Age of Wonders 4

[Lacrymas]

The HP values don't phase me yet because they are only meaningful in relation to damage done.

 

[Kruno]

I was about to scream about this today. I woke up, checked my inbox and bang!

I did not enjoy the last AoW, but I was in love with AoW 2 Shadow Magic. This looks more akin to AoW2 SM than the last game. I think AoW 3 was the company's Civ 3 moment.

 

[razvedchiki]

dont want to nitpick but the grafics have a somewhat degraded quality, almost looking like a mobile phone game.
didnt the faction blender design deemed as a failure in 3?

Get glasses.

aquire better taste.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

The fact its kind of a sequel to Shadow Magic is curious.

I am calling it here now - the Shadow World is coming back.

It is. Probably.
https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/age-of-wonders-4/news/age-of-wonders-4-dev-diary-1

 

[octavius]

I wonder how the AI will be?
As weak as in 1 and 2? Not being able to do the same things as the player can do, like not being able to pick up items or explore various sites? I can forgive weakness, but sloppiness and laziness is more problematic.

 

[Suicidal]

Biggest issues from AoW3 I'd like them to fix - since you can pump up heroes' damage and defense, they got very broken very fast and trivialized most of the campaign, and that's not good I don't like it ;d Damage is all that mattered in battles and from what I can see it's going to matter even more now because they said model count affects damage. Hopefully they can do something about that. Races felt a bit samey and mostly cosmetic, but judging from the gameplay trailer they are going to be even more cosmetic this time around. I asked on their Discord if the races are just cosmetic but nobody knows for sure yet. High tier units completely replaced lower tier ones and that's sad.

From what I've seen your unit composition is determined by your civilization type (feudal, barbaric, arcane, etc.) + whatever magic tomes you acquire, which seem to have both summoned and regular units you can research. Race only gives some general properties all of your units will share + their looks.

 

[Dadd]

dont want to nitpick but the grafics have a somewhat degraded quality, almost looking like a mobile phone game.
didnt the faction blender design deemed as a failure in 3?

I don't like the lack of grittiness in the visuals. That contributes to what is shown so far feeling like a mobile game.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

coming may 2023

trailer has some in game pictures

looks like there is still gold, mana and channelling points for your leader.
there is food (city grown), production (building structures), draft (hire unit faster) [ there are 2 separate queues inside cities for units and for buildings]

I have a wild guess that on top left we have global enchants (purple) and social influence (green) that grants you access to different units as the game go (there is turn counter on 2x screen at the bottom of my post); base on below statement:

Craft your followers by combining bodily forms, societal traits and arcane powers

after watching LP: purple on top left is research, green 2/2 are whispering stones (phones) that you drop on allied cities to influence them/

Craft your followers by combining bodily forms, societal traits and arcane powers. Build anything from a clan of cannibal halflings to mystic moon elves, or recreate your favorite fantasy tropes. Seek powerful tomes of magic to enchant your armies and see your people physically change as they morph into angelic beings or scions of chaos to face their enemies.

thats interesting appearently you made your faction from:
1. home land (grassland, underground, forest ..)
2. race
3. social traits (cannibals, moon folk ...)
4. type of magic you will use

sounds great on paper, but in practice it was a miss in AoW 3 IMO.

----------------------
I hope it would be good game, because the 3d graphic is readable as nothing before, and i think im going to buy new rig just to enjoy it full beauty.

full unit stack is 6 units... meh
you move all your guys then enemy... as before
there is miss chance for range units (you can friendly fire), melee always hit
reduction of figures in unit reduce the damage dealt ... yesss

as i see the biggest problem of aow3 combat is still there. Direct unit damage is too strong, and all play with buffs/nerfs/healing is less viable. why bother casting spells/using unit skills if unit die in 2 hits? this lead to shit like aoe healing for basic casters :-/

another issue seen on LP, late tier units make lower tiers redundand. On LP giant is tanking whole players party for multiple turns, while the tier 1 just die like flies. this will lead to making DoomStack of only T4 units (like in aow1 or aow3), which is lame (if you think different, then you are wrong)

====
at the end i think this would be aow3 on steroids :-/

yes I hate doomstacks of all one type of unit, which is why I stop playing almost all of these types of games in late game..they are boring

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I genuinely want to be excited for this, but I'm completely spent after PF and I just don't see this being good. The fact that it really doesn't look like an evolution of AoW3 only confirms it.

And to see people popping up all over (including itt) to cry for porting over decline from PF is p. disappointing, but whatever.

Also, increase the stack limit back to 8 units ffs. That's like one simple thing you could do that would instantly make your game a lot better.

 

[Lacrymas]

It's giving me MoM vibes with the tomes. Normally, I'm all for customisation, but not at the expense of the races all being only cosmetic. Even in MoM where all the races shared basic units (kinda, some races had more units than others) they all had at least one unique unit (halfling slingers anyone?). If they are committed to supporting this game, it's probably going to happen like with AoW3 - bland, underwhelming release and then it gets gradually better and more varied with patches/expansions. PF didn't become better because Paradox pulled the plug iirc, hopefully they don't interfere too much this time. Why did they buy the studio known only for AoW if they are going to meddle with it?

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

People coped with "PF is g...g...gonna get better with dlc and patches just like AoW3 did" and it only ended in tears. They seemed to, sort of, notice what the problems were, but the attempts at fixing them were like trying to put out a forest fire with pee pee (like an attempt to make races more unique by giving them one extra t1 unit in the starting stack or +150 energy). And the content just wasn't there, either, regardless of how you perceived its quality.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Damn, most important question as I don't have time to watch the full lp - do they, 100% while looking directly into the camera, confirm that actually handmade campaigns and handmade scenarios are back?

I feel really dumb asking that, but, you know... PF.

 

[Lacrymas]

I didn't watch the stream too long, I just skipped to the important bits, but I don't think they talked about campaigns or scenarios at all. I asked about that on Discord yesterday but nobody knows and no devs chimed in (at all, not only about this question).

 

[cvv]

Man... The art style is going so HoMM 5-7. Age of Wonders used to be so much more classic/painterly high fantasy. Departed noticeably with AoW3 and much further this time.

This. Getting some Planetfall vibes instead of HoMM 5-7 tho.

As if there's a lingering whiff of cold, functional science-fiction style in there. It's not as pants-on-head retarded as Endless Legend but still, the classic high fantasy of yore it ain't.

Well, hopefully the gameplay will be just as great as AoW3, four years after the release with all the patches and DLCs.

 

[DakaSha]

Ai will be shit and trivial early game battles will be boring as fuck and slow shit down

 

[Lacrymas]

АI being shit in 4X games is a tradition at this point. 4X games are in essence PvP-focused, too bad it's hard to get a game with friends going.

 

[Demo.Graph]

I must say, I'm kinda stumped by some posts ITT. What Planetfall vibes? Planetfall was a prestigious (though kinda unbalanced) SMAC-derived mod for Civ 4 (alas, the last Civ game).
It's obviously good to have a sequel for a 20-year-old game. But I doubt that it's going to have Lady Deirdre worm porn... isn't it?

 

[Lacrymas]

PF is not even in the same ballpark as prestigious ;d

 

[Lacrymas]

What are the chances they'll do a proper campaign? From where I'm standing, not high, let me tell you. Especially when such an easy "solution" from PF presents itself.

 

[vota DC]

Wounded units will deal less damage? That could be interesting. Shame there isn't a way units block attacks in melee but if they keep armor system from aow 3 It Is fine.
Rats seems a good idea since I had them in food chain lore so my mod will be easier.
I wonder if they will fix production overflow, for example produce 2 tier 1 units in one turn instead of wasting production.

 

[Lacrymas]

Wounded units will deal less damage? That could be interesting.

Not if they keep post-hit retaliation. It will just be a death spiral where your entire gameplan revolves around attacking first à la Heroes 3.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Damn, most important question as I don't have time to watch the full lp - do they, 100% while looking directly into the camera, confirm that actually handmade campaigns and handmade scenarios are back?

I feel really dumb asking that, but, you know... PF.

They mentioned some sorta story campaigns, but I get the sense that it is more of a premade scenario thing than anything else.
Oh well, at least it has barbarians.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Oh, I'm p. sure there will be A campaign. Just wondering if they are planning to drop the utter decline where all the "campaigns" in PF were 2-3 ugly RMGs with some pre-set events/quests. And you couldn't do crap about it, because there was no option to add hand-made scenarios, either.

 

[HeroMarine]

Played a ton of AoW3 back in the day and enjoyed it but not very confident about this one. I'll keep an eye opened in any case.

 

[Raghar]

They combined ideas from that SF game, and reduced unit limits to 5 + leader. Interesting. Soon there would be tablet version 4 v 4 units would be brawling.