underground limited by bedrock

[robotninja]

does anyone know if there are terraforming skills for underground? I would've thought anything with bedrock would be in the geomancy/ materium books, but seems now. it makes underground adaption really easy to be limited by rng if you get a bad starting area.

[CrUsHeR]

The underworld needs to be completely reworked.


1) There are literally zero areas worth settling a new city, in terms of resource node clusters.
You can only find isolated wonder sites, nothing else.

2) Starting distance setting completely ignore the whole underworld.
Even with the "massive distance" mod you will end up barely 2-3 screens away from the next surface player.

3) Most of the time, the nearest passage to the surface leads directly to a "Gold" spawner with T4+ defenders.

[Beje]

Originally posted by Frienby:

Please let me know if you can terraform the bridge, because that sounds amazing.

I just got off work and I had time to try it out. Good news! So here's my experimentation town, nowhere to expand just tunnels, but there's an open area to the right:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2973633675
I used the Create Forrest spell, which adds Mushroom Forest in the underground and it worked
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2973633699
And I can even stretch out through the tunnels to the next adjacent free open space and expand there
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2973633712

Now I feel stupid I didn't try this earlier and I feel compelled to start another underground campaign lol.

[Kurosawa0]

I think they should jsut make it so that you get another option for custom realm creation. AoE 3 had it that you could set a % value for diggable rock and bedrock.

Currently what I do is I just pump out vassal cities in the small spots. Then the area is 'used' but I do not have to care too much about it.
It does seem interesting though that you can make the small tunnels in bedrock provinces habitable. When I tried on the tutorial map it showed that I could not use the Earth Shatter spell on bedrock, but I did not try using it on a bedrock province AFTER opening up it's tunnel.

[ayrtep]

So if you cast forest on one of those narrow tunnels you can expand you city down them? I am going to have to try that.

[Frienby]

Originally posted by Beje:

Originally posted by Frienby:

Please let me know if you can terraform the bridge, because that sounds amazing.

I just got off work and I had time to try it out. Good news! So here's my experimentation town, nowhere to expand just tunnels, but there's an open area to the right:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2973633675
I used the Create Forrest spell, which adds Mushroom Forest in the underground and it worked
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2973633699
And I can even stretch out through the tunnels to the next adjacent free open space and expand there
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2973633712

Now I feel stupid I didn't try this earlier and I feel compelled to start another underground campaign lol.

This is incredible and I can't wait to do a new run, knowing I can terraform those tunnels changes everything!

[Malakithe]

Im sure the filthy surface has terrain you cant build on either

[BoogieMan]

Underworld play is greatly inferior to surface play in just about every metric. You can terraform some of the tunnels, but some of them you just arbitrarily can't if the terrain and province are shaped a bit odd. It always results in an invalid spell target.

Two identical empires ran by the same person one underground one surface, the surface one will be comfortably superior. More EXP, more terrain, more resources, more items, less hampered movement, etc.

[Pyro Penguin]

there is just waaaay too much bedrock and lava in the underground, there are too many areas that only have 1 entrance and are completely blocked off from the rest of the underground

[Frienby]

Originally posted by BoogieMan:

Underworld play is greatly inferior to surface play in just about every metric. You can terraform some of the tunnels, but some of them you just arbitrarily can't if the terrain and province are shaped a bit odd. It always results in an invalid spell target.

Two identical empires ran by the same person one underground one surface, the surface one will be comfortably superior. More EXP, more terrain, more resources, more items, less hampered movement, etc.

I am just playing underground for the aesthetic, tho would be nice if there were more mines/ iron underground. It's weird that they are more plentiful on the surface, but I'd be fine with lacking most magical resources if at least the minerals were underground.

[BoogieMan]

Originally posted by Frienby:

Originally posted by BoogieMan:

Underworld play is greatly inferior to surface play in just about every metric. You can terraform some of the tunnels, but some of them you just arbitrarily can't if the terrain and province are shaped a bit odd. It always results in an invalid spell target.

Two identical empires ran by the same person one underground one surface, the surface one will be comfortably superior. More EXP, more terrain, more resources, more items, less hampered movement, etc.

I am just playing underground for the aesthetic, tho would be nice if there were more mines/ iron underground. It's weird that they are more plentiful on the surface, but I'd be fine with lacking most magical resources if at least the minerals were underground.

Yeah, I image they'll tweak it. My first 3 games were underground races and it was thematic but underwhelming.

[CrUsHeR]

The weird thing is, how the underworld vs surface difference is a vastly exaggerated opposite of AOW3.


In AOW3, you sometimes started on a continent with 2 entire screens on the side only having like 1 library or crypt landmark. Also the surface exploration was greatly stalled by oceans being vast and having extremely dangerous pirates with flying units and galleons.
Though at least you could compensate by simply building more cities, even if they didn't have a couple of resource nodes.

While the AOW3 underworld was always filled to the brim with resource nodes and landmarks. Like those little enclaves with at least 3 nodes within the initial city founding radius, you had one of them per screen on average. Having several races being able to start there without penalties made it simply the better choice in every aspect.



Now on the AOW4 surface, no matter where you look there are HUGE clusters with resources, everywhere. Literally looks like someone spilled a bag of resource candies across the whole map. If it wasn't for the extremely expensive city cap upgrades, you could found 1-2 cities per screen.

In turn it isn't exaggerated to say that the AOW4 underworld has absolutely nothing outside of the city spawns already present at game start. And the excavation process is unbelievably dull and slow. Due to the city cap, it simply isn't viable to found a city without resource nodes.

[=(FGR)=Sentinel]

Originally posted by ayrtep:

So if you cast forest on one of those narrow tunnels you can expand you city down them? I am going to have to try that.

Any terraforming spell works, actually, so long as you've dug out the earth in the tunnel or bridge part. I found this out because I was using the Nature spell that passively turns provinces into grassland and noticed I could build a farm on a bridge over lava a while later. Earth Shatter also works, so I assume the arctic terraforming does as well.

[Frienby]

Originally posted by =(FGR)=Sentinel:

Originally posted by ayrtep:

So if you cast forest on one of those narrow tunnels you can expand you city down them? I am going to have to try that.

Any terraforming spell works, actually, so long as you've dug out the earth in the tunnel or bridge part. I found this out because I was using the Nature spell that passively turns provinces into grassland and noticed I could build a farm on a bridge over lava a while later. Earth Shatter also works, so I assume the arctic terraforming does as well.

I wish I could take both underground adaption and arctic adaption at the same time, would be awesome to build underground ice palaces lol

[Midas]

Originally posted by Frienby:

Oh okay, so underworld adaption really is a bad trait to start with. It looked fun with fungal farms and stuff. This makes me sad lol

It is fun, and the bedrock is no serious obstacle. I just did an industrious underground empire yesterday and it was a bunch of fun. Basically all dungeon delving and treasure hunting.

[jasons073]

While I agree room for underground expansion should be limited for balance purposes, it's way too limited right now. There's too much bedrock, and some tiles that are improvable on the surface can't be improved any way underground. For example, if you build near underground rivers/lakes, you can't build improvements on water tiles, which doesn't make any sense.