Age of Wonders: Planetfall by Triumph Studios

I haven’t played in 2 plus weeks, due to work issues and general extreme business, which is unlikely to change.

Which is a shame as I do maintain there is much more good stuff going on in this game.

AoW:Planetfall is free to play this weekend on Xbox One. Not sure how that promotion extends to other platforms. It’s also 20% off there as well.

Fwiw, I have it on good authority that there’s some sexy stuff inbound.

Paradox is announcing the details on Saturday, yes?

Yes, 10:00AM CEST.

Can’t wait!

Wasn’t there supposed to be a big reveal today?


Ohhh duh. It’s only Friday hahahahaha.

New expansion detailed and it looks like a ton of new content, including a new secret tech and npc faction, coming mid-Nov for $15. Very groovy, baby!

Gameplay stream showing off the expansion this morning in a few hours.

Oh I am so here for this. I keep going back and forth on it but Planetfall is probably gonna be my goty.

Only issue is that I have not played Planetfall much (though I have it), and whenever I see one of these DLC announcements for a game where I have not played the base game much, it always makes me think I should just wait for the DLC to come out and then start playing it.

It’s a superb and fully fleshed out game now. A new NPC faction and a secret tech are welcome new content but hardly anything to wait on, IMO. There’s multiple NPC factions and secret techs already.

Yeah, while I welcome new content, the game definitely feels fleshed out as is.

Here is the archive of the gameplay stream from yesterday:

If you don’t want to watch this video (which as I type this I’m over 30 minutes into it) you can skim my notes below.

Notes:
First they talk about some of the content and changes coming free with a patch that will drop alongside the expansion.

  • A welcome change to Auto-Battle - see the results and decide if they are what you expected, and if not, you can manually do a combat after seeing the results of the auto-battle. No more re-loading when your 1200 points army loses two key units vs. a 390 point neutral creep army! So you could effectively auto-battle every combat and only fight the ones you feel you could do better or have a specific goal/strategy in mind.

  • Changes to how vehicles/heroes work. They noticed that a base hero often had better stats than a vehicle, so why use them? So instead now vehicles give a template/stat bonus instead of base abilities. And once again, if you die the vehicle dies so it retains that value.

  • Imperial Defense is a structure that guards Gold/Silver terrain landmarks - these of course existed before, and would be a challenging battle as they generally had some sort of passive bonus for the defenders. IIRC. In any case, what they have done is now once you complete a battle and gain the Silver or Gold level landmark you gain a new Strategic Operation related to the combat effect in that Imperial Defense, that you can then apply to your entire domain! I’m not clear if this is free or part of the DLC. I think it’s a free change to an existing mechanic, however.

  • They talk more about Orbital Relays, which once again seem really cool to me. Teleporting units from among relays is going to be really handy. You can use diplomacy to open up Shared Relays too to teleport to AI relays, and a Covert op to disrupt/shut off someone else’s Relay. And they can be razed as well.

  • You no longer need a unit on a sector to annex it.

They note the free content patch grants a lot of Quality of Life improvements like this. Speeding up late game with Orbital Relays, no longer needing units to annex a sector, stuff like that. They talked about changes to how they had made tier 3 units slower to offset their power (they were hoping it would make people decide between powerful, slower armies but all it did was frustrate players whose best units couldn’t keep up). So that’s been changes, tier 3 units are now 32 movement like (most) anything else. In combat, however, tieir 3 units have Cumbersome so getting them to a fight isn’t a problem any more, but they are slower in combat to keep that balance. Seems like a smart change to me.

Stuff from the paid expansion:

  • More wild life units due to the game featuring called Reapers. The units they showed look super cool, imo. Here is one of them (the tier 3), their tier 2 is probably one of my favorite units in the game though.
    image

  • New world templates (like Tomb World) balanced for more aggressive gameplay that leads to a shorter game (in theory?). The Tomb World template has a starting quest that get you into battling the awakening Heritors. They weren’t talking too much about Tomb Worlds, but it’s cool to have another world template to select at game creation for sure. Lots of cool new combat maps (I assume these can show up on any world, but will show up more commonly on Tomb Worlds).

  • Showed off the new Heritors Secret Tech a little. For example, here is one of the mods. Sounds like there is some fun stuff going on here, where this mod allows the units main attack to potentially earn Essence Charge, and then this mod would allow the unit to spend those charges with a free action ability to improve accuracy by a massive ammount (30% bonus per essence charge drained). Seems like a really cool ability.

  • I also managed to get a screen grab of a tactical operation from the new Secret Tech that seems cool. Targeted unit has a 12 Strength chance (very high) to become Condemned (which seems to give -400 morale and -2 arc resistance?). When the unit dies you permanently gain a unit known as a Drained.

They talk about Drained units later, as they are one of the new units - when they achieve max rank this drained unit gains the ability to jump into the body of another target, permanently gaining control of it. There was a unit from AoW2:Shadow Magic that could do this that I loved, so it’s a thrill to see the return of this powerful tool for me.

  • Shot I grabbed of part of the Secret Tech research tree:

  • Here they showed off one of the new units from the Secret Heritor Tech you can build once you research it, a Siphoner. They can siphon essence from enemies and like the earlier mod they showed, give those charges to other units for bonuses.

image

  • Tier 3 unit is the High Lord, a powerful unit that can do lots of things including Mind Puppet. Which sounds crazy.

  • Also new creatures… including … uh, this guy.

  • A new NPC faction that’s coming to the paid DLC, the Forgotten. They were sort of cast off from the Heritors, and have a distinctive look/feel to them.

Here is the Eater of the Dead, their Teir 4 you can obtain/build if you make friends with them. These guys look really cool.

  • Anomalies - new strategy layer exploration sites. They give some insight into the history of the Star Uninion and the units, factions, and etc. in the lore. Sounds like a neat extra sub quest type of thing? They always take a few turns to get started while your hero gains a little XP per turn he’s “clearing vegetation” or whatever the specific anomaly calls for? Something like that. Then when it completes a thing happens.

  • There are new hero skills that can increase benefits, such as XP, of Anomamlous sites.

  • This particular Tomb ended up being +60 Research Points…

And that leads into the next segment, where you make a choice of what you want to do next:

…in this case the player chose to awaken the units which led to a ton of more research, a High Lord and a mod (Es’Teq Fangs), and the changing of the site into a Silver landmark! Very cool. Though it took planting his forces here for 4 full turns to get it done, so it’s not all gravy I suspect.

  • There are THIRTY anomalies they have added to the game, of various sizes. Including brutal “end game” anomalies.

Now we move into one big last battle and I have to bail to get some stuff done this morning. I think that they are done showing new things other than the units in this battle, and of course the things they may mention during the combat*. I’ll assume I covered the bulk of what they discussed earlier and hope you guys found this as awesome as I did. I have it on good authority this has been in beta and several prominent community members have been providing feedback and that the new content is in excellent shape!

*For example, the big High Lord unit can also be a vehicle for your hero, and your actual hero is then seen floating in that central crystal chamber! Kind of an amazing little touch there.

Lots of excellent stuff coming, but this is huge! No longer have to truck my units across the world or have some nearby just to ensure I can keep growing my colonies.

Great stuff. The auto battle changes solves my problem with it. The vehicle change is great too, along with all the other goodies.

Agreed. This was pointless extra micromanagement.

Awesome write-up, thanks Scott!

Cool that they’re adding Nekrons. I’m in.

Do we have a date yet aside from November?

Wow thanks for that info dump. I’ even more excited to get back into this. I knew grabbing the expansion pack season pass was going to be worth it.

The DLC for this is supposed to follow the Triumph model and not the Paradox model, right?