Absolutely wonderful - 2 hours long and worth every minute of your time.
This game gives me something to look forward to. I’m really enjoying what I’ve seen. I do hope the wonders on the map end up being diverse. For instance I’ve noticed in Planetfall that the wonders improved units, but it all felt samey - give +1 to shield or +1 to armor or +5 health. And there were multiples of the same I found strewn across the map.
That was fun. Makes me want to go upstairs and play AoW3.
Glad you enjoyed it! It was very fun to show the game off unscripted and more like we did for the Planetfall streams.
That’s what I’ve been doing for the last few days. AoW3 that is.
I just started watching the video and am looking forward to AOW4. The one thing that caught my eye was the first battle. The battle looked so familiar, then it hit me. The bottom image is a battle from Spellforce: Conquest of Eo.
Man, AoW4 is such a pretty game.
Some topics came up during the potential AoW4 features discussion in the AOW: Planetfall thread, and I’m wondering if we have an answer to them now that AoW4 has been announced:
- The question of Settlers vs. AoW1-style Preset City Locations with No Settlers came up, and I don’t think I’ve seen any settlers in any of the gameplay streams so far. I kind of liked the preset cities — it makes the game feel less like yet another Civ clone. Do we know which way AoW4 goes on this issue?
- Another topic that came up was Victory Conditions. There was a lot of love in the AoW:Planetfall thread for the Seals AoW3 victory condition. Has Triumph discussed Victory Conditions yet?
You will be able to place outposts on the map that can be turned into cities. This costs Imperium. I also believe there is a city cap with significant penalties for going over. So, kind of like Humankind, then?
Don’t think they’ve gone into detail about victory types yet.
There is, which I appreciate as someone that likes to go tall more than wide most of the time, but you can also spend Imperium to increase the city cap if you want to go wider - lots of interesting choices with how to spend your resources, like Imperium, it sounds like. You can also spend it to temporarily bump a cities growth rate, to get another pop faster, it looked like in the last stream.
I don’t think we know a lot about this yet, now you mention it. Or I’m not remembering a lot about it. @TriumphJordi have you guys talked much about victory condtions and I’m forgetting or not quite yet?
We haven’t discussed Victory Conditions in depth yet but there’s the usual ways to win. Military, Magic or Expansion.
Until I read what you wrote, I didn’t get the two screenshots were from two different games O_o
Hahahahaha
There’s no question that Spellforce Conquest of Eo is heavily “inspired” by the AoW series, but I feel Triumph should consider it flattery. I also think that Triumph should pay attention to the way the Spellforce Conquest of Eo devs used a very similar set of combat mechanics to achieve a tactical system that is IMO equal to or better than the best of the AoW system. The good news is, it looks like AoW 4 is already evolving its tactical mechanics in a similar way (this is probably an example of convergent evolution as manifest in game design).
The specific thing that Conquest of Eo does with the AoW tactical system is that by having various discrete, buffable, dispellable, upgradeable statuses of various sorts (including racial and other categories), it allows for a very “modular” approach to the tactical battles with IMO less micromanagement and complexity than the Planetfall mod system (which I loved but was in truth pretty damn complex and micro-manage-y). Also, the various sub-systems within tactics in Conquest of Eo are very crunchy: painful debuffs that can feed nasty abilities, stuns and counters and resistances, etc.
So Conquest of Eo definitely “borrowed inspiration” from AoW and I think AoW should borrow some of that tactical mojo right back.
I agree, and I hope Triumph has spent some time with the combat in Conquest of Eo. Not to mention those battles play really fast while still feeling as crunchy as any other tactical combat I’ve experienced.
Spellforce also limits you to one (moving) city and only allows one stack per battle, which keep it moving along. I felt like most of my time in AoW3 was slogging through sieges with 40 units.
I hate those big battles in AoW, but love so much of the rest of the game I put up with them.
I have heard AoW 4 has somewhat smaller battle maps which may help with the battle sprawl. It’s not just the number of units in the big fights, you also have to march them a ways to get to the fight.
I’ve played some of launch Conquest of Eo but haven’t had time to really jump back into it lately. My struggles with the game were mostly elsewhere so I haven’t paid to much attention to the combat either, as it all plays rather straight forward.