Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
For me, AoW4 combat was a huge change from AoW3 mostly because, in AoW3 you were often doing careful dances to lure out opponent retaliation/opportunity attacks, because doing that on your turn would reduce or eliminate actions available on the opponent's turn. AoW4 doesn't have any of that, as (barring things like freeze or stun) their guys will always get their full action points on their turn, regardless of how much retaliating they do. In AoW3, you'd also often draw out manual combat, so you could use healing abilities more time or eke out more XP, but that's all gone from AoW4 too. This has been replaced with shock units, defensive auras from shields and supports, and units that are more heavily specialized (e.g. most ranged units no longer have anything they can do in melee at all). Once I got used to these changes, I think that overall this is a significant net improvement, taking away things that were fairly tedious, and replacing them with things that overall are more fun.
Combat is grindy as all hell.
I warned truimp studio's against it so many times.
Removing auto win spells and overpowered tier 4 will only lead to long boring grinding battle's.
And here we are.
Long, boring and repative grindy battle's.
If you do not enjoy doing the same thing over and over again you wont enjoy the battle's.
Lucky the auto resolve is only slightly dumber then planetfall's so you can just win 90% of the fights using auto resolve.
If the combat feels grindy, it is probably because you are struggling with keeping up with the power curve, or taking battles that are very difficult to win with your current battlegroups. That means more turns to finish the battle than is probably needed.
The other thing might be that you are not speeding up the animations(especially during AI movement), meaning the battles take much longer to complete.
The game gives you a lot of unit types and abilities, because it wants the combat to be more complex than just "I have X, so I auto-win". The alternative would be having much faster battles, but they will be far less engaging and much more "samey"(always going for "the" strategy) as well, and then you would end up auto-resolving anyway, because now all battles are overly simplified, boring with no tactical depth at all. And that would be the worst thing for a game with tactical combat.
All that said, there are a lot of strong combos(due to the variety in units) that can speed up combat. From map-wide combat spells, to powerful unit combos, most battles are done in 3-4 turns once properly set up(sometimes faster). This is even more true if you have an Ascended ruler with a combat perk(like an extra spell each turn, or artillery strikes on every Marked enemy unit, every turn).
World spells can also soften up an army before the battle, either through damage or debuffs(or both), which also speed things up.
Then there is the approach to combat itself. Less focus on hanging back and playing defensively, means more turns with actual impact.
5-10 minutes of combat should not be a deal breaker in these types of games.
As for the battle maps themselves, I think part of the issue the OP is having is where they are fighting. If you fight in grasslands, you will have open fields in battle with minimal "stuff in the middle".
In rocky areas, there will be more mazing and terrain features that might block movement in some way, which you can use tactically(or be used against you).
Certain units care less about such terrain, like Flying units and Ethereal units. There is a major transformation that makes your racial units Ethereal, so consider going for that if you typically fight in such areas.
Another "trick" is picking the Lightfooted Form trait. It allows your units to pass through each other, making pathing in dense maps much easier and opens up new tactics to use.
Back in the previous games we had fun stuff like tearing down walls with vines, becoming immunie to a single or multipel damage type, Using magic to raise an razed city into an undead city with units only to raze it again.
Stuff like mana nukes or hellfire arent needed to win fights.
They just make the slog of auto win battles less tedious.
In this.
The units are just minnor stat changes.
The most interesting unit is the heavly nerfed reaper.
Who can only do suffer or die to weak units.
Compaire this to rogue building armies on the move via charm, Druids charming animals, healing troops and having so many army wide damage resistiance that you could become immune to everything execpt physical.
Or dreadnoughts turning tree's into money.
Or the dark elves incarne possesion power, the vampire being a life stealing seducer.
It is most telling that a lot of the stuff we used to have are add in via patches.
And even then in a worse version.
The battle's arent hard.
There tedious, repative, boring.
It is the same 3 vs 3 armies using the same troops with slighty difference stats.
There is no double gravity prevening flying, there is no twisted vines making the ground movement slow, there is no army wide static shield spell that give your entiry army a chance to stun people hitting it.
There is no area of effect spell with a range biggest the 6 hex and the spells we do have do so little damage you need to spamm them to accauly hurt.
I honestly do not get how anyone can look at this combat system and go:
This is great.
I get to do the same thing over and over again.
I dont need nukes to win.
I want nukes too speed up my victory.
There were quite many maps in AoW3 that were way worse than anything I saw in AoW4, for example there were maps with fances and barricades that you had to break to even get in or go around, you had maps with only one unit wide 'bridges' that you could block off, there were maps with walls and 'doors' that only one units could go through, you had the fire thing (Forge?) map that was pretty common, and not only had few entrances to the center zone, but also hazards on the floor...
And so on and so forth.
Don't see how AoW4 would be the one you dislike in that regard.
Me, I like balanced armies and prefer maps with obstructions, but not too many. My moments are huge charges to break enemy lines, but if is the only option with your army it might just find itself in bad ground or matchups.
With that said, you can quickly decimate the enemy forces with the right selection of spells and abilities in AoW4, just not to the extreme point where combat becomes completely trivial or where counterplay is impossible.
You can still auto resolve a lot of battles in AoW4, depending on the power difference and the composition of your armies. There are several traits and units that also makes it easier to use such a playstyle, because the AI can use the setup more effectively(without suiciding the units), and any damage taken can be replenished faster on the world map.
Manual battles are for the more even power levels, for when you need to fight repeatedly and minimize damage taken, or for when you need to inflict as much damage as possible in a losing(but important) battle.
I also disagree with your perspective on units.
Across the board, the units are not just "minor stat changes" when compared to one another. The usage and potential of various units varies greatly, even of the same type and tier. A skirmisher from the Barbarian Culture functions differently to one from the Reaver Culture, and both of those feels very different to something like a lesser Ice Elemental or a Slither Hatchling. All of which are tier 1 Skirmishers. Yet they can all have their spot to shine and not feel pointless("feeling pointless" was fairly common with low tier units in AoW3).
You have several units that can dominate, seduce or otherwise gain units after battle, increasing your armies as you go. You even have several Imperium upgrades that helps out here, if that is the playstyle you want. You have units that bring a combat summon of their own(either automatically or as an ability), as well as a couple of hero skills that adds extra units at the start of the battle.
And then there is Necromancy, which on top of providing a constant flow of fodder units(and later on, tier 3s and tier 4s), can raise enemy heroes as your own, or "restore" razed cities.
Speaking of the Undead, the Reaper is still an awesome undead unit, if used correctly. There is the instant death ability(remove an enemy and get an extra body to fight for you) and its sustainability(Greater Corpse Consumption and Dark Rites) that helps set it apart from any other unit in the game, but if you throw it into battle expecting it to solo an army unsupported, then you will indeed be disappointed, because that is not how the game functions or is balanced around.
The global map slowness(of what you can do in a turn, before combat) is more an issue than combat itself. And it tried the fast settings. I would say combat is not the problem at all, you just have to know how to deal with it in AoW4 and due to design changes you will see more combat, since units that participate in combat are limited to 3vs3/18vs18 units per combat only in AoW4 - which cause the illusion of beeing exhausted by it.
So TS tried to fix the problem of exhausting combat by reducing unit participation in battles, but made the problem worse since combat frequency was increased and so it backfired. I consider a few big key battles less exhausting or more exciting however your PoV is on the matter, than many mediocre 3vs3 Stack battles.
That said, you can just auto-combat those battles on a whim, with a good setup.
And yeah i still do not think the game engine can handle bigger combat with more unit without FPS loss its not as well optimized for that like Planetfall was.
Just do what i do:
1. Try to use a build that does max damage and works in both tactical combat and auto-combat, use more of the better shock units at T3 and T4 and enchant them + rank them up, and use support heroes, since higher stats always work well with auto-combat.
2. Since shock units are good in auto-combat, you can just use autocombat in those battles, that you know you are winning no matter what, like if you outnumber the other side or do not care as much about a possible minor casulaties, you can replace lost ones with new ones. Its only really an issue, if they were high ranked. On top of that many shock units in the game have some good passives and high movement, which makes it easy to replace them quickly.
I doubt there is anyone as helpful in making combat enjoyable.
Unless, like me, you are teetotal.
Planetfall > AOW3 > AOW4.
AOW3 and especially Planetfall had a lot of unit abilities and spells of some sort of mechanical nature that to me felt more impactful. While I don't dislike AOW4s combat it seems as though there is a lot of abilities that simply stack, or you turn on and forget about like the defensive modes. The mechanical like spells that are missing in particular are the more rogue like spells like quick dash, small but highly impactful. Smoke screen might be there now with the fey mist but ya.
Of course since walls are torn down theres no climb wall, break wall , pass wall, break walls skills that really matter. So thats one aspect that is entirely gone.
Planetfall had things like overwatch or skills to stagger units out of defense(this partially exists). It also had a lot of other abilities that synergized with others when used properly could be devastating. Planetfall felt very tactical
I very much agree with the fewer combat episodes with more units line-of-thinking.