Dev Diary #9: Ancient Wonders

[Eomolch]

Can we "pause" a decision and come back to it, or review other data while we are making it? For example, the locals ask you to buy the produce, but you don't have the money right now...can you say "Ok, wait a bit, I will be back", go and make some money, then come back and buy? Sometimes these decisions require immediate attention and cannot be skipped, and it can be a bit frustrating.

This is one I can answer, as it touches on Narrative Events in general. For Ancient Wonders and also most army encounter events there is the option to retreat your stack and come back later, which will give you the same event again. Exception are surrender events, where you directly have to make up your mind.

In all narrative events you can access a lot of relevant info via tooltip in tooltip info when they are already open.

 

[Eomolch]

Eomolch, while you are here, can you please answer the question if there are Ancient Wonders that provide bonuses to units as in AoW3? Thanks a lot

No, there are no AoW3 mythical city upgrade style unlocks from Ancient Wonders, sorry. They do however all unlock rare units for the Rally of the Lieges (meaning you can recruit them, but in restricted way).

 

[Triumph Jordi]

Why is it called the 'Rally of the Lieges'? Isn't the player the only Liege involved?
From what you've said it's more of a rally of your vassals (or feudatories if you want a fancier word).

That would be because Liege is also defined as

• obligated to render feudal allegiance and service
• a vassal bound to feudal service and allegiance/a loyal subject

The term can be used to both describe the superior and the subject. In Age of Wonders the owner of a Vassal is referred to as the Overlord, allowing Liege(s) to be a perfectly fine term for us to use.

Hi, I watched the live stream. Maybe dev can make a detailed reply on why the want a template healing system. It is a PvE game, this change just make game unnecessary longer and discounted. Now you need wait few turns between each fight regardless how well you played. Back to PT you can keep fighting from one victory to another victory. Which is super help when fighting high difficulty AI. You just keep taking its cities all the way to its capital.

We've detailed it on stream but it takes away both a Strategic aspect and a natural limiter/difficulty as well as the fact that players would/could stretch a combat to end it with more health than they started. Like you say yourself, in PF you're able to just keep going without needing to stop. That exemplifies a lack of attrition that would be expected from armies going from one fight to the next.

 

[Eomolch]

I believe this was confirmed in the previous dev diary on narrative events. You can connect events together - I’m sure you could link them to ancient wonders. I can envision a quest that sends you to different wonders that are locked behind geographical boundaries, but completing an event at the first one can unlock the second. There aren’t any events like this built into the game at this point, but modders can certainly add them.

Yes, so Ancient Wonders are a bit of a special case because they are bound by more rules than regular narrative events (e.g. defenders must be generated at the start of the game). So for more experimental ideas we also can't confirm or deny with certainty if they will work without literally trying it out ourselves.

Your idea with quest unlocking access to specific ancient wonders e.g. might be achievable in principle, but there are a bunch of hurdles with player communication and availability /distance of Ancient Wonders that you would have to overcome. Similarly for a chained dungeon event on the Ancient Wonder itself it may not work out due to the way the encounter and variables need to be stored and passed between events - it may be possible, but I honestly can't tell you.