Age of Wonders: Planetfall

A few months ago I was intrigued enough by Age of Wonders 3 so as to buy the newly released SciFi spin-off Planetfall. I suppose there's something to be said for a series which manages to leave fans begging for more despite consistently falling short of its potential for five iterations and counting.

That right there is a light unit taking cover... behind an allied heavy unit. In broad strokes, Planetfall initially comes across as a cosmetic mod of AoW3, but in fact it's filled in a great many missing details among its gameplay mechanics. The series' strongest point is its tactical side, and Planetfall adds more options for unit modification, damage types with associated status effect procs, mildly improved terrain with explosive hazards, destructible cover of different heights and a few other tidbits.

More importantly, it addressed AoW's blatantly lacking strategic side.
Terrain is now divided into claimable territories instead of relying on city radii to cover all resources, with each city able to expand to four surrounding territories, just complicated enough to make you plan out your expansion mentally without having to break out the graph paper.
Contrary to previous years' trend in strategy games (GalCiv3, Spellforce 3, etc.) toward removing static defenses or rendering them irrelevant to force the player to send armies to every single threat by way of busywork, building up your bases in Planetfall also builds up their defenses, and a fully operational city has little to fear from anything other than a major offensive until the end-game.
Geography has greatly improved, with climes flowing more smoothly and consistently instead of being randomly interspersed.
Map locations are more diverse, ranging from loot crates to spawners to dungeons which only one army can enter, to mini-quest locations which might offer different solutions depending on your alliances and class choice.
Neutral faction favor currying replaces buying neutral units at inns.
The best feature would have to be the reliable combat automation letting you personally address only one out of ten or so fights and greatly cutting down on the tedium of clearing a large map (and I do so love large maps) with a manual combat retry option in case of unexpected catastrophe.

Unfortunately, everything still feels a bit rushed and incomplete. Character creation puts you through a point-buy system with only 3-4 options in 3 categories, with little long-term impact. The economic side of things mostly revolves around maximizing your secondary resource (you always require more vespene gas "cosmite") to upgrade your units. The technology trees are paced well enough for beginning and mid-game, but are quickly exhausted during a long campaign, with no reiterative resource point sinks a la Stellaris. In fact, given Planetfall was published through Paradox, quite a few of its lackluster features beg the comparison "this worked better in Stellaris" most notably diplomacy. While AI leaders have grown a bit more complex (harder to simply bribe into complacency) they lack quite a few logical options, like telling an ally to stop attacking one of your vassals or prodding them toward allying with a particular native faction. Also, the good / evil reputation system is largely irrelevant and much too easily flipped from one extreme to the other.

In part that's understandable, as AoW's very involved tactical side draws focus away from its grand strategy angle. But, to compensate, as it started as a copycat of Heroes of Might and Magic, AoW implies much the same reliance on immersion and a bit of role-playing as opposed to abstract strategy. You'd think after twenty years they'd actually get good at that.

Character creation still relies on a race / class pairing, though in this case your class is called a secret technology. My first avatar choice is still my favorite. I went for Assembly / Xenoplague, meaning basically the Borg with Xenomorph pets. Which I'll admit is absolutely ridiculous and exactly the sort of cheesy pulpy derivative crap I routinely ridicule on this blog... but at the same time held an irresistible coolness factor. The Dvar, a "40K" version of fantasy dwarves are interesting enough with their rough-hewn Slavic industrial aesthetic and their penchant for terrain deformation, and the obligatory insectoid aliens might be interesting if not for their psychic angle, but that's fodder for a whole 'nother post.

Unfortunately, by the time you scrape down to the amazons riding dinosaurs with laser cannons, that's about as dignified as your options get. The more technological aspects of your technology trees revolve mainly around dropping the words "quantum" and "nano" into random sentences and the rest, sadly... is telepathy. You've got a good psychic superweapon and its evil psychic counterpart and psychic space insects and psychic space fish and psychic space mummies and psychic space capitalist mafiosi, and psychic vampire space ghosts because by this point sure, why the hell not? To me it just reinforces my oft-reiterated observation that telepathy is a dead end for science fiction. Even allowing for Planetfall's looser definition as science fantasy, the "science" angle's even flimsier than usual and its developers had no idea how to slap together anything but a high fantasy game with space wizards.

Worse yet this incompetence is generalized to most of the game's thematic elements. The visual artists actually did some decent work. Voice acting, however, wavers below convincing with some amusing flubs here and there. Antares, by the way, is not usually pronounced as "ant-arse" - although that would explain why I can never find the damn thing. The writing is uniformly bland and forgettable, punctuated only by some feeble attempts at humor about penguins and BBQ sauce which fall completely out of place in Planetfall's grimmer setting.


Being a TBS game about planetary conquest a comparison with Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri seems inescapable (and I dare say deliberately sought by Triumph Studios) but Alpha Centauri put a lot of effort into remaining balanced and even plausible despite its telepathy and other hand-waved space wizardry. Its base-building was built on materialistic explanations about solar reflectors and moisture gradients, the physics behind its weapons and armor researched to a level satisfactorily above pop culture level, its political arguments cleverly balanced to give even the more evil factions their good points and vice-versa.

I'm reminded of something I noticed about the webcomics Dominic Deegan and Star Power, respectively fantasy and SciFi superheroics both by the same author. The same flighty rationalizations and characterizations which endeared the first to its readers rendered the second laughable, and the same is true here. While it remained a fantasy series, Age of Wonders' notion of building factions and political alliances among elves and goblins added a layer of intrigue to fairytale antics. The same treatment in a nominally "sciencey" setting looks slapdash and lazy. I'm certainly enjoying Planetfall's steadily improving strategic and especially tactical elements, but this whole series desperately awaits more intelligent world-building and characterization. We really don't need more half-assed clones of Shadowrun or Warhammer.