Age of Wonders 4

[Dwarvophile]

Not yet finished the campaign and already bored. This game is shit.

 

[Fedora Master]

Like all modern PDX games it looks flashy and has a lot of things to click but there are no actual choices, a functioning AI or real gameplay.
I guess if you enjoy grinding through dozens of manual battles against low tier AI swarms, the game is great...

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

The problems are big and obvious, but let's not get overboard and compare it to in-house paradox offerings. This is still definitely a computer game, at the very least.

 

[Fargus]

Glad you're all enjoying this masterpiece

 

[El Presidente]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2975579768

Average 2023 californian female (she/they)

 

[BING XI LAO]

More types of resources is always good in 4X games and similar genres (like Total War) because it promotes map control and expansion.

Not exactly, you can reward control and expansion with just gold, more gold, even more gold. Multi-resource means the decision on where to conquer (with different income types at dfifference structures) now interacts with the decision of what unit type to train (costing different resources).

 

[Fedora Master]

Glad you're all enjoying this masterpiece

There is something to it but many of the mechanics turn into tedium by the mid-game.

 

[Dwarvophile]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2975579768

Average 2023 californian female (she/they)

what's the old orc sayin? sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken?

 

[vota DC]

Are the campaigns

Also wtf, moles now ? Those news races feels totally redundant with existing ones : toads, we already had nagas for amphibian, why bring up another underground race on top of dwarves, goblins and now ratmen. Is it just plain retarded or something I don't see ?

Races are just skins and don't matter at all.

Didn't they modded that yet? Some social traits are mutually exclusive, they could mod physical and mental traits with the same logic and tie them to races.

 

[Dwarvophile]

I think I'll try a dark/evil faction before giving up on this. Anyone knows if "cull the weak" also applies for magical/ranged attacks ?

 

[anvi]

The Steam reviews are so suspicious.

 

[cvv]

I'm sitting on this until at least the first DLC.

AoW3 was aggressively meh on launch and it turned out to be quite acceptable in the end.

 

[Lacrymas]

Planetfall was aggressively meh at launch and turned out to be aggressively meh in the end, so I don't see where that optimism is coming from.

 

[cvv]

Planetfall was aggressively meh at launch and turned out to be aggressively meh in the end, so I don't see where that optimism is coming from.

But it wasn't worse.

:dindutempletap:

 

[anvi]

I think even with all the money grubbing DLC AoW 3 sucks compared to AoW1/2. I am gonna skip this and try SpellForce: Conquest of Eo.

 

[Lacrymas]

How is AoW3's DLC money grubbing? It got 2 meaty and excellent expansions.

 

[Lagi]

I think even with all the money grubbing DLC AoW 3 sucks compared to AoW1/2. I am gonna skip this and try SpellForce: Conquest of Eo.

i hope you like to read

 

[anvi]

How is AoW3's DLC money grubbing? It got 2 meaty and excellent expansions.

All that shit should have been in the base game. Now you gotta pay 3 times for 1 game.

 

[Reality]

I miss the late 90s when expansion packs had an equal amount of singleplayer content to base game; MechWarrior 4 mercenaries, age of empires conquerer, baldur gate throne of Baal, StarCraft broodwar, rollercoaster tycoon corkscrew follies...

 

[ropetight]

I miss the late 90s when expansion packs had an equal amount of singleplayer content to base game; MechWarrior 4 mercenaries, age of empires conquerer, baldur gate throne of Baal, StarCraft broodwar, rollercoaster tycoon corkscrew follies...

We all miss it, but it will never happen again.
One of the reasons is economics and tech race in game engines.

Game engine and tooling development were much more expensive and risky in the late 90's., but lots of developers build their own stuff from scratch.
So everybody tried to milk some more from the same engine while it was still market viable - which was usually couple of years.

Nowadays, engines are insanely more complex, often free and come with editors and plugins for everything.
But they became obsolete while you are still in development.
Newer versions are very often not very compatible with earlier versions, and since have very little to say about new or deprecated features there can be a lot of breaking changes that require significant effort.
And often import of old code and assets is subpar solution compared to writing new stuff.
So, the best thing after couple smaller DLC's is to start from the scratch.

There are exceptions to this - Bethesda, obviously - but most studios have no resources to write their own engines or to port older code to new tech.

 

[GhostCow]

I miss the late 90s when expansion packs had an equal amount of singleplayer content to base game; MechWarrior 4 mercenaries, age of empires conquerer, baldur gate throne of Baal, StarCraft broodwar, rollercoaster tycoon corkscrew follies...

It used to be that they made a new game using the same assets, called it an expansion, and charged you $30. Now they call it a sequel and charge you $70 while selling you $10 dlc that add half an hour of content that doesn't even integrate with the main game.

 

[Van-d-all]

After 150h I'd say there's a good game buried underneath the plethora of bugs. I've been playing PDX games for years, and I don't think I ever played a game so awfully and thoroughly bugged in my life. As of now there are more bugs in the pre-game menus (I counted 7) than the pseudo-campaign has missions (literally five).

Virtually each and every aspect of the game has something broken, and for reasons unknown Triumph has been super slow to release patches to even the most obvious, blatant and game braking issues to the point the two hotfixes only solve some crashes, and even now, month after the release they've only just announced a patch is coming. Such approach, oblivious to player retention has seen the numbers on steam drop from 40k to 10k already.

That said, after a good deal of time spent in the editors trying to fix the most annoying shit myself, it's rather obvious majority of the bugs stem from wrongly set values in their labyrinthine, registry-like system. Something that potentially could be fixed, should they decide to spend enough time to actually acknowledge and gradually fix all stuff people report.

If stuff worked as the (disassociated from actual values) text descriptions say, there's a good deal of solid systems at work in the game. Most of all, the customization through race traits (even if visuals are purely cosmetic), culture (unit roosters & abilities), topped with social traits and lastly tome selection (and availability for T4 & T5) really allows some good mix & match buildcraft. From there, rest of the game plays out quite different given those empire choices, and I can see a high potential for random generated map replayability.

As for more systemic issues, firstly AI has major advantages, even on lowest difficulties but thankfully there are already mods to somewhat remedy that.

Secondly diplomacy is fucked, as AIs do stupid shit according to their "personality" like in Civ6. Meant to make diplomacy better with players acting according to actual events with casus belli and what not, but effectively I've mostly seen them hoard doomstacks of armies and rarely fight each other.

Third, the magic victory is just piss poor an unsatisfactory. Despite locations of final structures being telegraphed to all players like nukes in Civ, the AI is so unable to react, the base game mechanic just spawns some random armies around them in the last few turns.

Next, there's an issue with game time padding. While build and research speeds are configurable, the default pacing makes reaching T5 tome below turn 100 rather standard and as such, even in campaign, late game becomes a bloat of super units rolling 5+ powerful enchantments each.

Lastly, the campaign just plainly sucks. Instead of a set of missions, there are 5 "story realms", semi-generated maps with preset, mostly annoying, features. Thankfully it's possible to create a custom faction for every one of them:

1. Valley of Wonders - tripe tutorial level
2. Enchanted Archipelago - island map yay!; since most sea enemies are now embarked land units, I beaten it without building a single dedicated naval unit
3. Crimson Caldera - defeat AIs through heavily scripted quests, probably the most in line with older games, but the map has the super annoying "effect" where all units have a huge chance to go berserk in turn 3 of every battle, virtually fucking up all planning, so just autoresolve everything
4. The Eternal Court - supposedly diplomacy focused map, but as mentioned, diplomacy is fucked, so just ally Meandor (yes the same one) and wait until he wins an allied Magic victory with the 3 OP cities he starts with. Oh, and this time the map effect gets all units resurrected in battle after first kill. Joy.
5. Grexolis - an utter clusterfuck, supposedly a player + 4v4 AI map, but the allied AIs mostly keep to themselves, while player has to deal with the major enemy starting with 3 cities and rolling 5-6 doomstacks around turn 30. There are some bullshit effects for enemies and some for allies, but I don't exactly remember them. Just hold out for own Magic victory. Boring.

To sum it up - a promising game for custom generated maps, through sheer amount of faction customization possible, should they take the time to fix all the bugs; but as of now a buggy mess with a short, boring campaign.

 

[Blutwurstritter]

After 150h I'd say there's a good game buried underneath the plethora of bugs. I've been playing PDX games for years, and I don't think I ever played a game so awfully and thoroughly bugged in my life. As of now there are more bugs in the pre-game menus (I counted 7) than the pseudo-campaign has missions (literally five).

Virtually each and every aspect of the game has something broken, and for reasons unknown Triumph has been super slow to release patches to even the most obvious, blatant and game braking issues to the point the two hotfixes only solve some crashes, and even now, month after the release they've only just announced a patch is coming. Such approach, oblivious to player retention has seen the numbers on steam drop from 40k to 10k already.

That said, after a good deal of time spent in the editors trying to fix the most annoying shit myself, it's rather obvious majority of the bugs stem from wrongly set values in their labyrinthine, registry-like system. Something that potentially could be fixed, should they decide to spend enough time to actually acknowledge and gradually fix all stuff people report.

If stuff worked as the (disassociated from actual values) text descriptions say, there's a good deal of solid systems at work in the game. Most of all, the customization through race traits (even if visuals are purely cosmetic), culture (unit roosters & abilities), topped with social traits and lastly tome selection (and availability for T4 & T5) really allows some good mix & match buildcraft. From there, rest of the game plays out quite different given those empire choices, and I can see a high potential for random generated map replayability.

As for more systemic issues, firstly AI has major advantages, even on lowest difficulties but thankfully there are already mods to somewhat remedy that.

Secondly diplomacy is fucked, as AIs do stupid shit according to their "personality" like in Civ6. Meant to make diplomacy better with players acting according to actual events with casus belli and what not, but effectively I've mostly seen them hoard doomstacks of armies and rarely fight each other.

Third, the magic victory is just piss poor an unsatisfactory. Despite locations of final structures being telegraphed to all players like nukes in Civ, the AI is so unable to react, the base game mechanic just spawns some random armies around them in the last few turns.

Next, there's an issue with game time padding. While build and research speeds are configurable, the default pacing makes reaching T5 tome below turn 100 rather standard and as such, even in campaign, late game becomes a bloat of super units rolling 5+ powerful enchantments each.

Lastly, the campaign just plainly sucks. Instead of a set of missions, there are 5 "story realms", semi-generated maps with preset, mostly annoying, features. Thankfully it's possible to create a custom faction for every one of them:

1. Valley of Wonders - tripe tutorial level
2. Enchanted Archipelago - island map yay!; since most sea enemies are now embarked land units, I beaten it without building a single dedicated naval unit
3. Crimson Caldera - defeat AIs through heavily scripted quests, probably the most in line with older games, but the map has the super annoying "effect" where all units have a huge chance to go berserk in turn 3 of every battle, virtually fucking up all planning, so just autoresolve everything
4. The Eternal Court - supposedly diplomacy focused map, but as mentioned, diplomacy is fucked, so just ally Meandor (yes the same one) and wait until he wins an allied Magic victory with the 3 OP cities he starts with. Oh, and this time the map effect gets all units resurrected in battle after first kill. Joy.
5. Grexolis - an utter clusterfuck, supposedly a player + 4v4 AI map, but the allied AIs mostly keep to themselves, while player has to deal with the major enemy starting with 3 cities and rolling 5-6 doomstacks around turn 30. There are some bullshit effects for enemies and some for allies, but I don't exactly remember them. Just hold out for own Magic victory. Boring.

To sum it up - a promising game for custom generated maps, through sheer amount of faction customization possible, should they take the time to fix all the bugs; but as of now a buggy mess with a short, boring campaign.

The "biggest bug" that I have noticed concerns the hit chances of ranged units, interacting weirdly with critical hit chances. Although I'm not 100% sure if that is a bug or working as intended. Are those other bugs some minor glitches or bigger problems? I'd like to avoid them if possible.

 

[Fedora Master]

Without a real campaign, what's there even to do? The AI in the other AoW wasn't very good either but here it's just tedious. Endless skirmish maps against a flood of low tier stacks for 100+ turns? wow, what a game.

 

[Lacrymas]

There's almost 0 content in this game.