Which is somewhat hilarious, given that it wasn't even a couple of pages ago in this same thread that some of you were shaking your heads in disappointment about the claim that low tier units were trash and completely outperformed by the high tier ones, with no way to make them viable.
Literally no one, ever, anywhere was complaining about high tier units completely outperforming lower tiers, because that's obviously the way it should work and I'm always happy to help you understand such difficult concepts (4>1). The complaints were always about t4 being too easy to get and spam, but that was already "fixed" some time ago, in a better way.
This is the Codex so this is to be expected. About a half of this thread appears to be people shitting on the game, they contradict themselves a fair few times along the way. Some of the criticism sounds like part of these peeps haven't actually played the game but watched a few videos and jumped in to comment - like the "single map size" criticism which is both incorrect and irrelevant.
DO u 3v3n play, bro?? Then drop a truthbomb when AoW4 rmg seeds cornering you from the start, retarded ai forward settling, completely broken and pointless underground starts and so on are like number 1 or 2 complaints and 100% valid ones.
AoW4 is a good fucking game. There's balance issues (which can be fun for SP but I guess a big problem for MP), but this will steadily improve as patches come. This is a great base to add more content via expansions and it's a joy to play.
Do you want to be a dragon (retardedhawke.jpg)? Cause that's the type of content you gonna get - game getting bigger instead of better. For the record, I'd absolutely love to be proven wrong here. So do it, triumph.
The aforementioned "tome circus" is really completely overblown based on the fact that some people are sperging and are finding optimal strategies. Yes, some options are currently clearly better than others. But this will be easy to tweak for the devs and even now provided that you don't care about the "best choice" there's a lot of potential builds and combos that are quite good and very playable - at least in SP and in MP you can work around the balance issues by banning certain builds.
Optimal strategies are absolutely not the biggest problem. The underlying issue is the stupid implementation caused by their "make everyone different by making everyone the same" approach that carries a number of shitty implications. Like all the ones being mentioned by literally any person looking at the game from a critical angle.
But the tier 5 units in AoW 4 are a bit underwhelming. Not just by numbers but also by design, they are fairly boring. They aren't something that I look forward to getting, picking the proper enchantments which are usually in tier 1-2 tomes is much more important.
But it seems that neutral armies get raised to higher tier levels as the turns progress. It is really weird to see stacks of tier 3/4/5 units defending a resource node. I think they went a bit overboard there. It means that clearing them early on is always better.
AoW4 seems to be doing the same thing HoMM6 did - flatten the differences between tiers and make high tier ones nothing special. It's not only about the enchantment bonanza, but all units seem to have super high hp and the combat is less deadly. Even before the nodes scale, early game quests or wonders will often have t3-4 units and they're surprisingly easy to defeat.
Like I said, the t4 spam complaints must've really traumatized them, ever since PF they're doing their best to kick highest tier units down as much as possible. Whether you like that approach or not (many people seemed to love the fact that in PF kitting out t1-2 with mods and blitzing through the game with them was not only possible, but often optimal), the design ideas they introduce to achieve it are questionable at best.