For myself, and I think for a lot of people, gaining powers through experience is intrinsically satisfying. Nothing against enchantments, but something significant ought to come from XP. I think that MoM had the right idea there (although in general spells were applied to specific units there, rather than classes of units).
Yep. That’s definitely me. I love it when my units get more interesting and more powerful abilities as they gain experience.
I think after having played that new spellforce game right before this, which has a much more satisfying XP system for units, made this feel a bit underwhelming for me.
Interestingly in the Spellforce game I was initially concerned that leveling up every individual unit would feel tedious, but since the choices actually meaningfully impact gameplay instead of feeling like busywork it feels satisfying.
I hope the AoW devs take a little inspiration from that.
Well, here’s my review. This game is a massive disappointment. I got fed up with it after playing just a dozen games. I think the presentation and style is great, but the gameplay is a terrible combination of dull and annoying.
For example, if the max battle size is 18 units just make a stack 18 units. With the current setup of three stacks of six every time I want to attack somewhere I have to click move times three. The extra stacks add no meaningful gameplay or choices, so it’s just pointless busywork. I was so hoping that for this game they would have gotten rid of that.
The tactical combat is also poor, there’s a million skills and traits but they all do similar things so if you get in an 18 vs 18 furball you just get lost in trying to track what all the traits and skills do only to realize that it barely matters. I found myself auto resolving pretty much everything except for the rare 6vs6 battle that I lost in autoresolve.
And due to the above and because the AI cheats; winning a game is just a boring slog. Once you have your three stacks of high tier units you just move them across the map, clicking three times every round, auto resolve any battles that you’ll win without any losses and repeat for twenty minutes until you can vassalize the enemy. The magic and beacon victory same thing, one you launch it, you just sit waiting with your armies for the invaders to spawn, autoresolve the battle, next turn. Do this 15 times. There’s no challenge to this at all because you won’t start the countdown unless you’re certain you can defeat the invaders. Again, no meaningfull choice here, just click and wait, click and wait. And yeah, I could up the difficulty but then I’ll just get annoyed by the rampant cheating the AI does. I can deal with that in a game like Spellforce EO, but in a game that supposed to be symmetrical? Hell no.
That’s really my main problem with this game, there’s no meaningful choices to be made. Just stay alive to build and support your T3 stacks and you win. All the fluff and flavor surrounding it doesn’t matter at all.
In summation: a mile wide and an inch deep and you only realize the water is so colorful due to the toxic algae. I don’t regret buying the game, because I want to support Triumph Studios, but man I hope the expansions will fix this mess.
I don’t think your issues can be resolved with dlc.
Probably not, but I already paid for them so we’ll see.
I found Spellforce EO was a good deal more interesting gameplay wise, though I didn’t play much of that either.
Maybe I’m just fed up with the genre, although I do feel the whole 4x genre has become like Monopoly. Once great because there was nothing better, but now that there are better offerings you realize how dull it all was in comparison.
Afaik the dlc are all.content packs.
As in adding more tomes, more cultures, more forms, and also a Dragon type ruler.
Not rules changes like the army size limit etc.
That is my issue with the game, perhaps one I did not articulate very well.
As far as unit upgrades, it is kind of meaningless now. They could have done something cool to make high XP units super valuable.
For example archers: Every rank, they gain some HP, some accuracy, and some damage. Every 2nd rank they would also get +1 range. Now a high level archer is going to be far more valuable than a low level archer of the same type, and more importantly, more interesting to play.
And that kind of stuff is why this game bothers me so much. It is so close to being great, but they seem so afraid to do anything significant with factions., traits, unit upgrades, and even world options are not all that impactful.
Well I think a part of this apparent reticence is because everything must fit with everything.
That is true at least for factions.
The building blocks for factions are deliberately quite low key (hell one of those blocks is literally just the look) and if they made them more inpactful or added more steps, the end result might well be better but the process woulf be more complicated, and a key aim here was to simplify/streamline the game.
How does a faction who has no city cap while another faction has no casting point limit “not fit” with everything?
While I will agree that “balance” issues might be a problem, I would also argue that if there are so many OP / Cheaty things you can do, that it would not be a problem. Again, Ill point to MoM which are a boatload of “broken” mechanics which turned out to be super fun.
I get why people may feel disappointed but… it’s the same game as Planetfall (fundamentally) and Age of Wonders 3 ;).
Sort of. I value distinctness, and I feel something like the Dreadnaught was more distinct than anything in AOW4 where things feels more generic and mushy. And ultimately, this is Age of Wonders 4: I want an improvement and evolution over AOW3, not a sidestep or step back, if you know what I mean.
I don’t think AOW4 is bad, but I’m really hoping it improves with the expansions because I’ve never set aside an Age of Wonders game so fast. It was fun for me for a couple campaigns and then I was done.
Regarding the issue of having to micromanage moving 3 stacks of 6 around everywhere, I think having stacks of 18 causes more problems than it fixes. However, I think there’s a simple solution and, for the life of me, I can’t understand why it wasn’t implemented.
An easy and effective fix would be to allow you to select and group up to 3 units stacks together (maybe via a box drag to group as in RTS games). When you move one stack, the AI would move the other 2 stacks automatically on it’s turn to keep them within combat range of the stack you control.
The AI does this already for its units on it’s own turn so the code to do it is already written. So simple and I don’t understand why they didn’t do this. @TriumphJordi, any thoughts on this? Any chance it might be implemented in the future?
IMHO the best solution is to split the difference and increase the stack size to 12. I also think they could play around with it a bit and do something like what S:CoE did and make the stack size variable. (Another way to distinguish factions! A natural fit for the “horde” archetype.)
Again though this is why I find it amusing. Stack size of 6 has been baked into the games since Age 3. Suddenly it’s horrible. Many of the changes were done directly to address complaints people had about Planetfall.
I’ll be honest I’ve always found 3 and Planetfall to be boring. This one seems more my wavelength. I’ve only finished maybe one or two games of Age 3 or Planetfall in all the years I’ve had them, I just nod off otherwise, just Perfect Play things that I don’t find terribly interesting. There’s definitely some balance issues here that can be addressed I think though, such as availability of heroes, equipment, rate of research and auto resolve favoring racial modifications.
A lot of time players don’t really know what they want. People might be happier if the autoresolve was worse to players than now, because you’d feel more obligated to fight the battles, and in fighting them, see all the modifiers and bonuses more clearly in action. I remember for years and years in gaming forums people ask “what do you want” and the answers are invariably “more like game X” and “more of the same, but louder”.
I really feel this. I’ve bounced off every recent 4x I’ve played. Even an objectively good game like Old World failed to hook me like 4x used to hook me.
I’ve always hated the stack size of 6. Didn’t we once upon a time (AoW1?) have 8. I feel like just having those extra two units in the stack gave us a lot more opportunity to experiment and have some variety.
Six is too small and just sucks.
I’m with @Dejin on this, I always thought 6 was too small, and carrying around multiple stacks was needless busywork. But I figure as long as people are complaining about it now, I’m not going to sit quietly on the sidelines! This is the internet, after all!
I had a nice a-ha moment last night when a Rally of the Lieges came up with some super cool Dragon and Fairy units that I had gained access to via Ancient Wonders. However, I was instantly bummed out when I realized that I did not have nearly enough gold to recruit the sweet new units that I wanted. I eventually figured out that I could raise some funds via Diplomacy by selling a bit of gear and excess magic materials so that I could grab those new advanced units for my forces. That’s fairly basic strategic problem solving, but it’s been a while since I’ve played a 4x and I was glad my tired old brain could find that solution when it was already past my bedtime.
It also raised one question I could not find the answer to: Does the Rally only last for that one turn, or can you recruit units a few turns later if you need more gold? Also, do unused Rally recruiting points carry over into the next Rally when the available roster refreshes?
Gold seems to be the limiting resource in this game. I am probably hoarding Imperium and Mana too much, but I often run short on gold. I may need to look into gold-boosting factors for my next game.
Armies of 8 would be nice to diversify your forces, especially when special units become available later. I’m guessing the overall battle size limits are at least partly due to performance concerns.