Age of Wonders: Planetfall – Dev Diary #1: Welcome and Premise

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All units had melee attacks, and there were more non-ranged than ranged units. Against range units, your priority generally was to engage them in melee asap to stop them from shooting.

It looks like the featured infantry unit doesn't even have a melee attack.
 
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  • Develop Planetary Empire building: Compared to AoW3, we want to added new layers of depth to the economy and diplomacy systems. Sessions now play on wrapping planets which are procedurally generated.
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This really has me stoked. TBH nearly all 4x games of the near present succumb to the - for the lack of a better word - temptation to neglect civil management and imperialism in favour of battle simulation focussed gameplay. I know that AOW always had a strong focus on the tactical battles, but liked AOW III a lot nontheless.

Does this mean that there is some kind of "endless mode" planned, where you're taking more and more planets (each as a kind of skirmish game) in order to build a larger interestellar empire with its own mechanics?
 
I might be wrong but this looks to me like fantasy, turn-based child of CK2 and Stellaris, with help from uncle XCOM.


/edit: aww the disagrees.
To expand on the initial post; You make your awesome units, customize them (Ck2 characters), it happens in a sci-fi settings with fantasy elements (similar to Stellaris) and finally, You gain promotions for your units up, get attached only for them to die a horrible death (XCOM - only really played the original).


Can you upgrade units from lower tiers to higher ones?
 
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Dev diaries are great, I love seeing what is going on. Just two points of note (yes, I keep in mind that this is an alpha-screenshot):

Firstly, that map zoom had better be configurable. And I don't mean a simple zoom-in zoom-out, I mean being able to set a level of zoom as the default setting. That screenshot is showing very little ground in a very close-up way. On larger screens that would make my eyes and head hurt. It was a slight issue in AoW3 - everything had to be ginormous, I really do not want this to happen again or get worse. I like having my stuff small so I can see a lot at the same time. My screen can accommodate (small/medium screen, high res), I want my games to do that, too.

Secondly, still waiting on the "Wonders" part of the title...

On the character creation, I doubt that they will drop that - you can still customize your leader (SMAC-level at the very least AoW:SM-level probably), just not the regular cannon fodder.
 
There's a couple interesting things in the screenshot:

-The upgrade slots are labelled Primary upgrade and Secondary Upgrade, instead of being numbered. This implies that there are two categories of upgrade, and a unit can only have one of each, or possibly only one primary. This does somewhat make sense as not all upgrades should be compatible-it doesn't make sense to load flechette rounds into laser rifiles for instance, and a tank can only have one turret weapon.

-If we assume that the downward point arrow in a couple places is the operations icon, then it looks like there are separate CP pools for tactical (circle background) and strategic (globe background) use. I do like this, as in AOW 3 I only used tactical spells in an emergency, in favour of pushing out more summons. It also seems like CP are no longer 1-1 for operations costs.

-The icon for the vanguard spider-drone doesn't have the top mounted machine gun and grenade launchers that we've seen in screenshots, implying that those are upgrades. This raises the question of what on earth the base unit is supposed to do.
 
I definitely want to figure out what those resources up at the top of the screen are too. Another thread was suggesting that there might be limitations on Tier 4 units, which would be a welcome change.
Well it looks like the lightning bolt will represent Power, which is probably a combination of Gold and Mana from AoW, in that it is used as unit upkeep and likely for the "Spells".
The second one I suspect is Metals/Materials, which is likely for constructing things.
The third is obviously Research.
The forth one might be Currency. Speculating greatly here, but this is probably for use in trade and possibly used to help keep your people happy and motivated.
 
A personal little wish is logging feats for individual units. "Killed a hero" "Protected the Capital" etc. Maybe we'll get to implement that one day.
Haha, that'd be great. Could be implemented kind of like a "medal" system, rewarding exemplary performance and heroism going above and beyond the call of duty for specific actions. If you're feeling super ambitious, you could even attach attributes to those medals : so say a squad of "screaming eagles" kills a terror-inducing abomination, it could gain a medal ("Cross of Unyielding Faith" or whatever) granting resistance/immunity to terror. I'm aware this could cause special attribute creep, which AoW3 flirted heavily with, not to mention balance issues; but hey, food for thought. I would advise keeping a level cap though. I'd rather have 4 experience levels that feel distinct from one another with respect to what you can expect from a particular unit (I loved gaining new abilities when a unit "leveled-up") , than 100 levels that blend in with one another.

Also, I absolutely adore the premise. It makes perfect sense from a story/lore and a gameplay point of view. It makes it so researching technologies at such a brisk pace (within a human's lifespan) is actually believable and coherent, and it opens the doors to so many types of dungeons and encounters, it's great. I'm impressed.

Speaking of gameplay, one thing I would like to see are better options for retreating from an unwinnable confrontation, especially if your army is faster; or even just individual units, so they can save themselves. Obviously, if you get the drop on someone, faster army or not, you should be able to force a confrontation and get a chance to cause serious damage, but there should be circumstances that allow for a retreat/evacuation. I believe in AoW3 you could only retreat when attacking but never when defending? It felt really weird when a small scouting party of rangers with high vision and high movement got stuck in a fight to the death against much slower units barging in your general direction from just beyond the fog of war. You could never see them, or "track" them, because oftentimes movement range, even for the slowest armies, was greater then the vision range of your best scouts.

This could also come into play for high-tier "commando" type units, letting you attempt to preemptively snipe that highly problematic siege railgun without getting slaughtered down to the last man, before engaging with your "real" army. This would make "lighter" or otherwise lower-tier armies a lot more survivable against massive doomstacks meant to demolish anything in their path (obviously retreating won't help if said doomstacks come knocking at your Capital's door, unless your cities can gain the ability to fly or something; that would be a cool faction.)

The player could then specialize certain armies towards scouting and chasing down elusive enemies, while his heavy-duty armies follow some distance behind. So instead of the optimal strategy being to keep all your armies fully stacked and bunched-up together (AoE spells notwithstanding) with a few sacrificial mono-units (or spells) to scout, you could have it so mobile recon armies are just as essential to your success as your more heavily-armed armies in wars against enemy factions (I'm sure dungeons will require their own specialized approach).

This increase in overall survivability kind of ties in with the idea of preserving your high-rank units, even in a losing battle. Which is probably why I went on a tangent. Anyway, pardon the long post, I'm excited ;)
 
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Weekly dev diaries are one of the best things about the Paradox modus operandi. :)

The dark blue shield icon is the equivalent of resistance? Great that the unit cards still have all those details.

Some nice units in the army overview below. A drone and light walker maybe.
 
First a request to the AoW3 community: we kindly ask you to join us here on the Paradox forums, as the old Age of Wonders ones will be closed down later this year. This way Triumph can spend more time making games and less on fighting spam-bots.

Could you not do this, please? You can abandon them, fine, but not delete. Forums have very useful information about your games, modding of your game and you just throw away all of this? As a fan I could say that this will be horrible deed. Maintaining of the forums server isn't very expensive and time-consuming.
 
Thanks for all your reactions! I've seen some pretty good assumptions :)

Couple of reactions to various posts:

- Yes, leader (=Commander in Planetfall) creation including visual customization is definitely a thing in this game. AoW:SM style perks are back
- There's two types of defense unit ratings: Armor and Shields. Then there's resistances. More about this in combat related journals.
- Emergency Evacuation from TC... I know it has come up, I think for Vanguard.
- The golden radiant resource icon is Influence, mostly used for PvP and PvE diplomacy. More on this later of course
- Yes there are separate Combat and World Map Operation Points.
- The old forums will be closed for new posts, of course we'll try to keep it live as an archive - there's lots of useful info in the 200k posts there.
- I'm pretty sure we can get proper AoW3 sub-forums here. Should be sorted before we migrate.
 
I'm a little confused. Is it a turn-based strategy like a GalCiv or Master of Orion with multiple planets or it's like Sid Meier's Apha Centauri with multiple factions on one planet? It seems that it's second option.
 
I'm a little confused. Is it a turn-based strategy like a GalCiv or Master of Orion with multiple planets or it's like Sid Meier's Apha Centauri with multiple factions on one planet? It seems that it's second option.

The second option. The multiple planets are a framing device and relevant to the story campaign, which will be a series of games on different planets.