GWJ Strategy Club Game 17: Age of Wonders 4

Alright, I'll give this one a second chance. I don't remember why at this point, but I really disliked the game at launch. Glancing at the forum thread for the game, it seems at the very least I found the end-game to be a slog, especially coming off playing a bunch of Old World. Here's hoping that's been improved at least somewhat in the intervening year.

This is a good game, and it opens up after the initial game. If yo0u don't enjoy, well, you probably don't like the genre after all.

I'm in. Going to try to start a game tomorrow...

Another excellent choice by the Strategy Game Club, I'll probably be playing along co-incidentally, much like with Gladius a while back. This has been my comfort game since it came out, and it just finished its initial DLC run, which I think has been popular enough that they're going to continue making DLC for it, although details about what that might be are thin so far.

If you're into the faction creation in Stellaris, this should also be right up your alley, although it's not quite that complex. You're given a lot of flexibility to create your own factions and leaders to a very granular degree. Half the fun for me is thinking up creative concepts and trying to make them work in game. But there's plenty of decent pre-made options if that isn't your bag. Meshara the Radiant was my pick for the tutorial, and I feel like she'd be a great beginner friendly option.

A couple of things that might be worth knowing going in: when you're outside of the campaign and picking map settings, the map size you choose is always relative to the number of players in the game, and the standard size is a lot tighter than you might expect in a comparable 4x, it's a real knife fight. I was initially a bit put off by that, and the large map size gives you a bit more breathing room, but I've come to like the tighter pacing in the default settings, there are rarely any lulls, and I find it more engaging with a lot of skirmishing right from the start, but your mileage may vary.

It's also not at all balanced for competitive multiplayer, especially at the moment after a recent DLC added some very powerful options, and if you're anything like me, that's a good thing, that way lies bland faction design, but once again, if you're into that sort of thing, I've heard it's very unbalanced. I imagine it'd be great for friendly comp stomps or similar messing about however.

I got this early on and kind of stalled out. This'll be the kick I need to have another go at it. Because of that I don't have any of the DLC, so maybe I'll pick some up on Steam Sale discount if it appeals.

I was playing AoW4 for a while last month, so this is a good excuse to pick it up again.

I've bounced off all of the other Age of Wonders games, so I was a little surprised how much it worked for me.

I think that's what I like about it--it's not great if you want to have a fair fight, but none of my fantasies about bring a fantasy wizard involve fighting fair. It's more fun to throw wildly imbalanced armies into the fray.

I'm up and running, put about 3 hours in the tutorial the last couple of days. I was expecting it to be a few quests to teach you how to play, but it's actually a full blown regular quick match with a bit of tutorializing on top, which is kind of impressive. I'm going for an expansion victory for now, trying to take over as much land as possible. Wasn't sure I was going to get into much war (although I guess the tactical side is the calling card of the AOW series), but one AI was buddying up to me and the other was talking trash. They went to war and I got dragged in, so that's the next thing on the to do list. Hopefully I can get a real feel for how combat works, since most up to this point have been more 6v2 or 6v2 battles that I might auto complete.

I'm also noticing right away that the strategic level is more fun for some reason than AOW Planetfall was, which we played a bit ago. I can't put my finger on it, but there seems to be more going on and more interesting decisions to make.

Evening edit: I finished the tutorial campaign via conquest. There was two AIs, one was my ally and we stomped the other. Apparently I didn't have to conquer both to get the win. About six hours total in the last couple of days, which is a lot for me. I forgot how addictive strategy games could be once they're up and running.

Oh this is awesome. I love this game and I have been looking for an excuse to get back to it!

None of the updates wiped my pantheon on steam. I'm guessing something went wrong with the cloud save. I can't speak for Epic Games store but Steam has had trouble with saving and loading the cloud data with this game before when I switched computers. Might be worth manually backing up saves.

I’m keeping on with the story missions – they’re interesting enough and have some good setups. The latest one (Story Realm 3 – Crimson Caldera) is the most interesting so far, where you’re thrown into a volcanic region and war is the only option . So everyone against everyone. But you can undermine some of the competitors by doing side quests and to kick them out of the game. So I went around and did that to everyone, including a fun instance where one enemy faction had their boss and one other seiging one of my cities, and I finished the side quest that pacifies and “removes” her right before they broke through. That war instantly ended with no damage done.

I was able to secure (by whispering stones or force) the west side of the map, but the last enemy and the one I needed to actually fight to finish the chapter was on the right. So I moved over with 4 doomstacks around the lava crater at the bottom (thanks to roads for making this faster) and then went to seige a random unaffiliated city to make as my forward operating base. Then 5 doomstacks of the remaining enemy came by and stomped me flat. I reloaded a few turns and maneuvered so they came crashing down in a place where I could pick the battle. I started a 3 army on 3 army with their strongest unit, and won with maybe 5 of my guys left and all of theirs dead. Had to do the manual battle for that. Then they had only weaker stacks left but still had me outnumbered. I did an autobattle there, and wound up with my three lords and a random shield unit left, and EVERYONE else from both stacks were dead. Huge wipe on both sides. I warped my team back to home base to heal up, and then started cranking out new tier 3 units (and pikemen, my new offensive MVPs) to go do the next round.

After a few turns of building units (and also getting some teleporters set up), I pushed two stacks down to start taking the city, with another stack arriving every few turns. We repelled several large attacks and eventually took the city this way, and then I promptly dropped another teleporter on this new city to set up some proper reinforcements if they were needed, but I had 5 new doomstacks led by heroes and that was enough to snowball to victory.

This was probably the most fun I’ve had in a 4x for a while, with one giant Mutually Assured Destruction battle, key use of mechanics like teleportation, better team compositions, and a few really good huge manual risky battles.

AoW4 was eating up too much of my attention and free time, though, so it may be time to put a pause again for a bit.