a joke thanks to 5e D&D
can it be modded so it doesn't show the pronouns, fix the skins of the elves to be white and/or makes genocide a common thing for AI?
I really when people mix their homosexual political shit into the games, a few it's okay because there is always few people who are deviants but ruining the lore is going too far.
You need help.
lel, they are warhammergays
just like me
>They finally fixed free healing in combat by having in-combat heals revert on the world map.
This is gonna be a horrible change for my terrible gameplay.
Frick, I got used to AoW 3 system this is gonna be hard to adapt to
I love it. I hated knowing I was being inefficient by just ending battles instead of drawing them out forever to heal.
>You get knowledge per turn for each hero in your prison
>You get mana income per turn for each hero in your crypt
I like this a lot.
so that elves dev gameplay was the first content i watched about this game
seems like sectors are added from planetfall
is there something similar to empire mode too?
it was by far my favourite feature and made me actually play through my games to the end instead of dropping them when it was clear i won?
>is there something similar to empire mode too?
Empire mode is always on now. The whole game is empire mode.
the amount of time i will waste playing this game
Yep
Is there an easy way to play the game normally or do I have to reset my empire mode progress each time I start a campaign?
I dunno man, I'm not a dev. You can probs turn the Pantheon off in some way.
It seems like all pantheons do is unlock cosmetics and cause events to happen that allow you to recruit leaders from your old games as heroes in your new ones, likely nerfed to be at a level similar to any other hero you could recruit at that stage in the game.
I doubt they're gonna have any crazy meta-progression that makes you OP on turn 1 like in planetfall empire mode, given that the system is always-on and they haven't shown anything of the sort.
>It seems like all pantheons do is unlock cosmetics
They also unlock new map generation options and new cultural traits.
But yeah it looks like it's just about unlocking sidegrades, not about ramping up the powerlevel until you're disgustingly OP like in Planetfall.
>Paradox
Will check it out when it fully releases in 2+ years.
Haven't been hyped for a game in many years.
Does there exist a torrent to a beta/streamer/leaked version, perhaps?
Not yet, soon though. I'd expect a week after launch.
Nah, only a bunch of streamers got early access so far, and they're not going to risk their relationship with Paradox to leak the build.
looks like we get more sparkle elves in stream tomorrow as well as looking at what midgame is like
Age Of Wonders 4 Midgame Mystic Elves Dev Stream
Dev Diary #11: The Art of Age of Wonders 4
>https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/dev-diary-11-the-art-of-age-of-wonders-4.1576391/
Wallpapers (best girl Sundren is here)
>https://paradoxinteractive.files.com/f/55041ae37bd422e2/Age%20of%20Wonders%204%20Wallpapers
>Dev Diary #11: The Art of Age of Wonders 4
>https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/dev-diary-11-the-art-of-age-of-wonders-4.1576391/
I've got to hand it to Triumph, they really know how to invoke cool fantasy designs that are familiar, yet well executed and fun. And bravo for using the new color palette without oversaturating it with hideous colors everywhere like some other games are doing today
I'll be honest. Shitting on your old game is kinda hilarious. I'm guessing this is a completely different guy who wasn't even in the team? Like you are basically shitting on your colleague for petty ui and visibility shit lmao. Even one of the comments are saying they prefer the planetfall UI. Just embarrassing.
This isn't the first time I've seen game devs act like rabid dogs biting each other lol
Low IQ post. Just because they're aiming for a different vibe with this game doesn't mean they're "shitting" on the previous game.
AoW3 has a consistent "end of an era" type theme, approaching the end of traditional fantasy with its themes of industrial revolution, which is reflected in the autumnal palette hinting at change and endings. AoW4 is more about starting a brand new era of exploration and expansion, which is similarly reflected in the brighter, spring-themes palette invoking rebirth and growth.
I hope we get some AoW3 units/themes in one of the AoW4 expansion.
As much as i love industrial revolution in fantasy setting AoW3 filters me hard for some reason
Already confirmed for one of the expansions
https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/age-of-wonders-4/news/age-of-wonders-4-pre-order-announcement
Well that doesnt say much, we might as well get golems (gay) instead of warmachines and gunpowder
Golems already in the base game, so it wouldn't just be those
?t=1337
We are getting gunpowder units for sure they've been in every AoW since 1, the very first game had cannons, muskets and flame tanks and last had an entire class centered around these
I think they are steering well clear of gunpowder for at least the base game. Seems to be very regressed and magic heavy. None of the cultures have gun units and none of the tomes I've seen have them.
What else Industrial Society would be other than massed muskets?
They've shown it off. It's dwarf industrious. They have crossbows. And the materium tomes deal with golems and things like that. They're definitely saving gunpowder for an expansion. Or maybe not at all since the point of gunpowder is that you don't need to learn a magic tome to use it and tomes are the glue of this game.
Lots of people seem to think Empires and Ashes will bring back an AoW3 Dreadnaught-type culture, but the phrase "fuse magic and steel" makes me think more of some fantasy magitech than pure industrial.
Still, could go either way I guess, or even a bit of both.
I think it's not likely to be magitech solely because of the way Industrious high tier stuff is, mostly it looks obviously mandmade but very magical, so dialing it down in the magic aesthetic and cranking up the manufactured look seems like the obvious choice, but who knows?
I was clearly talking about Planetfall you pigeon brain lmao. Even mentioned Planetfall in the post.
It's always the dumber than dogshit anons immediately bringing in IQ to the discussion
>going from "fall" color palate straight to "spring" color palate
Oh no Winterchads, its over for us
The Necromancer DLC for AoW3 was very much winter themed.
yeah
plenty of devs just go with brown shitty 'realistic' pallet that is just painful to watch
we need more 4x games or strategy games that look like KoH
I already see myself 1000+ hours deep into this game
Triumph is amazing in that they innovate in every game they make instead of just copying what's hot in the market
I very like how they make race/tech combos in planetfall.
Oathbound especially, with celestial/heritor/psynumbra techs they can have completely different unit setup.
And usefulness of low tier units very important too.
Oathbound is sort of an exeption on versatility. Most races aren't as flexible in the sense that playing with other techs other than their main (vanguard/promethean, amazon/xenoplague, etc) is an objective nerf.
The thing about low tier units is amazing though. Most 4x games the meta revolves around rushing doomstacks, this is one of the points that make AoW games so unique
To be honest any race can use xenoplague just bcs "free" t3 stacks.
Vanguard can also work with voidtech, syntethis and even celestial
And promazon is very strong.
Yeah, they not change their playstyle so much as oathbound, but they definitely can use more than one or two techs.
>six out of eight leaders defeated before discovery
is this shit normal? zombie happening, 80th turn, default map btw
>is this shit normal?80th turn
I think yes, depend on map size?
In TWWH3 as example ~270 factions, 100 of them dead on turn10.
Depends on the pacing of the 4X game
AoW is typically pretty fast compared to stuff like Civ, at least the last two civ games where there are so many protections and mechanics that make conquering cities a pain in the ass
Evil magic mommy got me interested in the series, started with 3 and once I realized how all the seemingly random and separate elements of combat actually merge together I'm hooked. I'm doing the campaign but I keep getting smoked, I'll make good progress initially but then I'll hit a wall where I can't take any new cities, but by the time I get enough new units the enemy will have tier 4's and 5's covering the map. Not sure what I'm doing wrong, if I need better army design or better macro strategy, any tips?
I really like the wargame aspect, and I want more. What are some good physical wargames out there (besides Warhammer I'm poor) that I can try to get myself and my friends started with?
The AoW3 campaign is kinda awkward in that it's often best to rush the enemy ASAP since they start with several cities and will just outscale you in the long run.
Happy with how the midgame looks so far
The character models seem to be pretty good this time around. Way better than AoW3 and Planetfall.
Hope they don't go backwards from planetfall. That game had the most thought put in it design wise that wasn't just spamming your op late game units. Would be nice if they also bring back some soul that the 3D games desperately lack. In the 3D ones I always felt like I'm just a spicy ugly ass rng character in a bland world.
planetfall had a massive flaw with only 4 experience ranks which lead to your units not developing almost at all since all of them were just generic +4-10hp and +5% accuracy until a mediocre max rank bonus for almost every unit
tech rushing was way too powerful because mods more than doubled your unit performance
late game units also came so late unless you were in empire mode where you could just requisition them that i dont remember ever using them outside of empire mode
I am really digging these enchantments. They actually build up on each other really well. It's not just every enchantment being over the top.
Agreed. Hope there's a giant transformation to pair with the gold skin one.
There is. One of the mid tier nature tomes.
Based. Late-game is going to look like a complete clownshow
I dunno, the effects are kind of subtle except for the last tier where you go full demon or whatever. Like I would have thought metal and gold skinned ice zombies would look dumb, but in that picture it all blends really well.
A dude on the Paradox forum made a thing where you can plan out your custom factions. It also has tooltips so you can see what each option does.
https://ericdb.itch.io/wonderapp
Nice. Give him like.
Neat.
Awesome, kudos to that dude as well as you for sharing it!
What do you guys think, does picrel look like something best girl Sundren would have as her starting setup?
I'll probably change my mind ten times before release, but right now I'm thinking of something like this.
Need info about avialable tiers of unit types.
Like, i saw table where all except one culture have only t1 ranged, and barbs have t2.
There's this, but I think it's incomplete.
>but I think it's incomplete.
Fine if that true.
Since we have only battle mage, shock and shield as t3 units, and every culture have only1 t3.
So if it completed, need to get tomes with ranged units. And this is awfull solution for heavy ranged army, since enchantment tome have +1 range buff for ranged, so it's naturally choice for having advantage.
Rate my Sundren!
I dunno if the Dark culture units (see ) fit her AoW3 playstyle, but the ability to suppress dissent in her cities is almost equivalent to the Rogue's Iron Grip ability.
Maybe replacing her culture with High or changing the Shadow Walkers into Chosen Uniters would lean more to her Torchbearer affinity.
how are here 300 posts discussing gameplay when game isnt even out, do you guys are in beta or just paid shills?
try looking at the dates, moron
>can't believe people are discussing vidya on a vidya board, fricking shills
>how are here 300 posts
This is second thread.
>discussing gameplay when game isnt even out
Look similar to their prev titles, so why no?
>paid shills
>implying discussions and assumptions about a game from favorite series is not allowed
Gtfo.
There's several hours worth of devstreams already out, people getting info from that
stealth rats with attacks of opportunity and drow with dark magic powers
Is Planetfall worth checking out? The sci-fi premise sounds interesting, not sure if this will completely eclipse it though.
It's not a perfect game, but it's pretty good. It's better than AoW3 in some ways and worse in others. If you like the sci-fi setting it's definitely worth checking out.
Whether AoW4 will be strictly better remains to be seen. It does look like it's taking some inspiration from Planetfall but it's not just Planetfall 2: Fantasy Edition.
so can we bang elves yet ?
What is wispering stone?
An item you can give to independent cities. If they have a stone they like you more and can also give you quests.
WHY IS THERE NO NECROMANCY
>WHY IS THERE NO NECROMANCY
WHY IS THERE NO NECROMANCY
>WHY IS THERE NO NECROMANCY
WHY IS THERE NO NECROMANCY
>WHY IS THERE NO NECROMANCY
FRICK THIS SHIT GAME
There are multiple necromancy tomes you moron. Tome of Souls is the starter necromancy tome.
That's not necromancy, it barely counts
I want hoards of zombies and skeletons
>how come the level 1 starter tome doesn't let me instantly cover the world in skeletons?
How handicapped are you?
all you can do is summon some shitty ghosts in this game
its not necromancy
its ass shit
You're right, this game has no necromancy at all and people like you should stay far, far away from it.
See? I told you so. I accept your concession.
As this
anon said, people like you should stay far, far away from it
God I want to bully you so hard, but the other anons might have the better strategy.
Absolutely loved Planetfall. I couldn't get into the original AoW series / fantasy side. The city building and expansion in rings never made sense to me. But building colonies and bases for sector control? On a new world you're exploring and conquering? Perfect.
I'm going to hold off on 4 until it's out. If it's on playstation then sure. Filthy console baby here. But they do play well on console.
Played a bit of planet fall, need to reinstall and do a proper game.
Looking forward to AoW4. Releases in Australia’s on steam soon so getting
Are you a bot?
I am an assistant AI, if this solution has pleased you, please reply with <Thank You> or <Good AI>
>Releases in Australia’s on steam soon
There's whole MONTH ahead, it's like forever, silly bot!
When it comes to army building in the game, are you supposed to make stacks that are good on their own (a few melee, a few ranged, a few supports that all decently blend together) or should I have some stacks that are just calverly, just supports, just siege, etc. Because the movement buffs for some units but not all make me think that I'm just wasting resources since the stack can still only move with the slowest unit.
On that point, do you put all types of buildings in all cities, or should a city only get one of the unit promotion facilities and then spam that unit? Then you'll have 5 cities producing different 5 promoted units at all times.
You should ask yourself what's the intended role of each army (stack). I can see a mounted stack used to kill weak enemy armies while being fast enough to avoid the strong enemy armies, but would it be better than using those units as part of a more coordinated offensive?
My experience in planetfall:
Early game - take everything what i can take, more units is better since i can kill more or stronger enemies.
Midgame - depends, but mostly the same except i have some heroes.
And when i reach t3, there's time to form armies by move type and speed.
Like, i have floating 32-40speed units? I will make stack of them, and if i have lack of roles i can just put hero in floating vehicle to plug that hole.
No floating, no fast (40) movement units? Well, usually i just not recruit them lol. Exception if i want to have some slow but strong ground units for defense or something similar.
Are 3 and Planetfall worth playing? Haven't played any AoW game, what are they like?
Or should I shut up and wait for AoW 4?
All of the AOW games are worth playing. If you're only interested in the singleplayer campaign you can skip 2 and Planetfall since those have the worst campaigns IMO. Also AoW Shadow Magic kind of makes AoW2 irrelevant since it's pretty much the same game except with some new content and a different campaign.
As for AoW3 and Planetfall in particular, they both have their pros and cons but they're definitely worth playing. AoW4 seems to be more like AoW3 mechanically, but it does take some obvious influence from Planetfall as well (along with some original elements of course), so if you want to get a bit familiar with the franchise before getting into AoW4 it wouldn't hurt to play those. If you're mainly interested in the story and lore you can safely skip Planetfall, since it's not related to the mainline AoW timeline apart from some references.
So, AoW 3 is the superior AoW experience? I just don't want to play old games with no modern systems support.
If you don't want to play the older ones, i'd say AoW3 is the best, yeah. Especially in singleplayer. Planetfall is a lot of fun as well IMO and it makes some good improvements on AoW3, but it has a fairly crappy campaign.
you cant speed up your own unit animations in aow3 campaign which instantly makes it unplayable trash
>you cant speed up your own unit animations in aow3 campaign which instantly makes it unplayable trash
I'm 99% sure you can by double clicking the move button on the overworld or the combat map.
I just started playing 3 for the first time a week ago. The combat is the primary focus of the game and if you watch the AoE 4 dev streams you'll get an approximate idea on what to expect since it's similar enough to 3. The short of it is that combat is detailed enough that there's more potential to win battles through outplaying your opponent than just outright numbers or technology advancement and isn't just unit A -> B -> C -> A. There's very little city building and macro decisions to be had compared to something like Civ 5 or even Endless Legend/Space so if that's what you're looking for I'd move on.
While I'm enjoying the single player random map mode, I'm not enjoying the campaign of 3, every mission the only strategy is to blitzkrieg your starting army to the enemy and there's not much to these missions that make them stand out. It's not like an RTS game where the campaign mission vs skirmish are two totally different things.
If you're really bored and cash to blow then I see no reason why you can't dick around in 3 jw8mkwhile you wait for 4, but it does seem like 4 will be a direct upgrade to a lot of 3's mechanics.
>We considered producing, as some of you suggested, the Tome of May 2nd, which would automatically make the day May 2nd, but unfortunately found that it was incompatible with our physics engine.
my hopes and dreams have been shattered...
What will be your first creation?
I think about 2 ways.
Super offence like feudal+wolf mounts + overwhelm tactics + tome of beasts/horde.
Or if healing changes hurt too much, super defense: indistious + tough/bulwark + defensive tactics/ferocious + tome of ench. Lack of offense ability can be compensated with armor shredding.
I've had these little idiots planned out since the tomes were first shown off. Love the idea of lots of little imperialistic self righteous Gobbos. Not entirely sure how I'll develop them though. I don't really want to go religious.
>I don't really want to go religious
As i saw, there's order tomes which more about supemacy, just like Warhammer's humanity.
>zeal tome
status res debuff, +spirit dmg, + morale buffs.
>Tome of the Inquisition
no info, but sound like agressive as hell
>Tome of Subjugation
terrifying/intimidating aura, final ultimatum, subjugatigns raid, tyrant knights.
>Tome of the God Emperor
Burn heretics, kill mutants, purge uncleans!
are you me? only differences are I was going to use adaptable and feudal
Good taste fellow Gobbo imperialist.
yeah, I like the idea of gobs being more than just an unruly mob of sneaks. I guess stepping away from such preconceptions is a big draw of AoW4.
I admit when I have idle time I'm just in the faction creator playing around.
Yeah this game is living very rent free in my head right now. I've got that problem where I can't really start up other games because I just want to play this one.
I'm going through planetfall right now, which is helping.
I don't usually get hyped, but I really am looking forward to this. especially since Humankind was such a disappointment. from what I've seen so far, I don't expect to get burned like I did, which is just adding to the excitement.
Hopefully. This game is taking the same path as Humankind mechanically, which is a hard path to take. I just hope that fantasy/roleplaying aspect makes it work better than their attempt, so it feels less like there's a single "correct" way to play and more that you're encouraged to stick to a theme.
>feels less like there's a single "correct" way to play
that really was humankind's downfall. age of wonders has spells and race traits, different units with different mechanics, and all these other variables so you aren't just wanting to push production and science like humankind.
just the spells is enough to switch things up, since you don't know what units are going to be buffed or when a chain lightning is coming.
I don't know what me from a year ago was thinking just buying humankind without researching it, I really put faith in the developers just because they made endless legend/space. now I believe that whoever did work on legend/space must have gotten replaced.
I dunno, I think it's the same people, I think they just had an idea and probably didn't realise how awful it was until too deep to pull out. It definitely sounded cool on paper to me.
maybe, it's just hard to accept; especially since back then I had just played a bunch of legend and space 2.
I'll stop talking about an unrelated game now, so stepping aside from that: is there info on the tomes, like what's in them so far? at least the starting ones to fuel me playing with the faction creator even more.
There's a bunch of info. This anon posted a link to someone who did an in depth right up with screenshots of everything
You can also watch Partyelite's video on youtube where he went over everything in the character creator in depth and explained all the spells in all the tier 1 tomes.
thanks, anon
>In July 2016, Sega announced that they had acquired Amplitude Studios in order to expand their reach on the PC gaming market.
I don't think Sega had any input into Humankind. The idea was way too risky. If you were looking for signs of Publisher interference, the game would be similar to Civ. I mean maybe Sega rushed them, that's always possible.
Every single strategy game dev SEGA acquired has shit the bed.
People believe the BS about 'SEGA doesn't interfere with their developers', but they do. CA's Mike Simpson threw his bosses at SEGA under the bus in 2009; they insisted that Total War: Empire be released long before it was ready(similar problem Warhammer 3 had). His infamous 'SEGA are our most important customer' blog can still be found.
Amplitude went from making comfy games to shit; a night and day difference in terms of before and after from when SEGA bought them.
Relic went from making comfy games to shit. DoW2: Chaos Rising is the last good game they ever made, the last one published by THQ too, before they collapsed and SEGA bought Relic.
SEGA is where strategy game developers go to die. The only difference between them and EA in this respect is that EA shuts down studios after ruining them, but SEGA keeps them chugging along.
>Amplitude went from making comfy games to shit; a night and day difference in terms of before and after from when SEGA bought them.
In interviews they've stated that the sole reason they made their company was to create history 4x game like Civ. I dunno man, I've just never heard anything about actual interference from Sega come out of any of these devs. Usually if there's interference it leaks out at some point. Relic went to shit because it's good devs literally died or left the company. I suppose the horrific monetisation in CoH2 could have been Sega. It's hard to believe any developer would willingly do that to a game they are making.
Here's mine, I like the idea of a cold imperialist nation that borders on evil but isn't actually evil. It's weird that cryomancy gives shadow affinity but at least it works with what I'm going for in this specific scenario.
My strategy in game is primarily to chip enemies down with magic, and having my body blocking units hopefully ignore status effects from my AoE spells.
I feel like I could probably take a better trait than gifted castors, but I remember back in age of wonders 3 and planetfall, casting points were usually your ultimate cap on spells as you'd never really run low on mana/energy if you knew what you were doing.
Kind of sad the only purplish emblem options are dark purple and pastel pink. AoW 3 had a really nice light purple option. I feel like stacking casting points with gifted casters/ powerful evokers will be the "meta" pick for mystics (or anyone really) but I'm a hipster and I want to rush research
I do like how the tomes are all very much themed around the wizard ruler gradually becoming a demi-god. I know rushing tier IV units was the meta in 3 and they've been trying to move away from that but I really hope the gameplay reflects the theme with your main hero becoming ridiculously op. I want to have my lich lord be immune to all non-holy damage once I get the tier V tome of the eternal lord where only the tier V god emperor rival MC can take him on.
AoW 4 will be set in a fantasy setting as AoW 3?
Yes, it's set in the same universe, some time after the events in AoW3 (and its expansions).
The whole game's gimmick is moving between different dimensions/planets, so it may as well be a reboot
There's a single continuous storyline from AoW1 to 3 (and now 4). The only one that's a completely different setting is Planetfall.
Will AoW 4 be a good game?
It looks good so far, but of course the devs showcasing a game on their own stream doesn't necessarily paint a complete picture. I really fricking hope it'll be good and I have a reasonable amount of faith in the developers due to enjoying their past titles, but there's no way to be sure until it actually launches.
Weird question: I've never played AoW games, after Paradox announcement I googled previous games, and the overall reaction is that AoW 3 is one of the best games in the genre. Is that true?
A question was raised - should I play AoW 3 then or just sit and wait for AoW 4 and skip all the previous ones?
People really like the older games but I just find they aged too much. 3 probably IS one of the best games in the genre, but it's not exactly a big genre (the biggest competitor, HoMM, is basically locked in Ubisoft's discard pile)
>AoW 3 is one of the best games in the genre. Is that true?
Depends on what you want, really. AoW has always been a very combat-focused game. If you're looking for Civ-like empire building, deep city management, diplomacy that goes beyond the bare minimum, or anything like that, AoW games are just going to feel shallow. But the combat is among the best in the genre IMO, and the games always had good atmosphere, especially AoW1 which is pure soul.
I'm trying to wrack my memory here, are there any proper fantasy 4X games that actually have a deep empire management system? Endless Legend is basically sci-fi, there's Warlock and Fallen Enchantress but I haven't really played either well enough to know if they're good. Only other thing that comes to mind is Civ mods.
basically there's none
civ4 with FFH2 (i recommend MNAI-U for the best update AI)
you can probably get a good 50 hours out of aow3
there really arent any playstyles outside of trying to find landmarks that buff your t4 unit and then rushing them
guys I'm afraid every enemy I encounter is gonna be like in stellaris, a blob of random race/culture/tomes that has 0 personality, or stupid shit like super evil pure magic dwarves, religious good natured tech orcs etc.
I believe they said in one of the streams that there was an option to make the races spawn without randomized traits and such for boring basic b***hes such as yourself
I think they have a default option, plus a bunch of pre-made lords who'd suit your fancy as well.
>religious good natured tech orcs etc.
Well yeah, moronic shit like goblin succubi has kind of become the staple of the franchise. Hopefully it'll be a bit better in this, if the AI plays according to affinity and alignment then hopefully you won't often see holy zealots fighting alongside liches or things like that.
A demon that can take whatever form it wants, looking like a goblin when among goblins is your breaking point?
anon, I don't think fantasy is for you
I won't mind if they're moronic, as long as they are consistent. Like good religious rats is fine as long as they are clearly a faction in the realm.
AI races always spawn with the default traits. They might still have a different culture or different magic, but the race itself will always use the default settings. You will never get Dwarves who are super agile archers, or Orcs who are natural spellcasters, or stuff like that. The only way to include non-standard races is to make them yourself and let the AI play them.
yep, I think it's gaming time
If they have the promotion system from AOW3 in this game then the extra EXP race trait might be OP since it essentially gives units multiple instances of +10 HP. Human supremacy frick yeah.
Are we have info about lvlup of units?
Healing in general seems to be OP as shit in this game. IIRC one of the tier 1 nature tomes gives you a province building that fully heals any friendly army that starts its turn in that province.
that's why they made in-battle healing temporary
I can see myself getting so autistic with all the enchantment combinations just to see what they all look like together. I hope they implement some kind of randomiser. I really wish AoW3 and Planetfall had those so I could just slap the button and shit out a random combo of race and class.
They mentioned that there's an ingame encyclopedia type thing that lets you test what each transformation would look like. Not sure if it allows you to test multiple transformations at the same time though.
Yeah I'm wondering if you can get like Frostling transformation and demon transformation together. That sort of thing.
I think major transformations don't stack, at least not visually. Minor transformations always stack, but if they affect the same bodypart (i.e. two head transformations, two leg transformations, two skin transformations, etc.) you only get the visuals from the last applied one.
Very sad, but fair.
I haven't looked through the gameplay footage in enough detail, do we know what is affected by the transformations? Just your starting race? All the races inside your faction? Pick and choose?
It would be pretty cool if you could apply different transformations to different races to further synergise with their racial traits.
Affect only one race a i know.
So yeah, you can have two races with different transformations.
you can choose any race that you have at least 40% of the population/cities under your control
you pick each race seperatly
What other cultural archetypes do you think would fit in this game? I was thinking of perhaps a Greek city state like culture.
Oriental, Egyptian, Mesoamerican
I mean you can't just call them that. What would you call them?
not him, and I only know surface level, pop culture shit about any of them, but this is what I came up with:
Honorbound for knockoff samurai, could do Horse Lords for mongol horde flavor.
Deified with mechanics regarding resistance or temples or something.
I know even less about mesoamerican so I'm just going to call them the Cult with a sacrifice population mechanic.
>classic fantasy game
>please add real-world cultures to the game!
>I want to play as a samurai!
I hate normalgay brainlets so fricking much it's unreal.
>Noooo don't dilute my heckin Tolkien aesthetic!
>Feudal
nature/order
>Barbarian
nature/chaos
>Industrious
materium
>High
order
>Dark
shadow
>Mystic
astral
I think good additions would be
>Otherworldly
astral/shadow, cult-like and spooky
>Warbound
chaos/materium, completely militarized society with a technological focus (so Industrious isn't the only one)
>Imperial
order/materium, think greco-roman, louis XIV, the rennaissance/enlightenment, basically an entire society of vghposters
>Druidic
nature, henges and hippies
>Druidic
From one of the dev diaries, that one is definitely a culture that's coming in an expansion. They had a picture of a druid dorf.
>order/materium, think greco-roman, louis XIV, the rennaissance/enlightenment, basically an entire society of vghposters
Fairly certain we're getting the return of the Commonwealth from 3 in a DLC.
As the other Anons said, there's good reason to assume we'll get a pseudo-renaissance culture for the 2nd DLC and a druidic culture for the third.
What I would really like to see is a C/C culture, since that would be the only "pure" alignment left without a culture (assuming druids will be N/N and renaissance will be something like O/M). On the other hand, I find it hard to imagine how a pure Chaos faction would even work as a regular culture.
>pure chaos
My first thought was the standard post-apocalyptic crazy biker gangs but somehow fitted into fantasy. Maybe they would be completely nomadic? Might be a little too game changing for a culture.
No these are all good ideas, adding roving clans and endless cultist cultures to the game.
I would like to see a nomad culture, chaos-themed or not. All cultural units mounted (with a variety of mounts including camels and elephants). You'd get a penalty to founding and growing cities, but every hero would have an attached traveling encampment where you can train new units and heal like you're in a city.
What if there was a culture that was limited to only having 1 city and couldn't found more, but they received bonus affinities and a unique vassal mechanic?
You mean like the Cultists in Endless Legend?
Mite b cool, but I doubt we'll ever see something like that in an AoW game.
Thursday's Q&A said it will at least ship with a megacity mode that prevents you from getting more cities but lets you keep expanding your starter.
Yeah all the realm modifiers and set ups look pretty awesome. I hope you can randomise them though, otherwise I'll always just end up picking the most basic option from choice anxiety.
Cool. City management in Planetfall was really bad in many cases.
Was better than 3 at least, although I find myself having no reason to migrate races in planetfall compared to any other age of wonders.
>Was better than 3 at least
Are it?
For maximum output you should manually check every city every turn. When you have 1-2 cities, well.
When you start conq AI cities, and all of them also req total rebuilding? It's just hell.
You don't have to manually assign pops each turn and the more in-depth city management gives you something to actually work towards besides better unit production.
>You don't have to manually assign pops each turn
It's increase output. In some cases up to 50%.
>more in-depth city management gives you something to actually work towards besides better unit production
I repeat, you need to rebuild every sector in fresh conq city, it take a lot of time every turn.
Are you moronic so much so you have fun spending 20 min every turn just for manage cities?
No it doesn't take me that long, and I understand it increases output dramatically when you assign the right pops, which is why I do it once every 3 or so turns since that's usually how long it takes to increase city population or q new building to come up. All this takes less than 3 minutes if you know what you're doing.
3 mins for one city? Sure, why not.
Now imagine you should manage 15 of them.
I have and it really doesn't take that long. Especially at the point of 15 cities, q good chunk of those should've already had optimal Pops and building queues assigned to them earlier. Including dismantling all the shitty AI improvements.
Well. Can you give me video where you actively conq enemy cities, have 15 of them by, idk, turn 40 and every turn spent only 3 min to manage all of them them with maximal output.
If you can't, i'll assume you just liar and want to argue for unknown reason.
>This, but unironically.
>Go back to WoW.
lol
What does Dreadnought have to do with muh samurai orcs?
Dreadnought is inherently untolkein and a different style of fantasy compared to everything else in AoW3 and everyone sucks it's wiener
>Dreadnought is inherently untolkein
Half of Lord of the Rings is literally about the evils of industrialization.
So now we're arguing themes instead of aesthetics. So how does an eastern or steppe theme of honor break the coherency of the game? Or classic greek democracy theme?
That's exactly my point. Come up with an actual theme instead of "uhh just make it samurai and mongol hordes." Faction design should be definef by themes and mechanics, not "I want to be a samurai!"
And LOTR's also didn't have wizards summoning gold dragons and lighting elementals to fight for them. That's not the point. Nobody says the only thing that's allowed is to literally copy Tolkien, but claiming that themes of industrialization aren't part of classic fantasy is obviously wrong. Midwits are always perfectly okay with mixing bronze age elements and late medieval elements even though there's like a 3000 year gap between them, but when people start adding industrial stuff and guns (even though those developments were already around in the 1300s and 1400s) they start acting like you're getting your sources mixed.
LOTR's idea of "industrialisation" was "cutting down trees to smelt swords" not "steampunk tanks and drones", I don't recall Saruman sending waves of literal robots against Helms Deep.
Dreadnought or Technokrat(in german,the german name fits a lot better) is one of the few great things that made aow3 stand out.
that and there was something satisfying couquering an enemy elven mage nation and making elven technokrats
Hope we can make musketters,golems,tanks in aow 4
>Hope we can make musketters,golems,tanks in aow 4
Golems are in the game, but muskets and tanks aren't. The common assumption is that the Empires and Ashes DLC will add more industrial magitech stuff.
>muskets and tanks aren't
fricking gay,humans ALWAYS had access to muskets way back to the original AOW
This, human ultimate unit in the very first game was a fricking airship complete with weapons it would be super gay if we just went to fricking crossbows being the highest tech weapons in the game
Well that's what it is now.
I just fricking love muskets, use them in every game i can.
Age of Wonders? More like Age of Shit!
I haven't noticed during the streams, but do cultures in this have research attached to them? like do you research your higher tier units or is it a matter of getting the buildings? are there Feudal spells or do your spells only come from what tome you choose?
the streams make it pretty clear that units are attached to city upgrade level and that yes cultures have their own unique sets of spells
>cultures have their own unique sets of spells
that's good to hear
Yes. A lot of the research comes from tomes, but there's also research that comes from your culture as well as generic research that's accessible to everyone.
Sooo is there a reason for technological regression? Are we gonna get some context about what the frick happened with the world?
I thought it wasn't the same world as 3. Isn't the whole premise that you're playing as reality hopping wizards, and each "realm" is its own world? They're basically going the multiverse route, I expect easter egg references to the prior games (and Planetfall because why not) but not a coherent chronological sequel.
>Are we gonna get some context about what the frick happened with the world?
The Shadowborn won, opened the Shadow Gates, and brought back all the old exiled AoW2 wizards. It's possible one or more of them wrecked the Commonwealth. Though, as mentioned by
, it's likely they'll bring back the Dreadnoughts or at least a Dreadnought-like culture in the DLC. So maybe the Commonwealth is still around and simply isn't among he first factions to start exploring the multiverse. Either way, I really hope the AoW4 story maps will provide some insight into what happened between AoW3 and 4 beyond "gates opened, shit's fricked."
Most of AoW4 takes place on other worlds, but it would make no sense that Athla wouldn't at least be one of the worlds you can visit, most likely in the story maps. Especially considering that the premade leaders are almost all natives from Athla.
Fantasy hell opened and all the fantasy magic nerds in there were let out and brought down all of the big empires. Since they are all wizards and rely entirely on magic, limiting the use of technology is in their best interest. They are also jumping to different realms, so from a gameplay point they want them all starting around the same technology point.
AoW4's OST is up!
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/dev-diary-12-music.1577212/
dang, this is a hell of an improvement over 3s
really somber yet comfy
Feels a bit 'darker' compared to AoW3. Guess it fits the tone of the game.
oc do not steel
What's great is that if I understand the character creator right, your faction leader can be a different race to your actual race, so you can totally have a human ruling over a bunch of yellow rats.
>your faction leader can be a different race to your actual race
But only if you're the Wizard King.
Yeah if you're a Wizard King your leader can be any race, but if you're a Champion you have to be the same race as your regular units.
Might as well post my donut steels.
idk why i'm doing this since i'll probably get disappointed with the game if i buy it on release but here's my memes
Race 1 - swarm memers, spam low-tier units and spam cities if that's a thing
Race 2 - that speed! doing some sort of meme of flanking with unicorn mounts incl the starting hero, starting with a ranged unit and a scout unit too
Race 3 - materium affinity spam, stack defense to make units unkillable, shield and polearm units get +2 ranks each and you start with 2 of them
i do fear that all these distinct races will play more or less exactly the same in practice, and the AI will be garbo, but hey, it's fun to dream
forgot image
Yeah, the early game especially is gonna be very samey.
it makes me seriously question why no devs haven't just more or less directly copied the social engineering mechanics of SMAC
support costs + having some for free depending on your SUPPORT score + unit designer = completely different attitudes towards the type of units it's worth making, and consequently changes the cost/benefit of projects and buildings boosting unit morale and losses in combat
has there been any information on the landmark/whatever buildings where you can only bring one stack to right the encounter?
aow3 and planetfall had the same problem where playing a swarm race with multiple stacks eats shit against those
ancient ruins and sphinx temples for example
Judging from the steams, they work the same as before.
>steams
streams*
Frick I want to play this game now, not next month. I'm this close to becoming a streamergay just so I can get free early access to everything.
Do it! And share with us your copy.
I want to pick chosen uniters instead of devotees because I like the unit bonuses more, and the vassals are a good way to compensate for my own cities being huddled around my capital.
My only question is can people just steal your vassals? Is it really a good idea to keep independents as vassals instead of merging them into your empire?
>My only question is can people just steal your vassals?
They can't steal independent cities once you vassalise them, at least not unless they physically attack and conquer them. Before you vassalise them they can "steal" them by reaching the vassal relation level before you.
>Is it really a good idea to keep independents as vassals instead of merging them into your empire?
Depends on your build. The Order branch of the affinity tree has bonuses for vassalizing cities, while the Chaos branch has bonuses for conquering and even razing them.
I am starting to really like the options this character creator has.
some yikes nuggets I found from scrolling through q&a
>no crafting
>no melee on range units
>no disjunction (spelljammer building on the province instead)
>no start without a city
>only 5 campaign missions
>no water tome, basically water related content is like vanilla aow3
>no crafting
I actively avoided making my own artifacts so this isn't a problem for me. I suppose this would be bad for multiplayer purposes.
>no melee on range units
Not sure if I understand this. You mean the units can't have both melee and range attack or something else?
>no disjunction (spelljammer building on the province instead)
This one is kinda bad but maybe something in tomes can allow you to neutralize a magic spell
>no start without a city
It's a side effect of transitioning to the province system. Not a big fan since I liked the Civ-like city settling mechanic, but oh well.
>only 5 campaign missions
This one is possibly a deal-breaker. Hell, even the bare-bones Planetfall campaign had 12 missions. I hope we'll get a more thorough preview of the campaign soon.
>no water tome, basically water related content is like vanilla aow3
Eh, it's okay I guess. Let's hope the Cryomancy tome leads to something more interesting.
That's okay because HUHHH----AH YES! It has Pronouns! and uhh... you can make your leader and race a bunch of shitskins!
Besides have you seen the gameplay? there are two insuferable homosexuals talkings for hours while taking half of the screen with their faces! one of them looks a very small semetic & dysgenic speciment, you can relate with that, right anon?
Delicious shizoposting, keep going
>Not sure if I understand this. You mean the units can't have both melee and range attack or something else?
Ranged units can't attack in melee. Skrimishers can, as i know. Have no info about battle mages.
NTA
the ranged attacks seem to be a case by case basis as I've seen units which had both.
The only one of those I have a problem with is no crafting. Yeah sure crafting was stupid OP in AoW3 but it was fun to equip your heroes with custom gear and make them into rape machines. Just tone down the powerlevel of crafted items a bit and it would be fine. I hope they'll bring it back in one of the DLCs.
>>no melee on range units
this is a good thing
>no disjunction
IIRC there's an astral tome dedicated to protecting yourself from magic, could be something there. Tbh I kind of like it, both mechanically and lore-wise it didn't really make sense why you needed to study a school of magic to be able to cast a spell, but any wizard could remove any spell.
did anyone even ask if there were things like offensive or defensive domain spells that would need to be dispelled in the first place?
all we've seen so far are city resource buffs
Pretty sure there's nothing like that in the game any more. Just campaign map damage spells and stuff like freezing water. Honestly kind of glad. I hated the campaign map spells that just sat on your city unless you invested magic to get rid of them. Was just tedious to deal with.
>AoW: grand wizards
>AoW2: just wizards
>AoW3: wizard's apprentices
>AoW4: cultist (not skilled nor powerful as an apprentice)
the magic is getting weaker 🙁
I don't think that's correct, at least if you're going by the lore. AoW2 mages were stronger than AoW1 mages, while AoW4 mages are basically the same dudes as AoW2 again. The only one where magic is canonically weakened is AoW3, because of the events in Shadow Magic.
The ones in AoW4 are the mages from the first games but juiced to hell and completely insane by being locked in a realm of pure magic.
Disjunction spam was honestly one of the worst things about AoW3.
>finally put up a cool global spell
>next turn it immediately gets removed
Not to mention all the big offensive enchantments like cursing an enemy city were borderline useless by midgame.
For me it was going to war with some homosexual AIs and they start disjuncting random shit all over my empire
Gonna play planetfall for the first time to make the wait easier. Are the DLCs essential? I've just had vanilla sitting in my steam library for years untouched.
Nah, the DLCs add some cool shit but I wouldn't consider them essential. Just play vanilla first and if you like it consider getting the DLCs.
>Game releases
>Early access
>10% completed
>takes 3 years to "fully release"
>then 3 more years to have enough dlc/updates to be good
Cool so I guess I'll buy it in 2029 then
you seem to be in the wrong thread anon
Age of Wonders 4, correct?
yes? your entire post had nothing to do with any age of wonders game
I don't play early access games
good for you? still has nothing to do with age of wonders
AoW4 is launching next month. There's no early access. Not sure what you're so upset about.
There's a new generation of people that think DLC and expansions means a game is incomplete at release. They don't realise that companies always planned extra content and now they are just being more transparent about it because it helps with marketing
The publisher is Paradox. Seems like a pretty likely situation.
Because they did that with Planetfall.
Anon is probably thinking the planned DLC is an indicator of a Civilization V scenario
Good thing we can look up the release schedule for both 3 and PW and see that they typically release all the DLC within a year of the base game, unlike dragging the dripfeed out over years the way Firaxis does with Civ. I can absolutely accept the "paywalling already finished content that should be in the base game" criticism but that's mutually exclusive with the "unfinished early access" accusation.
moronic zoomer doesn't know how video game development works. I've seen this dumb shit logic before, you don't know what "complete" is. The dev could just release 80% of the current game, never announce and release future content, and you'd buy it like a moron because it's totally fully released guys! See? No expansions/DLC which means that the game dev is good and gave us a full experience
Unironically that is how gamedev work today.
Literally every studio aside small indies ones cut their content since they have no time and/or no manpower to complete all things which were approved in des docs.
"Will there be an option for co-op in the campaign?
The Story Missions are exclusively single-player, but players can of course play Special Challenge Realms in co-op."
Ouch.
Oof.
Yikes.
No co-op in 2023?
>but players can of course play Special Challenge Realms in co-op
>but players can play co-op
Did you misunderstand what you posted?
Anon, there's NO campaign co-op.
Playing a skirmish map with someone is hardly the definition. You can do that in warcraft 3, but its not a "co-op" game.
Why the frick would the campaign be co-op? They've never been co-op before. I can't even think of a 4x game with a co-op campaign. Who even plays these games multiplayer?
People with friends.
I can see why you wouldn't.
Stop trying to make a tortanic out of everything. I can see your posts throughout the thread and you're desperately trying to find things wrong with it and then adding insightful comments like "yikes". It's pathetic. It's just a niche fantasy 4x game. It's not big enough to be the next big paradox failure you want it to be.
Yikes
I have friends. Lots of friends. None of them play aow. Did you mean friends you made online or something? Honestly I'm old and have been very social my whole life and had a huge number of friends and the only gaming I did with friends was playing fps games at lan parties. I once dated a girl who played civ4, but she got busy and stopped gaming. That's the closest I ever came to meeting someone IRL who played strategy games. It seems like strategy gaming is a niche hobby. I will say that civ 6 seemed to break into normiedome though as I know a few women who play it. I can't stand it. Also, those women don't play MP and never will.
You don't have a LAN group you played Heroes 3, Civ 2 and Diablo and Starcraft with as kids and carried the friendships into the future?
Sorry, buddy. I'm in a group of 30-40s and we still love gaming together.
You sound like a 3rd worlder.
Yeah. I was born in and live in Canada.
I'm so sorry
me too
>AMA on reddit
>suddenly have morons shitposting the thread to death
really shouldn't be surprised about this
AoW 1 is my childhood favorite.
Who would've said back in the day that the guys from AoW will be the only ones left making decent games, everybody else failed, all other franchises like HoMM just got fricked by time and greed
I think order books look really strong.
Depends of how strong units t5 compared to lower tier, but i can see how to make unique army compositions with that spell.
that's not as strong as you probably think it is as you have to completely exhaust the units morale, kill just about every other unit except it and on top of that higher tier units are far harder to get to low morale
also where did you get that screen shot? is someone leaking all the tomes?
>kill just about every other unit except it and on top of that higher tier units are far harder to get to low morale
Yeah, but look like order have instruments to down morale.
>also where did you get that screen shot? is someone leaking all the tomes?
No, it was random surfing on forum
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/some-thoughts-after-the-ama.1577482/post-28869674
Btw i think ppls talk about sreenshots from discord, so need to check it.
I sure hope these next couple weeks pass by fast
I keep checking and it feels like it's been a month away for 4 months now.
>no map editor
Brothermen... I'm not a Conservative type, but even my faith is shaken. Either this new map generator they have is on another level, or its gonna be pretty boring with just random maps, no middle earth or other goofy shit
I don't think I've ever used the map editor for previous AoW games or downloaded user made maps for them. I have a feeling I'm probably not the outlier as well.
You can create custom maps with custom settings, events and questlines, but yeah you can't determine the actual map layout because that's handled by the random generation thing.
It's one of the reasons I expect that the story will be at least as bad as in Planetfall, if not worse. Even if the writing is good (and let's be honest, the writing was never AoW's strong point), you just can't make good story maps with a randomized layout. The other reason is that there are confirmed to be only 5 story maps. Even Planetfall had like 12 story maps at launch. It's lucky I don't play these games for the story or I would've been fricking pissed.
The biggest thing I'm gonna be missing is race specific terrain preferences and Flame tanks. Both of which I hope come back later.
?t=238
>Terrain changing in the middle of a game
Dare I say we might have the option of terraforming ourselves again? Maybe to the extent of AoW?
Hmm I'm not sure. That's uninhabitable sectors becoming a random habitable sector. If you could change habitable sectors, that'd change the bonuses and stuff. I know you can freeze ocean sectors though, and those are another inhabitable sector.
It sucks that we never got to the point in the sparkle elves stream to see if he could terraform the desolate zones
From how they were talking, I'm pretty sure they couldn't. You can definitely alter habitable zones though now that you've reminded me of that stream. They mentioned turning a desert into something else. I mean AoW at least had climate changing terraforming, so it'll have that. Like spreading snow and desert. But maybe not like carving out mountains and shit.
They've shown some mild terraforming options like changing regular terrain to frozen terrain or changing wasteland to fertile land, but unless I missed it they haven't shown anything like being able to raise mountains or cause floods like in AoW1.
considering you can blow up mountains and also raise new mountains in planetfall why not
Huh true. These games are best when they ignore balance and let you go hog wild.
Definitely seems like we'll get some sort of terraforming to do with lava and volcanoes(?) The pyroclastic eruption has a strategic spell icon.
I was about to say it's probably just an attack an army spell, but then I saw "shape the land" and now I'm hopeful for terraforming
Honestly AoW4 is the best the franchise has looked since the original. Yeah 3D will never be as nice as good 2D, but it still looks way better than 2 or 3. The UI is a straight upgrade since it does more while taking up less space, without losing in readability.
I agree. The original still looks the best to me, but 4 looks way better than the rest. 2 and 3 were always pretty ugly. Planetfall was fine at release but now compared to 4, looks washed out and ugly.
Ironic, considering that the UI redesign happened in PW mostly to make the game playable on console.
Finally got the Feudal titles in the dev stream today.
5 of them, one per hero, each hero taking one prevents any other hero from getting one.
Lord of War is heal and movement restoration after battle, but only once per map turn.
Lord of Crops or Production is +25 to food or production for the city they govern, Lord of Magic or Knowledge is +15 to mana or knowledge for your city.
Sounds relatively minor, but Lord of War could be pretty cool.
Also, nice digits.
how many sleeps left?
18 IIRC
That's too fukin far
necromancy?
Necromancy
Yea.
There are at least three necromancy related tomes that I know of, including a level 1 tome so you can start with it at character creation. There's also an undead racial transformation tome (iirc it's level 3) so you can turn your entire faction into undead.
so grievances are just causes belie or whatever from planetfall.
little bit more to it than that, but yes