Planetfall: Suppose they gave a doomsday and nobody came?

Man, you should have played the first one! Super cluttered, text everywhere.

Totally agree on Seals, great points from both @BloodyBattleBrain and @Sharpe there. The absolute keys IMO are that they come at a cost (and not being out fighting is a HUGE cost in AoW3 – the loot and xp from clearing neutrals or obvious benefits of fighting other players is absolutely crucial to victory) and that the AI can meaningfully engage with it.

Now I want to go play some AoW3, dangit.

How did the Civ 4 incarnation of Colonization compare to the original?

I liked it but I think I’m somewhat of an outlier. FreeCol is a thing though.

I honestly don’t remember enough about the original to say! When I mention Colonization, I should probably specify that I’m talking about that Civ IV re-make.

-Tom

Yeah, my memory of the original is very hazy. It looks like the civ4 re-make was a popular one for mods. Off to conquer the new world.

Yeah, seals are a clever addition to 4X formula. Usually in 4X you have a traditional zero-sum elimination victory condition. Then you have turtling victory, that is all about holding off while directing some resources to a victory sink. It can give you benefits like Rise of Nations wonder victory is about holding powerful wonders and Doomsday victory gives you bonuses. So it’s not correct to compare Doomsday to Seals, Doomsday victory is still in a vein of Civilization 1 turtling space ship building.

Seals is wonderful cause it adds a new dimension to a map, suddenly it’s a wargame with victory points, but it’s on the same map where the whole conquest warfighting happens. It’s as if they’ve made a sport where people play football and tennis at the same time and you can win by getting enough points in any of the games, but you never have to commit, that same player can swing and kick when they need to.

It’s quite hard to go back to it after Planetfall, so many little things got improved.

For example, off the top of my head, in PF, the neutral parties get their own turn, so you can predict and position and prepare for their movement to a degree.

In AoW3, they are part of the regular movement queue, meaning you can advance your party somewhere, and in the time it takes to select your 2nd stack to move to support your first stack, and independent army of Undead Titans has engaged your first stack, and you can’t win.

Very frustrating.

Plus no research or production rollover, plus lower tier units gets obsoleted much quicker…

Ugh, rollover, yeah.

I play aow3 with simultaneous turns but generally just let all the AIs go and then go last, so the npc movement thing doesn’t bother me.

Most of the time I win with the bulk of my armies being t2 - tbf I play pretty aggressively, but I have always found the tier balance to be pretty good.

Hero item management is much more annoying.

Terraforming feels tedious at times.

Overall I much prefer tactical/strategic/doctrine spellcasting to the shared pool.

Mama economy is still often funky.

Still, probably a top 10 all time game for me ;)

I feel like both AoW3 and Planetfall are “10s” (which is a rating I rarely give) but interestingly neither released as a 10. AoW3 had a number of rough edges and a notable lack of endgame on release so I’d say it was an 8 on release. Planetfall was more fully cooked on release but still had some rough edges. In both cases, the Devs did something very rare in game design IMO: they were able to see and acknowledge where work was needed and through patches and DLC fully baked each game into awesome strategy games.

I have a pretty damn high opinion of the AoW dev team at this point. It’s one thing to come up with a good game design but the slow evaluation and improvement of good into great, that’s impressive to me. And given how many devs learn the wrong lessons or “improve” their games into the dirt, my hat is off to the AoW devs.

Does any game release at this level now?

TS are awesome at this btw, in and out of betas.

75% off for $12.50 on Steam right now until March 26.

Screwing around right now. Trying to grasp the value of annexing vs setting up new colonies.

Do I just want to cram in as many colonies as possible in every other territory (since they can’t be adjacent to another colony)?

And is there any kind of “tax” on setting up TOO many colonies like with maintenance/global happiness? (other than building the colonizer unit)

Answered in the main Planetfall thread.

And speaking of Colonization, I didn’t care for the Civ 4 version but someone told me the original was different and a lot better. True?

That was my feeling, but I don’t think we share a lot of taste so YMMV.

What were the differences? I liked the idea of Colonization, but the Civ4 version I played seemed like it was 90% tedious micromanagement of your specialized cities supply chains.

You’d have to look it up. I haven’t played either in over a decade.

Old version had more micromanagement and no automation.

3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Age of Wonders: Planetfall by Triumph Studios