Age of Wonders: Planetfall by Triumph Studios

You’re right, I just find that many units too tedious so I just don’t attack. Sometimes they attack me though and I don’t have a choice :-) 1-2 stack is my sweet spot for enjoyment. When I had to fight some bigger battles I just brought a lot of extra firepower and autoresolved it with some minimal loses.

I guess what I was saying is that when it gets to that point I just go for the doomsday weapon victory.

I did like playing with Kir’ko unit that lets me eat enemy units. That was fun. I just finished out my third skirmish weapon of mass destruction victory.

This has always been my big issue with the AOW series. The big battles are just too tedious and too long. I end up autoresolving most of the time.

Well, my last two games have been ended by game-crashing bugs that I can’t move beyond without loading back turns in advance and just praying it works.

Weird that my first game went flawlessly and now it feels like a very unstable beta.

I’ll check back in a few weeks and see if it’s more playable. I submitted my crash reports, at least.

I used to dread the large battles at the end of AoW3. I think planetfall battles aren’t quite as big, but l too find 3 stacks too much.

I had my first crash last night just after a fight (playing on Xbox) but loaded the auto save and it went fine from there.

Is anyone finding the various tech trees to be a bit too similar / boring? I mean, the effect on game-play isn’t all that much it seems to me. Contrast this to AoW 3 where the druid tree is extremely different than the mage tree vs the dreadnaught tree, etc…

I spent some time last night (after losing yet again), just starting games so I could see the tech trees and absolutely nothing I saw in any of them made me think, “Oh wow, that is cool”. The closest thing to that might be the void tech melee unit with its quantum duplication, but that is just one unit. Mostly the techs seem to be + damage to some color (fire, biological, arc, etc…) some similar defenses, some similar buffs, etc…

Foreman getting buffed soon. He’ll speed up strategic map healing I believe.

Bulwarks should be considered machine gun platforms, not stompy mechs.

Keep them behind your Trenchers and use them to mow down whatever approaches.

Not really. Kirko have a doctrine to accelerate XP gain iirc.

And t shirts and posters.

The idea was to have fewer,but more decisive battles overall, but especially towards the end game.

You should have imho maybe 4 or 5 stacks as your largest army towards the late game, unlike in AoW3 where you could easily have some 6 armies with 6 stacks each.

Interesting, what size maps is this on? It’s
been a while since I’ve played AoW3 but I don’t think I ever had armies that large. But I only played small and medium maps.

Large or XL to be fair.

The medium map with 6 players is pretty huge. I have a sprawling empire now that those Kri’ko have been subjugated.

Getting ready for a war against an Assembly faction. They have a def pact so it should be interesting.

Thanks. The Foreman needs a buf. I think his weapon needs it most. The range seems too short and it always seems to target one of my units too, so I don’t use it.

My Bulwark got some shots in last night. He just seems a bit fragile. As do a lot of the Dvar units. I thought they were supposed to be the tough armored faction. And this is with a leveled up army. I haven’t played too much, so I could be mistaken.

To be fair, it’s just a Tier 2 unit.

Most of the Dvar tankiness comes from their leaders. They can just slather on bonuses to defense.

What ShivaX said, but also the Bulwarks deal incredible damage and the AI will prioritize them for it. Give them one or two defensive mods that grant +1 shields and can allow for various other bonuses, it makes them more survivable. I think by the end of my Dvar game I had more kills with Bulwarks than any other non-hero unit - and they were always easy and cheap (ish) to build, too. A Dvar staple in my book.

Another things that Bulwarks provide aside from awesome firepower is Overwatch. This is something that the Dvar otherwise don’t have access to at that point. Digging in with Trenchers while Bulwarks are in Overwatch behind them can shred an attacking army.

I’m not sure I like the “bait the AI into one bad fight, then steamroller their empire” design.

I’m stuggling playing the Amazons. The bombardon and Queen are great, but the slow strat map move is really annoying. The T-rex is ok, but the combination of a short range repeating attack with a strong melee attack is anti-synergistic, and they are surprisingly fragile. I think my favourite unit is probably the humble tier II lancer. I like the increased move, the flanking damage bonus, and the high damage single action ranged attack.

In other news, acid rain is ridiculous.

Alot of units are like this by the way.

Game is really quite brutal.

Should only really work on the first AI empire, and that’s if you rush them, on normal difficulty.

The empires after that will require more fighting.

Higher difficulty definitely.

From a bigger picture perspective, getting the balance right between decisive fights and your opponent not folding immediately is quite tricky.

I think the Kirko felt different than the other 2 I played. Maybe it was more because of the genoplague tree.

Compared to AoW3, where the emphasis was squarely on classes and thus said classes needed to be very distinct, I understand where you are coming from.

Also, this being a fixed tech tree, and being presented as a solid wall of tech, makes some of the things a bit hard to parse imho.

AoW3 had an actual book, so you saw at most 12 techs at any one time (unless you turned the page) and each one had a nice icon.

So I do get what you are saying.

However, I think the shift onto racial tech is a good one, and the tech tree works.

My only real gripe is it would have been nice to have something better looking!

Question for those with a lot of experience with this game…

Those dwellings. You can, of course, try to befriend one. But it is likely that the others are just going to be sources of ever-rising levels of extortion, with no upside to me. Either give in to their extortion, or perpetual war.

  1. I assume that if i wipe out their main dwelling, they are gone forever, correct?
  2. But whether to put significant resources into accomplishing that depends on whether they are equally problems for my AI rivals. Do we know whether the other factions face the same situation, whereby they can only effectively befriend one, and, more importantly, whether they face the same level of extortion? (It’s not that I mind if the AI gets an advantage in this regard, but I am a lot less likely to wipe out dwellings which are causing my rivals as much trouble as they are causing me.)

I’m not bored but I think it would be cool to have more differences, especially in the social techs