Age of Wonders 4 is a 4x strategy game that came out a few days ago. I am wondering if anyone has played this game or others in the series? I have not but from YouTube videos this new game seems pretty interesting.
It has been a few years since I have managed to get into Civilization 6 despite a couple attempts and I am wondering if this game might be the breath of fresh air that I need to get back into the 4X genre.
I will probably watch a few more playthroughs before deciding if I want to pick it up or not but I’d love to hear thoughts from you guys as well if any of you have played it.
So, I ended up taking the plunge, and - wow, this is quite the game! And not quite what I was expecting. But in a good way?
I was expecting basically Civ with a fantasy coat of paint thrown over it, and that’s not quite right. Certainly the city management map feels pretty civ-like, with cities that produce resources each turn in order to build buildings and recruit units. But instead of individual tiles, there’s a province system, which so far feels a little simpler than Civ tile improvements but (again, so far) still feels engaging.
Combat on the other hand is a whole different beast. I see a lot of comparisons to Total War, and I frankly don’t see it - this feels much more like XCOM to me. And that’s totally fine - the XCOM-like combat has been very strategic and engaging, so I’m totally on board there.
The race and empire creation is probably the most interesting part. The number of options and the way they interact is just staggering, in the best way possible. It really reminds me of Stellaris (especially now that Stellaris is getting more leader customization in the next update) - I’ve only scratched the surface, but this system seems extremely deep.
Aside from all that, the thing it reminds me most is the Civ IV mod Fall From Heaven. I’ve wanted a standalone game that feels like FFH since I was a kid (core Civ IV mechanics just didn’t work that well in the mod, so you’d end up with staggeringly large doomstacks of units that were just exceedingly BORING to fight through) and this finally looks like it might be it.
Have you played any of the previous AOW games? Or Heroes of Might and Magic? I was wondering how AOW4 compares to those.
AOW 1 & 2, HOMM 1-5 and Warlords were all very similar games.
The greatest strength of AOW2:SM was the editor. It let you create/edit maps with a random map maker as a starting point. But also allowed edits of the units, spells, abilities, buildings, etc. This has made the game playable for 20 years. I’ve never seen anything like it.
I haven’t, sorry - if I was in your shoes I’d try to find a YouTuber that makes good content for your favorites of those older games and see if they have a review for this new one.
It’s got an extremely detailed random map maker, yes. I can’t compare it to the older games but it looks pretty good to me.
Basically you select 4 properties for your map:
Geography - the map type - stuff like continents, islands, land (which I think is like Pangea in Civ), and more exotic ones like lava or dried up oceans
Climate - deserts, highlands, frozen, ‘endless fields’ which is fertile, or overgrown (forests), and scorched (even hotter than desert with desolate provinces)
Inhabitants - what the native wildlife is like. Normal animals, megafauna, dragons, undead, demons, astral creatures, lots of options here - I think 14 or 15
Pretender Kings - this is a toggle, if you turn this on there are 3 pregen civs that start off with a few cities, seems similar to Fallen Empires in Stellaris if you’ve played that
Then you can add up to 4 Misc traits (or none). These include environmental effects (size of the underground area, extra magic, lots of ruins, etc); free city modifiers (makes the city states more aggressive, or peaceful, or powerful, or turns them off); rule modifiers (starts civs underground, makes infestations keep recurring, makes it so that you can only have 1 city but it can absorb provinces much further away, etc), and unit modifiers (the dead come back to life, units are giants, units are immortal, etc).
There doesn’t appear to be a handmade editor, googling it I think the devs had said that even they don’t have a handmade editor and they use this generator (with added hidden variables) for everything.
Minor correction: it looks like you can unlock new Presence settings, so Pretender Kings isn’t a toggle, but it’s the only one of these options I have available.
So I’ve been playing through the first chapter of the story campaign as one of the default characters.
It’s a pretty small world to start, with just 3 empires: you, some elves, and a wizard king who is here to conquer the place. I played as a rising hero among the humans who united them against the threat, but I understand the narrative would adapt to any race I played or to playing as a conquering wizard king).
The elves aid me in my mission with advice and some magic, and I eventually get the free cities on the map to join me - including one that was leaning towards the wizard king at first.
I’m just now sending an army to raid the wizard king’s lands and see what I’m dealing with. I also had my people ascend into angelic beings, which is quite handy.
Since @What_Exit mentioned replayability as a concern, I thought I would mention that it looks like they’re going all out with mod support. The steam workshop already has mods that add traits for races and heroes.
I sent three armies full of lower tier units off to fight this wizard king, and holy crap I was not ready. Phoenixes are a real problem, as are hordes of arcanists who do much more damage than my archers do. Not to mention the fact that the enemy gets buffed whenever either of us casts a spell, often meaning that casting a buff or damage spell actually leaves me behind in terms of net buffs…
The good news is that my major weakness appears to be my archers, and I just unlocked Inquisitors throughthe Tome of Zeal, who are more powerful ranged units. My healers, knights, and infantry are all pretty strong. It’s hard to match a barrage from the wizards, though.
So the plot to this game (which is odd for a 4x game in the first place!) is actually kinda cool.
Basically there’s this world, Athas, which I gather is where the prior games took place. And there is a multiverse of various famtasy worlds connected by the Astral Sea, and these beings invade or are summoned throughout the earlier games. (Please correct me if any of that is wrong!).
These beings known as Godir or Wizard Kings are basically super powerful wizards who once invaded and conquered Athas, but they were eventually beaten and thrown into the Astral Sea. And at the end of AOW3 the seals protecting Athas were broken.
So in this game, they introduce a world called Magehaven which is protected by powerful enchantments that make it so that no one can hurt each other in this world; and the various mage kings hang out here to deal with one another. But mostly they spend their time invading Athas or other worlds (which is the ingame explanation for why the map generator is so nuts) to gain power.
These wizard kings enter the worlds pick a city with people (which may not be similar to theirs, for example the first guy you fight is a human but his servants are catfolk) and then try to conquer the world or achieve a different victory condition, such as building some magic towers and casting a ritual.
So there’s an ingame explanation for the main menu, basically!
You can also play as an Ascended Champion, where your civ leader rather than being a wizard king from elsewhere is a local who learned magic and became the leader of their own people to protect their world from the invading wizard kings.
Apparently once you win a game the champion you created becomes part of your Pantheon and will show up in the menu/in loading screens, and can even appear in games both as foreign leaders and as heroes to recruit or fight.
Well, I did it. On turn 47, I defeated Yaka the Wizard King and ascended to the Astral Sea.
I think I’m gonna do a few random maps before continuing the story missions.
EDIT: Ooooh, now that I see the Pantheon tree, some of these unlockables are really cool. They aren’t just cosmetics, they are new origins for heroes and new maps. I see why not everyone likes the idea!
