Four Things You Should Know After My First 50 Hours With Age of Wonders 4
Paradox Interactive and Triumph Studios were kind enough to let me play Age of Wonders 4 in its entirety these past few weeks. Aside from multiplayer, nothing was off-limits. Here are my impressions of the nearly complete version of this highly anticipated fantasy 4X game.
#1: The Production Values Are eXceptional
Very few 4X games, let alone fantasy 4X games, are as beautiful, well-produced, and audibly satisfying as Age of Wonders 4. Though 4X fans are notably able to overlook a lack of production values and some even actively rebel against such “frivolous” things, it’s easy to appreciate the amount of skill and effort on display here.
From detailed, artful unit models, to maps with lush forests, craggy mountaintops, and snow you can practically feel, the game just looks beautiful. Exploring each map to find its natural features is just as enjoyable as stumbling on its scattered Ancient Wonders, and unique locations that offer your cities exceptional bonuses. Those Ancient Wonders are a joy to behold, both for their gameplay benefits and for their spectacle, as they’re beautiful and mysterious, further adding to the ambiance and fantasy of the Age of Wonders universe.
But Age of Wonders 4’s beauty isn’t just skin deep, either. There is beauty to be found in the voice-over work, the crisp, clean user interface and user experience, and just as much allure to behold in the spell effects and combat skills.
I’m sure many of you reading this have already watched at least one or two of the developer-led gameplay videos, but there are intricacies lost in presentations like that. There are so many little details, from little sheep in your farms to wee little crows flying around crow-enchanted units, or the fire tips of arrows after a flame enchantment, and so much more. Audibly, I often found myself choosing a tome and listening to the excerpt read by the superb female voice-over more than once, despite normally avoiding “distractions” like that in the past.
My only complaint about the voice-over work, surprisingly, is that there isn’t enough of it. Whereas in Age of Wonders: Planetfall, I would often *cringe* at some of the voice-overs for various tech choices. Here, in Age of Wonders 4, I see so many opportunities for MOAR. I’d love to see quest passages read by multiple different actors or even voice lines for some of the other texts. As long as they match the quality of the Tome readings, I would love to hear more.
Hell, there are even multiple different models for the cities that you and your AI allies and enemies will found. In fact, there are so many models that I lost track of how many varieties there are. It’s little details like this that really do a lot to draw you into this fantasy world. Honestly, it’s like they thought of everything…
In short, everything about Age of Wonders 4’s presentation screams quality. The obvious infusion of funds and talent from Paradox (Triumph Studios’ new publisher) is clear and I’m glad to see it. This is one of the best-looking and best-presented 4X games in existence.
#2: It’s the Easiest Game in the Series to Learn
But fear not, there’s still some strategy and tactical depth to achieve, and on higher difficulties, the skill cap should still be pretty high. That being said, Age of Wonders 4 has, yet again, benefited from Paradox’s extensive knowledge of how to present dense information more legibly and fluidly.
From rather extensive tutorials to a large and detailed encyclopedia, to my personal favorite, nested tooltips (à la Crusader Kings 3), Age of Wonders 4 feels extremely accessible.
Hell, I’ll go out on a limb and predict that Age of Wonders 4 will do for fantasy 4X what Stellaris has done for space 4X: make it accessible enough and so wildly customizable that it will appeal to a much larger audience.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t many systems here to contend with. There are many tactical spells to learn, brutal and fast-paced combat to master, unit enchantments to consider, tome-specific units to compare and contrast, and city management to exploit. If anything, it’s more of a “true 4X” game than any other game in the series before it, but Triumph Studios has gone to great lengths to make it easier to understand, and much more approachable.
What results is a series of interesting decisions that mostly (okay, almost always) feel fun to deal with, while keeping it all relatively digestible in a way that few other developers and publishers have figured out.
Take, for example, city management automation: it’s actually pretty competent. If left to its own devices, it’ll develop a decent city and will follow your guidance on how it should proceed. Even better, you can step in and change queues if you’d like and it separates unit and city queues, so you can have it only manage the civilian side of things while controlling the military output, if you so choose.
It’s custom-order automation, and it’s really great for someone like me who despises too much micromanagement.
Speaking of city management, it’s a mix of Age of Wonders 3‘s simpler system, but with a huge influence from Age of Wonders: Planetfall. It’s much more nuanced than 3 but easier to understand and, perhaps, weightier than Planetfall. Adding new provinces to your city also feels much more intuitive here than in Planetfall, but it still feels important to your city’s development. It’s a great mix of the simplicity of the third iteration, and a larger step toward the depth that Planetfall introduced.
In summary, many elements of this series’ fourth entry feel much more streamlined and easier to use. From the cities’ dual queues to a hint button that provides small, non-overpowered tips on what you should be focusing on, to extensive in-game help, Age of Wonders 4’s onboarding is, in a word, wonderful.
#3: Its Tactical Combat is Still King and Now, Even Better
While the Age of Wonders series has always had first-in-class tactical combat, it’s often felt bogged down by the sometimes exceptionally long time that some battles would take to play out. It’s clear that Triumph Studios has heard those complaints and has made some important changes to some of its systems to mitigate that problem.
First, what stood out to me initially was that the “Autoresolve” option has become much more viable. Not only is it often (almost always) able to win battles that you’d expect it to, it does so in a way that’s not crippling your military capability, i.e. units don’t get seemingly sacrificed to the RNG gods and the outcomes are often what you’d expect.
I say often, as it’s not always the case, but the vast majority of the time, autoresolving a battle led to predictable outcomes. What’s better, is that they’ve brought over the “Retry” option from Age of Wonders: Planetfall, so it’s almost always worth letting autoresolve have a shot. If the result isn’t what you’d hoped for, or you think you could do better, then you can retry the battle in its full tactical depth.
In another measure to speed things up a little, enemy units now move in a synchronized fashion. Long gone are the days when you’d have to watch them all, one by one, move across the map toward your forces. Now, they’ll all move together in a dance-like fashion, speeding the enemy’s turn up considerably, and making those first few turns less of a chore.
In addition, the combat maps appear to be smaller, but they’re much more nuanced and have many more features that create a more interesting and tactical experience.
Lastly, city sieges as we knew them from previous Age of Wonders games are gone. Now sieges are set up very similarly to a game like the aforementioned Crusader Kings 3. You’ll add various siege equipment to your setup, thus decreasing your siege time, allowing for extra damage to enemy units once the walls are down, and other bonuses. Once the siege is complete, you’ll battle it out with any units remaining within the city walls or take the city, if no one is left defending it.
At the end of the day, the same tactical battle goodness you’ve enjoyed from previous Age of Wonders games is still here. Positioning matters, your use of tactical spells can mean the difference between winning or losing, and your timely special unit action can save the day. It all feels fun and frenetic, while remaining cerebral enough to keep you truly invested in each battle you partake in.
#4: The Fourth Iteration Could Be the Series’ Most Divisive
While there is a lot to like here, and I’ve really enjoyed my 40-something hours with the pre-release version of Age of Wonders 4, I’m not here to report that it’s all sunshine and rainbows.
A few things have me a bit concerned.
First, and perhaps foremost, is that the first few hours of every game feel a bit too similar. While different in some regards, the Cultures and their traits, which are essentially the two biggest asymmetric factors with regard to race creation, don’t really change gameplay dramatically. Sure, they provide some bonuses to gameplay styles and you can really lean into those later, but they don’t really change how the game is played at a fundamental level.
This all results in a very vanilla early game. Sure, it’s fun and exciting to explore the map, looking for good territories to annex, even better ancient wonders to explore and hopefully control, and eventually, run into other factions to befriend or wage war against. However, the manner in which you play the game does not change significantly enough to feel unique.
The only moderately-significant exception to this is when playing underground, but that’s mostly an aesthetic change, outside of mining out the rock of underground territories, which strangely doesn’t have a unique animation or sound effect associated with it, by the way (okay, that’s a minor nitpick).
Hell, what’s worse is that the culture-specific units are very limited and become practically useless by the mid to late game. Okay, I’m being too nice… they’re completely useless by the end game.
This is mitigated somewhat by major transformations, which are essentially spells that you cast to radically change your race’s looks and abilities, but it doesn’t change how same-y things feel in the early game.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this might be the first game where the mid to late game is more interesting than the early game. Even if the late game is still a bit more sloggy than I’d like.
I think in the months leading up to release, Triumph Studios needs to figure out a way to lean into the cultures a bit more and make them feel a bit more unique. Culture-specific tomes of magic feel like a no-brainer, but stuff like culture-specific buildings, or even more culture-specific territory improvements would be extremely cool, too.
For example, if my Barbarian-culture Toadkin could produce territory improvements that increased their damage in surrounding territories, or improvements that periodically produced more units, that would make them feel more unique. If they were the sole recipients of an early-game Magic Tome, which would further press their advantages in the beginning stages, that would help the same-y feeling of the first dozen or so turns.
Maybe add a “capstone Tome”, too. One that would even be a bit overpowered in its synergies with the cultures’ strengths.
Aside from that, faction creation has taken a huge cue from Stellaris, for better and worse. Sure, the wide assortment of body types, cultures, and traits is going to make many of the factions look pretty unique. However, the fact that there aren’t any hard-coded traits for any of the body types feels strange (so halflings can essentially be orcs, with their melee prowess and unnatural strength, if you want that).
Yeah, that’s going to rub folks the wrong way. I’ve already seen the complaints all over the Steam and Paradox forums and I foresee that being a design decision that Triumph might regret.
My last qualm is with how passive the AI feels, even on higher difficulties. Sure, they’ll declare war on each other, but they almost never declared war on me. This, thankfully, feels like an easy issue to balance out.
Bottom Line
Without a doubt, Age of Wonders 4 feels like the series’ most mainstream entry by far. As a long-time 4X gamer, I say that in the best possible way. Sure, we’ve lost out on some of the fun synergies that the race/class system used to provide in Age of Wonders 3 and Age of Wonders: Planetfall, but the game feels much more approachable and inviting. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to see some of those synergies return, however.
And there’s a lot here that I haven’t really touched on just yet, as I wasn’t able to see the mechanics in enough detail to comment on them. There are now Magic Materials that you can collect that provide individual bonuses when you do, such as “Astral Dew” providing an additional 20 map casting points or the “Tranquility Pool” which reduces spell knowledge requirements by 10%. In addition, if you collect three of a certain category, you can gain different, powerful upgrades, like the “Cosmoflux Elixir” effect, increasing knowledge and mana exploitation from those nodes by 10 a piece.
And I wasn’t able to see too many of the Major Transformations, either. I did take “Gaia’s Chosen” with my nature-oriented Frogkin race. The transformation increased their charge resistance, added 20 HP to their units, and added 3 to their status resistance. Plus, they took on a really cool one-with-mother-nature look. Otherwise, I was finishing games before I obtained many of the later tomes, as I was playing on smaller maps. But another of the spells out of that same tome as the Gaia’s Chosen transformation (Tome of Nature’s Wrath) was “Summon Horned God”, a Tier V “Mythic” unit that was absolutely devastating.
That reminds me of another concern I have about the viability of earlier-tier units in the late game. Even with unit enchantment spells, those units quickly ran out of usefulness as Tier IV and V units started making their way onto the map.
That’s not a surprise, considering that the same issue was present in Age of Wonders 3, but Age of Wonders: Planetfall had done a bit to mitigate that, which seems to have taken a small step backward here.
And I won’t get into the end-game slog that I felt on bigger maps, either, as I think that’s pretty standard for the genre, unfortunately. There are many ways to win in Age of Wonders 4, but some of the victory conditions led to hitting the “End Turn” button a bit more than I like.
To avoid that a bit, I played almost entirely with the “Megacities” map feature on every game, which removes city founding, while still allowing the player to use Imperium, a global administrative-type resource much like Planetfall’s Cosmite, to integrate free cities.
Plus, I’m not even sure what the answer is to this end-game conundrum, as it’s a genre-wide issue, so I don’t really want to complain about it further just yet.
Anyway.
On a much more positive note, as someone who started eXplorminate in hopes of channeling my love for 4X games into something creative and healthy (?), I have still only found a handful of 4X games that grab me and won’t let me go.
I cut my teeth on almost every 4X game to ever come out and only a small handful have truly stood out. Games like Colonization, Old World, Distant Worlds, Galactic Civilizations 2, and Endless Legend hold a special place in my heart. Hell, even Stellaris is starting to grow on me.
And I’m pretty sure I’ll be adding Age of Wonders 4 to my short list of truly memorable 4X games. Only time will tell, but the first 50+ hours haven’t been nearly enough. In fact, the Pantheon system practically BEGS me to keep playing, as I’m finally compelled to finish games in order to make my way through the rewards I accumulate from completing games (PS: would love to see more and more of these rewards).
(You can expect a fully fleshed-out follow-up article on Age of Wonders 4’s Pantheon System. It’s revolutionary and is worthy of many more words than I have left to write here. Stay tuned.)
Triumph Studios may have given up some of what made the Age of Wonders series unique and even worse, may have alienated some of its long-time fans in the process. But what it’s done to bring in a whole new wave of fantasy 4X game fans in the process will most likely more than makeup for it.
And, well…I’m here for it.
Prefer a video version? We’ve got you covered. We put together the above article in an easy-to-digest video form here:
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