Dear Godir,
We are excited to announce that the Giant Kings expansion and the free Ogre Update are going to be available in less than a month — on April 1st!
You can find below:
- Announcement trailer for Giant Kings
- Feature highlights
- Giant Kings First Look Stream
- First Dev Diary about Giant King Rulers
Watch the announcement trailer for the sneak peek of the upcoming features and reveal of the breathtaking key art (we know you’ll want it for the wallpapers
)Age of Wonders 4 Giant Kings Key Features:
- New Ruler Type: Ascend as a mighty Giant King, ruling over mortals with unmatched power. Giant Kings possess unique terraforming abilities and can use the Item Forge right from the start of the game. Call upon ancient weapons to fight with you and unlock powerful runes to forge unique equipment. Choose from one of four mighty clans and transform the world around you: flatten peaks, raise mountains, mold lava, and freeze the land!
- New Crystal Dwelling: A towering structure that houses souls of the ancient Giants encased in crystalline matrices. Earn the favor of the Council Prolocutor, improve your relations, and access a unique shop offering exclusive skills, magical equipment, and artifacts. Moreover, formidable new creatures are now roaming the lands: crystal-forged lithorine units and colossal primordial beasts, ready to challenge players to combat in Ancient Wonders.
- Landmark Regions: New massive regions will appear in your realm that you can annex to your empire for economic benefits — magnificent waterfalls, the remains of ancient dragons, majestic underground monuments, and more are waiting for you to explore!
- Shop Structures: Merchants now roam the land, offering powerful services and rare goods. Visit one of three shop types to purchase hero equipment and skills, mounts or strategic vision over world map areas. Feeling bold? Attack these traders to seize their wares - but beware, future dealings may be closed to you!
- Two New Tomes: The Tome of the Dungeon Depths, to build a grand underground empire and protect it at all costs. Transform your provinces into a new dungeon theme with economic bonuses and four special province improvements. Craft eternal Clay Soldiers and deadly traps to defend your territories. The Tome of Geomancy lets you become attuned to the Ley line energies beneath you and channel them to supercharge your army’s damage and resistances. Recruit Geomancer units to harness the powers of the earth, and encase your forces in razor-sharp crystalline armor.
- So Much More, including 3 new realm traits that include a story-driven region with unique endgame events, 2 new ancient wonders, 4 new music tracks, a new interface skin, and countless smaller updates!
Alongside Giant Kings, all Age of Wonders 4 players will receive a free content update on April 1st. The Ogre Update will include new features such as Feudal Culture rework, Siege rework, lava provinces and lots of visual updates. Full details on these free additions will be shared in the game’s patch notes shortly before launch.
Giant Kings First Look Stream
Watch the First Look Dev Stream here:Dev Diary #39: Giant King Rulers
Hi everyone! I am Luis Ferreira, a senior designer at Triumph Studios and I am here to tell you about the titular Giant Kings, a new Leader Type lumbering your way on April 1st, as part of the next expansion for the Expansion Pass 2 of Age of Wonders 4!
The ancient Giant Kings trace their regal line back to the Kingdom of Myrrida from the Age of Giants. Though the current clans are few in number and hold only a fraction of the power of that ancient kingdom, they are still primordial beings, masters of the forge and shapers of worlds.
There are four clans to pick from: Storm, Rock, Fire and Frost. In their role as earth shapers, each clan has a Runestele that they can summon on their provinces. This magical construction changes the surrounding terrain to a preferred environment, granting the giant’s cities economic bonuses.
As forge masters, all Giant Kings start the game with the Item Forge unlocked, and as they gain hero skills in one of their unique trees, their prowess with the forge becomes unparalleled.
But before you start the game you need to pick a weapon. The Giant Kings have the following weapons available to them:
- Magical Obelisk: This weapon is a bulky obelisk charged with runic magic that can be deployed at a distance. Using its Obelisk Crash base ability the giant teleports the obelisk above their enemies and makes it crash down on the target and all adjacent enemies, dealing physical and magic damage.
- Giant Axe: The weapon of choice for the melee giant wanting to deal heavy damage, this giant axe cleaves in a huge downstrike, dealing damage to the target and the unit behind them.
- Warhammer: More flexible than the giant axe, this weapon strikes in a repeating motion dealing damage in a 1-hex cone in front of the giant. It’s the perfect weapon for those wanting to sweep a group of enemies away.
Hero Skills
As you do battle and your Giant King earns experience, they will learn new skills unique to them.Their skills are split into three trees, as seen on the image above. From left to right they are:
Item Forge Tree
Skills that improve your forging abilities. This tree starts by giving giants more material on disenchanting items so they have more to work with.
Then come the Rune Infusions, which are special item infusions unique to the Giant Kings. Each clan has their own infusions, for example the Fire Giant King can grant a weapon more fire damage and a burning chance, make an armor that grants immunity to burning or enchant a wand with the ability to summon a Lava Runestone on the battlefield that burns all those around it.
The capstone skill Forge Master allows the creation of items with up to 6 infusion points (compared to the normal 5), marking the Giants as the ultimate item crafters, creating arms and armaments for themselves and their heroes that cannot be rivalled except by another giant!
Animated Weapon Tree
This tree of skills allows the giant to summon an enchanted living weapon in combat. The weapon conjuration starts as a tier one greatsword, dealing single target damage, of a type corresponding to the giant’s clan.
As you invest in this tree, you can upgrade the conjured weapon into a different, stronger, animated weapon, going from the tier one greatsword into a tier two weapon. There are 4 in total, with each clan having access to 2 of them: A hammer that hits in a charged area of effect, a ranged bow with phasing capabilities, a glaive that pierces enemies or a shield that stuns those it hits.
For example the Fire Giant can evolve their Greatsword into the Hammer or a Bow for ranged damage, while the Storm Giant can upgrade their summon to the Shield or the Glave.
Hurl Tree
Do you want your Rock Giant to throw a boulder and your Storm Giant to hurl a ball of elemental lightning? Then this tree is your pick. Each giant clan has their own version of this tree and as you spend points you can fine tune this ranged ability to your liking: You can focus on single targets by making this ability more damaging and debilitating or expand its area of effect by making your fire giant’s Hurl Flame into a Fireball.
Signature Skills
The Giant Kings’ signature skills are affinity themed runes that grant them bonus passives. At level 4 and 12 the giant can pick minor runes like the Critical Rune (Chaos) which raises Critical Hit chances or the Reflection Rune (Astral) which reflects a portion of the damage taken back to attackers.
At level 8 the Giant gets to pick a stronger rune, like the Fury Rune in the above image that changes the Giant’s movement speed and grants buffs as it attacks. Other runes at this levels include the Life Rune (Nature) which grants the giant Undying, reviving after a turn in combat, or the Brawn Rune (Materium) which grants the Mighty Stomp ability that in a 2-hex cone can apply Immobilized, Stunned and Bleeding.
At level 16 the giant has access to grand runes, which emulate the rune unlock at level 8 giving a weaker version of that rune to the Giant King’s army.
So taking the examples from above, the Grand Life Rune gives all units in the Giant King’s army Natural Regeneration and the Grand Brawn Rune gives all units a 15% damage increase along with a high chance to inflict bleed.
As an additional note, unlike affinity signature skills from Mortal Champion and Wizard Kings, these can be unlocked without having an affinity prerequirement. All affinity runes are available to your giant so you can build them however you want!
And that’s all I have for you on the Giant King’s for now, I left out some things so you can discover them once you experience this new expansion on the 1st of April! The next Dev Diary will be by Bas and he will go over the art of this expansion as well as the new regions and environments, so look out for it next week!
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