late game is hell with no tome limit

[LizardCommander]

I mean I guess to me it just doesn't matter.

The T5 Tomes are typically defining in one way or another. By that point in the game, the differentiation will still exist based on your Major Transformation, and T3-T5 Tome Choices.

Like yeah, the Chaos Wizard could suddenly pick up the ability to destroy provinces and create forests, then awaken those same forests, just like the Nature Wizard was doing, but it wouldn't really matter. In a head on head the Nature Wizard is going to be waaaay stronger due to the T5 bonuses to plants and animals.

As far as picking up old Shadow Tomes for Necromancy, there's some really strong stuff that's hard gated behind the T5 Tome. The Nature Wizard picking up the Shadow Tomes for Necromancy will find little use for them in all honesty. Now, there is a huge benefit to having more Summoning Spells since you can precast them, and drop all of them on a single turn for a huge set of armies, but there's disadvantages in the lack of synergy as well at times.

I feel like most of the time you can close out the game before the number of tomes leads to a complete lack of thematic cohesiveness. Really, by the point you have T4 to T5 Tomes the game becomes a World War with enough Summons. The AI doesn't do it right or else they'd be a complete nightmare, sending Scouts out everywhere even in the late game, and then using the vision they provide to constantly harass your cities while you are at the frontlines. It's kinda difficult to not closeout even if they were to do that though, you could recall your leader to pushback their summoned armies (which won't typically be more than 1k or so in strength), and then use a teleporter to return to the Front. Dropping an Outpost before you cast the spell (or using a Hero or Scout to do so) and building a Teleporter lets you keep up the pressure.

 

[Olauron]

Running with 30 Tomes is fun. And when I don't want to research more, I just select the 10 000 000 point skill to stop.

 

[Cybersbe]

Another thing is that I like the idea of having a theme for your faction, which can very easily be lost when you are researching everything like a madman.

Perhaps there can be some affinity restrictions (albeit softer) for lower tier tomes too? (ex. tier 3 requiring 4 points in the respective affinity.)

 

[Szeron]

Gosh, how quickly do you get new tomes? You have only 150 turns in order to avoid that sort of thing.

With the Ancient Wise Ones trait.. about every 4-6 turns. It's very easy to 'mill' beyond T5 by turn 100 with that Society Trait alone. (I did it by accident in my first game, with barbarians, without even investing heavily in research.)

However, I think the issue is less about speed and more about the implications of exceeding the 'apex' of T5. Once you reach the top, there's nowhere to go but back down.. and things tend to snowball very rapidly once you do. Soon, you'll be swimming in so many unit enchantments and racial transformations that your units just become a katamari ball of whatever you can stick on them.. and your rivals become much the same. It's no longer a war of Tree-people against the Demonkin, it's just horrific franken-blob against near-identical franken-blob that's slightly more or less freakish.

And sure, speedrunning to Magic Victory may sound like the logical course of action, but that solution doesn't really resolve the greater issue if magical victory is not the objective(or option). If you pursue a late game Conquest Victory (or expansion victory if you're particularly masochistic), there is nothing in place to prevent your thematic approach from bloating horribly. There's no way to say 'No' to picking a new tome that doesn't fit the intended playstyle. You eventually reach a point where it's forced upon you; your affinities become a rainbow mess that just feels and plays terrible. It's like trying to color a picture with all the colors of a rainbow.. and the result is an ugly brown mess.

 

[just.dont]

Affinity restrictions don’t come in until tier 4.

Unfortunately, affinity restrictions are extremely weaksauce right now. E.g. you can have nearly enough affinity for a T4 of a certain magic type just with your racial configuration. And add something extra on top (affinity from a hero, for example) to qualify for T5 without actually picking any lower-level tomes.

E.g. technically you can have 12 affinity in a magic type just from T1-T3 tomes, yet the game requires you to have only 6 for T4 and only 8 for T5. So given absolutely no affinity from any other source, you must pick half of lower-level tomes, then a T4, then a T5. But there are TONS of other affinity sources!

 

[oatbear]

Creating a build is as much about what you pick as it is about what you don't/cannot pick, so I totally agree that there should be some restriction, even if that decreases the number of possible builds. I can't really think of any game where there's not such a restriction.

 

[aadf97799c]

just put a cap on tome

maybe 10 or12

and introduce repeatable tech like stellaris

 

[bagas12]

Easiest solution to this, create a tier "6" repeatable Future Tome like Planetfall had, which only give a random bonus and random techs that only improve small things like planetfall did, make the AI be forced to this choice after his tier 5, no need to thinker with research timings and whatnot, if the problem is the homogenization of every AI having access to every skill after some time this is it.

Now if you have a problem with human players too it's best to address this with rules you impose among yourselfs, limiting tomes is a really easy way to break the game in a bad way for a bunch of people which has nothing to do with this.

 

[Taritu]

Seems like the best solution would be to put an option in the setup to limit tomes. (Hey, I play Stellaris and that's their default for stuff that is contentious.)

 

[bagas12]

Seems like the best solution would be to put an option in the setup to limit tomes. (Hey, I play Stellaris and that's their default for stuff that is contentious.)

The problem with this is what happens if you run out of tech to research? Of course if someone choose this they will prob not be at this stage, but planetfall already had an elegant solution to this problem which even gave the player choice of going for more abilities from other races (tomes) or keep improving what you already had with a repeatable end game research.

 

[Triumph Jordi]

If it were up to me, I’d like it so you can only have 2 tomes each from tiers 1-4 (as for Tier V, well, you already can only have one).

We used to have that system but it went too heavily against the Game Pillars we have for Age of Wonders 4 and was a heavily discussed subject during testing. It's why we ended up switching to the more flexible Affinity Tresholds for the higher Tier Tomes.

 

[Streletz]

I'm suprised that so much people are taking about restraining the tomes in late game. FOr me that would onnly make the problem worse.

The main probleme isn't the enchantements, its the lack of end game units. The problem is that you will use more or less the same units in the late game, no matter what faction you created. The diversity and the faction effects is more perceptible at the beginning of the game, but tend to go to a bottleneck toward the end.

I tried to make a Nimue (from AoW 2) themed faction - aka something that looks as a feodal realm, but is run by an evil and jealous godess. I could get the flavor of it in the beginning and the middle of the gam,e where my typically feodal armies were reinforced by fantasmal warriors and white witches, but toward the end, I just played the typical arcane/dark army.

I guess this is something that will be solved only by adding more tomes (and possibly alignements) in future DLC. Possible some dual-aligned tomes,, that could be unlockable only by choosing some specific ones before.

 

[Big J Money]

I'm suprised that so much people are taking about restraining the tomes in late game. FOr me that would onnly make the problem worse.

Because strategy gaming is all about making impactful strategic choices. By forcing the player to pick only 2 of 12 Tier II Tomes (for example), their choice carries a lot of weight. When they know that they can pick any of the other ones later, the choice carries less weight.

For example, let's say that that there's a T2 tome that contains a very popular summon. One that works well with almost any play style. If we could only pick 2 tomes at each Tier, then choosing that unit would prevent us from making another Tier II tome pick. It would be a sacrifice that has to be weighed.

There is still some choice obviously, because the game doesn't last forever, and when the player chooses their tome matters. But tome selection is a bit less impactful this way.

I personally would like to see some limitation regarding tomes of opposing schools, but I don't have any suggestions that would actually be good ones.

 

[Cybersbe]

We used to have that system but it went too heavily against the Game Pillars we have for Age of Wonders 4 and was a heavily discussed subject during testing. It's why we ended up switching to the more flexible Affinity Tresholds for the higher Tier Tomes.

I can see the logic there.

I still think it should be an option in game setup, though.

 

[sparkwarrior777]

We used to have that system but it went too heavily against the Game Pillars we have for Age of Wonders 4 and was a heavily discussed subject during testing. It's why we ended up switching to the more flexible Affinity Tresholds for the higher Tier Tomes.

understandable, I just finished a game where i went order and material and made steel skin angels which looked dope. Its just annoying when the AI keeps copying you so its less effective and not fun to fight as you are just fighting yourself.

 

[Streletz]

Because strategy gaming is all about making impactful strategic choices. By forcing the player to pick only 2 of 12 Tier II Tomes (for example), their choice carries a lot of weight. When they know that they can pick any of the other ones later, the choice carries less weight.

For example, let's say that that there's a T2 tome that contains a very popular summon. One that works well with almost any play style. If we could only pick 2 tomes at each Tier, then choosing that unit would prevent us from making another Tier II tome pick. It would be a sacrifice that has to be weighed.

There is still some choice obviously, because the game doesn't last forever, and when the player chooses their tome matters. But tome selection is a bit less impactful this way.

I personally would like to see some limitation regarding tomes of opposing schools, but I don't have any suggestions that would actually be good ones.

You will get exaclty the same result by increasing the number of tomes. If you usually unlock +/- 30 tomes in a game, there is a big difference between choosing between 80 dnd 150 of them. You'll simply wont have enought time to unlock all of them. Restraining choices is always a bad direction to pick.

 

[Big J Money]

A choice, by definition, is something that is contrained.

"Restraining choices is always a bad direction to pick" is an a broad statement that you need to put more effort into providing some justification for, if you want people to accept your argument.

Edit: I'm not arguing that restraining tome picks is the best solution, I'm just not accepting that basis for your argument.

 

[Bomdur]

I'm suprised that so much people are taking about restraining the tomes in late game. FOr me that would onnly make the problem worse.

The main probleme isn't the enchantements, its the lack of end game units. The problem is that you will use more or less the same units in the late game, no matter what faction you created. The diversity and the faction effects is more perceptible at the beginning of the game, but tend to go to a bottleneck toward the end.

I tried to make a Nimue (from AoW 2) themed faction - aka something that looks as a feodal realm, but is run by an evil and jealous godess. I could get the flavor of it in the beginning and the middle of the gam,e where my typically feodal armies were reinforced by fantasmal warriors and white witches, but toward the end, I just played the typical arcane/dark army.

I guess this is something that will be solved only by adding more tomes (and possibly alignements) in future DLC. Possible some dual-aligned tomes,, that could be unlockable only by choosing some specific ones before.

I don't like the idea of forcing it. I would prefer a slider/field from 1 to ∞ ... If i want a playtrough with only one tome i could have that. If i want all the tomes (exept V) i should be able to. What happens to research after that? idk, convert it to mana or whatever.

 

[Cybersbe]

A choice, by definition, is something that is contrained.

"Restraining choices is always a bad direction to pick" is an a broad statement that you need to put more effort into providing some justification for, if you want people to accept your argument.

Edit: I'm not arguing that restraining tome picks is the best solution, I'm just not accepting that basis for your argument.

Mostly, I’m just bothered when AI players use my characters and don’t follow the theme I imagined for them.

 

[Evernex]

I think another option would be changing the affinity requirements to be more stringent. This is an extreme example but if tier 4 required 13 affinity for example - you would need all the preceding tomes and would have had to have chosen some society trait in order to reach that limit - or chosen a ruler special ability that gave affinity. It would be much more difficult to reach that affinity with all of the tome paths and you would have to make specific decisions to reach it. All tier 3 tomes would still be an option. This could also create some fun play throughs where you happen to pick up a couple heroes with shadow affinity or completing a random quest that grants order affinity as an astral/chaos setup - allowing you to dip those other ways as well. These could make for more dynamic games where you don’t know what other tome paths you will get.

This is probably too extreme and there is likely a more elegant solution - for example requiring higher affinity the more tier 4 other tomes you have. Making it harder to get all the spell lines. Or having negative affinity for certain choices - making the combo of higher tier order/chaos tomes harder to achieve. The only other problem with this is requiring all the preceding tomes - as sometimes you may want an astral play through without having to get all the tier 1-3 tomes before hitting tier 4. But that could be addressed by having the first two series of tier 4 tomes cost normal amount of affinity - with the next tier having steeply increased cost requiring the above society traits/specific hero recruitment/other affinity granting effects to reach them.