In the first six hours, on steam, there was a 47% positive rating, with 1600 votes. Now, at 5220 votes, it sits at 83%. To climb from 47 to 83 percent requires a 97% review rating over the last 3600 rates.
@@zhuzhuglory Maybe, probably. I wonder if so many people really bothered to change their vote though. Usually they really like/dislike something to leave a review. For me, I only left 1 review so far, due to a very bad game experience. Games that are okayish I didn't bother. Wonder how others approach to reviews on a game/product.
NOOOO!!!!! You're supposed to get brain overload. You're supposed to come across the most grueling AI ever (which this game fails to do, according to reviews... I don't know, never played it)! You're supposed to feel frustrated, angry, and sad! You're supposed to rage quit and cry after a few hours of playing because it's so hard! If people in Somalia don't have it easy, why should you?
As a 4x vet I like that this game supports a "tall empire" playstyle with 3 cities, and I like the map spawns tend to have natural choke points that can be held by outposts. I wish the game had more fantasy immersion though, such as more voice acting for the factions and world lore like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri had 25 years ago.
The problem is they threw out most of the lore. Basically, the last game ended with the shadow gate seals breaking, freeing the long-imprisoned wizard god-kings and the potent magic they used. The old major powers that used to be the crux of the conflicts- the commonwealth and the Elven council- basically don't exist anymore. Arguably, the commonwealth got the worst of it because the industrial magic they had isn't even in the game anymore. Heck, the wars between the summer and winter cults are also long gone as well. Frostling aren't even in the game- and Tigren have been changed to Felines. The main story traveling between worlds rather than everything occurring on a single continent. In previous games, races had clear strengths and weaknesses. Elves, for instance, were amazing with bows and good with magic, but took growth penalties and had a vulnerability to blight. Orks were almost complete trash with physical ranged attacks, and were vulnerable to magic, but were amazing in hand to hand combat. You'd have magic lores, and your lords would have classes- the two would determine non-racial specific unit types and abilities. Instead of racial units, now we have "cultural" units. Instead of having lores of magic, we now have tomes. Lord classes have been done away with entirely- most of the old class units have been tied to specific affinities instead. Though I've yet to see a lot of the old thief units- like succubi. Still trying everything out though. In some ways, I miss the old racial identities the game had. AoW4 is pretty good- but it feels like it's missing things compared to 3.
In a way, it's kind of like being reduced to six races- with two chosen bonuses and ten cosmetic options. To give you an idea why I have mixed feeling about the way things are now,..... Sundren of House Inioch is in AoW4. she was a protag in 3, her class was rogue, and basically depicted as good aligned (although you could make her evil if you wanted to). Now she has the high culture and nature affinity- because the old rogue skills are mostly not in the game, and the few that are, are tied to shadow.
@@zhshsG7 Honestly, going through the actual lore would take too long. What I had there was more like a brief reference to the third game. The actual lore involved the high king being assassinated- a civil war, a conspiracy made by an ancient shadow cult, a counter conspiracy which I don't even think is a thing anymore. A mad old wizard they creatively named "merlin". Racial prejudice, inequality, war over dropped hats, and assassinated prince's. more cult conspiracies and counter conspiracies. You get the idea.
Crashed once on day one, but that was it. Been enjoying it ever since. I'd like to see a few more changes though. Make it easier to select the unit on a tile for one.
I'm playing on ps5 and it crashes sometimes but the autosave saves even the battles, once it crashed in the middle of the combat and I was worried that I'd need to do it all over again, loaded the game - and it was saved in the last turn, which was a nice surprise. Compared to Wasteland 3 that I finished last week and that crashed almost every 15 minutes (especially towards the end), often right after the battle where I had to do it again, characters not moving etc., this is night and day.
my wants so far: - Limit tome numbers per match, so not all players can unlock all tomes which loses their uniqueness (maybe certain culture can unlock more) - Stealth play style/culture, certain units that has go into stealth ability once or twice per battle, and attack bonus from stealth - Probably revamp the whole body/mind/society traits attributes, currently they effects only a little on gameplay. (but maybe because i havent played enough yet)
Limit Tomes could be a mod added by players or a mode added by devs Stealth could be cool but it’s have to be balanced again discovering hidden (I know some traits already do this) Mind/Body/Society have *drastic* effects on how you play a faction, the heck you talking about?
It is my only minor complaint. I really liked carrying over my hero/wizard across multiple campaign maps. In age of wonders 1 i think you played over 20 maps with your set of leveled armies and heroes. Just started 5th scenario here.
@@hanli5416 well you still can do it if you mark your character as a ruler in the pantheon. I haven't played previous ones tho so I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for
I feel the most impressive part of the game for me, as a very long time AoW player...is just how dam good the UI is on launch. The new UI offers so much of the dense crunchy game mechanics and details in a very visually easy to understand way. I have introduced several people to it via remote play now and the ease at which they pick up the basic visual information is amazing. With few exceptions it may be the best 4x UI I have ever seen in almost every way.
@@Stoigniew666 no its not. it always depends on the price and the content. you can have a single dlc which is overpriced without content (for example season pass for diablo4) and you can have 10 dlc's that enhance the game and are worth every cent. to just judge on a number is stupid
@@Rastayeti666 No, it's not stupid. Paradox has an intentional policy to milk dumb consumers that see no problem in an atrocious behavior. I understand some DLCs, but for example EU4 has about 60 DLCs. 60 for Pete's sake! Just do the damn game whole and complete from day 1 like they did back in the day. Today it's all about greedy companies milking cash from guillible fools that do not understand that business should be ethical, it's not just about making money with absolutely no regards to ethics and simple human decency.
So far the game has just been decent for me. I keep feeling like there must be something that I am missing. I like that you can customize your race but I don't really "feel" any different after doing so. My evil characters don't feel evil. My good characters don't feel good. Just not getting the roleplay aspect out of it that I had hoped.
Personally I couldnt care less about the performance issues those will get fixed. Its the fact that the game was barely a shell of what it used to be that pissed me off and made me hate it outright, it turned one of my dream games into something I outright hate. They took every bad aspect from planetfall and added it here, the GOD-AWFUL minimap and the terrible zone control rather than free build that already isnt AoW so this is more Planetfall 2 than iut is an AoW game. Another major disappointment was the races, what is the damn point of having so many races if none of it matters and its customizable?? it takes away the entire race identity, screw customization they can give you that freedom for your wizard but to remove the whole race and make it open doesnt mean they gave you great choices it simply means you couldnt care less about the choice you made cus it doesnt matter. One thing I know Ill be a very small minority in is the graphics, I think they suck, it doesnt have nearly the same amount of detail 3 had and it sure as hell doesnt look as clear and HD, its grainy with terrible visuals you can barely tell apart. I know this is a rant that barely anyone will read and even less will agree with but I need to get it out my system how disappointing AoW 4 (or Planetfall 2) was every time I see even a single praise about it.
I really can mirror the guy whose review was shown around 01:00 minute in. I simply can't believe they taken like 10 years to essentially re-release AOW3 with slightly better graphics and yet still have essential missing stuff compared to third game (E.G., the item variety which is a joke or the map settings that, no matter which setting you chose, still only allows for spawning in each other's backyard) . I'm honestly immensely disappointed in what I consider to essentially be a semi-scam of a game. I can only imagine that most of the folks that rates it highly have just not played AOW3 and thus don't feel this disappointment of being fed old, crusty wine in new (inferior) bottles!!
They really need to add some kind of playing vs world. Such as end game crisis in stellaris. The world is so close to feeling alive and hostile but it lacks danger for that imo.
One could speculate, that the Eldritch add-on possibly brings something similar to the Invasions in Planetfall, as Eldritch monsters would be kind of suited for that.
Sometimes, I'd wish the game would crash just a bit more. My first CTD was really late into my session, at 4am. So I slept at 4am. If it had crashed more, or crashed earlier, I would've slept earlier that night. 6.5/10 needs more crashes to fix my sleep schedule.
I'll have to disagree with them "striking a balance" between customization and distinctiveness. They seem to have gone full on with customization. Any mind and body traits have minimal impact on the way you play compared to the choice of governance, sociatal traits and the starting tome. While the form has no impact. You can have a two identical races that play identically, but one looks like elves and the other looks like frogs. A lot has been lost, even if they give inherit stats, bonuses and maluses to forms. In prior entries to the franchise, races had their own distinctive units unique to them and cities had different aesthetics based on race even in AoW3. Which added the choice of class in addition to race. Each race had their own variant of units with their own aesthetic and different abilities and quirks. Don't get me wrong, it's a fun game, looks good, seems to have a lot of mechanical depth, but is the least Age of Wonders Age of Wonders game and I won't be playing it without the Forge Master mod.
I've been playing this game for 74 hours now and I want to play more and more. There are already mods and not only for new colors or icons, but also with new tomes of magic and even units. Looking forward to the release of dragons.
i never played a 4x game before, got EU4 but was lost with all the stuff it had, but i am loving AoW4 and i go to work thinking about what to run or what to do next and just can’t wait to play when i get home, it truly is an amazing game imo.
Having never played a 4x game before how would you say AOW4 is for a beginner? I’m thinking of buying this game but also never played a 4x game before.
EU4 is a completely different genre though. This is 4X like civilization combined with tactical rpg battle. EU4 is grand strategy like HoI or Victoria. Total War is 4X with RTS battles. From macro to micro EU4 focusses on the macro, Total War is in the middle, AoW is the micro focussing on the individual units.
@@Reqkuiem It is quite beginner friendly. Normal diff is lenient enough to let you make whatever build you want. And the battle AI for autoresolve is quite good and allows you to watch a fight. Thus you can learn by watching AI fighting and get a feeling of what works (and even be surprised by some moves) edit: and the UI is VERY user friendly: just hover the mouse over any term in a descritpion and you get the link to its description. Makes it easier to get what this effect does, what this condition does etc...
I put 88 hours into this game in the first week and then CK3 dropped their expansion and well I am playing CK3 right now but I will be back to AOW4. Its an amazing game and I love it but .... CK3 is my true love.
as someone who has played ck1, and then ck2 and then ck3, and who has "loved" it - i can comfortably say that this is like 10x better game than any of ck games, even if you count for their DLCs. now how much better will aow4 be with couple dlcs? and why is that? because in ck/eu there is simply NO DECISION MAKING. you always know which choice is best, game literally never forces you to make a choice other then which province are you gonna paint next.
Game play-wise yes But the races being cosmetic is a big let down. Regardless, the gameplay has so many improvements I will be playing this for a while.
@@marinribaric9749 while I'm a fanatical mod enthusiast, i think "there is a mod for that" is not the right excuse for something missing in the game. That's like saying cyberpunk had a great launch because modders released a unofficial patch for it.
@@roxstar5088 Not an excuse. But it is a bandaid for if you already have the game. A lot of what made races unique and flavourful is still missing. Even the returning characters and their default factions play completely differently.
I haven’t played an Age of Wonders game before and I’m really really hooked. So much so that I’m considering buying Planetfall once I’m burned out on this game, which don’t seem likely for at least another 100 hours.
The main issue ive had is the game crashing once or twice a day, but this is very common for complex coded games like these, it will eventually get better overtime as they get feedback from players, and start improving the efficiency of the code.
My my concern and the sole reason I've not bought the game yet is Paradox' DLC approach. I really can't justify buying 50 confusing DLCs I lose track of, like in EU4 which I just abandoned for this reason exactly. Does anyone know if we're going to see overwhelming number of small DLCs released for AoW4? Or are they more sensible in this regard?
Well, or rather you prefer battle passes, loot boxes or cash shops? I think the Paradox DLC model is very transparent and it doesnt prey on gamers. You just choose and buy to get what you want.
@@PhoonBucgeneMY That's an interesting point but I must say I don't agree with it at all. My point really is: I prefer is no battle passes, no loot boxes, no cash shops and not a myriad of DLCs. A release every now and then of a new major and balanced add-on or DLC yes, by all means. But not dozens of them released so frequently as there was no tomorrow.
I did have some annoying crashes every 15 to 30 turns at the start. After having this happen a couple of times, I turned the settings down one step from maximum and haven't had an issue since. I haven't turned it back up since the hot fix, but also haven't been upset about not being at the top of the settings. Game still runs fine and is fun, which is good enough for me.
I was one of those affected by the day 1 crashing, but the fix was out and working before the day was out. Performance could definitely be improved, but it's definitely very playable. The more I play it, the more I see the cracks showing, but the state of this game at launch is still so far and away stronger than anything I've come to expect from a genre so prone to trial and error release cycles, and that makes me so excited to see how far that goes since the foundations are so strong.
i think my only issue is that the multiplayer feels like an afterthought at least when i played it early on, not sure if there have been any updates to that
i think multiplayer is best in any strategy game i've played to date. when games go out of sync, everyone can reload back to game within just few seconds. it's simply amazing feature and i've not seen it anywhere else before.
I had some crashes on PC with my Gog Aow4. It only happened when I use the Gog Galaxy app. When I run aow4 direcly it works. Patches help out and so far no more crashes and playing the game almost daily 😊 looking forward to the all DLCs / Expansions.
Well I hope it gets the Stellaris Treatment with very long Support because for me the Game is amazing. Actually something that feels fresh but still familiar.
Age of Wonders 4. Where the Khajiit from Elder Scrolls can fight the Warsong Clan Orcs from Warcraft that are allied with Rohan from Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile the Skaven from Warhammer dominate (yes-yes!) the Castlevania Vampires from Nintendo. It`s a fun ride that game :)
in regards to strategy games not doing well on console in general; I feel part of this is due to how long it took for consoles to make the switch to using an SSD over the usual HDD. Their main issue has always been either navigating the UI (though more recent games have been getting better about this) and the performance dropping as the game moves on. Planetfall on PS4 I hear was an amazing experience....until the late game, where turns would start taking upwards to 6 minutes for a turn to get back to you, with turns being much faster if played on a PS5, but due to the port being designed with the PS4 in mind, late game turns still take a couple minutes, just not as horrendously long as on the PS4. As for Age of Wonders 4, I've currently only watched footage of both the PC and PS5 versions, but the only gripe I have with the PS5 version from what I've seen is that you have to hover over tile individually when expanding your city to see what improvements it can get, though I have no idea if that's just a setting you have to toggle.
It's decent, but I preferred planetfall to be honest. 4 has a lot of hard counters and really heavily encourages swarm, which makes manual battles tedious. They also didn't do a whole lot to make multiplayer more practical. The story realms are not great.
Fantastic game. Brings back memories of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and adds Civ and Humankind elements on top of that. Immersion is an issue though. I think they went too far with customizable racial traits and in a long game, you unlock so many tomes and racial transformations that the unique identity from the start gets kinda lost. Maybe restrict opposing affinities a bit more after the early game, make certain tomes unavailable or increase the research cost of opposing magic or make racial transformations scale in upkeep cost. However, it's too early to tell. Just my first impressions after finishing the story realms.
Yeah. Late game always feels as if I wasn't playing my own faction anymore. I don't necessarily want to transofrm my orcs into demons, or angels, or astral beings, etc. I also don't think that a horned God or other mightful mythical unit would fit their build And I could obviously just skip those tomes but then I lack power against my oponents.
I would have liked for the races to be more locked in to certain traits and playstyles. Not only would I have liked for fixed traits, but also race specific units and maybe blocking out certain tomes for certain races. As someone that tends to min-max I get the feeling once I really got to know the game and figuered out all the mechanics, I will gravitate toward a certain build, which would mean that every subsequent game would play out pretty same-ey. To cripple my powerlevel for immersion/roleplaying is not something I tend to do really, so I rather have different races that somewhat railroad me into certain playstyles. Also then there are more different builds and strategies to learn, which keeps the game interesting for longer.
For me, AoW3 with mods is still the better game in almost every aspect (especially tactical combat) and will be for quite a while. The only thing AoW3 needed that is in 4 is the ability to produce units and buildings at the same time, and the city sector/imperium system. Every other new innovation/mechanic (I hate the new race system, tomes, and the development tree) makes the franchise head further and further away from the fantasy tactical 4x game this franchise started out as and closer towards an automated optimal strategy empire-building game with Paradox big numbers and broken combos.
I think Realm modifiers are going to be a big part of adding more depth to this game going forward. Many of these challenge realms serve as "side quests" to the story realms, and some creative use of them going forward could give us a lot of ways to replay the game.
I had a few crashes. One game kept crashing at a specific point during the AI’s move on a certain turn. Not sure what it was, but I sent several auto bug reports. I hope they help. Haven’t had a major issue since and been playing the game like a maniac. Really enjoying the customization aspect, as you pointed out.
It plays awesome on my potato. RX580 (~gtx 1060) / Core i7-2600k. Out of the box it is making the fans go bonkers. Point was: settings to middle ground, no aa (ok on 2k res), to cap fps (i don't mind 30), and limit the gpu to -30 to -50% of what it can do. Sounds rough!- but: it still runs fluently, but now temperatures stay at 60-70 deg C now. And looks good.
at launch i couldn't even open the game before crashing but the devs worked it out fairly quickly in less than a day. the game has been out for less than two weeks and i got more than 100 hours in ... my only issue is that i don't have more time to play. the fact that almost every mechanic overlap means that the modding community (that are already churning out content) will make one of the best 4x.
Some balancing is still needed but I'm having a lot of fun with this game trying different cultures, tomes and realms. Looking forward to the different DLC's!
I've been enjoying the game a lot, BUT... I'm here taking a short break from my last game because it just crashed. Was not expecting the crash as my rig is way above min specs, but I see others are having issues too, so I hope they increase the stability. It's my favorite AoW game and I might grow to like it more than most other turn based strat games.
I was a bit hyped despite trying to keep the hype down. At first I was a bit disappointed that the combat system and the units are a regression compared to planetfall. But the game kept me coming back and I racked up like 70 hours or so within the first 2 weeks, so there's no denying that it is a great game.
I'm actually finding this much easier to get into then aow3. Not to say this game is easier but rather the way they have represented some things in the game mechanic wise makes more sense to me. The only exception being the fact I had to look up to to make a new city because I am used to using settlers for that (you use hero's instead by just moving around the map and commanding an outpost be built). Made perfect sense and felt a lot better once I read that though.
I found that in the later game souls become less of a problem once to have enough units doing battle per turn and some city buildings. There's a spell to make a target army drop more souls in battle too that's useful
I agree, as early on, especially, you're relying on non-undead troops. Even out to 3 cities I have only acquired one bone golem, and just researched necromancers. So far the majority of my army has been regular necrotic goblins.
I am constantly surprised by people saying undead are difficult I have 2 full stacks of 6 skeletons by like turn 10, then turned them all into Bone Golem and had them run around with my hero alongside his own stack and just wreck shit The hell is everyone else doing?
@Aron Shick How are you getting the 120 souls necessary for that many skeletons? At 2 per unit killed (before getting the spell that adds more, but that's a tier 2(?) tome), that's a lot of units to kill that quickly.
I've had zero performance issues since day 1 on my 6 yo titan card. Great game though. My favorite mod for Civ back in the day was the high fantasy one and this basically turns it into an entire game and perfected it. I only have 31 hours in it so far but will easily have hundreds over its DLC lifespan.
I had so many crashes when I first started, I almost cried. I have a mid-low tier gaming laptop that is two years old and has a built-in nVidia graphics card so I thought it was MY fault. I played around with the settings and still crashing in general; mid-battle, on launch, etc. then after the 1st hot fix, I crashed way less (but still crashed from time to time) and have been FAR more stable once the 2nd hot fix.
Well you’re cool this is my first 4x game and I am struggling on easy with the third story mission I feel like I shoot myself in the foot early on by mismanaging my economy
from what I've seen, the only things that difficulty determines is how strong neutral enemies start out as and provides bonus resources to the AI, it doesn't seem to actually change how the AI will play
@@KingQuatto and as he said he doesn't make the AI "smarter". It just give it more ressources (higher level heroes from the start with starting gear etc...)
I'm loving the customization of all the races. The standard race builds are still there, every time you start making a custom faction they start off with those standard build traits. In fact all there are standard factions that come with the expected traits for the races they represent. But with this, it keeps the meta and specific builds from being race specific.
Ever since last update and me updating my gpu drivers, I'm having a blast. Only complaint about the game is that AI are quite fast on brutal to start ending the game, so i never get to play around with high tier units which are the coolest ones. Maybe I'm lowering difficulty because of that but then, you know? Also advanced settings should have an option to have a huge world, i really like longer games.... i only played epic/maraton on civ 6. A game that last less than 12 hours is not even a game
I didn’t crash at launch, funnily enough, however I’ve crashed to desktop 3 times since the hot patch. Granted I’ve also had a lot more time to play since the patch.
I beat the 5 mission campaign once, and thus far haven’t gone back to it. It’s empire mechanics are definitely more involved then AoW3 or Planetfall, but the meat and potatoes of why I play AoW (the combat) is definitely not as deep as previous entries. Like sure, it’s no longer T3-T4 spam long games of AoW3 could revolve into, but now it’s either enchantment spam, summon spam (which even the devs have tried to fix repeatedly) or the easy Magic victory. Which the devs also had to patch because you could get that victory in less than 50 turns. Faster with certain builds. All this free form business makes things just matter so much less. What difference do any of the “races” matter when you can just build a bear a race so that your Orcs aren’t even Orcs anymore. They’re just a texture pack on a dummy. Why bother focusing on just Order tomes when you can dip into a little of everything? What point is there to “role play” a kind of faction when the games own mechanics directly contradict that? It’s really the biggest issue I have with the game. Its just really shallow and wants you to fill in all those blank areas.
I got to 100 hours in this game and I feel like I have my fill, it was far too expensive for what it was. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy it but I got close to feeling like I "solved" the game with each run I did. Going from failing my first game because the AI did a spell victory by turn 107 to winning every game after that only improving on the time each game took. The last one took 86 turns to beat 7 AI. I started to delve into the lower resource maps like deserts and desolate world and the game's pace slowed down drastically but still won, just closer to the turn limit. The biggest failure to me though was settling underground. I was amazed by how cool it felts settling underground and how it turned into a kind of exploring game as I didn't know how the map would look as I was fighting my way through. It just ended up being a 1 city challenge because the other 4 cities I founded were just wrong. Either the tile wouldn't let me place farms or there were just no resources around to do anything with the city. You'd find ruins but the area around it was useless. I think the underground needs an overhaul with what tile can do what because it was honestly shocking how "underground adaptation" didn't save how useless the underground felt. I get why the AI immediately settles above ground now if they have that start. One thing that repeatedly bugs me too is how the AI seems to just decide it wants to settle in an area and no matter how much you block that area, once it decides it wants to settle there there isn't anything you can do to stop it. I spent 10 minutes reloading and blocking off different tiles to prevent this AI from settling in the middle of my 3 cities and it just insisted that an outpost was going there and there wasn't anything I could do to stop it. If I didn't block it also, it was going to snake to block my newest city off from the others. Oh, and there seems to be a bug that really doesn't like it when you can unlock multiple spells in a row. My game would freeze up for a solid 10-15 seconds as I pick one spell and reliably freeze up again after picking another. Not until the last spell that I won't instantly unlock will it not freeze the game.
It's a game that lets me say "My stone and steel infused mole people were attacked by demonic rats wreathed with lightning and fire, so I decided to call upon the power of god and turn my people into angels before becoming said god and turning my moles to gold".... You're damn right it was worth the hype for that sentence alone
They focused in the concept of creating your own story, with your own race (or a prefab one), just like Humankind. I loved the freedom do build whatever i wanted and play anyway i chose, even if I want to change my playstyle in the middle of a match, the game allows it!
I had a couple of crashes when using Alt+Tab, none resulted in lost of progress. We shouldn't get used to buggy releases, but comparatively speaking the game felt stable.
3070 GPU, sure I was crashing and somewhat often. However, this did not stop me enjoying the game and I and glad to report is happening way less now, though still crashes now and again. Game is great though, really enjoying it.
Worth it. Lots of promising new mechanics. Now it is up to balancing, quality of the DLCs and modding support. Just like how civ6 and humankind were not that good but promising when coming out. Mods and DLCs shaped them afterwards.
Thing is I have fun with AoW4, but at the moment I think Planetfall is still slighty better. Though admittedly that is because Xenoplague was my favorite tech and Kirko my favorite Faction. (God I hope the Kirko return in AoW4. The Xenoplague or something like it would also be a nice addition since it was a very unique tech in planetfall that was very different from all the others and Plague techs are often ignored in a lot of games.
AoW4 for me has been like playing a game like Warcraft 3 only turn based. It's fast-paced for a 4x game so usually by turn 20-30 I know if I f** up my build order and can just start again. It's not as complex as a game like Stellaris but in exchange it has an engaging combat system that can actually let you win otherwise impossible fights, especially against camps and neutral cities.
Paradox doesnt use battle passes, loot boxes or cash shops. They have the most ethical monetization practice in the industry. Yes its daunting when you open a game on steam and see 600 dollars of DLC. But thats literally a decade + of paradox supporting their games and making content so long as the game has a user base to keep playing it.
the Story Realm is count as campaign right? it has narrative story and voice acting and all after all. idk how many bcs i just played until the story realm 3 but its quite enjoyable for me. the only problem is that i can already see the monetization of DLC like other paradox titles such as CK or stelaris, i can see character clothing items as DLC lol
i just cant wait for the mods . gonna learn to create mods myself and create some as well. the only gripe i have is that i think i need a harder difficulty as i'm dominating the game in conquest victory right now at the hardest , maybe more unit allowance for battles (like they summon a random unit of each tier they have in the army at the start of battle to make a total of 3 more units at max) for the NPCs or more buffs to them at harder difficulty ?
Framerate on Series X needs a fix. Its stutters in performance mode. Other than that im having fun but funding the game a little barebones right now. Outside of story realms and the pre-gen realms (some/all? Have unique quests and wincons). Im finding nearly every game i start with create a faction plays similarly and im gettinb a tad bored.
I have an RTX 2070 with factory OC (cuz 3080 was new when I made my last purchase and cost as much as a small car (yes I know that's changed).) Never once had a crash since day one. Granted I only have 45 hours in it.
Honestly I had a AoW4 overdose the first few days. Now I'll pause a bit. I really wish an option to choose your enemies in border to set up the game you want. Having so many customation options in the game it's weird that there isn't the option to set up te enemies
The first person giving a negative review in the video, claiming : "How this game can be such a step back [...]. The game is just AoW3 [...] with no innovation or improvement." He really did not play in depth with the AoW games series, or at least, he doesn't give any attention to the gameplay and ergonomic issues we could meet in game. But I guess some people favor the diversity in races, with different passives or units, wich may lack in the current version of AoW4. However, in term of gameplay ergonomic and solving problematic winning strategies, the AoW game series never stopped evolving and that's one of the reason I love this game series. When in AoW1, you couldn't create and evolve cities. When physical immunity exist. When magic was extremely limited. When building a ram and moving it very slowly to the ennemy city was necessary (or abusing throwing rock units). When the Leader was the most OP unit that ever existed in the AoW series. When units could hit always 2 times whatever the distance they moved or ranged units had to not move at all in order to shot, or units being able to riposte an infinite amount of time. When in AoW2, you could craft your own item hero and then roll over the whole campaign. When enchants were still not ergonomic to use with the many debuffes, but awefully strong. When you had to constantly fight AI scouts that take your nodes. When flying units were still unreachable by ground units and could block ways. When you could already shred the whole ennemy army at defending your city at turn 1. When fights were still pretty random in term of hits, while back attack and defense mode didn't exist. When in AoW3, enchants no longer exist for a while (or only work in fight with solo targeting), but instead, you had to level up your units in order to have an unkillable strong army. When healing units was mendatory in order to farm all nodes the fastest way possible without losing any unit so that at the end, we have this elite army. When rushing and spamming tier 3/4 units was (in 95% of cases) the only effective strategy until now because tier 1/2 units becomes irrelevent very fast, because the power gap was high while it was easy to rush tier 3 units. When city and study management was cluncky with no compensation whereas it just lack some production or study points to finish something, or everytime the city get much more nodes at range when the city domain increase. When doing very specific building in a specific order in the first turns was mendatory to have the most advantage possible afterward. When it wasn't possible to build structures and units at the same time. When you could lose your city or strategic point in an instant because your units are a bit too far. When you needed to move your packs sticking them in a triangle in order to not be attacked while not having all armies available, same with attacking nodes, which you need to encircle Of course, I don't think I resumed every points above (and it's already huge) while some of the points listed above might be a funny thing and a reason of why we loved those game and why we could think that those thing disapearing is a step back. But at the end, the strategy, game ergonomy and counter play is favorised.
Shadow is the only one on the weaker side. Clearly chaos/nature is stronger for snowballing. But you can defeat brutal with astral/materium. Order can be OP just because of the imperium income that allows you to spam tier4-5. A lot of balancing to be done if you want the game to be esport, but otherwise nothing is compelling you to only play nature/chaos against AI.
Bought it yesterday already sunk almost 20 hours into it, not a single crash, but then I have a crappy 1050ti not a high end 3080ti and upwards. So err sucks to be run high end hardware I guess.
I play on Xbox and had never played any age of wonders titles before. Wasn’t following the hype and just stumbled upon it organically. Maybe it’s just because I’m new to this kind of game but this game is really blowing me away with its expressive capabilities and fun factor. Not to mention the easy to learn impossible to master strategy that just sucks you into deep thought. I love it! -lol I typed too much😂
Mid game is a bit boring. I hate hate hate having an underground as well. The production and province system seems kind of ambiguous and lacking direction outside of boost bonuses
Had one crash in 140 hours of play and I'm not running the most impressive rig. i7, GTX 1060, 16 RAM. So I'm one of the lucky players with a sunny run of the game.
What annoys me about these types of games is this: I spend 4-5 hours conquering & exploring only to find that the AI comes with 5 other heroes and conquers my castles one by one. Wtf am I supposed to do? create an army on each castle? I can't because I'm limited by the game's cap's. It's really frustrating
Build an outposts at key points on the map, on the path you are conquering and build a teleporter in them. If the Ai attacks your castles on the other side of the map, just teleport your army back.
I have had no issues with the game except for one turn getting stuck on an ai in one of my matches but I just reloaded to the previous save and the issue was resolved.
![СТОИТ ЛИ ИГРАТЬ В AGE OF WONDERS 4 В 2024 ПОСЛЕ ВЫХОДА ВСЕХ DLC [by Papa Kwazi]](/img/n.gif)
In the first six hours, on steam, there was a 47% positive rating, with 1600 votes. Now, at 5220 votes, it sits at 83%. To climb from 47 to 83 percent requires a 97% review rating over the last 3600 rates.
Science b*tch!
Insane, first time I checked I saw 52% but then it skyrocketed and I decided to give it a shot. Really good game, I would give it a high 8 or low 9.
That means, there's a huge amount of bots voting :D
@@onedayiwillbegone2366 It's also possible some people that voted negative immediately at launch changed their review after it was patched
@@zhuzhuglory Maybe, probably. I wonder if so many people really bothered to change their vote though. Usually they really like/dislike something to leave a review.
For me, I only left 1 review so far, due to a very bad game experience. Games that are okayish I didn't bother. Wonder how others approach to reviews on a game/product.
I honestly prefer this than most other 4x games cause I don't get brain overload and still feel very much satisfied doing my own plays and builds
I loved the Civilisation series but Civ 6 was just to much
NOOOO!!!!! You're supposed to get brain overload. You're supposed to come across the most grueling AI ever (which this game fails to do, according to reviews... I don't know, never played it)! You're supposed to feel frustrated, angry, and sad! You're supposed to rage quit and cry after a few hours of playing because it's so hard!
If people in Somalia don't have it easy, why should you?
As a 4x vet I like that this game supports a "tall empire" playstyle with 3 cities, and I like the map spawns tend to have natural choke points that can be held by outposts. I wish the game had more fantasy immersion though, such as more voice acting for the factions and world lore like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri had 25 years ago.
The problem is they threw out most of the lore.
Basically, the last game ended with the shadow gate seals breaking, freeing the long-imprisoned wizard god-kings and the potent magic they used. The old major powers that used to be the crux of the conflicts- the commonwealth and the Elven council- basically don't exist anymore. Arguably, the commonwealth got the worst of it because the industrial magic they had isn't even in the game anymore.
Heck, the wars between the summer and winter cults are also long gone as well. Frostling aren't even in the game- and Tigren have been changed to Felines. The main story traveling between worlds rather than everything occurring on a single continent.
In previous games, races had clear strengths and weaknesses. Elves, for instance, were amazing with bows and good with magic, but took growth penalties and had a vulnerability to blight. Orks were almost complete trash with physical ranged attacks, and were vulnerable to magic, but were amazing in hand to hand combat. You'd have magic lores, and your lords would have classes- the two would determine non-racial specific unit types and abilities.
Instead of racial units, now we have "cultural" units. Instead of having lores of magic, we now have tomes. Lord classes have been done away with entirely- most of the old class units have been tied to specific affinities instead. Though I've yet to see a lot of the old thief units- like succubi. Still trying everything out though.
In some ways, I miss the old racial identities the game had. AoW4 is pretty good- but it feels like it's missing things compared to 3.
In a way, it's kind of like being reduced to six races- with two chosen bonuses and ten cosmetic options.
To give you an idea why I have mixed feeling about the way things are now,..... Sundren of House Inioch is in AoW4. she was a protag in 3, her class was rogue, and basically depicted as good aligned (although you could make her evil if you wanted to).
Now she has the high culture and nature affinity- because the old rogue skills are mostly not in the game, and the few that are, are tied to shadow.
How did you remember that... yeah that was some great lore.
@@zhshsG7 Honestly, going through the actual lore would take too long. What I had there was more like a brief reference to the third game.
The actual lore involved the high king being assassinated- a civil war, a conspiracy made by an ancient shadow cult, a counter conspiracy which I don't even think is a thing anymore. A mad old wizard they creatively named "merlin".
Racial prejudice, inequality, war over dropped hats, and assassinated prince's. more cult conspiracies and counter conspiracies.
You get the idea.
you can increase the city cap with imperium
Looking back about 16 months later, AoW4 was the last great release of Paradox. Triumph Studios keeping Paradox' reputation high, amazing.
Totally
Crashed once on day one, but that was it. Been enjoying it ever since. I'd like to see a few more changes though. Make it easier to select the unit on a tile for one.
This is my single biggest ask.
Yes
OMG YES. Shit gets annoying sometimes lol
I'm playing on ps5 and it crashes sometimes but the autosave saves even the battles, once it crashed in the middle of the combat and I was worried that I'd need to do it all over again, loaded the game - and it was saved in the last turn, which was a nice surprise. Compared to Wasteland 3 that I finished last week and that crashed almost every 15 minutes (especially towards the end), often right after the battle where I had to do it again, characters not moving etc., this is night and day.
my wants so far:
- Limit tome numbers per match, so not all players can unlock all tomes which loses their uniqueness (maybe certain culture can unlock more)
- Stealth play style/culture, certain units that has go into stealth ability once or twice per battle, and attack bonus from stealth
- Probably revamp the whole body/mind/society traits attributes, currently they effects only a little on gameplay. (but maybe because i havent played enough yet)
But, so far i love the game, have been playing non stop from release lol
I want multiplayer to not crash on linux. Amazing game. Would like to see your additions too once I can play with my friends.
Limit Tomes could be a mod added by players or a mode added by devs
Stealth could be cool but it’s have to be balanced again discovering hidden (I know some traits already do this)
Mind/Body/Society have *drastic* effects on how you play a faction, the heck you talking about?
@@Jabberwokee mind/body/soc - i dunno, in the end, spam units, spam attack, kind of thingy... maybe coz of the unlimited tome effects
@@EveloGrave it is working for me on linux now. I hope issues resolve for you as well!
Yes, it is worth the hype.
Short Answer: Yes. Easily one of the best games of the year.
Im currently working thru the story. Im definitely having a blast. I know the campaign isnt like the past but i like the story so far
I just finished the 3rd story scenario.
It is my only minor complaint. I really liked carrying over my hero/wizard across multiple campaign maps. In age of wonders 1 i think you played over 20 maps with your set of leveled armies and heroes.
Just started 5th scenario here.
Does it really have a focused story? I'm about to start the first tutorial map. Been planning my faction all this time
@@hanli5416 well you still can do it if you mark your character as a ruler in the pantheon. I haven't played previous ones tho so I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for
Based on the selection screen I only saw one story map.
I feel the most impressive part of the game for me, as a very long time AoW player...is just how dam good the UI is on launch.
The new UI offers so much of the dense crunchy game mechanics and details in a very visually easy to understand way. I have introduced several people to it via remote play now and the ease at which they pick up the basic visual information is amazing. With few exceptions it may be the best 4x UI I have ever seen in almost every way.
triumph has a history of great support and totally worth dlc's. I have no doubt AOW4 will getting better and better over time
And with paradox being the publisher I’m sure a heavy load of DLC will be coming
@@shadowear1991 planetfall sadly only had 3
@@Rastayeti666 Very good that it was only 3. This 60+ DLC policy is atrocious and immoral
@@Stoigniew666 no its not. it always depends on the price and the content. you can have a single dlc which is overpriced without content (for example season pass for diablo4) and you can have 10 dlc's that enhance the game and are worth every cent. to just judge on a number is stupid
@@Rastayeti666 No, it's not stupid. Paradox has an intentional policy to milk dumb consumers that see no problem in an atrocious behavior. I understand some DLCs, but for example EU4 has about 60 DLCs. 60 for Pete's sake!
Just do the damn game whole and complete from day 1 like they did back in the day. Today it's all about greedy companies milking cash from guillible fools that do not understand that business should be ethical, it's not just about making money with absolutely no regards to ethics and simple human decency.
So far the game has just been decent for me. I keep feeling like there must be something that I am missing. I like that you can customize your race but I don't really "feel" any different after doing so. My evil characters don't feel evil. My good characters don't feel good. Just not getting the roleplay aspect out of it that I had hoped.
Personally I couldnt care less about the performance issues those will get fixed. Its the fact that the game was barely a shell of what it used to be that pissed me off and made me hate it outright, it turned one of my dream games into something I outright hate. They took every bad aspect from planetfall and added it here, the GOD-AWFUL minimap and the terrible zone control rather than free build that already isnt AoW so this is more Planetfall 2 than iut is an AoW game. Another major disappointment was the races, what is the damn point of having so many races if none of it matters and its customizable?? it takes away the entire race identity, screw customization they can give you that freedom for your wizard but to remove the whole race and make it open doesnt mean they gave you great choices it simply means you couldnt care less about the choice you made cus it doesnt matter. One thing I know Ill be a very small minority in is the graphics, I think they suck, it doesnt have nearly the same amount of detail 3 had and it sure as hell doesnt look as clear and HD, its grainy with terrible visuals you can barely tell apart. I know this is a rant that barely anyone will read and even less will agree with but I need to get it out my system how disappointing AoW 4 (or Planetfall 2) was every time I see even a single praise about it.
you complain about having more freedom in customization :v
I really can mirror the guy whose review was shown around 01:00 minute in.
I simply can't believe they taken like 10 years to essentially re-release AOW3 with slightly better graphics and yet still have essential missing stuff compared to third game (E.G., the item variety which is a joke or the map settings that, no matter which setting you chose, still only allows for spawning in each other's backyard) .
I'm honestly immensely disappointed in what I consider to essentially be a semi-scam of a game.
I can only imagine that most of the folks that rates it highly have just not played AOW3 and thus don't feel this disappointment of being fed old, crusty wine in new (inferior) bottles!!
They really need to add some kind of playing vs world. Such as end game crisis in stellaris. The world is so close to feeling alive and hostile but it lacks danger for that imo.
Well this game is pure sandbox compared to older titles. The only thing that stays is the pantheon stuff and custom factions made.
One could speculate, that the Eldritch add-on possibly brings something similar to the Invasions in Planetfall, as Eldritch monsters would be kind of suited for that.
@@lizardemperorkorbac4281 that would be sick. An increasingly difficult eldricht invasion of the world.
when yoou go for magic victory, your seed, root and heart buildings will get invaded by 2NPC army stacks (on normal difficulty) every turn.
Sometimes, I'd wish the game would crash just a bit more. My first CTD was really late into my session, at 4am. So I slept at 4am. If it had crashed more, or crashed earlier, I would've slept earlier that night. 6.5/10 needs more crashes to fix my sleep schedule.
performance issues slowly getting better, would enjoy some more frame stability on the empire and world selection screens
I'll have to disagree with them "striking a balance" between customization and distinctiveness. They seem to have gone full on with customization. Any mind and body traits have minimal impact on the way you play compared to the choice of governance, sociatal traits and the starting tome. While the form has no impact. You can have a two identical races that play identically, but one looks like elves and the other looks like frogs.
A lot has been lost, even if they give inherit stats, bonuses and maluses to forms. In prior entries to the franchise, races had their own distinctive units unique to them and cities had different aesthetics based on race even in AoW3. Which added the choice of class in addition to race. Each race had their own variant of units with their own aesthetic and different abilities and quirks.
Don't get me wrong, it's a fun game, looks good, seems to have a lot of mechanical depth, but is the least Age of Wonders Age of Wonders game and I won't be playing it without the Forge Master mod.
I agree, races are just flavour and it sucks. Planet fall is still superior
I've been playing this game for 74 hours now and I want to play more and more. There are already mods and not only for new colors or icons, but also with new tomes of magic and even units. Looking forward to the release of dragons.
i never played a 4x game before, got EU4 but was lost with all the stuff it had, but i am loving AoW4 and i go to work thinking about what to run or what to do next and just can’t wait to play when i get home, it truly is an amazing game imo.
Having never played a 4x game before how would you say AOW4 is for a beginner? I’m thinking of buying this game but also never played a 4x game before.
EU4 is a completely different genre though. This is 4X like civilization combined with tactical rpg battle. EU4 is grand strategy like HoI or Victoria. Total War is 4X with RTS battles.
From macro to micro EU4 focusses on the macro, Total War is in the middle, AoW is the micro focussing on the individual units.
@@Reqkuiem It is quite beginner friendly. Normal diff is lenient enough to let you make whatever build you want.
And the battle AI for autoresolve is quite good and allows you to watch a fight. Thus you can learn by watching AI fighting and get a feeling of what works (and even be surprised by some moves)
edit: and the UI is VERY user friendly: just hover the mouse over any term in a descritpion and you get the link to its description. Makes it easier to get what this effect does, what this condition does etc...
This wasn't hyped Enough! This is the 4x game that will win over people to the genre.
I put 88 hours into this game in the first week and then CK3 dropped their expansion and well I am playing CK3 right now but I will be back to AOW4. Its an amazing game and I love it but .... CK3 is my true love.
as someone who has played ck1, and then ck2 and then ck3, and who has "loved" it - i can comfortably say that this is like 10x better game than any of ck games, even if you count for their DLCs. now how much better will aow4 be with couple dlcs? and why is that? because in ck/eu there is simply NO DECISION MAKING. you always know which choice is best, game literally never forces you to make a choice other then which province are you gonna paint next.
wow. 88hrs would be like playing the game like a full time job + overtime for 1 whole week
Game play-wise yes
But the races being cosmetic is a big let down. Regardless, the gameplay has so many improvements I will be playing this for a while.
I'd recommend the Forge Master mod. Gives stats to forms, adds resources, unit equipment and quite a few interesting things.
@@marinribaric9749 Nice, I'll check it out. I don't mind the lack of stats, but I would like more variety in the weapons and armor designs.
@@marinribaric9749 while I'm a fanatical mod enthusiast, i think "there is a mod for that" is not the right excuse for something missing in the game. That's like saying cyberpunk had a great launch because modders released a unofficial patch for it.
@@Drago5899 well, the stats do make races less "just cosmetic"
@@roxstar5088 Not an excuse. But it is a bandaid for if you already have the game. A lot of what made races unique and flavourful is still missing. Even the returning characters and their default factions play completely differently.
I haven’t played an Age of Wonders game before and I’m really really hooked. So much so that I’m considering buying Planetfall once I’m burned out on this game, which don’t seem likely for at least another 100 hours.
100 hours is nothing in an AoW game. 😉
The main issue ive had is the game crashing once or twice a day, but this is very common for complex coded games like these, it will eventually get better overtime as they get feedback from players, and start improving the efficiency of the code.
My my concern and the sole reason I've not bought the game yet is Paradox' DLC approach. I really can't justify buying 50 confusing DLCs I lose track of, like in EU4 which I just abandoned for this reason exactly. Does anyone know if we're going to see overwhelming number of small DLCs released for AoW4? Or are they more sensible in this regard?
each for 20 - 30$...
@@ChRW123 It's totally mad isn't it.
Well, or rather you prefer battle passes, loot boxes or cash shops? I think the Paradox DLC model is very transparent and it doesnt prey on gamers. You just choose and buy to get what you want.
@@PhoonBucgeneMY That's an interesting point but I must say I don't agree with it at all. My point really is: I prefer is no battle passes, no loot boxes, no cash shops and not a myriad of DLCs. A release every now and then of a new major and balanced add-on or DLC yes, by all means. But not dozens of them released so frequently as there was no tomorrow.
@@HexForgerthey have already planned the doc for next one year. What do u think about them? It looks fine for me. One year 4 dlc pack.
I did have some annoying crashes every 15 to 30 turns at the start. After having this happen a couple of times, I turned the settings down one step from maximum and haven't had an issue since. I haven't turned it back up since the hot fix, but also haven't been upset about not being at the top of the settings. Game still runs fine and is fun, which is good enough for me.
I was one of those affected by the day 1 crashing, but the fix was out and working before the day was out. Performance could definitely be improved, but it's definitely very playable.
The more I play it, the more I see the cracks showing, but the state of this game at launch is still so far and away stronger than anything I've come to expect from a genre so prone to trial and error release cycles, and that makes me so excited to see how far that goes since the foundations are so strong.
The game's biggest weakness is the lack of awesome music like age of wonders planet fall. I only like and remember one song in this game.
i think my only issue is that the multiplayer feels like an afterthought at least when i played it early on, not sure if there have been any updates to that
i think multiplayer is best in any strategy game i've played to date. when games go out of sync, everyone can reload back to game within just few seconds. it's simply amazing feature and i've not seen it anywhere else before.
I had some crashes on PC with my Gog Aow4. It only happened when I use the Gog Galaxy app. When I run aow4 direcly it works. Patches help out and so far no more crashes and playing the game almost daily 😊 looking forward to the all DLCs / Expansions.
Well I hope it gets the Stellaris Treatment with very long Support because for me the Game is amazing. Actually something that feels fresh but still familiar.
Age of Wonders 4. Where the Khajiit from Elder Scrolls can fight the Warsong Clan Orcs from Warcraft that are allied with Rohan from Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile the Skaven from Warhammer dominate (yes-yes!) the Castlevania Vampires from Nintendo. It`s a fun ride that game :)
in regards to strategy games not doing well on console in general; I feel part of this is due to how long it took for consoles to make the switch to using an SSD over the usual HDD. Their main issue has always been either navigating the UI (though more recent games have been getting better about this) and the performance dropping as the game moves on. Planetfall on PS4 I hear was an amazing experience....until the late game, where turns would start taking upwards to 6 minutes for a turn to get back to you, with turns being much faster if played on a PS5, but due to the port being designed with the PS4 in mind, late game turns still take a couple minutes, just not as horrendously long as on the PS4.
As for Age of Wonders 4, I've currently only watched footage of both the PC and PS5 versions, but the only gripe I have with the PS5 version from what I've seen is that you have to hover over tile individually when expanding your city to see what improvements it can get, though I have no idea if that's just a setting you have to toggle.
It's decent, but I preferred planetfall to be honest. 4 has a lot of hard counters and really heavily encourages swarm, which makes manual battles tedious. They also didn't do a whole lot to make multiplayer more practical. The story realms are not great.
what hype? This was hardly covered by most mainstream media. I didn't even know it was in prouction.
Fantastic game. Brings back memories of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and adds Civ and Humankind elements on top of that.
Immersion is an issue though. I think they went too far with customizable racial traits and in a long game, you unlock so many tomes and racial transformations that the unique identity from the start gets kinda lost.
Maybe restrict opposing affinities a bit more after the early game, make certain tomes unavailable or increase the research cost of opposing magic or make racial transformations scale in upkeep cost.
However, it's too early to tell. Just my first impressions after finishing the story realms.
Yeah. Late game always feels as if I wasn't playing my own faction anymore.
I don't necessarily want to transofrm my orcs into demons, or angels, or astral beings, etc.
I also don't think that a horned God or other mightful mythical unit would fit their build
And I could obviously just skip those tomes but then I lack power against my oponents.
I would have liked for the races to be more locked in to certain traits and playstyles.
Not only would I have liked for fixed traits, but also race specific units and maybe blocking out certain tomes for certain races.
As someone that tends to min-max I get the feeling once I really got to know the game and figuered out all the mechanics, I will gravitate toward a certain build, which would mean that every subsequent game would play out pretty same-ey.
To cripple my powerlevel for immersion/roleplaying is not something I tend to do really, so I rather have different races that somewhat railroad me into certain playstyles.
Also then there are more different builds and strategies to learn, which keeps the game interesting for longer.
It's an instat classic to me, you can really do all kinds of races, from your standard fantasy, to something more exotic.
For me, AoW3 with mods is still the better game in almost every aspect (especially tactical combat) and will be for quite a while.
The only thing AoW3 needed that is in 4 is the ability to produce units and buildings at the same time, and the city sector/imperium system.
Every other new innovation/mechanic (I hate the new race system, tomes, and the development tree) makes the franchise head further and further away from the fantasy tactical 4x game this franchise started out as and closer towards an automated optimal strategy empire-building game with Paradox big numbers and broken combos.
I think Realm modifiers are going to be a big part of adding more depth to this game going forward. Many of these challenge realms serve as "side quests" to the story realms, and some creative use of them going forward could give us a lot of ways to replay the game.
One of the best games ive played in the last few years, and its my first aow game and 1st 4x ganme lol. Really reminds and gives me heroes vibe
I bought the game day 1 or 2 and I haven't encountered any performance issues what so ever, so for me its been smooth sailing since launch.
I had a few crashes. One game kept crashing at a specific point during the AI’s move on a certain turn. Not sure what it was, but I sent several auto bug reports. I hope they help. Haven’t had a major issue since and been playing the game like a maniac. Really enjoying the customization aspect, as you pointed out.
It plays awesome on my potato. RX580 (~gtx 1060) / Core i7-2600k.
Out of the box it is making the fans go bonkers. Point was: settings to middle ground, no aa (ok on 2k res), to cap fps (i don't mind 30), and limit the gpu to -30 to -50% of what it can do.
Sounds rough!- but: it still runs fluently, but now temperatures stay at 60-70 deg C now. And looks good.
As my first 4x game I am in love
at launch i couldn't even open the game before crashing but the devs worked it out fairly quickly in less than a day. the game has been out for less than two weeks and i got more than 100 hours in ... my only issue is that i don't have more time to play. the fact that almost every mechanic overlap means that the modding community (that are already churning out content) will make one of the best 4x.
Some balancing is still needed but I'm having a lot of fun with this game trying different cultures, tomes and realms. Looking forward to the different DLC's!
I've been enjoying the game a lot, BUT... I'm here taking a short break from my last game because it just crashed. Was not expecting the crash as my rig is way above min specs, but I see others are having issues too, so I hope they increase the stability. It's my favorite AoW game and I might grow to like it more than most other turn based strat games.
I was a bit hyped despite trying to keep the hype down.
At first I was a bit disappointed that the combat system and the units are a regression compared to planetfall.
But the game kept me coming back and I racked up like 70 hours or so within the first 2 weeks, so there's no denying that it is a great game.
I'm actually finding this much easier to get into then aow3. Not to say this game is easier but rather the way they have represented some things in the game mechanic wise makes more sense to me. The only exception being the fact I had to look up to to make a new city because I am used to using settlers for that (you use hero's instead by just moving around the map and commanding an outpost be built). Made perfect sense and felt a lot better once I read that though.
I hope they overhaul the undead tree. I've tried to play as them twice and both time the souls mechanic has been a chore
Soul Wells should provide a lot more souls, and upkeep for units should just be 1 soul and nothing, if thats not the case already.
I found that in the later game souls become less of a problem once to have enough units doing battle per turn and some city buildings. There's a spell to make a target army drop more souls in battle too that's useful
I agree, as early on, especially, you're relying on non-undead troops. Even out to 3 cities I have only acquired one bone golem, and just researched necromancers. So far the majority of my army has been regular necrotic goblins.
I am constantly surprised by people saying undead are difficult
I have 2 full stacks of 6 skeletons by like turn 10, then turned them all into Bone Golem and had them run around with my hero alongside his own stack and just wreck shit
The hell is everyone else doing?
@Aron Shick How are you getting the 120 souls necessary for that many skeletons? At 2 per unit killed (before getting the spell that adds more, but that's a tier 2(?) tome), that's a lot of units to kill that quickly.
I've had zero performance issues since day 1 on my 6 yo titan card. Great game though. My favorite mod for Civ back in the day was the high fantasy one and this basically turns it into an entire game and perfected it. I only have 31 hours in it so far but will easily have hundreds over its DLC lifespan.
I had so many crashes when I first started, I almost cried. I have a mid-low tier gaming laptop that is two years old and has a built-in nVidia graphics card so I thought it was MY fault. I played around with the settings and still crashing in general; mid-battle, on launch, etc. then after the 1st hot fix, I crashed way less (but still crashed from time to time) and have been FAR more stable once the 2nd hot fix.
They need a 3rd built in trait for the physical form , plus a list of other things the Ai is way too easy even on brutal
Well you’re cool this is my first 4x game and I am struggling on easy with the third story mission I feel like I shoot myself in the foot early on by mismanaging my economy
from what I've seen, the only things that difficulty determines is how strong neutral enemies start out as and provides bonus resources to the AI, it doesn't seem to actually change how the AI will play
@@Vexal50 you can change the ai difficulty of the other leaders
@@KingQuatto and as he said he doesn't make the AI "smarter". It just give it more ressources (higher level heroes from the start with starting gear etc...)
@@etienne8110 no he said difficulty not player ai difficulty so they might change
I'm loving the customization of all the races. The standard race builds are still there, every time you start making a custom faction they start off with those standard build traits. In fact all there are standard factions that come with the expected traits for the races they represent. But with this, it keeps the meta and specific builds from being race specific.
Ever since last update and me updating my gpu drivers, I'm having a blast. Only complaint about the game is that AI are quite fast on brutal to start ending the game, so i never get to play around with high tier units which are the coolest ones. Maybe I'm lowering difficulty because of that but then, you know? Also advanced settings should have an option to have a huge world, i really like longer games.... i only played epic/maraton on civ 6. A game that last less than 12 hours is not even a game
I didn’t crash at launch, funnily enough, however I’ve crashed to desktop 3 times since the hot patch. Granted I’ve also had a lot more time to play since the patch.
I beat the 5 mission campaign once, and thus far haven’t gone back to it. It’s empire mechanics are definitely more involved then AoW3 or Planetfall, but the meat and potatoes of why I play AoW (the combat) is definitely not as deep as previous entries.
Like sure, it’s no longer T3-T4 spam long games of AoW3 could revolve into, but now it’s either enchantment spam, summon spam (which even the devs have tried to fix repeatedly) or the easy Magic victory. Which the devs also had to patch because you could get that victory in less than 50 turns. Faster with certain builds.
All this free form business makes things just matter so much less. What difference do any of the “races” matter when you can just build a bear a race so that your Orcs aren’t even Orcs anymore. They’re just a texture pack on a dummy. Why bother focusing on just Order tomes when you can dip into a little of everything? What point is there to “role play” a kind of faction when the games own mechanics directly contradict that?
It’s really the biggest issue I have with the game. Its just really shallow and wants you to fill in all those blank areas.
I got to 100 hours in this game and I feel like I have my fill, it was far too expensive for what it was. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy it but I got close to feeling like I "solved" the game with each run I did. Going from failing my first game because the AI did a spell victory by turn 107 to winning every game after that only improving on the time each game took. The last one took 86 turns to beat 7 AI. I started to delve into the lower resource maps like deserts and desolate world and the game's pace slowed down drastically but still won, just closer to the turn limit.
The biggest failure to me though was settling underground. I was amazed by how cool it felts settling underground and how it turned into a kind of exploring game as I didn't know how the map would look as I was fighting my way through. It just ended up being a 1 city challenge because the other 4 cities I founded were just wrong. Either the tile wouldn't let me place farms or there were just no resources around to do anything with the city. You'd find ruins but the area around it was useless. I think the underground needs an overhaul with what tile can do what because it was honestly shocking how "underground adaptation" didn't save how useless the underground felt. I get why the AI immediately settles above ground now if they have that start.
One thing that repeatedly bugs me too is how the AI seems to just decide it wants to settle in an area and no matter how much you block that area, once it decides it wants to settle there there isn't anything you can do to stop it. I spent 10 minutes reloading and blocking off different tiles to prevent this AI from settling in the middle of my 3 cities and it just insisted that an outpost was going there and there wasn't anything I could do to stop it. If I didn't block it also, it was going to snake to block my newest city off from the others.
Oh, and there seems to be a bug that really doesn't like it when you can unlock multiple spells in a row. My game would freeze up for a solid 10-15 seconds as I pick one spell and reliably freeze up again after picking another. Not until the last spell that I won't instantly unlock will it not freeze the game.
It's a game that lets me say "My stone and steel infused mole people were attacked by demonic rats wreathed with lightning and fire, so I decided to call upon the power of god and turn my people into angels before becoming said god and turning my moles to gold".... You're damn right it was worth the hype for that sentence alone
They focused in the concept of creating your own story, with your own race (or a prefab one), just like Humankind. I loved the freedom do build whatever i wanted and play anyway i chose, even if I want to change my playstyle in the middle of a match, the game allows it!
in my experience turning off vsync solved all of my problems on day 1 and after that no problem
I had a couple of crashes when using Alt+Tab, none resulted in lost of progress. We shouldn't get used to buggy releases, but comparatively speaking the game felt stable.
3070 GPU, sure I was crashing and somewhat often. However, this did not stop me enjoying the game and I and glad to report is happening way less now, though still crashes now and again. Game is great though, really enjoying it.
Worth it.
Lots of promising new mechanics.
Now it is up to balancing, quality of the DLCs and modding support.
Just like how civ6 and humankind were not that good but promising when coming out. Mods and DLCs shaped them afterwards.
The patches they've put out have largely sorted performance for me. Glad they addressed issues so quickly.
I just had one creash that was repetitive, but loading to a previous turn solved the problem for me.
Thing is I have fun with AoW4, but at the moment I think Planetfall is still slighty better. Though admittedly that is because Xenoplague was my favorite tech and Kirko my favorite Faction. (God I hope the Kirko return in AoW4. The Xenoplague or something like it would also be a nice addition since it was a very unique tech in planetfall that was very different from all the others and Plague techs are often ignored in a lot of games.
Absolutely it was. This game is my new addiction. I can't stop thinking about it
Can't wait to see what its become after all the DLC are out
AoW4 for me has been like playing a game like Warcraft 3 only turn based. It's fast-paced for a 4x game so usually by turn 20-30 I know if I f** up my build order and can just start again. It's not as complex as a game like Stellaris but in exchange it has an engaging combat system that can actually let you win otherwise impossible fights, especially against camps and neutral cities.
What I would really like is a feature like the Dwarf Fortress history mode, where you can just let the world run without interaction from the player.
I had my fun for 50 hours but the AI is unfortunately very weak at the time and doesn't get a lot done..
Thanks I'm gonna try out the Deluxe and see about the expansions. Why not.
Paradox doesnt use battle passes, loot boxes or cash shops. They have the most ethical monetization practice in the industry. Yes its daunting when you open a game on steam and see 600 dollars of DLC. But thats literally a decade + of paradox supporting their games and making content so long as the game has a user base to keep playing it.
the Story Realm is count as campaign right? it has narrative story and voice acting and all after all. idk how many bcs i just played until the story realm 3 but its quite enjoyable for me. the only problem is that i can already see the monetization of DLC like other paradox titles such as CK or stelaris, i can see character clothing items as DLC lol
Paradox DLC policy is horrendous.
this is an AD....NOT A REVIEW, this is EVERYWHERE on UA-cam...
PAID MEDIA
i just cant wait for the mods . gonna learn to create mods myself and create some as well. the only gripe i have is that i think i need a harder difficulty as i'm dominating the game in conquest victory right now at the hardest , maybe more unit allowance for battles (like they summon a random unit of each tier they have in the army at the start of battle to make a total of 3 more units at max) for the NPCs or more buffs to them at harder difficulty ?
Framerate on Series X needs a fix. Its stutters in performance mode. Other than that im having fun but funding the game a little barebones right now. Outside of story realms and the pre-gen realms (some/all? Have unique quests and wincons). Im finding nearly every game i start with create a faction plays similarly and im gettinb a tad bored.
I have an RTX 2070 with factory OC (cuz 3080 was new when I made my last purchase and cost as much as a small car (yes I know that's changed).) Never once had a crash since day one. Granted I only have 45 hours in it.
Absolutely amazing game. They really nailed this one
Honestly I had a AoW4 overdose the first few days. Now I'll pause a bit.
I really wish an option to choose your enemies in border to set up the game you want. Having so many customation options in the game it's weird that there isn't the option to set up te enemies
I would like more animation, more weapons and items and more spells. Still love the game.
The first person giving a negative review in the video, claiming :
"How this game can be such a step back [...]. The game is just AoW3 [...] with no innovation or improvement."
He really did not play in depth with the AoW games series, or at least, he doesn't give any attention to the gameplay and ergonomic issues we could meet in game.
But I guess some people favor the diversity in races, with different passives or units, wich may lack in the current version of AoW4.
However, in term of gameplay ergonomic and solving problematic winning strategies, the AoW game series never stopped evolving and that's one of the reason I love this game series.
When in AoW1, you couldn't create and evolve cities. When physical immunity exist. When magic was extremely limited. When building a ram and moving it very slowly to the ennemy city was necessary (or abusing throwing rock units). When the Leader was the most OP unit that ever existed in the AoW series. When units could hit always 2 times whatever the distance they moved or ranged units had to not move at all in order to shot, or units being able to riposte an infinite amount of time.
When in AoW2, you could craft your own item hero and then roll over the whole campaign. When enchants were still not ergonomic to use with the many debuffes, but awefully strong. When you had to constantly fight AI scouts that take your nodes. When flying units were still unreachable by ground units and could block ways. When you could already shred the whole ennemy army at defending your city at turn 1. When fights were still pretty random in term of hits, while back attack and defense mode didn't exist.
When in AoW3, enchants no longer exist for a while (or only work in fight with solo targeting), but instead, you had to level up your units in order to have an unkillable strong army. When healing units was mendatory in order to farm all nodes the fastest way possible without losing any unit so that at the end, we have this elite army. When rushing and spamming tier 3/4 units was (in 95% of cases) the only effective strategy until now because tier 1/2 units becomes irrelevent very fast, because the power gap was high while it was easy to rush tier 3 units. When city and study management was cluncky with no compensation whereas it just lack some production or study points to finish something, or everytime the city get much more nodes at range when the city domain increase. When doing very specific building in a specific order in the first turns was mendatory to have the most advantage possible afterward. When it wasn't possible to build structures and units at the same time. When you could lose your city or strategic point in an instant because your units are a bit too far. When you needed to move your packs sticking them in a triangle in order to not be attacked while not having all armies available, same with attacking nodes, which you need to encircle
Of course, I don't think I resumed every points above (and it's already huge) while some of the points listed above might be a funny thing and a reason of why we loved those game and why we could think that those thing disapearing is a step back.
But at the end, the strategy, game ergonomy and counter play is favorised.
Is there any info on rebalancing the books? Cause right now running any set not chaos or nature really isn’t viable
I play astral/material and have no problems. I dont think 'viable' means what you think it means. Really, Shadow is the only one that needs tweaks
Shadow is the only one on the weaker side.
Clearly chaos/nature is stronger for snowballing. But you can defeat brutal with astral/materium. Order can be OP just because of the imperium income that allows you to spam tier4-5.
A lot of balancing to be done if you want the game to be esport, but otherwise nothing is compelling you to only play nature/chaos against AI.
Bought it yesterday already sunk almost 20 hours into it, not a single crash, but then I have a crappy 1050ti not a high end 3080ti and upwards. So err sucks to be run high end hardware I guess.
I play on Xbox and had never played any age of wonders titles before. Wasn’t following the hype and just stumbled upon it organically. Maybe it’s just because I’m new to this kind of game but this game is really blowing me away with its expressive capabilities and fun factor. Not to mention the easy to learn impossible to master strategy that just sucks you into deep thought. I love it!
-lol I typed too much😂
Mid game is a bit boring. I hate hate hate having an underground as well.
The production and province system seems kind of ambiguous and lacking direction outside of boost bonuses
Had one crash in 140 hours of play and I'm not running the most impressive rig. i7, GTX 1060, 16 RAM. So I'm one of the lucky players with a sunny run of the game.
Get a job.
What annoys me about these types of games is this: I spend 4-5 hours conquering & exploring only to find that the AI comes with 5 other heroes and conquers my castles one by one. Wtf am I supposed to do? create an army on each castle? I can't because I'm limited by the game's cap's. It's really frustrating
you dont need heroes to create armies. In early game you should never stop producing units.
Build an outposts at key points on the map, on the path you are conquering and build a teleporter in them. If the Ai attacks your castles on the other side of the map, just teleport your army back.
(without even watching the video yet) the biggest issue long term seems to be the AI. The way it uses the units is way too passive
I made my own enemy characters and having a blast. It's very sandboxy. 9/10
Nice the game seem interesting and I wanna give it a try🙂
so good idea! pitting our own creation against each other! gonna give a try 😆
My game still crashes when you start moving one unit on map and click another in all units overview UI. Albo units on map move soooo slowly.
Never crashed for me on PC so it’s been a great experience for me
I never crashed, at first, but have crashed twice since patch (but that is in dozens of hours of play).
9:17 I already did see this picture but now I see that you chose what affinity you dragon have instead of weapons.
The MP is kind of unstable. I am a little curious since I am new to the age of wonder series. Does planetfall have MP issues?
Now and then the overland labels disappear. Which is irritating but otherwise it's been pretty good.
I have had no issues with the game except for one turn getting stuck on an ai in one of my matches but I just reloaded to the previous save and the issue was resolved.