Age of Wonders 4

Completely agree. To me, Triumph followed the playbook of Sid Meier’s Beyond Earth with victory conditions. The necessary “Meet a Condition” then “Press End Turn X times” to win. In my view, the AI and the player need different conditions to win. If a timer has to be included, then let that partly dictate difficulty. An easy difficulty means a player needs substantially less time to hold a condition compared to the AI. A harder difficulty gives both player and AI equal time to hold a victory condition. And it has to be short enough to respect the player’s time. 15 is too long, especially in late game.

4X are mostly based on the assumption that both AI and players are the same type of entity, factions, empires, whatever, that compete in equal conditions. Which is why people complain if the AI cheats clearly. So the win conditions should be the same, although let the difficulty setting of the AI adjust the win condition for the AI seems a valid approach.

To me, the most obvious way to “win” a 4x game is to control a certain portion of the map to symbolize your status as unstoppable. I am not sure what percent of the map should be required, but if you own 60% of the world (through allies as well), then you have essentially won. That should be a victory condition.

However, I do like that AoW 4 does have it where you can just capture the capitol AND kill the main hero to win. It is much better than the slog of killing every city. However, their flaw is that they can move their capitol after losing it.

In one game I had take the enemy capitol like 6 times because I could not find their main hero. You should only be able to move your capitol if you own your capitol.

I also liked the cultural victory from Civ. It does seem that if everyone lives and breaths your culture and identifies more strongly with your culture than their native one, then you have essentially won.

I like the score type victory focus of Old World and Humankind. A 4X should not force you to specialize your civ for a single victory condition right away, and the score accumulation does not. Both games encourage changing focus as you go. Ambitions change in Old World and in Humankind you’re incentivized to go after the era stars that match your culture type that era.

A minor flaw, in this regard, is that you can kill the enemy leader and siege their capital but they’ll have time to respawn before you capture the capital, so you might have to do it all again.

This reminds me of AoW2, with the whackamole Wizards’ Towers. :)

The problem that I had, was that I had no idea where their leader was. It was not at their capitol. Each time a new capitol was founded, I would bee-line there and still no faction leader. It took FAR longer than it should have.

Of all the 4x games I’ve played, I like the way Eo ends the game best. It does a lot to alleviate the end game fatigue.

it’s been a while, but my recollection is that the ending of Fallen Enchantress worked well, and that was more of a 4X

Old World I think did a good job of it.

I would have rated Old World best-in-class, as “barely tolerable.” :)

I think I actually played it out to the very end three or four times, which is a huge amount for me. And that was out of at least 20 playthroughs.

It’s been a while and I forget the specifics, but even they made the last step so that it required a choice between lots of “next turns” as you accumulated some resource, or to fight some huge but one-sided battle.

But I know that it worked for a lot of people, and I am glad it did for you.

I think you also want the countdown-type victory to be long enough so that if the AI goes into win mode, the player has enough time for counterplay.

Same concept for the ability to migrate your Throne to a new city. If the player screws up early and gets their capital sacked or leader killed, you want the ability for the player to have a chance to come back from that. I really appreciate games that give the player a reasonable avenue to overcome setbacks rather than casting the “Load Previous Save” spell.

Edit: reread your post again and I see what you’re saying now. That is a point is yeah, announce to the player the ai is actively engaging a win strategy? Yeah that makes sense.

That’s the idea of tying the countdown to difficulty. Let’s say a beacon victory has been reached. The standard time now is 15 turns. Change that to 5 turns. If a player is playing on easy, they get considerably more than 5 turns to defeat an ai that reached this condition. If a player is on brutal difficulty then the ai and player are even; 5 turns for a player to respond.

I’m not saying this is a good idea alone though. I’m sure there’s unintended consequences from it. But I see a problem where in these win conditions a player is just doing nothing except press end turn a bunch of times to finalise the game. And short of building to some great climax that is typically prone to being some alternate way to screw over the player (eg the end of vortex campaign in TW:Warhammer 2, end game crisis in Stellaris) the end game should respect a players time and let them end it so they can move on faster to a new game.

I’m slowly playing through the story scenarios as a way to learn the game, so I have no idea yet whether 15 turns to defend the “victory pylons” is too long or not. It probably depends on whether the AI is strong enough to force you to play some real defense and scramble a bit vs. just staring at your armies of awesome while you End Turn over and over.

I tend to prefer the conquest/domination/diplomatic victory conditions anyway since you generally just keep playing the game until you win instead of switching into Extreme Build mode to construct the victory parts and then Prevent Defense mode to protect them. It’s fun to build the spaceship once or twice in Civ for the sake of completionism, but then I prefer to go back to dominating the globe.

Something is being announced tomorrow.

They did say that the first DLC was coming sooner rather than later. Which means fairly soon. I’d guess that this will be the formal announcement?

Would make sense.

Well, well, well. The first DLC will be out far quicker than I expected.

Dragon Dawn will be out on June, 20th, a scant 2 weeks away.

Here’s a feature overview, new form, 2 new tomes and new the ruler class, along with a scenario, it seems.

  • Dragon Rulers, a distinct new leader type, customizable from snout to tail, with unique new skills, equipment, transformations, and associated events!
  • Lizardfolk, a new physical appearance for your factions
  • Tome of Evolution, adding new units that evolve as they level, and new spells to boost all evolving units
  • Tome of Dragons, adding spells to summon dragons, wield the power of dragons, and become dragons!
  • The Ashen War, a new realm option where six mighty elder dragons are locked in

And a vid about it:

Tome of Evolution sounds like my jam.

Gah, that does look like a whole barrel of fun, even to a guy like me who decided to take a break from Age 4 for a while. C’mon, Triumph, give a guy a little more time to sulk in his metaphorical tent!

They had me at Lizard Peeeple.