3388

I’m far from a pro, I’ve only got like 150 hours but Oathbound/Heritor feels really, really powerful to me.

3389

I’ve certainly been absolutely kicking faces in with it in my current empire game.

I’m going to have to bump up to hard once I get maybe one more practice game in, though. This is silly.

3390

Man I really hope the team isn’t sick of making Age of Wonders games. I want an AOW4 with lessons learned from Planetfall so bad you guys.

Anyway yes, Oathbound/Heritor got things done. Having Siphoners there to double the turn of your hero or whatever insane triple-mod unit you’re rocking is just stupid powerful.

3391

I’ve bounced off AoW3 several times, but for whatever reason, I really love Planetfall. I like sci-fi, so maybe that’s part of it. Still, I’d buy an AoW4 in a heartbeat. And I bet the team isn’t sick of making money. :)

3392

I’d preorder the premium edition without batting an eye, and I almost never preorder games.

3393

Same, AoW4 with everything this game has, minus the mods for non-hero units, would be awesome.

Modding in planetfall reminded me of having to designing troops in Fallen Enchantress, but more tedious/less fun.

I think some of this is my heavy bias against micromanagement.

3394

One of the impressive things about the AoW team is that their games have a very solid track record of getting better with time, and I also have a strong sense that the devs “get it” and understand what works, listen to rational feedback, and make positive changes in patches. Compared to the average dev team, they are in the A-list on the quality/feedback loop IMO.

And that is something that matters a lot to me in terms of future purchases.

I am definitely looking to whatever is next for them AoW 4 or whatever it turns out to be.

And hell let me jinx this post by saying there’s a part of me that really wants them to apply the Planetfall type systems to some big licenses. I would pay hard currency, A-list pricing, for an “Age of WH40K” or an “Age of Battletech” game. (Yes I know licenses can sometimes be the kiss of death for devs but damnit I know what I like.)

3395

I think the unit mods are my favorite thing about Planetfall O.o

3396

I’m following about half a dozen “postmortem” or “what we want in aow4” threads. What are your thoughts?

I have…many.

But in a nutshell:

    • different campaign, more like AoW1, mixed in with some galactic empires mechanics
    • revamped city building and management
    • revamped map, blending from AoW1 and AoW3.
    • less bloat and build up time
    • a return to settled, pre-existing cities, not have everything be a colony
    • more races, including ones that break the template, mainly, make the dwellings also races, in other words, Giants as a playable race.
    • Races to be as diverse and interesting a PF races, as a baseline
    • mods (as equipments, artifacts, enchantments)
    • massively expanded magic system (there is room to go back to AoW:SM levels of spell power, balanced out by classes)
    • classes for sure, being more than secret tech, be at the level of AoW3
    • Retooling the mechanics around sieging. I don’t think any game out there gets sieges right.
3397

I think mods is perhaps the best thing they have.

But micromanagemnt suxxors.

In my mind, the ideal AoW would pare back the colony and sector management of PF, because that was slightly too far into micro and busy work.

Along a similar vein of thought, I have been playing Phoenix Point a fair bit recently, and I defy anyone to tell me the troop types in PF wouldn’t map nicely onto such an X-Com type* game.

  • type. X-Com has always been about defending Earth, I could see this PF Xcom type game being the same tactical gameplay, but on any of the infinite worlds of the Star Union.
    And with 9 races to choose from, as opposed to one in PP or Xcom (you are always Humans)
3398

I feel the opposite way, I would prefer more diversity in sector management, Along with some new victory conditions. Where i would like less micromanagement is in the large battles. I know the three stack 18 unit combat has been a hallmark of the series, But when every unit has several special abilities that combats start to feel tedious to me.
and I would like to make it easier to see enemy abilities and vulnerabilities by sight without having to click on each unit separately, I guess this is a consequence of the mod system.
but yes i’d be happy to send the money now if they launch a kick starter for AoW4 Or almost any game they feel like doing.

3399

Oh, this too btw :).

Fewer abilities but used more often, if that makes sense.

I could write a very great deal about racial design and how I would interesect it with damage dealing and mitigation.

I think one could have more diversity without more micromanagement/busy work.

I have outlined, in the past, a way to build on sectors and combine it with how cities would expand.

In essence, by “unpacking” the cities, and placing their structures onto the map, one ties the sectors more closely to the city, and uses the map itself as anti infinite city sprawl. For example, if a sector contains 10 hexes inside it, but you need to build farms, barracks etc, and they take up (X) hexes, then you need to think a bit as to what hexes you want to use now, and which to use later, especially if higher level buildings require lower level buildings, e.g. a Warhall being an extension of the barracks.

This also ties in nicely with the idea of sieging, because if an enemy occupies your farm, then you lose the income there, and said enemy can also occupy your barracks (cutting off your recruitment) and your workshops etc. So if said enemy spreads out their troops, they can cause more damage, but are more vulnerable to being picked off.

Fortified positions (forts, your citadel, city walls etc) can’t be so easily occupied and must be fought for, so a smaller force in a fort can exert control over a larger area where the enemy is invading, because if said enemy disperses to raid, they can be picked off easier.

in other words, a bit like what real life forts and castles did…

You can take this core idea, which is:

city structures occupy hexes on the world map

and do some really cool stuff with it, e.g. racial variations, such as Dwarves having walls automatically built on every sector (good luck raiding entrenched Dwarves!) or being able to easily build on mountain tiles (everyone else can build there but it would be very costly, and perhaps gated by research) or Wood Elves building on and spreading forest in every hex (so unique recruitment mechanics as they wouldn’t clear the forests to make a barracks etc) or Draconians building upwards and not outwards (increasingly large Dragonspire) and being all flying (but expensive and/or limited in recruitment.)

But at the core of it, the base idea is vey simple and doesn’t require much brain power to parse:

city structures occupy hexes on the world map ==> building x requires (y) hexes and sector z has (a) hexes.

which imho is easier to understand than energy sector level 3 requires this research to unlock then this upgrade, and I have to click in the city interface to do so, and I have to do it several times, and the AI misallocates sectors.

3400

I don’t always play armchair designer on the internet, but when I do I try and draft more specific, detailed bits of feedback on what works, what doesn’t, and what I think might work better.

Most of my thoughts on Planetfall are on pretty well-trod ground, so I won’t go over them again, but some things that have come up in my recent binge:

My goodness does the AI suck at developing cities. This is treading awfully close to “don’t design a system the AI can’t meaningfully play” territory. Also city management is heavier than I’d like in a wargame like AOW anyway, especially with residential sectors raising the ceiling for how effective tall cities can be.

Dunno if they’ve tweaked the map gen algorithm or if I’m just better at parsing it, but I’m not as put off by weirdly sprawling octopus sectors as I used to be. Still can’t tell the bloody difference between plains/ruins/fungus for the life of me without mousing over the hex.

I freaking love how neutral-heavy and interesting and interactive the maps are now. Landmarks, dungeons, pickups, visit sites, sector defenses, all of it. Just brilliant. Neutrals play into this; I love the way they work and the decisions they make you face in PF.

Make the tactical AI aware of Sleep or take it out. C’mon.

Mods. Okay. I’m not as put off by the cognitive load of mods any more, and I figured out why. It’s not just more experience with the game; it’s that I stumbled onto a heuristic that makes evaluating mods much easier. Every mod falls into one of these categories, and I mostly only care about the last one:

A) Mods that I literally don’t care about because they impact battle so little. Oh boy, sensor range and detector! Eh. This is maybe 5-10 percent of mods.

B) Mods that add some amount of passive offense, defense, or both. These are pretty well balanced in that a tier 2 weapons mod more or less has the same impact on the game as any t2 shield mod, etc. These can safely be evaluated as “eh, okay, this thing is a little tougher, whatevs.” This is the vast bulk of mods, like 70 percent.

C) Mods that substantively change the decision matrix. Stun retaliation, effect removal, stagger interaction, that kind of thing. This is the good stuff (not that category B mods can’t be powerful - they certainly can!). Many higher tier mods fall into this category, but they don’t see play all that often for a variety of reasons.

Category C mods are the ones you actually have to think about. I think the cognitive overload for new players is that they don’t know that they can safely dismiss 75 percent of what they see when they’re trying to make sense of army strength.

So for my money, I’d look at cutting all the chaff, reducing mods to one per unit, and making sure they’re awesome and fun to play with and impact the battlefield in meaningful ways. Then you can address the UI issue in a much cleaner fashion than making me dig into tooltips inside modals all the time.

If you can do that while keeping the feeling of making players feel clever and like they’re “getting away with something” (credit Marshall_LR and LSV), which is a huge positive of the existing PF system, that would be a massive win IMO.

The good news is that Paradox is no doubt about to hire me to go tell Triumph their business, so everything that has been prophecied shall soon come to pass ;)

3401

I just fired this up again with the new DLCs and had a blast with the Oathbound–I think landed on a similar mod-em-up-with-electric-effects approach you did.

I think you really hit the nail on the head re: mods. Agree 100% that they should reduce the number of mods to 1 and throw out the 75% chaff. I think it would be tricky but still possible to keep that “getting away with something” feeling (great phrase, agreed) with those changes. I really get that feeling when either (a) going heavy into a particular damage channel (i.e. hit them with the arc debuff and then arc damage and whatnot) or status effect (i.e. go all-in on stagger to keep them locked down); or (b) some really neat synergy between a mod and an existing unit’s abilities (like using a recharge ability on an enhanced once-per-battle summoning ability (thinking vanguard rocket turrets + synthesis recharging or something). I think there’s enough diversity with the status effects and abilities that they could do it even with reduced numbers. But I don’t know for sure.

My weird complaint about the residential sectors is that they give you an extra sector, but take up one sector, so you have to build them before you build your last sector, which is weird. Whatever.

3402

Agreed!

So more like Civ 6, works for me:)

The AoW series has always been more combat focused than Civ, and I like that, but I don’t think it’s really a wargame, and I wouldn’t want it to be. Going back to AoW3, the “good guy” and “bad guy|” reputations and the interactions with neutrals don’t fit my idea of a wargame, and neither does the blank map and search for good city locations. But I realize “what is a wargame” is hard to pin down precisely.

3403

Please no. Just no. There’s a massive readability problem with mods, every archer unit you see would have completely different powers. It’s a drag on Planetfall and I think it would be even worse in a fantasy game, where it’s frankly less narratively justifiable.

3404

I am surprised PF hasn’t come up with a way to make mods more “readable” on the tactical or even strategic map. Maybe assign each mod a class and a “class icon” that floats over the unit’s head. So passive armor buffs get a little shield icon; passive shield buffs get a little electric-arc icon; accuracy buffs get a green bulls-eye icon; debuffs to opponent’s accuracy get a red bulls-eye icon; buffs to melee strength get a biceps icon; etc. Heck, “Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes,” which I play on my phone, does this.

3405

This is the coldest take since Chamberlain waved a piece of paper that “proved” the UK and Third Reich would never be at war.

;)

3406

Yeah. In the context of a fantasy game I guess you could do halos or something, but the variety would have to be reduced to allow it I’d think.

3407

I think a big part of that is the sci fi theming.

A fantasy theme would imho be inherently more readable at a glance.

I don’t see why or even how every archer unit would have completely different powers…I

Design the ranges units around their weapon first imho, fewer moreover but more thematic.

E.g. A Crossbow unit would get mods to do with the crossbow, or other racial or class based nods, e.g. Make the seeker enchantment into a mod.

It would be more readable imho than AoW3.

Go through the aow 3 spell lists and imagine all the enchantment as mods.

You can already cast these in each fight in aow3, and it can get quite repetitive doing so.

If they were mods, with upkeep, you’d get some delicious thinking about which to use, when, in what combination, because you’d still have just 3 slots…

…and competing for those 3 slots would be more magically mundane equipment mods, like improved armour.