Age of Wonders 4

This was always going to be possible with any new game.

I for one would love to know what the thought/ decision making process is, like what problem are the developers trying to solve by using mechanic x etc.

Yeah, I think that mods add too much complexity to Planetfall combat. It’s on par with tactics-only games, yet you also have a robust strategic layer. You can’t look at the army and guess what it does, cause who knows, maybe these dudes who already have some interesting abilities also have a jetpack or some implants. And if you play your cards right, you will never see endgame units and mods in the actual combat cause strategic domination will make all the end game fights trivial.

So I don’t care if race itself is just a cosmetic (or cosmetic if you allow AI to randomize), the issue is that previously I could just tell you that I’m fighting Frostling Dreadnought and you knew what I’m talking about. Of course their magic spheres (or whatever secondary skills are called) played a part, but those are for deep dive in, those are things that you care more about your faction rather than the others. And from what I’ve seen in AoW4 you need a table to remember all of it. And none of the choices seem to be defining. Maybe tomes are cause they provide buildings and units. Who have I met? Cannibal imperialistic elves (standard race traits) barbarians led by a wizard with a tome of domination. I very much like the idea of evolving factions and alignment tree seems to be doing that. But it also looks like that in this game for the first 300 hours of play at the start of every combat with the enemy I’ll have to read the description of every unit and see what traits they have, cause dudes who look like elven warriors might be completely different entities. It sounds to me like a system that is great only after you’ve put a lot of time into it.

It sounds like the “real” game is all about tomes.

Unless ofcourse tomes have no synergy/cross with cultures, as that way you’d avoid the complications.

Sounds like your fear here is why forms have no impact, so that you can see “Barbarian” and parse that easily.

It also sounds like there won’t be any special linkage with cultures and tomes, i.e. if you are Barbarian and pick the tomes mentioned in the dev diary, and I pick the same tome, we get the exact same stuff (as opposed to a system where an Orc with tome of Faith would get something different to a Deaconian)

I think this essentially means that something like the Chaplain mentioned in the dev diary is the same for every culture.

[ So in AoW3 an Orc Crusader was enjoyably different because Warcry and Victory rush made you use them differently. Those differences were racial now they…don’t exist it seems. The choosable traits we have been shown so far seem like mostly passive bonuses. Maybe culture traits have this? ]

If that is so, then you just need to remember “Chaplain”.

Also, even if you have to read the unit card, they don’t look particularly full of information.

Look at the Tyrant Knight:

It’s classed as a “shock” unit and there are…2 things in the unit card.

IF there is no racial or cultural flavouring of this, then you will get the relevant information in just a few seconds, information sufficient to act on (get Pikes, think about morale buffs, think about how to counter the charge)

Also, these units look…pretty.

Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the Stellaris “everyone is the same blank template with a different layer of paint”.

And by not a fan, I mean I hate it with a passion and to date every game that’s done it has lost my interest after maybe two play-throughs.

AoW3 has still got it!

There are enough tome choices that in practice there will be many different types of Tyrant Knights through enchantments from other tomes (hopefully the tomes will be somewhat balanced). There are also the form traits. Cultures might also have inherent unit traits, like high have “Awakened” (But the presentation isn’t entirely clear on whether that applies to all your units or just the culture’s base roster)

Yes it does look like they’ve cleaned the unit card up a lot for quick readability which is good. “Demoralizing heavy charge” alone would have been about 4 separate lines in AoW3!

You will likely hate this then.

Remains to be seen!

Yeah, I probably approach it with Planetfall in mind, where every unit had 20 traits before research and mods added more.

Well, Orc Barbarian and Elf Barbarian will be the same ONLY if you customize the body and mind traits so they are the same in this case.

But yeah, since the minute I saw this new system, I knew this was going to happen. They are going for the ‘make your own faction’ route, which means there are several thousands combinations of possible factions, but also means you can end up with a pastiche of a faction fighting other pastiches, without clear identity. It’s the opposite design decision of having a dozen well designed, unique looking and unique playing factions.

I usually prefer the latter.

edit: but you know, there will be default faction ‘presets’, you can use those, and be done with it.

Best thing is to approach this as a completely new game.

Each new game in the series is usually very different to the predecessor, enough that they don’t compare well imho.

A little more from the head of Triumph on their thought process with the race system. It’s pretty long so I won’t block quote the whole thing.

You can cosmetically customize your race which is pretty cool:

This wasn’t shown in the footage thus far but you can change the look of your race. The army tab in the appearance customization screen allows you to tweak the appearance of your people with proportion controls and color controls:

  • arm length
  • leg length
  • body shape/thickness
  • skin tone
  • armor color

This to complement your creation and reflect your choices. If your orcs are more magic-focused, you can make them skinnier than their burly axe-wielding cousins for example.

Also stuff not custom-made by the player will typically veer away from anything too exotic and out-there.

I’m a bit nervous about the game now. If it ships with ‘normal’ varied races that are not difficult to keep track of what they do, then I’ll be OK. I don’t have anything against the ability to customize, but I don’t want to go up against enemies that I have no idea what they do unless I am always inspecting them - like what I had to do in Planetfall.

I know this has been mentioned before, but hopefully this is enough and doesn’t lead to the mental overhead that a lot of people complained about with mods. I mainly just don’t want to end up with a Stellaris situation when it comes to other factions.

Yeah, I’m with you. Ability to customize as a player is good. I don’t want a random hodgepodge when dealing with other AI factions, though (cavedweller elves mentioned in the link above). I want to be able to see I’m facing an elven army and go “Oh boy, their archers and mages may pose a problem here, I better figure out a way to cover and get in close where I can put my advantages to good use”.

Seems overblown to worry about a system that the AI doesn’t participate in the customization options unless you specifically want them to.

Largely, yeah. Although I think there’s a lot of value in handcrafting distinct factions that may be missing here (and may not be, of course). Stellaris has prebuilt factions as well but they’re just as vague and impressionless as the rest. That doesn’t mean Triumph can’t do the same thing better, though!

If you are playing single player, I believe the only custom races you will see, other than the races you design and save, will be the premade races from Triumph. I’m hopeful they will do a good job designing the races in a “classic archetype” way that is easy to understand and nicely asymmetric, like in Planetfall (Planetfall had WEIRD races but they were all easy to understand the general concept.)

I could see players making much more “gamey” races min/maxed and violating all sense of style and aesthetics and often very weird and hard to understand. But unless you are playing multiplayer, the only examples of that kind of Munchkin race you are likely to see are your own. And hopefully you will remember what the heck the race you designed is.

One thing that clicked with me reading @Lennart_Sas post on the pdox forums was the idea that since each random map/game is a different realm, it would be kind of odd if every realm had the same High Elves, the same Orcs, the same Halflings, etc. This dynamic approach to customizing your own race makes sense in that context.

In previous games the lore described wizards creating races and wizards traveling to other worlds, now you actually can . This game takes a grander perspective on these things.

This also jumped out at me.

But if you want to stick to more classic races you can do that too.

And this. The idea is you can pick “High Elves” if you want, and stick with them, and if the AI is playing as High Elves, they will be High Elves.

Of course that leads to two concerns (at least for me):

1 - Are the base differences between, say, High Elves and Orcs enough? Is it just two inherent traits that define the difference, other than their look? Or is there more to it?

2 - If the AI is picking High Elf and not going crazy with them, will all encountered base races feel the same? Sort of the opposite problem folks are worried about. Or does this simply mean the AI won’t use the tools to custom/randomize the “look” of the races nor the inherent traits, but will still randomly provide a variety of Socity Traits, Starting Tome, and the like? I assume the latter.

Well, it’s the two race traits + culture pick + two society traits + starting tome + ruler origin.

I’m referring to the basic race by itself. The complaint many folks have here is that all those things you listed combined just make races as a pick purely cosmetic.