• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Dev Diary #17: Post-Launch

Welcome to the first Age of Wonders 4 development diary since release. My name is Lennart Sas, game director / studio manager at Triumph. Today we’ll be reflecting on the launch, the reception and we are going to be looking forward to the big Dragon Dawn DLC and specifically the free Wyvern Update that accompanies it.

image__80_.jpg

Reflecting on the Launch​


Wow! What a launch. For us the Age of Wonders 4 launch has been a dream: both a critical and commercial success. Paradox put out a press release the game is the fastest selling in the series; selling 250k units day 4 of release. We are very grateful to all the people making this possible.

The launch has been a rollercoaster in other ways too of course; some may have seen the user reviews directly after release. This was primarily caused by people not being able to launch the game after purchasing. This was unfortunate and we started investigating and preparing a hot fix which alleviated some of the issue.

Luckily the user review score quickly climbed up in the hours after launch. Since then we have made a number of patches to improve stability and performance in the various platforms. We also got help from one of the graphic card manufacturers who fixed their driver.

We were happy to see the core premise of the game gaining massive traction. The faction creation and evolution plus all the new systems were widely embraced by fans but also appealed to a new audience. Of course we have also seen feedback and criticisms for a subsection of the fan base (that actually started as soon as we showed the route we were taking) that preferred a more traditional approach (to factions especially). In future updates we’ll keep on investing in faction content allowing both for more distinction in gameplay and growing the number of possible fantasies.

Modding is off to a promising start, with the Steam Workshop already having 285 mods at the time of writing. We see people adding in new content like creative additional Tomes but also making interesting adjustments to game flow. This is very inspiring to the team.

All in all the Age of Wonders 4 has had a very healthy start and we are looking forward to expanding the game with your feedback. Of course we have mapped out the DLCs for the coming year but we also expect to do a lot in the supporting patches and updates.

image__40_.jpg

The Wyvern Update and Dragon Dawn​


The Dragon Dawn Content Pack and the massive free Wyvern update that accompanies it are nearing completion. I can already say that the date may be closer than you think. We are on target to make this the fastest DLC / major patch release after launch for an AoW game.


20230426145714_1.jpg


The Wyvern Update​


The accompanying (free) Wyvern Update already has over 10 pages of patch notes. Here are some provisional highlights I can share with you: (thanks Jordi and Filip for summarizing this list!)

Faction Creation

We've added a Create Faction button which takes you directly into the Faction Creation Flow. You can create a new Faction from the ground up, edit an existing Faction or Generate a Random Ruler using the new Random Ruler Feature. We also added two new traits; one body and social traits.

Empire Development

The Empire Development Tree has been rebalanced. Early Skills will require more Accumulated Affinity and have an increased Imperium cost. Some Skills have been moved earlier/later and some are replaced with entirely new skills.

We've also addressed several issues with them, such as:
  • Wild expansion - Reduced chance of summoning a Greater animal from 60% to 20%, fixed a bug where it triggered on annexing ancient wonders or swapping provinces between cities.
  • Military Engineering - now grants work camp instead of Palisade walls, Outpost cost reduction reduced from 50% to 25%.
  • Knowledge Extraction - changed from 50 Knowledge per Hero level to 150 per Hero.

Souls

While several of the Tomes will be visited in this Update, Necromancy Tomes will have rebalanced Soul Economy. The following changes should result in a higher general soul income and the possibility to gain even more souls when investing in it.
  • All Necromancy Tomes: Change Soul Harvest income from 1/2/3/4/5 and 5 per hero level to 2/3/4/5/6 and 6 for each Hero.
  • Tome of Souls: Replace Soulbind Army: Sustained World Spell: Soul Collection: +6 Soul Income and 30 Gold upkeep.
  • Tome of Souls: Soul Fire changed from 10 Souls to 10 Mana.
  • Tome of Necromancy: Reduce Necromancer Soul cost from 50 Souls to 70 Gold and 25 Souls.
  • Tome of Great Transformation: Change the cost of Wightborn Transformation from 200 Souls to 300 Mana and 100 Souls.

Cavalry & Mounted Units

We've heard you loud and clear. You wanted more mounted units, so we have put several units on top of Horses, Wolf, Boars and the likes. The Mystic Spellbreaker, Hound Master and Wild Speaker units are now permanently mounted, while units like the Dark Pursuer, High Dawn Defender and Glade Runner will get mounts when paired with a Exotic Mount Trait.
These units will also be more easily recognized thanks to the new “Optional Cavalry” tag in the unit panel encyclopedia.

Quality of Life Improvements

But what have we done to make the player experience smoother? Well...
  • You now have the ability to disable the “Combat Action Camera”, giving full control to the Player. This should help with accessibility.
  • The “Show Location” button should now indicate way better where the corresponding event location resides. This now has an animated sequence so the Player can visually see where the location is relative to their current location.
  • Status Effects are now also displayed in the Unit Abilities panel. Here, you can see the number of stacks and duration of a status effect. They also include tooltips; so you don’t have to enter the Unit Panel anymore to determine what an effect does.
  • If you attack through an underground passage, the Reinforcement Rule is now disabled, so it’s always a 1 army vs 1 army battle
  • Added a Next and Previous button for the Hero Panel screen
  • Buttons for cycling through cities are now in a fixed position.

And of course a list of misc fixes

  • Fixed issue where vassals that where player cities would not send attack armies or spawn patrolling stacks
  • Fixed issue where campaign specific personality traits could get automatically assigned to rulers.
  • Fixed issue where players would sometimes incorrectly receive alignment penalties for breaking treaties when war was declared on them, instead the war declaring player now receives the penalties.
  • Fixed an issue where the 5 turns delay for declaring war on a Free City would not be applied when vassalizing a city / having a vassal city.
  • Fixed issue where vassalizing a migrated city, that at any point in time used to be a free city, would revert the city back to the original race of the free city. Instead it will now generate a new free city as owner of the city.
  • Fixed magic victory spells losing their effect when reloading that game.
  • Outpost upkeep is now correctly removed when the outpost is converted to a city.
  • Fixed bug where Spider Webs were dealing double damage
  • Events are moddable.
  • And much more!

We understand that you want to get your hands on these fixes ASAP but we kindly ask for a little more patience as we verify the fixes. Our plan is to roll these things out on all platforms simultaneously.

The road further ahead​


We are just at the beginning for Age of Wonders 4 and look forward to expanding and improving the game longer than we have done any game in our history. Your feedback will be a major driving factor, as we strive for even greater immersion, replayability and fun!


Be the first to know when we have wrangled the dragon
 

Attachments

  • 1685536079796.png
    1685536079796.png
    1,6 MB · Views: 0
  • 1685536079843.png
    1685536079843.png
    1,7 MB · Views: 0
  • 1685536079929.png
    1685536079929.png
    3 MB · Views: 0
  • 64Like
  • 31Love
  • 4
Reactions:
Someone already mentioned this and for some reason I can't find that post, but TLDR it would be great to have a trait that gives normal extra mounted units that is not a special mount.
I would even go so far and suggest that this trait should make Mystic Spellbreaker, Hound Master and Wild Speaker in to mounted units instead of making them permanently mounted, so that would give more different options to the player.

And one more thing about mounted units, it would be interesting to see scouts getting a secondary preferably combat use and not just scouting.
 
  • 3Like
  • 1
Reactions:
Part of the issue is that it varied by your gameplay settings.
Because the souls per kill carry so mcuh weight comparted to all the other methods, if you play with harder world settings you can get mroe souls, if you play with harder AI settings you can get more souls, and if you go to war a lot you get mroe souls, if you do diplomacy you do less.
The result of that is that to make it work it pushes you into a playstyle while allt he toehr books allow you to choose without losing power.
you are LITERALLY playing a horde of undead... WHY would you go diplo and not fully lean into the fantasy in the first place lol
the difficulty part is actually true i guess, playing easier world difficulty (while being significantly more boring imo) DOES pretty much half the soul gain globally simply by virtue of there being only half of the independent armies on the globe as a whole

tho, then again.... the game is already really easy just on normal settings as is, and thats coming from someone that usually sucks at civ games
 
What's broken about it?

And forgive me for assuming that "impossible to play multiplayer" is an overreaction. I've seen a few too many non-ironic "unplayable!" overreactions on this subforum to still take them seriously...
I do not claim to be a regular of this forum. If you played PVP enough, you wouldn't have this question. If you want to experience pain, I invite you to a duel. As they say, it's better to see once than hear a hundred times.
 
Last edited:
you are LITERALLY playing a horde of undead... WHY would you go diplo and not fully lean into the fantasy in the first place lol

No, YOU are playing a horde of murderous undead. I might play a number of different things that do or do not align with that.
Even Chaos , the "war" affinity makes you less warlike than how you consider shadow should be played.
 
Last edited:
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
That's a good first step for more mounted units, but I think a full class of light cavalry would be very nice to see added to the game. Possibly with a third tier 2 unit on all cultures, so there's room to give a light cav unit to most of them.

Say light cav is fast, low armor, moderate resistance, evasion to ranged attacks from moving, gets a weak base attack, but strong flanking bonuses.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
Please, add something more proper than this for colorblind mode

1669000_20230601235135_1.png1669000_20230601235137_1.png1669000_20230601235138_1.png1669000_20230601235139_1.png
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
I love the content for the DLC!

Does anyone know how you will be able to recruit dragons (tier V)? And devs with insights on this? Will it be through the Rally of the Lieges after having conquered some high tier Ancient Wonders (seems like a fair route to me)? Or through some late game Tome? Don't need all the details, would just be great to know the sort of "general route" here.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
Isn't that already colorblind mode?

I guess that is something someone would think who is not affected. I cannot really blame you since you cannot understand the differences for real. But it is about more than that and so far only Valorant stands out in regards of good accessibility.
 
I am happy that new balance patch and DLC is coming soon. However, changes made to Shadow affinity and specifically to necro build are not buffs but rather mostly nerfs and I think devs overestimate the value of souls in terms of costs. Nerf to souls earned per hero level to 6 for each hero was unnecessary. 30 gold for 6 soul is basically 50 gold for a skeleton, which is already what a normal pikeman unit costs (under these calculations Bone Golems which are a Tier II unit cost 180 gold!). Making necromancers cost 25 soul and 70 gold doesn't elevate them from being a trash unit within a trash tome. Tome of necromancy is still the worst tome in the game, being far worse than every single tier I and tier II tomes out there. Wightborn is still one of the worse major transformations in the game (only better than Astral Attunement). Reaper is still one of the worst tier V units, on top of having a souls upkeep. Only good changes were changing the combat spells to mana, since combat AI liked spamming soul spells for some reason, which often prevented you from ticking the box for using spells for autocombat if you didn't want your souls to be used.

Furthermore, there was still no mention of more colours during faction creation in the dev diary and in the community stream, despite the fact that it was the 2nd most voted suggestion (1st one was getting rid of city ruins) in the forums. It is annoying not being able to use black & red, black & purple and most of the typical "evil" faction colour combinations. Yes, there are mods that add more colours, but why is this left to modders when it should've been a core game feature in the first place.

There is also no mention of how late game tomes and research is going to be dealt with in the future. At this point it should be obvious to anyone who played more than 100 turns game why this is a big problem and there have already been a lot of topics posted about this issue.
 
  • 3
  • 2Like
  • 2
Reactions:
you are LITERALLY playing a horde of undead... WHY would you go diplo and not fully lean into the fantasy in the first place lol

Because I want to play the scary-but-Lawful-Good undead that make sure the frail mortals who can't easily be revived are safe?

I do not claim to be a regular of this forum. If you played PVP enough, you wouldn't have this question. If you want to experience pain, I invite you to a duel. As they say, it's better to see once than hear a hundred times.

Sorry, I don't usually play games with a single-player focus in a multiplayer setting.

You also completely failed to answer my question even in the most basic of ways, instead deciding to give an angry response and... challenge me to a duel? "1v1 me bro"? I thought I'd escaped that when I stopped playing League of Legends.

If you don't tell people what the problem is, people don't know what the problem is. So I ask once again: What's the issue with Blaze of the Horde, presumably specific to multiplayer?
 
  • 3
  • 1
Reactions:
Someone already mentioned this and for some reason I can't find that post, but TLDR it would be great to have a trait that gives normal extra mounted units that is not a special mount.
I would even go so far and suggest that this trait should make Mystic Spellbreaker, Hound Master and Wild Speaker in to mounted units instead of making them permanently mounted, so that would give more different options to the player.

And one more thing about mounted units, it would be interesting to see scouts getting a secondary preferably combat use and not just scouting.
@Lord Sheogorath suggested splitting mounts off into their own trait, with unit costs increasing for no mount/basic mounts for optional units/fancy mounts. I don't hate the idea but trying to balance around unit costs alone would be difficult, there needs to be other opportunity costs involved. Having a generic mount as a body trait that makes cheap mounted units could be good though. Or one that gives the mountables generic mounts and something banal but useful like +damage or something.

@Xartharos mentioned a Nomad culture or society trait which would also fill the "generic mount" gap, though there'd need to be something to compensate for taking both Nomad and an exotic mount trait "wasting" part of each.

@TheDarkMaster suggested adding a t2+ cavalry unit to the game as base culture units which I'd also like. I think only Dark has anything like that as a base right now?
 
  • 1Like
Reactions:
@Lord Sheogorath suggested splitting mounts off into their own trait, with unit costs increasing for no mount/basic mounts for optional units/fancy mounts. I don't hate the idea but trying to balance around unit costs alone would be difficult, there needs to be other opportunity costs involved. Having a generic mount as a body trait that makes cheap mounted units could be good though. Or one that gives the mountables generic mounts and something banal but useful like +damage or something.

@Xartharos mentioned a Nomad culture or society trait which would also fill the "generic mount" gap, though there'd need to be something to compensate for taking both Nomad and an exotic mount trait "wasting" part of each.

@TheDarkMaster suggested adding a t2+ cavalry unit to the game as base culture units which I'd also like. I think only Dark has anything like that as a base right now?
Ooops, yeah my bad it was from another thread.
Here's the original: link
Pigposting said:
What I DO want is a normal horse mount option if I just want a mounted theme faction. (The closest right now are wolf-mounted furies and they're anti-synergistic but I don't care, I'm not riding a spider or a flaming horse.)

I absolutely agree with you on this - "Having a generic mount as a body trait that makes cheap mounted units could be good though. Or one that gives the mountables generic mounts and something banal but useful like +damage or something."

The way they are trying to add more permanently mounted units feels kinda meh imo.
First more player choice (as in faction creation choice - normal trait or society trait) would be better.
Second, all the units who will be permanently mounted are solid units to begin with they don't really need that flat buff of extra mobility and extra HP (I assume it will be +10 HP).




Sadorhael said:
Does anyone know how you will be able to recruit dragons (tier V)? And devs with insights on this? Will it be through the Rally of the Lieges after having conquered some high tier Ancient Wonders (seems like a fair route to me)? Or through some late game Tome? Don't need all the details, would just be great to know the sort of "general route" here.
You are a dragon, well your ruler is (probably heroes will be too). (you can see that from the first screenshot)
 
  • 1
Reactions:
@Lord Sheogorath suggested splitting mounts off into their own trait, with unit costs increasing for no mount/basic mounts for optional units/fancy mounts. I don't hate the idea but trying to balance around unit costs alone would be difficult, there needs to be other opportunity costs involved. Having a generic mount as a body trait that makes cheap mounted units could be good though. Or one that gives the mountables generic mounts and something banal but useful like +damage or something.

@Xartharos mentioned a Nomad culture or society trait which would also fill the "generic mount" gap, though there'd need to be something to compensate for taking both Nomad and an exotic mount trait "wasting" part of each.

@TheDarkMaster suggested adding a t2+ cavalry unit to the game as base culture units which I'd also like. I think only Dark has anything like that as a base right now?
Regarding the combo of a supposed nomad perma mounted culture and exotic, although i can see how it can be seen as "wasting" a trait, i would say i disagree with that notion, because of the following comparation, currently i think feudal and dark are the only ones who have t3 mounted units by default there is also tyrant knight as perma mounted, we could say if you get the exotic mounts trait for those cultures is a waste since they already are mounted but to me i see as empowering them since the exotic mount trait comes with some goodies, nightmare comes with terrifying aura, i believe, which eliminate the use of a tome to get an enchant, spider come with 2 or 3 goodies which currently make it really op, wolf also comes with some 2 or 3 goodies with teamwork and upgrading attack or critic, i dont remember well about them, unicorn comes with phase through

i mean at the end exotic mounts can be seen as mayor upgrades to mounted units allowing some extra play or freeing up certain enchants or hero skills, although i do agree we should put all exotic mounts in some level plying field so every exotic is desired
I love the content for the DLC!

Does anyone know how you will be able to recruit dragons (tier V)? And devs with insights on this? Will it be through the Rally of the Lieges after having conquered some high tier Ancient Wonders (seems like a fair route to me)? Or through some late game Tome? Don't need all the details, would just be great to know the sort of "general route" here.
arent dragons already in the lieges ??? i could have swore they were
if not it might be similar to reaper, balor or other mythic which require a tier 4 book or tier 5 book from the dragon tomes that will release
 
Regarding the combo of a supposed nomad perma mounted culture and exotic, although i can see how it can be seen as "wasting" a trait, i would say i disagree with that notion, because of the following comparation, currently i think feudal and dark are the only ones who have t3 mounted units by default there is also tyrant knight as perma mounted, we could say if you get the exotic mounts trait for those cultures is a waste since they already are mounted but to me i see as empowering them since the exotic mount trait comes with some goodies, nightmare comes with terrifying aura, i believe, which eliminate the use of a tome to get an enchant, spider come with 2 or 3 goodies which currently make it really op, wolf also comes with some 2 or 3 goodies with teamwork and upgrading attack or critic, i dont remember well about them, unicorn comes with phase through

i mean at the end exotic mounts can be seen as mayor upgrades to mounted units allowing some extra play or freeing up certain enchants or hero skills, although i do agree we should put all exotic mounts in some level plying field so every exotic is desired

arent dragons already in the lieges ??? i could have swore they were
if not it might be similar to reaper, balor or other mythic which require a tier 4 book or tier 5 book from the dragon tomes that will release
I hope it's not too bound into the Tomes - especially not a Tier V tome that would make it exclusive, but that may of course be an option. Currently, you are only allowed to recruit Bone Dragons through Ancient Wonders (unless using a mod).
 
Ooops, yeah my bad it was from another thread.
Here's the original: link


I absolutely agree with you on this - "Having a generic mount as a body trait that makes cheap mounted units could be good though. Or one that gives the mountables generic mounts and something banal but useful like +damage or something."

The way they are trying to add more permanently mounted units feels kinda meh imo.
First more player choice (as in faction creation choice - normal trait or society trait) would be better.
Second, all the units who will be permanently mounted are solid units to begin with they don't really need that flat buff of extra mobility and extra HP (I assume it will be +10 HP).





You are a dragon, well your ruler is (probably heroes will be too). (you can see that from the first screenshot)
I know. But I sincerely hnope you may recruit dragons as your creatures as well, even independently of what physical form you choose to be as a ruler. Anything else would be weird.
 
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
No, YOU are playing a horde of murderous undead. I might play a number of different things that do or do not align with that.
Even Chaos , the "war" affinity makes you less warlike than how you consider shadow should be played.
if you dont want to play undead like they would play, and instead make the game harder on yourself
why are you complaining that the game is harder now...
 
  • 2
Reactions:
if you dont want to play undead like they would play, and instead make the game harder on yourself
why are you complaining that the game is harder now...

Maybe youa re playing them wrong and it working is just a bug?
Seriously, not being conductive to different playstyles in a game like AoW4 is pretty much a massive design issue.