SB Plays Age of Wonders 4 01 - Magehaven

[@theclimbto1]

You CAN have happy little, chubby Rats. But THOSE Rats are Fiendish. You can have Peace Loving Orcs, and you can have Undead Evil Elves. That's the entire point of the Customization, we're not bound to Trope, we can Create our own.

[@calebcipra6795]

Thanks SB for the video and all effort involved on it. I saw the Endless Legend series long time ago and now you bring this game that I just bought, hopefully we’re gonna have a new epic series here with you.

[@taylorbotnewsomtest5860]

So, years ago, I found your channel looking for Endless Legend gameplay. If never seen a 4x before and found myself fascinated. I watched literally all of your Endless Legend vids lol. Super excited to see another 4x! Hoping this will become a mainstay like endless legend

[@wiegraf9009]

Waiting for SB to discover that this is the perfect game to make the Hobbit Rats of her dreams 😂

[@hollowfallapart]

Dangit, was hoping you'd make some wholesome rats.

[@Jeff55369]

I mean, after he made the comment about rat hobbits, I kind of want to see that now.

[@christianjohansson7185]

Nothing will stop SB from getting to the rats. The undercity is patient

[@hircenedaelen]

@Jeff She*

[@Simon-yj4rt]

Nice one SB! So happy to see you're covering this :)

[@Hieronymus_]

And here I thought, the first episode was just SB doing faction & character creation :D

[@ardabaser1349]

Oh yeah, SB did it again. It is 4x time!

[@ItsTheIceIceBaeBae]

I've never played a game like this before, buying it for the ps5 and you jumping in blindly is so helpful after watching countless hours of awesome pros lol😂

[@caphalor08]

No one is stopping you to make your very own hobbit-rats?

[@douglas9521]

I think in this game you can make wholesome hobbit rats.

[@Sure_Ruse_User]

10:00 The already built structures can be viewed and destroyed by the menu with the gear, that is above the hammer for building production, in the city screen. 18:08 Unit Enchantments are generally buffs that you can cast on your armies or part of them depending on the type of units (defender/shock/cav...) that cost some continued upkeep (mostly Mana). Race Transformations are the same but without the upkeep but are also permanent and can not be undone. Minor ones can be stacked but you can only have one Major Race Transformation. 20:25 The bigger a Pin is the better the yield of that particular improvement compared to the other improvements. Here the province to the left had a bigger Farm Pin as there is a river going through it that gives Farms an extra 2 food yield on it compared to the other improvements which would gain no extra yield of any kind except the 10 gold from the gold vein all of them would get/give. 22:48 In the top right is the animation speed and also a freely on/off toggle-able auto-combat button (the red swords). There is a button on the bottom right to restart the battle as well. There is a small UNDO MOVEMENT button, after you moved a unit WITHOUT attacking or ability usage, next to the white Moral gauge and unit picture at the bottom. 26:43 Combat Casting Points is a fancy way of saying Max Cap of Mana you can use in every battle with your army if you have the overall Mana for it. It is not a special type of resource you have to harvest or something. (World Casting Points are the same but on/for map stuff.) The symbol you took for the mana cost of the ability is denoting that it is Frost type and the base damage value. You can fire through/over your own units. If your ranged unit stays directly behind/adjacent to only one unit it can fire without a malus to its accuracy. Any more units between it and its target cost accuracy and can have it land hits on the units in the line of fire, very much including your own units. This is shown by a (partially) red target line. 31:20 You need to remember that you can cast your spells independently from your units once per turn (after the first turn) if you still have Mana and Combat Cast Points. The big Star/Magic/Spell button next to the Ruler on the bottom right lets you open your complete spell list. The up to three smaller spell buttons above it are just your favorite spells slots you can modify from the spell list. 48:33 That is a Molekin. (There is at least one Enchantment that can give some units wings...) 56:00 The Sway value is shown in a pop-up when you hover over the Mask slightly below and to the right of the Free City's name (similar to the Stability one). The number below the Mask shows their relation/attitude towards you. The different bonuses to Allegiance gain from a positive attitude seem to be in 200-point intervals. 59:18 Important to note that those Enchantments will list the current number of units that would be affected/gain the Enchantment and therefore cost its upkeep in that list in the tool tip. Currently, you have no non-Dark units that this Enchantment would actually affect as all your units are Dark-type units and have this ability natively. Those Enchantments are likely meant to help armies with a diverse typing of units to all profit from a shared thing. 01:00:25 You can Right-Click on the units card/portrait to get to view all its stats including its resistances. (This might also work inside a battle to figure out how high their de-buff stacks are.) 01:05:05 That is a weird thing that happens if you Left-Click instead of Right-Click on a unit/area with a spell selected, Left-clicking again on an empty hex re-appears the spell use display. 01:11:25 The Advice is kinda displayed at the right time as moving a unit through/out of an enemy's zone of control uses up (one of) the enemy's retaliation(s). General tips: Double right-clicking on a map tile makes an army move there faster. Being inside your own territories increases your unit healing per turn by 5x (at least without the extra regen per turn racial ability it increases from 5 HP to 25 HP not sure about if it is always 5x). You might want to look at the mods the developer Triumph Studios has already put out (on the Steam Workshop no idea about Epic n co). One of them is about Penguins another allows to increase the map size and player count on PC something they seem to had to scale down for consoles.

[@benjiboy1337]

Speaking of Rats and fantasy sort-of-but-not-quite 4X games, Thea 2 got a new update that adds a lot of Rat related content. Wink wink

[@Mossy.Vagabond]

Perfect timing! The old Age of Wonders titles (esp. 1 and Shadow Magic) are two of my all-time favourite games. 3 was decent if a bit too streamlined, and I bounced off Planetfall hard. Have some big gripes with 4, mainly how everything that made races unique in previous titles is completely gone in favour of two tiny passive traits. I feel the depth overall has suffered a lot from that approach; on the flip side the game is likely way better balanced... but with how little some of the choices seem to impact, it does lead to the old "width of an ocean, depth of a puddle" dilemma that someone else mentioned in their comment. Although a little bit of the nuance that we have lost when it comes to empires has been pumped into the combat aspect now, with a lot more synergies and effects that you can play around with, which is neat! I do feel combat is the star of the show here in Age 4. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do in custom realm creation if you want something heavily themed or just more challenging maps. The combat AI feels better than it did in 3 and Planetfall, but the strategic map AI is till pretty lacklustre compared to other TBS (I still refuse to call this a proper 4X title). Stoked to hear your takes on this addition to the series, and hopefully more episodes if you enjoy the game enough!

[@Jeff55369]

I like that the t1 units are much more useful in this than in age 3. Seems like a solid upgrade. I'm not sure how to solve the issue of the ai's strategic planning on the world map. Might need to have it do some machine learning, but that can be expensive. I do wish this game used age 3's movement indication though. green for 3 action points, yellow for 2 action points remaining, ect.

[@jirivegner3711]

What's your opinion on map readability? I have played AoW3 single player a lot and both world and battle maps were super easy to read for me. In this video, I have no idea what I was looking at half the time.

[@Jeff55369]

@@jirivegner3711 the units aren't super readable, other than their flags. But other ui elements are fine. What are you having issues with specifically?

[@Mossy.Vagabond]

@@jirivegner3711 ​ There's a lot more STUFF on the screen in Age 4. Ssome of it doesn't have the best UI design, and some elements end up actively fighting each other (like trying to click a unit that's on a hex that also happens to have a town name on it)... it also does not help that a bunch of QoL features from previous games are missing from 4, so you have to spend more time navigating the UI. The icons are also incredibly huge, which is probably because the game's out on consoles as well and needs to be readable on TV screens (understandably). Overall, the different UI elements on the map feel a lot busier and less coherent / readable at a glance than they were in 3 (haven't played enough of Planetfall to compared it to that), but it's not too bad, I feel.

[@jirivegner3711]

@@Jeff55369 On the world map it feels like borders, icons and movement ranges are fighting on a layer drawn on top of satellite map. AoW3 has very distinct tiles with features contained in them, which makes them pop up much more, here map features seems to be integrated into map to much. Maybe it is just a video/youtube thing and it is fine when playing? During the last combat I had no idea what was what on the ground, the first one was ok. In the AoW3 battle maps were simple but I don't remember ever wondering what is passable and what is blocking.

[@Anublet90]

Nice! Hope to see you make hungry ratfolk next time, though!

[@matthewbennett8962]

Magnificent

[@zibus8456]

Been waiting for this!

[@avalen5515]

i see your hopes of the game not being too easy. By player numbers though AoW4 seems to be very popular. Which will bring a good healthy modding scene with how open the game is too modding. Which should then hopefully bring difficulty and AI mods if the game is too easy

[@marcopolish770]

Very cool! Comment for the almighty algorithm

[@milanstevic8424]

I'm not sure why everybody here seems to have bounced off of Planetfall. I'm a die hard fan of AoW2: SM and Planetfall was hundred times better than AoW3, very imaginative and rich with features. The empire building was never a focus of AoW, the buildings were always just the "icons on a tree graph". It was always about the sandbox, the racial builds, the magic, and the combat.

[@Sergeo333]

wooohoo :) excited to watch this.

[@SilimSavertin]

AoW4 goes pretty hard on having meta-lore, so I think that whole decision to voice the intro help windows is solely for immersion into the world.

[@SuperDoggy99]

I bounced off of AoW:Planetfall as well, mainly because the UI was too cluttered, unreadable, and way too "busy"--I just couldn't stand looking at the game, which was a shame ... because I really wanted to like that game. AoW4, on the other hand, is fantastic. The gameplay is addicting (thanks to having tons of choices, multiple interconnections between the systems, etc.) and it just looks great. It's crazy that AoW has eclipsed Total War: Warhammer on steam, as far as concurrent players go (and the Chaos Dwarf DLC was just released.) As a longtime fan of the AoW series, this is great news for Triumph, as it looks like they've got a genuine "hit" on their hands.

[@vegassims7]

I was wondering to myself, when is SB playing this?

[@willtomgames]

hey sb, are you gonna be playing jedi: survivor once all the performance issues are patched?, i loved your fallen order playthrough and would love to see you play survivor to

[@Koiring]

Rats are the best and are super cute!

[@pallingtontheshrike6374]

3:40 i mean the defaults are indeed stereotypical, but you can mishmash whatever you want in the custom tab, and that's kinda that point?

[@kayame18]

I hope you play a custom faction rat game

[@Reptonious]

Just pulled this from my wishlist because of the apparent fatal technical errors. I actually loved Planetfall and how there were only several factions but meaningful branches within them. That actually relates to this game's biggest criticism that I'm curious to see how it plays out because it can't be "fixed" per se like the technical stuff. I am hearing that this game is a wide but shallow puddle situation; too many choices dilutes the impact for the player. Let's see what happens with this series.

[@denisza123]

Played like 4 hours since launch, haven't encountered any performance issues or crashes, didn't update drivers either. Imo the tome system gives quite significant depth and playstyle variety (much more than Civ games or Endless Legend/Space or other Paradox titles with a unified tech tree), whilst the game is indeed much more combat oriented than other 4X titles

[@imblackmagic1209]

in the hotfix beta branch I had no problems (compared to 2 crashes I had yesterday, 5~ hrs play session), there's a lot of depth in the combat system and the spell synergies, not to mention all the unit interactions

[@sdauz]

Hey SB, love your 4x videos, would love to see what you think between endless legend and aow4.

[@Malk80]

Sadly he didnt create his own faction

[@GamingontheMellowASMR]

She and her. To me, it makes sense that she'd want to get to know the game a little before making a custom faction, in order to better understand what she's doing.

[@Malk80]

@@GamingontheMellowASMR ah, sorry for that. But i think creating a faction makes it easier to understand the diffrent Systems that come together. But as we know sb learns very fast anyway.

[@Jeff55369]

Text is voiced, because people don't like to read while playing games. Building boosts reduce the building's cost by 30%, so you'll want to prioritize that wherever it makes sense. (Which will be most of the time.) It's also retroactive, so you can start the building before you get the boost. The free city's attitude toward you can be seen by looking at the face to the right of the city's name. Hover over the face to get a breakdown of the effects. Losing the spell ui is definitely a bug. :P

[@siddharth9461]

Danke

[@Hybban]

Another great 4X with "meta progression" is Thea 2 - The Shattering. What is funny is that the meta progression is also geared towards the gods and the pantheon.

[@tyrannorama8643]

I’m pretty sure SB already did like a 60 episode play through of thea 2 on this channel

[@Hybban]

@@tyrannorama8643 he has. This comment was not for him as he never seems to read/react to them. It's for people hearing him say that it's new while there has already been at least a game implementing it (game that SB knows 😁 )

[@dominichelgoth8181]

@@Hybban she

[@Hybban]

@@dominichelgoth8181 Sorry, I didn't see the pronoun.

[@milkporch]

Using Custon Faction u can make robbit rats

[@ombra711]

You assume too much too quick a lot, I get you've played an embarrassment of 4x games in your lifetime, but give the game a chance to finish its tutorial. Otherwise, it was entertaining to watch you play for the first time.👍🏿