After 10 hours, the game shows real flaws and a lack of content.

[A.J]

I've played for a couple of days and currently play on Brutal difficulty.

- Vassals never actually help in wars, they camp in their territory and you only siphon resources from them.
- The AI will declare war but rarely do anything - even if it displays their army as being stronger. I've had to sit around with 3 stacks of my army around their borders for them to try anything. And 3/3 times so far, they attack but they still lose on auto resolve.
- The AI will sometimes not grab wonders.
- The AI never tries to overrecruit heroes even if they can afford it. (To clarify, one city equals one hero slot but you can still hire them they just cost more).
- Wonder variety is extremely low. They'll have different names and appearance, but the bonuses are exactly the same as other wonders including the units you get access to.
- Item variation is very bad. Some items and skills have wrong or just confusing descriptions descriptions. Crossbow for example fires once and you lose all your turn points despite it showing one stamina cost. I saw the same for some of the support skills that just blatantly saps your hero of all action points so that they can't even move despite displaying something else in the tooltip.

Before sounding too negative, the game actually has a solid foundation and the combat is pretty fun. This game needs like a year of development and a few expansions and it will be good. It eerily reminds me of Stellaris when it came out who needed the same - and today is a very good game.

[Saroodai]

+1

For my experience I confirm all above same same to me .. Hope there are more improvement to come and add new content.

[Telmorial]

Brutal difficulty? The max I could choose was 'Hard' (on a story campaign), which I'm finding a bit too easy. How do I choose Brutal?

[Gargoyle]

Originally posted by Telmorial:

Brutal difficulty? The max I could choose was 'Hard' (on a story campaign), which I'm finding a bit too easy. How do I choose Brutal?

my guess is custom made match

[sandman25dcsss]

All those problems are easy to fix: set teams in advanced options, increase world threat to max, disable all victory conditions, learn how action points work instead of complaining.

I lost such game because AI had 3 stacks of mostly tier 3 units on turn 50 and killed my 3 best stacks with 2 heroes while I was sieging their city.

[Dumah]

Yeah, have to agree. This is Stellaris all over again, game looks fancy on the surface but as long as you played it for a bit the shallowness starts to become more and more noticable.
With time Pdx was able to turn Stellaris in to a decent game, i guess we will have to wait and see if Triumph could make something decent out of AoW4.

[Styles]

Sounds like a you problem tbh

[Atma]

Some of the stuff you said is true (vassals don't do anything and item variety is low) and some is blatantly false (AI will absolutely overrun you if you don't defend, Ai recruits like 3+ heroes over his limit and there's plenty of wonders). So overall your post sounds like you didn't understand the game enough in your 10 hours to make a sufficiently believable critque post.

[sandman25dcsss]

Devs are aware of the vassals problem and are going to fix it.

[A.J]

Originally posted by Styles:

Sounds like a you problem tbh

You started Stellaris late, in 2017, what would you know about how the game developed vs on launch?

[A.J]

Originally posted by Atma:

Some of the stuff you said is true (vassals don't do anything and item variety is low) and some is blatantly false (AI will absolutely overrun you if you don't defend, Ai recruits like 3+ heroes over his limit and there's plenty of wonders). So overall your post sounds like you didn't understand the game enough in your 10 hours to make a sufficiently believable critque post.

Why then in my current Brutal game am I fighting a First Elf AI with only their base number of heroes?
No, you're just confused and don't know what recruiting heroes over the limit means.

And don't get me started about your ridiculous answer regarding wonders. "There's plenty of wonders". No there's not. Only if you purposefully didn't pay attention to the bonuses you were looking at when you find a wonder you'd say that.

I have two wonders with the exact same +30hp bonus and fairy units under my control right now in this game.

[Mikoto]

Originally posted by A.J:

Originally posted by Atma:

Some of the stuff you said is true (vassals don't do anything and item variety is low) and some is blatantly false (AI will absolutely overrun you if you don't defend, Ai recruits like 3+ heroes over his limit and there's plenty of wonders). So overall your post sounds like you didn't understand the game enough in your 10 hours to make a sufficiently believable critque post.

Why then in my current Brutal game am I fighting a First Elf AI with only their base number of heroes?
No, you're just confused and don't know what recruiting heroes over the limit means.

And don't get me started about your ridiculous answer regarding wonders. "There's plenty of wonders". No there's not. Only if you purposefully didn't pay attention to the bonuses you were looking at when you find a wonder you'd say that.

I have two wonders with the exact same +30hp bonus and fairy units under my control right now in this game.

Well I can confirm what the other person is saying as well. And I agree with them too.

[A.J]

Originally posted by Kai:

Originally posted by A.J:

Why then in my current Brutal game am I fighting a First Elf AI with only their base number of heroes?
No, you're just confused and don't know what recruiting heroes over the limit means.

And don't get me started about your ridiculous answer regarding wonders. "There's plenty of wonders". No there's not. Only if you purposefully didn't pay attention to the bonuses you were looking at when you find a wonder you'd say that.

I have two wonders with the exact same +30hp bonus and fairy units under my control right now in this game.

Well I can confirm what the other person is saying as well. And I agree with them too.

You're just wrong then. There are very few unique wonder bonuses.

[ben]

Originally posted by A.J:

Originally posted by Atma:

Some of the stuff you said is true (vassals don't do anything and item variety is low) and some is blatantly false (AI will absolutely overrun you if you don't defend, Ai recruits like 3+ heroes over his limit and there's plenty of wonders). So overall your post sounds like you didn't understand the game enough in your 10 hours to make a sufficiently believable critque post.

Why then in my current Brutal game am I fighting a First Elf AI with only their base number of heroes?
No, you're just confused and don't know what recruiting heroes over the limit means.

And don't get me started about your ridiculous answer regarding wonders. "There's plenty of wonders". No there's not. Only if you purposefully didn't pay attention to the bonuses you were looking at when you find a wonder you'd say that.

I have two wonders with the exact same +30hp bonus and fairy units under my control right now in this game.

Wonders will be seeded via RNG so its possible that you rolled two of the same in your realm, you would have to roll a fair number of realms to be able to conclude that wonders were limited.

If you only played 10 hours then it seems fair to assume you have not rolled that many realms so are not in a position to judge wonder distribution.

However devs should make it so each wonder can only be rolled once per realm.

[Malaficus Shaikan]

Yeah welcome to modern day gaming.
I had an interesting debate this afternoon at just how tame modern day games are.
How game seem to be designed to play in only one want.
Fun suboptimal playstyles are not allowed.
Even in single player.

To take a simple example from previous age of wonders games.
Age of wonders 1 had a spell that teleported your party to a random location.
It isnt really pratical but it is none the less a fun spell to have.
Age of wonders 2 raise mountains allowed you to cut of entire parts of the map.
It was fun.
You also could drown your enemies by burning the ice there standing on.
Age of wonders 3 terrian spells could make your people very happy.
You could spend a lot of mana just reshaping the map.
Even without wetlands or raise mountain.

None of these things matter to modern day gaming.
They arent used for combat so they arent added.
It also doesnt help that the sector systems limits the amount of stuff you can do.

[Resand]

Yeah content are thin on the ground. Extremely few items to speak of, same "random" events every time, few wonders, and most upgrades seems to be +/- 10% of something