I’m not ecstatic about the game, but I think you guys are maybe a bit too harsh…:o
I bounced off of Planetfall but am having a good old time with this. Yes, it’s largely AOW3 with some things streamlined and some other things, namely customization, elaborated, but I’m fine with that.
Clearly the road they went down with this one was, “Our main goal to make a game where you can customize your fantasy race in a zillion different ways, so if you want pious, do-gooder rats or cannibal halflings you can absolutely do it.”
If that’s the road you’re on, you’re definitely choosing to travel the path of the traditional, largely symmetric 4X game where sides differ due to their different relatively small bonuses - and then increasing the number of those small bonuses.
When you’re on that road, you’re not going to end up making an asymmetric game where each side plays by entirely different rules, because allowing players to mix and match highly asymmetric rules when making their customizable faction is going to be a balancing and debugging nightmare.
Was this trade-off worth it? I think it probably is, even though in my dotage I tend to prefer more asymmetric designs. Granted, the game as it works now demands a fair commitment to role-playing a bit on the part of the player: the temptation for your broody edgelords to pick up cheap and good Nature stuff, or your Order-obsessed faux-Romans to pick up some early Chaos traits is just too large. But that temptation can maybe be dealt with by tweaking some numbers, as people have suggested.
Even with tweaking, you’ll never have an asymmetric game where the sides play totally differently given the road they’ve chosen to travel. You’ll just have a faction-customization sandbox where you can mix and match a whole bunch of relatively small traits. Which … I am fine with. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make some bloodthirsty Dark Sun halflings.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good game. It just hasn’t grabbed me for whatever reason. I will continue to plink around with it though.
Just listed to the 3MA podcast where they discussed AOW4. They were all very positive about it, and brought up some points I hadn’t heard before, such as the campaigns not taking that long. I’ve been distracted with Diablo 4, but I now want to get back to this sooner rather than later.
The basis is solid. It just needs a bit more tweaking to achieve greatness.
I admit that AOW:Planetfall didn’t really quite grab me until the last expansion was in place and patched properly (the Oathbound at release were so unbalanced that it was hilarious. Well, if you played as them, that is. Everybody else got “Lucky Halfling” flavored PTSD).
It needs a bit more unit variety, more stringent limitations on tome picks, better itemization (or a forge, maybe) and a bit more batshit insane stuff to really shine.
Particularly the hero skills and the lower-tier magic items are so mundane it hurts. Even the tier 4 stuff only has a few spectacular picks. A ring of fire immunity just doesn’t quite inspire the same glee as pulling Festivity or Death’s Gaze from a ruin in PF.
I think this game is pretty great, and it delivered to the level that I was hoping it would. Being able to choose the background, tomes, and powers that I want for my faction is enough for whichever build I’m using to feel interesting mechanically and I can RP whatever I want for my culture and race. It reminds me a lot of a good board or card game tableau power drafting system, which is rad.
My only complaint is that I really want to see more tomes. I want even more options and stuff! That will also perhaps alleviate some of the complaints from people who don’t feel like their factions are unique; the more tomes there are to choose from, the less you’ll see others with powers that overlap yours. There are apparently already some solid workshop tome mods appearing, which I’m excited to try alongside Dragon Dawn.
I am finally playing this game.
I’m running into to a memory leak which is causing my OneDrive to be quickly filled up.
It seems to be a known bug, and the workaround suggested doesn’t seem to fix it.
Any suggestions?
I’ve only played a little of tutorial and it looks very rad. I see others say that all these racial quirks don’t feel significant enough and that’s sad to hear. Comparison to Stellaris is inevitable and it at least feels much better than Stellaris, where only some radical faction characteristics felt like they’ve affected something, and fundamental stuff like ethics is barely noticeable.
One thing I want to praise is gamepad controls. I can’t put my finger on it but compared to Planetfall it’s much, much more robust and user-friendly.
Yes, they do not play differently enough. There are small differences, but that is not sufficient. Its like saying one faction has slightly better archers, but slightly worse melee vs another faction. Yeah, it is different, but not different enough.
This all comes from AoW3 where you might compare Druids to Dreadnaughts or Mages vs Warlords. All very different.
As a 2ndary complaint, the world building options have very minor effects as well. You would think playing on a frozen world would be drastically different than playing on a verdant world, but its only a minor inconvenience being on the frozen world.
I tried to make a world that was truly inhospitable, but it was impossible. The game engine kept making these ‘islands’ of green patches all over. So at worst, you just could not place a city anywhere, but you still had plenty of choice.
IANADev, but just curious; does your pagefile still have issues if you move it back to C:?
Yeah, so, I don’t see this being altered to a degree sufficient to address this.
I think I’m finally throwing in the towel on this one. Been playing it on and off since release and it’s just not satisfying to me. Too many aggravations. Which I don’t completely lay at the feet of the devs, I think this game is just intended for a different style of 4x player than me. I’m primarily a builder at heart, I always want to develop big bustling cities and invest in my economy and boom late into a military superpower. The AI behavior prevents that in ways that drive me batty. It’s horrible about plopping outposts/cities really near my cities for no apparent reason and cutting off my growth. Or just investing in too many stupid little cities that don’t have room to grow, so when I take them over I don’t want to absorb them, plus they are usually blocking my expansion, so I have to raze them. Basically I have to get into position militarily to completely win the game before I can build the empire I want to build.
The final straw was this morning where I had a war with an AI going. It took a couple of my outposts that I’d plopped down adjacent to cleared bronze wonders for the sweet sweet imperium income. It did this while I was busy razing a few of the AI’s cities. I wasn’t worried about it, because I’d just hit the research level for Gold Golems and was about to build an unstoppable army that would completely squish the AI. I knew those outposts would be back in my hands shortly.
But the AI of course immediately conquered both outposts and promoted one to a city despite the outpost being completely boxed in by developed provinces from my vassals. So if I retook it my choices would be to keep a tiny city with no expansion room(and I’m at cap), vassalize it which would mean I wouldn’t get the imperium income back, or raze it which would mean I can’t rebuild it because no outposts on city ruins.
I’m tired of playing builder against an AI that just likes to burn things down and create chaos. Too much frustration, not enough satisfaction. This apparently isn’t the game for someone who likes to build up empires.
I think you found the reason!
Oh sure, I agree. The AI prioritizes aggravating and harassing human players over actually building up a good empire. That is, to me, a fun killer.
I’m with you. Not just with AOW, but with a lot of other 4X games we well.
It is a major pet peeve of mine when AIs seem to be prioritize to annoy and harass the human player rather than focusing on becoming stronger themselves. It was my biggest issue with Warhammer 3 and how the AI would practically sabotage itself just to try to hit the human player.
Well said. The AI doesn’t bother me so much in the TW:WH series of games, because the build-up part of it is both simpler and the AI can’t really muck it up. As long as the player is keeping up a good war with the computer factions then there’s room to grow the heartlands in peace. The provinces are pre-drawn and static. The build options are simple and basically just take time and patience to invest. I feel like total war games don’t punish my playstyle, unlike AOW4.
AOW4 has a much richer and more complex city building and territory system going on, but apparently players are supposed to largely ignore that and build armies and go smash stuff faster than the AI can smash back. Trying to really lovingly take advantage of all that richness in city building just sets one up for frustration. I think that’s the most aggravating thing from my perspective. If the point of the game was just to build armies and go smash enemy armies, why all the CIV-style city building complexity?
That comments reminds me of the skirmish AI in Company of Heroes. They just didn’t know how to play well while keeping forces effectively, so instead they just harassed the player with tiny groups from a dozen fronts at the same time.
That’s a really good comparison and absolutely right. I remember playing many skirmish and MP skirmish CoH games against the AI and found it aggravating how they’d constantly sneak in and cap points they had no reason to beyond where the action is/was.
I’d certainly liken the AI in AoW4 to be much like a cockroach. It’s an annoying pest that doesn’t know how to die. Fight the penultimate battle of strongest 3 stack v 3 stack, go for the final blow, but no, the AI pulls another army out of its arse thanks to the bonuses it gets, which then results in, well, what you’d think/hope is the final FINAL battle.
The forward settling is annoying. One part of AoW3 that worked for me was disabling city founding. Instead, create a map and every city was then a control point to take. There are hints of it in AoW4 with the city ruins province to develop into a city. And given a choice between brain dead AI settling cities or the map decide where the cities are, I’ll gladly take the latter.
What are the odds that the Dragon patch will brake saves? I have one of the longer maps in mid game but am distracted by Diablo right now. Will it be safe to resume after the patch this week?
The Player Start has the most value on the map so it’s one of the places that will have a High desire from the AI to settle.
This makes sense for the AI though. Since it’s at war with your Vassal it can occupy and steal those provinces as the City gains population.
The game is made so that those who want to invest into or have that deeper building complexity they can. Age of Wonders is a more offensive game, if you want a more builder-like experience you’d be better to move away from the default settings. Things like Far Player Distance, maybe even Slow Game Speed, turning off certain Victory Conditions etc.
Minimally. While there might always be some issues, by and large old saves games should continue to work. That of course changes the moment you are using mods. Those will first need to be updated with the newer version of the tools.