Dev Diary #20: Roadmap 2023

[ffsffs1]

Disagree on restricting affinities. Being able to dip into all the affinities isn't what contributes to the "sameness" of different factions. Even if you're generating points in all six affinities, some of the branches will still be largely ignored.

 

[Leyrann]

There should be a limit of how many affinities you can take. Maybe 3 would be ideal for now, considering there might be other affinities in the future as well.

So, first of all, Triumph has already said they are not going to go with a hard limit. Thank god.

But just to show how dumb your suggestion is: If you can only take 3 affinities, a Dragon ruler with, say, Astral/Shadow dual affinity focus would not be able to take the Tome of Dragons, because that'd put them at 4 affinities (Astral, Shadow, 1 Chaos, 1 Nature).

Hard-locking 6 out of the 15 possible dual-affinity Dragons out of the most thematic Tome the game has for them is just...

Please put some thought in your suggestions, is all I can say.

On top of this, a tome budget should be implemented.
No more than 30 cumulated levels on all your picks.

Ah yes, keep the problematic enchantment stacking by allowing you to take all tier 1 and tier 2 tomes, but don't allow more than 11 tomes if you progress properly.

You've heard of solving the problem without adjusting the parts that are fine. Now get ready for "solving" the parts that are fine without adjusting the problem.

Mana/gold should be convertible at a set exchange rate, maybe via a market building and enchants in general should be expensive to upkeep (think multipliers on same type of enchants).

That defeats the entire point of having separate resources.

I spam farms because I want to grow my city large and 2-3 quarries to build faster. Everything else is roughly irrelevant.
Why should I ever build forests when I can build farms and quarries (except for niche wonder bonuses)? The Materium bonuses for building same type of improvements near each other are now irrelevant.

Because it makes the food buildings, which generate more food than farms do, cheaper to build?

3 Foresters gives a 30% discount on each of Store House, Granary and Estate Hall, which together give you food equal to twelve farms.

The special improvements should give to the tile the new property while keeping the original as well. It should also count as an extra improvement for bonuses.

Why?

Also, make it an upgrade option for the tile itself and not a building queue, which is already quite large as it is.

It's called 'having to make hard decisions'. Production and gold are scarce resources, and you need to think about what you want to use them on most.

Why do the developers feel that the AI should build an outpost/city between my two major cities which also happen to be 20 provinces away from his closest city?
There should be a huge penalty the further away you go from your border when creating an outpost. I feel like 6 provinces away from your closest city should be the maximum range before getting penalties.

Why should the AI not be allowed to grab as much land as they can? If you don't like it, take it back by force. Or expand more quickly yourself.

Outposts should be open for attack without having a war declaration and maybe for some races, not even incur a diplomatic penalty depending on the distance.

Why?

They claimed the land as theirs, and a sovereign entity forcefully taking land from another sovereign entity is arguably the definition of war.

Terraforming options should be a dedicated feature, away from the casting book, but still tide to gold/mana.

Why?

All heroes and the leader are way more powerful than any unit on the field. At endgame, they get to be immortal and have resurgence as long as they win the fight.
There should be a hard cap on the number of heroes. I would say that 6 is a magic number, but feel free to disagree. Maybe tie this limit to traits and buildings?
If I see an "army" of 18 heroes, I know something went wrong.

Sounds like you play multiplayer to me.

Anyway, pretty sure Triumph is looking at this already. Elsewhere I saw a suggestion that heroes over the cap should cost imperium. I like that one.

Soft limits > hard limits. Always.

Fighting a brutal AI is tedious and unrewarding.

Wait, are you a multiplayer player?

After that, they will ram you with +3def/res T1,T2,T3 unending stacks of units, which they lose, even though they have 10def / 3res T2 shield units, because it sucks at combat. The unfun part is that you have to defeat in some games ~40 stacks before you can even reach their cities!!! Thank God for the auto combat feature!!!

Funny. You can beat 40 stacks in autocombat to reach their cities, presumably using a far smaller number of stacks than the AI does. But in autocombat, you by definition have the same combat AI that your opponent does.

Perhaps the issue is not in fact that the AI sucks at combat, but rather something else, such as army composition or enchantment stacking? As I said earlier, please put some thought into your suggestions - and conclusions.

The city siege times on a well fortified city is absurdly high... No siege should last more than 3 rounds, under any circumstances.

And yet you call the +5 fortification bonus per quarry from an Ancient Wonder "cringe inducing". Which one is it, fortification is too weak or fortification is too strong?

Anyway, 3 rounds under any circumstances? Does that mean that even if I can only use Headlong Assault to speed up the siege, it should still finish in 3 turns, capping fortification strength at 45? But what, then, if I instead have Wizard's Bombardment, Earthshatter Engines, Devastator Spheres and the Tremor Ritual to boost my siege breaking strength to 49? Do I get to siege any city in just a single turn, even without Siege Magic or Siege Breaker units?

In PvP, attacking a player army in a spell jammed city that may also have 1 or 2 city enchants is also a hard pass. Most win strategies are abusing various trait/enchant/spell combinations to decimate the opposing army in 1-2 rounds. There are no such thing as "fair" battles in AoW4 .
At T5 tomes, three spells of that type will devastate you withing 2 rounds. There are some absurd builds that can make you route before you even begin the battle...

Obligatory reminder that 4X/TBS games are unfathomably hard to balance for PvP, as the games are simply too complex. On top of that, the multiplayer playerbase is only a tiny, albeit very vocal, part of the total userbase - at most 1-5% - and already receives a disproportionate amount of attention.

What diplomacy?
Every AI that is closer than 30 provinces to you, will start hating you like the devil himself!!!

Uhm, no?

They will abandon all common sense and do everything in their power to destroy you. They will abuse the diplomatic tools to do so as well ).

What kind of game are you playing?

Or are you constantly causing grievances and never paying them off or something?

 

[Matrasel]

So, first of all, Triumph has already said they are not going to go with a hard limit. Thank god.

But just to show how dumb your suggestion is: If you can only take 3 affinities, a Dragon ruler with, say, Astral/Shadow dual affinity focus would not be able to take the Tome of Dragons, because that'd put them at 4 affinities (Astral, Shadow, 1 Chaos, 1 Nature).

Hard-locking 6 out of the 15 possible dual-affinity Dragons out of the most thematic Tome the game has for them is just...

Please put some thought in your suggestions, is all I can say.



Ah yes, keep the problematic enchantment stacking by allowing you to take all tier 1 and tier 2 tomes, but don't allow more than 11 tomes if you progress properly.

You've heard of solving the problem without adjusting the parts that are fine. Now get ready for "solving" the parts that are fine without adjusting the problem.



That defeats the entire point of having separate resources.




Because it makes the food buildings, which generate more food than farms do, cheaper to build?

3 Foresters gives a 30% discount on each of Store House, Granary and Estate Hall, which together give you food equal to twelve farms.



Why?



It's called 'having to make hard decisions'. Production and gold are scarce resources, and you need to think about what you want to use them on most.



Why should the AI not be allowed to grab as much land as they can? If you don't like it, take it back by force. Or expand more quickly yourself.



Why?

They claimed the land as theirs, and a sovereign entity forcefully taking land from another sovereign entity is arguably the definition of war.



Why?




Sounds like you play multiplayer to me.

Anyway, pretty sure Triumph is looking at this already. Elsewhere I saw a suggestion that heroes over the cap should cost imperium. I like that one.

Soft limits > hard limits. Always.



Wait, are you a multiplayer player?



Funny. You can beat 40 stacks in autocombat to reach their cities, presumably using a far smaller number of stacks than the AI does. But in autocombat, you by definition have the same combat AI that your opponent does.

Perhaps the issue is not in fact that the AI sucks at combat, but rather something else, such as army composition or enchantment stacking? As I said earlier, please put some thought into your suggestions - and conclusions.



And yet you call the +5 fortification bonus per quarry from an Ancient Wonder "cringe inducing". Which one is it, fortification is too weak or fortification is too strong?

Anyway, 3 rounds under any circumstances? Does that mean that even if I can only use Headlong Assault to speed up the siege, it should still finish in 3 turns, capping fortification strength at 45? But what, then, if I instead have Wizard's Bombardment, Earthshatter Engines, Devastator Spheres and the Tremor Ritual to boost my siege breaking strength to 49? Do I get to siege any city in just a single turn, even without Siege Magic or Siege Breaker units?



Obligatory reminder that 4X/TBS games are unfathomably hard to balance for PvP, as the games are simply too complex. On top of that, the multiplayer playerbase is only a tiny, albeit very vocal, part of the total userbase - at most 1-5% - and already receives a disproportionate amount of attention.



Uhm, no?



What kind of game are you playing?

Or are you constantly causing grievances and never paying them off or something?

Are we really going to debate that the AI will 99.99% of the time try to destroy you when he is in "close" proximity to the player?
I mean, really? They will immediately come and settle near you for no apparent reason than to annoy you or provoke conflict.

They are going to rival you after they settle 2 provinces away from your capital, although the outpost is 20 provinces away from their closest city.

They will also disregards claims, insult, denounce, fabricate claims and try to bring other players/AIs into the hate train.

There is ~0 chances that you can actually reverse this trend once it started. Maybe with unlimited gold reserves?

On all other points, those are my views on the current state of the game.
Having played ~40 multiplayer games with a friend where we would also add on a custom as many brutal AIs as we could fit.

Siege battles with 3 slots unlocked are more of an end game thing.
If you play well, you are facing a 50+ city fortification with the default sieging rig. That is 2 slots and almost zero siege power.
This WILL make you wait there for 6+ rounds at best.

AIs are not hard to beat, they just spam units and heroes at a rate that far exceed what a player can reasonably go with.
I call this poor design, a band aid over the AIs inherent poor decision making in combat, especially.
And again, this is purely by observation and by all means, everyone is free to disagree!!!

On the tomes issue, I proposed a more rigid system so that game design can have some freedom.
I just suggested some ways of fixing this otherwise complex problem.

Other suggestions that I have is to limit the battle enchants to 1-3 offensive, 1-3 mirror race transforms and 1-3 defensive.
These are all numbers in the end and limits call for creative game play as opposed to mirror like armies that have everything on them.

On the terraforming meta game play, to answer your "why" is because I consider this added layer of complexity fun!! It is purely subjective and some may prefer Tetris versus complicated overlapping features of a 4x game.

An outpost is a forward settlement used entirely for military purposes. They were built with the mind set that some foreign force could attack them without warning at all times.

Wikipedia:
"A military outpost is detachment of troops stationed at a distance from the main force or formation, usually at a station in a remote or sparsely populated location, positioned to stand guard against unauthorized intrusions and surprise attacks; and the station occupied by such troops, usually a small military base or settlement in an outlying frontier, limit, political boundary or in another country. Outposts can also be called miniature military bases based on size and number of troops it houses."

Stretching the concept into the game, the outpost is free for all until it becomes a real settlement.
See the outpost concept from "Humankind" for reference.

Thank you for taking the time to read and give an answer to all my points!!!

 

[Thiend]

I realize this is probably way, way more than is planned... But is it possible to make a second "underground" -like layer for underwater, with the water update or as a later expansion?

I'll be honest, if I start being able to make a civilization that lives entirely underwater I probably won't be able to make myself play any other way ever.

 

[Anry de Kornelle]

here someone correctly noticed the fact that only the salon number of people writes on the forum. take even me, I read this forum from diary number 3, if I'm not mistaken. but my first post was made today. and only because all night long, instead of sleeping, the thoughts came into my head that a knight riding a war horse and a knight’s spear in his hands should be something much stronger than what is now in the game. perhaps this is a deformation due to an in-depth study of history. But if they are more believable, then the battle tactics will be brighter

but maybe I didn’t really understand and wrote my proposal in the wrong topic, but I hope they won’t beat me for it and read the message.

sorry, got a little carried away. So today I wrote for the first time on the forum, if my ideas and description are useful, then I will write more. If not, then most likely I will not write much. the game is excellent, no matter what the developers do with it, we will continue to love it, well, or not, it depends on who likes it in the end result.

in aow 2, you could only learn the elements that were chosen at the beginning of the game. I chose one element, so I studied it quickly and use it to my health, I chose everything and be kind to study the whole game and never learn the necessary spells in the end. we were very severely limited in the beginning, so what? everyone who played this game was wildly happy with the game. it’s just that many people have been spoiled too much and want everything to be possible for them right after all.

in general, restrictions are definitely needed, if only because as a result of the forces the game will drag on, we will all have absolutely everything the same. and it turns out that no one will be unique. the lack of uniqueness will make each game similar to the previous one. tell me how many days in a row are you ready to eat the same dish three times a day? because of the monotony, we will simply stop playing this wonderful game, because it will get boring. and then I won’t help any DLC because they will just do more complex monotony, but in fact there will be nothing new.

once again I want to thank the developers of the game for their age of wonders in my life I want to wish them to make the game that we will play for a very long time and everyone will love it like the first time

 

[Walkaboutout]

If tome research restrictions just HAVE to be in there (specifically in the form of disallowing tomes), I would really, REALLY, love to see some sort of toggle or game start option for it.

I get that some people feel differently, but the freedom to chart my own winding path through the tomes, and eventually bring it full circle so as to have a complete range of abilities (as a sort of reward for continuing to survive against dangerous enemies long enough to get there), makes the game far more fun, and much less frustrating for a player like me.

I'd even be okay, of course, if researching outside of your "primary affinity(s)" would come with a research speed penalty or something (but not an outright disallowing). That is, assuming that with research restrictions comes a method by which the game determines what your "primary affinty(s)" would be, or simply allows you to declare what that is yourself specifically, during faction creation.

At any rate, I feel like having a toggle option, if nothing else, would be time well spent and well appreciated by some of us, if it's decided that hard limits on affinities and tomes just has to be in the game at all.

 

[LizardCommander]

My suggestion for how to achieve the thematic nature of the factions per affinity without locking you out:

Each Tome has an extra effect that is unlocked based on a certain level of that affinity being reached (something that is not currently present in the game ideally, so that it feels genuinely like it is adding not restricting something).

For example, Tome of Necromancy at 10 Shadow Affinity might unlock a new Spell, give it a 1 hex radius, applies Decaying and a new debuff that 'If the enemy dies while this debuff is on them they turn into a T1 Zombie'. Resaonably balanced, powerful in the right circumstance, but has counters.

Low level tomes should actually have a reasonably high affinity requirement for the extra benefit, this would lead to a more natural expansion within an affinity for maximum return.

I don't think there are enough form units in general, adding 'improved' versions of certain T1 Tome Units could be a reward for putting in a bit of affinity. I.e. Pyromancy with 15 Chaos Affinity unlocks a new T4 Pyromancer Battlemage, same with Cryomancy for the White Witch.

 

[owtfox]

Came here to check on the state of the game. Did a dev even respond to this thread?

I wonder how the AI improvements are coming along.