Age Of Wonders 4 (hereinafter referred to as AoW) is a representative of 4 strategies. She is beautiful and her fantasy visuals are very attractive (subjectively, of course). From the very start, this project offers quite a lot of variability: you can design your own faction by choosing a race, culture, characteristics, and customize the appearance; for the created world there is a whole set of modifiers that are designed to provide diversity for each batch; There are several options for winning, and players themselves are free to choose the way to achieve the goal.
It sounds very tempting, and after a couple of games, the above emotions really arise. However, the deeper you begin to dive into the mechanics, the more questions appear..
P. S. Yes, the game came out a full 4 months ago, and the majority have already formed their opinion about this product (for example, a review from Stopgame or a user blog), but the purpose of the publication is simply to share your thoughts without claiming relevance. I have not played other parts of the series, so the game will be considered separately from them.
Basic gameplay
Let’s imagine that we have chosen one of the pre-prepared factions, started a game, and we are immediately greeted by something civilization-like.
A city with a certain territory, a scout and a starting army with a ruler at its head. You can determine what to build in the settlement and what magic to study. Yes, there is no usual technology tree here; instead, here you need to study books with magic, then open volumes with more powerful spells, and so on until the end.
Combat
Naturally, AoW has battles on the global map, but they are executed as turn-based tactical battles in the HoMM style.
When two warring troops meet, there is a certain radius of reinforcements from their own or allied armies.
The rules are quite simple: all units of the first side move first, then the second, and the attacked one has the first turn. Up to three armies from one alliance can take part in the battle at the same time, each with up to 6 units, including heroes.
And, having played games for different cultures, I want to say that these battles are wildly boring and monotonous, fortunately there is auto combat, which copes quite well. However, from time to time you have to replay battles manually and you are as reluctant as possible to do this.
What is the reason? The subjective opinion is this: the battles in all games look the same – tanks in front, arrows in the back and we wait for the enemy to attack our defenses. However, it is worth recognizing that the spells and abilities of the heroes sometimes add minor variety.
Let us separately consider battles for maximum capacity: 18 units on each side. Playing all the animations, although not bad, takes forever even in accelerated mode. Yes, and graphically sometimes everything merges into one big mess and you focus exclusively on the icons of soldiers.
In my opinion, if the battles were made more compact, it would benefit them.
Strategic part
Let’s move on to the strategic component of this game. Here everything is according to the classic 4x:
Exterminate – everything is clear here, https://sistersitescasino.co.uk/casinos/paradise-8-casino/ you need to snatch one of the types of victory from your rivals, usually through battle.
But what’s going wrong?
Resources
There are 4 main resources in the game: gold, mana, knowledge, authority.
Knowledge allows you to learn new spells, units, buildings. At the same time, if magic can only be discovered in this way, then troops and buildings are rather a bonus, since all shooting ranges are available to the player without learning any technologies.
Authority is used to buy tree cells in the screenshot above. Each branch represents a certain path of development, except for the bottom, since it is common to all. Each circle gives either a passive or one-time effect, and the further from the center, the more expensive the cell.
Leveling up is influenced by: faction culture, selected books (elements from which are studied for knowledge) and sometimes heroes.
Also, due to authority, you can increase the favor of free cities.
Structures and units are built for gold and mana. Troops require constant maintenance costs. Mana, moreover, is used in tactical (in battles) and strategic (on the global map) spells.
As a result, the economic part of AoW comes down to maximizing the production of these 4 resources (and it feels like there is an obvious inflection point towards mana and gold).
Victory
There are 4 options to win the game, two of which I would call classic:
And two more unusual ones:
Expansion: you and your vassals (free cities) must control a certain amount of territory. After which it is necessary to erect certain buildings and hold out for a certain number of turns.
Magic victory: you need to subjugate 5 ancient wonders of the gold rank, reach a book of rank 5, learn the required spell, cast this spell and hold the captured wonders for 5 turns.
And, in fact, to achieve any of these victories, you need to gather an army and fight in battles (not necessarily with other rulers, but at least with neutral monsters)
Those who played AoW will probably say that I missed quite a lot of details: about diplomacy, about capturing ancient wonders, about hero equipment, about underground and above-ground maps, about random tasks and probably about something else (you can find out about these mechanics in the reviews at the very top of the article). And I agree with this, but despite the seemingly large number of mechanics, they really lack depth and are extremely linear. And here quantity does not compensate for quality: at the end of the day, each batch is mechanically similar to the previous one.
Preparing for the game
After the entire main gameplay has been reviewed, you can move on to the preparation stage to choose who and what world we will conquer as.
Choosing peace
You can select one of the presets or create a new one with parameters at your discretion.
There can be up to 9 players on the map at the same time. There are various variations on the type of classic continents or islands, and something fresh: lava lakes and barren oceans. The following can also be customized: weather conditions, type of neutral monsters, free cities, restrictions on the empire or army and other aspects. There are also special conditions (3 at the time of writing): “Domain of the Ice Queen”, “Challenger Kings”, “Artisan Kings”.
And now the combinations of these modifiers seem to have quite a significant impact on the strategic part of the party.
Choosing a faction
Here, by analogy with the world, you can choose a pre-prepared one or create your own. In AoW, a faction is a combination of race, culture, and development traits.
There are currently 10 races available, each with 2 features. But the fly in the ointment in this barrel of diversity is that these features are not unique to the race, but can easily be replaced by any other from the list. Because of this, it turns out that races only affect the appearance of your faction.
But culture is already beginning to influence the style of play to some extent. There are 6 options to choose from, I won’t write about the details of each of them, but they affect the units, as well as what will be pumped up in the authority tree.
After choosing a culture, you need to select two features that can affect some parameters throughout the game, as well as slightly change the starting conditions.
Finally, you can customize the appearance of the ruler and the people, choose a coat of arms, starting weapons for the hero, as well as the names of the faction and our alter ego.
To summarize the formation of a faction, at the start they will differ in different development paths, starting set of units and magic, as well as minor differences in available troops (for example, one culture has spearmen and magicians available at the first tier, while another has swordsmen and archers).
And if we talk about the whole game as a whole, then the following picture emerges.
The strategic part is not distinguished by the depth of mechanics, developed diplomacy, resource management and the like. It’s clear that the emphasis is on tactical battles, because they are a prerequisite for all types of victories (except for victory on points), but they didn’t grab me at all.
But at the same time, there is a good faction editor that allows you not only to choose the appropriate style, but also to form a metagame inside the player’s head. Barbarian Toads, Holy Rats and many other combinations for every taste and color. You can at least play your favorite factions from other universes.
And the flexible setting of the world brings that strategic diversity that is lacking in normal conditions.
If we talk about my personal opinion, then in the process of writing the article, some advantages for me became disadvantages, and it happened the other way around. But overall, this is a good game with beautiful visuals, which can create a variety of situations and enforce the “one more turn” rule. But AoW still cannot replace Civilization, since the emphasis here is different.