Unfortunate, that you aren't interested in the environmental puzzles, but to each their own. Excited for whatever comes next!

Have you ever played antichamber? Its not too long and cheap(i bought it years ago for like 5 dollars, probably cheaper now). Its a great game but very hard for me. It breaks the laws of 3d space and quite difficult to map sometimes. Another one i think you might be interesded in is Lingo, since you mentioned you were a linguist.

If you get all the lasers im thinking you have at least 3 more episodes maybe more with the bonus area.

Clue for the hedge maze so you don't have to look it up. Pay attention to the sounds in the game.

The reward for all the lasers is more content, maybe one of the best areas of the game. I highly suggest you try to get them. Also there are like 200 hidden environmental puzzles, some of them are fun and interesting to find, but mostly I think you would hate tracking them all down.

Those are some interesting puzzles.

Amazing dodging of the copyright issues by not realizing there was a video playing the whole time! Also the recordings aren't important at all they're more of a thing to go looking for on a replay if you really want to explore the world more. There's no plot information in them, just ruminations.

Ah Miriam. One of the most sane and humanitarian of the characters in the plot, unfortunately let down by an over aggressive AI and weak faction bonuses. It’s rather sad because she is an amazing character. I sort of imagine her as adult Thunburg with how of she goes “WTF did you do!?!” To the other leaders and “Yes we CAN do this… but should we? What is the cost of our actions here?” To her own scientists. Where the AI builds up aggression for people doing research (something core to the game and you can’t stop doing even if you wanted) leading her to immediately declare war on her closest neighbour and die turn 5, in the books and dialogue in the game she is a rather calm and sceptical person who has no problem with science as long as it’s approached after looking at all the risks and only bursts out in absolute rage when she sees others being hurt or abused, even the planet and environment. It would have been far more fitting if she gained aggression from factions having drones and riots, even when suppressed by garrisons and the police stat, looking at the true health of your population and judging you on that, along with how you wage war on others, making the people of other nations suffer.

And this I think was my favorite puzzle of the whole game 1:14:21

There is a content reward for getting all the lasers, and it's not just KZbin videos. Leads to one of my favorite parts of the game.

This was the puzzle that made me start using screenshots and photoshop 53:43

I ran into these videos late, as I'm a recent AOW player. I'm glad to see you started a series on the AOW4 story missions as 1) nobody else seems to make videos on these and 2) You tend to make different choices than I make (I took the easy route for this one). Looking forward to watching more of these!

37:38 you thought you didn't know the rules for the symmetry dots

I think it's worth it to finish all the areas. You still have the treetops, the castle, and the town. Plus a whole new panel/area type that's is somewhat around the bamboo forest. you were very close to the start of it once just never happened upon the first panel.

The black substance in the castle isn't ink, its a reference to the legend that medieval castles used boiling pitch as a defensive weapon by pouring it down on the heads of invaders. I'm not sure how historically accurate that is though

I'm also someone who's trying to make an alchemist class, so thank you for this tutorial! Savior of all alchemists out there lol

Let me know if you want a hint for the treehouse timer door puzzle. To help clarify its rules/situation, I can tell you that it is possible to solve with everything you have access to at the moment. You aren't missing any mechanics, symbols or event flags that would block the ability to solve it.

Lol you def had access to that area the whole time

You are wrong about the view point for the fast door. Think about what you did on the green path in that area

Before you came here, I don't think you had a formal theory of "regions being able to contain multiple shapes", "shapes' positions inside a region don't matter as long as they contain all the tiles with the shapes' picture on them" and "you can swap shapes' positions as necessary". At least, I didn't get that impression from earlier episodes. You're definitely much better armed now to conquer any further shapes puzzles. 46:30 - I think "intersection", "intercept", and "interception" can all work as nouns to describe a point of convergence, but "intersect" doesn't work - it's "x-intercept" and not "x-intersect". English is weird. Good job really powering through this area. I struggled with some of those advanced shape combination puzzles with gaps that had a lot of different options that were tricky to evaluate.

I love this game!

You're a lifesaver! I've been looking for this exact tutorial for my game. I'm trying to make the same mechanic for my alchemist class.Thank you so so so much!

If you looked through the blue door and the yellow window at the same time

I think that some of the audio logs and philosophical bits are interesting examinations of "how the scientific process works in terms of trying to discover something new, or make knowledge more precise", and therefore have some, very loose, connection to how to navigate a puzzle game and learn the system of rules the game is presenting. That said, I definitely understand "just wanting to do puzzles"; that's a perfectly legitimate thing to want. The audio logs are 100% optional and the videos are almost 100% optional, so you definitely can just treat this like a normal puzzle-adventure-world game and ignore the philosophical stuff. If you get very very late in the game and are trying to "do absolutely everything", you will then know what the videos are "really" about, but you definitely don't have to worry about that right now.

You can right click to selct units obsolete in the city production menu without wntering the workshop

I noticed something while reviewing the footage earlier, so we'll be revisiting an area at the start of the next episode.

One advantage to an open-world puzzle game is having the ability to leave things you're stuck on and come back later, and for that reason, at the moment I won't give hints for the places where you got stuck -- I'm sure you can figure it out, but it's good to be able to take a break and make progress elsewhere.

I don't think that the last criticism is fair. The rule you don't know was taught to you in that very same line and you successfully implemented it. I think you just forgot it.

I'm glad you came back, I hope the future puzzles are more to your liking.

There's more than 5 minutes left :) SPOILER You didn't check all the labs. For the achievements, you should go back to the warriors. I think you missed taking a closer look at the bard's performance. And you can try a new style ;)

SPOILER Check the silver mine

Oh man a video every night? You are spoiling me

The only negative of your videos is that there aren't enough of them :)

Nyan hit sound

I played this as a youngling....Watching this series now brings back waves of nostalgia. I remember being so afraid of the AI i would not dare venture south until I had an army of knights. I was afraid of losing units because humans are going extinct and any loss was critical! I rebuilt everything, colonized every corner of the map. Now I see that the writing is minimalist, but it was effective on the mind of a child I suppose. Thank you for recording and uploading this series.

How to use holy wound of compunction ???

The theme seems really interesting! I agree though having the translations provided immediately by mousing over feels a little excessive.. I think it would have been better if they didn't explicitly tell you what the words mean but instead only let you type your own entries?

If you end up dropping this game, I'd understand that; this did turn out to be a real "slow burn" of a game, definitely not fast, snappy or particularly willing to explain itself in any way clearer than a Zendo game or a series of diagrams. I think there are more interesting audio logs and philosophical discussions sitting around in the game than what you've found so far, that you might also find more interesting, but it's also true that they're not just highlighted and out in the open. You have to be able to walk slowly and look around for little glowing rectangles, which is maybe vaguely interesting if you're passively doing it while looking around the environment but not much fun to go actively looking for on purpose. I certainly hope you stick with it and come up with a scientific approach that you feel comfortable with, but if you're just plain not enjoying the game then that's entirely reasonable. Ultimately my own feelings about the game are too complicated to stuff inside a KZbin comment (well, I guess it took me an entire video series to really talk about them), but suffice to say there's parts of it I liked and parts of it I wish were done better or were more accessible or forgiving. Maybe if you watch an LP of the game (not necessarily mine although I'd appreciate it), some stuff might make sense with the benefit of hindsight, showing a different way of theorizing or disproving/supporting hypotheses, or just not needing to focus as much on navigation and gameplay. Maybe. Some hints about points of interest, if you want to keep going: When you arrived at the swamp by boat, it will turn out that you actually arrived at the "rear" of the swamp area. It may be instructive to find the "front" of that area since that's where the yellow-square tutorial is. I think it may be one of my more favorite "mechanical symbols on a puzzle panel" in the game for what kinds of puzzles it enables, but I definitely needed to see some specific examples before I understood it. There is another puzzle area slightly inside that beach section you walked through (to the east of the temple with those stairs and the environmental puzzle with the glowing path you activated, it is inside the forest/jungle). It contains puzzles with a different presentation to anything else you've seen so far, that don't involve the black-and-white dots. The house on the coastline (the far side of the mountain) that had that suspicious yellow trail on it, is another puzzle area, with more examples of the dots, if you want more dot puzzles to test theories on.

Way to go you found a secret puzzle!! Not a lot of people just find that naturally

So some tips that I think will make this less frustrating for you. 1, stay out of the town that area is the combination of every mechanic and has no tutorials. 2, if the puzzle doesn't give you feed back it's not the tutorial zone for that puzzle type. 3, go around the outside of the island and find a boat. It will have a map with symbols for each of the major puzzle types and their zones. Spoiler hint to follow on the black and white. Think less of going between each white and black and more about your line making a fence. The real rule is subtly different from what you are currently thinking but makes a difference when the white and black don't fill the whole puzzle.

While rewatching the footage for timestamp purposes, I think I figured out what might be going on with the treehouse section. My current guess is that I'm dividing the grid into segments that each contain exactly 2 stars.

Hey its been out for a year, maybe you'll enjoy it now? The 3rd expansions is out too

The black and white rule is simple and you were supposed to understand it in the beginning of the game. Now you are going to be stuck every time you have to deal with it, so I think you should watch the solution because it shouldn't be so frustrating for you. Anyway I like to watch your videos at lunch and I hope you will enjoy the rest of the game, which is more straight forward in terms of "knowing what the pieces do" :)

Nice going on the shadow mazes area! Really powered through that. There were a couple aspects of that that tripped me up, so it's gratifying to see you not get stuck on them like I did. I do find the way this game plays with figure-and-ground, signal-and-noise, fascinating.

Certain puzzles can be hard for lets players based on their settings

You do not quite know the rule for black and white yet. If you keep looking around the environment there are large amount of hidden images that can only be viewed from certain angles, kind of like a neat little art surprise.

Obviously I don't want to go into too many details, but I think you might enjoy other areas' puzzles a bit more, in terms of the rules being easier to discover and the main development being trying to work with the known rules. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to tell you that you'll see more puzzles in the vein of that "impossible" puzzle in front of that door near the starting area. I get the impression several people didn't like this desert temple area, for similar reasons to what you were talking about (too confusing to figure out the first puzzle, too repetitive, kind of annoying to find the right places to stand), so you're not alone. This game has a lot of beautiful environmental detail, but when starting out it can be hard to tell what's meaningful and what isn't. I think that's on purpose - I get the impression the designers wanted the player to be a little confused and a little frustrated sometimes, and be able to take a step back, be patient, and work things out. That is, for better or for worse, the theme they are trying to present. ...How well they implemented that is ultimately up to the player to judge.

Try to stick with it and keep pn exploring everything. There are some things you are very close to without knowing what you are getting at. There were for me some very satisfying relizations late game. Also you will get the pieces together at some point and i think be pleasantly challenged to put them to use.

A neat little detail you may have missed, that would have hinted at a solution you found on your own: note that the pole of the panel at 15:45 is slightly twisted, indicating that it was originally supposed to be pointing at those rocks.

The Solution for the SUN riddle was short to see at 16:39 look at the black marks on the red panel. For me the most difficult was the audio puzzle.