And that tier 3 tome confirms that they’ll be more interesting than just higher levels of the same sort of thing. I like the variety in what tomes unlock(like new buildings) rather than just being spellbooks.
We’ll see. I think AoW3 had a beautiful system of Race/Class combination which gave you an absurd number of playable factions, plus minor modifications with spheres or whatever they were called. Here I’m afraid that factions will feel generic like in Stellaris, cause they’re made from so many building blocks without any big ones. Planetfall might have been even better cause the factions themselves were so diverse and secret tech (and also hero traits) were like seasoning on top, you had both a lot of combinations and well-defined factions. And here when you meet someone you need to look at a long list of traits, none of which are probably that important by themselves.
But it’s all speculation.
I’ve got the same concern. I don’t need or want 50 choices about anything. I’d prefer a few distinct large choices that matter over dozens that individually aren’t significant.
I don’t share the concern but I do get it. Personally I think this system sounds like it will be a lot of fun, and most important to me, super replayable. The race types do have unique traits, but as far as I know we don’t know what those traits are (I assume they may have unique variants on unit types as well, but that may be more about Affinity than Race/Form, hard to say).
I’m getting some Small World vibes here I’m really digging.
Hey, I want it to work and I’m all for replayability having played AOW3 for 400+ hours.
But I also know when I make soup continually adding more ingredients eventually just makes bad soup.
Sure, I get that, I’m just not myself seeing any indications of that here. At least not yet!
The above concerns were my initial concern with the system, but it does seem like Triumph has awareness of this. Starting species/culture still seem pretty foundational, and then at a glance you’ll be able to see the affinity values which should give you a pretty good idea of what you’re up against.
Here’s the new link
On the official discord there is a…lively…thread about the forms.
They don’t.
And some of them were revealed in the announcement video, e.g. iirc ferocious.
Forms have default traits but you can remove them.
No interplay between form and culture.
Every unit of culture x will be the same, regardless of form.
Orc Barbarian is the same as Elf Barbarian etc.
Identical except for (and this is the big unknown, namely the impact ) the mind and body trait you choose, and your society trait.
That sounds like a step back! I’m OOTL, are these differences just moved elsewhere to avoid any kind of “ickiness” about tying it to race? I really liked the fact that Elf archers were really good and that sort of thing, but as I understand it gaming is trying to move away from that idea.
Yeah, that’s a shame to read. I knew you could customize the traits for the forms, buit I assumed that was just for a bit of flavor and min/maxing, and that an Elf was an Elf when encountered in the gameworld that was generated, and had some maybe unique Elf specific units coupled with maybe Elf specific events or other things. In AoW3 when you had a racial version of a researched unit, it had the qualities of that race, so I’m a little disapointed to read most of what @BloodyBattleBrain wrote.
Politics may play a part, but it looks like the biggest thing is the central focus on customization. Build-your-own-faction is the basic concept of the game and they tried locked form traits but melee elves (or whatever) being suboptimal felt bad. They wanted to allow any faction fantasy.
It looks like the tome and empire tree choices will be substantial enough that the racial abilities will be mostly offloaded into other choices you make during the game. So there will be plenty of faction diversity, just “faction” is what you create now and some of it is determined during the game rather than at start.
At the risk oversimplifying, “race” in the old sense is now culture, “class” is now tomes and tree upgrades. Form traits (like ferocious orcs) provide unit modifiers but can be customized to make it a cosmetic choice if you want. Also there are perks and leader background to add yet another layer.
I can see both sides of this (I realize how lame it is to say that) but I’m mostly ok with it.
So unless you specify otherwise, the AI will generally use the default form traits for its factions. So you won’t get muscular halflings or whatever from AI factions unless you tell the generator to give you exotic stuff.
I would like to see a couple of unique units added per form eventually (maybe one tropey fantasy unit and one more offbeat?) But there are so many variables to how you build your faction something had to be simplified I guess.
They’ve chosen to go with player customization of races instead of curated asymmetrical races, which may be a step back, but doesn’t have to be. I’m assuming the game will come with a bunch of stock Leaders with races chosen by the developers. If the Devs do a good job of building interesting pre-made races and leaders, it will be quite good.
One thing I’m unclear on is how special abilities will work. One of the distinct aspects of Planetfall was the fact that each races had distinct units with unique special abilities that could dramatically change combat. I could actually see AoW4 working well if the various customizations you choose confer special abilities on units, or if tome research confers abilities. There are ways to make the actual units the player encounters cool and interesting.
In prior games, when the player creates a custom leader, they could choose to save that leader and then in future games, the AI can be randomly assigned that leader. And in AoW4, leader is connected with customized race, so presumably that will be saved as well.
So I believe (hopefully Triumph can confirm) you could create custom barahir versions of many races, save those and then the AI can be assigned them in future games. So, in theory you could go hog wild.
In both AoW3 and Planetfall, I ended up with a bunch of Sharpes of various stripes saved and then fighting against me in later games. Sharponius vs. Sharpeya! Sharpia vs. Sharpey! Etc.
That makes sense, but I share @alekseivolchok’s concerns. I worry things are going to be generic and hard to recognize. In Total War: Warhammer, an army of Wood Elves, Bretonnians, Chaos, or Dwarfs means something. Specific army composition may vary pretty wildly, but I have a general idea of what I’m going to need to be concerned about with the various factions.
Compare Stellaris to Sword of the Stars. The latter has very distinct factions that require different approaches, either playing as them or playing against them. If you have a Hiver on your border that is very different than having a Human on your border. And then there’s Stellaris, where bird dudes vs. mollusk dudes really doesn’t mean a thing. Those cute butterfly guys are Fanatic Purifiers? Oops, didn’t realize it.
In Stellaris, how do I deal with butterfly dudes vs lizard dudes? No idea! It’s like the Whose Line Is It Anyway of video games where the factions are made up and the race doesn’t matter.
I certainly don’t think it has to be that way, of course. And if the AI does play distinct setups that you can become familiar with that will help. I’m just thinking that if a lot of people had issues with the mental load of unit mods in Planetfall and not being able to recognize what does what, this decision may be a concern. Happy to keep an open mind and wait and see, of course!
It’s entirely possible that Triumph has addressed people’s concerns over the mod system in Planetfall only to create a new set of concerns about custom races.
In AoW3 melee Elf was also arguably sub optimal, but there is an argument to be made that half the joy of picking your race and class was the decision to mitigate a weakness or amplify a strength or go sideways.
The most melee focussed class was Warlord, and I can tell you Elf Warlord was a blast to play.
Pick air for seeker, creation for an easy heal plus bless, wild magic for unlimited minor elementals to spend your mana on.
Elf Mounted Archers in numbers with heal, bless, some of the warlord buff spells, seeker would carry you for alot of the game, and then you could comfortably mass Gryphon Riders.
The current system is a conplete change, so much so that imho, althoigh natural, it is not worth conparing to previous systems.
By which I mean try and evaluate this as a new thing entirely.