why most units are so slow

[valera-wrx]

Like really.. played 50 hours, enjoyed the game, but in all runs my army inevitably turns to phase beasts + whatever cavalry is available.
I am trying playing without phase beasts and it's such a slog.
I think most units speed should be increased by 40, flying ones all get 48 and leave only mystics and heavy lifters at 32..

[Midas]

Origineel geplaatst door sandman25dcsss:

Origineel geplaatst door Midas:

Combat doesn't feel any different to me, besides lacking the 'run' option planetfall had. On the strategic map, we get a lot of tools for speeding units up. Teleporters, forced march, and I've also noticed that units making roads now use the road as they make it, so even that's a lot faster.

Teleport and force march are middle/late game things. 5 tiles per turn on road? No, thanks, I will keep using +100%MP mod. It was ridiculous when it took me 6 turns to meet my first free city as dark (they have 32 MP scouts).

6 tiles, but it's more because anything but flat plains usually cost a lot of movement, so using roads to get through forests and the like is a good way to speed things up. I can understand people wanting to make things faster, but I feel like the point was that they gave us tools to speed things up specifically for making those strategic and logistic choices when we want armies to cover ground quickly.

[darkholyPL]

The problem is not the move points, but the cost of moving that has been increased by quite a lot compared to AoW3.
You could move on a road for 3 points per tile, or 2 if you had advanced logistics researched, now it's 5 points?
Default move cost in AoW3 was 4, now it's 6. You get the idea.

[Midas]

Origineel geplaatst door darkholyPL:

The problem is not the move points, but the cost of moving that has been increased by quite a lot compared to AoW3.
You could move on a road for 3 points per tile, or 2 if you had advanced logistics researched, now it's 5 points?
Default move cost in AoW3 was 4, now it's 6. You get the idea.

I feel like that had to happen, though. In AoW3, you didn't have forced march(outside of specific spells) or teleportation gates. In planetfall they introduced the Orbital Relay, but you couldn't build roads freely. Best you could do was build outposts on sectors that weren't in cities. Now we have both automatic roads in provinces like planetfall, AND manually-made roads where you need them, AND a teleportation system that is basically just better than PF's Orbital Relay, AND forced march for everyone. That's a lot of mobility tools.

Too many mobility tools begins to trivialize movement in general, and that's bad in a strategy game, because positioning and travel logistics should matter. I'd assume that slowing stuff down was to balance all the choices we have now, and make rapid map traversal something you have to plan out and pay for.

[darkholyPL]

Origineel geplaatst door Midas:

Origineel geplaatst door darkholyPL:

The problem is not the move points, but the cost of moving that has been increased by quite a lot compared to AoW3.
You could move on a road for 3 points per tile, or 2 if you had advanced logistics researched, now it's 5 points?
Default move cost in AoW3 was 4, now it's 6. You get the idea.

I feel like that had to happen, though. In AoW3, you didn't have forced march(outside of specific spells) or teleportation gates. In planetfall they introduced the Orbital Relay, but you couldn't build roads freely. Best you could do was build outposts on sectors that weren't in cities. Now we have both automatic roads in provinces like planetfall, AND manually-made roads where you need them, AND a teleportation system that is basically just better than PF's Orbital Relay, AND forced march for everyone. That's a lot of mobility tools.

Too many mobility tools begins to trivialize movement in general, and that's bad in a strategy game, because positioning and travel logistics should matter. I'd assume that slowing stuff down was to balance all the choices we have now, and make rapid map traversal something you have to plan out and pay for.

Well I'm just pointing it out, I'm not complaining. I'm fine with the movement in AoW4 for the most part, but I do think terrain like forest or swamp are a bit too expensive to move through. They besically force you do the looney toons thing, and put a road down while you move on it. It's kinda silly.

[sandman25dcsss]

Trivializing movement is meaningless when you spend 8 turns sieging late game capital and 2 turns sieging an outpost created by scout in single turn. What exact problems would we have if we still spent 2 MP per road in own territory and 4 MP on other roads? I haven't used forced march in my 150 hours because of stupid "no regen in enemy territory" and "all healing is temporary" changes.

[Midas]

Origineel geplaatst door sandman25dcsss:

Trivializing movement is meaningless when you spend 8 turns sieging late game capital and 2 turns sieging an outpost created by scout in single turn. What exact problems would we have if we still spent 2 MP per road in own territory and 4 MP on other roads? I haven't used forced march in my 150 hours because of stupid "no regen in enemy territory" and "all healing is temporary" changes.

I don't think you're expected to use it all the time. It's also something that your build can impact. If you have the first materium empire trait, you can bring up outposts quickly, and I've used that to rush to a position, and set up an outpost there, then wait inside my outpost to recover. Barbarian culture gets special mechanics specifically for recovering from forced march in their outpost, which their scouts can put up ahead of an army, so I expect that's even how they're intended to invade. Rush a scout in, get an outpost started, rush the army in, use the rite to fix them up, and off you go.

For what it's worth, I don't think being faster would have been a problem, but that's also because I play on larger maps. Some of the default map sizes are really small, and I'd expect that's a factor to being slower as well.

[sandman25dcsss]

Origineel geplaatst door Midas:

Origineel geplaatst door sandman25dcsss:

Trivializing movement is meaningless when you spend 8 turns sieging late game capital and 2 turns sieging an outpost created by scout in single turn. What exact problems would we have if we still spent 2 MP per road in own territory and 4 MP on other roads? I haven't used forced march in my 150 hours because of stupid "no regen in enemy territory" and "all healing is temporary" changes.

I don't think you're expected to use it all the time. It's also something that your build can impact. If you have the first materium empire trait, you can bring up outposts quickly, and I've used that to rush to a position, and set up an outpost there, then wait inside my outpost to recover. Barbarian culture gets special mechanics specifically for recovering from forced march in their outpost, which their scouts can put up ahead of an army, so I expect that's even how they're intended to invade. Rush a scout in, get an outpost started, rush the army in, use the rite to fix them up, and off you go.

For what it's worth, I don't think being faster would have been a problem, but that's also because I play on larger maps. Some of the default map sizes are really small, and I'd expect that's a factor to being slower as well.

Yes, I play on large map too. Though +100%MP can really backfire with standard distance, yesterday I got my whole army killed in hotseat on turn 2 by AI who had tier 3 unit and 3 tier 2 units among others. So now I always play with at least far distance.

[Malaficus Shaikan]

I think it is because they want to move away from the very pro attacking mindset previous age of wonders games have.

My proof:
Attacking without grievance is punished.
Ai hides in its capital.
Limited to 3vs3 fights.
And travel taking forever.
Forced waiting at sieges.

The cynic in me wants to believe they did it to drag out game time.
Just like those 50 hours game where 48 of those hours is traveling on large empty fields.

But it is more likely they are still obsessed with making age of wonders about the armies instead of the magic system.
Trying to be more like heroes of might and magic instead of master of magic.
Or worse.
Trying to compete with warhammer total war 3.

[BBB]

From memory, AoW1 had quite slow move speeds, and I think AoW4 was trying to mimic this a bit.

It probably also has something to do with how maps are generated now, being, I believe, smaller than previous games.

I.e. slower map movement to make the smaller maps function the same as larger maps with faster speed.

[Aunty Herbert]

I think the aspects that benefit from slow movement is, that you really need to think about how to get a teleport network going, so outposts become more important, and it also makes summoned units quite a bit stronger, from which a lot of people tend to shy away because of the mana upkeep.
It makes the game a bit more arduous to play, but it does benefit the economic depth of the game, that you actually have to put your mind and resources into preparing infrastructure for travel.

[valera-wrx]

Origineel geplaatst door Aunty Herbert:

I think the aspects that benefit from slow movement is, that you really need to think about how to get a teleport network going, so outposts become more important, and it also makes summoned units quite a bit stronger, from which a lot of people tend to shy away because of the mana upkeep.
It makes the game a bit more arduous to play, but it does benefit the economic depth of the game, that you actually have to put your mind and resources into preparing infrastructure for travel.

but you really dont need to do anything like that in most cases. You just have your 32-speed armies which remained from first 1/3 of the game to cover your rears, while your main heroes with combat summon perks (summon elemental/wildlife/undead) + automoton helper, and cavalry + phase beasts are roaming around disintergrating everything. AI isnt especially picky, you just feed him temporary summons while your main units are flanking. And with all enchantments available phase beasts hit really hard and are quite durable.. and even if few of them die you reinforce easily.
Point of the post is to speed up some other units (not every one, just some of them) to provide more diverse strategies to play.

[Illusioneer]

Origineel geplaatst door Aunty Herbert:

Origineel geplaatst door Illusioneer:

The units are not slow, they move appropriately according to the pace of the game.

Sorry, but that is such a nonsensical proposition. The pace of the game is amongst others defined by the speed of the armies. That's like saying: "I am not overweight! My body mass is exactly average for a person with my height and body fat percentage!"

It's not just the army movement speed that sets the pace of the game. It's also resource rates, construction times, pop growth speeds, tech rates, ect. If you speed up armies, you desync it with everything else.

[suejak]

I think it's interesting that the world feels big because units are relatively slow. It also makes the movespeed upgrades more attractive (e.g. leafskin, scout speed boost), makes teleport spells/upgrades meaningful, makes your ruler special for "recall ruler," makes the high movespeed mounts better, makes forced marching meaningful, etc. etc.