Age of Wonders 4

Bugs meaning you can get in locked states where you can't win if you don't have allied victory enabled because of an enforced alliance you can't break? Really dumb.

Сама игра понравилась, давно не было стратегий где ты сам делаешь свою фракцию НО ЕСТЬ одно НО, оптимизация игры отвратительная, я не знаю может мне не повезло с пк геймингом, однако такой плохой оптимизации я даже в хогвартс легаси не видел, из часа игры половину я просидел в загрузке, игра вылетает после некоторых СТАРТОВЫХ битв, я уже всё пробовал и графику понизить, и игру переустановил, но геймлей всё равно выглядит также: запустил, подождал загрузки (мин 5), вступительная катсцена, подождал загрузки (мин 10), короткий пролаг, запускаю раунд, пролаг, создаю расу, лютое мыло, подтверждаю, пролаг, подождал загрузки (мин 5), пошел драться, подождал загрузки (мин 2), победил, после рулетка(25% вылетит, 75% нет), пролаг, подождал загрузки (мин 1), поставил строительство, юнита и разведа, новый ход, повторить выше сказанное и всё это сопровождается периодическим мылом. Также нет желания играть в парадокс геймплей, где что бы играть полноценно нужно купить дополнений на 3 эти игры (это ещё и по скидке). Подводя итоги: я очень ждал скидки на игру и сама игра мне понравилась, и возможно я бы смог починить эту оптимизацию, но впечатление от игры уже испорчено так что рефанд

The premiere 4X fantasy themed game to play. The craxy amount of customization in how to make your own faction look and play is insane. The tome system makes for a really open way of advancing your tech while keeping in theme to the world. And with regards to the world, Triumph crafted a beautiful setting that even I can create a story or lore to randomly generated maps. DLC-wise, there's a lot but some enchances the world better like Giant Kings, Eldritch Realms, and the most recent Secret of the Archmages. Already played nearly 400 hours of this gem and looking forward to hundreds more.

Look at the prices of those DLCs. You can literally get four of the best games ever made for the price of a single DLC for this game. It's greed. That's what it is. And by the way, you can create 90% of the contents of those DLCs yourself with the mod tools. Don't support predatory and abusive business practices.

The game itself is really good and fun, don't get me wrong. But the constant crashing, multiplayer bugs, softlocks, abysmal performance and other shenannigans are not worth the price of the game, let alone all the DLCs. I'll still continue playing because I am stubborn, but I cannot, in good faith, recommend purchasing this. Not for a full price.

good game and fun but crashes every couple of turns in single player... so thumbs down for me until its fixed.

[h1]AoW4 highlights how a game with so many options, leaves you with very little choice.[/h1] Really there are 4 major issues with the game: [h3]1. Scaling[/h3] Research takes forever, affinity trees take forever, population growth takes forever, production takes forever, all of this being on Fast instead of Normal as well. Everything in this game is really, REALLY slow unless you're seriously optimizing a path towards a specific mechanic. Some people might say that it's normal for a 4x game, but I completely disagree when Endless, Civilization and (to a lesser extent) Stellaris all have systems in place where even if your gameplan is hyper-specializing into a single facet of the game, you can at least keep up in the other facets to not be completely out of the race. But even if you are ahead of the curve in a few places, you are still taking forever to get ahead of that curve in the first place. Fast timescale helps but pop growth even under that timescale still takes ages to increase, optimized research is still taking around 16-22 turns on average for reasons I will mention in a moment, moving around the map is taking forever and even ending turns is taking forever due to how hard performance drops at turn 70+. Don't even get me started on city caps, the amount of resource you need to get more than a cap of 4-5 cities is just completely stupid. [h3]2. Map dependency[/h3] Unlike in the earlier mentioned games like Civ, Endless or Stellaris, if you get anything below a really good starting position in AoW4, you are screwed for the rest of the game. There's no way to export your resources from one city to another to help them catch up, nor is there a way to actually make a middling city somewhat decent at something and that (in my opinion) is due to how map dependent the game is. See, while in Civ 5 a bad start hurts, you can still eventually overcome it and still be an endgame powerhouse thanks to not only your own knowledge, but things like Specialists and Great Person tile improvements can turn otherwise bad tiles into decent to good tiles and help specialize a city towards a specific resource to help the empire overall. However, AoW4 doesn't have systems like this in place, so you are at the mercy of how optimized you can make a city, which is entirely based upon how the map decides to give you resources. This brings me to my next point, which I believe is one of the two primary issues the game has. [h3]3. Rigidity in Playstyle[/h3] See, despite the fact that you can seriously customize an empire to your liking, you will ultimately be forced to come to terms with the fact that you really only have 1 true way to play the game effectively. The primary culprit in this case is the fact that you NEED to get 4 cities down to actually compete in any way towards endgame. There's no such thing as "tall" play in AoW4, because you simply get overrun by those that play "wide", not to mention the earlier fact that specialists don't exist as a gameplay mechanic for cities when looking at Civ for a comparison. This results in the following problem; You customize an empire to be exactly as you want with a specific gameplan in mind, but you have to put that gameplan on pause to place your 4 cities, one of them being highly likely to be incredibly hard to grow depending on your build. You can see this in all sorts of discussions surrounding the early game as well, everyone tells you the same thing: "You NEED to drop cities down by turn 10 or you're screwed!" Now this wouldn't be such a massive issue if it wasn't for the final issue: [h3]4. Resources[/h3] So you need to drop cities, one is almost guaranteed to have a growth issue due to its location and it's going to cost you a serious amount of Imperium, which is the most important resource you actually have. Imperium as a concept sounds great until you realize there are very little ways to improve Imperium gain, which sucks because a LOT of things require it: Empire Development, City founding, City takeover, Hero Skill resets, Tier 4 and 5 unit maintenance, you get the idea. It's an extremely important resource that can barely be increased, and the main way to increase it is also incredibly map dependent due to the fact it's all about taking over wonders. Meanwhile, cities have very closed economies, where the only global pools they can directly interact with is research, mana and gold, while draft, food and production have no way to be shared among cities at all. The fact there is no system in place to make this feel less painful is quite sad, considering every other 4x on the market has a way to transfer resources to other cities to help them out. [h1]Honorable Mentions[/h1] [h3]Adaptations[/h3] The best adaptation you can get for a race is Desolate - why? Because you can actually use lava tiles to generate a lot of mana while also having Astral Affinity + Wizard King to get an immense amount of resources from lava tiles. You can take it a step further and hybridize into Materium Affinity to abuse the fact that Desolate provinces usually have a lot of hills/mountains to set up quarries with, making both types of tiles have absolutely insane resource productions to the point of absurdity. Of course this is also dependent on whether or not the Desolate region of the map is large enough to hold all the cities you want, but most of the time it isn't so you'll have to accept mediocrity for alternate cities. [h3]Realm Customization[/h3] Majority of Realm traits in the game feel very samey or restrictive, especially dominant enemy choice and terrain choice. These aren't necessarily bad, but if you dare to random a map you have to be prepared for the fact that you will have a constant uphill battle. Only other thing I can say is that I wish there was more Realm traits that did more unique things. Maybe a modifier to INCREASE free cities? or a modifier to slow down infestation invasions? Again, there's a lot that this system COULD be doing but doesn't, and it feels like it's intentionally doing this for the sake of selling more DLC with these in mind. [h3]Affinities[/h3] This is tangentially related to the Resources section above. Affinities are primarily determined by how you set up your empire and which tomes you select throughout the match. Failing to get 8 of an affinity will prevent you from grabbing a tier 5 tome, which really hurts your endgame (and also forces a rigid choice again!) This system is also what determines which Empire Developments you get, and some affinities (Materium) are far better than others in that regard, with other affinities having good niches but overall weak power. [h3]Balance[/h3] When you finally find an empire build that can kick everyone back to the stone age, you essentially become nigh-unstoppable. The difference between an empire that is "decent" or "good" compared to an empire that could be described as "meta" or "really powerful" is insane. We're talking orders of magnitude stronger, not simply a difference between maybe +2 techs if you hyper-specialize into research - these "really powerful" or "meta' builds just straight up wipe the floor with everything else and nothing comes close to bringing them down outside another one of them. [h1]Closing Thoughts[/h1] There is FAR more I wish to write about for AoW4, but I'm approaching character limit for this review. Give the game a try, but don't be tempted to buy the DLC's without a sale. I would predict it will take maybe 4-5 long games to get most people to take a break for an extended period of time. Also, don't try to optimize the fun out of the game like I did, let the wave of creativity with races go as long as possible. But regardless, you'll eventually feel that rigidity creep up on you the more you play. Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle.

Great game but they make multiplayer broken after every update/DLC.

If you're not 100% looking for grand turn base strat. that feels like the Total War: Warhammer games.

Bought the game on launch. It was okay, but lacked content. Came back 3 years later, and oh boy look at all that new stuff! So I buy $90 worth of DLC and now the game crashes on launch. After an hour of googling and manually editing the game files, I can now get past the Paradox/Triumph screens at launch and make it all the way to the title screen, where after 10 seconds of waiting I get "Age of Wonders 4 is not responding." Drivers are up to date, BIOS is up to date, I uninstalled and reinstalled three times, verified the file integrity. Nothing. Can't even get to the main menu. I played it on launch so I know my PC can run it. Very disappointing, I heard good things about the new content but I can't actually access any of it.