What I meant by that is that roads make your movement cost a flat 5 per hex (which is as low as movement costs go in AoW4 without a nature empire perk that reduces movement by 2 in your domain). However, 5 is the same cost as grassland and maybe some other terrain depending on culture/traits.
Personally, I think roads should provide the best movement cost per hex in the game. Make it 3 or 4 movement cost per hex for roads so they make a little more of a difference and give you an incentive to spend the gold to build them. I wonder if road movement points can be easily modded?
From on top of my head, you can turn terrain tiles into fertile and forest, there the radiating frost, and chaos has a spell that turns a pretty large area into ash fields.
Yea, the dark book has is half undead/half ice magic and there is a spell that spreads ice out from your cities. And weirdly removes mountain ranges which I discovered much to my distress the time I cast it.
I just finished my massive map game and found out a few things. There is a cap of 30 population for a city. Even though I was playing with the megacity setting, I still hit the cap pretty quickly. I think it should be increased when you can have only the one city. It really limited my expansion.
The hero/leader level cap is only level 20. I know you could turn that off in AoW3 so I’ll have to check the settings to see if they included it for this game as well.
Yesterday I quit a game because no matter what, clearing the nearby Wonder crashed the game. I had seen lots of crashes previously, but always random stuff that did not repeat when I went back in and continued.
So I started a new game this afternoon, went to clear my first Wonder, and I am getting a crash again.
Not quite what you’re asking, but there are thankfully plenty of mods to extend the level limit and/or give more skill piper level.
Not yet, but I’m sure the time will come. I’m assuming no mods? That’s the kind of behavior I would see in other games when something would make a call for a list which had been “helpfully” renamed.
It’s working for me again, fingers crossed it will continue.
It had been crashing without mods, but I suspect that the problem may have been that I was playing with some factions created with mods (additional colors, smaller unit symbols) in use. Anyway, I deleted all custom factions, verified the installation, and a new game seems to be going fine.
Thanks for the tip off that it could be mod related. I tend to assume that these purely aesthetic mods won’t interfere with anything, but that is not necessarily true.
Yeah, I have 4 mods installed: The massive maps mod, a mod to increase unit movement, a mod that increases the hero level cap to 30, and a mod that increases the city population cap to 50.
We are just at the beginning for Age of Wonders 4 and look forward to expanding and improving the game longer than we have done any game in our history.
It sounds like they’re improving the parts of the game that need improvement, though ending the game really needs the most work and I haven’t seen anything on that yet.
But to be fair, I don’t think anyone has solved the problem of how to end a 4X game. The spectrum of solutions runs from godawful all the way up to barely tolerable.
I’ll bet that there’s a very strong correlation between people who love 4X games and people who have no compulsion to complete run throughs.
Completely agree. To me, Triumph followed the playbook of Sid Meier’s Beyond Earth with victory conditions. The necessary “Meet a Condition” then “Press End Turn X times” to win. In my view, the AI and the player need different conditions to win. If a timer has to be included, then let that partly dictate difficulty. An easy difficulty means a player needs substantially less time to hold a condition compared to the AI. A harder difficulty gives both player and AI equal time to hold a victory condition. And it has to be short enough to respect the player’s time. 15 is too long, especially in late game.
4X are mostly based on the assumption that both AI and players are the same type of entity, factions, empires, whatever, that compete in equal conditions. Which is why people complain if the AI cheats clearly. So the win conditions should be the same, although let the difficulty setting of the AI adjust the win condition for the AI seems a valid approach.
To me, the most obvious way to “win” a 4x game is to control a certain portion of the map to symbolize your status as unstoppable. I am not sure what percent of the map should be required, but if you own 60% of the world (through allies as well), then you have essentially won. That should be a victory condition.
However, I do like that AoW 4 does have it where you can just capture the capitol AND kill the main hero to win. It is much better than the slog of killing every city. However, their flaw is that they can move their capitol after losing it.
In one game I had take the enemy capitol like 6 times because I could not find their main hero. You should only be able to move your capitol if you own your capitol.
I also liked the cultural victory from Civ. It does seem that if everyone lives and breaths your culture and identifies more strongly with your culture than their native one, then you have essentially won.
I like the score type victory focus of Old World and Humankind. A 4X should not force you to specialize your civ for a single victory condition right away, and the score accumulation does not. Both games encourage changing focus as you go. Ambitions change in Old World and in Humankind you’re incentivized to go after the era stars that match your culture type that era.
A minor flaw, in this regard, is that you can kill the enemy leader and siege their capital but they’ll have time to respawn before you capture the capital, so you might have to do it all again.
This reminds me of AoW2, with the whackamole Wizards’ Towers. :)
The problem that I had, was that I had no idea where their leader was. It was not at their capitol. Each time a new capitol was founded, I would bee-line there and still no faction leader. It took FAR longer than it should have.
