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I'm Here to Answer Questions After 50+ Hours with AoW4

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How'd you find the overall pace of your games? Is it comparable to AoW3/PF? Or perhaps a bit shorter/longer?

As for city development, we know the sector system is now per-pop provinces, but how do you find the overall city management? Is it somewhere between the basic AoW3 and more developed PF, or perhaps more advanced then PF? And when I say more advanced, I'm assuming that still means less than other 4X games that place more emphasis on empire building (but I'd be happy to be wrong!)
 
how varied were the narrative events?

What were the computer generated factions/free city races like? did they seem at all procedural or completely random?
 
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Great video, some great points and hopefully Triumph can tweak some of your concerns.

I was wondering if the dreaded Doomstacks make a return from 3? They were skillfully modded out of 3, which made the game way more playable imho. But question is, does the AI again use them. To people who don't know; Doomstacks are stacks with the maximum of 6 units all the highest tier. The AI loved to build those, which frankly destroyed the game because of the large difference between those and the lower tier units.

What I saw from the gameplay video when Tombles got attacked by the undead stacks in the underground, is the way you attack changed? In AoW 3 you had to touchan army with multiple stacks to make them fight, but here the second undead group was behind the main attacking party and still was invloved. Is the yellow outline the range in where you need to position stacks to participate in attacks, a bit like in Warhammer 40k?

Does the main map feel big or small. I know you played the majority on smaller maps, but did you try out the biggest map? And how did that play?

First few questions, when I think of more, I'll let you know. Thanks in advance!
 
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Oooooh, that feel when you find one of these threads early enough to ask questions.

The big one on my mind is tome-related. From what I've seen, there are at least a few tomes that seem to almost linearly continue from previous tomes, building on the same mechanics, so there's clearly an incentive to commit to your gameplan in that regard. I'm curious about the opposite-- how much did you feel incentivized to mix and match, or break away from your previous affinities entirely?

The second question is more subjective. One of the things I really enjoyed in Planetfall were the unit mods-- getting the opportunity to decide how to minmax my specific units with the tools available to me was cool. Enchantments seem to fill mostly the same role here, but I'm curious how involved the decision-making is there. Did they feel like real considerations, where you had to decide if you wanted this buff over that buff? Or was it more just about piling on as many enchantments as you physically can and calling it a day?
 
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FungusMouse said:
How'd you find the overall pace of your games? Is it comparable to AoW3/PF? Or perhaps a bit shorter/longer?

As for city development, we know the sector system is now per-pop provinces, but how do you find the overall city management? Is it somewhere between the basic AoW3 and more developed PF, or perhaps more advanced then PF? And when I say more advanced, I'm assuming that still means less than other 4X games that place more emphasis on empire building (but I'd be happy to be wrong!)
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Personally, the pacing feels better than both 3 and Planetfall. Mainly because I was *always* doing something, which felt like every turn matters more than the previous entries.

City development is more deep than Planetfall, while not feeling as overwhelming. The dual queue system REALLY helps keep forward momentum. Also, various buildings get a boost depending on what territory improvements you've made. Say, for example, you've built two farms already. Then a farm improvement for your city is "Boosted" and that improvement is built much more quickly. It really helps specialize cities and makes each city feel unique. But I think the fact that there are two "tabs" of each city that you'll really focus on through city management makes it feel much more approachable and fun.

The territory improvements are on the same "tab" as other city improvements, which makes it all much more clean, etc.

But it's up there with any other 4X game. In fact, AoW4 feels the most 4X out of any of the entries so far, IMHO.
 
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I see in one of your screenshots are society traits not in other previews. I assume those are unlocked through the pantheon system. Can you share the tooltips (Perfectionist Artisans, Talented Collectors, Silver Tongued) or what you remember they do? Did you unlock others in arcane, chaos, and order?
 
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Technogremlin said:
how varied were the narrative events?

What were the computer generated factions/free city races like? did they seem at all procedural or completely random?
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Surprisingly, the narrative events continued to surprise me into hour 50. I was still seeing things I'd never seen before. I think a lot of them are triggered by various map characteristics and since there are A LOT of different map characteristics, I saw a few dozen different events, I think.

The computer-generated AI factions, i.e. the major factions were all the preset factions. However, the free city folks were all unique and had a variety of different characteristics. Sometimes, you'd run into an elven group with a minor transformation that made the more magical (forgive, I forgot its name), while other times, you'd run into Dwarves that already had the "Stonekin" (I think that is its name) minor transformation, which gave them bonuses to armor and being underground, etc.
 
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Low said:
Great video, some great points and hopefully Triumph can tweak some of your concerns.

I was wondering if the dreaded Doomstacks make a return from 3? They were skillfully modded out of 3, which made the game way more playable imho. But question is, does the AI again use them. To people who don't know; Doomstacks are stacks with the maximum of 6 units all the highest tier. The AI loved to build those, which frankly destroyed the game because of the large difference between those and the lower tier units.

What I saw from the gameplay video when Tombles got attacked by the undead stacks in the underground, is the way you attack changed? In AoW 3 you had to touchan army with multiple stacks to make them fight, but here the second undead group was behind the main attacking party and still was invloved. Is the yellow outline the range in where you need to position stacks to participate in attacks, a bit like in Warhammer 40k?

Does the main map feel big or small. I know you played the majority on smaller maps, but did you try out the biggest map? And how did that play?

First few questions, when I think of more, I'll let you know. Thanks in advance!
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Thanks! I hope they can shore it up. I've said this before, and I mean it with every fiber of my being: if Triumph released the game I played last week RIGHT NOW, it'd still be the best fantasy 4X game I've ever played. Another couple of months of polish might just knock it out of the stratosphere. And I don't say that lightly.

Doomstacks are way too expensive in AoW4. Sure, you can have one or two, but they get really expensive to maintain, especially on smaller or middle-sized maps. Most particularly because a lot of the best units cost mana and mana can be in short supply if you're using enchantments and conjuring units. I simply didn't see them as being as bad as AoW3 to any degree. And trust me, those doomstacks ruined AoW3 for me, too.

I'll have to watch Tomble's video. I'm sorry, but I don't quite know what you're talking about. I was playing the game, rather than watching gameplay vids. I know, I know...I'm spoiled.

The map, when on the largest settings, feels absolutely gigantic. With both the regular Earth and the underground, it takes the first half of the game to fully explore the map, and that's with flying enchantments on your scouts. The maps get really, really big. Not the biggest out of any 4X game I've played, but big enough that I got a bit overwhelmed, honestly.

But I don't like my 4X games to be monster games that take 30 hours just to finish one game. For example, I played a bit of both and completed 4 full games in that 50 hours. 2 of which took about 15 hours each. And I also experimented a bunch, too.
 
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Chainlinc3 said:
Oooooh, that feel when you find one of these threads early enough to ask questions.

The big one on my mind is tome-related. From what I've seen, there are at least a few tomes that seem to almost linearly continue from previous tomes, building on the same mechanics, so there's clearly an incentive to commit to your gameplan in that regard. I'm curious about the opposite-- how much did you feel incentivized to mix and match, or break away from your previous affinities entirely?

The second question is more subjective. One of the things I really enjoyed in Planetfall were the unit mods-- getting the opportunity to decide how to minmax my specific units with the tools available to me was cool. Enchantments seem to fill mostly the same role here, but I'm curious how involved the decision-making is there. Did they feel like real considerations, where you had to decide if you wanted this buff over that buff? Or was it more just about piling on as many enchantments as you physically can and calling it a day?
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There are absolutely tomes that help shore up weaknesses from other tomes. Say you have a tome that is oriented towards ranged units and provides a great archer, you might want to take the next tome that has a really great brawler or fighter unit. There's some fun mix-and-matching to do, for sure.

"Or was it more just about piling on as many enchantments as you physically can and calling it a day?" I'm glad you asked this. I think it's more of a case of piling on as many as you can reasonably afford with your mana. Of course, I didn't get to really dive into the meta of the unit enchantments, but I almost never saw a reason to not just THROW THEM ALL OUT THERE, within reason.

That being said, I did play on some of the easier maps and can imagine that the mana economy might be harder to manage on maps with less of it. So it could become a harder decision in a game where mana was more limited. Wildly enough, even 50 hours wasn't enough to give you a definitive answer here. I NEED MOAR lol
 
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Electrum Leopard said:
I see in one of your screenshots are society traits not in other previews. I assume those are unlocked through the pantheon system. Can you share the tooltips (Perfectionist Artisans, Talented Collectors, Silver Tongued) or what you remember they do? Did you unlock others in arcane, chaos, and order?
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They're not unlocked through the pantheon system, actually. There are a lot of traits that aren't natively associated with a particular form that you can choose in the custom traits options. I won't spoil it too much, but there are quite a few really interesting ones.

Honestly, I don't remember EXACTLY what those traits did, so I can't comment definitively on them. But needless to say, those are just some of the options.
 
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borex69 said:
How was your autocombat experience?
In previous series it used to take unnecessary losses
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It's the best it's ever been. I specifically mentioned this in my preview. It's the most accurate autocombat I can remember in any game and it made the game much more smooth and fun, honestly.
 
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borex69 said:
Did you discover broken or underpowered unit/combos/spells?
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Underpowered? Yes. I forget the culture name, but the one focused on building felt like the least powerful culture. Artisans, I believe? I just remember thinking that they'd be more fun, but they were the least fun and powerful culture of the lot.

There are plenty of combos that probably wouldn't feel *too* great, but I *did* find some really OP combinations. Which, honestly, is a lot of fun IMHO.
 
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borex69 said:
Can you tell us more about city siege?
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Once your army arrives at a city, it's given the opportunity to use a variety of skills you've accumulated through research and development to break the siege faster.

So, let's say you march your army to the enemy's city. You're presented with a screen that shows how many turns it'll take to break the walls. You can then select from several modifiers based on what you have to lessen the time it takes, or even add damage to the enemy units once the walls are broken. I think the average siege lasts 5 turns, which you can reduce to 2, from what I saw. You start with the ability to add two modifiers to your siege and can add to that number with research and city development, too.

I hope that's explained it well enough. I wish I could show you a screenshot...
 
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