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PC|XS|PS5 Age of Wonders 4

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PC|XS|PS5 Age of Wonders 4

Unread postby icycalm » 19 Jan 2023 18:49

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https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/game ... -wonders-4

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1669 ... _Wonders_4

Triumph Studios wrote:Rule a fantasy realm of your own design! Explore new magical realms in Age of Wonders' signature blend of 4X strategy and turn-based tactical combat. Control a faction that grows and changes as you expand your empire with each turn!


I was browsing Gematsu's Twitter feed, and they were saying that Triumph will be revealing their new game today on YouTube, so I click on the link, and it said 9 minutes, just as I was about to go to sleep. Quite excited, I wait to see what would drop, and of course it was AoW4. First they played the short trailer I link at the bottom, and then they launched into a live demonstration which is still going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7pKeH1cLb4

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The graphics look good, so it's nice to see the demo, but in itself, the demo is boring because they're playing and explaining things as if you've never played this kind of game before. I just want to see the new features highlighted, not told how you move across the map...

At any rate, from the little that I did watch, plus the detailed bullet points on Steam, it looks like the new stuff is mostly stuff I don't care for. E.g. customizable races. That's such a daft idea. I suppose you mix characteristics from elves and dwarves and make dwarfelves? All the new features they highlight are of this nature, not appropriate for the genre at all; I am not going to enumerate them, go check them out for yourselves if you're interested.

So basically I doubt it will be real 4X, just as Planetfall wasn't. That was about 2X, basically sci-fi Heroes of Might & Magic; and I expect this to be the same. Which is fine if you know what you're getting into, just as long as I am not suckered it's 4X. So I expect borders will be preset, I won't be able to build roads, and all the usual stuff that dumbs down the game to 2X.

Graphics look good though, and the tactical maps also look like they've been taken up a couple notches. I would have liked to see more units on the battlefield, that's one feature they could have added to the game that I would consider solid, as opposed to the fluff they're adding, but it doesn't look like they're doing this.

Anyway, I am sure it'll be a decent game, certainly better than the Total War: Warhammers. Maybe we can play it in MP at some point. Though it's lacking the charm of Songs of Conquest [ > ], it'll probably be quite a bit more complex.

And it's coming VERY soon. They've been working on it since mid-2019, so it's coming out May 2.


P.S. The cover illustration at least is kickass. No complaints there.

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Announcement Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgV66Jd ... XVyolQO3wj

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icycalm
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Joined: 28 Mar 2006 00:08
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Re: PC|XS|PS5 Age of Wonders 4

Unread postby icycalm » 05 May 2023 20:23

https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/765 ... ed/1669000

LionSaurus wrote:Okay so - this game has some good, some bad and not much ugly in my opinion. I'll list some of the bad, some of the good and then I will go into details about them and for some of them I will say a word why I think something is bad, though some others might consider it good or vice versa. So lets kick it off - with the bad!

The bad:
Water gameplay is lacking
Faction diversity watered down by customization
Tome faction thematics are not all complete
Enchantment upkeep
"Campaign" is marred by RMG and not coherent
No item crafting

The good:
Combat is engaging and better then ever
Diverse options of units outside of cultures
Sieges are a great addition
City management improved
RMG is a powerful tool [RMG stands for Random Map Generator. -icy]
Toggleable? Yes!

Now let's dip a little more deeply into each of these points starting with the bad:

Water gameplay is lacking
As the tin reads - there is nothing to do on the water. There is nothing to engage with or search for- no wonders, hardly any resource nodes or pickups, no unique game elements. TS seem to have decided water tiles are just meant to be a hinderance and not a game element which is a huge shame considering how decent water gameplay was in Planetfall or how much interesting things you could find there at the end of AoW3's life cycle. I sincerely hope they do more with it in the future.

Faction diversity watered down by customization
"When you have a million choices the choices often become the same". You can make decent unique factions, but you will never be able to make them as unique as they could have been had they been pre-designed. For a lot of people the faction customization is a positive. For me it's not. I will however say the faction creator is a powerful tool so if you like customization then this should be up your alley.

Tome faction thematics are not all complete
Tomes generally have a rough theme covering them, but not all of them have a uniformed theme from tier 1 to tier 5. You might have an idea in your head when you begin, but half of my games I found myself not finding fitting tomes to "finish" the faction concept.

Enchantment upkeep
Enchantment upkeeps can quickly go out of control because the upkeep is per unit and enchants all of your units of that type and doesn't scale according to the tier of a unit. So you might end up having a tier 1 unit garrisoned in a city costing you 18 gold and 30 mana in upkeep when it's unit upkeep base is only suppose to be 8 gold.

Story realms are marred by RMG and not coherent
I did in no way enjoy the story realms. The story telling becomes disconnected when RMG (Random Map Generator) places a mission goal in a weird spot that requires you to march past the enemy you were supposed to unite to fight together. The story is also super loose and incoherent as it has to be when the map is randomly generated and you play a nameless whoever that can be swapped out each story realm.

For my part I would have preferred if they crafted the campaign maps and locked the character and faction the player plays as to actually tell a story - focus on the story and not the sandbox. There are enough sandbox modes to play.

No item crafting
There is no crafting of items in the game (yet).

And now for the good!

Combat is engaging and better then ever
Keeping this short - the tactical combat is the best yet and AoW has in my opinion always had the best 4X combat.

Diverse options of units outside of cultures
Though culture units aren't very unique some of the tome units make up for it.

Sieges are a great addition
Yes, sieges were in AoW3 and I will add that AoW3 is my FAVORITE AoW game ever! I do however think sieges are done better in AoW4. Siege operations are really cool and there is a huge variety of them when you include the ones from tomes. You also have defensive structure options and a lot of them.

City management improved
I'm not much of a 4X city manager, but I will admit there has been a lot of strive made for city infrastructure. More thinking required - so this is a positive if you like more complexity to city management.

RMG is a powerful tool
As much as I hate the RMG for the narrative campaign, the tool makes beautiful and somewhat sensible world maps for the sandbox.

Toggleable? Yes!
You can customize your sandbox experience to the Nth degree. What's not to like?

TLDR; It's a great game if you like 4X fantasy - especially if you like customizable factions. The game performs great and plays great so if you are into this sort of gameplay then the game is for sure for you.


There are some negative takes too, and they sound like what I'd say if I played this. I've been saying for a while that these new "4X" games aren't really 4X, and this guy seems to get it: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/765 ... ed/1669000

triadasoul wrote:The game become even more 4x then it's previous parts and somehow lost it's uniqueness - just buff management and sector painting all over the random generated map - nothing left of exploring rpg fantasy strategy which AoW was during it's first two parts. Simplifiing the mechanics like flyers, water transport, collapsing game dimensions. For sake of what that transition to 4x strategy is made - is a mystery to me. There are no games like older AoW 1-2, Heroes of Might and Magic 1-3, Disciples 1-2 on the market- what reason is making another Civilization game.

Still if you are a fan of 4x games - it is nice - just another one with cool features - you can manage your buffs and sectors in million directions.

Also the game crashes too often to call it a release version (approx once in 10-15 minutes)

If you are a fan of old AoW (1,2 Shadow Magic) don't even consider wasting your money on this.


UncleYar wrote:I agree that the handmade, detailed maps are a big loss. Honestly with the level of detail they're aiming for - look at the trees, they're absolutely not the same scale as in Shadow Magic - I don't even know if they could make handmade maps as alluring as the ones in AoW:SM. Still, AoW3 had similar scale and had much better maps than this.


More in the same vein from the comments to this review, by the same guy as above: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/765 ... ed/1669000

UncleYar wrote:Yeah, I've always associated the word Wonder in Age of Wonders with the delight of uncovering yet another gorgeous hand-designed area in AoW2/Shadow Magic. AoW3 was a huge downgrade in visuals with its low-poly 3D but at least there were still some interesting handmade maps. Planetfall and AOW4 finally brought the asset quality back to decent (still not as detailed as AoW2 though), but the feeling of awe when exploring seems gone since everything is mapgen and AOW4 has little visual variety on the world map.

The tomes of magic have some pretty incredible spells, combat seems really good, the events are cool and the city-building is a lot more interesting though, too bad they went with the "shapechanging no-name blobs" approach to races.
Good news is that if they want to they can easily use this system to make a standalone expansion in the spirit of Shadow Magic with hand-designed races.


And here's someone who gets closer to the heart of the matter, and my view, than anyone else: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/765 ... ed/1669000

Martronix wrote:Same as in AoW3, this game focuses on city building in a way that is very close to a Civ game. Except it does it just a little worse in the sense that it’s all a little less clean and obvious as it would be in one of those games. On it’s own that’s not a big deal, but unlike a civ game, cities in AoW are rather bland and “universally good at everything”. They don’t shape with the terrain they are in, they all look the same and somehow they can all specialize in everything you would want, even if the terrain around it doesn’t seem suitable for it. This makes them very flexible, yes, but at the same time also generic and forgettable. Even the wizard towers that are reintroduced in this game seem to be a minor feature to the city instead of the centerpiece they used to be. Losing one (city or wizard tower) is just an annoyance now and not the empire crippling disaster it used to be.


The city-building in fantasy 4X was never good, not even in Master of Magic, simply because fantasy city-building can never be as detailed as the historical kind, let alone compete with Civ which has the whole of history at its disposal. The heroes were MoM's selling point, but few get this, and not even the MoM remake's designers (they think the wizards were the main selling point...)

I'll go into all this in detail at some point. At any rate, you now have a decent first impression on how AoW4 plays. I'd be more excited in trying the MoM remake, though this doesn't seem bad for a week or two either.
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icycalm
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Location: Tenerife, Canary Islands


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