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.