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TBS Age of Wonders: Planetfall - AoW gone to space

chuft

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2008
Messages
496
I am enjoying it more as I learn more about it. The strategic map has three buttons above it, with no counterpart in AOW3, which I didn't notice. They are different views - military and economic and operations (which in this context I believe means faction vs faction operations like covert stuff). It starts at economic which hides your units and this is why I could not find my armies.

I think one reason I got off on the wrong foot was the color. I don't like the color orange. I can take it on sunsets and the fruit, but not much else. The default hero for the tutorials etc has orange as his color. The strategic map has a very clean and abstract look. So you can imagine my reaction when I go to look at my empire and see this.

76867517074ADCF7389D0C49D3EB8082F41C62ED

Yeah I wasn't charmed. Next game I will pay more attention to customizing the leader.

Also the starting territory where I was, is arctic. Even in AOW3 I hate arctic terrain and minimize it in the random map generator settings. In this game the white weapon ranges disappear on white arctic hexes. Made it hard to tell what was going on. The battle maps are also very cluttered with obstacles which at first was really annoying. However the interface for interacting with the map has some cool features - such as showing red or yellow symbols above enemy units when you plan a move, so you can see who you can get a good attack against if you move to that hex. The destructible terrain is something you will utilize a lot more than in AOW3, since an explosive which flattens some junk on the field can open a much better LOS for your other units to shoot through.

Like AOW3 there is no minimap in the tactical battles, which can get frustrating in large battles. There is also no way I have found to really get a look at the sky. At the start of the battle you typically see a very cool sky in the background but then it zooms in and your maximal tilt on the camera prevents you from ever seeing much of it again. A shame since some effort was obviously put into these backgrounds.

There is also the matter of roads. You can't build them manually like in AOW3. But you get them automatically connecting your cities and their sector capitals. This seems useless for getting troops to the frontier, but I recently found out you can found "forward bases" in sectors you can't claim at the moment. This costs Influence, which is expensive for most of the game, and the province gets a little garrison but doesn't generate income. But what they do do is cause roads to connect that sector HQ to your road net if you have another sector next to it. This is how you are supposed to speed deployment to the frontier. These outposts, which can also claim a territory before an enemy can, can in late game be used to build orbital relays at so you can teleport guys to the front from your home cities.

The terrain got a lot cooler as I finally got out of the arctic and got to battle in some fungal areas and other cool looking terrains.

Tier III and IV units are not the monsters they were in AOW3. Adjust your expectations accordingly. Pay attention to unit designations. My "secret tech" Tier III that I could first build was an Aegis Tank. I figured that would be my heavy hitter. Turns out its main purpose is to generate a shield around adjacent units and act as a sort of portable shield generator.

The Stagger mechanic is important and should be paid attention to. In fact keywords in general require some attention. Lasers and plasma weapons, for example, both do "thermal" damage, but the weapon mods you can add to units which affect thermal damage, are only for lasers, not plasma. Assault Rifles and Grenades both do kinetic damage with the same icon, but one has the "firearms" keyword in parentheses at the bottom and the other has the "explosive" and "grenade" keywords, which means they are affected differently by mods and enemy defenses.

There are key shortcuts for "Next army" and "Next hero" but they only go to ones who haven't finished. This makes it predictably irritating when you find a new piece of gear, and you want to look at all your heroes and their skills. Still can't imagine why they removed the arrows for shuttling back and forth in your armies and heroes. At least you can in cities.
 

chuft

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2008
Messages
496
Here is an example of the needless GUI confusion.

The unit in the lower left belongs to the enemy AI. The unit in the upper right is a marauder stack (barbarians basically).

aAtJMjG.jpg



Yes, they picked "white skull on black shield" for both your enemy on the tutorial/practice planet, and for marauders. Once you realize this, there are subtle differences in the shield and skull shape, but it took me awhile - and having both on the screen at the same time - to realize it, since I didn't meet the enemy AI for a very long time (was on a different continent). This is own goal type stuff. Fortunately this is not an underlying problem with the game itself, just the ridiculous colors they picked for the bad guy in the learning scenario.
 

Zboj Lamignat

Arcane
Joined
Feb 15, 2012
Messages
5,523
Is it just me or is melee screwed up in this game? It's been years since I played AoW3 but I don't remember melee being so bad there. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong, dunno.

Seems to me the only marginally useful melee in Planetfall are high-level heroes in a beefy tank with high armor/shields that still have to be additionally buffed or obscured. And they still don't survive for long in any tougher battle. Maybe it's because due to a multitude shield-bypassing mechanics or maybe because ranged in Planetfall is overwhelmingly more beefy and frequent than in AoW3 (understandably so). That said I've used maybe two melee units in the 30+ hours I've put in this game and eventually I've retired both.
Power-wise melee can be very OK for some race/tech combos when it comes to theorycrafting. Void assembly, for example, let's you stack lots of evasion, stagger resistance, life steal, teleport, kinetic res debuff and that's early on, later you get things like damage reflection and autoressurection. When it comes to actually playing the game, you just don't want to do it for two main reasons:

1. It just exacerbates a lot of shitty stuff about the game: unwieldy ui/unit control, clunky and unsatisfying animation/combat feel, being overly reliant on some form of overused "put units in a ball for a buff" which is then easily punished by gazilion aoe everyone has and so on.
2. While it's good when it works, you'll always encounter lots of matchups where it's completely useless while ranged is just always good and reliable.

It's just one of the problems I first noticed when trying this game: multiple attacks per turn ranged weapons>>>everything else. Especially if your tactic is built around applying some form of debuff, which it very often is. You can maybe build something around the one 1ap shot weapons and the "gain 1ap on a kill" trait, but that's pretty much it. And it's all made that much worse by the shocking decline of the hero inventory system and the fact you can easily go entire biggest map/maximum enemies game without getting a drop that's useful for you.

Opinions on the Empire mode that they've added - just a gimmick or does it improve 'replayability' as it were (as opposed to just playing multiple single scenarios)?
Just like everything in this game: whatever. You unlock stuff while completing planets so that you can tackle more difficult planets with more unlocked stuff. For whatever weird reason you unlock pre-researched tech for your race, but if you want to buy your actual racial units for a given planet that's a complete nono and you can buy only stuff from other races. Best thing is probably unlocking neutral units so that you can actually use them, but it's nothing mindblowing.
 

chuft

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2008
Messages
496
I've realized almost everything on the battlefield can be blown up. As a result they are not as cluttered as I thought. It can be great fun clearing fire lanes so your advantage, or destroying enemy cover. The Alt key lets you force fire at anything.
 

chuft

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2008
Messages
496
There appears to be a bug whereby if you annex a sector, roads instantly appear between its capital and other sector capitals/cities, but...this does not work if the new sector is trying to connect to a Residential sector. Residential sectors with their urban terrain appear to block road construction. As a result it is best to build residential exploitations last, as they effectively stop the road net once built to anything new you acquire past them. Suburbia, it appears, is a dead end.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
Gamers that aren't used to tabletop stuff tend to be pissy about bad luck (see, people playing Xcom), mostly because they don't understand the dice rolls, whether literally or just can't internalise them.
I would argue that it's less about the dice rolls and more about the dice results. The one glaring thing I've noticed about Ye Olde Xcom is that the hits and misses simply don't look and feel realistic. Without ever even looking at the actual percentages, there's just something deeply off about how shots go. Characters firing out of windows miss by hitting the edges of the windows, a symptom of shots that miss going in decidedly wrong directions. This just isn't a kind of miss you'd realistically see in real life. When characters miss, their shooting looks worse and more absurd than a Stormtrooper's. When they hit anything, their shooting is suddenly something that would put Simo Hayha to shame. I've seen a guy thread the needle with a bazooka shot through 5 different windows, a shot which would realistically have been just downright near impossible, but hey, 24%. A guy can hit a BIRD with a bazooka from across the map.

It's not just the dice rolls, but the results that those dice rolls produce. It doesn't help that the X-Com hit percentages are apparently actually janky, as you can get hit percentages exceeding 100%, that still go wide of the target.

In contrast, games like Silent Storm or even JA2 rarely produce the jarring sense of characters going from worse than a Stormtrooper to satellite-guided homing shots in the same turn.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
Because I mentioned this gaem in the Gladius thread, has this actually become even a fraction as good as AoW3?
 

Zboj Lamignat

Arcane
Joined
Feb 15, 2012
Messages
5,523
Because I mentioned this gaem in the Gladius thread, has this actually become even a fraction as good as AoW3?
Nope. If you weren't blown away by the release version (and why would you) then the dlc are extremely poor deal compared to what AoW3's post-launch support did and don't really improve the game much:

1. The mechanical additions to base game are either stiilborn/boring/impactless (anomalies, grail) or a pathetic attempt to re-add stuff from AoW3 done in a worse way (cosmic happenings, more upgrades from landmarks).
2. Lizards are undercooked, but ok. Paladins are boring, shit and unfun (you just don't want to be meele focused in this game for many various reasons).
3. A lot of cool, important stuff from AoW3 is completely missing, replaced by fuck all. A real lot.
4. The biggest thing they added is the empire mode. But it's a typical feature made for people who already like the base game, not something that will make you like it. Also, I think it's free and not related to any dlc.
5. Game is dead and abandoned, some of the bugs left are quite serious, like the endless end turn or endless animation freeze in tactical combat.
6. It still feels like B team trying to recreate AoW3 with little budget and little talent and trying to sell it at AAA price. And the worst part is that Triumph obviously don't have a B team.
 

Zboj Lamignat

Arcane
Joined
Feb 15, 2012
Messages
5,523
Oh yeah, I played it quite a lot. AoW3 is my no1 post-decline strategy/tactical game and I reaaaaaaaly wanted to like PF:negative:
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
Speaking of Triumph - what's up with them? Are they making something new? Why did they shit the bed with this game? How is the budget low when they were bought by Paradox?
 

cvv

Arcane
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Speaking of Triumph - what's up with them? Are they making something new? Why did they shit the bed with this game? How is the budget low when they were bought by Paradox?
They haven't revealed anything yet. I was hoping for some news at this year's Paradox event but nada (my disappointment was quickly forgotten though coz apparently Surviving Mars is getting a new expansion - a game I've been p. much obsessed with this year).
 

Zboj Lamignat

Arcane
Joined
Feb 15, 2012
Messages
5,523
Speaking of Triumph - what's up with them? Are they making something new?
It's more than likely they're working on AoW4 right now. Their reputation among the core fanbase must've taken quite a hit with PF so maybe they don't want to make a reveal too soon.
Why did they shit the bed with this game? How is the budget low when they were bought by Paradox?
Maybe it wasn't too low, but the opposite - the cash injected from the snowjews made them focus and waste it on pointless things, like the ubiquitous shit-tier voice acting. I really don't know, I don't have explanation for stuff like basic mechanics missing or the absolutely broken/hilariously bad animations. What seems almost certain is that the funding was cut as soon as the overlords noticed the poor reception the vanilla release got. The final AoW3 dlc has objectively more/better content than all the PF dlc put together.
 
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Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
They have to try really hard with AoW4, especially in the wake of how well AoW3 turned out. As far as I remember, AoW3 wasn't particularly great when it came out. I remember playing it but felt it was very barebones and I didn't like the elf campaign much (I didn't play the Commonwealth then). With all the patches and expansions, however, it turned out great and one of the best combat-focused 4X games ever imo. I hated and still hate the graphics, but eh. The reptiloids cutting funding after the lukewarm reception of PF was a bad move and Triumph probably didn't have enough of a budget to fix it/add to it as much as they did with AoW3. I'm going to try and find reviews of AoW3 from the time it came out to see what others thought of it then and compare it to the reception of PF. That might prove illuminating.
 

Lacrymas

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2015
Messages
17,948
Pathfinder: Wrath
At a very cursory glance, it seems like the reviews on popular sites are basically the same for both games. The most significant difference I could find is in the Eurogamer reviews, PF's revew is noticeably more negative. It's not negative in general, but it's not as praising as the AoW3 one. On Steam, the recent reviews for AoW3 are at 86%, while the ones for PF are at 70%. Overall, they are both at 80ish%. On GOG, however, even though PF has a 0.1 advantage (3.8 for 3 vs 3.9 for PF) in the numerical reviews, the written reviews are more scathing. I believe the low numerical score for AoW3 on GOG is because people think it "has DRM" (which is not the case).

Sooo, yeah, you have to dig deep to find more negative reviews for PF, but they are there, compared to almost none for AoW3. Steamspy also lists the owners of AoW3 as between 1 and 2 million, while the owners of Planetfall are between 200 thousand to 500 thousand, so significantly less.
 

Zboj Lamignat

Arcane
Joined
Feb 15, 2012
Messages
5,523
Reviews don't mean much. Titles like that thrive on active player base. No one likes or plays this game. I was interested in Planetfall, its release and post-release support, I browsed both steam and official paradox forums. There was like five people willing to discuss and pretend PF is good. Literally, I'm not exaggerating. Steam forum had those two demented guys that scoured every thread, who probably are still there, like a ghost sailor clinging to a sunken ship. Someone comes, makes a thread like "this gaem sucks", "this mechanic doesn't make sense", "AoW3/Endless/Civ is much better" and those two barge in "loool hurrrr, PF is gr8 m8". That's all there was. No one from the team or community management gave a fuck (I think I had some short discussion with someone from the dev team about my worries once, but it was long before release). Modding never took off. Game doesn't have or support hand made scenarios (yeah :lol:) so the community part that was always great in this series from day one is completely gone. The active player chart looks like something copied from an average slitherine game.

:dead:
 

chuft

Augur
Joined
Jun 7, 2008
Messages
496
Have over 550 hours in the game and have enjoyed it quite a bit, just playing the campaign, haven't even gotten to the random maps or empire mode yet. I got off to a rough start as I detailed earlier but really came to enjoy the game, my occasional frustrations come from the scenario designs rather than the engine.

Being able to take back moves, replay battles, see what targets you have shots at and how good those shots are when planning a movement path, all are nice UI and playability enhancements.

I have this, Gladius, AOW3, and SMAC installed and feel lucky to have such a choice when I feel like conquering a map.
 

cvv

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Different strokes for different folks. I for one have much more fun with external challenges - campaigns and scenarios, official or fan made - than setting up my own custom games and custom goals. In all my favourite strategy games I've always sunk way more time into campaigns and scenarios than custom maps, including PF.
 

Zboj Lamignat

Arcane
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Feb 15, 2012
Messages
5,523
I guess it's a shame that PF doesn't have scenarios and its campaigns are rmg with preset objectives as well then. But honestly, campaigns in PF are just plain bad, definitely worse than vanilla AoW3 that already were bland, boring and often poorly designed.
 

cvv

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I guess it's a shame that PF doesn't have scenarios and its campaigns are rng with preset objectives as well then. But honestly, campaigns in PF are just plain bad, definitely worse than vanilla AoW3 that already were bland, boring and often poorly designed.
:big lebowski opinion meme:
 

Raghar

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Vatnik
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Jul 16, 2009
Messages
22,506
Planetfall is kinda crap. I wrote at release why they screwed up, from point of game design.

Basically, AoW3 vs Planetfall is like Warhammer Fantasy vs WARHAMMER40K. Things are different.
In warhammer fantasy goblins are normal goblins, aka fast breeders.
In WH 40K ORKZ are PSI fungus who read somehow book about orks from warhammer fantasy, and now its playing as pretending to be them.

In warhammer fantasy, there are cavalry charges, UNRELIABLE siege engines. Bigger power, bigger chance of failure, and bigger boom. Formation fighting.
In WH 40K everyone is hidden behind some terrain, and even Necrons melt when two heavy vehicles are using autocannons and missiles. Everyone is shooting from cover, with exception of rare heavy armored melee users, typically on jump jets or deployed into middle of enemy unit from dropships. Then finding the enemy leader they tried assassinate this way is better in melee than was in shooting.

Planetfall should be bit in the middles. Normal real world like use of tanks and stuff, airforce, artillery barrages. Something like shadow empire, just closer to battlefield to see all that infantry and tank groups.

But that would need redesign the combat, and game mechanics. Thus it will be no longer AoW3 just with slightly different mechanics and units that looks radically different.
 
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