Age of Wonders: Planetfall by Triumph Studios

As you know I am totally biased.

But I think the release version of this gne will be better than the release of AoW!

I mean, I would hope so - it’s largely the same team, it would be weird if they hadn’t learned anything from AoW3 and both its expansions. :)

weird but not unheard of.

From these guys? Did they flub previous expansions?

I took his point to mean he’s seen developers do it, not Triumph in particular.

That was my first thought, but then I don’t know why he would try to counter my point with such a sentiment. We are only concerned with Triumph for these purposes, I would assume. I don’t believe we have to worry about Triumph putting out a worse product at launch with Planetfall than we had with AoW3, something I’d have thought @BloodyBattleBrain would be happy to have agreed with me on. I have mis-read the room before, though.

I can’t see Paradox’s involvement lowering the quality of what Triumph puts out. My only worry is Paradox-style nickel and diming, and that tends to be mostly an issue with Paradox’s own games instead of stuff they publish.

I meant studios do sometimes take steps backwards when releasing sequels.

I wasn’t countering @BrianRubin, as I in fact agree with him that I think Triumph here took a very long and in depth look at what worked well, and less well, and I remember a series of surveys a couple of years ago which went quite in depth and spawned some very interesting discussions.

It is interesting though, if you chart the changes across the games in the series, how some things could be argued to have gone backwards.

This is all very much YMMV territory, but let’s take the example of T3 and t4 units, because we were talking about them earlier.

In the 1st game you had fixed cities, you could never found a new city, only rebuild a razed one.

Those cities were of a fixed size, which determined what lvl unit they could produce. 1 hex cities meant only tier one units etc.

There was no random map generator either.

One most maps, there were very few 4 hex or even 3 hex cities. The demo map that got me into the game is called First Conflict and has Haflings, Goblins, Orcs and Elves as playable races, and Humans as a neutral race in the middle.

Only Humans have size 3 cities and no one has size 4 cities on the map.

The result was gating of higher tier units more so than even in Planetfall.
Unfortunately the balance between tiers was not so good (you basically always wanted the highest you could get, as most units were trash) and ditto the balance between races (a race with dragons as t4, or the lightning lady elves had, were your best bet as they were totally imbalanced!)

You ended up with some very tense fights over the handful of big cities.

Anyway the core idea here is tying units available to the level of city development, and tying that to the map itself.

With the introduction of random.maps in aow2 onwards, any city could end up producing any unit.

In AoW3 this also happened, although TS did add extra building via patches so the pace of city development was reduced a bit.

In Planetfall you need to research the units, and the economic system is designed to favour lower tier units, and from.what we have seen so far, t3 and t4 units aren’t nearly the powerhouses they used to be. Well t4 units especially.

An example is the Celestian T4 units which requires influence iirc, and quite a bit. I think the number I saw somewhere was 100 influence, and there’s a cap on how much influence you can have, which I think is 200. Basically, much harder to mass this unit.

So, you could say how cities and higher tier units has evolved, but you could also say it has gone backwards, if you so chose.

AoW3 saw 6 unit stacks, no true flying, class system taking precedence over race, 6 races down from 15.

Which some people most definitely so as going backwards.

PF has 6 races and classes, but both seem.much more fleshed out than previous games.

True flying is back, but so too is chance to hit, and some people are already saying it’s a step backwards.

It’s a difficult thing to create a sequel it seems, putting it mildly.

Ther are some people who literally want just AoW1 with new models and textures.

edit:

also, city development and management.

First game had fixed cities.

2nd game had cities on the map and options to start with a settler only, no settler etc.

AoW3 had the same options.

PF it seems has no options: you always start with the planetfall, and a small city. There isn’t a way to have no settlers.

So.one could argue that’s a step back.

I dont think it is because the central thesis of the game is shattered empire, people living in ruins, complete collapse of civilisation, so having gleaming cities existing might not fit that so well.

If this is the case, at least the AI should be able to use settlers this time.

I’m expecting a good bit of AI improvement going to a 64-bit engine, though Civ V-VI proved it wasn’t a guarantee.

In AoW2 and SM the AI had issues with settlers but in AoW3 it used them very well.

So well in fact they had to cap the rate of settler use.

But the AI couldn’t use fortresses at all, well more accurately it couldn’t use builders.

So now there are no builder units, and creating a fortress is done by spending influence to make a forward base.

I am very curious to see how the AI manages settlers now.

Bitness and memory usage don’t really have any bearing on AI from anything I’ve seen, so I wouldn’t expect that to change anything. The biggest factors are A) if the game design kept AI in mind and B) the time/effort of the developers. That’s about it.

More gameplay:

and an interview:

edit:

and an article

And Assembly spotlight video:

edit:

And a developer playing PF, as Assembly.

First note - the sound effect for selecting/cycling between races/secret tech is terrible. Wow. 3 minutes into that video.

It’s too bad he’s playing on Easy. I am curious how this random, low sub count player got his hands on the game early?

I’m googling around but not finding anything too promising. Got a link?

I’ll have a look.

Hey @ioticus I’ve had wrist problems too. A couple things I’ve done that help out a lot.

You can try switching to a more vertical mouse setup, these are specifically setup to reduce strain on wrists and I’ve found they cause me a lot less problems than a traditional mouse.

If that doesn’t work, try using a Steam Controller. These work quite well for turn-based games like Age of Wonders, although they do take some time to get used to (I think it took me a full evening of gaming to get used to it the first time, they still take me upwards of an half-hour to get used to it if I haven’t used it in a while), but once you get the hang of it, it works quite well. These don’t strain your wrist at all.

https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Wireless-Vertical-Ergonomic-Optical/dp/B00BIFNTMC/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=Anker+Mouse&qid=1561600920&s=gateway&sr=8-3

Was going to link to the Steam Controller on Amazon for Tom’s affiliate program (assuming that’s still a thing), but Amazon is selling it for $118 whereas you can get it directly from Valve/Steam for $49.99 (wtf Amazon).

Also not sure if this is mentioned upthread, but they’ve announced AoW: Planetfall is coming out on consoles.

Today’s diary is a look at something called Adaptive Multiplayer.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/age-of-wonders-planetfall-dev-diary-40-the-new-adaptive-multiplayer-system.1194839/

It “combines AoW live simultaneous, classic turn and Play by Email system in one flexible whole.” A first in the genre.

Cloud based online play where players can toggle between classic and simultaneous turns - that’s a good idea, actually. Play here and there during the week as time enables, and then on the weekends switch over to a full blown experience and play together. I think that’s really clever.

This sounds overall very good - it seems like a great way for a big community to more casually play a big game of AoW together, I think. There are limits (defined at game setup) to how many times you can manual combat back to back with other players to reduce time lost by other non-participants (no cost to play out a battle vs. an AI player of course). The ideas behind this are solid, if it’s implemented properly we could even get a big game going here.

OH that sounds GREAT.

That sounds fantastic and that kind of attention to MP make me hopeful they’ve improved the issues I’ve complained about with AOW3. Exciting!

I was thinking of this very sentiment when I read this line:

Multiplayer is cloud based. Even though it is not your turn, you can log in to your online games at anytime. You can view the lay of the land and plan your next move. You can observe the moves of others within your field of vision and chat to other players who are online at the same time.

This makes me think they have resolved that very issue, else you couldn’t very well “pop in and review the lay of the land” while other’s were online taking their turns at the same time. In theory.