Age of Wonders 4

"Opfer dich
Erfüll der Götter Plan"

 

Erdling - Weißglut

 

 

Having bought yet another of their inevitably DLC-riddled games at release price, I may as well admit I've somehow become Paradox's bitch. Frog boobs aside though, I've been quite enjoying Age of Wonders 4. Triumph Studios has benefited greatly from their partnership.

 

That should read "surroundings" but far be it from me to nitpick.

(Also, "master this realm" would flow better than "become the master of this realm".)

(But as everyone knows, I'm not one to criticize.)

 

As per my Noldorin leanings I evenly mixed myself an elven nature / astral empire and dove right into a couple of plays through a grassland-rich continent world, then a coastal desert. My first impression was that AoW now looks like a fully professional product, for better or worse.

The music's meh, relatively bland, but I guess not everything can be Nova Flare or Terratus or Dance of the Cryptek or Lord of the Dead. Or can it? Opinions vary.

In any case, the flavor text has improved.*

That chick cooing her way through the voiceovers knocks the Cate Blanchett impersonation out of the park, but it does get a bit monotonous, and incongruous for the various experts on / authors of magic tomes to speak in the same meditative, soothing female lilt regardless of whether you're summoning demons, traipsing through the astral plane, raising zombies, planting corn or smiting thine enemies with songs of ice and fire. Even if you only hired the one voice, you could've directed her better.

The interface is now fully modernized and fluid, complete with Civilopedia (thank you) toggled map markers, minimap and pointer zooming and taking a page from the likes of Stellaris and Old World in cross-referencing and nesting tooltips even more smoothly on mouseover:

For strategy games with mountains of information to consider, this ain't nothin'! Nonetheless, some corners seem to have been cut, like the tired old scrolling through gigantic unsorted, inexplicative lists and submenus:

Nowhere near as bad as Stellaris' species window, mind you

Also took me a while to figure out manually setting province expansion, and I had to ask DuckDuckGo where to find the "disband unit" button (upper right in its detailed info page, damn-nigh invisible, at least on small interface scale.) They also desperately need some more visible sort of marker or reminder about pillaged provinces (something like Old World's timer icons?) because as it stands I forget to rebuild them for dozens of turns. In an unexpectedly amateurish twist worthy of quasi-vaporware like Crossroads Keep, autosave also lacks any customization, saving every turn or not at all and not even allowing you to delete individual turns, to where after just two matches I've already overshot my GoG sync limit of half a gig. Still, overall, movement, construction, spellcasting, pretty much everything flows very smoothly.

Actual gameplay has moderately improved, but also makes some unnecessary concessions.

 

Adding an expansion-limiting resource called Imperium (roughly equivalent to Stellaris' Influence) plays nicely into gold/mana maintenance (do NOT go three cities over your limit like I did, you've been warned) and props up the game's best facet, smoother escalation. Ever since HoMM and Civ were in diapers, TBS have struggled to balance their neutral or "barbarian" factions, often either overpowered early on or too soon trivialized.** I've seen more modern 4X like Stellaris and Old World work toward smoothing out that transition. AoW4 I'd say trumps them in this department, building on its predecessor Planetfall's use of goodie guards, spawners and dungeons with more interactive outposts and independent towns plus a competitive reputation / vassalage system transitioning pretty seamlessly toward end-game army clashes. Kudos.

 

Those clashes themselves, however, have lost some strategy. While the new siege options and 1-radius town walls add a bit of depth, for some unfathomable reason Triumph decided to throw out the hex adjacency jockeying for position from previous titles which allowed multi-army hordes to chew each other apart from the edges, flank an enemy army with fast harrassers to split them up, or prioritize units in-combat based on angles of approach.

Now the combat map generator seems to just autoselect <=3 armies on each side randomly from within 3 hexes (the ones with highlighted flags above) and sticks them on opposite sides of the battlefield no matter their initial approach. Whether it interfered with the new, larger cities, or they couldn't teach their AI how to maximize placement, or they simply decided to go the more idiot-friendly route for "accessibility" I couldn't tell you, but cutting this feature spells a large step down from Planetfall.

 

They've also similarly oversimplified offensive spellcasting and protection from same. Instead of Planetfall's opposed "operation strength" skill check, a spell jammer now completely prevents all enemy spellcasting in its city's range. Granted, being a province upgrade it can be pillaged, improving the niche for camouflaged raiding, but it's too flat an all-or-nothing proposition.

 

I'm also not crazy about how unit purchasing/upgrades are handled.

 

Still worth it.

Enamored as I was of Planetfall's rudimentary modular design (or Fallen Enchantress' for that matter (or Alpha Centauri's for that matterer matter)) I resent regressing to merely casting global upgrades affecting all units of certain types. It might work well in conjunction with modular units (don't cast a battlemage offense buff if you build them for support casting, etc.) but as a standalone feature there's basically no reason NOT to cast every single buff possible. Their upkeep scales with number of units affected so it doesn't go to waste unless your units are idle, which they shouldn't be. Even the more exorbitant buff spells are offset by reducing attrition among your veterans. Not much strategy here.

Dual town production output for buildings and units makes sense (getting to be a 4X standard) but doesn't mesh well with AoW's existing emphasis on multiple unit acquisition routes, themselves amplified for #4. Neutral / vassal unit purchases are now combined into the Rally of the Lieges, but I've found it for the most part extraneous to my own production... aside from a couple of ogres to beef up my spindly elves' front line. It just overlaps too much.

Compounding the issue further, you store strategic spells for instant casting as in Planetfall, but where Planetfall limited summons to low-tier fodder, AoW4 duplicates #3's top-tier unit summoning. Combined, this means instantly summoning entire top-tier armies to the front line at a moment's notice, trivializing much of an offensive's buildup.

 

All this overlap boils down to a tech tree significantly wider than it is deep. Intended to offer replay value, in any but the shortest playthroughs it yields a multitude of interchangeable units / nukes / buildings with little practical difference. Note the mage above suffers from the usual +5 everything problem homogenizing damage types. While Planetfall wasn't great about this (few or no games are) it more successfully differentiated between mechanical / biological or electrical / burning or armor melting / shield bypass mods. Here you'll rarely see an enemy (e.g. golem) making you consider your damage type.

 

Granted, my Noldorin playstyle skews my perception on several previous points: heavy on mana, range and food, light on production, melee and cash. That skew itself should count as a positive feature. Where individual units have lost some personality, "affinities" (i.e. classes) have gained some. Nothing says old elf magic quite like a march of the ents:

Sustainable tree-herding. Hippie catnip.

 

Combine Nature's stronger mana-dependent instant armies and visibility through all forests with Astral mana production and teleportation and you get a faction that might look weak but can telefrag an enemy's capital across the map while he's busy trying to shift the front line. Six affinities give a decent spread to mix-and-match, redundancy admitted.

 

Though dungeons are now somewhat disappointingly pared down (uniformly single-turn, two-step events) they've at least ditched the pointless all-purpose archeology skill and now not only check for your possession of a skill but incorporate your affinity level in an opposed check (and, visually, just for funsies, show your army composition):

 

Fear my horned god and bone wyvern mount and also guy #3!

So while the dungeoneering angle's currently underdeveloped, it definitely retains room to grow. (Hint-hint, Triumph. Hint-freakin'-hint.)

 

You'll also see small but meaningful steps forward in a number of side-details. I've been wanting to see terraforming worked back into these games since the original incarnation of Elemental: War of Magic (or more aptly since Alpha Centauri) and AoW4 makes a minimal effort of it, with some affinities recasting provinces to suit their terrain bonuses. (Nature gets a twofer: grasslands AND forests.)

Most healing spells now also give only temporary in-combat hit points, removing the tedium of entering combat just to heal your units and increasing attrition on longer forays away from your borders.

Those all-important combat terrain features match or improve upon Planetfall's showing, for instance with brush that can confer a ranged defense bonus and also be set on fire for a burning DoT, reminiscent of D:OS.

 

What can I conclude? I don't entirely agree with some of their design direction, but nonetheless can't deny AoW4 is an improved and fun mix of personizable strategy. And since I shilled out ninety bucks for an expansion pass you'd damn well better build on this shit, you tulip-munching swindlers!

 

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* I'd say more about the flavor texts and general mood now, but I'm saving it for a comparison with Sunless Sea, Fallout 2, KC:D, etc.

** I really think more games should be taking a page from Alpha Centauri, scaling the neutral faction's or environment's threat level all the way to existential along a campaign's length.