I miss my Lizardmen turtle rider unit. :( What version of AOW was that in?
I forgot about that one!! Nice callback.
It does look like there was a turtle ballista in AOW1, which is what I was thinking of:
https://aow.heavengames.com/units/unitstats_lizard_ts/#Turtle-Ballista
Looks like it may have been moved up so it would land right before the big Steam summer sale.
You can camp out a bit longer if you want, you have a whole summer to fulfil your Dragon fantasies
Awesome!
Breakdowns from PartyElite and JumboPixel:
One thing I like is that Dragons cannot wield most hero items. They choose an affinity/breath weapon instead of default weapons, and put their unused hero items on a dragon hoard, which generates income each turn. That’s a nice bit of asymmetry, which the game could use a bit more of.
Based on some of the early access, it looks like the Dragon expansion is also potentially coming with a free update that re-balances certain skills/tomes (in battle summons), the price of affinity skills, and general UI niceties. The battle summons and other big crutch spells will do a lot to change the battles. The affinity adjustments will directly reward affinity focus for tree unlocks and possibly indirectly discourage the Baskin Robins approach to tome selection. This might do a lot for changing how some folks feel about “all factions feeling the same”.
I say “potentially” though as it could be the early access changes are very much in flux still. Either way, it does seem to indicate that AoW4 1.0, like other AoW games before it, will improve greatly over time.
Patches always came with updates.
How so? Other than “Dragons”, I did not see anything that really solves the “everything feels too similar” problem. Also I can only guess the dragons, would play somewhat differently, but until I play it (which I will not because I am not buying the expansion), I could not know for sure.
I think the point Chaplin was making is that the early stages of the tree will cost a lot more to unlock, so you are possibly better off investing heavily into a specific focus rather than broadly dabbling in some or all affinities to get the unlocks in a reasonable timeframe.
I’m certainly open to the idea that rebalancing what’s there can already go a long way to make those pieces feel how I’d hoped. I’ve also watched enough of DasTactics videos on the DLC to be really interested in the content they are adding with it. Makes me really hopeful the game ends up in a place where I love it eventually.
Part of the “meta” gameplay is abusing the fact that early tomes can be researched in record speed around the early midgame, provide decent bonuses via enchant stacking at low cost, and count toward unlocking the affinity tree branches, which contain useful passives and items.
The idea was originally to get bonuses that correspond to your tome picks, but it ended up with “I’ll take one with everything, and extra cheese!”
Yes. As @Strato was indicating, I was attempting to point out the tweak to empire tree growth as substantially effecting how scattered the tome pickups become as focusing will be needed to get the higher empire tree items on the branches. This then means the player will potentially have to be more selective on tomes in general which will effect individual game sessions even more because, yeah, “everything with extra cheese” might now be ordering nothing at all.
I guess it will still fairly bland and generic to me then. Typically I would stick to two main affinity branches and only spread out after I had nearly completed the other two. Sometimes I might take a a tome from another branch to pickup an affinity power, but mostly this was reserved for after I had completed my base affinities.
I am really hoping they do something, at some point, to make it so different races combos play drastically different rather than the IMHO rather minor / bland difference there are now.
I just hope they do something about the heroes being so bland. The abilities are all very much the same regardless of what hero you get. Currently, it’s the equipment they have that distinguishes them more than their skills do. And equipment is horrible too.
There are only a few abilities that really feel like a power-up (summons) and I’m assuming those will be nerfed going forward. Which will leave heroes in an even more terrible place than they already are. They need to really overhaul equipment itemization and hero skills. Unfortunately, I don’t see it happening anytime soon. I guess there’s always hope for a good mod.
Yeah that’s just not on the cards afaik.
I guess Ill end up playing this again in a few years when I am bored and forgot why I didn’t play it any further.
That would be quite sad if they left it is this state.
The promise was great, but the reality was not.
Is the reservation/complaint that the factions dont olay differently?
Well, the design is for you to make your own race/faction/whatever, with an emphasis on anything being able to be anything, which means pretty much all the assymetry you want cant come from race creation (e.g. “why do my haflings have to be slow etc”) amd instead must come from.somewhere else.
In this case, from the tomes.
And as you can pick any tome any time (mild restrictions) it means you aren’t going to get much variation here, in the game’s current iteration.
There is scope for making differences matter more, for example if you tripled the cost of research, then each tome pick would be much more impactful.
Yeah, I was really excited for this but it simply is a snoozer. Planetfall was a lot more engaging for me.