You can argue that Endless Legend is a prettier game, but their maps are all over the place. Lore-wise their planet is artificial and is going through some hard times, so there’s even a lore explanation why do the maps look dumb.
I never realized it but now that you’ve said it - yeah, Planetfall maps don’t have that. They have individual sectors and they are kinda like Endless Legen, only even more artificial cause there’s always a center and a very limited number of features.
My only issue with the Planetfall map was reading the map. It was surprisingly hard to find armies and that sort of thing, everything just blended in with the background.
There were times I knew an army was in the area, but I had a moment of playing Where’s Waldo before figuring out where they had wandered off to in the last turn.
The city-building/empire stuff seems just as thoughtful and interesting as dragging your fantasy armies and heroes into battle, honestly. I loved every word, image, and diagram here.
Also, next week we get another stream - the community can vote for what they will play, details at the end of the blog.
I really like the Planetfall map as a map. I try to play most TBS games zoomed in as much as possible, especially in the early game. Up close there’s a lot of detail; I don’t have any trouble telling urban tiles from forests or badlands, etc.
Zoomed out these details start to blur together, but that’s actually a pretty good representation of how satellite imagery looks! I have a hunch that was a deliberate aesthetic decision to make the map look more modern/futuristic.
The map also has a very consistent scale. If you’re zoomed in you can see individual buildings, but zoom out and they blur into planet-spanning metropolises.
I also found the names pretty memorable.
I don’t say any of this to challenge anyone’s comments on the map’s readability. I just appreciate the direction they took in Planetfall.
Yes, that was a nice read that dev diary. City development was always the weakest part of Age of Wonders games, so this being fleshed out is nice. The expansion of the sector system from Planetfall making provinces smaller, and available with every population increase deals with two complaints I had with the Planetfall system. The first complaint was waiting for the arbitary x4 population increment before building a colonist else things were just not efficient in my view. The second is that the so-called natural borders in Planetfall looked anything but natural.
I think it was in the eXplorimate hands-on I read earlier that also talked about all the smaller visual details that exist in the game. I really hope Triumph succeed with this game.
Looks like 6am PDT/8am CDT if I did my conversion right. I went to the discord to see what was winning and it looks like Toadkin (race), Dark (culture), Souls (starting Tome) and Wizard King are the current leads by enough I expect that to be what they roll for the game. I’m really excited to see the game shown off in real time (rather than the demonstration-style loading a save game that has been played beforehand a few times and rehearsed) - I’m also starving for more footage of this damned thing.
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.
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.
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.
