Age of Wonders: Planetfall by Triumph Studios

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

I don’t generally agree, but there aren’t very many racial techs either - most of the techs (Firearms, Psionic, etc. - the damage channels) are shared and always the same, giving mods and general operations to use. The secret tech is where the bulk of the crazy comes from, and I’m okay with that because it all synergies in fun ways with the racial and damage channel research. The racial techs, however, all have very, very unique units for every race, which is the meat of what faction you want to play as, plus some racially specific and incredibly powerful operations and docterines.

What are people’s build strategies for cities? In general, I am now going to do energy first, then food, then production, and lastly research. I also try and scout for areas that have that special resource (which I can not remember at the moment) to build cities in. Also how quickly do you build cities and how many do you build before going more tall than wide?

Research building in the early game gives you quite the decent boost.

Still working through my first game but I started out pushing food first. More pop means faster expansion, which means more of everything. Not sure that is “best” and hopefully there are many viable ways to go at the start as that makes for a better game IMHO.

I forgot that doctrines are social techs; operations are military, right? and the basic economy techs seem to be all the same?

I’ve been mixing up depending on what the nearby sectors are like- if there are couple of two food sections nearby than I do production or tech and if not I start with food. It also depends on whether I take an extra large starting colony

I don’t understand what to specialize sectors in - that is, if I’m trying to ‘play to the terrain’. I usually go for whatever I have 2 of the same resource icon.