Age of Wonders 4

[chuft]

And rightly so.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Mage leader starting with 100hp

 

[Lagi]

all enemy move at once in their turn, if they dont attack which is very nice.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

So, settlers are not a thing anymore and you just buy outposts with gold which then evolve into cities.

Some of the unit designs are p nice.

Map is way prettier than PF, but seems similarly boring/featureless.

 

[chuft]

PF's cities grow so fast that there is a huge incentive to spam colonizers in the first 15 turns. I don't remember AOW3 being like that.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

And the new video reinforced my distaste for returning ranged rng. To hit chances seem ridiculously low and streaks of 6-7 misses in a row are very much back.

 

[chuft]

I think the first mod I used for AOW3 was the No Lucky mod. Halflings were really annoying.

 

[fantadomat]

A friend of mine accused me of degeneracy when I sent him a screenshot with the furries from PF.

But you are degenerate....



Anyway,the game looks meh at this point,still will try it out on release. IF there is a campaign and it is not just generic faction making soulless garbo.

 

[Raghar]

Frankly AoW4 has incredibly shitty graphic. Either these are placeholders, or it's REALLY BAD.

Also I got bad vibes from watching these two. Do you remember how Dungeon Crawl changed when they turned it into stone soup? They even removed food consumption. And they totally thought it was RIGHT THING TO DO.

I have weird feeling these two are people who are more than willing to reduce AoW4 into a simplistic game, that plays like crap, and be proud about it.

 

[Lacrymas]

The guy on the left said healing in combat is a game design problem because it can allow an army to go on forever, which is true, so combat healing now only gives you temporary hit points that are lost after the battle is over. In light of this, I have a little touch of hope that they aren't too far gone.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

temporary hit points

More games ought to use this. Underrated mechanic.

 

[Suicidal]

The guy on the left said healing in combat is a game design problem because it can allow an army to go on forever, which is true, so combat healing now only gives you temporary hit points that are lost after the battle is over. In light of this, I have a little touch of hope that they aren't too far gone.

I don't remember this being a problem in the older games because healing abilities usually were limited to once per combat or once per day, so not sure why this change was required. Did they make healing spammable?

Also something I'm noticing in these newer AoW games like Planetfall and now AoW4 is that the older games were a nice middle ground between HoMM and Civilization games, while the newer games seem to skew more towards Civ, which is a shame because I like HoMM a lot more than I like Civ.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

AoW became a 4X with 2 already, but what is definitely noticeable with the latest entries is the unfortunate cuck-a-dox influence. Starts with the UI, then diplomacy, anomalies (not fitting a game like PF at fucking all) and now you end up with race as cosmetics and "angelic retarded purifiers" and "cosmic perpetrators of poo poo" all around.

 

[Raghar]

AoW became a 4X with 2 already, but what is definitely noticeable with the latest entries is the unfortunate cuck-a-dox influence. Starts with the UI, then diplomacy, anomalies (not fitting a game like PF at fucking all) and now you end up with race as cosmetics and "angelic retarded purifiers" and "cosmic perpetrators of poo poo" all around.

What's a "cuck-a-dox"?

 

[Van-d-all]

I don't remember this being a problem in the older games because healing abilities usually were limited to once per combat or once per day, so not sure why this change was required. Did they make healing spammable?

Because those abilities in previous games have a once per battle limit plus a once per turn heal split between the army stack. This allows provoking battles with trash mobs just to spam those battle heals in single turn, and have the strategic heal on top of that.

 

[BING XI LAO]

The guy on the left said healing in combat is a game design problem because it can allow an army to go on forever, which is true, so combat healing now only gives you temporary hit points that are lost after the battle is over. In light of this, I have a little touch of hope that they aren't too far gone.

Adding temporary healing is good, it would be nice to have both this and general healing. But this sounds like fagz removing one of the main points of a mechanic because it "shouldn't be allowed".... fuck off fagz!!!
Nothing wrong with army having indefinite staying power when it has healing access.

 

[Lacrymas]

There is something wrong with it because it removes attrition as a factor.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Never saw this as a pain point and I think healing-related stuff was nicely done in previous games. You have p. rich mechanics connected to it with different healing options spread among spells, factions, units, upgrades and there was a nice layer of c&c where sticking with dedicated healing unit was not optimal, but you reaped some actual benefits from it. This change is likely to result mostly in even more niche/support units becoming benchwarmers while stacking raw muscle becomes even more of an obvious choice.

 

[Suicidal]

There is something wrong with it because it removes attrition as a factor.

They could, in addition to temporary HP healing, make healer units increase your units' regen on the map, so when the enemy is deep in your territory, sniping healers with hit and run stacks or spells could be a viable strategy. Removing it completely seems like a "no fun allowed" balancing tactic.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Which brings us full circle to the most important point: if you want to experiment like that then, first and foremost, bring back the 8 unit stacks. No one is gonna take your shitty temporary healer or some derivative of it when they have 6 picks available (mostly five cause you want a hero).

 

[visions]

I don't remember this being a problem in the older games because healing abilities usually were limited to once per combat or once per day, so not sure why this change was required. Did they make healing spammable?

Because those abilities in previous games have a once per battle limit plus a once per turn heal split between the army stack. This allows provoking battles with trash mobs just to spam those battle heals in single turn, and have the strategic heal on top of that.

The healing ability (such as clerics have) in AoW 1 is usable once per day, not once per battle. Pretty sure there are no once per battle heals in AoW 1. You can use the once per day healing of a unit, or the healing spells of heroes/leaders that use mana and are usable both in and out of battle (since they are unit spells, not combat spells) so there is zero need for provoking battles for healing in AoW 1.

 

[Lacrymas]

Healing should be rare and only available to higher tiers and units should only regen passively in your own territories. I don't think taking your starting units all the way to endgame is good design or something to actively strive towards. It diminishes the importance of logistics and makes you play as conservatively as possible. Especially now that unit and building production are separated, there's 0 reason to play for minimal losses. But yeah, bring back 8 unit stacks.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

What should be strived towards is richness of options and interesting asymmetry. Which is something that previous games mostly provided in relation to healing - getting passive heals was far from obvious for certain combos in AoW3, for example. Taking options away is rarely good design, particularly when your game already has a problem of myriad units that literally never get used, because the player is actively discouraged from doing so.

 

[Johannes]

It's banal to go through the motions of using heal in several battles a turn. Some aow3 heros could also have a heal ability on cooldown, which encouraged sticking as long as possible in a single battle to heal stuff as much as you can.


Though the obvious solution would be to make healing abilities per turn, not per battle or every 3 turns in a battle, instead of temporary hp. Though temporary hp could still be a fun and powerful mechanic, st least if you can push units above their usual max hp, but it's a bit different than normal heal.

 

[Lacrymas]

These games need more attrition, not less, so healing every single turn is not only counter to that it's also going to be extremely tedious and will needlessly prolong battles.