NOTE: If you are planning to ONLY play this game SOLO, then consider this to be a POSITIVE review! Almost all of the major issues have to do with multiplayer!
I love this game. I've bought every last bit of DLC, even the wholly-cosmetic ones, and I've played it for a truly unreasonable amount of hours. Unfortunately, the stability of multiplayer play has significantly declined over the past two years. Every new DLC impacts the stability negatively, and no progress on fixing old bugs is being made. The major issues that you are now guaranteed to encounter are as follows:
"Out of Sync" - regardless of if you play with Classic or Simultaneous turns, every single multiplayer game will start having out of sync errors at the beginning of every single new round by about turn 30. These are relatively benign, if annoying, just kicking you out of doing anything while it re-syncs.
"Lost Progress" - Later on, as the Out of Sync errors get worse, players begin to lose progress, with infestations that were destroyed re-appearing, conquered cities switching back to before they were taken, units missing multiple turns of movement, and so on. There seems to be no good way to predict or prevent this.
"Hidden Waiting for Player Decision" - Very frequently in lategame multiplayer games, the entire game will be frozen, with nobody able to do anything, due to the game waiting for a player decision. Crucially, this bug [b]does not inform the player who has to make the decision[/b] of this, and they will simply also be stuck. The only way to fix it is for the person who has to make the decision to leave the game and re-join, which then causes an Out of Sync error, and then (hopefully) allows them to see the decision that they have to make.
"Opponents are Moving Forever" - Commonly in lategame multiplayer games, during the "Opponents are Moving" phase, there will eventually come a turn where the AIs simply never finish their turn. We've tested with waiting days, having only the host join, having everyone disconnect, and other things, but the only way to fix it is to revert the turn entirely, play through it again, make different choices, and hope that it doesn't happen again. Sometimes, there's no escaping it, and the save is doomed.
"Loading Crash" - This issue, once rare, is now present on almost every single multiplayer game I am in. It's extremely simple - once you load into the multiplayer game, Age of Wonders 4 crashes. This happens for every player. There is no resolution but to revert the game. Even then, I have had three separate games in the past week where this did not solve the issue, and the entire game had to be abandoned. This issue is becoming increasingly prevalent, and I have yet to have a single multiplayer game reach turn 80 since the new DLC before it becomes permanently unplayable.
While this game is a joy in solo, the real fun is in multiplayer - or at least, it used to be. Until Paradox puts in the effort to resolve the increasingly-severe multiplayer stability bugs, I do not reccomend this game to anyone who wants to play with other players.
