Age of Wonders 4

There is just going to be too much DLC creep soon, and buying in is going to be harder and harder even with editions that comes with the DLC that is already years old. I want to recommend this game because I love it and I want as many friends as possible to play it with, but the buy in is just too much. Without a sale going on you're currently paying $50 for the current Expansion Pass 3, $50 for the base game, and ~$125 for the older DLC expansion content you cannot get from expansion packs anymore. Premium Edition is definitely worth the cost, big discount on what you're getting for $40 ontop of base game, but still a $90 buy in. Otherwise, I would recommend it. Paradox published game, so I don't expect the DLC situation to ever get better. This game has a lot of fantastic ideas and I absolutely love its artistic style. There are a lot of ways to dress up your civilization and it has the classic victory conditions(score/conquest/research/landcapture) and some scenario related ones(koth, kill/ally specific scenario leader) as well as some interesting challenge realms. The combat has a lot of strategic depth to it, allowing several playstyles to work just fine in games against the AI or friends. Different Lord options (Warlord/Wizard/Dragon/etc) do make civilizations feel quite different alongside the many different cultures and tomes. Not all are made equal and there are still some things that still aren't all there yet (chaos focused culture). If you engage in pvp you'll quickly realize there aren't so many competitive strategies, but if you're playing with friends or against the AI it doesn't matter too much. The reward tree you fill out after finishing games feels like a pretty arbitrary progression but there are a lot of things in it you'll want to unlock to get the full experience. Winning with a lord allows you to give that lord some meta-progression they can carry into new matches. On the negatives, this game does not really run well at all. I [i]can[/i] run the game on higher settings and stay around 50-60fps, but because having the settings high and not locking my framerate causes this game to more or less stop me from multitasking because of its resource consumption. I've settled with lowering the settings to mostly medium and locking the framerate at 60. (I play on 2560x1440) The game doesn't have the depth to really justify how poorly it runs but it is published by paradox so I wouldn't hold my breath on it getting any good optimization.

It makes me sad, but... I cannot recommend this game. 👎😔 Yeah yeah I know, I've played it for 500 hours. Actually it's much more than that (offline). So - here's why I did. You really can "create the empire of your wildest fantasies"! There are so many possibilities. If you have a favorite fantasy trope, or even a really weird OC, you can probably make it in this game. I've made shadowy spymaster dragons, deadly Nightmare-riding mongols, lush giantesses that love rivers and salad, bite-sized pike-and-shot dog people, cannibalistic tiger men, etc etc etc. Your identity is backed up by the mechanics, and it makes your characters feel real. The game's huge surface area and interconnected systems mean there are tons and tons of tricks and strategies to discover. It's genuinely exciting to read through the encyclopedia and realize some amazing new scheme. I love my action figures and I love making them 🤩🐲🦄 ...But despite that, it's a thumbs down. Here is my enormous just-barely-organized-list of reasons why. First off, the issue closest to my heart. THERE IS NO EMPIRE MODE. That alone has soured me on this game from the beginning. For those new to the series, Empire Mode essentially allowed you to have a cool personalized campaign with meta progress. Now it's gone! I get to make all theses amazing custom dudes, then I can't even take them on a campaign?? All I can do is drive them through one mission at a time and grind my stupid boring pantheon points??? Lame lame lame lame LAME. While I do play to win, personally? I could not give less of a crap about the winning itself. Ever finished a game of Civilization and felt sad that your journey was over? I don't want it to end! I wanna tell EPIC FANTASY STORIES across SPACE AND TIME and watch my guys become AMAAAZING!!! 😭 A match should be an episode in an entire anime series about my guy, not a frikkin one-shot c**ktease!! (Oh btw, if you hate pantheon points too, there's a cheat engine table that will give you as many as you want. Search it up and be free!) Quality control is extremely poor. Updates - even *paid DLCs* - often contain content that, out of the gate, simply does not function. I don't just mean stuff is bugged - I mean straight up, the feature does nothing or isn't even there. Most updates also break large swathes of old content, sometimes in baffling ways. Fixes take a long time to come if they come at all, and if you report something you'll often be told it's "working as intended" - even if that is a patently ridiculous idea. Most recently Triumph stated to bug reporters that it is not a bug that underground societies forget how to live underground when absorbed 😵‍💫️ I've completely given up on playing multiplayer, as fully half of my attempts have resulted in save-destroying desyncs. Overall, I get the impression that testing isn't a major priority, or if it is they ain't very good at it. They definitely prioritize making new paid content over maintaining what they've already sold you. Baroque DLCs and new features come through (partially broken) while enormous swathes of the game lie fallow or broken. My heart goes out to the Industrial and High cultures, which have scarcely seen an update *since the game released*. Big Total Warhammer energy. Oh, and those OCs you can make? Updates will totally break those too. Sometimes they become completely unplayable. Updates can wipe out your entire super-grindy pantheon upgrade tree, too. Models often are ugly, have ugly animations, clip for no reason (like the Simians, whose idle tail animation clips right through their legs), are hideously kit bashed together from old assets, or simply recolored WoW-style. Even though costumes are supposed to be modular, a great deal of them simply do not work together - I swear at least half of all outfits are completely broken for the poor neglected mole people. When the developers want to put a human-shaped helmet on a wolf or goat man, they don't worry about respecting your aesthetic - they just cut off his entire nose and call it a day. Got weird legs? Say goodbye to the bottom half of your outfit. Pants and shoes are for humies only. There are a substantial number of completely unrecolorable costume pieces too. Many of the unit transformations and enchantments just look straight up bad, like Draconian (turn snot green and gain rotting wings) Gaia (piles of sticks pop out of random body parts and clip through your clothes), Rock (same deal but with giant ugly boulders!), and Goldskin (makes your skin gold, but only like, 40% of it, and it's so patchy that it looks like a disease). At least you can turn them off now. Y'know. Since the players asked to be able to. Since everything is so ugly. (OK NOT ACTUALLY EVERYTHING BUT I'M MAD ALRIGHT?) It's a strategy game so I don't have to tell you that the AI opponents are terrible. Standard stuff: they're stupid, they're passive, they cheat, etc. If you want to fight players instead, well, like most PvP, it's probably going to be sexless and miserable. From what I've heard fights come down to speed contests as one side tries to be the first to one-shot the other. AND you'll desync. The tactical battles are fairly compelling but like many other grand strategy games, the autocalc will constantly kill your dudes, forcing you to manual tons of easy, boring fights until the tactics lose their savor. And as usual, the AI's goal in said fight is not actually to win or do anything that benefits them, but to hurt the player as much as possible. Developing your cities involves following a thoroughly boring and obvious algorithm where buildings, perversely, have lower and lower ROI per tier, so you should build just about every ♥♥♥♥♥♥ building before anything actually cool. A large number of special province improvements are just bad, so you don't have to worry about those. Information is often poor, with tooltips being ambiguous, absent, wrong, or simply missing important information like WHAT AN ABILITY ACTUALLY DOES. Oh, and if you saw they existed and were hoping to do Civilization-style peaceful victory types? Sorry. They suck. Hard. Not only do they take forever, they force you to play King of the Hill against the entire map at once, meaning you actually have to have a stronger military and FIGHT MORE than if you had simply conquered everything like a basic Gilgamesh b****. Overall, I want to love this game. It's a fancy game. I want to smoke this fkin game 🚬😮‍💨 but bro. I just can't do it. This game sucks. Sure, I'll probably keep playing it anyway, on and off - but it'll never be what I want it to be, and I wouldn't have spent over $200 to have this experience if I knew what I did now. 😞 The End 😞

I thought i purchased everything to date in the bundle i clicked on (120 AUD including the season pass) only to open the game to find out that there is an expansion pass 3 apparently....... for another 30 AUD.......... scummy business practice.... very scummy. Edit: not 30... the bundle I purchased for over 100 dollars only included pass 1... not 2 and apparently a 3rd.... 70 AUD each... buyer beware.

This is the best game that I don't play. I bought the game on launch, with all the passes, because I thought I'd no-life this game for the rest of the year, in '23. Sadly... I covet happiness via [i]beginning[/i] new games, and seldom ever play them enough to make a Twitch streamer blush. I always [i]WANT[/i] to buy all the DLC's, and I always [i]WANT[/i] to get really invested in this game. I don't even know all the updates and QoL improvements that have happened over the years. All I know is that this game deserves more love. [b][u]However[/u][/b] ☝️, I think the DLC monetization strategy of Paradox Interactive is [b]extremely hostile[/b]. Again... [h3]The monetization strategy of Paradox Interactive, across [u]ALL[/u] of their games, is [b]hostile[/b].[/h3] I own the first pass, and for me to scoop all the rest of the content available, today... it's $185 + tax. [spoiler]GTFOH![/spoiler] This company is [b]ALLOWED[/b] to get away with this nonsense with every single game they make. I will admit that the DLC for AoW4 looks to be the most compelling, compared to Across the Obelisk's trashy DLC, or the Prison Architect's nonsense they've pulled. I don't even play Europa Universalis games because of the DLC strategy of Paradox Interactive. Anyway... just because there's too much DLC, and it's [b]wayyyy overpriced[/b] I do not even recommend the game. I know that's unfair to Triumph Studios, but they signed the deal with Paradox to pump DLC until they've milked every last dollar out of their fans. So, I guess it's actually very fair. They knew what they were signing up for. This game [i]could[/i] be the 4x/strategy version of Baldur's Gate 3, IMHO. This game could be THE premier 4x game of all time, even, but it'll forever be marred by a paywall, complete with a mural of the Paradox Interactive CEO giving all of us the middle-finger.

I started playing this game just over a month ago. This game has taken over my entire life and honestly I'm not even mad about it, this game is a masterpiece. I'd wanted to play it for a long time, but unfortunately I didn't have either the money nor a good enough computer, and now that I've played it, I'm so annoyed that I couldn't sooner. This might be the best game I've ever played

It took me a few tries to get into it, but now I'm thoroughly obsessed with Age of Wonders 4. It's a fantastic 4X game that blends Civilization with Heroes of Might and Magic, but it also is more than the sum of those parts too. Probably the most unique feature is the race customization and progression. You can build a unique fantasy race (or use one of the MANY pre-built ones) that has its own strengths and weaknesses. But what's so cool is that, during the course of a campaign, you can unlock spells that vastly alter the appearance and abilities of your race. Want to turn your molemen into eldritch demons? Sure. Transform your dwarven empire into sentient crystal-people? Your call. Make your forest elves trade in their legs for snake tails, making some weird-ass naga hybrid? It's your life, dude. Anyway, the game is great. The layering of all it systems makes for some really fun moments and very engaging campaigns that can be fun all the way through. The battle system is also quite enjoyable, too. Near the end of a campaign, I'm usually using autobattle because it can really extend the length of a campaign if you fight every battle yourself. But it's great to have both options (and if you lose an autobattle, you can retry it as a regular battle to see if you can reverse your ill fortune). My only real complaints are that -- surprise, surprise -- enemy AI can be quite dubious and a little too passive for my tastes. I've been at war with factions for 50 turns and felt like they didn't once send an invading army over to me, despite not having much else to do. I also wish diplomacy had some more granular options, especially around war target coordination. But my gripes with the game are minor in light of all the fun I've had. Would really recommend this (and all of its DLC, which just adds more and more content to an already content-filled game) to just about anyone into strategy games.

别买，过一回合闪退一回合，4090+13900k+16*2芝奇皇家戟+ssd一直闪退，没招了

Невероятно замудренный гибрид Цивилизации 5 с Героями Меча и Магии 4. Хреналион параметров, статусов, свойств, алайнментов, валют, зависимостей, микромеханик, на каждый чих есть скромный объясняющий тултип в пяти частях, с завязкой, кульминацией, развязкой и неожиданным поворотом. Разобраться — невозможно! Рекомендую! Нет, серьёзно, Это просто игра в которую добавили ВСЁ. Вообще всё! От больших сражений, где по несколько союзных армий воюют совместно на общем поле, до редактора мать его персонажей, уровня какой-нибудь РПГ! ЗЫ: Да, периодически падает! Это правда. Но с таким количеством [i]всего[/i] это чудо, что оно вообще работает.

One of the most fun 4x Turn-Based on the market. Ridiculous amount of replayability. The reason why I won't recommend it is because of Paradox and their ridiculous tendency to sell all their games with 20+ dlcs. Greedy doesn't even describe those chaps.

Age of Wonders 4 feels like somebody dumped a fantasy novel, a tabletop campaign, and a war simulator into a magical blender and somehow made it fun instead of overwhelming. One minute you’re creating noble frog knights riding wolves under a moon goddess, and the next you’re launching apocalyptic spells that turn the battlefield into a flaming nightmare. The game constantly rewards creativity, letting you build ridiculous fantasy civilizations that feel personal instead of generic. Every campaign becomes its own chaotic story full of betrayals, giant monsters, and moments where your carefully crafted empire nearly collapses because you got greedy and tried to fight three kingdoms at once. What makes the game really addictive is how alive everything feels. The music swells like you’re starring in your own fantasy movie, the customization options are almost dangerous for people who love character creation, and the combat scratches the same itch as moving miniatures around a tabletop map at 2 AM with friends. Even when you lose, it feels entertaining because the disasters are so dramatic. Triumph Studios basically made a fantasy sandbox where half the fun is watching your own terrible decisions become legendary stories.