Yeah, I think I might just set this down. I’m getting results like this nearly every battle, and yet I can’t keep up (I’m the victor here).
He has two cities, one of which I’ve pillaged most of his stuff. And it just doesn’t seem to make any difference, there’s just unending waves. Even after this battle, he still has armies of 6/6/4 adjacent to me.
You’re playing with the max distance between players, right? How many cities do your opponents have? I wonder if the extra space means more cities and more stacks.
My last game the AI never held more than three cities and I saw maybe 6-8 stacks moving around. My rough sense is that the AI fields 2-3 stacks per city on normal. If they’ve got four or five cities that could mean a lot of stacks.
Edit: nevermind, just saw you mention that he only had two cities.
That’s a distinct possibility. For my anecdotes worth I haven’t played a game above normal. I’ve seen a goodly amount of pillaging, maybe not as much as @KevinC but then he’s done some harder difficulty work.
I’ll play nice with someone for zero effort. As soon as I get asked to do something they can fuck off usually (although I’ve joined a war or two). For more belligerent neighbors sometimes having a sizeable stack+ near by the border seems like it might be helping, but it’s hard to say for sure. And borders aren’t always so easily defended (my current game is an absurdly ideal setup). About the only thing I do before I am ready for serious action is maybe annex a province/explore a wonder someone else has a claim on (the province claiming system seems wackadoodle to me, incidentally). I don’t trade or ask for things or anything like that. I ignore other nations where possible.
Playing with respawning infestations is a fun all its own but also ties up resources you might otherwise use to patrol/“guard” a border.
Gosh this is the first time I’ve really felt left out of a thing. Moving my three armies every turn feels more of a chore than something I actively care about. Conquest is by far the easiest victory even on Brutal the AI clearly is not designed to build three perfect stacks. I beg anyone who thinks this game is even vaguely good to try Spellforce it is a vastly superior option.
Phew! Slog over, victory won. I would love alternative victories that didn’t involve armies appearing at your gates and stuff so that I don’t have to conquer everyone. I wonder why Seals didn’t carry forward?
That again sounds in principle a great way to divide up big stacks and encourage smaller engagements!
Shame it doesn’t sound like it’s working.
Fwiw on story map 2 I had my entire army wiped out (3 stacks) and rebuilt it in…5 turns.
Still, what you guys are talking sbout sounds odd.
As does 19 turns for a siege.
Longest I’ve had is 6 turns.
Regarding the pillaging, the AI tends to use single units per pillaging area.
Pillaging locks a unit in for 2 turns.
Generally, this means you can sweep them up with a single stack.
Ofcourse if they have 1 stack divided up for pillaging and 3 others ready for battle, then you’re in trouble!
As the game goes on, the standard army composition shifts to units with quite the high HP, high damage and loads of abilities.
It can get quite hard to keep track of it all.
I play on Slow so production times are slower (about 30% slower maybe?). This was also wasn’t late in the game, so we each had a couple cities. Technically I had just barely taken a third, but it was still being absorbed. So that would mean my two cities (one of which was younger and didn’t have a lot of draft income) would each need to pump out 2 units per turn. That ain’t gonna happen, at least not on Slow. Maybe Normal is a lot faster for units. Even if I had the draft income there’s no way I would have had the gold.
Ultimately, I think a part of th eissue is that the AI has full map vision at all times. That means it knows when it can go in for some raiding if your main force had to go deal with another threat (which is what occurred in my first screenshot). He had 30 units in total pillaging around, so it wasn’t something a few leftover units could have dealt with.
There was alot of summoning! And mostly t1 and t2 units, which can be 1 turned.
Me too. I was not a huge fan of earlier games in this series, but I thought that this was just about the best solution for a 4X victory condition so far. I wonder why they dropped the idea.
I have experienced the same situation in two games now where it is a real war of attrition, but the AI just seemed unfazed. I can fight a large battle, take a moment of respite (1-2 turns), then go to siege and whoops, there’s another 3 stacks plus extras lurking around. And in my second game, it was Golden Golems and Iron Golems on the AI’s front line, along with a mix of T1 and T2 units. Golden Golems in particular are not cheap, especially when I was fielding them myself in my last game. Frustrating as you can imagine, and just highlighted a need to bring more than 3 stacks to conquer, if only to resupply low health units.
Aside: When I was playing Planetfall, I experienced the same cheats at play. I’m fine with AI cheating, I know it has to happen, but as always, when it is so egregious, then it can cause problems. In Planetfall, I saw that the AI was fielding a lot of stacks as I pushed against their last two cities, and somehow could sustain that army size despite the lack of an energy exploitation.
In terms of pillaging improvements, I had the AI do that to great effect in my last game. So much stuff to rebuild. What was clever is the AI took the opportunity to cut my economy down, what wasn’t clever is the AI didn’t then push onto cities and claim them. It just lurked about. Another interesting AI quirk is settling in places it really shouldn’t. One city was established near my capital, and the best it could do land wise was one Bronze wonder, and one land province that secured a tunnel entrance. Everything else was water. And then when the city was razed by me, the AI went back some times later and rebuilt there. And then in the same game, and same sort of area, I had the AI set up a one province outpost right in between two of my largest cities. That outpost’s grand achievement was only to annoy me (and did so very well, I was going to go to war strictly because of that outpost).
My last game was definitely a fun ride. Zephyr archers and progressing through the Materium tomes, and feudal society saw some pretty good damage output. I did go through a silver tier wonder which gave me access via Rally of the Lieges to the Blessed Soul unit. I really need to focus on those wonders earlier in the game. I never think I’m strong enough to take them when really a good mix of Tier 2 and 3 units is enough for most. I think the Gold Tier wonders are the ones requiring the most preparation - need to be near end game for those I guess. I was playing on the map that is the jungle one with rampaging beasts. Can’t remember it, but it kept me busy squashing all the different camps that would appear.
Does larger population on its own provide any benefits? What I’m wondering is if I have a city that only has ocean squares around it and all I can do is put down fisheries and all they do is provide more food, is that pretty much useless to expand it, or is there something I will get out of having a larger population?
I didn’t see anything specifically about larger populations increasing instability, so maybe it doesn’t matter? But I feel strange having the city grow for no other purpose then to fish more and more of the ocean.
You can still put down build buildings. And there is the fishing line of buildings that ends with the Seafarer Guild giving food, production, draft and gold per fishery. And the empire development on the nature side will boost those fisheries. But it will take a while to build things I would imagine.
Well, I think Spellforce scratches a different itch. If you really like making your own race and empire management, AoW4 will be the better option.
Does Free City Allegiance drop if a Whispering Stone is withdrawn? I had a Free City that as far as I can recall I had maxed out the relationship with, I’m fairly certain it got far enough that I was asked if I wanted to absorb it into my Empire — I didn’t want to as I had other places I wanted to place cities. I withdrew the Stone and stuck it in my capital to improve stability.
A long while later, I went to check on the Free City and I didn’t even have visibility from them. There was another Empire that had started to try to raise Allegiance with them, but in spite of the fact that I had lost line of sight with the city, I still had more Allegiance then the other Empire.
All I can think of is I do think I moved the Whispering Stone. I suppose it might have also been a scripted event. This was playing Campaign Map #2.
Any thoughts on what might have happened?
I’m pretty sure that once you max out the relationship with a free city, you automatically get back the whispering stone. I’ve had messages saying I got it back automatically - I didn’t even get a choice. I don’t think my relationship was hurt by it.
There are buildings which scale based on population. There aren’t many, and this tend to be Tome structures I believe. Temple of Fertility is one such (+1 food and draft per pop, which is quite good in later stages). IT’s from one of the nature T3s. The one without the archer/shield unit summons, as I recall. Dunno how many more there might be.
Nature affinity has two skills that provide boosts per-province. The research one is one time (iirc), but flat per province. The other gives +5 mana income per province with a resource, I believe. Those are reasons to grow a coastal city with lots of ocean provinces (assumign there are resource nodes worth grabbing in water provinces), being sort of indirectly tied to population count in cities.
The sting, as it were, comes from lack of access to conditional buildings (e.g. masonic hall gives +I can’t recall Prod income but needs two quarries to build; there’s a handful of these across all resource types) and being limited on which guild you can put in the city. So you will suffer for certain resource incomes/growth. But you can still build a pretty solid base of incomes just from the basic city structures.
I try to avoid leaving cities with too little land provinces, though.
The highest level city building goves stability oer population, if that helps.
@tomchick I’ve been thinking about your method of exclusively using autoresolve, and while I don’t think it’s for me it’s made me feel much less bad about going with the autoresolve results when the AI does better than I would. ;)
I do have a hypothetical for you (and I’ll admit it’s a bit snarky so I apologize off the bat for that): If you could have the AI play the strategic game for you, would you? I thought of this when I realized that if you cede control of the tactical battle at the beginning and just watch the AI go, you get the same result as if you’d skipped the battle entirely. (Maybe this was obvious to everyone, but for some reason I assumed that it used a different algorithm.) That made me wonder, would they ever implement the same button on the strategic map, so you could watch the AI play your empire?
I’m assuming the answer is no (both to the hypothetical “would you” and the practical “would they”). The main practical reason that I can think of is that the AI gets enough cheats on the world map (infinite vision, cheaper builds) that it’s not playing the same game as you. You’d have the option of either watching the AI cheat, or get crushed by the other AI cheaters. So now I’m wondering two things. (a) If the tactical game so simple that it’s always “walk forward and punch goblin”, then why do we bother? (b) If they did make an AI that played the game well (with all the AI these days, I assume somebody could if they had access to enough GPU), would we bother?
For (a), I think the answer is two-fold: first, it’s not always “walk forward and punch goblin”, and I do manage to pull off victories the AI fails at; second, there’s a lot of decision-making before the battle that you only see evaluated in the battle, and that’s still interesting (a la Dominions).
Anyway, I should probably get back to work now.
Hey, I’m perfectly happy to answer snarky questions! Lord knows, I’ve posed enough in my time, it’s only fair. :) But to answer your question – it’s an easy and ultimately short answer, but bear with me while I get there – let me explain why I was* playing Age of Wonders 4 the way I was playing.
I’ve been exploring games that straddle the strategic and tactical layers. Master of Orion (by way of the Remnants of the Precursors remake). The X-coms and Phoenix Points, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns Dorm Life Simulator. Creative Assembly’s Total War games are another example. These are all comprised of series of tactical battles united by a strategic context. That bifurcation creates unique design challenges for those games and their genres. Yet a lot of developers seem reluctant to admit that one layer is just a shell for the other layer, which is how the early Total Wars did this. One of the distinguishing features of Triumph’s Age series, which sets it apart from other 4Xs, is that its historically been focused on richly detailed tactical combat.
For instance, up until Age of Wonders 4, cities in Triumph’s Age series were mostly just elaborate spawners you had to manage to spit out your armies (cf the original Master of Orion). But it feels like Age of Wonders 4 has a) fleshed out the strategic layer and b) streamlined the tactical game so the two layers are more co-equal than ever. I find this a little…alarming and also a little exciting, but for various reasons, I think Age of Wonders 4 needs more work. So I’m on hold with it for now.
HOWEVER, when I came to it, I wasn’t really interested in another game about tactical combats. I’ve been playing various dungeon crawler boardgames, and I was hitting the original X-com really hard earlier this year, and I am absolutely stoked to restart a Phoenix Point playthrough soon. If it weren’t for the godawful Dorm Life shell around Midnight Suns, I’d probably still be playing the heck out of that one.
Instead, I came to Age of Wonders 4 looking for a fantasy 4X and not a tactical combat game, which is where Triumph has traditionally put their focus. That was one reason I was okay with ceding the tactical combat to the AI (the other being that I was surprised at how well the AI handled tactical combat!); it meant I could fully explore the strategic layer, and specifically I could feel out what sort of single-player and multiplayer game Age of Wonders 4 would be (note that multiplayer usually means setting all combat to autoresolve). So by skipping past the time I’d spend moving my elf one space to punch a goblin for 1-6 points of damage, I could experience more of the strategic layer, which is the part of Age of Wonders 4 I was specifically interested in.
Basically, my decision to try autoresolving every battle was less about Age of Wonders 4 and more about the fact that I was checking to see how it holds up next to Old World.
So there’s your answer. I wouldn’t be interested in letting the AI resolve the strategic game because that’s the part I wanted to play. That was the reason I installed it. :)
Also, just to clarify a couple of things:
My assertion isn’t that it’s “always walk forward and punch goblin”, as you say. Instead, my assertion is that 90% of the time, it doesn’t matter because the battle was decided before it started. Again, this is true of most game and all actual battles. But it seems to me we “bother” because we like the sense of agency, because that’s why many people play videogames? But my choice to autoresolve battles was largely a way to speed up the game by skipping past inconsequential decisions that, I felt, were usually just busywork.
By the way, a secondary goal for me when I autoresolve all the battles was to see how the AI holds up if I can’t exploit it tactically by doing things it’s too dumb to do. But because the tactical AI is so solid, I’m not sure I see that making a significant difference.
Yes, this is the question I find fascinating! Because what I’m discovering is that Triumph Studios did indeed make a game that plays the game well. Seriously, I’m delighted with the tactical AI in this and Planetfall. It’s taught me a lot! In fact, watching it in action in both games has just further reinforced my decision to play this way.
* I have shelved Age of Wonders 4 for now. I’m guessing it’s going to be an amazing game in about a year or so, but my opinion of it’s current state is that it’s somewhere between “unfinished” and “a mess”. Given Triumph Studios’ insight, talent, and history, I don’t think it will stay that way, but I’ve decided to go back to Planetfall while they finish up Age of Wonders 4.
