Age of Wonders: Planetfall by Triumph Studios

I’d just repeat this:

I can fully support this statement.

Ditto

Maybe planetfall will spark some ideas for another expansion for AOW3 Fantasy expansion.

No we don’t.

I’ve heard rumours of a new race or 2, and cyrogenic (cold) damage as a damage channel is an obvious choice, and new secret tech can always be imagined.

So I suspect at least one of the new dlc will be content heavy with 2 of the following 3:

  • a new race
  • damage channel
  • secret tech

and then a lighter dlc with the remaining of the previous 3.

I don’t think we will see Eternal Lords level of stuff, which added 2 races, a class and I think 3 new specialisations.

I wish AoW3 would come to Xbox, I don’t enjoy gaming on PC anymore.

Wrist problems or something?

Yeah, the mouse causes wrist pain, and a host of other PC related issues like bugs, incompatibilities, need to update drivers and hardware, and being hunched over a keyboard next to a small screen is not nearly as comfortable as couch gaming. I’ve also grown to really hate Windows, as nothing ever seems to work like it should for me and it’s been like this for over 20 years in my experience. I like Xbox (although the UI is much slower and inferior to the PS4 UI IMHO) but can’t stand the Windows OS. A few years ago I left PC gaming and have been much happier. I think I’ve put in more hours on the console the last 3 years than I did over the span of close to 40 years of PC gaming.

Locked in my pre-order @ GMG for the Premium Edition.

Gotta work on the backlog between now and August 5th!

What sort of sucks is I discovered I’m really, really excited for Fire Emblem on the Switch - a franchise I historically really get into and enjoy and this entrant looks really interesting (and gorgeous). But it drops just a few weeks before this! Ack.

The good news is that Skynet is unlikely to awaken before you’ve had your fill of both.

August 5th is a great date for me- get back from EVO the previous day and have rest of week off.

Have you been watching the Monday streams? The player is in the late game now, turn 125+ and he’s only fielding Tier IV units just like AoW3 back in the day. He’s got plenty of resources to field and maintain these high level units, in fact hasn’t really used low tier units for some time, and overall he’s fielding quite a few units/army stacks/heroes with only 4 colonies (maybe 5). Here he is attacking an AI player with SEVEN Tyrannodon units, the big bad boy for the Amazon, armed with lots of powerful mods and the like.

I don’t think things will end up being very different from late game AoW3, which may or may not be a good thing depending on one’s preference I suppose. This is a pretty decent sized map, not sure what the settings were for the game setup (it wasn’t shown) so maybe with big maps this is just how the game looks after over one hundred turns?

oh hey what’s going on he----

OH SWEET MARY HOLY MOTHER THAT IS A LOT OF LASER SPACE DINOSAURS

…ahem. Carry on.

I could reliably have a t4 unit out by turn 35-40 in AoW3.

I could have a 6 stack by turn 50.

And the opportunity cost wasn’t very much.

And several players were much better.

Now, I believe a player can get a t4 by turn 58, if they focus their research on only that and go heavy on research sectors, and thus sacrifice energy, production, food, well rounded research paths. None of those were really a consideration in AoW3, except maybe research.

fast research to unlock your t4, build the appropiate building, and voila, done. And your economy didn’t really suffer either because you could rely on clearing for quite a while, which I think has been massively toned down for PF.

The AoW3 comparison would be Knights in lieu of Tyranadons.

I think the blue player has one t3 unit there, in the centre stack, the celestian unit. The flier and other celestian unit are t2. The Frenzied is tier 1, the sniper is tier 2, the biomancer is tier 2.

If that is the army at turn 125, rather proves my point I think.

Plus, I get the impression that the streamers are messing around on pretty low difficulties, including the Pdx guys.

I’m more worried about late-game AI than how many T4’s and how few T1’s given this match up. The AI had a much larger army than the player, but if it’s all low tier units spread over their empire, a small concentrated force of T4’s will just roll through them like they stand still.

Sure, maybe the AI is playing like you wrote earlier, with viable low tier units all day long, but it seems to me it’s still a wiser strategy to flood your army with the highest tier units you can build, and there seems to be no reason no to do so.

It would be the wiser strategy to use only special forces and air craft carriers, yet this doesn’t happen, because of cost, and various other reasons.

So, yeah, ofcourse a stack of 1 t4 and 5 t3 units will beat out 2 stacks of t1 and t2 units (because, otherwise, what would the point be of having higher tier units, if not to give an advantage?), but the entire design of the new game is supposed to heavily gate the production of t3 units and t4, compared to AoW3.

To recap, regarding t3 and t4 units in Planetfall:

  • you need to build the appropriate barracks
  • you need to research the unit
  • you need cosmite to build the base unit
  • their production costs tend to be very very high, so even a fully kitted out production city will need a few turns to make one
  • the equivalent cost in lower tier units will pretty much always win, especially if they are cosmite modded and the tier 3 is not
  • modding a t3 or t4 unit is 3 to 4 times more expensive for the same mod than modding a t1 unit

Going back to that screenshot, having a stack of 5 Tyranadons is actually more of an investment than getting 5 Knights together.

That’s a much more valid concern imho than worrying about the much bemoaned T4 “spam” that people complained about in AoW3, which came about because of an excess of resources given to the Ai especially, and arguably to the player over the course of very long games (large maps)

resources seem much more curtailed, and access to units much mroe gated, as already outlined.

Regarding what the Ai does with it all, that is a vey good question.

In AoW3 it would fast tech to it’s t4 class unit, and fast build to it’s racial t3 unit, and fast tech to have the maximum number of casting points, then it would crank out the “best” units it could (best here meaning almost inevitably most expensive and that in turn meaning almost ievitably t4 units)

And it would do this for every class, which is why facing a Dreadnought or Warlord Emperor AI in mid to late game was far more dangerous than a Sorceror, or a Necromancer, because “build and pump out units” is precisely how a warlord and Dreadnought should be played.

However, the modding community, and one mod in particular by a guy called Jolly Joker, tweaked the Ai building parameters, and made single player quite challenging without facing many t4 and t3 units.

Now if a modder (in fairness, he is quite obsessive) could do that, then one hopes the pros at Triumph will be able to deliver something more complete.

Plus, the dlc nature of the industry nowadays could actually help them here, because they can tweak and alter things once their sample size of players goes up, namely after release.

They did this with AoW3 after all.

I gotta pre-order this when I get home.

Dammit @jpinard you missed out on the GMG 25% discount!

At least it’s still 15% off. So he’s only out like five bucks, could be worse.