With the recent announcement of ‘Master of magic’ remake, I immediately reinstalled AoW3 and playing every time I get the chance, since. I remember it as a great revival of the series and my memory was correct. I’m still having a great time with harder difficulties on a huge map, where I craft my own stories as I play.
With the conclusion of the Planetfall, I believe it’s quite certain to expect a new AoW game for 2 reasons.
- In the foreseeable future, there are no major titles for high-fantasy turn-based 4X game. Aside from Master of the magic of course but because of the investment limitations, I don’t believe it’s going to be presentable enough for a wide audience, even though it can be quite an entertaining game for the niece audience. Amplitude, Stardock, Mohawk, etc… all making historical or else but not high-fantast setting.
- Paradox factor. Paradox has invested quite a large sum over the past 3 years and they are nowhere near what they are hoping to be. Many investments are turned out unsuccessfully. As the CEO has spoken; they expect more profits and I believe they are going to push more DLC and new games for 2021-2023 than their last 3 years.
So, for these reasons, I believe Triumph has already started pre-production after the hiring of (sorry I forgot the name) a developer from Amplitude and I have some feedback I hope Triumph would at hear to… so enough distractions, here are my feedback over the AoW3 and Planetfall.
The third installment was around hexes and it is now the current way of doing things. As for Planetfall, it introduced regions but it isn’t like Endless Legend. More like a bigger filled with filler, smaller hexes. I always found the world at Planetfall boring and I never figured it out why (maybe because I didn’t play that much) but since I reinstalled the AoW3, I finally understood why. Because it doesn't feel organic. It feels too arbitrary as a level design.
In the classic AoW series we get to see the organic rivers, beach, then plains. High mountains covered with forests, snow happening, and each of them has buildings or delves randomly generated. This felt good. I hope you will keep it for the fourth game.
Every magic mana should be separated. The game uses only one single mana and it’s not that important with mana nodes you control. The design is already there with a variety of creatures and spells. The only thing left is balancing and reworking on the resources.
The generic mana should stay as it is BUT Air, Earth, Fire, etc… all would offer their own resource and this unique resource should be spent wisely. Every special mana node or a certain type of building should give a single that special mana resource.
Ex.
If you control 2 air mana nodes you will still get +20 to your mana but the player should also be getting +2 air mana. And maybe the player would spend this on a great magical creature or a powerful spell or build a building. This resource shouldn’t accumulate but play as a “hard cap” to do Über-powerful things
I believe it’s time for more complicated city management. Rather than having one race for each city. Multiple races could migrate to a city. Having multiple races in a city should give many more options but control would be much harder as the unrest should raise via, terrain features or else.
It shouldn’t be only forced though via action. If a (let's say) dwarfs are unhappy in a human majority city. After certain turns, the dwarfs should migrate to another player, opponents, natural, and lastly create their own city/delve.
With this the game level is going to be more dynamic and create more new stories, even though the player explores every tile; the population should be changing.
Army recruitment should cost population (in question) also.
In the first games, party management was a thing. The player was spending a small time, composing their party because of the morale penalties via mixing a lot of races. If an empire tolerance is high enough the more powerful parties the player can create (because of the strength of every race, meeting a single party) therefore it should be more rewarding to be able to create greater parties. Also, the size should be increased by 2 or more and the reasoning is coming next.
AoW3 make new graphical changes to the units and now we see the whole regiment fights the same power as a regiment cut in half. This needs to be fixed in the next game. Reminding you that this is the first time I use “fix” word. Because it really messes up the perception of the players.
The simple and most logical fixing would be the design of the Warhammer 40K Gladius. Unit damage was based on the number of units left.
For the singular unit(a great demon or whatever mid-tier-boss-level unit) fix, the HP should host levels of thresholds. With every threshold passes, the singular unit should receive a penalty for something.
That's how the regiments and singular units should be more balanced but most importantly make sense and maybe the hero units shouldn't be affected by these changes to make them slightly more unique.
- more powerful spells are needed
looking at it now, realizing AoW campaign spells should be more impactful to the world. From blasting volcanos to overflowing rivers damaging units or cities. There really should be more terrain affecting spells. Creating impassable storms, crashing waves changing tiles into the water, earthquakes affecting both underground and top, maybe even creating new “stairs”
Really powerful spells should be in the game I think. Just like Master of Magic.
oh if there would be a 4th part of aow i would be absolutely into it again.
i actually do not really care all too much about balance, i want my units to "feel" fun. so even if i understood why the ranged mechanics and some other units bahaviour as well as cost are as they are, i would have liked things even stronger in their field of specialty, like elves ranged attacks having more range additionally, or the necros resurrect corpses and priests heals with cooldown instead of once per turn.
PLANETFALL:
for planetfall, i somehow understand your opinion, it has by far not the cool flair of the fantasy setting, and the regions can be bothersome when u have too cross a region of anotther faction to reach your target, they dont even feel right, but there is one point i really love about it: "my empire", where i conquered these and those planets and with the so found artifacts, advantages in tech and racial opinion. what great improvement. i can even imagine advancing that part to an interactive campaign. imagine the possibilities... a world map, full of continents and kingdomes inhabitet by the different races, where u expand your territory as well as the others do and u can invade them and so do they with u, diplomatic alliances, maybe even spying, stealing info aboutt cities characters, wuests to assassinate heroes, or influencing via spies... might be aow on a whole new level, and i donno if it would destroy the feeling aow has, but as an additional option, an endlessplaying mode there could nothing be wrong, right?
STRONGER MAGIC AND STRONGER TERRAIN EFFECTS:
yes, creating volcanoes sounds awesome, as long as there would be a real influence by that, like they actually spit lava, create lavarivers, damage armies by hitting them with lava or because of the toxic stuff they throw out... i would iove to see strong magic indeed. iceage, reducing foodincome and production to a point of negation, depending on how suited the race is for that climate. expanders could get a trait that reduces the effects of climate on units and cities for higher upkeep costs for example.
THE TILE QUESTION:
hexes without regions.
POPULATION:
multiple races in one city? okay, sounds interesting. but, since that city would be able to produce dwarven firstborns, elven archers, dark elf repeater ballistas anddrakonian flyers, there should be some kind of restriction. like, when cities grow, they add an additional tile they use on the worldmap. in some way like it was in aow1, except for cities can grow. every tile can be populated with a race. and the max tier you can produce from that race would be the number of tiles they inhabit in that city. for each race some unrest, resulting in less income/production, okay, and peacekeepers could negate the negatives effects. i was a fan of racial alignments, which would mean that its way easier to manage an elven-dwarven than a goblin-dwarven city. reimplementing undead and archons would mean that even peacekeepers might be always oont the verge of revolt in ccities with that combination. which brings me to my next point...
RACES:
humans, draconians, orcs, goblins, elves, dwarves, DARKELVES, UNDEAD, ARCHONS, SHADOWDEAMONS, ...
tbh, i never played humans in part 3. but they are essential. goblins... well, i guess they are too. but not implementing darkelves? thanks to arnout we got a template mod for that. i like the necro mechanic, but i honestly wouldnt miss it if there would be undead as a faction again. i liked the reaper, the vampire, the resurrecting zombie, the style... and for shadowdeamons, the harvester was soooo cool... i would be happy to see them again, maybe as INSECTA, leaving DEAMONS for diablo-like or warhammers deamon-like badass fear-infusing monsters, i mean, come on, angels are already there, they could be high tier acrchon units. and, how about SKAVEN?
PARTY MANAGEMENT:
how about the max size of units within a party depends on the leadership skills of the partyleader? like there is no limit to spots a party can have, but every unit needs some leadership points and your partyleader only has a certain amount of? would not even necessarily havr to be heroes, for example dark elven spider queens or the shadowdeamons brains could have a lot of leadership points. supporting units may have that too. goblins simply do not need lots of leadership points because they are simpleminded enough and easy to control. some races should reflect that they are only strong in masses, so individual units can have lower stats compared to other races. goblins as prime example could therefore produce 2 units at the same time, like starcraft zerglings.
and why is having multiple models per units a thing since civ? it never had a real impact anyways, it was just not logical that the last survivor dealt the same damage as when it was a squat. how about an upkeep per model? i pledge for back to the single figurine, with more details on the model.
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT:
what u sugguest is basically an addition to the system fallen enchantress uses. im not against it, quite contrary, the more complex the better, but i think, as i specialize in one magic, there should be a way to convert the nodes then. OR you start with spells from your specialization researchable, and unlock the research of other magic types by reaching node threshholds...? you could even develop noddes from the type of your specialization... anyways, summons and spells of a certain magic type should then also need that specific mana, but with only one income of that? how about the magic the gathering-like cost, meaning that spell needs all in all 5 mana, but at least 2 of them have to be red mana, same could go for upkeep. i somehow always return to the thought that some kind of converting has to exist.
another aspect of ressources are the structures in your domain, and it always bothered me to not get the max out of my units (until the league of extraordinary builders mod came out) because this or that structure wasnt there or didnt even exist on the whole map. with the "my empire" mode form planetfall, where u get longterm benefits from racial things and research tech, this could be a solution. how about the builders you produce can create structures on the worldmap, taking more than one turn? and that each city can only have/use a certain number of structures in its domain (converting rulz again). expanders (or builders if that specialization exists) could have technologies that gives them additional boni somehow.
ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS:
normal units developing to (minor?) heroes on some rank after gold, keeping their skills.
shadow world as layer again -kind of the astral plane in shadowrun, with shadow shift again
multiple underground layers (fist more earthen, can create tunnels, second almost only stone, only dwarves may build tunnels)
heaven and hell as layers
a more comfortable editor and paket manager (even tho it really is not bad at all as it is in part 3, it is powerful, provides lot of possibilities, but both feel clunky)
AGE OF WONDERS 4:
well, the truth is that turnbased 4x games are not that popular compared to fps or even rts.
so, realistically, if a company decides to make a project as big as some here... well at least me, would hope for, it would cost probably more than it would return, at least in the first months, maybe even years. too bad money is always an and mostly the issue why things are not even started or dumped pretty fast.
knowing paradox, i bet a 100€ straight that it would be released unfinished with lots of dlc to cashcow and probably only implement things to a certain degree, whereas we could only hope for triumph to implement at least tools again to mod the rest into it. i do not necessarily hate the concept of dlc, but looking at cities skylines it feels like "okay forget it, i wanna have one game not 100 packages".
so what would be a justifyable price for a game like that? looking to starcraft 2 with its 40-60€ at the beginning and f2p now, the expansions... and thinking about inflation and everything gets more and more expensive, i guess a 100€? considering there has to be years of developent (or is the engine good enough still to just make new models etc?)... i cant tell. it seems at least that aow3 was no flop, at least not enough to make triumph bankrupt, so there seems to be a large enough group of tbs 4x still. so, will it be developed, ...? i hope. i think there could be a survey for this to check if there would be enough buyers. what is personal advertisement and datacollection good for if not that? =)