late game is hell with no tome limit

[Streletz]

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.

Well let me rephrase then - restraining the player seems like a catastrophic direction to take in a game whose main selling points is litterally the customisation and the liberty of creating your own empire. Restriction is rarely welcomed by the players (if you dig the Stellaris Forums for instance you will find plenty of exemples of this - from the hate toward planet limits back in 2012, to the eternal question "why PDX don't let me play a spiritualist machine empire").

If you want to restic a player ability, you better have a good reason for doing so, I don't see it here Would that give a bigger diversity at the endgame? No, it's the opposite. Would that create new playstyles? No that's the opposite.

Restring them for the sake of "Each choice has to matter?". Well, first, nothing forbids you to restrict yourself in your games, instead of asking to restrict the game itself.
Secondly the real game bottleneck where choice matters is the imperium income.

Each mechanic in the game doesn't have to matter for ewvery of your microdecision. We've alreadt been through this with Planetfall, and the non scalable cosmite ressources that was needed for absolutely everything in the game, and quite a few enjoyed this.

 

[Koiju]

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.

This must have been what I heard Tom talking about, seems it was changed, fair enough

 

[Newbee53]

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.

I did something similar with giant, golden angles. They were awesome. No one seemed to be coping me. Most people seemed to be going mainly chaos. There was an astral and someone else I don't know what they were doing. Kind of weird if people were going the same way as you. Maybe it has to do with diplomacy? I basically ignored everyone until they started to declare war and that stuff.

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

That level might be good for tier five. But honestly most of the good stuff is in tier four when you're looking at transformation. I'd rather be able to have three or four affinities and still being able to get a major transformation. That's how you make you're really cool creatures.

 

[Cybersbe]

Well let me rephrase then - restraining the player seems like a catastrophic direction to take in a game whose main selling points is litterally the customisation and the liberty of creating your own empire. Restriction is rarely welcomed by the players (if you dig the Stellaris Forums for instance you will find plenty of exemples of this - from the hate toward planet limits back in 2012, to the eternal question "why PDX don't let me play a spiritualist machine empire").

If you want to restic a player ability, you better have a good reason for doing so, I don't see it here Would that give a bigger diversity at the endgame? No, it's the opposite. Would that create new playstyles? No that's the opposite.

Restring them for the sake of "Each choice has to matter?". Well, first, nothing forbids you to restrict yourself in your games, instead of asking to restrict the game itself.
Secondly the real game bottleneck where choice matters is the imperium income.

Each mechanic in the game doesn't have to matter for ewvery of your microdecision. We've alreadt been through this with Planetfall, and the non scalable cosmite ressources that was needed for absolutely everything in the game, and quite a few enjoyed this.

My personal thoughts:

I CAN restrict myself… but I can’t restrict the AI. And it can be annoying when they don’t behave as I want the character I created to behave.

Here’s where I stand: I would like it if, when setting up a game, I can adjust the preferences of AI players, so that they have Tomes they’ll prioritize over others.

Example: my self-righteous crusader, when played by an AI, should want to get the Tome of the Inquisition and Tome of Subjugation when they can.

 

[Arilou]

The simplest solution (if you don't want hard caps) would probably be to have the research cost increase by the number of tomes you have unlocked. It won't quite "stop" a determined player but it will certianly delay things if the cost increase is steep enough. (

 

[Sadorhael]

I respectfully disagree with this. Exactly that you are able to choose what tomes you want and combine them in any way late game if one of the fun points for me. Prioritisation still plays a big role with regards to the early and midgame.

If this is indeed changed, please to make it an advanced option while setting up the game, so you don't lock people in.

 

[Evernex]

That level might be good for tier five. But honestly most of the good stuff is in tier four when you're looking at transformation. I'd rather be able to have three or four affinities and still being able to get a major transformation. That's how you make your really cool creatures.

Agreed, that was just an extreme example to showcase the possibility. Another option would be to put additional tomes above a certain limit (more than 3 tier 4 tomes for example) cost imperium. I haven’t played enough to know if this would delay things effectively, but This would still allow to eventually gain all the tomes, but require a bit more investment that you have to balance against obtaining other units/cities/etc.

 

[Sollis]

I agree there should be a limit, and conversion of research to resources after the limit is reached. I suggest about 11 tomes is right.

Not sure I'd like a flat limit. I think there should simply be an diminishing return on tomes researched beyond two per tier and nine total tomes - where the tomes research speed is slower after nine, then dramatically slower (4-5x) by the time we reach tome 14-15 and perhaps the hard-cap is ~21

I'm sure there's a good middle-ground option here. Perhaps there could be a new set of options in real creation? The thing I would like to avoid is the end game tome spam where we can run through the lower tier tomes in such a short amount of time.

In future there will be more tomes in total, which will only partially address the issue of build diversity between factions in a given game.

 

[Kevin Ross Brown]

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.

Nah.

My most interesting journey up the the tome tree is always the first one because I'm either going tall or wide and in either case still building something that feels unique.

When you swoop back around and fill-in all of the other tomes, you're just min-maxing at that point. The flavor vanishes.


'I want a scoop of literally every flavor of ice cream in my bowl!' is how you get a dessert that is a tasteless mess, and that's what the endgame of AoW 4 currently feels like. Color me unsurprised that we got here via design-by-committee, where the objective was to stick to the game's 'pillars', whatever that means, instead of making something that was fun to play.

 

[DevWolf]

Perhaps they should limit the number of tomes you can get of each tier or have harder restrictions on affinity requirements. Maybe even both could be good measures.

We can only get 1 tier 5 tome. So we could go backwards from there. Limiting the player to 2 tier 4 tomes. 4 tier 3. 6 tier 2 and no limit on tier 1.

As for affinity requirements, add a requirement for all tomes above tier 1 and then increase the amount of affinity required for higher tomes. Affinity isn't hard to get in game. So perhaps the requirements should jump for higher tiers. 2 for tier 2. 4 for tier 3. 8 for tier 4. 12 for tier 5.

They could also have opposing affinities suppress each other based on which one is higher. More order than chaos, chaos points are effectively halved. If your total chaos points go above order, then your order points become effectively halved. Question is should this affect unlocked tomes and research?

If this does affect it, would that mean each spell and unit would have an affinity requirement? That if your active points are below the requirement you can't use them? what do you guys think?

 

[Uriak]

We can agree than taking everything is kinda bad (though can be fun to try once) , but honestly many restrictions flung here could end up not very fun.

-> first the crux of the problem is whether the game is over or not when you reach that moment where you need to sink that research cost into something. That's a whole question that as said above encompass the choice of units and stuff to do in general at this stage. If this tends to happen a few turns into the last decisive battle it's not a big issue, but that can change with some playstyles and it's difficult to tweak the game pace to satisfy everything. People who fight early on, should have a chance to reach to mid-late game techs before the dust settles, in PF you could often with without using T4.

-> the best solution to this is unfortunately one that needs time, aka having more tomes in general. When we'll have twice the starting number this issue will not be catastrophic.

-> putting restrictions will hamper some gameplay styles. If you want to use opposite affinities tomes in your factions, should this be punished ? Not as a last ditch upgrade but during the main course of the game.

One possible way to avoid rainbow enchantments is to make stacking them restricted specifically or more and more costly above some point. This must be convenyed clearly in the UI, however. Having access to a wider pool of units and immediate spells isn't a glaring issue, I think ?

Finally if we really want to play around affinities, I'd rather reward going into one direction than overly punish broader approches. Maybe ramp up research costs with a rebate depending of your previous affinities?

 

[aono]

If you want to use opposite affinities tomes in your factions, should this be punished ? Not as a last ditch upgrade but during the main course of the game.

I wouldn't exactly call it "punished", but I think it should that opposition of elements should be present. Still, it's incuring a penalty, so... yeah.

Maybe ramp up research costs with a rebate depending of your previous affinities?

That was more or less my initial idea: ramp up research cost HIGHLY, and then reduce it drastically for each point of corresponding affinity (and increase it for each point of opposing affinity, making it so that, if you're playing both affinities, the bonus is at least partially hindered by penalty).
For example, ramp up basic cost for, like, 150%-200%, and then reduce it for 10% for each point of corresponding affinity, and increase it for 5% for each point of opposing affinity. (Numbers aren't final.)

 

[Frank327]

It's a difficult problem to solve because on the one hand you don't want to restrict players from using certain tactics and on the other hand you want to incenticize interesting faction progression.
My take on what needs to happen:

- Increased research cost for every finished research, perhaps with small decrease in base research cost of higher tier tomes. That should prevent the tier 1 spam from being effective.

- Maximum minor race transformations (3) and maybe some restrictions on what enchantments you can combine. Again, to prevent every faction from turning into the same mess.

- Maybe some better AI research priorities? If necessary maybe even give the option to pre-determine Tome progression for AI leaders that you created.

- Some early empire development skills are ridiculously strong compared to their cost. While some of the later ones are barely useful. I would prefer a buff to the higher tier empire development skills as you still want the early ones to be impactful.

 

[CyberianK]

I think all the complicated systems are bad. No hard limits no super complicated opposing affinity system.
The system is fine the way it is design wise and they made an intentional design decision to go this way.

A tiny bit of math for exponential increase on repeating the same tier to get all tomes will not change the "originally advertised" way of going 2 each to T5 higher while stopping some ALL T1s by turn 30 abuse or lategame researching everything where choices don't matter anymore. At the same time it does not forbid playstyles with harsh limits or goes against the original gamedesign.

I feel the issues can be fixed with a single line of code in the formulas calculating research cost.

 

[Kevin Ross Brown]

Perhaps they should limit the number of tomes you can get of each tier or have harder restrictions on affinity requirements. Maybe even both could be good measures.

We can only get 1 tier 5 tome. So we could go backwards from there. Limiting the player to 2 tier 4 tomes. 4 tier 3. 6 tier 2 and no limit on tier 1.

As for affinity requirements, add a requirement for all tomes above tier 1 and then increase the amount of affinity required for higher tomes. Affinity isn't hard to get in game. So perhaps the requirements should jump for higher tiers. 2 for tier 2. 4 for tier 3. 8 for tier 4. 12 for tier 5.

They could also have opposing affinities suppress each other based on which one is higher. More order than chaos, chaos points are effectively halved. If your total chaos points go above order, then your order points become effectively halved. Question is should this affect unlocked tomes and research?

If this does affect it, would that mean each spell and unit would have an affinity requirement? That if your active points are below the requirement you can't use them? what do you guys think?

MoM had a restriction of 11 books; slightly more if you did some extremely difficult fights to score them.

Eh, but why use one of the great games ever made as a guide? Doesn't fit the 'design pillar'.


Would solve so many problems while keeping playing choice alive (just like it did in MoM). Want to go wide? Sure, go for it. Midrange? Why not. Want to go dive deep into a specific lore and just splash a bit? Be my guest.

But you've got a budget of 11 picks. So every Tome you grab comes at the cost of another Tome.

 

[DevWolf]

MoM had a restriction of 11 books; slightly more if you did some extremely difficult fights to score them.

Eh, but why use one of the great games ever made as a guide? Doesn't fit the 'design pillar'.


Would solve so many problems while keeping playing choice alive (just like it did in MoM). Want to go wide? Sure, go for it. Midrange? Why not. Want to go dive deep into a specific lore and just splash a bit? Be my guest.

But you've got a budget of 11 picks. So every Tome you grab comes at the cost of another Tome.

So how would it work in this game? How would it interact with the other mechanics? What happens to research once you run out of picks? What happens if someone runs out before getting to a 5th tier tome? People need to research at least, 8 tomes before they get a 5th tier one. So after their 5th tier tome they only get 2 more choices? Is it just an 11 tome budget or is it flexible? Can players earn more picks by conquering gold tier wonders? Would it not be better to just put limits on how many tomes of a tier you can get?

 

[Kevin Ross Brown]

Like the rest of MicroProse's catalog, MoM gave you a repeatable research option that basically just gave you a higher score every time you completed it once you mined-out the tech tree. Seems as reasonable a solution to the non-problem of mining out the tech tree as any.

That and/or or just include an equivalent to the Spell of Mastery that just wins you the game when researched.

 

[aono]

That and/or or just include an equivalent to the Spell of Mastery that just wins you the game when researched.

That's not how it worked in MoM.

 

[DevWolf]

Like the rest of MicroProse's catalog, MoM gave you a repeatable research option that basically just gave you a higher score every time you completed it once you mined-out the tech tree. Seems as reasonable a solution to the non-problem of mining out the tech tree as any.

That and/or or just include an equivalent to the Spell of Mastery that just wins you the game when researched.

Say someone researches all tier 1 tomes and get to this win game spell early. What would prevent someone from rushing to the win game spell? Would this mean changing how research is done? Would the cost of researching go up per tome regardless of its tier? Wouldn't this make the current magical victory system redundant?

 

[aono]

Say someone researches all tier 1 tomes and get to this win game spell early. What would prevent someone from rushing to the win game spell? Would this mean changing how research is done? Would the cost of researching go up per tome regardless of its tier? Wouldn't this make the current magical victory system redundant?

Let's start with another question, should we.
In MoM you establish your library from the start of the game, bar optional fights in high-level dwellings, with 11 picks, part of them being spellbooks, and part of them being perks that gives other bonuses; all elemental books are non-specific (meaning, for example, that there is no such a thing as "book of roots" against "book of beasts". If we're to implement this system here, in AoW4, how do we solve it? Are we just remove the whole idea of themed, relatively small books and replace it with general "Life Affinity", with books giving it, and research being effectively locked for the affinity established on the start of the game, or what?
(also, I somehow suspect that Triumph have a closer implementation of the same system, a bit younger then 1994; called

Or we're replacing the system of MoM to the system where you have limited picks of small tomes for the duration of the game, to be selected in-game, because it's completely different system?