Age of Wonders 4

Well, from what we have seen, this is not going to be your cup of tea :(.

I suspect @ShivaX and others just need to adjust perspective. We have seen what everyone wants like unique units from tomes/affinity so we just need to shift the language a bit and get used to new terminology. What folks want from what other games call factions or “race” is here it’s just called other things.

I’m optimistic about the faction customization. I enjoyed faction customization in AoW3 and Planetfall much more than in, say Stellaris or Elemental/Fallen Enchantress. The culture-affinity synergies look similar enough to the old formula that I’ll give them a chance.

Two things bug me about customizable factions. First, if I have to do the legwork of designing a faction I’m going to have to understand the game mechanics so I can make meaningful choices about that faction. So those mechanics better be clear and easy to understand. I’ve felt like that was doable with both AoW3 and Planetfall but not, say, Stellaris.

Second, if key gameplay characteristics are tied to unit traits, rather than the unit themselves, then the unit visual designs need to be WYSIWYG. I need to be able to glance at a stack and figure out if they’re order elves or shadow elves. Planetfall and AoW 3 do a good job of this at the army level, but Planetfall especially could have benefitted from more visual feedback on mod loadouts.

The thing I’m optimistic about is that the upfront customization seems pretty straightforward. The tome stuff is all happening as you play and as you’re building that understanding of the game itself.

Wow, the options when it comes to creating random maps sound absolutely incredible. It’s like absolutely no one ever said “Age of Wonders maps are boring” yet Triumph was like “hold my beer” anyway.

Well those customization options and the Pantheon system (an evolution of the Empire mode from Planetfall) sound excellent. This game is definitely a day 1 purchase for me. I’m still hoping for Seals of Victory mode, but if it ships without that, I can wait for an expansion.

This game is looking fantastic.

Edit: 9am CST/10am EST

And the diary:

So far this video has convinced me that race customization is better than having static race traits. Taking the standard Dwarf race traits (those the AI will have unless you tell the AI to mix it up, which is probably what I’ll be doing every game) of +2 Defense and Defensive Tactics (bonus Def and Res if standing next to another figure with Defensive Tactics, all Dwarf units would have this then) and picking, for example from the video, +3 Resistance instead (resist spells/status effects) and Underground Adaptivity to make a sort of Deep Dwarf is so much more interesting than “all Dwarves are the same”. It’s not any different than having sub-races, seems to me?

I haven’t had a chance to read the dev diary yet but if it’s how you describe that sounds good to me.

Link to the full video:

I’m making my way through it slowly due to a busy day, but halfway in and I’m absolutely delighted by this.

Interesting to note - the Culture of your race also defines what spells and things you can research it looks like. For example,

image

You’ll note below the title that it’s a skill level II Buff Spell and it’s tagged as Industrious. He chose Tome of Enchantment at the start of the game - the Industrious tag comes from him selecting Industrious at the game start, and it manipulates a keyword ability (Bolster) that his units have for being Industrious.

So there is more to research than just spells/skills from Tomes!

Just be prepared for a very sudden bleep about halfway in xD

The visual cues in battle, such as the floating text when status effects begin or end or are resisted, or the little icons that do things like denoting how many retaliaions someone has left, are just perfection.

I clearly need to actually watch this video. I thought it was going to be very focused on the faction creation stuff like the dev diary so I wasn’t all that interested(mostly because I find it more interesting to explore those options once I actually have the game to fiddle around with) but it looks like it’s much more than that.

Yeah, it’s almost an hour long (50 min) and probably 35 full minutes of gameplay.

@TriumphJordi I got to your sudden bleep and it was, in your defense, well earned.

The joke is that Tom swore like plenty of times earlier in the video but only two were bleeped out xD

LOL brilliant.

Question - if that Bone Dragon is a Tier 4 (that thing is incredible btw), is there really a 5th Tier of units that’s even more terrifying? Or is Tier 5 the “heroes” of the game?

Oh, nice, not only is there a “restart combat” baked into the UI (or is it “restart round”?) but there is a “redo” button for when you move someone and want to take it back and move them correctly.