All you can do is repaint the terrain to your race's preferred color.
Well, that's a highly disingenuous way of putting it, because there are a lot of ways you can change terrain/climate and then a proverbial shitton ways to capitalize on it. It's a very rich and interesting system and PF has a gaping hole in its place.
What I meant was that neutral faction alliance is one of the things that influences your army composition/behavior, through mods and their unique units. It's not really a choice (unless it's a very big map where there are 3-4 different neutral factions, from my experience you can effectively suck up to 2, maybe you can do more with some diplomacy-focused build), but spawning next to different factions will influence how you play the game depending on the faction/tech. I agree that this system is shoddily implemented, they could have done much better.
I never felt like it did, although I guess in theory it is possible, like many other things in PF. There are some early mods that can be beneficial for you (but it's purely random) - furry leg mod is gud if you go melee (PF protip: don't go melee), laser melt autonom mod is ok, paragon have a good one for infantry. But as soon as you unlock more of your tech tree it becomes p much completely irrelevant. When it comes to units I don't think I ever used them. The only option that seems strong on paper are autonom with networking bonuses and punisher unit, but I still never felt the need to bother with unwieldy gud boi points economy to get something out of it when it's nowhere near impactful enough, let alone necessary. In AoW3 you could crank out neutral units just as everything else and some of them were really good in certain setups (like water maps) while others were just universally great. But even if you weren't interested in neutral units at all (which admittedly happened very often), you still got the city with its economy and ground control. I have to repeat myself that I really, REALLY dislike the implementation of neutrals in PF and things like research quests blocking your tech for multiple turns is yet another example of the devs suddenly losing the comprehension of how their game works/plays on basic level. The anomaly system expecting your main stack to sit idle for many turns is another striking example of that.
I honestly don't remember much about this. I'll need to replay 3 before 4 comes out. Looking at the wiki just shows those default bonuses that I mentioned.
It's the same thing that PF does. In PF dvar purifiers have barricades while amazon echo walker is mounted. In AoW3 tigran hunters have shredder blades and halfing reanimators morale boosting. AoW3 has more of this due to being class-focused.
Yeah, I'm looking. L1 military upgrade is "boring", because harpoon thrower happens to be a bad unit. There are good l1 upgrades, though, some were already given itt. L2 and 3 military upgrades are strong boosts for good units and economy ones are universally great. Then you can factor in the actual synergies, which is the point I'm trying to hammer in, like combining the royal guard upgrade with abilities that necromancer and/or shadowborn gives you.
Yes, Druid giving ranged units bleeding is one of those class upgrades that can impact your racial units.
It starts with bleeding, but then you get lost of other bonuses from racial and perk choices that make already one of the best scaling t1 units much, much better. Because interesting combos.
I believe every class has one of them, which makes them very few in number, which is what I said.
Lolnope. Seriously, you don't seem to remember AoW3 much or weren't paying a lot of attention. Druid alone, if we're sticking to that example, has multiple upgrades that affect summoned, monster, animal, archer and support units across the board. Necro has upgrades that vary from boosting p much everything across the board to strong infantry, irregular, support and pikeman-specific upgrades. Warlord boosts xp, lowers cost, gives martial arts, increases hp for different categories of units regardless of class/race. And so on. And that is class only. And then there a lot of upgrades that impact strategic layer - not a thing in PF.
All I'm saying is that necromancer affects every race significantly, but in the same way.
And all I'm saying is that PF has no unique/asymmetrical classes/races even if some of them are just begging for such mechanics. And in AoW3 there is much more to influence your build than just class.
I hope you will forgive me if I don't find stuff like this terribly interesting
I'm not sure what to do about you not finding this interesting, but those upgrades are very impactful for certain combos.
It has everything to do with the discussion because what I've been saying all along is that I like how you can mix and match different parts of your race/class/neutral faction tech and have basically a different army every game, even when playing as the same race. Like my assembly + voidtech example. My army consisted of assembly energy weapon units + voidtech flying support units (forgot the names) that I stuck a bunch of energy weapon mods on + the imperial melee spearmen that I also gave a bunch of energy upgrades to. I could play another game of voidtech assembly and do physical damage + melee focus cause voidtech lets you do shit like go through walls/teleport/interrupt enemy attacks on your units. Or I could pick another tech. Are most of those combinations in any way effective or viable? Fuck no. But I'm not an aspiring PF pro player so I don't care about effectiveness. They are good enough to let you beat highest difficulty bots.
Meanwhile in AoW3 if I play something like Frostling Theocrat, the progression of my army would be the same every game, and if I picked Tigran Theocrat it would still play very similarly to Frostling Theocrat (you start the game using your racial units, and eventually transition to angel + shrine spam).
Couple of points here:
1. You keep sticking to mods, since this is the only thing to stick to with PF, but it's a really weird comparison since that system doesn't exist in AoW3. So if you like it enough so that for you mods>perks, racial xp, strategic upgrades, limiting rng, much more robust morale/alignment mechanics, cooler and more influential landmarks, underground layer, hand-made maps and probably quite a lot of stuff I can't recall from the top of my head then sure. Personally I would see this as a steep decline even if mods were actually not largely limited to theorycrafting and more synergetic than they actually are.
2. I'm really not buying the point of "army progression" being somehow much different between the two games. Whomever you pick in PF, same units will generally be strongest and same stuff from secret tech will synergize most. The actual difference is that in PF it stops at that while AoW3 you're still far from done. I played AoW3 way more than PF (and I still played PF a lot), but never tried all the possible combos that come to my head while in PF I think I finished a game with all race+tech combos (although a lot of them once and through the retardedly quick and easy doomsday weapon launch).
3. I want to reiterate my main point against PF: despite the fact that there is only race and class to pick, a lot of those pairings are almost complete blanks that do nothing for each other. So you either focus on secret tech (which is sometimes viable, sometimes not, but never particularly interesting) or focus on race and hope that secret tech maybe has a unit or mod that is just universally great and strong regardless of matchup.
Part of the problem is that in AoW3 it's too easy to transition to T4 spam and T4s can beat pretty much everything else, while in PF they are harder to get to and don't automatically win against your T1s and T2s.
This was brought up multiple times already and while PF absolutely did solve the AoW3's problem of t4 spam, it simply did so by swinging wildly in the opposite direction. Both takes are far from ideal so it's mostly personal preference. I don't like AoW3's way much, but still prefer t4 actually being a thing in most games, instead of having to go out of your way to see them just to realize they're p meh.
P.S. I feel bad shitting up this thread with these quote wars
I don't mind tbh, as long as we're sticking to game mechanics.
