Age of Wonders 4

[MJW (ya that one)]

After Bob quit RB I have to post this thread. 

Looks like they are trying to look like civ6 as much as possible. 

[MJW (ya that one)]

Well it launched today.

Not much to say yet but they got rid of a bunch of broken stuff (unit healing). They also made it so your units no longer have to touch to get pulled into battle. So the AI doesn't have to move properly in a hex or triangle to avoid getting stack-split.

[Blake00]

Will be a while before I can play it but have been enjoying the dev diaries.. looks like a beautiful game.. although maybe too customizable and spreadsheety for some.. I'm sure I'll enjoy it though.. especially after lots of patches and dlc lol

[MJW (ya that one)]

2 more changes.

1. They added the rule where when a unit takes damage that unit deals less damage. I don't like this change because it takes away the distinctive feel of AoW combat. Edit: They made it not apply to single units.
2. Leader's spellcasting is not attached to the leader-unit anymore. I think they did this because under the old rule it lead to situations were it was better to attack without the leader. This is because you could have him spellcast outside the battlefield acting as a 7th unit (max stack size is still six).

[MJW (ya that one)]

Game fails to tell you how bad going over the city cap is. However, it is nasty enough that going over (just by one) when you have just 4 cities it would never be worth it. It might when you have just 3 cities but that situation won't last long because it only takes 200 IMP to get to a cap of 4. So, going over the city limit is never worth it unless you are planning to raise it very soon.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Filthy Robot is playing this game in case anyone cares.

This game was a bit harder than planetfall but only because they gave the AI a ridiculous 50% discount. They will patch it down to 30%. Still worth buying for 60$ due to the newness factor but won't get as many hours of AoW3. (300 hrs vs 1000 hrs).

[MJW (ya that one)]

AoW4's AI appears to found cities much more aggressively now. It may be a real challenge to beat if Triumph Studios kept the insane 50% discount. 30% might not seem that much of a drop but discounts get exponential more powerful as you approach 100%. AI would actually have around 43% more units.

[MJW (ya that one)]

One against 8 Very Hard AIs playing as a team. Done with the game expect DLC story packs. AI is very annoying to play against as it has fog-of-war hack. They did have it in AoW3 but unit maintenance wasn't as brutal and you could stack split. This made it possible to defend everywhere anyway.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Finished the last story pack so I'm done with the game. The last map it takes awhile for the AIs to get rolling to kill thralls (you have to kill thralls to avoid a game over) but they are stronger than the enemy AIs and you get much stronger over time. So, the problem is avoiding running out of time at the start. There's a quest that wastes a bunch of time that you should just ignore. Declining the quest gives you draft too, which will accelerate your start and give you enough time.

[haphazard1]

So the way to beat the scenario is to ignore the scenario? Seems like poor scenario design.