Age of Wonders 4

[Modron]

This looks OK... never played any of the first three. What do you guys think?

Why not play AoW, AoW 2, and AoW SM then? Even the fourth game AoW 3 is fairly decent.

 

[Raghar]

This looks OK... never played any of the first three. What do you guys think?

Perhaps play AOW: Shadow magic if you're interested in this first

He'd spoil himself when he'd be using finished product. Going in without any positive expectations could only result in some positive expectations.

 

[kangaxx]

This looks OK... never played any of the first three. What do you guys think?

Why not play AoW, AoW 2, and AoW SM then? Even the fourth game AoW 3 is fairly decent.

Time as much as anything, kids somewhat limit things. I'll have a look though, thanks.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

Reviews look ok. But it will probably take again all dlcs to turn it from an acceptable game to a good one. I'm curious how well the faction creation works. Looks like the make-or-break feature of the game. The class/race/specialization combinations from AoW III did allow different play styles. I hope we don't end up with tons of options that all feel the same instead of a limited but meaningful choice.

 

[Perkel]

Never liked AOW3. This seems to be AOW3+.

 

[Lacrymas]

Never liked AOW3. This seems to be AOW3+.

It doesn't look anything like 3, lol.

 

[Norfleet]

Time as much as anything, kids somewhat limit things. I'll have a look though, thanks.

You know, I've used to hear this all the time, but after having my own, I've not found this to be the case: If anything, kids have increased my time-availability through now having a source of slave labor I can outsource menial tasks to. Now that I have kids, for instance, I no longer have to do my own repetitive grinding in MMOs: I have my own personal slaves for that. What exactly are you doing with your kids that they are more of a time drain than a benefit? How exactly have you turned a source of slave labor into an encumberance?

 

[fantadomat]

First two minutes of that clip and i lost all interest in the game. It is just some generic 4x now,gone are the days of cool campaign and unique races to play around. Now it is all about make your own soy boy youtube weird faction so you could put screeching tags on your videos lol.

Reeeee cat assassin on big spidies.....soooo coool yo,click like und subscribe,very coool yo!

 

[Norfleet]

A generic 4X, and you can't even play on a decent-sized map, only the extremely tiny default maps.

 

[Fargus]

AoW1 still the best AoW game for me.

 

[Perkel]

Never liked AOW3. This seems to be AOW3+.

It doesn't look anything like 3, lol.

And yet it looks like clusterfuck 3 was, map readability wise.

 

[Suicidal]

I was watching some streams and I think the game looks fun enough and I'm interested in trying it but I'll probably wait for the complete edition to be discounted before getting it and by that time a couple of the planned DLCs will probably already have released.

 

[Lord of Riva]

Looks great on most fronts, bad on others.

I like the customization options, even though a there is clearly a wokeness factor involved: Body Type 1 & 2 and the fact that Races (now called forms) have no inherent traits, as if biology did not matter. I like the fact that you can do a lot more like this but in this day and age you have to question on why it has been created like this imho.

The Affinity system looks pretty cool as it not only provides a lot of flavor to the research and event systems but also promises to be a very dynamic mechanic in which you can react to other players play styles if you see you are disadvantaged.

I really like some of the innovation, having production (buildings) decoupled from Draft (units) makes it a lot easier to have a reasonable standing Army while trying to boost you economy, I mean juggling those two was part of the strategy but, especially in MP, with autocombat you could loose units that you would not have and had to take a hit to your economic progress in addition to your loss. This system as of now seems to alleviate the issue.

The game looks pretty cool graphically and I think they struck some gold with their class system in three which has been expanded (as said above through form having no traits) so that more and more units can be seen in flavorful designs.

The map sizes seem extremely small, allowing basically no exploration from what we could see. The focus is clearly on getting player to player interactions as soon as possible showing that the series has more of a focus on Wargaming compared to being a classical 4X, for my personal enjoyment I found the maps in Planetfall already too small, so making them even smaller will potentially break the game for me.

I also do not particularly enjoy all the imposed limits, that they most likely use to have better balance, city limits, hero limits, stack limit, max army count in battle limit all of this has been lowered from earlier entries, the biggest balance factor has oddly not been though: In longer AoW games the lower Tier units became obsolete and the map was chock full of Doomstacks, they did not limit the amount of tomes one could research, I would think that this would be the way to go.

The Naval combat is completely atrocious.

All in all I am very much looking forward to it.

 

[Suicidal]

The map sizes seem extremely small, allowing basically no exploration from what we could see. The focus is clearly on getting player to player interactions as soon as possible showing that the series has more of a focus on Wargaming compared to being a classical 4X, for my personal enjoyment I found the maps in Planetfall already too small, so making them even smaller will potentially break the game for me.

I was watching a stream where the guy set the player distance setting to far and he actually played for like an hour and a half without encountering any other players on the map... after which his game crashed during end of turn processing and bricked his save, forcing him to restart.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

This looks OK... never played any of the first three. What do you guys think?

Any of AoW1, SM (improved version of 2) or AoW3 is a safe bet. Older games have their problems (like rather simplistic combat ruleset), but win with the amazing presentation and some great campaigns if that's your thing (particularly campaign in AoW1). AoW3 is a strong candidate for the best tactical combat in a strategy game ever and rivals most rpgs/dedicated tactical games in that aspect. It is declined in some ways, though, with some unnecessary simplifications brought by modern design sensibilities and it looks rather goofy, too.

I'd definitely play all of these before touching 4.

 

[Lacrymas]

From the previous entries, only 2 is sus. Even its campaign starts very meh (I haven't even finished the first map of it, lol, it's too big for a first map and there's nothing much going on). In terms of campaigns 1 >>>>> SM > DLC campaigns for 3 >>>>> 3's base game campaigns >>>>>> 2 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Planetfall. I wouldn't be surprised if the campaign for 4 turns out to be the worst of the bunch. If there's a campaign at all.

 

[Suicidal]

From the previous entries, only 2 is sus. Even its campaign starts very meh (I haven't even finished the first map of it, lol, it's too big for a first map and there's nothing much going on). In terms of campaigns 1 >>>>> SM > DLC campaigns for 3 >>>>> 3's base game campaigns >>>>>> 2 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Planetfall. I wouldn't be surprised if the campaign for 4 turns out to be the worst of the bunch. If there's a campaign at all.

Why do you think SM's campaigns are so much better than base 2's. I've recently finished playing 2 and am now almost done with SM and while SM is indeed better, I don't think base 2 is that much worse.

 

[Lacrymas]

From the previous entries, only 2 is sus. Even its campaign starts very meh (I haven't even finished the first map of it, lol, it's too big for a first map and there's nothing much going on). In terms of campaigns 1 >>>>> SM > DLC campaigns for 3 >>>>> 3's base game campaigns >>>>>> 2 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Planetfall. I wouldn't be surprised if the campaign for 4 turns out to be the worst of the bunch. If there's a campaign at all.

Why do you think SM's campaigns are so much better than base 2's. I've recently finished playing 2 and am now almost done with SM and while SM is indeed better, I don't think base 2 is that much worse.

I'm just basing it off of 2's first map ;d Maybe the others are better.

 

[Suicidal]

From the previous entries, only 2 is sus. Even its campaign starts very meh (I haven't even finished the first map of it, lol, it's too big for a first map and there's nothing much going on). In terms of campaigns 1 >>>>> SM > DLC campaigns for 3 >>>>> 3's base game campaigns >>>>>> 2 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Planetfall. I wouldn't be surprised if the campaign for 4 turns out to be the worst of the bunch. If there's a campaign at all.

Why do you think SM's campaigns are so much better than base 2's. I've recently finished playing 2 and am now almost done with SM and while SM is indeed better, I don't think base 2 is that much worse.

I'm just basing it off of 2's first map ;d Maybe the others are better.

I found the first map to be pretty decent - it's pretty much a tutorial that makes you do stuff like using transports and rebuilding ruins but if you play on hard the enemy also swarms you with armies full of t2s and t3s so you get to fight a lot. There are worse and better missions in the campaign. Fire 3 is one of my favorite ones in terms of how the map is designed and also one of the hardest ones, so if you don't like that one you probably won't like the others as well. Although, I'm not sure what are your reasons for liking or disliking campaign maps are. Maybe you will hate Fire 3, but like a map that I hated, like Water 2.

 

[anvi]

The UI/controls are always terrible in this series. Whoever designs it should get aids.

 

[anvi]

Every turn 20 new events of boring crap and you have to click each one. Or you can just ignore them all and there's no point even playing.

 

[Absinthe]

Flawed, but fun factor wins.

His strategy camera is way too fucking zoomed in and he spends too much time whining about the fucking graphics in tactical combat and not enough discussing the gameplay aspects. He's just basically throwing out some basic info on what the game is like while focusing his review on superficial aesthetic crap and analogies/comparisons to other games because he seems to be a superficial fucking person who is having difficulty talking about the game in front of him.

 

[Beowulf]

Ehh, his a game journo that plays a new title every week and does not focus on strategy games. What can he ramble about anyhow apart from commenting on the presentation or aspects that don't require delving deeper into the subject matter?
He got to release the video before the game can be played, so he got his clicks and that's the last time he will be mentioning this title.

 

[Lacrymas]

Being a game journo must be a joyless existence.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

The UI/controls are always terrible in this series. Whoever designs it should get aids.

Haven't heard of any aids ridden team making a good UI, have you heard different?