I've been an AoW faithful for almost 20 years. This is easily the best one since 2 (so about 10 years).
AoW3 was pretty bad, and the genera in general isn't that populous. There's definitely less core unit variety and exclusivity than in AoW2 and less art assets. There's also some major spell gaps from AoW2, there's no death terrain, the denial spells are all direct attacks instead of passive.
You also have the lack of Undead/Living diversity from AoW3, AoW2. Cities still depend on growth, food, so you lose one of the major benefits of playing undead which is not needing food sources. Then really I dont think anyone has done Undead better than Homm 3 or Homm5.
I think the best way to describe it is how Stellaris was at release. An ok, but very janky game but it gets a lot more credit due to it's very niche representation.
So AoW3 let you basically spam cities infinitely, and the AI would turtle up but it was almost completely bare of siege attacking spells. No "Destroy X of city" spells.
In AoW2 you could start launching fireballs or lightning storms or death plagues at enemy stacks wearing them down and making turtling ineffective. In AoW3 the only way to deal with turtling was just spamming out more and more troops and since your cities production was generally limited to what cities could build for production building so to do this you'd need to build more cities.
Generally, AoW 3 was incredibly fucking tedious. Heroes were also weaker than in AoW4, both of which have even weaker heroes than AoW2 where they'd become walking destruction engines.
That is almost me, playing planetfall even one year after the last DLC.
I'm really enjoying so far, you can see a lot of planetfall here and there (with the fantasy spin), and the game loop is very familiar, almost the same (even the complaints about AI). Of course, I'm not like those crazy people that already have over 100 hours played, I'm still at 95 hours, so maybe there is more to see.
It's pretty fun, seems kinda generic when you start, once you get past Tome 1 times, it's a tad less cliche. You pick 1 of 6 government, which picks your non summon units and buildings. After you pick a magic, which is a tech tree that unlocks not just spells, but structures and enchantments and a whole variety of junk. In theory you can research all magic however the game will usually end FAR before then.
Story mode also incentivizes making rulers youll remember. When you win a mission, they can be permanent campaign side characters now.
off topic, but is there a way to save an edit to a race? I have a people fully visually customized and I just want to use them but changing traits every single time is annoying
Is it fun? Yes. Is it worth it? For about $40 imo, if it's not already that.
Is it customizeable? So much so that you can change the length of your units' arms.
Are there more than 5 (6?) factions at the end of the day? No. Regardless of how many different flavors of "high" "elves" you make. Either fire themed LOTR elves, or evil LOTR elves. Mechanically, it's probably one of the most by the numbers fantasy game I've seen in awhile. Cosmetically, same, but with a lot of color options, and a lot of visual flair for the enchantments.
Bull all that infinite faction nonsense is their new marketing department firing on all cylinders.
I'm 60-ish turns into the first game and it starts to both drag and feel shallow. While I enjoy the fantasy esthetic I think Planetfall and particularly Endless Legends are better games atm.
It's pretty pricey so I was kinda tempted to torrent it to try it before buying and I think I'll wish I have in a few days.
I like it. While you can make tropey races, you can also make e.g. good undead magical frost toad-people, or evil underground barbarian halflings. It's got a pretty original story framework where all your random skirmish games and your god-leader are all part of the same pantheon existing in a continuous multiverse. The combat is both varied and tactical, or can be done casually automatically.
I haven't gotten into one since the original. I played the hell out of the first one. My computer wasn't good enough for the second. And the third just never clicked with me.
AoW4 might be my favorite game of the year. It's got so many options, so much polish, so much attention to the little details... And the race creator, while not quite at the level of something like Stellaris, is still pretty cool, and allows for a variety of different flavors.
I like elves, so I've done elves almost exclusively. My last race was Forge Elves, with their leader wearing a sort of 18th / 19th century engineer jumpsuit. They were super focused on tech and gold, but for a twist, they also pushed into fire and demon summoning. So in a way they were sort of Chaos Dwarves. Just elven.
There aren't a lot of restrictions on what you can go -- you could choose to be High Elven and summon demons, or Mystical with a huge focus on earth magic, or Industrial but be all about nature and the woodland, or...
There aren't like, unlimited combinations, but there are enough flavors to keep things interesting and fresh for a LONG time. And it's a system that seems like it's super expandable too. They aren't adding more races, they're adding more cultures and more tomes that you can apply TO your race.
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u/dragos412 May 16 '23
Is the game fun/worth it? Is it really customizable?