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TBS Age of Wonders: Planetfall - AoW gone to space

smaug

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So, with a new DLC does this fare worse than AoW3, or a new DLC is needed in order to make a fair and balanced conclusion?
 

Zboj Lamignat

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I don't know if I believe this game ever reaching the final form AoW3 level. It's still consistently beaten by AoW3 concurrent player number wise, so I'm not sure if the motivation and money to genuinely improve it is there.

The two best improvements it received is the ability to manually re-play tactical combat after using auto resolve and annexing sectors without moving units into them. I'm fairly sure both of these are included in a patch, and not the dlc itself.

The new secret tech seems like a faction downgraded for budget/time reasons. They're very strong in themselves, but don't synergize with, well, anything at all and the new minor faction just looks like more of the same.

The anomalous site seem taken from a completely different game, as they require your strong stack to just sit in place for many turns instead of creeping, although the rewards can be pretty crazy. Once I jumped 4 techs in one turn after completing an anomalous site early lol.

Tried the campaign for a couple of turns, it's the same autism-level genius that the vanilla ones are. They just spam you with one incomprehensible quest after another, then some of them auto-fail after two turna without you doing anything, then you get a quest to defeat someone who you were supposed to befriend a turn ago and then... Don't know what happened there, the vanilla AoW3 campaigns were kinda boring, but competently done and the dlc ones were genuinely good.
 

Silly Germans

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I dont understand why they did not simply continue to improve the gameplay from AoW3, even with the setting change. AoW3 with dlcs and mods is pretty good, if they simply
made a good campaign, worked on some problems like city spam and economy in general it could have been great. But looking at AoW Planet Fall doesn't look like an improvement
at all.
Are there any things that it does better ?
 

Lacrymas

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Why developers don't learn from their past experience is a question from almost the beginning of this century. Nobody has an answer. What they should've done is go 2D, but that's neither here nor there.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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Are there any things that it does better ?
The racial units are definitely more varied now and the mods do good job at keeping low tier units relevant throughout the game. That's pretty much all I can think of. The elephant in the room is not things done worse, it's just that a lot of things that AoW3 has are plain fucking missing here and not much is offered in exchange.
 

Lacrymas

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They wouldn't be able to squeeze more money if they just gave you everything AoW3 already has now, would they? That's probably Paradox's idea.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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I thought so too, but the first dlc doesn't look like the're trying to bring back stuff from AoW3 and monetize it at all, despite it being an obvious, ready made solution to try and salvage the game. Of course they might change their tune soon.
 

mwnn85

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Aside from the slight improvement alterations to the tactical battles - a chance to miss, new damage types and status effects (staggering, etc)
Plus the Alpha Centauri like unit modding.

I don't really see much which hasn't been done better elsewhere; indeed it didn't even hook me at all.
I think I even played Warhammer 40K: Gladius - Relics of War for longer.

If I couldn't get my hands on CIV IV or the other top choices then I'd pick Warlock Master of the Arcane Complete out of the bargain bin.
I wish I would've grabbed the latter from Humble for free some years ago as they added all the DLC for free later on.

Triumph still appear to be incapable of designing an engaging 4x game.
Perhaps they should stick to making scenario based tactical games, something in the same vein as Warhammer 40k: Sanctus Reach?
 
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Zboj Lamignat

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Oh god, please no. Planetfall is not nearly as retarded with missing as AoW 1-2 are, but still, the moment I lose a unit because I had 8 grazes in a row on some shitty tier1 trash standing in the open I rage and my fingers are itching to alt+f4. AoW3 ditching misses, but adding flanking and surprisingly deep morale system + retaining range and obstruction penalties was one of the biggest inclines.

Also, staggering needs major revamp as it's implemented really mindlessly right now. The worst thing about it is that it makes full action weapons even more useless than they already are.
 

mwnn85

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Oh god, please no. Planetfall is not nearly as retarded with missing as AoW 1-2 are, but still, the moment I lose a unit because I had 8 grazes in a row on some shitty tier1 trash standing in the open I rage and my fingers are itching to alt+f4. AoW3 ditching misses, but adding flanking and surprisingly deep morale system + retaining range and obstruction penalties was one of the biggest inclines.

Also, staggering needs major revamp as it's implemented really mindlessly right now. The worst thing about it is that it makes full action weapons even more useless than they already are.
I wasn't a fan of the combat or constant missing in AoW 2 either - especially the elven bowmen in Julia's campaigns - and I've edited my post accordingly.

The only thing I really like about AoW1 is beefing up a hero. The unit roster in the early games was all over the place.

Planetfall is a bit clearer when it comes to manoeuvring units as the target lines/unit icons change colour to indicate chance to hit plus it shows the %.

I noticed the computer opponent still favours hiding all it's units behind cover until one gets killed or injured - at which point it commits everything forward. It's probably the most useful way of winning siege maps in AoW3 against the AI.
Flanking still seems to be present as does the choice of moving and shooting (up to 3 times)

If I was gonna make one change, I probably would've made unit strength drop off as models get killed - that seems to be what Fantasy General 2 is doing.
 
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Vatnik
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If I was gonna make one change, I probably would've made unit strength drop off as models get killed - that seems to be what Fantasy General 2 is doing.
It's what MoM did in the 90s but the LITERAL faggot devs are incapable of doing now, fuck I hate nu-AoW
 

Lacrymas

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It runs the risk of creating a spiral of death if not balanced very carefully though.
 
Vatnik
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There's no such problem in MoM. I don't see it. It increases the value of getting in the first hit, but there's nothing wrong with getting the first hit in being particularly valuable.
 

Lacrymas

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There kinda is. There is nothing particularly tactical or smart about it and most of the time it's decided by the turn order, rather than something that the players do. You can see this in the Heroes games (without 4) where the battles all revolve around getting the first hit every time and low level spells like slow and haste are the most overpowered because of it. It's better if the units have simultaneous retaliation.
 
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Galdred

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
There's no such problem in MoM. I don't see it. It increases the value of getting in the first hit, but there's nothing wrong with getting the first hit in being particularly valuable.

There is no problem with that, as long as one side is in a hurry, otherwise, the optimal strategy would be for both side to wait for the other one to get in range:
If the attacker(the one who initiated battle) has a limited time before being forced to retreat, then there is no problem at all indeed.
That said, lots of long range power also solve the problem by forcing the other side to get in murder range.

There kinda is. There is nothing particularly tactical or smart about it and most of the time it's decided by the turn order, rather than something that the players do. You can see this in the Heroes games (without 4) where the battles all revolve around getting the first hit every time and low level spells like slow and haste are the most overpowered because of it. It's better if the units have simultaneous retaliation.

The heroes games pushed it to 11.
What is optimal is sending "lone peasant stacks" to eat counterattack overkill from a large units, then hit them with real units without counterattack at all.
AoW 1 didn't have this problem because of unlimited counter attacks (which still brought other problems...), but AoW 2 did, except that you cannot do ludicrous things like in HOMM with stack size.

That is why I don't like counterattacks in games. Whether unlimited (AoW 1), or restricted, it always leads to cheesy tactics.
Actually, I think The Operational Art of War did it a lot better than every other game:
You have to plan all battles for the turn, then trigger them. The "time spent" depends on how long it took to finish each of the programmed battles, so you may have time for another round of move + attack afterwards. The damage inflicted by all sides are obviously dependent on how long these battles lasted.

On a side note, MoM did have plenty of balance problems actually. Having different counts for units made buff spells much more potent on units with a high head count.
Hence the infamous halfling slingers of death (with stacked buffs + warlord).
But at least, it had a ton of very different broken combos for different stages of the game, and it felt "organic", so it is hard to fault the game for that.

I personnally prefered the way AoW 1-SM did it, with units being abstracted as a single character, and fighting as one. Losing models without losing combat efficiency is really bad.
 

Lacrymas

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Oh, yeah, I forgot about the disposable 1 unit "stacks" like peasants, troglodytes or skeletons that eat retaliations. The AI also gets confused and always attacks them first, so it's very easy to preserve units and never get your doomstacks attacked.
 

Van-d-all

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There is no problem with that, as long as one side is in a hurry, otherwise, the optimal strategy would be for both side to wait for the other one to get in range:
If the attacker(the one who initiated battle) has a limited time before being forced to retreat, then there is no problem at all indeed.
That said, lots of long range power also solve the problem by forcing the other side to get in murder range.
Given how trivially simple it would have been to implement, and AoW actually having a mathematically well thought out damage system, which proves their competence in this regard, it's pretty obvious it's a design choice. Hard to say for certain why they did this, but I'd guess it's about balancing single & multi model units - if regular units were subject to a quantity malus, it would make single model units even more overpowered. It's stands to some reason that such unit might be also subject to said malus, if, say, it's a living being, but things like tanks, and most importantly heroes (which are a huge part of the game after all) start to get weird - it's not like a gun loses it's damage properties when shot by a wounded hero or a broken tank. It would have to be an accuracy malus then, I guess, but then again it's weird to apply it to multi model units. And should they decide to go all the way down the rabbit hole, and actually apply damage malus to multi model units and accuracy malus to single model units it would make balancing a major issue, because same abilities would have varied usefulness depending on unit type. Needlessly convoluted, thus ditched idea IMO.
 

Lacrymas

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The multi-model units are just a visual representation, it's not such a big deal. Yeah, it's weird if we apply real world logic, but we really shouldn't in this case.
 
Vatnik
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I forgot, does MoM actually have simultaneous attacks? I guess I have no problem with those. I guess to make first-turn advantage not annoying without that, you would need most battles to have a mixture of infantry, fast units, and long-ranged ones, to prompt people to attack first instead of maneuvring endlessly, each unwilling to move into range first.

I don't think infinite retaliations in AoW1 is a bad thing, it allows strong melee units to absolutely annihilate weaker melee units even in a massive ratio, but I quite like the idea - and even the gameplay - of strong melee beasts having to be countered by ranged attacks. Only related problem is that aow1's swordsmen are weak against basically everything including archers, so the game should ideally be played with a mod that addresses unit balance by boosting various bad spells and units like swordsmen numerically.

People say that AoW1 has a balance problems with overly strong heroes, and I used to agree, but I think they are going off singleplayer too much - the AI doesn't develop or use heroes as well naturally. In multiplayer this isn't the case, especially in PBEM where you have auto-combat, heroes become vulnerable once more. Against a 10 DEF hero, an archer does 0.4 damage per turn on average, and even the strongest hero can only kill 1 archer a turn unless it's using an aoe breath attack and also gets lucky with it/has marksmanship, which is rare. Or unless it has the Chain Lightning spell. Without those, against an 8-stack of archers, even the strongest melee hero will have had 72 arrows shot at him by the time he kills all eight archers, and each arrow has a 10% chance to hit for max damage of 2 (because it is by definition a critical hit if it manages to hit 10 DEF), so that's 14.4 damage. Heroes start with 10 HP, so a strong hero can definitely get up that high for HP, but even 16 HP is very risky.

In one game I had a hero with 50 movespeed, haste, Warp Party, concealment etc running around by themselves in a map that had been conquered almost wholly by another player. I was moving vast distances and razing every poorly defended city, then reanimating those cities immediately. It was impossible to catch me, until he eventually researched Town Gate and used it to drop an Air Galley on me - I didn't have a good enough ranged attack to compete with it.
 
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Vatnik
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Given how trivially simple it would have been to implement, and AoW actually having a mathematically well thought out damage system, which proves their competence in this regard, it's pretty obvious it's a design choice. Hard to say for certain why they did this, but I'd guess it's about balancing single & multi model units - if regular units were subject to a quantity malus, it would make single model units even more overpowered. It's stands to some reason that such unit might be also subject to said malus, if, say, it's a living being, but things like tanks, and most importantly heroes (which are a huge part of the game after all) start to get weird - it's not like a gun loses it's damage properties when shot by a wounded hero or a broken tank. It would have to be an accuracy malus then, I guess, but then again it's weird to apply it to multi model units. And should they decide to go all the way down the rabbit hole, and actually apply damage malus to multi model units and accuracy malus to single model units it would make balancing a major issue, because same abilities would have varied usefulness depending on unit type. Needlessly convoluted, thus ditched idea IMO.
It would only be unbalanced if you started with unit stats balanced for a game without casualty malus, then added it, which is an unrealistic scenario. MoM has casualty maluses and Eador has an injury malus system. There is no problem with them in either game, it's not weird - what's weird is their absence - nor impossible to balance, that mindset is probably the reason nu-AoW is lacking all sorts of mechanics that existed in older games. Though perhaps the lisping sodomites who developed nu-AoW genuinely couldn't do any better, since those nebbishes thought Civ5 was a worthy inspiration for both aesthetics and gameplay.

I probably should leave the thread, all I have to contribute is butthurt rants
 

Van-d-all

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The multi-model units are just a visual representation, it's not such a big deal. Yeah, it's weird if we apply real world logic, but we really shouldn't in this case.
Yes and no. Yes, the actual numbers can be rather liberal, as if in, 10 models represent an entire company or whatever the base unit scale is, but also no, because as I wrote, the hero unit is still a single unit.
MoM has casualty maluses and Eador has an injury malus system.
Because when it comes to melee, magic, or archery it stands to reason that even singular hero damage output is reliant on his health. The literal examples of firearms and vehicles weren't placed in my first post by chance. Both have a long standing tendency of fucking up fantasy mechanics, be it cRPG, P&P or tabletop.
 
Vatnik
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The multi-model units are just a visual representation, it's not such a big deal. Yeah, it's weird if we apply real world logic, but we really shouldn't in this case.
Yes and no. Yes, the actual numbers can be rather liberal, as if in, 10 models represent an entire company or whatever the base unit scale is, but also no, because as I wrote, the hero unit is still a single unit.
MoM has casualty maluses and Eador has an injury malus system.
Because when it comes to melee, magic, or archery it stands to reason that even singular hero damage output is reliant on his health. The literal examples of firearms and vehicles weren't placed in my first post by chance. Both have a long standing tendency of fucking up fantasy mechanics, be it cRPG, P&P or tabletop.
I don't see the problem with having various attacks which are excluded from the injury malus.
 

Van-d-all

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The multi-model units are just a visual representation, it's not such a big deal. Yeah, it's weird if we apply real world logic, but we really shouldn't in this case.
Yes and no. Yes, the actual numbers can be rather liberal, as if in, 10 models represent an entire company or whatever the base unit scale is, but also no, because as I wrote, the hero unit is still a single unit.
MoM has casualty maluses and Eador has an injury malus system.
Because when it comes to melee, magic, or archery it stands to reason that even singular hero damage output is reliant on his health. The literal examples of firearms and vehicles weren't placed in my first post by chance. Both have a long standing tendency of fucking up fantasy mechanics, be it cRPG, P&P or tabletop.
I don't see the problem with having various attacks which are excluded from the injury malus.
Maybe, but again, as I wrote, within system that includes things such as injury malus, such units would require some kind of malus for both balancing and reason's sake. Probably accuracy. That makes things like skills work non-uniform, eg. something like "power strike", a low ACC high DMG attack would work good on units subject to injury malus, since they don't get their ACC lowered, but bad on ACC reduced ones. Effectively the entire system becomes obfuscated and starts to lack clarity & cohesion.
 

Lacrymas

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Having such mechanics would only further disempower low tier units compared to higher tier, though, especially since higher tiers have higher defenses and higher HP. I'd actually agree if higher tier units get bigger maluses from damage received and the maluses for lower tier units are more negligible.
 

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