Johannes
Arcane
That doesn't have too much to do with heros. You want to attack independents only with a stronger stack, hero or not.
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Age of Wonders 4
- Thread starter Lagi
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Heroic Liberator
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Raghar
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That reminds me the stream with stellaris where main species were ugly nasty slime people. Then the Stellaris devolved into current bloated irrelevant mess that doesn't simulate anything.
Suicidal
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I watched the entire video and also that dwarf one they did a while back and it made me realize something.
The whole faction creation mechanic is basically the AoW 3 race + class system with extra steps.
Your culture is now basically your race. It defines your core army units that you will be using a lot in the early game, your buildings and a small part of your researchable spells/upgrades. Very similar to how race worked in AoW3. There are also 6 cultures like there were 6 races in AoW3 at launch. Differences between culture units seem more significant than between different racial units in AoW3 at a glance. For example, I remember in the dwarf video they chose the industrialists and their basic melee units were the shield troops that attacked up to 3 times and had a lot of defense and some defensive mode buffs so it was useful to park them next to enemies and just go into defensive stance instead of attacking. All of the units also had some stacking armor buff mechanic. The evil culture, on the other hand, has basic melee soldiers that function more like cavalry - they only attack once but have a charge attack. They also have archers and mages that apply various debuffs to enemies and your units get bonuses from hitting targets with debuffs. I'd imagine every culture has some gameplay theme for its basic troops.
You also get to pick your racial and society traits, so there's some customization and while the bonuses don't seem that significant I'm sure you can min-max them to great effect (I remember one of the devs mentioning that you can get some of your basic units to start with 2 veterancy ranks from the traits for example, which is pretty big in the early game).
The tomes are basically the class + the specializations schools mixed in. A lot of the tomes they showed even give you access to exactly the same or similar units to what you get from classes in AoW3, like the 2 starting holy-themed tomes giving you chaplains and zealots (which are probably equivalent to crusaders or martyrs from AoW3 theocrat), one of the nature tomes letting you summon random animal units like the archdruid could. There is 1 big difference - because each tome gives you access to only a handful of upgrades and 1-2 units, but you get to pick several tomes over the course of the game (the devs mentioned that in a typical game you would research around 9 tomes, implying that you can get even more), you can effecitvely multiclass. In AoW3, for example, if you pick theocrat, you get the whole theocrat package (holy spells, theocrat units like crusaders, chaplains, angles, shrines) to last you the entire game, while in AoW4 you can start off with researching the 2 holy tomes but then pick something else, like nature tomes for example, creating a theocrat + archdruid hybrid.
From what I've seen, the tomes give you access to the majority of your researchable stuff and also your higher tier units, so they function just like classes in AoW3. The devs mentioned that some tomes contain only spells, making them more similar to the specialization schools.
Some higher tier tomes have prerequisites, like if you want to get the tome of giga necromancy you need to have enough darkness affinity so you'd probably need to pick some lower tier necromancy tomes beforehand. You can get affinity from researching tomes, picking certain hero skills (but only for your main hero) and from your initial faction creation choices.
So we're basically returning to the AoW3 system but with more flexibility.
Some other things from the video:
-Hero customization seems a lot more detailed than in Planetfall and more similar to AoW3. Each level you get to pick from a lot of different passive upgrades or active skills and also every 5 levels you get to pick a major ability. + There's the equipment system that Planetfall lacked, but with the ability to give your hero different normal attacks by equipping different weapons, which Planetfall introduced.
-You no longer need to bunch up your units next to the enemy to attack with several stacks, now both sides get to bring in units to battle from several hexes around the place where the attack happened, and you can choose which stacks to bring in.
-You can imprison heroes you kill and then do various things with them. Necromancers can kill them and then revive them as undead. They get to keep their appearance (like armor, stuff like wings) but become a skeleton.
-Tier 4 and 5 units seem very strong so depending on how easy they are to obtain we might be back to T4-5 spam.
-There are caps for everything, like how many cities and heroes you can have. These caps increase over time, but you can actually go over the cap if you have the gold to support it, because all it does is cost more or give you extra upkeep.
The whole faction creation mechanic is basically the AoW 3 race + class system with extra steps.
Your culture is now basically your race. It defines your core army units that you will be using a lot in the early game, your buildings and a small part of your researchable spells/upgrades. Very similar to how race worked in AoW3. There are also 6 cultures like there were 6 races in AoW3 at launch. Differences between culture units seem more significant than between different racial units in AoW3 at a glance. For example, I remember in the dwarf video they chose the industrialists and their basic melee units were the shield troops that attacked up to 3 times and had a lot of defense and some defensive mode buffs so it was useful to park them next to enemies and just go into defensive stance instead of attacking. All of the units also had some stacking armor buff mechanic. The evil culture, on the other hand, has basic melee soldiers that function more like cavalry - they only attack once but have a charge attack. They also have archers and mages that apply various debuffs to enemies and your units get bonuses from hitting targets with debuffs. I'd imagine every culture has some gameplay theme for its basic troops.
You also get to pick your racial and society traits, so there's some customization and while the bonuses don't seem that significant I'm sure you can min-max them to great effect (I remember one of the devs mentioning that you can get some of your basic units to start with 2 veterancy ranks from the traits for example, which is pretty big in the early game).
The tomes are basically the class + the specializations schools mixed in. A lot of the tomes they showed even give you access to exactly the same or similar units to what you get from classes in AoW3, like the 2 starting holy-themed tomes giving you chaplains and zealots (which are probably equivalent to crusaders or martyrs from AoW3 theocrat), one of the nature tomes letting you summon random animal units like the archdruid could. There is 1 big difference - because each tome gives you access to only a handful of upgrades and 1-2 units, but you get to pick several tomes over the course of the game (the devs mentioned that in a typical game you would research around 9 tomes, implying that you can get even more), you can effecitvely multiclass. In AoW3, for example, if you pick theocrat, you get the whole theocrat package (holy spells, theocrat units like crusaders, chaplains, angles, shrines) to last you the entire game, while in AoW4 you can start off with researching the 2 holy tomes but then pick something else, like nature tomes for example, creating a theocrat + archdruid hybrid.
From what I've seen, the tomes give you access to the majority of your researchable stuff and also your higher tier units, so they function just like classes in AoW3. The devs mentioned that some tomes contain only spells, making them more similar to the specialization schools.
Some higher tier tomes have prerequisites, like if you want to get the tome of giga necromancy you need to have enough darkness affinity so you'd probably need to pick some lower tier necromancy tomes beforehand. You can get affinity from researching tomes, picking certain hero skills (but only for your main hero) and from your initial faction creation choices.
So we're basically returning to the AoW3 system but with more flexibility.
Some other things from the video:
-Hero customization seems a lot more detailed than in Planetfall and more similar to AoW3. Each level you get to pick from a lot of different passive upgrades or active skills and also every 5 levels you get to pick a major ability. + There's the equipment system that Planetfall lacked, but with the ability to give your hero different normal attacks by equipping different weapons, which Planetfall introduced.
-You no longer need to bunch up your units next to the enemy to attack with several stacks, now both sides get to bring in units to battle from several hexes around the place where the attack happened, and you can choose which stacks to bring in.
-You can imprison heroes you kill and then do various things with them. Necromancers can kill them and then revive them as undead. They get to keep their appearance (like armor, stuff like wings) but become a skeleton.
-Tier 4 and 5 units seem very strong so depending on how easy they are to obtain we might be back to T4-5 spam.
-There are caps for everything, like how many cities and heroes you can have. These caps increase over time, but you can actually go over the cap if you have the gold to support it, because all it does is cost more or give you extra upkeep.
Zboj Lamignat
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I didn't watch everything, but skimmed through it mostly focusing on the combat parts.
Overall impressions:
1. All the people working at triumph seem rather awkward, and I assume they pick the "normal" ones for the streams. My marketing advice would be to do what a lot of other companies do: hire some 5-6/10 chick that has absolutely no idea what she's doing.
2. The overall aesthetics of the game are much improved over PF, thank god. Might be a contrast effect from how prosper the previous game was, but at least the strategic map looks incomparably better. They even brought back the nice cloth zoom out map instead of the unreadable abomination from PF.
3. I'm not sure how I feel about this game yet again gunning out for completely new mechanics over it being an actual AoW4. There definitely is some potential there with tomes and affinities, so let's see.
4. It's rather obvious that, yet again, a lot of staples from the standard that was set by AoW3 are missing. But the game is definitely not as barebones as PF was, so there's that.
Combat:
1. The qol and readability is nice with clear indicators of ap use, to hit/range chance after movement, unit placement and types and so on. But it comes at the cost of some yuge mobile game-like icons that don's mesh with the overall style well.
2. I'm really not a fan of bringing the rng back, even if only for ranged attacks. Already saw some stupid crap like 30% to hit on a unit standing 2 hexes away.
3. The AI seems really dumb. In the landmark battle it rushed forward with squishy ranged troops while keeping melees back and then, when it had a chance to finish off a severely wounded unit, it chose to take a distant pot shot at a full hp hero, instead.
4. The animations are rather poor, but much, much better than in PF. At least I didn't see any moments where it seemed like frames are missing, which happened constantly in PF.
5. I like the idea of low tier shock troops that have just one attack, but cancel retaliation and defense mode. Didn't see a lot of different units, but it seems they mostly stuck to AoW3 idea of active abilities mostly reserved for heroes and supports instead of giving out awesome buttons like candy, which is fine by me.
Strategy layer:
1. Unless I'm mistaken, they did a mash up of Aow 1 and 2 hero development system, where you have a list of skills instead of random choice, but you can always pick one on a level up and there is no sp management. Seems like a bit of a risky move, as a lot of options will probably never get used for being underwhelming.
2. An actual inventory is back for heroes, thank god.
3. I'm mostly happy with city management. Yeah, there's sectors and they've introduced some low iq nu-civ inanity like "boosts" and what not for fuck knows what reason, but buildings have cost again, the production/draft duality is a nice idea and the aesthetics/ui seem fine as well.
My final rating at this point would be: this will almost 100% be (much) better than PF and I don't hate what I see. At the same time, it does not seem the evolution of AoW3 that I would love it to be. Also, they can fuck off with that pricing after I've fallen for buying full-package PF.
Overall impressions:
1. All the people working at triumph seem rather awkward, and I assume they pick the "normal" ones for the streams. My marketing advice would be to do what a lot of other companies do: hire some 5-6/10 chick that has absolutely no idea what she's doing.
2. The overall aesthetics of the game are much improved over PF, thank god. Might be a contrast effect from how prosper the previous game was, but at least the strategic map looks incomparably better. They even brought back the nice cloth zoom out map instead of the unreadable abomination from PF.
3. I'm not sure how I feel about this game yet again gunning out for completely new mechanics over it being an actual AoW4. There definitely is some potential there with tomes and affinities, so let's see.
4. It's rather obvious that, yet again, a lot of staples from the standard that was set by AoW3 are missing. But the game is definitely not as barebones as PF was, so there's that.
Combat:
1. The qol and readability is nice with clear indicators of ap use, to hit/range chance after movement, unit placement and types and so on. But it comes at the cost of some yuge mobile game-like icons that don's mesh with the overall style well.
2. I'm really not a fan of bringing the rng back, even if only for ranged attacks. Already saw some stupid crap like 30% to hit on a unit standing 2 hexes away.
3. The AI seems really dumb. In the landmark battle it rushed forward with squishy ranged troops while keeping melees back and then, when it had a chance to finish off a severely wounded unit, it chose to take a distant pot shot at a full hp hero, instead.
4. The animations are rather poor, but much, much better than in PF. At least I didn't see any moments where it seemed like frames are missing, which happened constantly in PF.
5. I like the idea of low tier shock troops that have just one attack, but cancel retaliation and defense mode. Didn't see a lot of different units, but it seems they mostly stuck to AoW3 idea of active abilities mostly reserved for heroes and supports instead of giving out awesome buttons like candy, which is fine by me.
Strategy layer:
1. Unless I'm mistaken, they did a mash up of Aow 1 and 2 hero development system, where you have a list of skills instead of random choice, but you can always pick one on a level up and there is no sp management. Seems like a bit of a risky move, as a lot of options will probably never get used for being underwhelming.
2. An actual inventory is back for heroes, thank god.
3. I'm mostly happy with city management. Yeah, there's sectors and they've introduced some low iq nu-civ inanity like "boosts" and what not for fuck knows what reason, but buildings have cost again, the production/draft duality is a nice idea and the aesthetics/ui seem fine as well.
My final rating at this point would be: this will almost 100% be (much) better than PF and I don't hate what I see. At the same time, it does not seem the evolution of AoW3 that I would love it to be. Also, they can fuck off with that pricing after I've fallen for buying full-package PF.
Last edited:
Suicidal
Arcane
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Can't wait to make my faction which is gonna be 56% dwarf, 25% angel, 17% elemental and 2% sub-Saharan African.
Zboj Lamignat
Arcane
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Waaait a minute, so the landmarks don't unlock special buildings/unit upgrades now? Like, at all?
Huge fucking
Huge fucking
Suicidal
Arcane
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The ones I've seen in the video give you access to unique units, sort of like capturing ogre/fairy/etc. dwellings in AoW3. Maybe there are those that give existing unit upgrades as well.Waaait a minute, so the landmarks don't unlock special buildings/unit upgrades now? Like, at all?
Huge fucking
Zboj Lamignat
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Nope. I wrote the post, because I read comments under the latest dev diary on p-dox forums and one of the devs officially confirms there's nothing like that in the game.
Come to think of it, I didn't see any npc dwellings, either and I assume with wonders giving unique unit access those are not a thing, either?
Ok, this is bullshit.
Come to think of it, I didn't see any npc dwellings, either and I assume with wonders giving unique unit access those are not a thing, either?
Ok, this is bullshit.
Suicidal
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That's lame. Wonder why they'd remove a feature that they added before and people seemed to like.
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So, Sicilian?
chuft
Augur
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Waaait a minute, so the landmarks don't unlock special buildings/unit upgrades now? Like, at all?
Huge fucking
So all units built will be the same regardless of what city they were built in and what is in the area around that city?
What do the landmarks do then?
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Help you orient yourself on the map?
Suicidal
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The ones they show so far gave resource income and access to special units (1 gave ogres, 1 gave serpents, 1 gave fairies) and some other bonuses. Also what Lacrymas said - they usually come with a mini quest you have to resolve and get some reward for doing so.Waaait a minute, so the landmarks don't unlock special buildings/unit upgrades now? Like, at all?
Huge fucking
So all units built will be the same regardless of what city they were built in and what is in the area around that city?
What do the landmarks do then?
Example:
Not sure what Rally of Lieges is, I don't think they explained that yet. I guess it's some way of recruiting the special units that the landmark provides.
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chuft
Augur
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So it sounds like the unit bonuses thing from AOW3 and Planetfall have been replaced by adding new buildable units instead, in lieu of dwellings.
The mini adventure thing was present as exploring anomalous sites in Planetfall, and seemed a direct import from anomalies in Stellaris - Paradox influence at work. I think it actually is fun although fans of "rushing" all the time will probably not find it worth dedicating a hero to for multiple turns. But it fits my "exploring" style of play quite well. Only good thing to come out of Stellaris really.
The mini adventure thing was present as exploring anomalous sites in Planetfall, and seemed a direct import from anomalies in Stellaris - Paradox influence at work. I think it actually is fun although fans of "rushing" all the time will probably not find it worth dedicating a hero to for multiple turns. But it fits my "exploring" style of play quite well. Only good thing to come out of Stellaris really.
Fuck 3 models especially when combined with multi-figure groups.
"imperium" .. why they couldn't come up with an actual resource that can be stockpiled, I bet this is some civ5/stellaris/eu4 type cookie clicker limiting factor shit
Zboj Lamignat
Arcane
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Do you even know what difficult words like "replace" mean? Recruitable neutrals existed in troves in both 3 and PF. This has been "replaced" with fuck all, as per their usual recent modus operandi. Not to mention that landmarks unlocking unique units were very much a thing in AoW3. You can add that to the list of stripped features, as afair no such thing existed in PF.
The resources from annexing landmarks can be very impactful, but they sure as hell ain't exciting. Units can be very cool, of course, but if it comes at the cost of neutral dwellings no longer being a thing then it's an extremely poor tradeoff.
The longer I think about it, the more it seems like the general design approach of 4 is very similar to PF. PF stripped and declined a lot of staple AoW stuff and a lot of new incline brought by 3 and banked everything on mods. And while the mod mechanics was admittedly very extensive and cool in theory, this approach backfired massively. 4 seems to continue with a similar angle, but they're banking on tomes (and, to a lesser extent, affinities) this time.
Sarathiour
Cipher
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This mechanism was only added with the expansion of AoW3, it wasn't in the base game, so there still is a flicker of hope.Waaait a minute, so the landmarks don't unlock special buildings/unit upgrades now? Like, at all?
Huge fucking
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